Stendhal, Illogicality, and Imagination: The Dirt of Politics and the Politics of Dirt in the Vie de Henry Brulard, Lucien Leuwen, and La Chartreuse de Parme
Abstract 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.
Stendhal’s Muddy Realism
Abstract This essay examines the role of mud in the work of Stendhal. It argues that what is often a stable marker of reality in his writing, as in Realist writing more generally, can also operate as a destabilizing element by pointing to the limits of metaphor and understanding. The essay begins by examining two famous passages from Stendhal’s major fictions. It argues that in the first, from Le Rouge et le Noir, the meaning of the mud metaphor is both pivotal and unclear, while in the second, from La Chartreuse de Parme, physical mud is presented as illegible to the protagonist. The novel Lucien Leuwen is then studied with a view to showing that mud becomes associated in that novel with traumatic blows to the protagonist’s sense of self, with a malfunctioning of metaphor and with an unstable social reality. Realist mud is drawn into association with the Lacanian Real.
Conflictual Media Events, Eyewitness Images, and the Boston Marathon Bombing (2013)
The proliferation of camera phones over the past decade has created an unprecedented landslide of visual information in the online public sphere, transforming the form and amount of communication in relation to crisis events. International research on this subject has primarily centered on the way in which the production and dissemination of eyewitness images convert mainstream media's coverage of crisis. This article broadens the perspective by focusing on eyewitness images in relation to “conflictual media events.” The article contributes to discussions on the definition of conflictual media events in today's mediatized and connective media environment, which has undergone radical changes from the era of mass media hegemony when Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz first outlined media events. The article further examines the ways in which the circulation of eyewitness images erodes established boundaries between experts and laymen and between professionals and non-professionals in relation to conflictual media events. The bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013 constitutes the empirical point of departure.