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Literary Review
Survival in love and war
Ravi Vyas
GEORGE ORWELL, who wrote extensively on Dickens and his novels, said that his characters were prototypes of their trade or class rather than individuals, representing social functions rather than particular human beings. Much the same could be said of most 19th-century English fiction, written in periods of real or apparent social stability when people's roles and relationships were preordained and permanent, and even their feelings, thoughts and motives were expected to conform to defined patterns. This is easy to understand in a caste-conscious world like ours where everyone knows his place and few have a chance to know themselves, let alone others. Social stagnation (again ourselves) distorts perception down to the smallest detail for, it makes people appear only in their moral, ideological functions. And this is because we observe only what we expect to see; the unexpected is unnoticed, denied or condemned. When too many things are taken for granted it is impossible to perceive the truth and what takes over are long chronicles of society at a particular time, in, to use Stendhal's phrase, pedestrian seriousness that then passes off as literature.
But while this could be said for most 19th-century fiction written in England, it doesn't hold for European literature that penetrated behind the social façade to reveal the forces and the man within. Stendhal was one of those who did and the classic example of his lightning expose of social reality was The Charterhouse of Parma.
Set in Italy at the time of the battle of Waterloo, The Charterhouse (1839) is the imaginary biography of our Italian hero, Fabrizio del Dongo. Barely 17 years old, he runs away from home with a head full of romantic notions and an allegiance to his idol, Napoleon. As he scoots from one place to another in the battlefield of Waterloo, following dubious escorts, dodging bullets, having his horse stolen, trying to discover whether he has actually taken part in a battle, and encountering a pusillanimous army in full retreat, Stendhal comically observes that Fabrizio doesn't understand in the least what is happening. To understand what is happening in the whirl and muddle of war, to see a pattern beneath ephemeral events — how many can or are even conscious that they ought to?
The celebrated description of Waterloo with which the novel opens is a large-scale demonstration of the boringness of war and has been described as one of the earliest pieces of truthful battle literature in existence. And this is because Stendhal has created few episodes of the rout but so suggestive are his brushstrokes that the mind sees behind the given details taking in the whole battlefield. Later, Tolstoy said that he learned from Stendhal how to describe battles, how to disregard the grandeur of armies for the experience of individuals. But not even in the great battle scenes in War and Peace is there one as poignant as Stendhal's description of Fabrizio's enthusiastically fumbling attempts to join Napoleon's last stand. And at the end, Fabrizio does not know whether he has been in the battle at all; all he has seen is smoke and confusion, stragglers bargaining for horses and food, shooting, stealing, maiming — and the mysterious spectacle of people who have suddenly ceased to live. (Stendhal was part of Napoleon's Grand Army in the European campaign and was involved in the retreat from Moscow.)
Through the build-up and let-down of Fabrizio's expectations, Stendhal makes us see not only beyond the details of the battle but beyond the confines of the period, beyond the glittering slogans and delusions that war is beautiful even when men unite in self-destruction. The solitary corpses on the field of Waterloo are the foundation of the principality of Parma, a totalitarian state that belongs to all ages.
Fabrizio, the veteran of Waterloo, tries to make his fortunes in Parma under orders from his aunt Gina Sanseverina — "a woman whose beauty was the least of her charms" — and her lover, Count Mosca, the Prime Minister. There was nothing in the world that Gina didn't know: she understood men, she understood politics, she knew how to charm, she knew how to fight. She was never deceived by false notions; she even knew herself. She was high-born, rich and powerful. Count Mosca, a master of diplomacy and intrigue was her slave. Even without trying, she could inspire passions and could lead men to risk their lives and even murder to please her. You couldn't have come across a real or imaginary human being so well equipped to get what she wanted from life, or who wanted it so badly. "The universe was a footpath to her passion."
She wants her nephew. Everything she does, she does for Fabrizio. He has sincere affection and admiration for her, but he has fallen in love with Clelia Conti and there is nothing she can do about it. The Duchess illuminates the impossibility of controlling our destiny; in fact, in the end, she even reconciles us to it.
If you have to summarise The Charterhouse in one word, it would be worldliness. When the worldly diplomat, Count Mosca advises his adored Gina to marry an elderly man who can give her wealth in return for her title, you can be shocked at the nobleman pimping his beloved, but then we appreciate the grasp of circumstances. Similarly, Mosca advises young Fabrizio to enter priesthood with an eye to making a bishop: a strange piece of advice to give to a libidinous young man, requiring years of patient learning and abstinence but the only way up the social ladder was either the church or the army. Mosca also advises Fabrizio to take a mistress from a conservative family and to read in public only the stupidest right-wing newspapers. What Stendhal is saying is that none of us are romantic isolates; we are social animals, being watched by potential allies and enemies. Mosca is a realist and to be worldly is to know that men and women are not angels, they have their vanities and vices to justify.
At times, when Mosca is demonstrating the realpolitik of court life, it seems that he is giving "courses of instruction in political amoralism." In fact, it is said that The Charterhouse is the novel that Machiavelli would have written had he lived in, and banished from, the Italy of the 19th Century. To an extent this is true. What Machiavelli said in The Prince is that there is no easy correspondence between ends and means and much of The Prince is occupied with this saying, "If you wish to achieve this end, you must use these means". But this does not mean that the Prince is amoral; it merely indicates that he was honest enough to face the difficulty of adjusting political behaviour to moral precepts. When Machiavelli writes that "to use deceit in any action is detestable, nevertheless in conducting war it is praiseworthy and glorious" he may irritate because he is telling the truth. Given war, deceit is necessary; given politics, which is war by other means, intrigue is necessary. If we dislike Machiavelli and Mosca in The Charterhouse, it is for preaching what we practise and more for describing what we practise.
But there is a difference between Machiavelli and Mosca: it symbolises the problem of the liberal who, in a moment of social helplessness, retains his vision of the desirable society yet feels protest to be futile and therefore tries to adjust to the realities of power. Because of this effort, Machiavelli's political thought did not add up to a unified system, as Stendhal's political insights do not quite add to a unified vision. Stendhal, as reflected in Mosca, is also troubled by the difficulty of reconciling what he believes or would like to believe with what he must do or supposes he must do. "Who knows what one must go through on the way to a great deed?" Stendhal asks in Scarlet and Black. It is this problem that makes Stendhal so "modern" a novelist. Our beginnings more often than not never know our ends or even how we arrive there, willy-nilly.
Taken together, Mosca, Sanseverina and Fabrizio embody a remarkable interplay of values: worldliness, personal passion and a kind of distracted innocence. They are people who have been left stranded in a despotic world, people who are conscious that there is little left for them to believe in except to snatch some fragment of happiness for themselves and for each other. Happiness through personal relationships? Is this possible when they do not believe in anything and when their way of life was pitted against despotism? So, we go back to a basic question: the debacle of liberalism and the problem of how intelligence can survive in an age of cant. Stendhal's answer in The Charterhouse of Parma, tentative as it may be, is that you can live happily provided one uses one's wits.
The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal, English translation by Margaret Shaw, 1958, Penguin Classics, special Indian price, £ 4.99.
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