Stendhal littéral: 'Lamiel' (review)

Fresh from co-editing the first two volumes of Stendhal's Œuvres romanesques complètes in the Pléiade series, for which he deserves the gratitude of all dix-neuviémistes, Yves Ansel has turned his attention to Lamiel, Stendhal's unfinished and relatively neglected last novel. Ansel adopts a back-to-basics approach, weighing up authorial intentions the better to arrive at readings that he considers to be demonstrably right: 'Toutes les lectures, n'en déplaise aux tenants de la déconstruction, ne sont pas égales: certaines sont plus égales que d'autres. Les lectures invérifiables sont, de facto, "infalsifiables" puisque ni vraies ni fausses' (p. 39). This attitude leads Ansel to castigate other scholars for what he refers to as their 'textrapolations' (passim):

Lire Stendhal (ou tout autre écrivain), ce n'est pas chercher des sésames qui ouvriraient miraculeusement la porte de sens cachés derrière le texte apparent. Ce n'est pas non plus creuser sous la surface (le texte n'a pas de 'fond'), sacrifier la lettre à l'esprit (au symbole) ou lire entre les lignes (où il n'y a que du blanc). Le texte explique le texte […].

(p. 42, emphases original)

Were it to gain wide currency, this assertion would risk making many a professional critic redundant in more ways than one. Happily, Ansel himself turns out to be quite good at reading between the lines. He also makes use of a number of critical open sesames to explain portions of text that have hitherto not managed to explain themselves, for example when he returns to a new reading first revealed in his Pléiade annotation of Le Rouge et le noir but supplied by Pierre Barbéris: Mme de Rênal and Julien have sex in his prison cell, so the blank spaces tell us, miraculously opening up a hidden meaning behind the supposedly ascetic text of the novel's ending. Professional critics do have their uses after all. Ansel ranges widely over Stendhal's fiction — he is particularly strong on Lucien Leuwen — but his main focus is indeed on Lamiel. He usefully corrects a number of idées reçues about the novel: that Sansfin is uniquely immoral, that Lamiel is a proto-feminist rebel at war with society, that she is no more than a female version of Julien Sorel, and so on. Few previous commentators escape censure for their wrong or unverifiable readings, and many of Ansel's criticisms are well founded — the book's grumpiness is part of its liveliness. However, Ansel makes curiously little effort to engage with the arguments produced by the many distinguished female scholars who have written about Lamiel. Feminist interpretations are summarily dismissed as just so many more 'textrapolations'. In particular, Ansel's allusions to Naomi Schor's 'Unwriting Lamiel', in her Breaking the Chain (see FS, 40 (1986), 370–71) in no way suggest that he has grasped the detail of her argument. More generally, Ansel appears unwilling to acknowledge that feminist scholarship continues to enrich our understanding of Stendhal's heroines, Lamiel included, as most recently demonstrated by the publication of Maria Scott's articles on Stendhal's theatrical heroines (FS, 62 (2008), 259–70) and their engagement with history (Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 37 (2009), 260–72).