Stendhal en tout genre: essais sur la poétique du Moi (review)

Crouzet's book — his fourteenth devoted to Stendhal by my count — is actually a collection of articles published between 1976 and 1991, here linked together by a preface and by the remarkable consistency of Crouzet's approach (repetition proves more of a problem than inconsequentiality). The articles were written, according to Crouzet, in the margins of his major studies, listed modestly only as Stendhal et le langage (1981), La Poétique de Stendhal (1983) and Le Héros fourbe chez Stendhal (1986). The collection is misleadingly titled insofar as it only covers a few of the genres within which Stendhal wrote, namely the journal, autobiography, the fragment, travel writing and the pamphlet. Crouzet himself lists a number of the more obvious omissions, including 'la vie d'artiste ou de grand homme (c'est peut-être le genre qu'il aura le plus continuellement pratiqué)' (p. 8). The collection is thus better described by its subtitle. Crouzet's writings on Stendhal appear always to return to the same broadly construed point: Stendhal, or else his characters, through their beyliste exercise of le naturel, demonstrate that one must learn to be literary to be authentic, artificial to be natural, rehearsed to be spontaneous, hypocritical to be sincere. Stendhal teaches himself (and us?) to construct a 'moi qui n'est pas moi': 'un moi' seen as 'un je authentique' (p. 44). 'Pour être soi il faut se détacher de soi: s'appartenir, mais à distance.' (p. 74) 'Pour être soi, et vraiment soi, il faut être moins soi.' (p. 308) It is from such paradoxes that Crouzet derives his poetics — and ethics — of the Moi. In this collection, Crouzet makes his point on many occasions and in many different contexts, for example with regard to the voyage (pp. 182-84) and the polemical pamphlet (p. 225), or otherwise through his analysis of Henry Brulard as a 'personnage intermédiaire et fictif d'une vie réelle' (p. 152). It is not always clear, however, where his point gets us. Crouzet rejects theoretical approaches to Stendhal, most notably in an ill-executed attack on structuralism (pp. 24-26), in order to clear the way for his vision of a Stendhal made up of flesh and paper, life and text. Leaving to one side begged questions of philosophy and biology, Crouzet uses this vision more plausibly to conjure a poetics than an 'éthique de la mondanité' (p. 17). His emphasis on beyliste stylistics leads Crouzet to downplay Stendhal's idealism and, more particularly, the fanatical seriousness that subtends his work: the pistol-shots that interrupt the concert. Crouzet rightly draws attention to the paradoxes implied by the bourgeois Jacobin Stendhal's aristocratic literary values. He struggles, however, to relate the various acts of self-creation he identifies in and with Stendhal's writing to their obvious inspiration: the self-generating new men and women of the (myth of the) French Revolution, born slaves, self-created free. Readers familiar with Crouzet's sometimes verbose and opaque style will be amused to learn that his study of the Stendhalian fragment has led him to conclude that 'la prolixité n'est pas la clarté: c'est une erreur de croire que tout expliquer fait tout comprendre' (p. 164).