Class 4 again

Alright—Jeff here—I’ve been slow to join in; I blame my High Office. But it is a snowy night in Brooklyn and good for ruminating and so let me set down some reflections especially on Stendhal but also on the class more generally…

…beginning with that idea Graham has mooted, via White, of historical consciousness: our project being, both to develop a sense of the variety of possible forms of such consciousness, especially as kinds of making; and to wonder, what new forms (or what old forms, or hybrids) might be adequate to our own moment? In what shapes can we know the past; how can we make our history both most true and most useful (and discover what relation or ratio between those two criteria we need)? Our basic wager is that we will get a better grip on the problem for having tried it ourselves.

Another way of posing the problem, a little closer to the terrain of literary criticism: what do we mean when we historicize a text; what kind of history are we making, when we do? Literary critics can sometimes be naively deferential to the historical record, as though it were the real against which the fancies of criticism must be tested. But to invoke history, in making a literary argument, is always to invoke it in a particular shape, and to engage in the sort of tendentious narrativizing that White so determinedly taxonomizes. Where does the new historicism fit among the emplotments of Metahistory? What is implied by particular ligatures between text and event, text and context—do they conjure a genre, tragic or comic? A structure of argument, contextualist, for example? Such questions may be asked on the largest and the smallest scales, and should be, but we do not always ask them.

For the historians, all the more important—how would you emplot the books you most admire; how about the essay you last wrote?

I should say, White’s large questions about plot will not be our only questions. The poetics of history certainly operates at that level of total narrative. But the techne of getting the past in, presenting the past, whether in literature or historiography or criticism or anywhere else, includes other instruments, at other scales. There is detail, for example, the stuff of the past, things that bear implicit dates, properties. Closely related, style, how ways of speaking and writing date their speakers and writers. White showed us some things about syntax that we might do well to follow up, too. The parataxis of Burckhardt, for example, as both a symptom (for us readers) and, arguably, a tool (for him) of a kind of history that abjures overarching logic. We might compare the implications of such sentences to the magnificent, suspended period that ends Keene’s “Mannahatta.” What does that sentence imply for Keene’s metahistory?

But Stendhal, Stendhal. Let me try to gather up a few threads from the past couple of weeks’ discussion. I thought we did a good job with Fabrizio, as a charming, volatile, distractible cipher at the center of the book—impressionable hero of a Bildungsroman, who may not learn anything at all. He stands athwart a thousand contradictions, in his boyish naiveté, his sense of aristocratic privilege and honor (in spite of, because of, his illegitimacy?), his intimations of the general value of human life (the Liberals’ sense of the happiness of the many?), his church career and his susceptibility to omens, his classicism; his desire to be in the middle of things, to be part of history, of battle, but his perfect delight in the altitude, solitude, and semiotic poverty of his tower. As James Merrill says of the mirror, “You embrace a whole world without once caring / To set it in order.” (Recall Stendhal’s aphorism re the novel as a mirror out for a walk.) What sort of historical consciousness is this?—or does his character consist in the very limitation of his consciousness; in its passing appetites and affinities, not even properly ironic?

Around him, however, are constellated other characters of more determinate vantage: the Count, who seems to be such a perfect steward of a precarious aristocratic order, who thinks Parma is not yet ready for a republic (407), and so deftly postpones it; he is an immaculate tactician, unconcerned with strategy (and also strongly tempted into a different code again, that of companionate marriage—a formation not at all to do with the courtly world he sustains; his love for the Duchess is among the book’s great achievements). How would White characterize him: a satirist, a conservative; somewhere between mastery of small metonymies, and an ironic dissociation between politics and history? (His “satirical subtlety” [282]; he likes games, whist and backgammon.) And the Duchess, as intelligent as the Count, as subtle, if somewhat less adroit in her calculations—if only because she puts her wit at Fabrizio’s disposal, and is willing to make change on a scale that the Count never assays; she sets in motion, after all, an assassination and a rebellion, and uses a flood just to send a signal. Is there a theory of history behind her actions, a comic emplotment, a synecdochic dedication to the well-being of a favored son? How about Palla? A Romantic? Or does he tend toward those ideological implications that White sees as generating no serious history—fascism, even?

So there are a number of different kinds of history focalized in the characters (including more minor characters, Marshall Ney, even Giletti). What of the novel as a whole? Its great reputation for ironic realism does seem to bear up under White’s definition. Satire is a basic mode; comedy and tragedy are invoked at different moments, and romance too (the atavistic aspects of the tower and of Palla’s character, which we raised in class), but what is most striking is its ironic collation of contradictory vectors and markers, pointing backward and forward, indexing many pasts. It might be possible to argue that there is a seismic liberalism underneath all of it, that Stendhal wants to show us that beneath all of these erotic maneuverings, history is moving, whether in a Hegelian or a Tocquevillian sort of way, toward the priority of the people. Then again, perhaps the book’s fragmented consciousness—as distributed across its dramatis personae; as concentrated, or perfectly dispersed, in Fabrizio—is historically inert, and what it is good at is not emploting a historical story, but (more like Burckhardt) giving us a slice of time without identifying in it any impulse to necessary change. That, to be sure, is a kind of poetics of history…

…and raises the question of activism. That is, parallel to the question of whether we like the book, feel sympathetic, love or forgive its characters, is the question of what we might do about it. Is this a book that might motivate a reader to some action? If so, what, and how? If not, what does it give us instead—what kind of pleasure, what kind of understanding; to what relation to history does it enjoin us? This too will continue to be an important question, for some books we read will seem to have strong designs on the reader’s own historical agency; others, not.

“To the happy few”!—it is hard to see this as an activist novel, exactly. How ironic is that final dedication, that final toast? Fabrizio seems to have had another happy three years of improvised trysts with Clèlia, living, as he did in the tower, in the interstices of history, improvising undisruptive, perhaps even insignificant forms of satisfaction. His great mistake is to try to establish his paternity, and gain custody of his son—wrenching what seems to be a double illegitimacy into a proper genealogy, as though he could claim his place by main strength in that oldest sort of history, the family tree. What to make of the tragic outcome? Should Fabrizio have forged some new relation, and a new politics for it?—do we stand in need of a notional republic where divorce is possible and family life can be renovated? Or, and this seems much more within the novel’s ken, should he have accepted that life is lived best by tactics of local irony, assuming a disjunction between larger social forms and private affect? Acquiescing to the present, at history’s expense; or at least, the sort of history that moves?

That’s more than enough for now. But as we think about how White’s historians do history, how they make the past present, let’s keep in mind the way Stendhal does it too—the modernity of his irony, as we characterized it in class, which could be said to produce an awareness of history that, in its wry, tolerant, affectionate breadth, teaches little about how things might be otherwise, but everything about how they were. Keene will be different, yes?