Stendhal - The Red and the Black (#1)

First reading: February 2021

Julien Sorel is a more interesting anti-hero than any of the characters populating the gritty dramas of the Golden Age of Television. Tony Soprano, Jimmy McNulty, Walter White, Don Draper -- they all are beat by Sorel. This is partly due to the limitations of the medium: we get cheap thrills from Walter White and Tony Soprano being placed in life-and-death situations, but Stendhal's narrator is able to tell us the depths of Sorel's devastation when the object of his desire spurns him. Sorel is like Draper in that they both remake themselves to fulfill their ambition. But Sorel is clear-sighted about the hollowness of what awaits him at the top of the society's perch.

Let's back up and contextualize, because The Red and the Black is not famous in the English-speaking world. It is set in France in 1830, 15 years after Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. Julien Sorel is a peasant from a remote province in the Jura. He has an eidetic memory and has memorized the Bible front-to-back. His father and older brothers run a lumber mill. Julien is the runt of the family and his bookish nature is anathema to the muscular coarseness of his father. He hides in the rafters of the sawmill and reads -- and tries his best to dodge the beatings unleashed by his family. They view him as a traitor.

Julien's mentor, Father Chelan, has spread his reputation as a young man of learning in the town of Verrieres. But Chelan, one of the only principal characters without guile (which turns out to be his downfall), mistakes Julien's learning of the Bible and Latin for piety and spiritual devotion. And in the reactionary political climate of 1830, Julien is forced to hide his affection for Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and disguises his adoration for Napoleon, his hero. Julien has merely identified the priesthood as his ticket out of the family business. His first step onward and upward is to be appointed tutor to the children of the mayor of Verrieres, M. de Renal. The irony is that M. de Renal does not give a thought to his children's education: he is only interested in appearing "aristocratic" in having a tutor for his children.

The stage is set for Julien's rise: he proves himself useful to his social betters, while fostering contempt for their hypocrisy. He does the minimum he needs to maintain their favor. He views them as stepping-stones on his path to greatness, hoping through his pluck and wit to climb up the social ladder. He thinks himself a man of adventure, a man behind enemy lines, exercising bravery and cunning on the battlefield of life. And it is no exaggeration to represent it as a battlefield. It is a mistake to think of him as just another arriviste, a petty social climber. He is climbing, but he is doing it entirely out of self-preservation: he is escaping from a life under his father's thumb using the only options available for him. He is trying to run to a place of safety.

But Julien's dreams of Napoleonic conquest do not unfold straightforwardly. He thrusts himself into peril by seducing the women of his benefactors. Stendhal is not being subtle here: we really are made to believe that Julien is superior to his benefactors because he is cuckolding them.

You see, Julien is handsome. And he is unlike the rest of the men populating high society in The Red and the Black, because he is honest with himself about the hypocrisy and pomp that surrounds him. He is, in a word, self-aware. Scorn of the rich and privileged fuels him. And this makes him irresistible to Madame de Renal, and later, Mathilde de la Mole, who both regard him as an "original".

Julien's plans do not account for the unpredictable behavior of his paramours. His ambition reduced his model of everyone in the upper crust to a worthless hypocrite, chess pieces on a board. Even while he is escalating the sexual tension, he steadies his shaking hands by imagining himself as a warrior about to breach the fortress of his enemy. And because his ego is so wrapped up in playing the role of a Napoleon, he is unable to connect emotionally with his lovers, because he is so conscious of the gap between who he is and the role he is forcing himself to play. After Julien has his first liaison with Madame de Renal, our narrator writes:

But, in the sweetest moments, he was still the victim of a bizarre pride, and aspired to play the role of a man accustomed to subjugate women: he tried unbelievably hard to spoil his endearing characteristics. Instead of being attentive to the ecstasy which he aroused, and the expressions of remorse which heightened its intensity, he was constantly beset by the idea of duty. He was afraid of terrible remorse and eternal if he deviated from the ideal model he had set himself to follow. In short, what made Julien a superior being was precisely what prevented him from savoring the happiness which came his way. Every inch the young girl of sixteen who has delightful coloring, and is foolish enough to put on rouge to go to a ball.

The irony is that Madame de Renal does correctly perceive Julien's better qualities. He is an attentive and kind tutor. He genuinely cares for her children. And, despite his plans, he begins to love her in return. Their reverie is broken up by Madame Renal's growing remorse about her adultery and the whispers of the servants who resent Julien's aspirations to move beyond his station. When anonymous letters threaten to dishonor Madame Renal, Julien escapes to a seminary in the province's capital city of Besancon. It is not the last time the sword will dangle over his head.

Julien recognizes only in retrospect that his entanglement with Madame Renal shattered his chance at lasting happiness. And his flight from Verrieres makes him restart his quest for a place of safety:

He had only experienced revulsion and gloomy thoughts during the dinners that been put on for him; in this solitary house, was he not able to read, write and think without being disturbed? ... But a traveller who has just climbed steep mountain sits down at the summit and finds perfect pleasure in resting. Would he be happy if forced to rest forever?

One of the challenges that The Red and the Black forces us to confront is if Julien lived the celibate life of a priest and renounced social life entirely, would he find lasting happiness? Or would he be so warped by his repression that his soul would be destroyed forever? It is the same question posed by any who contemplate a withdrawal from the world to protect themselves: is life worth living without meaningful connections to others? And are we actually capable of changing our personal nature?

In the seminary, Julien's conflict with society is portrayed in the most stark terms. He is the rare man of quality, with mindless drudges like his father below him, and hypocrites above him who have done nothing to earn their wealth. Again, he ascribes no meaning to his religious education, but takes immense pride in being quicker than his classmates. His pride is his curse. He is the object of such contempt that his fellow seminarists dub him "Martin Luther" due to his arrogant eloquence. He is aware of this, and tries to force himself to adapt, but he cannot help from expressing himself:

He aroused their enmity by expounding their own opinions better than they could themselves.... [Father Chelan] having given him the habit of arguing straight and not being taken in by idle words, he had neglected to tell him that in someone who is not highly regarded, this habit is a crime; for all sound arguments cause offense.

But Julien is then plucked out of peril by another benefactor that can see the light shine in him: Father Pirard. The priest recommends him as scribe to M. de la Mole, a nobleman in Paris. And Julien's adventure takes another turn while he lives in the Hotel de la Mole. Julien's habit of attracting benefactors disguises just how precarious an existence he leads. He is entirely dependent on the good graces of some man in authority to grant him the freedom that he craves. But his benefactors are only thinking of how Julien can be useful to them. Without any family to his name, Julien has to earn everything he wants through favor. Is that very different from our situation today? Those of us who choose to leave our hometowns in search of a white-collar career place themselves at the mercy of admissions committees and hiring managers, the administrators who will determine whether we will be forced to move to Palo Alto or Cambridge, Austin or New York City. And once there, we are accumulating the experiences we need to gain the favor of the next bureaucrat who will shuttle us to our next destination. The arbitrary nature of these judgments cleaves us from our relationships, and, like Julien, we are forced to move from beyond the people we love, to be immersed completely in our struggle to obtain the stability we seek.

In the Hotel de la Mole, Julien meets his match in the stunning, witty, haughty Mathilde. Mathilde de la Mole is the most eligible young woman in Paris, and she too falls for Julien. But unlike Madame de Renal, who fell for Julien spontaneously, Mathilde thinks herself into falling in love with Julien because he is a foil to the boring sons of the aristocracy who populate her drawing room. She recognizes Julien's individuality. And so she plots to seduce him, thinking herself in love with him. She writes a daring letter to him, inviting him to climb a ladder through her bedroom window. Despite his paranoia that it is a setup concocted by the jealous Count Norbert (Mathilde's brother), Julien decides to fulfill his duty:

What's the point in denying it? he said at last; I'll be a coward in her eyes. I'll lose not only the most dazzling women in high society, as they were all saying... but on top of that the divine pleasure of seeing the Marquis de Croisenois sacrificed for me... A charming young man with all the qualities I lack: a sense of appropriateness, birth fortune... This remorse will dog me all my life, not on her account -- there are so many sweethearts... But there is only one honor! ... And here I am clearly and distinctly retreating in the face of the first real danger that comes my way.

He puts his pistols in his pocket in case he is ambushed, and climbs the ladder to Mathilde's room. But this time it is Julien who is the lucid one, captivated by Mathilde, and disappointed that she is the one who is solemnly fulfilling a duty instead of being captured by genuine affection. Her heart is poisoned by self-doubt. She pushes herself to give herself up to Julien, because he had passed the tests she had set for him, and she is merely playing the role of the woman who is feeling passionately in love. This alienates Julien from her. Instead of tenderness bringing him to genuine feeling as in his romance with Madame Renal, Mathilde's iciness forces Julien to maintain his role of a general who just executed a maneuver to perfection, detached from humanity, thinking of his relationship with Mathilde as yet another conquest.

Julien and Mathilde play a humiliating cat-and-mouse game. Mathilde, ashamed at having lost her virginity to Julien, shows him unremitting scorn. In response, Julien's affection for her only grows, but he is tormented by her cruelty, and wonders what he can do to rekindle her love for him. He eventually lands on the classic strategy of pretending to be in love with someone else -- the Marechale Madame de Fervaques -- to attract Mathilde. He ignores Mathilde and spends all his time in Madame de Fervaques's salon, spending his evenings copying love letters given him by a Russian prince. This cynical strategy works: Mathilde's will is broken by Julien's iciness -- and Julien is seized with joy. And Mathilde herself comes to name what she feels as "love", merely because she isn't bored stiff by him. He makes her feel something due to his unpredictability.

This is an astonishingly clearsighted representation of casual sexual relationships. The two parties know that they are playing a role for the other person, and they force themselves uncomfortably into that role, because the alternative is actual vulnerability, which means that the pretense of detachment cannot hold. Witness, too, that "detached" is the opposite of "clingy", and clinginess is a phenomenon when one person breaks character to evince a desire beyond the carnal. The idea of having "standards" places us in the same position as Mathilde: we feel we are compelled to say yes to people who meet them, but that is no guarantee that they will do anything to move our hearts. We are starved for connection, constantly on the lookout for a ray of real humanity shining through from the cynical role-playing. But we try to control ourselves such that we don't betray our real feelings first, because to advance them may cause our counterpart to reject us. The struggle to hold the higher ground of indifference is what most of the game-playing comes down to.

As Mathilde and Julien's relationship illustrates, it is possible to earnestly desire and be deluded. Mathilde is so overcome by her vision of the life that she is to share with Julien that decides to raise the sakes: she writes a letter to her father exposing their affair. Meanwhile, a letter arrives from Madame de Renal: in her guilt, she has written to Mathilde's father to deliriously expiate her sins -- but blames Julien entirely for corrupting her, saying that it was part of his cynical strategy to assume control of the house. Madame de Renal's letter is a masterful example of irony -- she condemns Julien for seducing her as part of his cynical strategy to climb the social ladder, but we know that, while Julien is every bit as guilty of hypocritical ambition as she alleges, her seduction was not part of the plan.

This begins Julien's downfall. Julien enters a fugue state and travels back to Verrieres to kill Madame de Renal. He finds her in church and succeeds in putting a bullet in her shoulder, but does not kill her. Julien is put on trial for murder.

And it is in his imprisonment that Julien finds lucidity and attains the mantle of a Stendhalian hero: he takes responsibility for his crime, even as Mathilde pulls all the strings imaginable to get him acquitted. She thinks he is insane for refusing to use the avenues for evading the law that her social rank has made available to him. But Julien's final act of consequence is to confess his guilt in court. The irony rises to such a high pitch that officers of the court cajole him to make excuses for himself, but he refuses to. Julien preserves his integrity to the bitter end. Without an avenue for his ambition, he realizes that all he would have needed for a good life would be a modest income and a quiet place on a mountainside in the Jura.

Mathilde, for her part, uses Julien's trial as a spectacle to draw attention to herself as the lover of a man condemned to death. Unchained from her need to protect her reputation, she is free to play the hero of her own story, much as Julien once did. Our narrator thinks that Mathilde's defense of Julien is performative:

...she would have liked to let no moment of her life go by without filling it with some remarkable act. The strangest projects entailing great risk to herself filler her long conversations with Julien. The gaolers, well paid, let her reign supreme in the prison. Mathilde's ideas did not stop at the sacrifice of her own reputation; she didn't care if she proclaimed her condition to the whole of society. Flinging herself on her knees in front of the king's galloping horses to beg for Julien's reprieve, attracting the monarch's attention at the repeated risk of being trampled to death, was one of the lesser flights of fancy of this exalted and fearless imagination.

But Julien is put off by Mathilde, and instead relishes Madame de Renal's visits to his jail cell. In the end, they both forgive each other and come to recognize that what passed between them was love. It is Julien's final consolation: the novel ends with his death by the guillotine, Mathilde cradling his head, and Madame de Renal dying suddenly, now that her love passed from the earth. It is a bit of a clumsy ending, but it works symbolically: Mathilde faced no real danger, while Julien and Madame de Renal paid for their very real attachment.