Why Read the Classics? (18 page)

[1984]

It was during his Milanese period that Henri Beyle — who up until then had been a man of the world, more or less a genius, a dilettante without a precise vocation and a miscellaneous writer of uneven success — elaborated something that cannot be called his philosophy, since he proposed to go in directly the opposite direction to philosophy, nor his poetics as a novelist since he defined his poetics as an antithesis to the novel, perhaps without realising that he himself would shortly become a novelist, but something which can only be called his epistemological method.

This Stendhalian method, based on the individual’s lived experience in all its unique irrepeatability, is opposed to philosophy which tends towards generalisation, universality, abstraction and geometric pattern. But it is also in opposition to the world of the novel, which is seen as a world of physical, one-dimensional energies, of continuous lines, of vectorial arrows pointing towards an end, whereas his method aims to purvey knowledge of a reality that manifests itself in the shape of small events, localised in place and time. I have been trying to define this epistemological method of Stendhal’s as something independent of its object; but the object of Beyle’s epistemological quest is something psychological, the nature of passions, or rather of the passion par excellence, love. And the treatise the as yet unknown author wrote in Milan was
De l’Amour (On Love)
, the fruits of his longest and most unhappy Milanese love affair, that with Matilde Dembowski. But we can try to extract from
On Love
what is now called in the philosophy of science a ‘paradigm’, and see whether this paradigm is valid not just for his psychology of love but for all aspects of Stendhal’s vision of the world.

In one of the prefaces to
On Love
we read:

The text goes on to take issue with eighteenth-century novels, including
La Nouvelle Héloïse
and
Manon Lescaut
, just as in the page before this he had refuted the philosophers’ claim to be able to describe love as a complicated but geometrical figure.

We can say, therefore, that the reality whose essence Stendhal wants to explore is punctiform, discontinuous, unstable, a pulviscular cloud of heterogeneous phenomena, each one isolated from the other, and in turn subdivisible into even more minute phenomena.

At the start of the treatise one might think that the author confronts his subject with the classificatory, cataloguing spirit that in those same years led Charles Fourier to draw up his minute synoptic tables of the passions based on their harmonious, combinatory satisfactions. But Stendhal’s spirit is at the opposite extreme from a systematising order, which it continually avoids even in what he wanted to be his most ordered book. His rigour is of a different type: his discourse is organised around one basic idea, which he terms crystallisation, and from there it branches out to explore the range of meanings which extends beneath the nomenclature of love, as well as the adjacent semantic areas of
happiness
and
beauty
.

Happiness
too, the more one tries to confine it within a definition of substance, the more it dissolves into a galaxy of different moments each separated from the other, just like love. Because (as Stendhal says in chapter 2) ‘the soul becomes sated with everything that is uniform, even with perfect happiness’; and the relevant note explains: ‘One single moment in existence provides only one instant of perfect happiness, but the way a passionate man lives changes ten times a day.’

Nevertheless this powdery
happiness
is a quantifiable entity, it can be counted using precise units of measurement. In chapter 17 we read:

We can instantly see that Stendhal’s mathematics immediately become extremely complicated: on the one hand the quantity of happiness has an objective size, proportionate to the quantity of beauty, but on the other it has a totally subjective size in its projection on the hypermetrical scale of amorous passion. Not by chance is this chapter 17, one of the most important chapters in the book, entitled ‘Beauty Dethroned by Love’.

But then the invisible line which divides every sign also passes through
beauty
, and we can distinguish an objective aspect — though this is difficult to define — and the subjective aspect of what is beautiful for us, which is made up of ‘every new beauty that we discover in the object of our love’. The first definition of beauty which the treatise provides (in chapter 11) is ‘a new capacity for giving you pleasure’. This is followed by a page on the relativity of beauty, exemplified by two fictitious characters in the book: Del Rosso’s ideal of beauty is a woman who at every moment suggests physical pleasure, while for Lisio Visconti it is a woman who at every turn must incite him to love as passion.

If we realise that Del Rosso and Lisio are both personifications of two aspects of the author’s psyche, then things become even more complicated, because the process of fragmentation pervades even the subject. But here we become involved in the theme of the multiplication of the Stendhalian self through pseudonyms. Even the ego can become a galaxy of egos: ‘the mask must become a succession of masks, and the use of pseudonyms a systematic use of multiple names’, says Jean Starobinski in his important article, ‘Stendhal pseudonyme’.

But let us not go any further down this road; instead let us consider the person in love as a single, indivisible soul, particularly as just at this point there is a note which is more precise about the definition of beauty as
my
beauty, namely what beauty is for me: ‘it is the promise of a character useful to my soul … and is more important than the attraction to my senses.’ Note that here we find the term ‘promise’ which in a note to chapter 17 forms part of his most famous definition:
’la beauté est la promesse du bonheur’
(beauty is the promise of happiness).

On this phrase, and its predecessors, premisses and later echoes, right down to Baudelaire, there is a very interesting essay by Giansiro Ferrata (‘II valore e la forma’,
Questo e altro
, VIII (June 1964), pp. 11-23), which highlights the central point of the theory of
cristallisation
, namely the transformation of a negative feature of the loved one into a pole of attraction. It is worth recalling that the metaphor of crystallisation derives from the Salzburg mines into which branches without leaves were thrown: when they were recovered some months later they were covered with crystals of rock salt, dazzling like diamonds. The branch as it had been was still visible, but every knot, twig and thorn now possessed a transfigured beauty; in the same way the mind of the lover fixes on every detail of the beloved in a sublime transfiguration. And here Stendhal pauses on a very striking example, which seems to hold for him the highest importance both on a general theoretical level and on the level of lived experience: the
‘marque de petite vérole’
on the loved woman’s face.

It could almost be said that the whole of Stendhal’s discourse on beauty revolves around the
marque de petite vérole
, almost as though only by confronting the symbol of absolute ugliness, a scar, can he arrive at the contemplation of absolute beauty. In the same way it could almost be said that his entire typology of passions revolves around the most negative situation, that of the fiasco of male impotence, almost as if the whole treatise
On Love
has its centre of gravity in the chapter ‘Des fiasco’ (On fiascos), and that this famous chapter was the sole reason for writing the book which the author subsequently did not dare publish and which only appeared posthumously.

Stendhal broaches his subject by quoting Montaigne’s essay on the same topic, but while for the latter this is just one example in a general meditation on the physical effects of the imagination, and inversely on the
indocile liberté
of the parts of the body which obey the will — a discourse that predates Groddeck and modern treatments of the problematics
of the body — for Stendhal, who always proceeds by subdivisions and never by generalisations, it is a question of unravelling a knot of psychological processes, including
amour propre
, sublimation, imagination and loss of spontaneity. The most desirable moment for Stendhal, the eternal lover, the first moment of intimacy with a new conquest, can become the most anguished moment; but it is precisely upon such a consciousness of this glimpse of total negativity, of this vortex of darkness and void, that one can build up a system of knowledge.

It is by starting at this point that we could imagine a dialogue between Stendhal and Leopardi, a Leopardian dialogue in which the latter would exhort the former to draw from his lived experiences the bitterest conclusions. This would not be without historical foundation since the two men actually did meet, in Florence in 1832. But we can also imagine Stendhal’s reactions on the basis of, say, those parts of
Rome, Naples et Florence
which deal with the intellectual conversations he had in Milan sixteen years earlier (1816), in which he manifests the sceptical detachment of the man of the world, concluding that in the company of philosophers he always manages to make himself unpopular, something which never happens to him with beautiful women. In this way Stendhal would have quickly abandoned the Leopardian dialogue and followed the path of the man who does not want to miss out on any pleasure or pain, because the inexhaustible variety of situations which derives from this approach is what makes life interesting.

Consequently, if we wish to read
On Love
as a ‘Discourse on Method’, it is hard for us to square this method with those that operated in Stendhal’s times. But perhaps we could see a correspondence between it and that ‘evidential paradigm’ that the historian Carlo Ginzburg has recently tried to discern in the human sciences in the last twenty years of the last century (‘Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario’ (Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm), in
Crisi della ragione
, ed. A. Gargani (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), pp. 59-106). One can trace a long history of this evidential knowledge, based on semiotics, on awareness of traces, symptoms, involuntary coincidences, which privileges the marginal detail, the rejected elements, everything that our consciousness habitually refuses to pick up. It is not inappropriate to see as part of this line Stendhal and his punctiform knowledge which connects the sublime with the infinitesimal,
amour-passion
with the
marque de petite vérole
, without ruling out the possibility that the most obscure trace may be the sign of the most dazzling destiny.

Can we say that this programmatic method articulated by the anonymous author of the treatise
On Love
will be one which will be faithfully observed by the Stendhal of the novels and the Henry Brulard of the autobiographical works? For the latter we can certainly reply in the affirmative, inasmuch as his aim is defined in precise opposition to that of the novelist. The Stendhalian novel (at least in its most obvious and popular guise) tells stories that have cleanly delineated outlines, in which clearly drawn characters follow their dominant passions with consistency and determination, whereas the autobiographical Stendhal tries to catch the essence of his own life, of his own individual uniqueness in the shapeless, directionless welter of inessential facts. Carrying out this kind of exploration of a life ends up by becoming quite the opposite of what is intended by ‘narrative’.
La Vie de Henri Brulard
opens like this:

It is memory itself which is fragmentary by its very nature, and several times in
La Vie de Henri Brulard
it is compared to a crumbling fresco.

Because of this, Stendhal claims, ‘there is no originality or truth except in the details’. Here are Giovanni Macchia’s words in an essay dedicated to this very obsession with detail (in his ‘Stendhal tra romanzo e autobiografia’, in
Il mito di Parigi):