Stendhal. The Red and the Black (1830). Trans Burton Raffel. New York: Modern Library, 2004.

This may be the first full French novel I've ever read, which embarrasses me to admit, but I can't recall any others, except Didier Van Cauwelaert's One-Way, which I picked up solely because of the Sam Lipsyte blurb on the back of it. I wasn't impressed by that book, but I loved this one. I think, in order to love it as much as I did, one has to have been enrolled in back-to-back-to-(almost)-back semesters of 19th-century British literature. These books (think Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Brontës) are full of discretion and propriety, and if anyone dies it's in a very sterile way. Maybe Charlotte B. is an exception to the above, but it's a generalization I'll present as the truth for now.

Here, we have Julien Sorel, who not only has actual sex with two women (actual sex not appearing in British literature until, well, Joyce, probably), but he's married to neither of them! And the first one is married to someone else! And the second one he actually gets pregnant! And Stendhal never! once! moralizes! this! behavior! It's incredible!

If there is a moral dilemma at the center of the novel it's this: what is it that should impel us forward in our individual lives? Is it passion, romance, the red? Or is it duty, professionalism, the black? These days, I'm beginning to think that this is the real existential problem of being human. I think also that it's a cop-out to say, "Well, Dusty, a balance of both is what's best in life." Stendhal doesn't provide any answers, ending his novel more bleakly than any other I've read in recent times, with (spoiler warning) death and loneliness and injustice and abandonment, and something tells me that this kind of hard-truth approach to narrative is something I should start to expect this semester. Madame Bovary commits suicide, doesn't she? Haven't I read this numerous times? I'm pleased that the French are tough enough as a people to attack all this stuff head-on. Maybe I'll finally grow up as a result.

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My edition of the novel is 485 pages long and around page 341 here's something unexpected that happens:

After that wild night, [Mademoiselle de la Mole] believed she'd managed to triumph over her love.

(Writing these things, I know will still further injure this unfortunate author. Prigs and prudes will accuse me of indecency. But it does no harm to young women, shining so brilliantly in Parisian drawing rooms, to suggest that one, just one, among them might be susceptible to the insane acts disfiguring Mathilde's character. She's a completely imaginary person, and indeed conceived well outside the manners and mores which, in the pages of history, will secure such a distinguished place for our nineteenth-century civilization.

[. . .]

(Ah, my dear sir: a novel is a mirror, talking a walk down a big road. Sometimes you see nothing but blue skies; sometimes you'll see the muck in the mud piles along the road. And you'll accuse the man carrying the mirror in his basket of being immoral! His mirror reflects muck, so you'll accuse the mirror, too! Why not also accuse the highway where the mud is piled, or, more strongly still, the street inspector who leaves water wallowing in the roads, so the mud piles can come into being.

(Then we're all agreed: Mathilde's character is impossible, in this time we live in, this age no less prudent than virtuous. I suspect you'll find it less irritating now, as I continue telling the tale of this lovable girl's foolishness.) (341-42, emphasis added)

Now might be a good time to mention that this novel was written in 1829-1830. And after reading this passage, which comes right in the middle of a chapter, something hit me that I'd been mulling over for a while now. Reading over any decent number of early-to-mid-19th-century novels has shown me that the po-mo shenanigans of John Barth, et al, were nothing innovative or different. They were merely (clumsy and obnoxious, in my opinion) attempts to reclaim or reconstruct texts' awarenesses of their own creation that James and the Moderns worked so hard to conceal.

The 19th century was just as interested in coming clean as the 1960s were. They just didn't need to couch it all in hip neo-critical terms of revolution. They didn't have to kill the author in order to make us skeptical of him.