Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are attempting
to contain a man who really consciously refused
to be contained. Oh, absolutely. A figure who
somehow manages to bridge the gap between, you
know, this passionate romanticism and the icy
precision of literary realism. We are diving
into the multiple identities, the brilliant works,
and the frankly bizarre psychological legacy
of Marie -Henri Bile, who everyone knows as Stenthal.
And our mission today is to take this entire
stack of sources, his life, his theoretical writings,
his really controversial reception, and turn
them into cohesive knowledge for you. Because
Stendhal isn't just a writer. He's more like
an intellectual riddle. He is. He's the author
critics credit with inventing modern, serious
realism. Yet, if you ask most people, he's best
known for a strange physical malady named after
him. And that abstract, almost systematic analysis
of how we fall in love, it's a very strange combination.
It is. To be the starting point of one of the
most intellectually rigorous movements in literature,
while also being the namesake for, you know,
a psychological reaction to art. Exactly. Stendhal
spent his entire life trying to live this flamboyant
romantic existence, hiding behind a whole series
of honestly hilarious aliases. And yet his greatest
contribution to the world was his absolutely
merciless, almost clinical psychological clarity.
We're dealing with duality at every single level
here. We are. And we want to understand why a
writer who dedicated his work to the happy few
and, let's be honest, struggled for recognition
in his own time, is now considered just indispensable.
So we'll start by unpacking the man himself.
Marie -Henri Bale, born in Grenoble in 1783,
died in Paris 1842. We'll trace his path from
Napoleon's army to the salons of Paris, analyze
his most enduring nonfiction ideas, crystallization
and Stendhal syndrome. And finally, we'll grapple
with his literary style, examining why his novels,
especially The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse
of Parma, are seen as these foundational texts
of modernity. So let's begin. The origins of
the man who saw life as a masked ball. Okay,
let's unpack this complicated, intensely self
-analyzing man. And we have to start with the
deep wound of his childhood. We do. The sources
all describe Marie -Henri Bale's early life as
definingly unhappy. Which seems so contrary to
the passionate theatrical characters he would
later create. Right. And the central tragedy,
really the thing that shapes everything, is the
death of his mother, Henriette Gagnon. She died
in childbirth when he was only seven. And that
loss, which he felt so intensely, seems to have
just permanently skewed his emotional life. It
wasn't just the loss, though. It was the environment
that came after. His father, Sherabin Bale, was
an advocate, a landowner, you know, firmly bourgeois.
And Stendhal carried a lifelong antipathy toward
him. He famously called his father unimaginative.
Which, for an intellect as restless and romantic
as Bale's, was probably the worst insult you
could possibly level at someone. Exactly. That
early sense of psychological isolation, that
rebellion against the stifling order of the French
provincial bourgeoisie, that really becomes the
engine for his fiction. It does. He's rebelling
against the mundane, the regulated, the predictable,
which is exactly what his protagonists, like
Julia Sorrell in The Red and the Black, are doing
constantly. But he did have one steady emotional
anchor. Right. His younger sister, Pauline. Yes,
Pauline. He maintained a steady, very detailed
correspondence with her throughout his life.
That connection is absolutely vital. And you
can sort of see his later focus on female characters
who are often so much more active and intellectually
complex than the men. You can see it stemming
from that foundational connection. I mean, they
aren't just plot devices for him. They are intensely
observed, fully realized human beings. And this
internal tension he had. His bourgeois background
versus the radical emotional life he craved that
also shaped his politics, right? Yeah. This ambiguous
attitude toward Napoleon and the monarchy. Completely.
He had one foot planted in the establishment
through his family, but his head and his heart
were already drifting toward these revolutionary
liberal ideals. And that tension became very,
very real when he encountered the French Empire.
The military and theatrical worlds of Napoleon's
France were, as our sources say, a total revelation
for him. Absolutely. The army gave him a stage
for the ambition and the intellectual energy
that provincial Grenoble could never, ever satisfy.
He served as an assistant war commissioner, an
auditor with the Conseil d 'Etat. But it was
his participation in the military campaigns that
really forged the analytical, disciplined mind.
that would later be capable of writing realism.
And we have to pause here because his time during
the disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia provides
the ultimate anecdote, illustrating his famous
sang -froid, that cool -headed self -possession.
This is where we start building the case for
Stendhal as the originator of realism. He witnessed
the burning of Moscow. An event of almost apocalyptic
romantic scale. Right. But the profound insight
into his character comes during the winter retreat
that followed, which was one of the most catastrophic
military failures in history. Starvation, disease,
freezing chaos everywhere. And the sources emphasize
that he remarkably maintained his daily routine,
including shaving every single day. Shaving?
Amidst total human breakdown, he clung to that
tiny, disciplined, almost absurd act of civilization.
So if I'm following you, you're arguing this
isn't just some quirky detail. This is the core
of his literary methodology, isn't it? Precisely.
The ability to observe and impose order on overwhelming
chaos. Literary realists didn't just report on
events. They selected details that spoke volumes
about human character. And his insistence on
shaving suggests this iron will. This dedication
to mental clarity, to maintaining a sense of
self above the environmental pressures. That
clinical distance from personal disaster is the
exact same distance he later applied to his character's
emotional disasters. And it wasn't just a psychological
posture. His clear -headedness proved pragmatically
useful. He saved his own life and the lives of
others. He did. During the crossing of the Berezina
River, he was the commissioner of war supplies
so he could see the logistical nightmare unfolding.
The main pontoon bridge was overwhelmed. Thousands
were dying. And Stendhal, keeping his head, identified
a usable fort across the river and led his companions
to safety. He used practical on -the -ground
observation, the hallmark of a realist, to survive
the romantic tragedy of the campaign. So he returns
to Paris. A competent survivor, his admiration
for Napoleon still intact, he saw the emperor
as the ultimate self -made man. But then, the
fall of Napoleon in 1814 meant the end of that
theatrical world he loved, so he made a defining
choice. He left France for Italy. And this was
the period he considered the happiest of his
entire life. Yeah. He settled in Milan, stayed
until 1821, and only left because his anti -Austrian
sentiments and his fear of getting involved with
the Carbonari. The revolutionary secret societies.
Exactly. It just made his position too precarious.
His attachment to Italy was profound. He saw
it as a place of genuine, unvarnished human emotion.
More sincere, more passionate than the stiff,
politically reactionary atmosphere of Restoration
France. He romanticized Italy as the home of
truth. And he used that difference in emotional
temperament as a literary tool. Right, there's
that famous slightly toning cheek aside he puts
into the Charterhouse of Parma. A novel he wrote
in a feverish 52 days, which is incredible. He
describes a character driven to contemplate suicide
out of despair over love. And he feels he has
to explain this intense reaction to his French
readers. Yes, he says, and I'm paraphrasing here.
To make this clear to my French readers, I must
explain that in Italy, a country very far from
us, people are still driven to despair by love.
The idea that he had to clarify the mere possibility
of dying from heartbreak to a Parisian audience
says everything. It does. It highlights his belief
that true, unadulterated passion had been suffocated
by French society, while Italy still offered
an environment where emotions were visceral,
even destructive. And this emotional sensibility
linked directly to his political identity. He
was an avowed liberal. Anticlerical. Highly critical
of the Bourbon Restoration. His time in Italy
convinced him that romanticism, with its focus
on intense emotional life and freedom, was the
perfect aesthetic counterpart to political liberalism.
He saw the fight for political freedom mirrored
in the fight for artistic freedom, and his politics
had very real consequences for his career. They
did. You mentioned he was appointed French consul
in Trieste in 1830. And was promptly rejected.
Yes. Prince Metternich. The powerful Austrian
foreign minister, the symbol of European conservatism,
refused to grant him the exquiter, the official
recognition. Aye. Explicitly because of Stendhal's
known liberalism and his outspoken anti -clerical
views. This was not a man who kept his opinions
to himself. He was publicly identified with the
movement that threatened the established order.
So we have this precise, cool -headed veteran
who is at the same time a passionate, politically
engaged liberal. Let's turn now to his famously
complex romantic life. The dandy, the obsessive
womanizer, and the secret feminist. He was a
man consumed by the chase and by the analysis
of the chase. His nonfiction treatise, Delamore,
which we'll explore in detail, was basically
an attempt to rationalize his own unrequited
passion for Mathilde, Countess Dombowska. And
he suffered profoundly from what he called the
restlessness in spirit his pursuits caused. Yet
he just had to categorize that suffering intellectually.
And it wasn't just the sophisticated European
women. The source of mention his deep distress
when his childhood friend, Victorine, married.
He described her to his sister Pauline as the
woman of his dreams. It shows the depth of the
sentimental life he was trying to cage with a
rational analysis. His personal life was often
messy, but his intellectual observations about
women were revolutionary for the time. This is
why figures like Simone de Beauvoir later spoke
so highly of his empathy. In The Second Sex,
right? Exactly. She gave him significant credit,
arguing that he genuinely perceived a woman as
simply a human being, rather than a collection
of social roles or a function of male desire.
That's a powerful distinction. He saw the individual
humanity first. De Beauvoir even called him a
feminist writer. primarily citing his rebellious
heroines. Characters like Mathilde Lamolle in
The Red and the Black, who actively carve out
their own destinies and refuse to be defined
by patriarchal expectations. But Beauvoir, ever
the sharp critic, she offered a nuanced view.
She did. She noted that while he championed women's
freedom and equality of spirit, his ultimate
vision for them was still, generally, limited
to marriage. So it shows the limits of his era.
and maybe the limits of his own imagination regarding
social structure. His radicalism was psychological,
not fully structural. I think that's a perfect
way to put it. It's a fantastic insight. Now,
before we move to his formal concepts, we have
to acknowledge the immense physical toll his
life took. The sources detail his protracted
health struggles, starting with syphilis, contracted
in 1808. This is a truly painful chapter, and
it must have fueled his need for self -analysis.
The treatments he received were, by modern standards,
horrific. 19th century methods. He was taking
iodide of potassium and, crucially, quicksilver
mercury to combat the disease. And he was the
clinical observer, even of his own suffering.
He meticulously documented the consequences in
his journals. Swollen armpits, difficulty swallowing,
agonizing pains in his testicles, chronic sleeplessness.
And profound neurological symptoms. Giddiness,
roaring in the ears, a racing pulse, and tremors
so severe he admitted he could scarcely hold
a fork or a pen. And modern historians of medicine
believe that many of those symptoms The tremors
and vertigo were more likely for mercury poisoning
than the disease itself. He was being constantly,
systematically poisoned by his doctors while
traveling across Europe, desperately seeking
cures. This constant physical agony must have
contributed to his need for intellectual control
and escape. Which brings us to the ultimate form
of escape and control, the pseudonym. The man
who defined realism was obsessed with hiding
his true identity. He used over a hundred aliases.
This wasn't just a literary quirk. It was a psychological
compulsion, a way to live multiple lives at once.
The sources list names from the formal, like
Dominique or Salviati, to the completely absurd.
Louis -Alexandre Bombette, Don Phlegm, William
Crocodile. William Crocodile. It speaks to the
theatrical quality of his mind. And the name
we know him by, Stendhal, was borrowed from the
German city of Stendhal, the birthplace of the
art historian Johann Joachim Minklmann. And he
added the H just to make sure the Germanic pronunciation
was clear. He was that precise. He viewed life
itself as a grand, complicated game. He advised
himself in his private writings, look upon life
as a masked ball. It was a deliberate strategy
to achieve Baalism. the term later coined for
that intense, self -proclaimed egotism and self
-analysis you see in his characters. The irony
is so rich, isn't it? The man who wanted to be
a lanky blonde German who hid behind countless
masks, who advocated for the subjective pleasure
of living anonymously, is celebrated precisely
for his capacity for unflinching, objective realism.
His deepest personal truth was found in the fictional
disguise. That tension defines his genius. That
is the perfect hinge point. The man is defined
by his masks, but his legacy is defined by his
clarity. Let's move from the personal identity
to the intellectual framework he created or inspired.
Okay. So now we transition from the biography
of the masked man to the psychological concepts
he formalized, starting with his own rational
analysis of love, crystallization. Yes, from
Delamore, Polition 1822. It's Stenhall's attempt
to reduce romantic passion, the very thing that
caused him so much personal pain, to a systematic,
almost scientific process. It's a phenomenal
attempt at intellectual containment. It is. Stendhal
argues that falling in love is a mental process
of idealization, where the mind attributes imaginary
perfection to the object of affection. And he
uses a famous analogy to explain this. The journey
from Bologna to Rome. I find this analogy incredibly
helpful because it grounds the abstract. It does.
Bologna in this framework represents indifference.
It's the pre -romantic state where you're just
observing the person and your imagination is
dormant. And Rome, by contrast, is the destination.
Perfect love, where the object is entirely idealized
in your mind. And the key is that the departure
from Bologna, that initial spark, the shift from
indifference to fixation, is instinctive. It's
not willed. Once your mind fixes on the person,
the process of crystallization begins. And he
compares this process to what happens to a tree
branch left in a salt mine. Exactly. Over time,
the branch becomes coated with sparkling, beautiful
crystals. The bare branch is the person's true
self. The crystals are all the imagined perfections
we project onto them. And he breaks this down
into four defined stages, a roadmap of how we
fool ourselves into passion. Let's walk through
the journey. Okay. Stage one is admiration. This
is the initial perception of qualities. You see
something about the person, a talent, a physical
attribute, a witty remark that is pleasant and
impressive. It's simple, objective observation.
Stage two is acknowledgement. The process becomes
reciprocal, or at least you start to think it
could be. Right. This is the recognition that
it would be pleasant, even beneficial, to gain
the loved one's interest. The potential for interaction
shifts the dynamic from passive admiration to
active personal interest. Then comes stage three,
hope. This is where the imagination really takes
over. It takes flight. Hope envisions gaining
the person's love, dreaming of a future shared
with them. The possibilities begin to overshadow
the observed realities. You start weaving stories.
And finally, stage four, delight. And Stendhal
is really specific here. He is. This is the delight
derived from overreading the beauty and merit
of the person whose love one hopes to win. This
is the full crystallization moment. The mind
has finished coating the bare branch with imaginary
diamonds. The person is now flawless, magnificent,
perfect in your subjective view. It's fascinating,
isn't it? For a writer credited with realism,
his major psychological theory is all about the
necessary function of illusion in love. You could
argue that crystallization is the first modern
systematic theory of cognitive bias in romantic
attraction. It explains why six months later,
when the crystals start to dissolve, the person
you loved seems so utterly different from the
person standing in front of you. Because you
were in love with your own creation. Exactly.
That intellectual leap from suffering intense
heartbreak to rationally charting the steps of
that suffering is peak Baalism. And the origin
story of this whole concept is pure Stenhalian
theater. Oh, it's the ultimate synthesis of the
mundane and the profound. He was talking to a
man named Girardi during a trip to the Salzburg
salt mine. While describing the geological process
of salt crystal formation, the analogy just struck
him. He immediately detailed the entire process.
Bologna, Rome, the four stacks on the back of
a playing card. On the back of a playing card,
it's the perfect snapshot of the man. Intellectual
genius applied casually, obsessively, and recorded
fleetingly. It is. Now, if crystallization is
about the internal, analytical construction of
love, we have to shift to the concept named after
him, which is all about the external, overwhelming,
and profoundly physical reaction to art. Stendhal
syndrome. This shift is a beautiful contrast.
We go from the mind idealizing a person to the
body collapsing under the weight of cultural
perfection. Precisely. The Stenthal syndrome
is named for an experience he had in Florence
in 1817, which he later documented in Naples
in Florence, a journey from Milan to Reggio.
What exactly happened when he was confronted
with the concentration of history there? He was
utterly overcome. The specific location was the
Basilica of Santa Croce, which is just a treasure
trove of art and history. It's got the tombs
of Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli. So cultural
density overload. Exactly. And upon leaving the
porch of that basilica, he was hit by this profound
psychosomatic reaction. How did he describe the
feeling? I mean, the physical feeling. He documented
a fierce palpitation of the heart. an unnerving
sense that the wellspring of life was dried up
within me. This was coupled with severe dizziness,
giddiness, and a constant fear of falling to
the ground. So a panic attack. Induced by sheer
cultural overload, the density of genius and
history compacted into one space. It sounds like
it. It's almost the physical opposite of the
cool clinical self -control he maintained while
shaving during the Russian campaign. Right. It
suggests that while he could impose order on
chaos, he struggled to contain the intense beauty
of human accomplishment. That tension is key.
He could rationalize love, but he couldn't rationalize
cultural awe. His experience remained an interesting
anecdote for over a century until it was formally
recognized. By the Italian psychiatrist Graziella
Magrini. Yes, in 1979. The condition, a specific
set of symptoms including a racing heart, Nausea,
dizziness, fainting, primarily affecting sensitive
first -time visitors to cities like Florence,
was diagnosed and officially named Stenthal syndrome.
So we have two remarkable psychological legacies
attached to his name. Crystallization, the internal
rational method for dissecting the illusion of
love, detailed on a playing card. And Stenthal
syndrome. The external, involuntary physical
surrender to the reality of overwhelming beauty,
documented on the steps of Santa Croce. It perfectly
captures the split nature of the man, the analytical
scientist trying to contain the romantic soul.
He was perpetually trying to be both Bologna
and Rome at the same time, maintaining indifference
while experiencing perfect rapture. That sets
the stage beautifully for his ultimate contribution.
the literature that synthesized these two forces.
Yes, let's get into the novels. Moving now to
his literary identity. And it's important to
remember that Stendhal was not a blockbuster
seller in his time. He famously dedicated his
work to the happy few, a phrase he wrote in English
in the original text. And this is often misinterpreted
as pure literary elitism. But it's not, is it?
No. The irony is crucial. Our sources confirm
this phrase is almost certainly an ironic reference
to Oliver Goldsmith's 1766 novel The Vicar of
Wakefield. Okay, unpack that for us. In that
book, the phrase ironically refers to the tiny
number of people who actually read the title
character's obscure pedantic treatise on monogamy.
So Stendhal wasn't necessarily being arrogant.
He was being commercially realistic, maybe even
self -deprecating. Exactly. He knew his precise,
highly analytical style was not going to appeal
to the mass audience of the high romantic era
who preferred the epic drama of writers like
Victor Hugo. His genius would have to wait. He
had a very clear sense of his own aesthetic position,
though. the romantic realist. He did. He championed
the romantic aesthetic in works like Racine and
Shakespeare, arguing for freedom in form, praising
Shakespeare's boundless scope and complexity,
while unfavorably comparing him to Racine's strict
classical rules. He wanted the passionate subject
matter of romanticism, but with the disciplined
observation of a scientist. That drive for discipline
and precision led to the methodology that defines
his lasting contribution. His novel, The Red
and the Black, is considered his most notable
work, a clear literary tribute to the world of
ambition and political flux created by Napoleon.
And this is where we need to unpack the theory.
discusses Stenhall's profound metaphor for the
novel. The novel as a mirror being carried in
a basket. This is the foundational idea of Stenhallian
realism. OK, let's break this down. What does
the mirror in a basket tell us about his realism
compared to just saying the novel reflects reality?
It tells us two crucial things. First, the mirror
reflects reality. That is the objective requirement
of realism. Sure. But the second part, the basket.
acknowledges the inherent subjectivity of the
author the writer is carrying the mirror selecting
when and where to pull it out and show the world
what is happening the artist's goal is not just
documentation it is selection organization and
judgment so it's edited reality the author selects
and organizes reality for a cognitive function
aiming for unity coherence and most importantly
typicality Exactly. Stendhal's realism is about
cognitive function, meaning the arrangement of
facts is designed to make you, the reader, understand
the psychology and the social forces at play.
Which takes us directly to the assessment of
Eric Auerbach, who argued that modern serious
realism began with Stendhal and Balzac. Yes.
We need to understand what Auerbach meant by
serious realism. What differentiated Stendhal's
approach from earlier novelists? Auerbach's key
point in his seminal work, Mimesis, is that Stendhal
integrated the volatile, specific historical
moment into the very substance of his character's
lives and actions in a way that had never been
done before. Earlier realism often focused on
social manners or generalized class issues. Stendhal
focused on contingency. Give us a concrete example
of this historical contingency in The Red and
the Black. Auerbach points out that scenes in
the novel are almost incomprehensible without
a detailed knowledge of the political, social
and economic stratification of that perfectly
definite historical moment just before the July
Revolution of 1830. So Julian Sorrell's entire
dilemma, the conflict between ambition in the
army, the red, and safety in the clergy. The
black is a situation dictated entirely by the
reactionary political environment of the restoration
period. It is the pressure of history isn't just
a backdrop. It's an active force shaping the
individual's choices and ultimately their downfall.
Stendhal was writing timeless psychological truth
through meticulously contemporary political observation.
He was using the novel as a serious vehicle for
investigating the individual human being tracked
within the rigid structures of a specific. volatile
historical environment. And he applied that same
observational rigor to nonfiction. He wrote A
Life of Napoleon, A Life of Rossini. And that
Rossini biography is valued more today for its
wide -ranging musical criticism than for its
strict historical accuracy. Right. It reflects
his deep love of composers like Haydn, Mozart,
and Rossini. Even his posthumously published
autobiographies, Memoirs of an Egotist and The
Life of Henry Broulard, carry this historical
weight. Auerbach noted that Stendhal's self -analysis
is far more closely and concretely connected
with the politics, sociology, and economics of
the period than similar autobiographies by Rousseau
or Goethe. He was a product of history in a way
that seemed to affect him more directly than
anyone else. This makes the critical appraisal
of his work so fascinating because it creates
this massive divide between those who loved his
insight and those who loathed his style. Oh,
a huge divide. Let's start with the psychological
champions. They are effusive. Hippolytain, a
major French critic, argued that Stendhal's psychological
portraits were real because they are complex,
like living human beings. He saw the complexity
of the internal struggle made manifest. And maybe
the greatest endorsement came from Friedrich
Nietzsche. Yes, in Beyond Good and Evil, he called
Stendhal France's last great psychologist. Nietzsche
valued him so highly he described encountering
his work as one of the most beautiful accidents
of his life, ranking the discovery nearly as
high as Dostoevsky. That comparison to Dostoevsky
is significant. For Nietzsche to put Stendhal
in that company, despite his often cool, concise
style, shows the power of his internal observations.
Emil Zola, too, praised his psychological accuracy,
though he also noted the structural implausibilities
and Stendhal's very visible authorial intervention.
The mirror in the basket principle. Basically,
yes. But then we have the doubters, most notably
Vladimir Nabokov, who was famously dismissive
of what he saw as a clumsy, unpolished style.
Nabokov was cutting, as always. He dismissed
Stenthal as that pet of all those who like their
French plane, asserting that the red and the
black is much overrated and criticizing his paltry
style. This highlights a fundamental schism in
literary history. If a writer's prose is occasionally
abrupt or lacks aesthetic beauty, does that diminish
the profundity of their psychological insight?
That's the argument, that his analysis is brilliant,
but the vehicle is sometimes flawed. The insight
overcomes the style. And this tension is what
Eric Auerbach ultimately synthesized in his final
appraisal. Okay, so how did Auerbach reconcile
this? He gave what might be the most balanced
yet most powerful critique. He admitted Stenhall
was not quite a great figure, his ideas were
erratic, and his style short -winded. He even
said the prose only seldom wholly takes possession
of and fixes the subject. It's an evaluation
full of serious caveats. But despite these flaws,
Auerbach deemed him historically indispensable.
Why? Because Stendhal was compelled by his specific
circumstances, his personal instability, his
desire to escape the old order, his position
in the tumultuous aftermath of Napoleon, to look
at reality in a fundamentally new way. So his
own psychology matched the needs of his chaotic
historical moment. Exactly. His fluctuation between
romantic rapture and cold, Bayless self -control
meant he was the right person with the right
tools at the right moment in history to come
to terms with reality in a way which no one had
done before him. He invented the means for the
modern novel to become a serious tool for political
and psychological investigation. An incredible
legacy. Inventing realism almost by accident.
In a way, yes. So what a profound and contradictory
figure. We started with Marie -Henri Bale, the
unhappy bourgeois child who found a theatrical
stage in Napoleon's military machine. Displaying
almost inhuman sang -froid while literally shaving
during the catastrophic retreat from Moscow,
he cherished Italy as the only place where despair
was a viable reaction to love. He was a dandy
and the egotist, yet recognized by Simone de
Beauvoir as a proto -feminist for his perceptive
insight into women's humanity. He was a man suffering
from terrible medical treatments whose identity
was so fractured he required over 100 aliases,
forever trying to perfect the art of the mask.
And his name defines the emotional and cultural
landscape. He gave us crystallization, the four
-step rational process detailed on the back of
a playing card in Assault Mind that systematically
explains how we idealize the love object in our
minds. And he inspired the Stendhal syndrome,
the terrifying physical surrender, the fierce
palpitation of the heart and dizziness experienced
when overwhelmed by sheer, magnificent cultural
accomplishment and beauty. He was a novelist
dedicated ironically to the happy few, whose
prose was dismissed as paltry by Nabokov, but
whose psychological vision was hailed by Nietzsche
as the last great French mind. Ultimately, he
was the author who convinced critics like Auerbach
that modern realism required a novelist to weave
the specific, complex, political, and social
reality of their time into the very fabric of
their characters' interior lives. It all hinges
on that great Stenhalian tension between the
mask and the mirror. We talk about balism, the
term for the self -proclaimed egotism in his
characters. And Stendhal famously advised himself
to look upon life as a masked ball. This raises
an important final question for you, the listener,
to mull over. Stendhal was obsessed with aliases,
disguise, and retreating behind a mask. Yet his
greatest, most lasting value was identified by
critics as his acute psychological realism. So
what is the ultimate connection between deep,
often painful, self -analysis, the egotism, and
the fictional disguise of the novel? is the best,
most objective way to truly reflect reality through
fiction to first perfect the art of the mask.
Does one need distance, emotional or perhaps
physical distance, via the pseudonym to truly
see and dissect the world objectively? Something
to consider the next time you find yourself wearing
one identity in public while observing the world
with the precision of a completely different
self. Thank you for joining us for this deep
dive into Stendhal.