Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (New York, NY, Modern Library, a division of Random House: 1999); Richard Howard translation. Original work published in 1839.
Stendhal's late-career masterwork, The Charterhouse of Parma, is the sort of novel I tried the first time around to read when I was still too young to enjoy it. Almost ten years ago exactly, I picked up the novel and read through the first hundred pages or so at breakneck speed. Coming up for air at the end of the evening, I surveyed what had gone before. I remembered that there had been the Battle of Waterloo. And there seemed to be an aunt doomed to an incestuous love affair with her nephew. But otherwise, I could scarcely recollect who all these people were and what else was happening in the novel. I therefore put the book aside, realizing that—for whatever reason—here was a masterpiece that was not yet ready to disclose its secrets to me.
Now, a decade later, having dug the same paperbound copy out of a storage unit and savored it at last, over the course of a long summer weekend, I think I am in a position to say why I struggled with the novel the first time around. The book is, for all its five hundred pages, a masterwork of compression. As the translator of the Modern Library edition, Richard Howard, tells us: this is a book that demands to be read with especially close attention. Stendhal heaps detail after detail, and often, events occur in such rapid succession, and are handled so elliptically, that if one allows one's mind to wander for an instant, one can miss crucial details of the plot.
Take for example the Prince's scheme of sexual blackmail in Chapter Twenty-Seven. The build-up to the dreadful event has been so slow in coming, up to that point, that when my mind drifted on the first read-through, I almost missed the fatal occurrence itself. In my defense, Stendhal confines it to a mere implication contained in a space separating two sentences—in the first of which, the childish and clumsy Prince appears at three minutes to ten, looking shame-faced and cowardly, and in the second of which the Duchess departs half an hour later, abandoning his court forever. The fatal pause, in which the cruelly-extorted promise itself is fulfilled, is not even marked out for our notice by a paragraph break.
In other words, the events of the plot are simply told one after another, with almost no differentiation of weight attached to one over the other. There is none of that variation of emphasis, therefore, that—in a more conventional novelist's hands—would give the reader some clue as to when their attention can relax, vs. they have just come to a crucial development.
Nor am I the only one to experience the novel this way. Readers past and present have evidently complained about this same feature of the book. A famous and mostly laudatory review by Balzac, appended to this edition, compares this tendency on Stendhal/Beyle's part to the fault of painting that I have elsewhere described as hyperrealism. It is a principle of visual illustration—expressed by Ruskin and others—that some degree of abstraction is necessary, paradoxically, to create an impression of reality. Hence, Balzac writes, Stendhal needs to spare us some details in order to bring the ones that merit our attention to greater life.
While this characteristic of equally weighting sentences and details (the most crucial development is here given the same time and space as the most trivial incident) means that the novel requires special attention to read—as Richard Howard notes—I'm not sure that this is a fault. Stendhal himself, in his appended response to Balzac, graciously accepts the fellow-novelist's praises, and no less generously rejects his criticisms. Perhaps he should fill up his novels with more laggardly descriptions of landscapes and appearances, so that the reader's attention can wander restfully without missing anything important, Stendhal says, with characteristic irony—but he confesses he has always found such passages boring.
In short, the novel's remarkable compression and intense rapidity of development is what gives it its distinct flavor. Its narrative elements read almost like a medieval or antique chronicle: and, indeed, it is the straightforward and unselfconscious genealogical accounts of the lives of swashbuckling Italian noblemen that are said to have given Stendhal his inspiration (and which our hero Fabrizio ends up translating from Latin himself). Add to this medieval quality, then, an utterly modern Stendhalian irony and self-consciousness, and you have the entirely sui generis experience of reading this novel.
What is the source of this famous irony, that emerges so unexpectedly in what at first has all the trappings of a Gothic romance? In the early chapters, one welcomes it simply for the rich amusement it affords. As the novel climaxes, one becomes convinced that it offers a comprehensive attitude to life that may be all that can save one amidst the sorts of political vicissitudes the novel describes.
The Charterhouse of Parma takes place in the despotic principality of an Italian city-state in the early nineteenth century, in the grip of a brutal reaction of a threatened absolutism against the twin threats of Jacobin revolt and Bonapartist liberalism. Being wholly virtuous and ideologically principled in such a setting is not an option—unless one wishes to join the other liberals in an underground dungeon, where the cells are sadistically designed so as to allow the victim neither to sit nor to stand; or one wishes to be ruined financially. Stendhal makes a point of noting that the only thoroughly honest characters—who never dissimulated or contradicted their true beliefs—have been in and out of prison for years, or condemned to penury.
In such a setting, irony becomes a way to preserve one's sense of inner integrity and self-respect, even while one is forced to conform one's outward actions to a regime one despises. When Fabrizio, an admirer of Napoleon, is launched on his episcopal career, his aunt tells him that he must learn the dogmas of orthodox theology as one would learn the "rules of a game of whist"—one doesn't have to believe in any of them; one just has to know them, and not let on that one questions them. This same aunt and her lover, Count Mosca, in turn liken courtly politics to a metaphorical game of whist; and it is a literal game of whist that establishes Fabrizio's fortunes in the Prince's court.
Yet even while benefiting from their success at surviving and thriving in the ancien régime, Fabrizio and the other characters never betray themselves inwardly, because they never lose their utter contempt for the other flatterers and toadies around them, or the despotic regime they serve. When Fabrizio receives a warmly enthusiastic and supportive letter from the local archbishop, for instance, he is tempted at first to write him back an equally glowing and appreciative response. But then he recalls a snubbing remark that the archbishop once made toward Napoleon, and reminds himself that the archbishop is only writing this way out of a snobbish desire to curry favor with the nobility, so he ignores the archbishop and addresses his letter to Count Mosca instead.
Is such a response to an intolerable political environment actually worthy of respect? Is irony enough to make it up to the tyrant's victims—or would any person of real integrity have long since joined the true liberals in their odious dungeon? There are times, to be sure, when the central characters' cynicism becomes outright hypocrisy, and then they lose one's sympathies—one of these episodes has already prompted a spasm of poor poetry on my part; another comes when Fabrizio stabs a rival lover (admittedly in an act of self-defense) and his aunt the Duchess concludes, without concerning herself much with the question of his guilt or innocence, that even if he had inflicted the fatal wound deliberately, the death of a mere actor is of small account, and no reason under any circumstances to imprison a noble Del Dongo.
Yet, these distasteful episodes aside, one largely finds it impossible to blame Stendhal's characters—nor, at any rate, does their creator ever hold them up as icons of virtue either, to say the least. In a world where few of us would willingly choose the dungeons, if it came down to it, Stendhal's wit and irony offer a model for how the mind can still preserve some scrap of independence—through withering scorn for the cant and injustice that surrounds one—even when one is at the mercy of despotic foes. Such an attitude and methodology for resisting oppression may seem strange to many Americans, unaccustomed as we mostly are to outright political violence—but who knows, the way things are going, it may be one that many twenty-first century liberals come to find as necessary to the preservation of their sanity as the defeated liberals of Stendhal's Italy did in their time.
Since this masterwork and Richard Howard's fine translation deserve more editions, I offer the copy edits I spotted in reading the novel, along with my own marginal observation.
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p. 59. "You foreign accent" (sic—should be "your")
p. 128. "who had even, on that occasion, had uttered" (sic—extra "had")
p. 135. The Prince's anonymous missive to the Count, implicating Fabrizio in an affair with his aunt, is perhaps the letter that Philip Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman has in mind, when he observes—in a line from Roth's novel The Human Stain—and in response to the query, "Who capable of rational thought sends anyone an anonymous letter?"—"Maybe it's a French thing [...] Isn't there a lot of it [... i]n Stendhal?" Zuckerman then name checks Stendhal's other masterwork, The Red and the Black, but perhaps he was really thinking of The Charterhouse of Parma.
p. 136. "and gloomy thought[s] have given me no respite"
p. 241. "an untimely resolu[t]ion"
p. 260. "who turns to stone as soon as soon as any..." (sic)
p. 310. "once out of prison, separates socially as we are..." (sic)
p. 385. "ever-renewed verse and gaiety" (sic—should be "verve")
p. 474. "to which he had retired, These" (sic—should be a period)
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