Devenir Stendhal: amitié et formation littéraire. Par Muriel Bassou

Abstract

Stendhal’s writings show the author repeatedly identifying with his imagined readers — and so inviting his actual readers to identify themselves with him — in ways that can be viewed as either friendly or manipulative, depending of course on one’s own personality type. Narcissists, or ‘fripons’ as Stendhal generally refers to them, assume that his protestations of sincerity are in fact all lies, part of his eternal evasiveness in slippery service of some mysterious greater game of unknowability; empaths, or ‘dupes’ as he generally refers to them, assume that he is in fact sincere in these protestations — for what could finally be the point of playing such vacuous games with the emotions of others, or indeed of writing at all, if one does not wish to establish meaningful communication with fellow human beings and make oneself, in some ways at least, knowable to others? The question of Stendhal’s sincerity is key to any consideration of his theorizations and representations of friendship, which repeatedly emerges as a major preoccupation in his work, including in his autobiographical writings. These latter trace the origins of this preoccupation to the isolation of his early childhood years, eventually alleviated by his friendship with his grandfather’s valet, Lambert (Vincent Lamberton), ‘mon ami, auquel je disais tout’ (Stendhal, Œuvres intimes, ed. by Victor Del Litto, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1981–82), ii (1982), p. 674). Stendhal carried this saying of everything over into his writing, including his fictions, and this helps to explain why he claims to think of his readers, the Happy Few, as his friends to whom he can speak sincerely. Friendship is therefore not just a recurring theme in his writings, but rather central to Stendhal’s practice as an author, as Muriel Bassou demonstrates in this excellent and comprehensive reconstruction of Stendhal’s disparate theorizations of friendship. Adapted from her doctoral thesis shortly before her premature death (the typescript was finalized by Marie-Claire Bassou), this monograph succeeds in its aim of giving us a virtual De l’Amitié to place alongside Stendhal’s own published De l’Amour (1822). The author shows how Stendhal variously conceived of friendship not as a self-servingly pragmatic contract but as a free gift; as a means of learning how to know and judge oneself; and as a collaboration, a blurring of the lines of the sovereignty of the individual and also of authorship. This explains why so many of his writings resulted from forms of dialogue with his actual friends and why his readers, his virtual friends, are expected to supply such a particularly large share of the meaning of his work. Muriel Bassou understood that to be a member of the Happy Few one must oneself see the point of friendship and prove oneself capable of it, not least by recognizing Stendhal’s own friendliness for what it is: a sincere and at times compulsive attempt at communication. She has combined her great erudition with Stendhalian qualities of clarity and sound judgement to produce what will henceforth be seen as the standard work on this important topic.