“What is love?” (
Lamiel, suivi de Armance
, Hachette, Paris,
1965
, 90) Stendhal’s characters wonder. In their quest to understand love, they encounter a hostile society. In response, they return to ...the self: instead of accepting the authority of tradition, they rely on their own observations and experiences. Stendhal, who defends intellectual equality, praises this concept of curiosity. Empirical curiosity is a response to a patriarchal mindset, to a mindset that clearly obstructs the cultivation of the self. In that regard, curiosity appears to be a subversive weapon, allowing the characters to deconstruct conventional roles. At the same time, this new form of curiosity is dangerous. As empirical curiosity escapes any kind of rules, it knowns no boundaries: the curiosity of the subject is unbridled, reckless, and savage. It is even so destructive that it threatens the integrity of the subject, that it turns the curious into a monster. In
Lamiel
and
La Chartreuse de Parme
, Stendhal reflects upon this paradox. He proposes three medicines to reckless curiosity: organization, concentration and reflection.
This article looks at the ways in which Stendhal foregrounds representations of dirt in a number of his autobiographical and fictional texts, most notably the Vie de Henry Brulard, Lucien Leuwen, and ...La Chartreuse de Parme. It shows how Stendhal assigns apparently contradictory political meanings to these representations. In particular, the article aims to recontextualize Henry Brulard's declaration: 'J'ai horreur de ce qui est sale, or le peuple est toujours sale à mes yeux'. It is argued that, in his fiction, Stendhal takes care to distinguish between the physical dirt imputed to 'le peuple' imagined as 'la canaille' and the moral dirt that he detects in all classes and shades of political opinion in Restoration and Orleanist France. It is further argued that Stendhal uses this distinction to draw attention to a series of disjunctions between reality and illusion that together came to shape the post-Revolutionary political order as far as he was concerned. The article begins and ends by setting its analysis of the dirt of politics and the politics of dirt within the broader context provided by longstanding critical debates revolving around the questions of Stendhal's alleged (political) inconsequentiality, that it is to say the illogicality of his reasoning, and the dominant role played by his imagination.
In Praise of Older Women (1965) by Stephen Vizinczey, The Tutor (2002) by Peter Abrahams, and Fabrizio's Return (2006) by Mark Frutkin are three novels based on Stendhal's fiction. Vizinczey and ...Abrahams have used Le Rouge et le Noir as their hypotext, while Frutkin's novel bears a marked resemblance to La Chartreuse de Parme. The three contemporary novels are compared to Stendhal's two books in order to indicate their similarities, but also to locate their differences. Both the similarities and the differences help the reader not only to understand the original Stendhalian texts but also to appreciate the somewhat surprising manner in which Stendhal's fiction lives on in important twenty-first-century fictional preoccupations with eroticism, migration, psychopathy, and a kind of magic realism.
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