Vision, Voice, and Audience in La Chartreuse De Parme Lottie Katz
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Vision, Voice, and Audience in La Chartreuse de Parme Lottie Katz Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Lottie Katz All rights reserved ABSTRACT Vision, Voice, and Audience in La Chartreuse de Parme Lottie Katz This dissertation presents a close reading of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, analyzing its written style, its themes, and the relationships between its numerous characters and narrative lines. Through a rigorous investigation of these factors, Stendhal’s explicit creative project emerges: the author’s desire to present himself as a storyteller in conversation with his reader. As storyteller, Stendhal applies himself to show rather than tell. In his narrative method first person often replaces the third; the story unfolds before the reader’s eyes as it would on a stage. The clarity and sobriety of Stendhal’s language becomes a vehicle for the vivid expressivity and dynamic energy that give rise to the Chartreuse’s blatant theatrical presentation. This analysis unfolds in five chapters and an epilogue, illuminating the foundations of Stendhal’s theatrical style. I. Caricature: The Rogues’ Gallery: An inquiry into the passages that present Stendhal at his satiric best. II. Sentence Structure: The stylistic characteristics that underpin theatrical presentation. III. The Emphasis on Time: Stendhal’s manipulation of narrative time facilitates the forward movement of the action; it is theatrical in the sense that there is a continuous flow of movement. IV. Architectural Structure: Enables the disparate components of the narrative to fit together, though there are a multitude. V. Theatrical Prelude: The culmination of Stendhal’s tactics results in an aura of theatricality. Table of Contents Acknowledgments ___________________________________________________________ iv Dedication ________________________________________________________________v Preface _______________________________________________________________ vi Introduction ________________________________________________________________1 Chapter 1: Caricature: The Rogues’ Gallery______________________________________8 Chapter 2: Sentence Structure ________________________________________________25 I. Italics ________________________________________________________25 II. The Demonstrative Adjective _______________________________________34 III. The Epigram ____________________________________________________40 IV. The Colon ______________________________________________________41 V. The Presentative _________________________________________________50 VI. The Broken Sentence _____________________________________________55 Chapter 3: The Emphasis on Time _____________________________________________63 I. Time __________________________________________________________64 II. Time on the Clock________________________________________________77 A. Money ______________________________________________________77 B. Place ________________________________________________________78 C. Time ________________________________________________________80 i Chapter 4: Architectural Structure ____________________________________________96 I. Linkage ________________________________________________________96 II. Scenic Geometry________________________________________________109 III. Geometry in Narrative Structure____________________________________121 IV. Converging and Crisscrossing Lines ________________________________127 V. Antithesis _____________________________________________________139 Chapter 5: Theatrical Prelude________________________________________________145 I. Painting _______________________________________________________146 II. Seeing ________________________________________________________158 III. The Other Senses _______________________________________________167 A. Feeling, touch _______________________________________________169 B. Sound______________________________________________________170 C. Smell ______________________________________________________176 IV. The Musicality of the Text ________________________________________177 A. The Functions of Brevity ______________________________________178 B. The Rhythm that Molds to Content_______________________________183 Epilogue: The Theater ______________________________________________________188 Bibliography ______________________________________________________________202 ii Appendices ______________________________________________________________203 Appendix A__________________________________________________________203 Appendix B __________________________________________________________204 Appendix C __________________________________________________________208 iii Acknowledgments I wish to thank all those to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their help in the completion of my dissertation. Professor Antoine Compagnon must have been startled by my letter seeking permission to resume the work I had started so long ago. I am deeply appreciative of his kind consideration of my request and of his help in contacting Professor Elisabeth Ladenson, Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology and specialist in nineteenth and twentieth century French literature. Together, they agreed to read my first draft. They saw in that first attempt the possibilities of success. Dr. Ladenson offered me her help. Without her kind support and generous guidance, I could never have written my dissertation. Dr. Ladenson put me in contact with Jennifer Rhodes, who edited my manuscript, and to whom I am eternally grateful for her ceaseless hard work, her expertise, and her steadfast encouragement. I would also like to mention Professor Emmanuelle Saada, who, in the early days of my return, answered all the phone calls I made to her office and made me feel welcome. I am indebted for the support of the entire French Department and to its secretary, Isabelle Chagnon for her good-humoured cooperation and patient attention to my inquiries. My family has always supported my dream of writing on Stendhal and his Chartreuse de Parme and encouraged me whenever my resolution faltered. To them, also, I owe my heartfelt thanks. iv Dedicated to the memory of my husband, David Katz, and to my parents, Hugo and Jolan Kohn. v Preface The preface to the Chartreuse sets the tone for the entire novel. In it, Stendhal remembers a visit with friends in Padua. As Stendhal recounts it, during the pleasant evening spent in their company, around their table, these friends told him the highly immoral but fascinating story of the brilliant Duchess Sanseverina. Later, this tone of cozy camaraderie is carried forth as Stendhal takes the relay and continues the conversation with a new group of friends, the readers. He acts as a guide, not only of the physical terrain, but of the intimacies of his characters. As befits a guide, he does not probe or enter into deep intellectual discussions, though he might discreetly brush against them. His overriding concern is to maintain a light, easily accessible manner that will not repulse his audience. Therefore, his aim is not to interrogate, but to show. He wants his audience to see what his characters see, and while he lays bare his cast’s internal motivations, he wants the audience to watch them as they perform the acts of their life in their external manifestations and, as is especially possible during a theatrical performance, to vicariously participate along with them. In my study, I wish to show the primary role the theatre and the senses occupy in the Chartreuse. First among these senses is seeing; the text’s pictorial quality creates scenes worthy of a painting or a stage set, complete with script. The response of Stendhal’s characters to outside stimuli is responsible for the text’s poetic references to nature, space, and sound. In The Gates of Horn, Harry Levin explains the role the ideologues and perforce, Destutt de Tracy, one of their leaders, played in Stendhal’s thinking about the importance of the senses. The ideologues represent “an empirical approach to the mind-body problem. Knowledge is derived from sensation, not from innate ideas; human nature is the variable product of particular vi conditions. The mind is a blank tablet to be etched by human experience” (Levin 103). Their senses aroused, the characters react to the stimuli around them, which the reader may also enjoy. To this end, the text is sprinkled with the expressions “vis-à-vis”, “en face de”, “tête-à- tête”. Such receptivity of the senses to outside stimuli includes smell and sound, as Stendhal, like the alchemists of old labors to transmute his material from base metal to gold, from the dross of forgotten history to the vivid panorama of lives lived. (For a representative sample of these features, please see Appendix A.) The novel is a transposition of the elements contained in the preface, from Stendhal’s easy sociability at the table with an Italian family as he consumes an excellent sambajon that, he tells us, comes from the “café Perdoti”, a reminder of the cafés he loved to frequent, to the story of the duchess herself, an example of the Italian beauty and temperament he so admired. The young Stendhal, bivouacked in Padua years before 1830, becomes Lieutenant Robert of Napoleon’s army, bivouacked in the del Dongo household of Milan. Lieutenant Robert steps out of the story’s time frame, speaking to what seems his alter ego, Stendhal, about the past, which is the present of the story, “De la