Stendhal: Journal, and: Stendhal: Vanina Vanini et autres nouvelles (review)

This is the first paperback edition of Stendhal’s Journal, and the first in nearly seven decades to have been able to draw directly on six notebooks — dramatically acquired in 2006 from the private collection of Pierre Berès for the Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble — which cover a combined period of over three years between July 1805 and October 1814. The relevant sections of Henri Martineau’s Pléiade version of the Journal have been revised in the light of a rereading of the newly acquired manuscripts. More modest in its chronological sweep than Victor Del Litto’s later Pléiade Journal, this version is accompanied now by a new preface, a chronology of Stendhal’s life by Mariella Di Maio, a note on the text by Xavier Bourdenet, a previously unpublished draft letter of 1808 (found in one of the Berès notebooks) to the author’s friend and cousin Martial Daru, a useful bibliography, as well as revised notes and an index of names cited. Dominique Fernandez’s engaging preface makes a case for understanding Stendhal’s Journal as an exercise in extreme sincerity that is valuable in and of itself rather than as a lens through which to view the author’s later work or his historical period. Fernandez highlights the distinctive character of Stendhal’s diaries, the thing that differentiates them from other examples of this usually melancholic genre: their essential optimism. It seems a shame that, in order to highlight the comical and life-affirming qualities of Stendhal’s Journal, the preface cites the eighteen-year old Beyle’s advice for physically overpowering a sexually hesitant woman, especially when it also cites, this time as an instance of his modernity, the young man’s unguarded account of a meaningless sexual encounter. Undeniably, these passages belong to a vein that is amply represented in the Journal, but other elements of the text are far more illustrative of its invigorating novelty.

There has been a proliferation, in recent years, of editions of Vanina Vanini, occasionally accompanied by other short texts by Stendhal and often explicitly catering to French collégiens and lycéens. What is interesting about this new publication, which includes San Francesco a Ripa, Le Philtre, and Le Coffre et le revenant, is that all four nouvelles date from 1829–31 and are shown to share similar structures and preoccupations. The only piece missing from the set is Mina de Vanghel, probably on account of its inclusion in a 2004 Gallimard edition along with Vanina Vanini and Les Cenci (a later text and not a nouvelle but a chronique italienne). The dossier that follows the texts begins with a pedagogical exercise: Olivier Tomasini’s analysis of a painting by Joseph-Désiré Court offers an original route into a discussion of Stendhal’s own aesthetic. Subsequently, a highly readable, insightful seventy-page dossier by Xavier Bourdenet begins by offering an introduction to the nouvelle as a privileged genre of the Romantic period and as a product of both cultural cross-fertilization and tradition. Bourdenet then explores the particular characteristics of the Stendhalian nouvelle : its exotic contexts, its knowing borrowing from and rational undercutting of gothic motifs, its passionate, tragic, and often uncompromising heroine, its tendency to present the male lover as constricted and even enchained (suggesting perhaps an alternative perspective on Naomi Schor’s argument in Breaking the Chain (see French Studies, 40 (1986), 370–72)), and its foregrounding of the theme of incommunicability. A third section treats of Stendhal’s writing practice more generally, highlighting, for example, his habit of ending stories abruptly and the famously swift pace of his narration. The dossier goes on to introduce extracts from texts in which a character, like the hero of San Francesco a ripa, witnesses his own death or...