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  • Figures du destin stendhalien
  • Benjamin McRae Amoss
Kliebenstein, Georges. Figures du destin stendhalien. Pref. Philippe Berthier. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004. Pp. 390. ISBN 2-8785-4290-8.

Drawing on rhetoric (classical, nineteenth-century, and modern) and narratology, Georges Kliebenstein seeks to uncover the rhetorical figures that underlie the narratives of Stendhal, both fictional and biographical. He distinguishes his theory of a "transrhetoric" – only one of many terms he coins in the course of this challenging and lexically jubilant study – in two ways. On the one hand, it extends the workings of classical figures of speech from words and phrases to the sequence of events, from the level of elocutio to dispositio. On the other hand, it ignores the border between the literary texts and the writer's life, seeking figures common to both. In exploring Stendhal's own attitude toward classical rhetoric – his insistent deprecation of "l'emphase," for example – Kliebenstein examines the absence of instruction in traditional rhetoric that [End Page 497] was a characteristic of the écoles centrales, including the one in Grenoble the writer attended. These establishments represented an attempt to break with the pedagogy centered on language that marked education in France before the Revolution. At the same time, Kliebenstein notes Stendhal's extensive knowledge of rhetorical terms.

Taking as his object of analysis the "adventure," with its ambiguous connotations of what happened and the possibility of something unforeseen, Kliebenstein identifies the elements of Stendhal's texts that serve as predictors of the future, figures destinales: the writer's technique of announcing characters, the thematic importance of presages and promises, the tactics of the chase and the battle plan, applied to disparate domains, his invention of mathematical formulas to explain things, the set roles characters see themselves called to perform and the plans and projects they spend time developing and then feel obliged to accomplish, his attraction for codes and pacts and sets of rules, and his testamentary urges to control life after death. For Kliebenstein, these are the "signes diagnostiques les plus criants de ce qu'il faudrait appeler, pour pasticher Beyle, une futuromanie" (37). Kliebenstein puts in place a typology of the omnipresent "systèmes d'annonces" that brings together these elements of the Stendhalian corpus, often already well-explored through other approaches, yet he acknowledges that Stendhal, in this area as in others, resists theorization. His meticulous and exhaustive analysis of this "système prédictif" reveals how more often than not these attempts to foresee if not control the future misfunction. But paradoxically, as with the writer's condemnation of figural language, the misfiring of destiny as figured in the text prompts Kliebenstein to turn to the narrative figures, "figures de récit," which could account for the "systèmes stendhaliens" that are in fact "anti-systèmes": "L'aventure stendhalienne est le lieu d'une désorganisation systèmatique des 'suites d'actions' dont pourrait rendre compte . . . une rhétorique narrative" (195).

Text is thus conceived as a syntax composed of actions, and the rhetorical figure that turns out to govern the Stendhalian text (fictional and biographical) most often is that of hendiadys, which Bernard Dupriez defines in his Gradus, les procédés littéraires: "dissocier en deux éléments, coordonnés, une formulation qu'on aurait attendu normalement en un seul syntagme dans lequel l'un des éléments aurait été subordonné à l'autre." As a narratological concept, Kliebenstein distinguishes hendiadys from Genette's "repetition." Notably, hendiadys allows for only one recurrence of the action and when the action recurs it is altered. Kliebenstein relates Stendhal's practice of narrative duplication to a "rituel diphasique" that structures his texts and his life, that constitutes the "rhétorique du récit" of Stendhal. Kliebenstein specifies the type of hendiadys appearing in Stendhal as a "hendiadys croissant" that follows the binary formulation of a + A. In this form, contrary to the typical use of the figure of speech – the second element is normally subordinate to the first, as in an example Dupriez cites, Eluard's "Elle et ses lèvres racontaient" – the second occurrence represents the completion or accomplishment of an incomplete or failed first attempt...

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