A Few Thoughts on Stendhal's The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century

I acknowledged in the discussion of literary realism in my recent book on modern literature that the term is used in different ways, and even to refer to different periods--with Ian Watt treating it as very much established in the eighteenth century, but others, particularly where attentive to French literature, thinking of it as a post-Romantic, nineteenth century, movement, with these commonly taking Stendhal's 1830 novel The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century as a founding work.

Reading that book it is easy to see why. Stendhal's novel is not just "realistic" in the sense of adhering to tenets of realism (in its intensively detailed, supernatural-excluding and fairly cold-eyed portrayal of what for the author and his audience were everyday reality) but its fierce anti-Romanticism. The protagonist of the book, Julian Sorel--a carpenter's son from provincial France--in the wake of the Revolution and all it brought (contrary to the sneer of the historically illiterate yet historical epic-addicted Ridley Scott, a genuine transformation of the structure of French society), envisions himself as having a grand "career" ahead of him, and stops at nothing to realize that vision. Unlikely as it seems, the profoundly deluded and foolish Sorel actually does in his fumbling way end up on the cusp of achieving everything he had ever desired (marriage to the daughter of a rich and powerful Parisian nobleman, property of his own, a military commission, and even a fake aristocratic lineage to round out his new image) when the revelation of a skeleton in his closet turns it all to dust, leading to a murder attempt against the former lover who exposed him--and leading Sorel to the gallows in the extreme opposite of where his journey was "supposed" to take him.

This combination of delusion and denouement is pretty standard in French realist literature of this era, with Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary perhaps the most famous example, and parallels quite easy to see in the tales of Balzac's "Human Comedy." (Here Eugene Rastignac may indeed make it to the top--but it seems significant that he has no romantic illusions about himself as he pursues his advancement, whereas that all too impressionable youth who did have illusions, Lucien du Rubempre of Lost Illusions and its sequel, alas, comes to an end even more poignantly tragic than Sorel.)

For my part, I would rate those other authors and works more highly from the standpoint of storytelling and literary craftsmanship. In contrast with Stendhal's "chronicle" we have much more tightly constructed plots and flowing narratives, as well as displays of that acme of narrative skill that is "dramatization" (what crude doctrinaires champion as "Show, don't tell"). There is also, in Balzac's case, his breadth and depth of attention to what Henry James called the "machinery of civilization"--all as the time Stendhal spent in Sorel's endlessly scheming mind got a bit wearing in a way that those other authors' intense attentiveness to the goings-on in their own protagonists' thoughts never did. Nevertheless, as is so often the case, if others told this sort of tale more impressively, Stendhal gets the laurels for doing it first, paving the way for these later titans who did so much to make French literature, and modern world literature, what it has become.