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.
Reading Julien Sorel in the Age of Terror
Abstract This article presents a new and topical reading of Julien Sorel as a fanatic, and questions, in the process, Julien’s traditional status as an exemplar and embodiment of Stendhalian values (energy, imagination, freedom). In particular, it sets out how Stendhal’s account of fanaticism proves unexpectedly ‘double’, for fanaticism produces both freedom (as in the case of the exemplary Charlotte Corday) and servitude, to a person (Napoleon) or to an idea (honour, duty, heroism). Only in some very limited respects will Julien emerge as the new Charlotte Corday (a tyrannicide); rather he stands principally revealed as Napoleon’s delusional victim, the new Séïde (from Voltaire’s Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète): an unthinking would-be killer who passes like a storm, doing harm seemingly at random, and achieving nothing.
Food, Mud, Blood: The Material Narrative of Zola's Débâcle
^fi ublished twenty-one years after the historical events it reworks in fiction, Zola's J^ great novel of the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870 envisions a double debâcle that of the catastrophe of war and the collapse of Napoleon Ill's regime following civil insurrection and its bloody repression in March 1871. Classic approaches to La Debâcle have invested heavily (and predictably) in broad allegorical interpretations, sweeping over the material and the particular in pursuit of ideological transparency and the kind of synthetic reading that Zola's penultimate Rougon-Macquart novel would appear to elicit.2 Zola brings his novel to an unequivocal conclusion and an ideological resolution on the barricades of Paris, with the intellectual, insurgent, disruptive agency (represented by the bourgeois Maurice Levasseur) quelled by the values of nationhood and order (incarnated in the peasant Jean Macquart).^ The chronological disjunction between the historical events (1870-1871) and their fictionalization (March 1891 -May 1892) is decisive in this respect: the completion of La Debâcle hastens the completion of the novel cycle that will situate Zola in the role of chronicler of an era now passed into history, but crucial in explaining modern France to the French, both in terms of material progress and the modernization of values and assumptions. Distance also affords closure on events which had a profound impact on Zola's thinking, from his everyday family life to his position as a polemical journalist.4 In La Debâcle, conclusion and closure are found in the deproblematization of political complexities itself intensely problematic represented by the deep friendship of Maurice and Jean, a friendship built on the uneven ground of ideological (and class) differences and profound personal empathy. Because reading for allegory assumes a narrative investment in transparent meaning and stable ideological positions, such assumptions have worked to obscure the deeper representational texture of Zola's modern, materially rich war novel. My concern is with the complex and shifting relationships of men at war to the material world which they inhabit and which, in turn, inhabits them. In focusing on Zola's fictionalization of the