Stendhal: Œuvres romanesques complètes. Tome I. (review)

This is the long-hoped-for replacement of Martineau's venerable edition. It is chronological, will be in three volumes and the good news is that there are small improvements to all texts, that the next volumes will have much needed new versions of Lucien Leuwen and Lamiel prepared by specialists and that the short stories are given proper attention. The bad news is that this edition is in the new Pléiade-lite format with less convenient notes and minuscule type for marginalia. One result of the lack of space is that the reader is often referred blankly to articles in learned journals, the gist of which should have been summarized. This is particularly true of Berthier's edition of Armance, where this tactic is used to stay above the critical fray around this enigmatic novel. He is right and generous in wishing to allow for as many readings as possible, but it is misleading to attribute the important changes of interpretation purely to shifts in critical fashion, rather than to the discovery of facts which have made new hypotheses necessary. So, while Berthier's notes are excellent on the social and political background, in keeping with the overall spirit of this edition, they are much less complete on the related literary and esthetic issues which were for Stendhal central to this, avowedly his most 'erudite' novel. The reader is not told that he was re-reading, and pertinently annotating La Nouvelle Héloïse, while writing the second draft. Nor is he given any help with understanding why Stendhal might have gone to such lengths to incorporate references to German and English literature, or why he might have wanted Byron to figure so prominently alongside Sade and Custine. A full critical edition would not send readers to libraries to get help with this. Turning to Le Rouge et le noir, Ansel brings to his edition a wide knowledge of the sociology and politics of the period and readers looking for explanations of such allusions are richly rewarded. But this marks also the limitations of his approach, which presents the novel as a straightforward mirror of the Restoration (with perfunctory nods to Bakhtin). His notes make light of all the many medieval, baroque and gothic touches, as well as of the religious symbolism. Clearly Ansel is deaf to all that makes Le Rouge et le noir not just a compendium of socio-political allusions, but a founding text of the distinct tradition of Romantic Realism on which Dostoevsky drew. For the same reason, Ansel dismisses as irrelevant the moral and symbolic (as opposed to practical) parallels between military and ecclesiastical careers and shows little grasp of the moral need for Julien's lengthy reflections in prison, or the explosion of black humour at the end. Taken as a whole, this edition promises to be promising on the establishment of texts and on socio-political allusions. But there are signs that insufficient attention is being paid to the stylistic shifts between Stendhal's major fictions, even though a better recognition of these has been one of the collective achievements of recent years.