Stendhal and the Discovery of Ironic Interplay

Abstract

Why did it take Stendhal so long? So long, that is, not only to hit his stride but to feel it at all? Novelists are often late starters, and yet when the brilliant school mathematician had come to Paris with the ambition of becoming a great world writer, it was not the novel especially that led him on. Anything but. Then it was the drama, and a plethora of false starts in criticism, in this or that autobiographical attempt, in travel writing, at last in a treatise on love. He had arrived in Paris, as he repeatedly tells us, on the eve of the Eighteenth Brumaire in 1799; counting most of his work of the late twenties as still practice, it was a good thirty years till he hit his full stride in Le Rouge et le noir, completing that novel with his finally characteristic speed while the Revolution of 1830 was coming to a head. What enabled Stendhal at last to write fiction, I should like to show, was marshalling his ideological conflicts to produce a powerful and dominant ironic interplay. In the process of this demonstration, having analyzed elsewhere the contrastive force of his irony of event and its implicit ability to generate potentially infinite pairs of contradictions,' I should like to take a long look at the range of ideals and feelings that the irony he thereby discovered can be made to