2 - The Red and the Black: the novel

Summary

Sources

We have seen that by 1830 Stendhal was already the author of a considerable body of published and unpublished works. Although he was now a skilled writer, his reputation, for the reader of the times, would have been quite modest, at best that of a journalist or polemicist. As a novelist, a few knew of him as the anonymous author of the undistinguished Armance. Yet Armance set the tone for Stendhal's greater novelistic achievements in at least three ways: it is derivative (the plot was adopted from Mme de Duras's novel, Olivier), it is grounded in contemporary history (the salons of 1827), and the main character's conduct seems enigmatic and even unintelligible. It already introduces its reader to the problematic reciprocities of the real and the imaginary, the self and the world, ‘Mr Myself’ and ‘Stendhal’.

Since Stendhal's name is forever linked with the aesthetics of the mirror (to avoid the vexed term of ‘realism’ for the moment), it is worth noting that the preface to Armance introduces this specular metaphor, which returns time and again in relation to Stendhal's novels. The authors of a recent comedy ‘presented a mirror to the public; is it their fault if some ugly people passed in front of the mirror? What side is a mirror on?’