The Red and the Black (3 page)

too far and that his prose in
The Red and the Black
had been too angular and staccato in effect, he need not have feared,
because he succeeded in producing a narrative whose lean and
vigorous tone and constant forward impetus not only suggest the
no-nonsense approach of the young man in a hurry but have also
prevented the novel from dating. We may no longer have an immediate
sense of the boldness of the novel's topicality, but we cannot fail to
be aware of its principal stylistic hallmark: its presentness.

This presentness is apparent from the very first page of the novel.
You are there walking up the main street of Verrières, you can see M.
de Rênal, you can hear the dreadful din of his nail factory. The first
chapter and a half of the novel are in the present tense, but even
after the narrative has moved through a series of subtly modulated
changes of temporal gear into the conventional mode of a
story-in-the-past, the sense of presentness remains and is constantly
reinforced throughout the novel. The present tense dominates
The Red and the Black
.
It is the tense of the narrator and his ubiquitous interpolations, be
they geographical (about Verrières, Paris, or even the Rhine),
sociological (about the behaviour patterns of provincials or Parisians
or about how seminarists eat a boiled egg), sententious (life is like
this, or that) or simply chatty (by the way, I forgot to tell you, I
must confess that...). It is the tense also of the putative reader to
whom reference is periodically made in the course of the novel (you
think Julien is being silly, you don't like these reception rooms),
and it is the tense of the characters themselves--in their dialogue,
their interior monologues, and their letters.

The sense of urgent actuality which is so characteristic of
The Red and the Black
--and
which makes it such a good read--is created in further ways. There is
almost no anticipation of subsequent events in the novel, so that the
narrator comes over not as someone already in the know but as one who
is as eager as we are to get on with things. The future, it seems,
is as unpredictable for him as for us. By the same token he takes care
not to delay us with flashbacks. There are a number at the beginning,
inevitably, when he has to fill us in on some of the background, but
mostly the narrative obeys the

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rules of the chronicle, which by definition is 'a detailed and continuous register of events in order of time'
(OED)
.
On five occasions, however, it is almost as if the narrator has been
overtaken by events, and we find him being obliged to interrupt the
onward surge of the narrative to go back and supply supplementary
detail. These five occasions are five key moments in the plot:
Julien's first visit to M
^me
de Rênal's bedroom, Mathilde's declaration of love to Julien by letter, the shooting of M
^me
de Rênal, the day of the trial, and the execution of Julien. In each
case the shock value of a major turning-point is preserved by
postponing narration of the preliminary events which immediately lead
up to it.

Throughout the novel we are
continually being surprised and kept on our toes in this way. The
pace of the narrative is extraordinarily rapid, in places quite
implausibly--and entertainingly--so, and the viewpoint from which the
events are recounted varies constantly. One minute we are immersed in
Julien's thoughts, the next he has already written the letter he was
thinking of and we are learning of the recipient's reaction.
Sometimes such a switch will occur within a single sentence, and there
may be several within the shortest of paragraphs. By the sheer speed
and unpredictability of its unfolding
The Red and the Black
creates that very excitement and imaginative zestfulness which it finds so deplorably absent from the world it describes.

The reader may meet with other surprises. One of the main lessons of
the novel would seem to be that it is dangerous to preconceive the
future. As Julien reflects in prison upon his past life, he realizes
that he was distracted from the happiness and fulfilment he could have
found with M
^me
de Rênal by his overriding ambition to seek
fame and fortune. Because his head was filled with all sorts of
fantasies, many of them derived from what he had heard and read about
Napoleon, he was less able to appreciate the value of what reality was
offering him. As if to reinforce this lesson Stendhal plays on his
reader's expectations within the novel in such a way as to lead him or
her into similar error. Repeatedly we are inveigled into speculating
about Juhen's future, both by what some of the characters predict for
him and by the parallels which immediately

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suggest themselves between his life and that of various historical and literary figures.

Thus the various references to Julien's desire to seek fame and
fortune, together with the recurring possibility that he is a
foundling, put one in mind--and would most certainly have put a reader
of 1830 in mind--of the typical eighteenthcentury novel plot which is
so playfully exemplified in one of Stendhal's favourite novels,
Fielding
Tom Jones
. Is
The Red and the Black
to be
another novel about the parvenu, we may wonder. Or are we reading the
biography of another Napoleon, the man whom Julien so much admires? Or
of another Richelieu? Or perhaps of a revolutionary hero in the mould
of Danton, or Robespierre, or Mirabeau? Just before Julien shoots M
^me
de Rênal, it seems that many of these predictions may have been
correct. The parvenu has arrived: money and title, an officer's rank
and the most brilliant match in Paris, all are his. 'When you come to
think about it,' he reflects, 'my story's ended, and all the credit
goes to me alone' ( 11.34).

But then comes the letter from M
^me
de Rênal, written at the dictation of her confessor and describing
him as another Tartuffe. This portrait is so at variance with the
person he believes himself to be that he goes off to destroy the
supposed purveyor of this distorted image by doing the last thing one
would expect a mercenary and falsely pious hypocrite to do. While he
then spends the remainder of the novel trying to sort out who he
really is ('to see clearly into the depths of his soul': 11. 44), we
also have to answer the same questions: who is Julien? what does he
stand for? We see that there is no substance in the idea that he is a
foundling, we remember that he has been thoroughly uninterested in
money all along, we note that, unlike Napoleon, he owes his commission
to patronage not prowess and that he resembles him only in so far as he
resembles Mathilde's father imitating him at parties, and we
recognize that, while Julien may have a chip on his shoulder, he is no
political radical and has none of the idealism of a Danton. Even his
speech at the trial, we are carefully informed, is an act of bravado
brought on by the insolent look in the eyes of the gloating Valenod.
Nor is he indeed Tartuffe. His ambition to 'make his fortune' is a
nebulous boyish dream of

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somehow bettering himself, in all senses, not the project of a would-be property tycoon.

The shooting of M
^me
de Rênal explodes our preconceptions of the end of the novel just as
surely as it does Julien's, and it is for this reason that
foreknowledge of it may falsify a first reading of
The Red and the Black
.
Subsequent readings, on the other hand, may bring one no nearer to
understanding it! Critical opinion about this crucial turn of events
has varied widely in respect both of its significance and of its
aesthetic merits. The notorious view expressed by Emile Faguet at the
end of the last century was that the shooting was implausible and
provided irrefutable evidence of novelistic amateurishness. Quite
definitely not one of the Happy Few, Faguet argued that a clever
schemer like Julien would be mad to throw it all away because of a bad
reference from M
^me
de Rênal. What's more, the Marquis de
la Mole still had a pregnant daughter to marry off and the daughter in
question had pretty firm views as to whom she wanted for a husband.
Since Faguet, a number of people have tried to defend Stendhal by
saying that Julien is indeed mad, that is, that he acts in a kind of
somnambulistic trance and is therefore not entirely responsible for
his actions. While there is some evidence in the text for Julien being
in something of a state, it is insufficient to sustain such a thesis.
More persuasive are those who have argued in terms of an act of
vengeance and who have noted that, because M
^me
de Rênal is a
woman, Julien is denied the opportunity of clearing his name by
challenging the offender to a duel. Most persuasive of all, perhaps,
is the view that the very inexplicability of the act makes it true to
life. It is a crime of passion and, as such, not reducible to the tidy
comprehensibility of the rational. By the same token, on the level of
novelistic technique, it constitutes an act of defiance, a refusal to
tell the story as if it were like many other similar stories, an
assertion that the central event of this novel is unique: just as its
main character is not like other heroes of history and literature but
is, as he is so often described in the book, someone quite out of the
ordinary.

But what lessons can we
draw from the experiences of this man who shoots the woman he loves?
That we should not preconceive our lives, that we should live for the
moment and

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be ready to pounce on those fleeting moments of happiness which life
occasionally offers? That love, and love alone, holds the key? Yes,
partly, but the rich and subtle ironies, indeed the comedy and the
pathos, of
The Red and the Black
derive substantially from the
ambiguity surrounding these questions. True, at the end of the novel
it does seem as if imagination, that error which 'bears the mark of a
superior man' ( 11.19) as the narrator calls it, is to be mistrusted.
Imagined futures have led both Julien and the reader astray, and
Mathilde's desperate determination to relive the violent romance of
her sixteenthcentury ancestors begins to look increasingly suspect and
sterile. She alone is not surprised by the shooting, for it
corresponds to so many of her fantasies, yet these bear little
relation now to the increasingly authentic nature of Julien's
experience. Like him we too may be 'tired of heroism' ( 11.39). But
earlier in the novel Mathilde's energy and imagination seemed
commendable, as did her disdainful rejection of easy mediocrity. Were
we wrong to commend her? No, just as we may not be right to see Julien
discovering any universally applicable recipe for happiness at the
end of the novel.

For why in fact did
Julien pass up the happiness on offer at Vergy? Because he might have
been bored. He himself reflects on this question:

Could happiness be so near at hand?... A life like this doesn't involve
much by way of expenditure; I can choose whether to marry M
^lle
Elisa [M
^me
de Rênal's maid] or become Fouqué's partner... But a traveller who
has just climbed a steep mountain sits down at the summit and finds
perfect pleasure in resting. Would he be happy if forced to rest for
ever?' ( 1.23)

For all
that Vergy epitomizes some cherished Stendhalian values and for all
that Julien's pursuit of happiness could well have ended there,
imagination says no. Energy, curiosity and exploration are as
important as the trusting repose of reciprocated love. It may even be
better to travel than to arrive. The pursuit may matter more than the
happiness.

However perfect the view
from the mountain-top, there are other peaks to climb, and Julien's
wise analogy points to the tragic disjunction between happiness and
imagination which

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lies at the very heart of
The Red and the Black
and is its principal concern. From the start Julien has been faced
with an ancient dilemma: 'like Hercules, he found himself with a
choice--not between vice and virtue, but between the unrelieved
mediocrity of guaranteed well-being, and all the heroic dreams of his
youth' ( 1. 12). Heroically he defends himself against the lure of
'dreary caution' ( 1. 14), heroically he abandons the bliss of Vergy,
and heroically he rejects the worldly achievements of M. Julien Sorel
de la Vernaye: 'in short, what made Julien a superior being was
precisely what prevented him from savouring the happiness which came
his way. Every inch the young girl of sixteen who has delightful
colouring, and is foolish enough to put on rouge to go to a ball' ( 1.
15). This rouge is the added highlight that imagination lends to
life; not the knowing artifice of black ambition but the gratuitous
and unthinking enhancement of blood-red vitality, the wanton assertion
that there is more to be had from life even than all the bounty life
may already have bestowed. It is make-up as make-believe. And it is
this very quality of uncalculating passion which brings Julien the red
ribbon of the cross of the Legion of Honour to wear against the
unyielding blackness of his clerical habit, a sign of life to cheer
the 'uniform of [his] century' ( 11. 13) which he wears 'like someone
in mourning' ( 11. 1). For the Marquis de la Mole, when Julien
appears before him in red and black, he is an equal, an aristocrat by
nature, a 'superior man', and for us too. He belongs to that other
Legion of Honour, the one founded by Stendhal after the manner of
Napoleon, whose members, though not legion, make it a point of honour
to 'judge life with [their] imagination' (11. 19) and whose
names--Octave (in
Armance
), Julien, Lucien (in
Lucien Leuwen
), and Fabrice (in
The Charterhouse of Parma
)--have a Roman ring to recall the energy and
virtù
upon which an earlier empire was founded.

Alas, Julien also resembles that other young Roman, St Clement. The
real St Clement was the third pope and in no way military, but the
statue of Stendhal's mint is depicted as representing a 'young Roman
soldier' who has met a violent end: 'he had a gaping wound in his neck
which seemed to be oozing blood' ( 1. 18). This last detail, the
thousand candles

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