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Stendhal,
Memoirs of an Egotist, trans. Andrew
Brown (London: Hesperus Press, 2003)
Smoke & Ash
It is impossible to recommend highly enough a leisurely stroll through
Stendhal’s Memoirs of an Egotist, grazing upon it, off and on,
perhaps while traveling. It is an event commensurate only to sauntering
through George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), tearing
each page out as you go - reading with wild abandon. The comparison rests
on Shaw’s aphoristic “Revolutionist’s Handbook,” tucked into the back
of the book, and best read in the half-darkness of twilight. To read Stendhal
with any serious intent other than to travel to the edge of things is
to invite tedium. As such, it is also best to race through The Charterhouse
of Parma, non-stop (if you can), and to battle your way, saber held
aloft, through The Red and the Black.
Here, more than half a century earlier, Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle, 1783-1842)
constructs a no-less-witty, complex, mannered, ironic, cranky, and caustic
recollection of the years 1821-1830. (The book was written in 1832, but
not published until 1892). Included by Hesperus Press, for good measure,
folded into the back pages of the slim volume, and with a possible nod
toward Shaw, is the equally quizzical, aphoristic “The Privileges” (published
in 1861), Stendhal’s parodic wish list for super-human powers.
Memoirs covers a period in Stendhal’s life before the publication
of The Red and the Black, when he was circulating through both
noble and ignoble salons in Paris (which he mostly loathed), during a
period of self-imposed ‘exile’ from Milan (which he dearly loved). It
is possible that he was ‘chased’ from Italy as a ‘spy’, with a ‘sidewise’
excursion to London (which he feigned to merely tolerate). This is his
life, then, before fame, before Balzac read The Charterhouse of Parma
and anointed him. It is an admixture of loafing and maneuvering. He paid
or bargained to have his modest non-fiction works published by generally
unscrupulous publishers working the middle-brow echelons of Parisian society.
Indulging his appetite for gossip, and as compensation for the endless
games endured cultivating literary ambitions (the near endless waiting
for ‘some-thing else’ to arrive), Stendhal writes: “I had two perfectly
innocent pleasures: 1. to chat after dinner while going [for] a walk…2.
when it was warm, going to read the English papers in Galignani’s garden.“
Between the lines, on cat’s paws, approaches Immortality.
Tales told, en passant, include: self-loathing critiques and summary judgments
of salons frequented (and salons tasted and abandoned); conversations
and (shall we say) ‘love affairs’ or ‘friendships’ with French and English
prostitutes; therapeutic strolls in the evening, with allies; the absurd
machinations of the avaricious Bourbons (back on the throne, however briefly);
the transparent, not-so-clever maneuvers of haute-bourgeois civil servants
trying to flatter the regime (especially in the loathed, and mercilessly
mocked ‘Academy of Inscriptions’); chary militarists bemoaning the misadventures
of the lost Empire; parvenus (including Stendhal) circling salons in search
of free-floating favors (mistresses); uninvited harangues from moral gadflies;
flashes of anomie, then known as ‘wit,’ an article of faith amongst the
intelligentsia; sparks, fumes, and palls of grey smoke from rising and
falling stars. Is this cooking the books, getting even, or something else?
Certainly it is cooking the books, but not in the usual fashion of vulgarly
falsifying things. As always with works of the imagination, what is omitted
is as important as what is admitted.
Echoing within the hollowed-out spaces of the fractured and self-reflective
narrative - within the ennui-charged, topological and retrospective gaze
of a memoir that owes as much to Stendhal’s heroes, such as Montaigne
or Rousseau, as to anything present then (at least in France) – are intimations
of things deferred or lost and, perhaps, things to come. In the latter
case - that is say, what is to come - we hear the low, faintly-discernible,
yet impassioned call of The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), a landmark
that only emerged from Stendhal’s impassioned imagination after The
Red and the Black (1830), and, according to legends about his method
of composition, non-stop.
Cooking the Books
What remains mysterious about the timing of these works - the autobiographical
and auto-hagiographical site into which Stendhal inserted Memoirs,
remembering his intention to publish Memoirs of an Egotist posthumously,
if at all - is that time is invariably warped or folded into itself. Stendhal
writes in the fictionalized Foreword of The Charterhouse of Parma
that this tale, arguably his finest work, was written “in the winter of
1830,” when, in fact, it was dictated between November 4 and December
26 of 1838. Whereas The Red and the Black was set down (if we can
trust Stendhal’s dates at all) in the winter of 1829, the latter a very
important something that makes no appearance whatsoever in Memoirs
of an Egotist. This slippage consorts with the fictive gestures of
the entire production of Stendhal, under the influence of his time, both
ahead and behind his time at the same time.
In the Foreword by Doris Lessing, Stendhal’s “prickly self-regard” is
described as follows: “The lens of his intelligence is focused on himself
with a concentration that amounts to ferocity. He lists his absurd characteristics
as well as his good ones and never spares himself the description of a
moment of humiliation or silliness.”
For Stendhal, literature takes the form of self-reflection, sometimes
distorted, intentionally or otherwise, by memory. As a result, it reveals
something more real than real. Stendhal steps into the mirror-game of
self-inflected literature in the manner of Rousseau’s ‘legendary’ (in
part invented) Confessions. The principal echoing void within Memoirs,
the most significant ‘hole’ that is part and parcel of the whole twisted,
sordid account of the author’s twisting in the wind in Paris (yet recalled
between publication of his two great novels), is the enigmatic term ‘Milan’
and what it means for Stendhal. The most significant affect here is longing
for lost love and authenticity. Stendhal’s disjointed and incomplete narrative
runs backward through internal time, only appearing to hop around in external
time, to the high-Romantic (unconsummated) love affair that haunts him,
which goes by the name ‘Métilde’. The memoir starts in 1821, in Paris,
the year Stendhal was chased out of Milan by the Austrian police. The
tender memories of Métilde permeating Memoirs of an Egotist trace
the period immediately antecedent to the timeframe he surveys self-critically.
“To be without passion: Stendhal could not say anything worse.” To be
‘out of time’ (one way or another) is also to feel lost, abandoned, and
impoverished.
The memoir is, after all, a dissection of Stendhal’s life up till 1830,
its abrupt end indicating, perhaps, two subsequent years of fruitful brooding
(1830-1832) coincidental to the arrival of The Red and the Black.
Notably, Memoirs of an Egotist recounts a nine-year gestation
foreshadowing Fabrizio’s nine months spent locked away in the Farnese
Tower in Parma, before his escape. (Richard Howard’s Afterword
in the 1999 Modern Library edition of The Charterhouse of Parma
notes what has been noted by others, that “Fabrizio’s nine months’
imprisonment…is analogous to the Carthusian monks’ discipline in their
monastery.”) In the casually constructed Memoirs of an Egotist,
Stendhal left behind an absurdly disjointed and somewhat toxic record
of the nine years he spent in the ‘charterhouse’ of Paris, ‘weighing things’.
Like Gunter Grass, Stendhal would almost certainly put in a good word
for melancholy, the affective ill-humour of being imprisoned in time,
the wrong time. Yet unlike the brooding angel in Durer’s iconic “Melencolia”
(the inspiration for Grass’s searing essay regarding the necessity of
hastening slowly), Stendhal paces to and fro, agitated, within the space
of Memoirs of an Egotist amidst the ruins / instruments of his
own quest for knowledge. As with Grass, the call (that indescribable Some-thing
Else) that calls from the shadowy edges of literary imagination quite
simply eclipses everything else, when it arrives, including everything
merely ‘literary’.
As Jean-Luc Marion has shown in Being Given (1997), the call of
the Given arrives to quite simply (essentially) ravish the witness. But
it also gives to the self itself, its own depth and sublimity. Within
the folds of Stendhal’s memoir we see Stendhal in the process of processing
the call that will transform his jaded self, delivering to himself his
Self, bringing on, within nine years, the two masterpieces of so-called
fiction that have made Stendhal endure.
Proust’s admiration for Stendhal becomes a sort of living proof that Stendhal
was quite right that his ideal reader would not arrive until sometime
after 1880. Hastening slowly, all things in time, and through the medium
of time. The marks that may be read between the lines of Memoirs of
an Egotist are the ‘intercalary’ marks that mark time, waiting, filling
up time (marks that sometimes mark languishing in time). The intense
forward momentum of everything that came afterwards, for Stendhal, the
galloping pace of the two great novels, the sublime fire burning within
each tale is literary proof that Marion (in The Crossing of the Visible)
is absolutely right. A so-called saturated phenomenon - and Marion points
to revelation, the paradox of paradoxes, as the highest form of such phenomena
- crosses the boundaries of the visible, passing through time and
space, leaving behind the ‘stigmata of the invisible.’
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