Nineteenth-Century French Studies 12.4/13.1 (1984):178-180.
Crouzet, Michel. La Poétique de Stendhal. Paris:
Flammarion, "Nouvelle Bibliothèque Scientifique,"
1983. 329 pp.
[Reprinted with the editorial permission of Nineteenth-Century
French Studies]
The last few years have been both the period of the bicentenary
celebration of Henri Beyle's birth and a period of rejuvenation
of Stendhal scholarship, largely thanks to the contributions of
Michel Crouzet. Since the beginning of this decade, Crouzet's
works of literary analysis and documentation have included Stendhal
et le langage (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), Stendhal et l'italianité
(Paris: Corti, 1982), La Vie de Henry Brulard ou l'enfance
de la révolte (Paris: Corti, 1982), a two-volume edition
of Lucien Leuwen with copious annotations by Crouzet (Paris:
Garnier-Flammarion, 1982), a major essay on Lucien Leuwen
in the proceedings of the February 1983 colloquium on Le Plus
Meconnu des Romans de Stendhal, "Lucien Leuwen" (Paris:
CDU-SEDES, 1983), and an annotated edition, Quatre études
sur Lucien Leuwen. Crouzet's recent addition to this rapidly
expanding critical library, La Poétique de Stendhal, is
but the first volume of a clearly ambitious project entitled Essai
sur la genèse du romantisme.
In La Poétique de Stendhal, Crouzet continues a
study undertaken in Stendhal et le langage, the examination
of Stendhal's "crise du langage" and his passage from
a phased of mistrust of language to an eventual reconciliation
with it through the conception of a unique "poétique."
Crouzet now views the period of Stendhal's early career from the
perspective of the growth of modernism in the post-revolutionary
period: the only way in which the writer could respond to his
mistrust of linguistic self-consciousness was with "la 'terreur',"
and Crouzet proposes to demonstrate that "Stendhal se trouve,
mais partiellement, à l'origine, et comme la première
victime visible ou conscient de cette inquiétiude de la
mauvaise foi littéraire" (p.12). To do this, Crouzet
divides his study in two sections: the title of the first, "L'Ere
du Soupçon," suggests Crouzet's strategy of linking
his analysis to Stendhal et le langage through an examination
of the elements that inspire Stendhal's mistrust and revolt against
language; then, in the second section, "Le Sublime,"
Crouzet uncovers the elements which constitute Stendhal's compromise
with language through a "poétique du sublime."
The title of this study's first section also reveals Crouzet's
belief that an age of mistrust existed well before "l'ère
du soupçon" heralded by Nathalie Sarraute, and that
Stendhal's writings express both the refusal of a "parole
institutionalisée, socialisée" and the demand
for an aesthetic based on "la vérité d'une
`passion', dans la cruauté d'une nature ébranlée
par l'art" (pp. 16-18), in other words, the "sublime."
Since, as Crouzet maintains, "le beyliste va . . . se diriger
vers une possible union des contraires où nous découvrirons
la restauration au moins
Reviews 179
d'une `poétique'" (p. 20), the process of this "discovery"
lies at the heart of Crouzet's approach: he first considers the
"situation de l'écrivain révolté,"
of which Stendhal offers a prime example of both writer and
"révolté" in his formative stages. From
his unsuccessful attempts at writing Molièresque comedies,
Stendhal understood that the roles of writer and "mondain"
were formed simultaneously, art in complicity with society and
vice versa. But Stendhal's very attempt to found a new relationship
with language in order to avoid this complicity inspired a profound
distrust and lack of certainty as to the relations of the writer
with language. The result was a revolt against the writer's self-consciousness
as being all too literary, rhetorical, with Racine et Shakespeare
offering a "terrorist" attack on the sterility and connivance
of classicism (Racine) and a call for literature "à
l'état sauvage" (Shakespeare).
Crouzet then explains the reasons for Stendhal's profound suspicion
of writing:: in three chapters, he examines, from the Romanticist's
perspective, the decline of literature in the eighteenth century,
the hypocrisy of "la littérature au piège des
rapports sociaux," and in particular, the contamination of
classicism due to its collaboration with the political power of
the "Ancien Régime" which implied "la contrainte
sociale sur la littérature et la contrainte politique sur
les hommes" (p. 89). But Stendhal wavered between a reform
of writing and a revolt against it: "Ou bien il s'agit de
rétablir le mouvement naturel de l'invention qui d'âge
en âge a fait succéder des `romantiques', ou bien
le `romantique' est tout de même d'une autre nature que
ses prédecesseurs classiques. . . . Trouver en somme le
point, le point où le conflit disparaît, où
les deux côtés n'en font qu'un" (p. 103). Crouzet
completes the first section by examining the various facets of
this "être romantique", portraying Stendhal-Romanticist
as a man of limitless authenticity, of a "stylistique de
l'égotisme." Stendhal's paradoxical situation of admitting
the possibility of constructing an ideal nature, "et non
sur une nature d'emprunt ou de tradition", but also the possibility
"que l'on puisse recevoir la nature elle est un donné
extérieur à la fonction poétique" (p.
117) leads to "la `Terreur'" of the modernist age of
suspicion: "La parole qui se veut authentique n'est plus
dans la littérature, au contraire, il faut la conquérir
contre la littérature, par une subversion qui la détruit
pour la fonder" (p. 120). And Crouzet closes this section
by showing how Stendhal's "terrorist" activity has been
used by a contemporary "terrorist," Paul Valéry,
against the "beyliste" himself.
But what framework allows Stendhal to overcome his suspicion-laden
trap? An aesthetic of the "sublime", whose components
Crouzet examines throughout the second section. He defines "le
sublime" as "la prise de conscience de soi par l'anéantissement
de soi, devant les puissances inexpiables, devant une Vérité
qui . . . est en fait impensable et indicible" (p. 133).
This aesthetic current, whose adherents include Longin, Burke,
Fénélon, Helvétius, Alfieri, Schiller, Diderot
and Shakespeare, inspired Stendhal to seek a form of expression
which was both "parole" and "action", a cult
of energy which Crouzet calls "la version esthétique
ou rhétorique de l'attitude révoltée"
(p. 140). Thus, in the second section, Crouzet considers the relationship
of this aesthetic of extremes with its origins ("Le Sublime:
L'Enjeu"), with "la `Terreur'" ("Le Sublime:
la Beauté Terrible", whose principle is "l'oxymoron
beyliste" from De l'amour, "l'amour malheureux est
180 Nineteenth-Century French Studies
bonheur"), with the duos "Beauté et Laideur"
and "Beauté et Sympathie", and with another emotion,
"Sens de la `Douleur Regrettante'." Finally, Crouzet
examines the relationship between art and politics in a chapter
entitled "'Le coup de pistolet dans un concert'" , and
affirms that, for Stendhal, "l'essentiel, c'est que littéraire
soit presque antagoniste de politique; . . . Littéraire
s'oppose à un type d'intérêt personnel,
virulent et réel, et surtout désagréable
. . . l'odieux" (pp. 282-283). In other words, Stendhal's
aesthetic oscillated between a literature which "se confond
avec le but avoué, avec une finalité
immédiate qui est celle de la tentation politique, celle
de la vulgarité ordinaire" and a literature that "fuit
cette bassesse égoïste, vers les hauteurs d'un déintéressement
sublime" (p. 283). Thus, for Stendhal, "le coup de pistolet"
is the fundamental problem "de la force et de l'idéal,
du sublime et du beau, du moi esthétique aussi bien,
des rapports de I'art et de la réalité vécue"
(p. 284), and it is precisely this conjunction of opposites which
Stendhal conceives as the very function of the novel.
For readers of the earlier Stendhal et le langage, Crouzet's
new study may appear to cover material already well examined,
and to a certain extent, this is correct since, in each work,
Crouzet considers Stendhal's passage from suspicion and hesitation
to compromise and action. But a main difference between these
two studies is that in La Poétique de Stendhal,
Crouzet no longer focuses his analysis primarily on the manner
in which the eighteenth-century theorists influenced the crisis
of language reflected in Stendhal's works. Rather, Crouzet now
considers the same problematic from the perspective of how this
crisis emerged both in Stendhal's conception of writing and in
the general context of romanticism and of the progress of modemity.
One suggestion for readers new to Crouzet's work is to start with
La Poétique de Stendhal, which provides an accessible
foundation for understanding Stendhal's suspicion of and reconciliation
with language, and then proceed to the broader analysis in Stendhal
et le langage. However one approaches the work of this foremost
of "stendhaliens", the task is frequently arduous, given
Crouzet's complex style, often with three or four major ideas
woven together in a single sentence. But despite the effort that
one must expend, the reward is a progressive sequence of insights
which constantly engage the reader's attention and challenge his/her
understanding of a literary corpus whose fine points are only
beginning to emerge two centuries after the author's birth.
Charles J. Stivale
Wayne State University