Stendhal's Conception of the Narrativity of Visual Signs

Abstract

An attempt at understanding Stendhal's conception of the pictorial and to set it in correlation with his fiction is not by any means a frivolous enterprise of aesthetic transcription. It amounts to an attempt at comprehending the artist's imagination in its essential structures as they articulate his perception of reality and his recreation of that reality in his works. Painting means for Stendhal what Ruskin and architecture would mean for Marcel Proust, that is to say an aesthetic apprenticeship of the imaginary that fashions the tools for the description of space and of the world around. As Gerard Genette has shown, to speak of space in literary texts is far from being paradoxical but is rather an attempt to recapture that fascination with space that is so essential to the poetic state described by Paul Valery (Genette 1.969:44). The education of the imagination in which Stendhal's reflections on painting and music participate is of considerable consequence, since it establishes and structures a conception of the sign which in turn conditions the aesthetic work of representation. Indeed, everything in Stendhal has to be understood in accordance with an endless game whereby the correlations of indices and of signs interlock to suggest the essence of things instead of describing their existence. The suggestive aspect of this process becomes the trademark both of the written and of the spoken word because, as Genette has observed, even l'amour stendhalien est, entre autres choses, un systeme et un echange de signes (Genette 1969:165). In his analysis of Italian painting, Stendhal defines the visual sign as open, that is to say, it allows for the absorption of the observer's imagination into the world of the picture, a process of integration that permits the individualized completion of the work of art painted