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Auerbach's Stendhal: Realism, Figurality, and RefigurationAuthor(s): Laszlo K. GéfinReviewed work(s):Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 27-40Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773341 .Accessed: 28/09/2012 04:57

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Auerbach's Stendhal: Realism, Figurality, and Refiguration

Laszlo K. Gefin Liberal Arts College, Concordia

Abstract One of Erich Auerbach's important insights in Mimesis is that the classi- cal separation of styles became displaced by the representation of concrete reality in narrative from the Gospels onwards. Equally important is his concept offigura and

figural interpretation, which so connects two historical events that the second is a fulfilment of the first. With the coming of the modern novel, figurality disappears and is replaced by a mimetic representation of historical reality. Auerbach's chapter on what he considers the first realistic novel, Stendhal's Rouge et le noir, argues that a detailed and accurate knowledge of the economic and social conditions of the times is indispensable if we wish to understand the novel. The present paper rereads the

episode selected by Auerbach to suggest that this privileging of the historical context over novelistic narrative conceals traces of the figural interpretation ostensibly re-

placed by the novel's mimetism. Elaborating on Paul de Man's insight that mimesis and irony are incompatible in novelistic narrative, the paper argues for a disfigured figurality in the modern novel in accordance with the nostalgic desires of its split subjects. With irony and parody, rather than transcendent figurality, as the novel's

structuring devices, we are left with intertextuality and thus immanent refiguration.

One of the lasting legacies of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis is the insight that the classical separation of styles was gradually displaced by the represen- tation of concrete reality in narrative from the Gospels onwards. Equally significant is Auerbach's concept of figura, which according to him enters Western writing with the "Christian mixture of styles" as a mode of inter-

pretation in which a connection is found "between two events or persons

Poetics Today 20:1 (Spring 1999). Copyright ? 1999 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.

28 Poetics Today 20:1

in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first" (1968 [1946]: 73). In the earlier

chapters of the book Auerbach argues for narrative as primarily an imita- tion of reality in that it imitates "the sensory experience of life on earth"

(ibid.: 191); but also, when the figura beyond the literal level is perceived by readers, "then the sensory occurrence pales before the power of the

figural meaning" (ibid.: 49). He in fact points to "the antagonism between

sensory appearance and meaning" (ibid.). With the advent of the modern novel in the early seventeenth century, figurality disappears and is replaced by a mimetic representation of historical reality, as, for example, in Don

Quijote, where characters are shown "in their true reality, their living every- day existence" (ibid.: 342). And when Auerbach treats what he calls the first realistic novel, Stendhal's Rouge et le noir, his main concern is to show that in Stendhal we are witnessing a reversal of styles in the "entrance of existential and tragic seriousness into realism" (ibid.: 481) and, even more

important, that by the novelist's hand "the realistic novel has become the successor of classical tragedy" (ibid.: 496). He sees the novelty and signifi- cance of Stendhal's achievement in terms of historical verisimilitude, with the author aiming "to situate the tragically conceived life of a man of low social position (as here that of Julien Sorel) within the most concrete kind of history and develop it therefrom" (ibid.: 457-58).

In this paper I propose to reread the episode chosen by Auerbach from Le Rouge et le noir. As readers familiar with Mimesis know, the scene Auer- bach selects from the novel is the one where Mathilde de La Mole for the first time takes notice of her father the marquis's newly hired secre-

tary, Julien Sorel. She overhears Julien, who is fresh from the seminary at Besangon, telling the abbe Pirard, his mentor and benefactor, that he would prefer not to dine at the table of the great aristocratic family because

during these formal meals he gets so bored that he is afraid he will fall

asleep. Mathilde's reaction is revealing: "There's a man, she thought, who

didn't come grovelling into this world like that old abbe" (wasn't born on his knees) (Stendhal 1953: 268). Auerbach (1968 [1946]: 455) dismisses the

episode's "function" and "psychological value" as lying outside his subject; what he finds more germane emerges in this frequently quoted statement: "What interests us in the scene is this: it would be almost incomprehensible without a most accurate and detailed knowledge of the political situation, the social stratification, and the economic circumstances of a perfectly definite historical moment, namely, that in which France found itself just before the July Revolution; accordingly, the novel bears the subtitle, Chro-

nique de 1830." The statement is puzzling, for it would appear that Auerbach makes knowledge (historic, economic, etc.) of the period a prerequisite

Gefin * Auerbach's Stendhal 29

to understanding the novel. If we took the statement literally, Stendhal's novel would have to be pronounced incomprehensible, not only today but at all times, including the age of Stendhal. For, in addition to the sheer impossibility of acquiring such expertise, what can "a most accurate and detailed knowledge" mean in historical terms, aware as we are (or ought to be) of the contingency and indeterminacy of historical data? Auerbach never states explicitly how such knowledge-by what means, from what sources, through what verifiable channels-is to be acquired; what he does say is that it precedes and validates the reader's understanding of the novel. Only a naively mimetistic point of view could conceive of such order of precedence and derivation; Auerbach's vision is manifestly more compli- cated than that. I would suggest instead that underneath his privileging of historical knowledge vis-a-vis novelistic narrative lurk vestiges of the figural interpretation ostensibly extinguished when the novel took over as representative of modern man's desacralized weltanschauung. The point is that a version of figurality surreptitiously invaded Auerbach's scheme

precisely because the modern novel itself had clung to figurality, albeit in a changed and, as I hope to show, inverted manner. In other words, Auer- bach "forgets" about the persistence of figurality, which motivates and structures the modern novel, because in it figurality has been disfigured- or at least refigured- in accordance with the thwarted expectations and nos- talgic desires of the novelistic subject, if not of the novelist himself.

I would argue, then, that "accurate and detailed knowledge" of the his- tory and economic situation prevailing in 1830 does not guarantee compre- hension of Le Rouge et le noir. Rather, it is assumed that taking into account the intentional structure of a refigured figurality is more conducive to understanding. If the central tenet of figural interpretation is that a certain occurrence in history, the figura (always in the divine scheme of things), prefigures a subsequent event and that that later event fulfills the first, then the refigured modern novel (always in the secularized human scheme of things) nostalgically harks back to an earlier occurence, an allegoric or intertextual antecedent, and in the process ironically disfigures it. In short, instead of transcendent figurality, we are left with immanent refiguration.

In order to make my rereading of the episode from Stendhal's novel clear, it is necessary to summarize Auerbach's theory of figurality, and its gradual replacement by a certain type of novelistic realism. Auerbach first introduced this theory in his 1929 Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Dante, Poet of the Secular World), and then developed it in greater detail in the semi- nal article "Figura" (1944) and in his magnum opus, Mimesis, published two years later. Figural interpretation for Auerbach is a hermeneutic in- strument of Christian eschatology; in even simpler terms, since it deals in

30 Poetics Today 20:1

the relationship of signs, it may be called transcendental semiotics. The term figura is a Latinized version of the Greek schema (outward shape), found first in Lucretius and later in Quintilian and other rhetoricians, and also of typos, as the Christian fathers, particularly Tertullian and Augus- tine, used it to describe Jesus' appearance as a fulfillment of the Hebrew

scriptures. According to one of Auerbach's many definitions, "figural in-

terpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second

encompasses or fulfills the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life. Only the understanding of these two persons or events is a spiritual act" (1984 [1959]: 53). Auerbach repeatedly stresses the historical character of both figure and fulfillment; in connection with Moses being a figure of Christ, he writes, "Moses is no less historical and real because he is an umbra orfigura of Christ, and Christ, the fulfillment, is no abstract idea, but also a historical reality" (ibid.: 34). Yet the fulfillment is always greater and of a transcendent order over and above the figural one; the figura is always an imitatio veritatis, that is, it only prefigures, or

imitates, the veritas, the higher truth or reality. The origin of figurality is found in certain passages in the epistles of Paul, and as Auerbach makes

clear, figural interpretation was brought about by a set of compelling his-

torical circumstances, namely, the spreading of the gospels to the gentiles, beyond the communities of the first Judeo-Christians. Accordingly,

an adaptation of the message to the preconceptions of a far wider audience, its detachment from the special preconceptions of the Jewish world, became a necessity and was affected by a method rooted in Jewish tradition but now

applied with incomparably greater boldness, the method of revisional interpre- tation. The Old Testament was played down as popular history and as the code of the Jewish people and assumed the appearance of a series of "figures," that

is, of prophetic announcements and anticipations of the coming of Jesus and the concomitant events. (Auerbach 1968 [1946]: 48)

All persons and events in the Hebrew scriptures became potentially and

actually shadowy announcements of the later "truth," and while the earlier

figural announcement is real enough, the fulfillment is of an incompara-

bly higher order. It is this order which, according to Auerbach, is beginning to be sub-

verted by Dante's "realism" in La divina commedia. In a theoretical or theo-

logical sense, Dante still clings to figurality, or to his own version of it, the fourfold scheme of interpretation. However, in his reading of Canto 1o of

the Inferno, Auerbach (ibid.: 200) concludes, "In the very heart of the other

Gefin * Auerbach's Stendhal 31

world, he created a world of earthly beings and passions so powerful that it breaks bounds and proclaims its independence. Figure surpasses fulfill- ment." "The image of man eclipses the image of God. Dante's work made man's Christian figural being a reality .. ." (ibid.: 202). From Dante on- wards, then, Auerbach sees the direction in literature's representation of the human world tending toward an ever more pronounced realism. In- stead of the legitimizing ground of a divine plan, the authority for the inter- action of human beings will be grounded in history. This would account for Auerbach's insistence on the incomprehensibility of texts by Stendhal and other realists for readers lacking detailed and exact knowledge of the historical circumstances which the novels purportedly represent or imitate.

It is my contention, however, that instead of a straightforward copy of the sociopolitical situation of 1830, both the cited episode and Le Rouge et le noir as a whole reinvent a secularized version of the figural pattern. In this version (which, as already mentioned, I distinguish from figurality by calling it refigured) the fulfillment, or veritas, had already occurred, and the novel's major events, namely, the romance ofJulien Sorel and Mathilde de La Mole, are the belated umbra of that truth. In this way, then, Stendhal's renowned realism is seen as qualified by an allegorical construct (being organized around it) rather than as a "chronicle" of reality, the novel's sub- title and the author's own celebrated image of the novel as a mirror walk- ing down a highway notwithstanding. The relations between events and persons are no longer figural or strictly mimetic; rather, they are intertex- tual and thus inevitably ironic, which simultaneously banishes any notion of tragic realism in Julien's fate.

Intertextuality as concept and semiotic practice will be discussed below; but it is important to note at the outset that irony is incompatible with realism, tragic or otherwise. Although irony as a structural device in the novel has been noted by Georg Lukacs in his Theory of the Novel, it was Paul de Man, first in an essay on Lukacs, then in his groundbreaking "Rhetoric of Temporality," who pointed out that if irony is an organizing principle in the novel the latter cannot at the same time be seen as an imitation of reality. "Irony," wrote de Man (1983: 56),

steadily undermines this claim at imitation and substitutes for it a conscious, interpreted awareness of the distance that separates an actual experience from the understanding of this experience. The ironic language of the novel mediates between experience and desire, and unites ideal and real within the complex paradox of the form. This form can have nothing in common with the homo- geneous, organic form of nature: it is founded on an act of consciousness, not on the imitation of a natural object.

32 Poetics Today 20:1

De Man (ibid.: 228) singles out La Chartreuse de Parme as "one of the few novels of novels," because it is a "successful combination of allegory and

irony" in its ironic retelling of the story of Eros and Psyche, the myth, in de Man's words, "of the unovercomable distance which must always pre- vail between the selves." The scheme is also applicable to Le Rouge et le noir, with some variations and the proviso that, in my view, intertextuality is a much more potent force than de Man ever allowed for.

The historical, autobiographical, and fictional texts in the refigured pattern, which so strongly and disastrously influence both Julien and Ma-

thilde, may all be loosely grouped under the rubric of romance, a fictional mode depicting an idealized reality and commensurately superior charac- ters. In Northrop Frye's [1957: 33] definition, "the hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him," so that we are closer to the world of legend and fairy tale than to forms of realistic representation. Romantic or romanticized figures and even their

counterimages become objects of desire for the split Stendhalian subject. If Julien, especially, is an unknown and unknowable quantity to various characters in the novel (the abbe Pirard and the marquis de La Mole

among them, as well as Mathilde); and if critics such as Michael Wood

(1971: 77) point to his being "a montage of borrowed bits and pieces," those bits are not merely copies transposed from Stendhal's life and times, his

experience, say, of the Berthet and Labarthe affairs, his real-life models for the crime passionnel. These "bits" involve and ironically revolve upon ideal models or prototypes in Las Cases, Rousseau, Moliere, in the case of Julien, and the family romance of the de La Mole family, d'Aubigne's Histoire universelle, "descriptions de passion" in Manon Lescaut, the Nouvelle Heloise, and so on, in the case of Mathilde-though her father had for- bidden her to read Walter Scott's novels (Stendhal 1953: 314, 321). In the cases of Julien and Mathilde, texts as sites of refigured fulfillments are

responsible, far more than Don Quijote's romances of knight errantry, for the disjunction of a false ("real") and an imagined ideal world. As Serge Bokobza (1986: 127) has noted, "the imagination is a mental force not sub- servient to the principle of reality. Rather, the meeting of the imagination and reality provokes a break" (my translation). The "real" is the world in which the characters are condemned to live, while the ideal-imaginary ap- pears with a halo conjured up by the seductive allure of a world found

only in books. Thus, they are subject to idealization, not to say idolatry, because they come to be seen not only as traces but as embodiments of a fuller reality and a unified self or subject preceding any dissociation of

sensibility. The interplay between these two cognitive poles corresponds

Gefin * Auerbach's Stendhal 33

to the play between tragedy and irony, figurality and refiguration, unified self and split self, none of which, incidentally, are resolved in the novel.

Quite apart from the fact that in this "chronicle" of 1830 it is precisely the July events that remain unmentioned, the novel itself supplies the nec-

essary background, which in turn provides the reasons for the utter ennui

suffocating the great noblemen and women around the dining table of the marquis de La Mole. Even if we do not possess a "most accurate and de- tailed knowledge" of the times but only read other novels written during the period (e.g., those of Hugo, Balzac, and George Sand), it becomes clear that this state of affairs is not imitated but constructed by Stendhal. The world of ennui is his allegorization or compression of an imagined reality whose refigured typology casts the present age as but a shadowy and frozen trace of a lost, finer, and fuller world. As one of the noblest characters in the novel, Count Altamira (exiled from his native Spain under sentence of death), says to Julien, "There's no real passion left in the nineteenth cen-

tury. That's why people get so bored in France" (Stendhal 1953: 304), the qualifier "no ... left" implying a past time when true passions had indeed existed. This sentiment is frequently repeated in Stendhal's oeuvre, from his other novels to De l'amour, Vie de Henry Brulard, his diaries, and autobio- graphical essays.

The construction of this tableau establishes a quasi-historical back-

ground of stasis and boredom against which Julien and Mathilde's char- acters stand out all the more starkly. In Auerbach's (1968 [1946]: 454) de- scription, Mathilde is "a girl of nineteen, witty, spoiled, imaginative, and so arrogant that her own position and circle begin to bore her." Now, if Mathilde's social world bores her (Julien notices that she often yawns at table), this is not due to her congenital arrogance, nor to her typifying aristocratic young women all over France; rather, she finds her circle in- sipid and dull relative to the ideal she has been carrying, since childhood, of her romantic ancestor Boniface de La Mole, whose involvement in a political intrigue led to his beheading in 1574. What has not ceased to im- press Mathilde, however, is the fact that this La Mole was the lover of the queen, Marguerite de Valois, wife of Henri IV. According to legends Mathilde has found in her father's library, the queen obtained the head of her beloved upon his execution and the following night buried it with her own hands in a chapel near Montmartre. Mathilde's full given name is Mathilde-Marguerite in memoriam Queen Marguerite; she wears black every April 30, the anniversary of Boniface's execution.

It is this prototypical or refigured image of Boniface de La Mole, im- printed in Mathilde's imagination, that transforms the uncouth, though handsome country bumpkin, Julien, into a reincarnation of her ancestor

34 Poetics Today 20:1

and, in turn, causes her to metamorphose into a latter-day Marguerite de Navarre. (To underscore this self-induced transformation, Stendhal ironi-

cally titles part 2, chapter o1 "Queen Marguerite." The title is preceded by a compliment uttered by Count Altamira in an earlier chapter, "How beau- tiful she would look on a throne" [Stendhal 1953: 299].) Nowhere is Stend- hal's irony more pointed than in Mathilde's wildly mistaken assumption that Julien was not born on his knees, for governed by her idealized image the gaucheries of this ambitious hypocrite, this arriviste and would-be par- venu come to be perceived as noble virtues of a heroic figure who cares

nothing for public opinion and is not impressed by being allowed to dine with members of the high nobility. When she later convinces herself that she is in love with Julien, she does so in terms of an idealized and imaginary past: "There was no question, of course, of anything but a grande passion; a trivial love affair would have been unworthy of a girl of her age and birth. She gave the name of love only to that heroic feeling which was to be met in France in the days of Henri III and Bassompierre" (ibid.: 321). As she exults a little later in an interior monologue: "Between Julien and myself there's no contract to be signed, no family solicitor needed; everything here is on a heroic scale, everything springs from chance. But for nobility, which he

lacks, it's the love of Marguerite de Valois for young La Mole, the most dis-

tinguished man of his day" (ibid.: 323). She admits that ifJulien were both

poor and nobly born, her love for him would be "nothing more than a vul-

gar act of folly, a commonplace misalliance; I wouldn't want such a thing; it would have nothing of what characterizes a grand passion-the enor- mous obstacles to override, the dark uncertainty of the outcome" (ibid.). That all this self-allegorizing, in the words of Jean-Pierre Richard (quoted in Pearson 1988: 128), is a sort of"anachronistic snobbery," cannot negate the fact that Mathilde refigures and acts out to the very end (burying with

her own hands Julien's severed head) a fantastic narrative of grande amour-

passion found in a nostalgically romanticized historical chronicle. Mathilde's divided self is matched by that of Julien. If there is a term

most apt to describe him, it is the word "bookworm" spat out at him by his illiterate father. Stendhal makes it clear that it is the rootless subject,

especially the subject that split itself off and estranged itself from its famil-

iar bourgeois milieu, that attempts to create its own past and pedigree by succumbing to, and capitalizing on, the allure of books. (Unlike Julien, the young aristocrat of La Chartreuse de Parme, Fabrice del Dongo, is nearly illiterate at 12, when he is already an officer of the hussars; in ironic con-

trast, Julien assumes this rank only for a few days before his downfall [see Stendhal 1960: 12-13]). Overcompensating, Julien commits the entire New

Testament to memory (in Latin at that), desperately seeking a promise of

Gefin * Auerbach's Stendhal 35

nobility in testaments of the past. In a paradigmatic scene whose refigura- tional significance cannot be overestimated, Julien is caught reading on the job by the elder Sorel in the latter's saw mill. Old man Sorel could forgive his youngest son anything save this mania of reading. A blow sends the book into the river; as we learn shortly after, the perished tome was one ofJulien's favorites, the Memorial de Sainte-Hdelne, Napoleon's memoirs as dictated to Las Cases during the former emperor's exile. As the narrator remarks, this work, together with the bulletins of the grande armee and Rous- seau's Confessions, comprised Julien's Bible, but here the scriptural events are notfigurae to be fulfilled by a later transcendent person or event but the record of an already completed greatness that Julien longs for and imitates. The texts kindle his imagination and transport him into a realm of fantasy that spoils his own reality. When he is offered the post of tutor to the de Renal children, his first horrified reaction is, Do I have to eat with the ser- vants? As the narrator explains, "This horror of eating with servants was not a natural instinct with Julien. He would have done far harder things to make his way in the world. He drew his repugnance from Rousseau's Con- fessions, the only book that had helped his imagination to form a picture of

society [sefigurdt le monde]" (1953: 40). The real world is thus figured or, more

correctly, refigured by Julien according to a romanticized image of the real produced by Rousseau's similarly divided subject in the Confessions.

Stendhal's irony becomes even more apparent when we note that Juli- en's other well-known, and incongruous, models from which he derives his code of conduct are the Napoleon of the Memorial, and Tartuffe, Moliere's hypocrite par excellence. Both are textualized and thus rhetorically con- structed images-prosopopoeias-of a subject; and while Jacques Birn- berg is correct in noting that "Julien is not Tartuffe, Julien believes himself to be Tartuffe; which is quite different" (1985: 129; my translation), he is not only stating the obvious but alluding to the ironic distance that sepa- rates the refigured prototype from the later occurrence. There is a similar involvement in the case of Napoleon; as the narrator says, "For many years past Julien had not let, perhaps, a single hour go by without tell- ing himself that Bonaparte, an unknown, penniless lieutenant, had made himself a master of the world with his sword" (Stendhal 1953: 43-44). But the gap between the Memorial's heroic subject and Julien is unbridgeable; in fact, the two prototypes, the military conqueror and the faux devot, are joined by Julien in a refiguration of pure instrumentality: via methods of Tartuffian hypocrisy, Julien proceeds to seduce the innocent Madame de Renal (who, as Stendhal is careful to point out, does not read novels), all the while invoking the heroic ideal of military duty. Julien's divided self is constituted by the traces of these two intertextual selves; and even if one

36 Poetics Today 20:1

may be labelled "ideal" and the other "real," one rouge, the other noir, the

tragedy of their conflict is overwhelmed by the irony of the unbridgeable distance between them. Hence any idea of substantiality or authenticity is ruled out; Julien can never be, as Claude Liprandi (1961: 179) has argued, "an honest and pure human being" (my translation).

It would, of course, be incorrect to suggest that Stendhal was not an astute observer of his social and political environment. Nor am I imply- ing that historical reality does not inform the development of themes and characters in the novel: several characters are modeled, at least initially, on people in real life. But if Stendhal emphasized vanity, ennui, confor-

mity, and hypocrisy as the leading attitudes of his age (at least in France, for his views of Italian morals and sensibilities were markedly different), this emphasis issued from a vision, much like Mathilde's and Julien's, of a past refigured into an ideal state of affairs from which the present was

imagined to be a lamentable falling off. This view is similar to St. Paul's, at least in that it is also a dual vision dictated by real historical events, seeking to justify the present in terms of the past. But at this point the

analogy stops. Instead of the Hebrew scriptures serving as figurae in the fulfillment of a divine plan, various documents have been co-opted for use as secularized Bibles which can only testify to persons and events such as

Napoleon and his era that, from the vantage point of 1830, appear as loci of fulfillment. As an added piece of painful irony, for Stendhal, as well as for his heroine and hero, the truly great events had taken place well before

Napoleon. As noted in connection with Mathilde's mimed passion, their

postfigural vision had privileged the Middle Ages up to the sixteenth cen-

tury, of which, as Emile Faguet has noted, "the age of Napoleon had been a pale and short renaissance" (quoted in Liprandi 1961: 175; my transla-

tion). But such a rebirth was perceived only by split subjects whose nostal-

gic desire had invested a past's textual traces with a power and glory that it could never possess. The desperate longing of the novelistic subject for the assumed substantiality of antecedent textual figures is a sign that the sub-

ject is basically empty, devoid of a transcendentally authorized selfhood. The structure of the modern novel, with its reliance on intertextual scraps and fragments, may thus be taken as a secularized follow-up to an older,

ontologically based notion of justifying the present in terms of the past.'

1. Rene Girard, in his Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, has argued that such emptiness leads the novelistic character to vainly seek authority in other humans, called "mediators." In the end, however, a genuine "conversion" comes for all "true" heroes when they renounce their false sense of autonomy and return to Christian humility. Despite ostensible resemblances, the

present intertextual/rhetorical reading departs wholly from Girard's metaphysical mimet- ism and in the specific instance ofJulien's "conversion" categorically opposes it. (For Girard's

interpretation of Julien's death, see Girard 1966 [1961]: 294.)

Gefin * Auerbach's Stendhal 37

In this movement from ontology to textuality, both mimetic realism and its legitimating ground, history, become destabilized as a result of the irony inherent in intertextual operations. As noted above, Auerbach (1968 [1946]: 200) traced the beginnings of realism and a corresponding fading of figurality to Dante, using the examples of Farinata degli Uberti and Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti in the Inferno, Canto o1, to argue that "the effect of the earthly figure and its earthly destiny surpasses or is subserved

by the effect produced by its eternal situation." This opening up and ex- tolling of "a world of earthly-historical life, of earthly deeds, endeavors, feelings, and passions" (ibid.: 201) may be taken as a complex sign of a desire on Dante's part to weaken or even break the transcendental chain of figurality. It is also conceivable, however, both from a strict theological viewpoint and that of de Man on the incompatibility of realism and irony, that the hubris of a Farinata still holding hell, and thus God's judgment, "in great despite [in gran dispitto]" (Inferno 10, 36) is not merely a sign of realism but also one of parody. Moreover, if Auerbach (1968 [1946]: 198) further argues that the Commedia came to be written in a combination of mixed and figural styles-"in the mixed style as a result of the figural ap- proach"-it may be plausible to suggest that the mixed style played an

important role in weakening the figural mode. This mixed style, however, was not a variant of Auerbach's "Christian mixture of styles," but a style reverting to a narrative mode originating in the Hellenistic age. It was the rhetorical and discursive practices of the Cynics in general, and those of

Menippus of Gadara in particular, that first collapsed the classical sepa- ration of styles. Not only did the Cynics transform mythological material in parodies, burlesques, diatribes, travesties, and various comic genres, introducing new mixed styles into the literary discourse of the time, but, as R. Bracht Branham (1996: 85) pointed out, they aimed at "opening up whole new areas of literary activity and using these new forms as a way of critiquing the conventional genres of writing and thinking enshrined in the more established classical kinds rooted in the old oral culture."

It was this seriocomic mode, irreverent, impudent, crass, sexually ex- plicit, and in its profanity deliberately cut loose from any notions of transcendence, that Mikhail Bakhtin saw as the precursor and structural component of the modern novel, the original locus for his concepts of carnivalization, dialogism, and polyphony. The discourse of the novel, in Bakhtin's (1981: 294) view, was thus inescapably multivoiced, importing and domesticating the languages of other texts; the result, in his words, was "not a single language but a dialogue of languages." It was this idea of a multivoiced mixed style that Julia Kristeva, the inventor of the term "intertextuality," has taken a step further. While acknowledging her debt

38 Poetics Today 20:1

to Bakhtin, she has defined a more distinct and subsequently influential

theory of textuality, according to which "all texts are constructed as mo- saics of quotations, all texts are absorptions and transformations of other texts. The notion of intersubjectivity is replaced by that of intertextuality, and the language of poetry is to be read at least as double" (1969: 146; my translation). This duplicity and ambivalence of what Kristeva calls the Menippean novel, which she sees extending from the fifteenth century through Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Sade, Balzac, Lautreamont, and Dos-

toevsky to Joyce and Kafka, results in its being no more tragic than comic, no more serious than parodistic: it is in fact both in turn (ibid., 162). It is

clear, however, that the earthy/earthly realism of the Menippean novel is destabilized by the potential parody inherent in the mixture of styles and in the fragments borrowed from other texts.

Although Stendhal's name is conspicuously absent from Kristeva's list, as the author of Le Rouge et le noir he could easily be included. It should be

noted, however, that the oscillation between the age of ennui and the tex- tual past of Boniface de La Mole and Henri IV (and that of Napoleon/Tar- tuffe), arising from the split selves of the hero and heroine, complicates the

Menippean scheme precisely because of the refigured structure of Stend- hal's novel. Kristeva's larger claim, that "the history of the Menippean novel is also the history of the struggle against Christianity and its repre- sentation, that is to say, an exploration of language (that of sex, of death), a consecration of ambivalence, of 'vice'" (ibid.), while in most respects ap- plicable to Le Rouge et le noir, must be qualified. It is true that before his exe- cution Julien repudiates the Judeo-Christian deity, but Stendhal's ambiva- lent irony in employing another intertextual marker is once again glaringly apparent: "This good priest would speak to us of God. But what God? Not the God of the Bible, a petty despot, cruel and athirst for vengeance ... but Voltaire's God, just, kind, and infinite" (1953: 502). However, it is not the absence of God that torments and isolates Julien but his amour-passion for Madame de Renal, strangely reawakened by the proximity of Mathilde's intertextual infatuation. Despite his newfound love, Julien remains a hypo- crite to the last, a borrowed persona self-consciously looking at himself in Napoleonic terms, even during his walk to the guillotine: "There now, he said to himself, everything is going well .... My courage isn't failing me" (ibid.: 508). The narrator's comment, "Everything passed off simply and decently, with no trace of affectation on his part" (ibid.), is a telltale

sign that Julien's death was no more "natural" to him than his abhorrence of eating with servants. The rift in Julien's selfhood is not closed even in

death, for he cannot renounce that ideal part of himself that came into

Gefin ? Auerbach's Stendhal 39

being (fractured and shadowy being at that) through the "bookworm"'s devouring of volumes that kindled in him unappeasable desires.

The novelistic practice of intertextuality, then, as a successor to Auer- bach's concept of figurality, may aspire to a deontologized semiotics of immanence, but it still contains vestiges of the renounced system. Over the chaos of modern history, which promises no "last things," a refigured figural structure is cast, situating a subject that has neither fulfilled some past figura nor "cynically" freed itself from any and all need for transcen- dental legitimation. On the contrary, its gaze is forever directed backward to an imagined fulfillment and grand passion contained in "true" legend and "true" chronicle that are privileged because they are still held to be within the penumbra, however secularized and refigured, of the "truest" passion, that of Christ. The irony of this process of refiguration can hardly be overlooked. If, therefore, Le Rouge et le noir can in any sense be taken as a "chronique," it is one of the "birth" of the divided fictional subjects, male and female, the first inauthentic (because nostalgically belated) "figurae" in the European novel. Such a status does not, however, confer superiority on these characters, even if they are aware of their ambivalence and inau-

thenticity, for as de Man (1983: 214) warned, "to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic." In contrast to Auerbach's concept of figu- rality, the second or belated figural occurrence merely involves but does not fulfill the antecedent event or persona; rather, both secular model and postfigural "figure" can be seen as simultaneously constituted and disfig- ured by the irony of their imprisonment in the maze of textuality.

References

Auerbach, Erich 1968 [1946] Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Ilestern Literature, translated by Willard

R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 1984 [1959] "Figura," in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, translated by Ralph

Manheim, 11-76 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Bakhtin, Mikhail

1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press).

Birnberg, Jacques 1985 "La Citation molieresque dans Armance et dans Le Rouge et le noir," in La Creation

romanesque chez Stendhal, edited by V. del Litto, 121-30 (Geneva: Droz). Bokobza, Serge

1986 Contribution a la titrologie romanesque: Variations sur le titre "Le Rouge et le noir" (Geneva: Droz).

Branham, R. Bracht 1996 "Defacing the Currency: Diogenes' Rhetoric and the Invention of Cynicism," in The

Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy edited by R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Caze, 81-104 (Berkeley: University of California Press).

40 Poetics Today 20:1

de Man, Paul

1983 Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Frye, Northrop

1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Girard, Ren6

1966 [1961] Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press).

Kristeva, Julia 1969 "Le Mot, le dialogue, et le roman," in q77E/JeLWctK77: Recherches pour une semanalyse,

143-72 (Paris: Seuil). Liprandi, Claude

1961 Au coeur du rouge: L5Affaire Lafarque et "Le Rouge et le noir" (Lausanne, Switzerland: Grand Chene).

Pearson, Roger 1988 Stendhal's Violin (Oxford: Clarendon).

Stendhal [Henri Beyle] 1953 Scarlet and Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century, translated by Margaret R. B.

Shaw (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin). 1960 La Chartreuse de Parme, edited by Henri Martineau (Paris: Garnier).

Wood, Michael

1971 Stendhal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).