Henri Beyle sous influence

Abstract

Henri Beyle 's literary beginnings illustrate the fluctuations of the notion of influence in the aesthetic sphere at the beginning of the 19th Century. At first turned away at the beginning of the 1800s to the benefit of a strategy of imitation, still impregnated in classical doctrine, influence became an important principal of his literary education. Neglecting the ordinary sense of the term, which supposes the often harmful effect of an ancestry exerting some form of uncontrollable power, Beyle evacuates all idea of submission from the notion of influence, and views it as a relationship of election, a freely consenting character from whom he intends gaining numerous benefits. Contrary to imitations rhetoric, influence's culture, as he put it into practice, is the cult of living sensation; thus supposing a "sympathetic" soul, receptive to and enriched by all aesthetic emotions. But this euphorie make-believe also has a darker side : badly controlled influence becomes a virus, a poison which leads to self-annihilation in another person 's mind. Therefore, without abandoning the idea of his motivating power, Beyle is actually applying himself to another practice of influence, in search of singularity, that which he exerts over himself, though, amongst others, his diary and his letters. Here lie a great many areas of study of influences, in which, through successive filters, appears a precious quintessence : that of originality.