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.
Plato's Parmenides
This book offers a controversial new solution to the famous puzzle of the so-called 'gymnastic' half of Plato's Parmenides, the meaning of which has so far completely eluded understanding. Meinwald goes on to show that the Parmenides serves to introduce a metaphysics which has outgrown the problems commonly associated with the 'Platonism' of the middle dialogues, providing a crucial bridge between those dialogues and the later works of Plato. 'Simply stunning. [Meinwald's] interpretation of a difficult and crucial Platonic text is not just to be placed among others as one more excellent competitor. It supersedes the others.' Sandra Peterson, University of Minnesota