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Literary Review
Beyond all this fiddle
Ravi Vyas
"If I meet God after my death, I'll be very surprised, but if he allows me to speak I'll have plenty to say to him."
Stendhal to Sainte-Beuve, 1834.
ONE of the things they order better in France is the honour and attention they accord to intellectual activities — which may explain why they have had so many profound thinkers and why so many of their novels are essentially novels of ideas. Compared to the English who have little taste for ideas disguised as literature — and not much for ideas at all — the French have even less for creative work without theories to support it. There has not been much of a public role for the literary intellectual in England unless he is also a novelist, poet or playwright, whereas in France, a man's imaginative writing often seems not much more than a handy way of drawing attention to his ideas.
Stendhal's Scarlet and Black (it has more often been translated as The Red and the Black) fits effortlessly into the French system, in the psychological lineage of Nietzsche, Gide, Dostoevsky and other "realists'. Stendhal tells it all and a lot of it concerns the affectations of envious malice. But even today, when life and literature present a crowded gallery of outsized monsters, madmen and sadists (witness Gujarat), many are curiously reticent to talk about sheer everyday malice. Perhaps it is because our threshold levels of tolerance have risen so high that "anything goes"; or because malice is so basic to our nature that it has to be denied to carry on with the received notion that there is very little malice in the world and a lot of paranoia. Thus, while we claim to know all about the ego's interest in our thinking, we continue to waste time and energy on the pretence that our beliefs, principles, opinions and our reasoning powers are not in the pay
of our emotions. This pretence (which is responsible for so much humbug) is the prime target of Stendhal's irony and a current in the tension in Scarlet and Black.
Stendhal isn't shy about spite — he shows up the claim that all the world loves a lover for the brazen lie that it is. In fact, he has as an epigram to the first part of the novel, Danton's injunction, "Truth — Truth in all its rugged harshness." So here is outrageous candour, cutting to the point, combined with a touch of irony, insinuating that the meaning and relevance of what happens in life, the pattern underneath the ephemeral events, is never that simple.
The passionate pride of the mediocre. The phrase is Sartre's but the revelation is in Stendhal's Scarlet and Black. Julien Sorel, a miller's son, is beaten by his father for reading books — a sign of the boy's wish to be superior. And the rationalisation follows: because he is "lazy". When Julien becomes a tutor to the Mayor's children and exchanges his peasant jacket with a small, black suit (there were only two ways to rise in post-revolutionary France, either join the Army or the Church, symbolised by the colours, scarlet and black) his own brothers ambush him in the woods to an inch of his life because they cannot accept the sophisticated tailoring! In Stendhal's world, like in ours, people have more interest in beating down others, instead of improving themselves.
The spitefulness of Stendhal's characters depends not on their fixed character but on their emotional state. Julien Sorel (who suffers from imagined insults as much from real spite) is finally condemned to death because he refuses to humble himself before the jury, and yet he is capable of despising his mistress, Mme. Renal, as an empty and selfish woman whenever he suspects her pride. On every page of the novel, the characters are ready to change their attitudes towards people, to persuade themselves of new and impartial judgements and act upon them when their ego is wounded.
Stendhal doesn't complain: the gasping self-pity that makes most books on the human condition into nauseating revelations of the authors' sorrow for themselves is totally absent in Stendhal's realism. He does not sentimentalise his characters' miseries; he just shows them for what they are to warn us to beware of ourselves, beware of being unhappy. We may become virtuous (or at any rate harmless to ourselves and to others) if we are truly happy, for, contentment is a generous and even humble state of mind. This is the importance of love — though love too has its rationalisations.
Which brings us to what has been described as the "characteristic magnitudes", or the central themes, of Scarlet and Black. What gives us joy? What is it that we truly love or hate? Stendhal shows through the central characters of Julien and Mme. Renal that happiness depends on our actual feelings and not, as commonly supposed, on our situation. Mme. Renal, who grew up in a convent, has no desires other than her upbringing allows her to have. Submissive and timid, she is the ideal wife and mother, held up as a role model by the people in the small, provincial town. When she falls in love with Julien, she can explain her sentiments: she is overjoyed that her children are in the care of a tutor who doesn't beat them. And so she is "perfectly happy, thinking of nothing but Julien, without the slightest notion of reproaching herself." When she can no longer be unaware of her love, she admits it to herself but dismisses it: "This madness will pass."
Julien, on his part, has firm and considered opinion about the worthlessness of all emotions. He prides himself so much on his rationality that while he is deeply in love with Mme. Renal, he still pretends to himself that he is playing with her. Affectations like these produce the ironies in our lives, but the irony is in the contradiction that can grow and ruin us. When Julien leaves Mme. Renal, she pretends that the void left by his absence is remorse, guilt, proof of her sin that could be traced to her Christian upbringing; but when she is asked for a character reference to pave the way for his marriage to the daughter of a noble, she persuades herself that she owes it "to the sacred cause of religion and morality" to write a letter that will cut off both his marriage and career. Julien, who only speaks and acts just to go ahead, doesn't realise that his passion for Mme. Renal (he is a fanatical believer in the power of reason) drives him back to her to try and kill her.
"Stock responses", that we know how we will react to events and also know our feelings about them, is the source of much of our unhappiness. It is simply not possible to know this, Stendhal says, because of the continuous tension in our consciousness between our expectations and real reactions. One way to describe Scarlet and Black, then, is to say that it is the ironic tale of a young man who is so determined to put himself in "happy situations" that he knows for sure what will give him happiness to the extent that he fails to notice it when he is happy! But having said this, no naïve rationalist would be pleased with the novel; the belief that we are only justified (who isn't?) if we only calculate correctly, if only we do the right thing (and who doesn't try?) then we will see a future that works. There must always be a method. And so hubris turns hope to false certainties, everyone expects a winner, but when the morning paper brings news of another mind-blowing surprise (again, Gandhi's Gujarat) where do we go? The certainty that we know is the most destructive of illusions. Scarlet and Black puts ideas and ideologies in their place: if they are relevant to the character, they are expressions of an inner condition; if not, they are meaningless — or worse, poison.
Scarlet and Black is many stories rolled into one and you could read it any way you wish to. But its greatest charm lies in Stendhal's style. He seems to be talking to you all the time and, like all conversations, he has dispensed with transitional sentences whenever it suits him. "Let us dispense with ten years of progress and happiness," and then carries on with the crux of the story, polishes off the business with a terse epigram to show that men and women are not angels, that they have vanities and vices that they seek to justify. Stendhal said he was in the business of knowing the human heart; he seems to have dissected his own as if it were a guinea pig just to teach us us. And so he cries out:
"I have loved truth... where can I find it?...Everywhere I see hypocrisy, or at least charlatanism, even among the most virtuous, even among the greatest men." His lips curled in disgust. No, man cannot place any trust in man.
Scarlet and Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century, Stendhal, first published in French, 1830, English translation in Penguin Classics by Margaret Shaw, 1953.
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