Stendhal et l'Amérique (review)

Read as a companion to his 1982 Stendhal et l'italianité, Michel Crouzet's Stendhal et l'Amérique arrives, more than a quarter-century later, to fill in what is for Crouzet the opposite pole of what we might call Stendhal's "geomythography." As Crouzet argues, "America" for Stendhal is the dialectical opposite of Italy: the land of political liberty, the place where Stendhal's republican hopes were most perfectly realized, and also – or, as Stendhal by the 1830s would come to see it, necessarily – the land of limitation, of the disappearance of æsthetic and passionate individuality into a mediocre brand of homo economicus. Crouzet's book is organized by thematic chapters that also chart the development of Stendhal's idée d'Amérique from an early enthusiasm directed against the anti-republicanism of Restoration politics to a late skepticism about the possibility of the self 's survival in a land of purely political liberty. America, for Stendhal, carried the burden of signifying modernity in its purest form, just as Italy came to represent the last true outpost of the anti-modern.

Stendhal's experience of America, of course, as opposed to his first-hand knowledge of Italy, was purely notional. Crouzet's book is therefore an intellectual biography of a peculiarly distanced kind: we get a thorough account of Stendhal's reading about America, particularly his reading of the popular accounts of European travelers to America (Basil Hall, Victor Jacquemont, Frances Trollope) and, redacted through his mentor Destutt de Tracy among others, of Jeffersonian political theory. Crouzet's reading of Stendhal's reading is always supple and multifaceted; as he demonstrates, Stendhal the anti-American was wary of versions of anti-Americanism that derived from reactionary anti-republicanism. The chapter on Stendhal's annotations to Trollope's 1831 Domestic Manners of the Americans is exemplary: here we see Stendhal refusing to let his leftist brand of hostility to American life collapse into the kind of Tory aversion Trollope displayed. Throughout the book Crouzet catches Stendhal in the act of constructing an anti-modern leftism, of a kind that gestures toward Arendt and even, perhaps, Foucault.

This masterful story of intellectual development is beset, however, with two pressing difficulties. The first is the peripheral quality, in relation to Stendhal's major texts, of the evidence Crouzet supplies. The question of how exactly Stendhal's engagement with ideas of America shaped his fiction is left mostly implicit; a dramatic claim that Lucien Leuwen is "un roman américain" is rather strained, particularly given Crouzet's endorsement, earlier in the book, of the old-fashioned but perennially popular notion of the "impossibility" of the American novel. Crouzet's book helps clarify Stendhal's thinking more than it helps clarify Stendhal's art. Furthermore, the fun-house-mirror quality of Stendhal's experience of America – its refraction through European political experience, through translations of various kinds – leaves open the question, naïve as it might be, of its validity. Crouzet slides elusively between a critical, even objective, distance from Stendhal to an occasional endorsement – often posed through rhetorical questions – of Stendhal's conception of America. Crouzet's sly presentation of Stend-hal as a prophet of contemporary geopolitics is both understandable and yet strained by the abstraction of Stendhal's experience. To pose the not-at-all rhetorical question raised by Crouzet's provocative book: can Stendhal's idée d'Amérique tell us more than simply how Stendhal's mind worked?