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.

The Degeneration of Classical Education

The "Classical" education is, of course, largely a thing of the past, certainly in its more substantive forms--and not at all surprisingly.

There was a time when, for example, the study of Latin was eminently practical. In a period when the vernacular languages of the present were localized and unstandardized Latin had the virtue of being a highly standardized language that was internationally known by the educated elite of the Western world. It lent thus itself better to use when precision was called for, and when people were trying to communicate with others from outside their country, or even their village, than their native languages--and thus was the language of law, administration, diplomacy, science, scholarship, religion, higher culture across the culture region, the more in as the Roman legacy loomed so large in all these areas. (Thus, as late as 1687, did Newton write his Principia in that language.)

Of course, even by early modern times this was beginning to change, with the vernacular languages increasingly liable to precise and wide use--to national use, and even international use, and get used as such, with the fifteenth century seeing English come into its own, for example, and the sixteenth giving the English language the Tyndale Bible and Shakespeare, with all this proceeding through subsequent centuries there and everywhere else. The role of Latin in daily life shrank, and its prominence in education was increasingly a legacy of the past, surviving on inertia and, in the case of those discomfited by liberal and radical currents in the present day, rejection of the modern (preferring as they did the conservatism of what survived of the Ancients to the Enlightenment of their own time).

That made it a more strained, artificial, thing, and unsurprisingly a less successful thing, such that a Coleridge was to quip that a youth was no longer to be assumed capable of thinking in Latin--and increasingly, a Classical education's principal "benefit" the ability to superciliously toss about Latin tags, to the bewilderment and embarrassment of peers who had not had the "benefit" of an upbringing such as theirs. (Indeed, in such a manner did Percy Sillitoe in a now notorious tale find himself snubbed by the overgrown public school students of whom he found himself in charge--as head of Britain's Security Service!) By that point the fondness for the Classical languages as centerpieces of elite education was harder than ever to deny as plain and simple snobbery, with such episodes showing it.

Of "Caveat Emptor"

The Latin tag "caveat emptor" is commonly rendered in English as "Buyer beware."

The term is usually taken to indicate that the buyer bears "personal responsibility" for making sure the seller does not cheat them.

Given the respect with which the words "personal responsibility" are treated in this culture few dare criticize the principle.

Still, in spite of the pieties about the market that few are brave enough to challenge in the mainstream (James Galbraith's remark about being expected to "bend a knee and make the sign of the cross" when publicly using the word "market" is all too accurate), one imagines many have quite other feelings about the matter. The relation between buyer and seller is by no means consistently an equal one. Quite the contrary, it is often extremely unequal, especially in an age of complex products, and Big Business--such that the buyer, especially one of limited means, who can little afford to lose out in any market transaction and for whom any such transaction is full of fear and trepidation, is apt to feel themselves thrown to the wolves in such a situation by those in power who say "Caveat emptor," especially when they understand fully that in the contest between seller and buyer Authority is on the other party's side against the lowly consumer.

An Education Befitting a Fourteenth Century Gentleman

Told that a student has attended an expensive private school--let us make it an expensive private school in continental Europe--and there had a curriculum that included Latin, fencing and horse-riding different people react in different ways.

The person of conventional mind will be awed by the combination of upper classness with unfamiliarity (Latin, fencing, riding remote from their daily life), and, believing the rich superior and their educations superior and being impressed by anything associated with other, will feel themselves inferior.

By contrast the person of really practical mind will not be awed, but rather dubious about the training a person of the twenty-first century for the demands of the fourteenth century, when Latin, the sword, horsemanship, were genuinely important to the career of a man of gentle birth. They might take an ironic attitude toward it, but alternatively they might be anxious at the implications for the larger world--which will have an elite whose incapacities to fulfill its tasks will thus include a thoroughly out of date preparation for life. (Thus did George Orwell speak of politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra.)

Those inclined to the left's view of where the wealth for such educations come from could be expected to react more strongly still. That the great wealth underwriting these educational absurdities is not a "meritocratic" reward for "hard work" and talent but the proceeds of "primitive accumulation," "surplus labor," and "financial parasitism," makes such usage of their money all the more grotesque--while seeming to them yet another discredit of the elite the conventional so respect.

Persons who think that way should be unintimidated by the presumed superiority of those with elite educations, the poses they strike, and the Oohs and Ahhs of the credulous at the thought that here is someone who was taught to handle a foil in school. Still, open contempt is a rarity, with few displaying it quite like an Upton Sinclair as he lamented that Woodrow Wilson, from whom so many expected so much in the years of the First World War and after, had been studying ancient languages and "imbecile" theology instead of getting the training--in economics, in sociology, in geography--to grapple with the real problems of that moment, with consequences that Sinclair was far from alone in deeming disastrous for the world.

Of Bitterness

When spoken in reference to a person the word "bitterness" denotes an individual's anger or disappointment over some aspect of their life, especially an enduring and likely personal outlook-defining anger and disappointment over an aspect likely to have been unimportant.

A person's being bitter is commonly considered a failing on that person's part.

Of course, I will not deny that bitterness can be toxic. But were that merely the issue I do not think that there would be so much opprobrium toward persons who give evidences of being bitter.

After all, consider what we associate bitterness with--a sense on the part of person feeling that way that others have treated them less than justly. Implicit in this is an indictment of those others, and perhaps of society itself, and this is a thing that people of conventional mind cannot countenance, and accordingly dismiss or attack anyone whose speech or action even hits at such indictment. The fault must not be with society, but with the individual, making their feeling illegitimate. And even if they really were unjustly treated in a way that cannot be denied, they think the person who suffered the injustice at others' hands should simply "Whatever. Get over it!"

As an attitude toward another individual is concerned it is not empathetic or sympathetic, respectful or tolerant. As an attitude toward society it is, at best, complacent in the extreme--and for those whose opinions generally count, which is to say the privileged and elite, the authority-holding and the comfortable, selfish and self-serving in the extreme, with all that tends to flow from that, including the ready demand of "convenient social virtue" on the part of others as they brush off any and every problem in a manner not only callous toward others, but inimical to any enlightened conception of their own self-interest.

Considering all that the very least one should do is stop and think before they rush to condemn others merely for feeling something less than convenient to the comfortable. Indeed, they should recall that if people have any right to a subjectivity whatsoever that includes the right to be bitter, the more in as bitterness may well be a valid response to life experience--and that denying those already mistreated that right too can scarcely be expected to do anything but add to their bitterness.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Mystery Science Theater 3000

Not long ago I happened across the story of Mystery Science Theater 3000 writer and performer Kevin Murphy (the guy who was Tom Servo) meeting Kurt Vonnegut Jr..

It seems that Vonnegut did not care for the show's concept.

Given Vonnegut's reputation as a satirist this may seem surprising--but then I find myself remembering Vonnegut's creation Kilgore Trout, and how, in a way very rare for fiction of its generation, Trout's tale showed how lonely and sad and bleak the odyssey of an artist can be. How little appreciated, to the point that they may not even think of themselves as artists, because no one else does, and in spite of all the cheap "Believe in yourself" self-help dross and "artists don't need other people's support" crap people of feeble and conventional mind love to peddle, this matters.

A show that is literally all about punching down at makers of "bad movies" via an hour and a half of heckling is a far cry from the outlook on life that produced a Kilgore Trout, and it is in that spirit that I take Vonnegut's answer to Murphy that "every artist deserves respect."

Indeed, I have to admit that while back when the show was on the air I was a fan I find myself sympathizing with Vonnegut's stance more and more all the time.

The False Image of the Professoriat's Gentility

Fiction, especially that kind of contemporary fiction which reaches the broader public, overwhelmingly deals with those leading lives of relative comfort and privilege--like the more affluent professionals. So it goes with our depiction of college. Yes, we had a sitcom about a community college not so long ago, but now as before the college we are most likely to see pop culture depict is a four year research institution with graduate programs and sports teams and dorms and campus life, staffed by professors living a cloistered but essentially genteel existence.

Of course, it may seem that in spite of that the popular view today is a bit more nuanced. The lot of the adjunct professor of whom American higher education has made ever more, and ever more exploitative, use, has been increasingly discussed, for example. Still, even those who know of such things think it a recent novelty. By contrast, those who read Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step learn that even if the extreme, semester-to-semester insecurity of the professor is a new and unwelcome change, a poverty that makes even a shabby gentility out of the question has been the lot of a very large part of the American professoriat for a very long time.

A Few Words on Keisuke Kinoshita's Army

I was unfamiliar with even the name of Keisuke Kinoshita until early one morning I happened upon his 1944 film Army on TCM.

What overwhelmed everything else for me while watching the film was the official value system the movie presented as prevailing in the Japan of the movie's day. The world over people are told that it is right that the state draft the children they spent their adult lives raising to fight and possibly die in the state's wars--and that they ought to be proud of their children doing so.

However, here it went further--parents told they should not merely be willing to have their children drafted and fight and die, and proud of those who fight and lay down their lives, but that they should be ashamed for caring whether those children are alive or dead, whether they will ever see them return home, instead of being content that they are "serving the Emperor" (and not simply by pompous authority figures, but supposedly "right-thinking" peers). And indeed the film is above all remembered for infuriating the censors with its final scene in which a mother seeing her son off to war, shows herself unable to let go of the child she raised.

I was aghast at the propaganda line this film was intended to promote, and which (as I later learned) at least some of the makers of the film bravely defied in that final scene, and that reaction has stayed with me ever since. In fact it has been much on my mind in these years as the Japanese people protest the rehabilitation of wartime militarism by the nationalist right in their country. This was what they lived through--and they have no desire to repeat the experience.

"It's Only a Movie": Further Thoughts

Considering the dismissal of a movie's content with the remark that "It's only a movie" it seems to me that, aside from the essential flippancy of the remark toward the other person who committed the crime of speaking there is a particular dismissal of anything resembling artistic aspiration and critical standards as we know them--especially when it is the answer to somebody's pointing out a movie's lack of realism.

The plain and simple truth is that as is generally the case with modern art forms those making movies endeavor to achieve the illusion of reality, in part because audiences have to be made to "believe" in what they are seeing to become emotionally involved in it in that conventional "dramatic" way most storytelling, and most movies, aim for, all as the same effect matters even in light entertainment. ("It's funny because it's true!" goes the common explanation of something that the person in question finds funny.)

Of course, there is such a thing as artistic license--in part because transforming the stuff of life into a 90-minute or 2-hour or 3-hour dramatic presentation requires a good deal of selection and compression and combination and distillation. (Hence such innovations as the montage.) Yet their makers generally do not aspire to get things wrong, and their doing so is not generally thought to their credit. It is therefore far from illegitimate to point the fact out--no matter what the idiots who blow off any observation with "It's only a movie!" say.

"It's Only a Movie"

When someone raises the faults of a movie's depiction of its subject a certain sort of person responds with the retort "It's only a movie!"--or words to that effect.

Their meaning seems to be that as the movie is "only a movie" what the movie presented was not to be taken seriously and that the person who said something about it suggesting that it was at all to be taken seriously is a fool to do so, making what was merely flippant actually insulting.

This is all the more the case in that the response is so lazy and dishonest as to be an insult to the intelligence of anyone to whom they are responding. After all, does the person who says "It's only a movie" themselves abide by their own standard--never, ever taking any aspect of any movie seriously? And even if they do so do they actually understand the implications of that position, that no one can legitimately do so? That movies mean nothing as art? That they have no impact on perceptions?

Are they really ready to stand by all that?

Almost certainly not. Rather their intent was to shut down the other party, and (perhaps unintentionally, but very likely intentionally) do it in this pointedly disrespectful way.

Consider, then, how much respect someone who does that deserves in return.

Is News Avoidance Surging?

Back in October 2023 the Pew Research Center reported that Americans follow the news less closely than they used to do. Where in 2016-2018 the percentage describing themselves as closely following the news was in the 50 percent range the figure was in the 37-38 percent range in 2021-2022--a dramatic drop-off over those few years that can seem related to what people see objectively getting worse. There is the pandemic, the economic turmoil, the wars escalating and spreading across the face of the Earth, the horrific intrusion of ecosystem collapse into more and more lives, among much, much else--and the way in which the media continue to live down to the lowest expectations every sane and informed person has of them as they propagandize rather than inform, terrify rather than enlighten, break the spirits of those who care rather than perform the democratic mission about which they are so pompous, while disgustingly praising themselves for their "responsibility" and "professionalism" as they set about it.

Still, it can seem that after a low point in 2021 there were hints of a mild rebound in attentiveness to the news--with the rebound not so mild among those in the 18-29 age range. If less inclined to follow the news closely than their elders at all those points in time covered by the survey it seems worth remarking that over the longer term the drop was smallest in their case (8 percent for the 2016-2022 period, as against the 19 percent drop among the age 30-49 group), due to a 5 percent surge in the percentage claiming to follow the news from 2021 to 2022.

Might that be indicative of increasing attentiveness to politics among the young? Perhaps--though one should remember that this is a matter of self-reporting in response to a question of a rather general nature, subjective perceptions of which may have changed over time (these six years rather a long time in the media world). One should also remember that even if entirely accurate it still leaves them a long way from the engagement level of their elders--with of those 65 and up, even at this low point, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) still following the news closely. All the same, it is something for those hopeful that an age cohort many associate with withdrawal from life will become more engaged with the world they live in to watch.

Len Deighton's Blood, Tears, and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II: Some Reflections

Picking up Len Deighton's history of the early portion of World War II Blood, Tears & Folly I was not sure what to expect--the main draw the fact that Deighton created the fictional secret agent who has since come to be known to the world as "Harry Palmer." Alas, my reading of the book corresponded to the Kirkus Reviews assessment of the book as, in spite of its promises from its subtitle forward, not only lacking "original research," but "fresh perspectives,"but instead, as the review has it, the book proving just "mildly contrarian" as it went over what, for those of us in the English-speaking world at least, were the most familiar and exhaustively studied aspects of the conflict, rather conventionally treated.

Still, if the book fell well short of the promise it seemed to make it seems to me to, three decades on, have interest at least as a reflection of the years in which it appeared. Deighton's Blood, Tears and Folly appeared as part of that body of revisitation and revaluation of the was that questioned the received, patriotic, view of Britain's role in the way--the years when Correlli Barnett was still putting out his "Pride and Fall" quartet, when British government whistleblower-turned-historian Clive Ponting published 1940: Myth and Reality--and when those defending the received view, from people like Ponting more than Barnett, fired back at them (with such counterblasts coming from some surprising places, as I was surprised to see when I read Angus Calder's The Myth of the Blitz).

At the same time there is what gave that revisitation a contemporary edge, namely the parallels of the Britain of the World War II era as Barnett, Ponting et. al. described it, and the Britain of their own time--not least the country's elite overrating its strength and importance in the world, and failing to come to grips with important industrial and economic weaknesses. Indeed, writing of Britain (and America) up against Germany and Japan in the 1940s Deighton drew an explicit parallel with the English-speaking powers in their economic competition with Germany and Japan in the 1990s--which, like many at the time, he thought Germany and Japan might have already won. ("Is the European Community . . . about to become that faceless bureaucratic machine that Hitler started to build? Is the Pacific already Japan's co-prosperity sphere?" Deighton asks in the introduction.) In his thoughts about such matters Deighton struck me as orthodox and conventional and unimpressive in his thinking (certainly relative to the impression he makes as a novelist, and his promise of a "revisionist" view), with his remarks about the U.S.-Japanese competition in particular telling in this respect. (In his book's last pages he describes that competition as a matter of whether a "closed, class-conscious, racially exclusive" society would triumph over "the world's most open and dynamic one." Japan did not triumph as many expected, of course, but the causes and consequences of Japan's failure to do so were quite remote from what he seemed to think.)

Still, had he focused on developing that idea, rather than devoting most of his time to recounting the familiar highlights yet again in the familiar ways (Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the fall of Singapore)--and in the process, maybe moved his thinking beyond the conventionalities--he might have delivered that "fresh perspective" the book he delivered so sorely lacks.

The Wearisomeness of Les Claqueurs

Over the years I have paid a good deal of attention to the entertainment press simply because of the subjects I write about--and personally think that press has got worse. Looking at particular web sites over the years it certainly seems to me that many a site that had once provided at least some interesting comment has been reduced to a platform for listicle-packed clickbait, while the proportion of breathless hype to substance has exploded--enough so that I find myself less and less inclined to bother with anything my immediate research needs do not require me to look at, the claquing that was always an annoyance simply become intolerably exhausting. The result is that where once upon a time the trivia of entertainment news seemed at least capable of offering a respite from the horrors of the headlines, it now seems to me something to avoid just as much.

William Gibson on "Toughness"

As I have remarked in the past William Gibson's nonfiction, even taken on its distinctly postmodernist terms, can be very uneven--but at his very best Gibson can and does offer an important insight, strikingly phrased.

One, rather off-handedly presented in his tribute to Japanese film actor Takeshi Kitano, referred to how toughness and its display is so often "simply the pornography of fascism."

The words ring as true for me now as when I first read them. Indeed, I suggest that the reader watch very carefully the way "journalists" use the word "tough" in referring to politicians and their policies, all too revealing of the real sensibility of many of those who not only would never present themselves as fascists, but indeed react with outrage whenever anyone uses the word at all (even in reference to literal fascists).

"Brutally Honest"

Just as "tough love" is more often about toughness than love, brutal honesty tends to be more about brutality than honesty. A certain kind of person can never pass up a chance to say something hurtful--and does not when they have handy the excuse that they are being "honest."

Considering such "honesty" I find myself thinking about those people with wealth and power and status one hears about, surrounded by people who always tell them what they want to hear, and accordingly tell them only what will flatter them, often to their longer-run cost.

I suspect most of the people on this planet, who lack wealth and power and status, are in the opposite position--surrounded by people telling them what they do not want to hear, not because the person in question needs to hear it, but because it gives those around them pleasure to say it, and in line with brutal honesty being about the brutality rather than the honesty, the brutal things they say need not have anything to do with facts or truth at all.