Stendhal

Japanese: スタンダール - すたんだーる（英語表記）Stendhal

French novelist. His real name was Henri Beyle. He is considered to be on par with Balzac as a French novelist of the first half of the 19th century, but he also wrote literary criticism, travelogues, biographies, and autobiographies. In addition to his literary activities, he was a soldier and civilian employee in the Napoleonic era, and a diplomat after the July Revolution, and his life was filled with many well-known romantic adventures and was extremely eventful.

[Akio Tominaga]

Life

He was born on January 23, 1783, into a wealthy bourgeois family in Grenoble, the capital of the Dauphiné region in eastern France. The young Bayle's mental life seems to have been quite unique. He loved his mother dearly and hated his father. "My mother was a charming woman, and I was in love with her... I hated my father so much when he tried to interrupt our kisses," is a passage from his autobiography that can be said to be a typical record of the Oedipus complex. He lost his mother when he was seven years old. "This is when my mental life began," he said. Surrounded by his hated father, his aunt who was a fanatic old woman, and his tutor, a priest, the boy thought of himself as a slave. This rebellious boy's education consisted of his rebelliousness against the conservative and hypocritical nature of his provincial bourgeois family, his love of literature and 18th-century rationalism instilled in him by his liberal maternal grandfather, the "Spanish temperament" instilled in him by his great-aunt, who loved integrity above all else, and Don Juan-like life lessons from his libertine uncle. Because he excelled in mathematics, he moved to Paris at the age of 16 and was given the opportunity to take the entrance exam for the Ecole Polytechnique, but his true desire was to "become a playwright like Molière," so he ended up abandoning the exam. However, with the help of a relative who was a high-ranking army officer, he joined the Italian expeditionary force, and in the early summer of 1800, at the age of 17, he crossed the Alps and set foot on Milan soil. His experience of liberation in Italy after grey years was decisive for him. It was here that he discovered freedom, love and pleasure, beauty and music, and the Italian way of life. Since then, Italy has become his spiritual home.

He soon left the military and returned to Paris in 1802, where he devoted himself to literary studies for several years, aiming to become a playwright. In addition to reading books and going to the theater, he was interested in the "ideological philosophy" of Hervecius, Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, and others, and under their influence he worked hard to build a first-class philosophy of humanity. Despite his persistent efforts, he did not achieve any notable results in terms of his playwriting, but the significance of his studies during this period is immeasurable. Many of the foundations of his later novelism were cultivated during this period. During this time, he fell in love with the actress Melanie and accompanied her to her performances in Marseilles, which was also his first experience of living together with her. From 1806 until the collapse of the Empire in 1814, Bayle held various positions as a military officer and as a civil servant, moving around Europe. It can be said that this was a period in which he was more ambitious about building his social status than he was about literature.

In 1814, he lost his job with the fall of Napoleon. After that, he started to write in earnest. He started with "Haydn, Mozart, Metastasio" (1815), followed by "History of Italian Painting" (1817) and "Rome, Naples, Florence" (1817) after moving to Milan. The latter was the first time he used the pen name Stendhal. Matilde Dembowski, whom he met in 1818, was the greatest love of his life, but their love did not come to fruition, and this experience was later crystallized in "De amours" (1822). In 1821, he was warned by the authorities to leave Milan due to his writing activities and his association with liberals, and returned to Paris in despair over his love for Matilde. In Paris under the Restoration, he was nothing more than a disappointed wanderer in the literary world. Without a permanent position, he began to contribute a wide variety of critical essays to French and British magazines. Racine and Shakespeare (1823, 1825), which provided cover fire for the Romantic movement, also belong to this series. Other works include A Life of Rossini (1823) and Walks at Rome (1829), but his debut novel, Armance (1827), dealt with the unusual theme of a sexually impotent protagonist, but he concealed this fact and did not attract much attention.

After a long period of misfortune, the July Revolution of 1830 brought him the position of consul. His masterpiece, The Red and the Black (1830), published around the same time, was not well received. After that, he commuted between Rome and Civitavecchia, a suburb of Rome, and took several annual vacations to Paris. Tired of his work, he found solace in writing. Although his two autobiographies, Reminiscences of Egotism and The Life of Henri Brullard, and his novels Lucien Ruben and Lamiel, were all left unfinished (published posthumously), he published a series of short and medium-length stories collectively known as the "Italian Chronicles," including The Nun of Castro (1839), and Notes of a Traveler (1838). In particular, "The Abbey of Parma" (1839), which is an extension of "Chronicles of Italy", is the masterpiece that concludes his life. On March 22, 1842, while staying in Paris, he suffered a stroke in the street and died the next day, March 23, without regaining consciousness.

[Akio Tominaga]

Novel techniques and characteristics

Stendhal's achievement as a novelist is that he established a type of realism in modern novels. As the subtitle of The Red and the Black, "The Chronicles of the 1830s," suggests, there is a lot of evidence that the author, as a chronicler, set out to portray the reality of France, and he certainly had the conviction that "man can no longer reach the truth except through novels." This can be combined with his famous epithet, "A novel is a mirror carried along the road." Indeed, his novels do not aim to be panoramic of society as a whole, as Balzac's were, and rather tend to focus on the story of a single protagonist. Stendhal's mirror reflects the times and society, but almost always through the lens of the protagonist. This is probably why his works use so many internal monologues. He also writes in his creative notes, "Descriptions of manners and customs are boring in novels...Try to turn a description into a surprise, and it will become an emotion." The greatest secret of Stendhal's creative work is his ability to accurately capture the inner thoughts of his protagonists as they waver in the face of reality, and to put them to lightning-fast pen. This is the method of psychological realism.

By the way, how did he set up the protagonist, who is nothing but a privileged lens in the novel? Needless to say, as an alter ego. It is often said that Stendhal's protagonists are idealized versions of the author, but the author's own internal contradictions and pattern of failure, aspiring to be intelligent but being swept away by fits of sensibility, are not alleviated in any way by the characters in the novel. Rather, the plot of the novel is driven in large part by the protagonist's failure. While the author enjoys ironic pleasure in analyzing his own past failures through the protagonist's failures, he also finds an opportunity to confirm and accept his true nature, which was inevitable in his failures. What is idealized is in fact nothing other than a perspective for self-awareness. The author, who has passed the age of forty, relives the past projected onto the young protagonist - this strange double life of the author in his works is the secret of the structure common to many of Stendhal's novels. This is probably because the author never tires of repeating the theme of "the young protagonist's debut into society."

Stendhal constructs his novels using a variety of discontinuous techniques, including frequent authorial intervention in the form of ridicule or commentary on the protagonist, frequent use of internal monologue, a style of writing that bends sharply and leaps at sharp angles as if tracing the "surprise" of the characters, and a narrative style that describes only the result without the cause, or conversely, omits the result altogether, yet is psychologically very realistic. Due to the originality of his ideas and methods, he was not widely understood during his lifetime, but it is for this very reason that, as he himself predicted, his works have gained more and more readers 50 and 100 years after his death.

[Akio Tominaga]

"The Complete Works of Stendhal, edited by Kuwahara Takeo and Ikushima Ryoichi, 12 volumes in total (1968-1973, Jinbun Shoin) " ▽ "A Study of the Formation Process of 'The Red and the Black' by Kobayashi Tadashi (1962, Hakusuisha)" ▽ "On Stendhal, by Thibaudet, translated by Kawai Toru and Kato Tamio (1968, Fuyukisha)" ▽ "My Stendhal, by Ooka Shohei (1973, Rippushobo)" ▽ "A Biography of Stendhal, by Muroi Yoichi (1984, Yomiuri Shimbun)"

[References] | The Red and the Black | The Parma Monastery | Love Theory

Source: Shogakukan Encyclopedia Nipponica About Encyclopedia Nipponica Information | Legend

Japanese:

フランスの小説家。本名アンリ・ベールHenri Beyle。19世紀前半のフランスの小説家としてバルザックと並び称されるが、ほかに文芸評論、旅行記、評伝、自伝などにも手を染めている。文筆活動以外にも、ナポレオン時代の軍人、軍属、また七月革命以後の外交官の経歴があり、周知の数多い恋愛遍歴に彩られた生涯はきわめて波瀾(はらん)に富む。

［冨永明夫］

生涯

1783年1月23日、フランス東部ドーフィネ地方の首府グルノーブルの裕福なブルジョア家庭に生まれる。少年ベールの精神生活はかなり特異なものだったようだ。彼は母を熱愛し、ひたすら父を憎悪した。「母は魅力的な人だった。そして私は母に恋していた……父が私たちのキスを邪魔(じゃま)しにくるときなどは無性(むしょう)に父が憎らしかった」という自伝の一節は、典型的なエディプス・コンプレックスの記録といってよいだろう。その母を、彼は7歳のとき失った。「このときから私の精神生活が始まる」と彼はいう。大嫌いな父、狂信家の老嬢である叔母、家庭教師の神父に囲まれた自分を、少年は奴隷だと思う。地方都市のブルジョア家庭の保守性・偽善性への反発、他方リベラルな母方の祖父から授けられた18世紀的合理主義思想と文芸への愛、なによりも高潔を愛する大伯母から吹き込まれた「スペイン気質（エスパニヨリスムespagnolisme）」、さらに放蕩(ほうとう)家の叔父から学んだドン・ファン的人生訓、以上がこの反抗児の教育の総体である。数学に秀でたため、16歳でパリに上京、理工科学校（エコール・ポリテクニク）受験の機会に恵まれたものの、彼の本心は「モリエールのような劇作家になる」ことであり、結局受験は放棄した。が、親戚(しんせき)の陸軍高官の世話でイタリア遠征軍に加わり、17歳の1800年初夏、アルプスを越えてミラノの土を踏む。灰色の年月ののちに訪れた解放としてのイタリア体験は彼にとって決定的だった。彼はこの地で自由を知り、愛と快楽を、美と音楽を、そしてイタリア人の生き方を知る。それ以来イタリアは彼の精神的故郷となった。

　まもなく軍職を離れ、1802年ふたたびパリへ出たベールは、以降数年間、劇作家を目ざして文学修業に精進する。読書、観劇のかたわら、エルベシウス、カバニス、デスチュット・ド・トラシなどの「イデオロジー哲学」に傾倒、その影響下に彼一流の人間学構築に腐心した。執拗(しつよう)な努力にもかかわらず劇作にみるべき成果はなかったが、この時期の修業の意味は計り知れない。後年の小説家の素地は多くこの時代に培われたのである。この間、女優メラニーに恋して出演先のマルセーユまで同行したが、これは彼が初めて経験した同棲(どうせい)生活でもあった。1806年から1814年の帝政崩壊まで、ベールは軍属として、また官吏としてさまざまの役職につき、ヨーロッパ各地を転々とした。文学よりも社会的地位を築くことに野心を燃やした時期といってよい。

　1814年、ナポレオンの没落とともに失職。以後、文筆活動が本格化する。『ハイドン・モーツァルト・メタスターシオ伝』（1815）を皮切りに、ミラノ移住後の『イタリア絵画史』（1817）、『ローマ・ナポリ・フィレンツェ』（1817）が続く。後者で初めてスタンダールなる筆名が用いられた。1818年に知り合ったマチルデ・デンボウスキは生涯最大の恋人だったが、この恋は実らず、その経験はのち『恋愛論』（1822）に結晶する。1821年、それまでの執筆活動とリベラル派との交際から官憲ににらまれてミラノ退去の勧告を受け、マチルデへの恋に絶望しつつパリへ戻る。王政復古下のパリで、彼は失意の文壇放浪児でしかない。定職もないまま、フランス、イギリスの諸雑誌に多種多様の評論の寄稿が始まる。ロマン派への援護射撃『ラシーヌとシェークスピア』（1823、1825）もこの系列の仕事である。ほかに『ロッシーニ伝』（1823）、『ローマ散歩』（1829）があるが、小説としての処女作『アルマンス』（1827）は、性的不能者を主人公とする特殊な主題を扱いながら、その点を包み隠した作品だったため、さして注目を集めるに至らなかった。

　長い不遇ののち、1830年の七月革命は彼に領事職をもたらした。前後して出版された『赤と黒』（1830）は彼の代表作だが、好評を博したとはいいがたい。以後は、ローマ近郊のチビタベッキアの領事として同地とローマの間を往復し、かたわら何回か年単位の休暇を得てパリに遊ぶ生活が続く。職務に倦(う)む領事は書くことに慰めをみいだした。二つの自伝『エゴチスムの回想』『アンリ・ブリュラールの生涯』、長編小説『リュシヤン・ルーベン』『ラミエル』はいずれも未完（死後刊行）に終わったが、『カストロの尼』（1839）を含む「イタリア年代記」と総称される中短編群、『ある旅行者の手記』（1838）などを発表。ことに、『イタリア年代記』の延長線上に位する『パルムの僧院』（1839）は生涯を締めくくる傑作である。1842年3月22日、パリ滞在中に街頭で卒中の発作に襲われ、意識を回復しないまま翌23日没した。

［冨永明夫］

小説技法と特徴

小説家スタンダールの功績は、近代小説におけるリアリズムの一つの型を打ち立てた点にある。『赤と黒』の副題「1830年年代史」が暗示するとおり、作者が年代記作家としてフランスの現実を描くことを課題としていたことは多くの証拠から明らかであり、「人はもはや小説においてしか真実に到達しえない」という省察を胸に畳んでいたことも確かである。これに「小説、それは往来に沿って持ち歩かれる鏡である」という彼の有名な警句を重ね合わせてみればいい。確かに彼の小説は、バルザックのそれのように社会総体のパノラマを志すものではなく、むしろただ1人の主人公の物語に終始することが多い。スタンダールの鏡は、時代を、社会を映し出しはするが、それはほとんどつねに主人公というレンズを通じてなのである。作中であれほど内的独白が多用されるゆえんであろう。また創作ノートにいう「風俗の描写は小説中において味気ないものだ（中略）描写を驚きに変えてみるがいい、描写は一つの感情になるだろう」。現実に直面して揺れ動く主人公の内面を的確にとらえ、神速の筆に移す、これがスタンダールの創作の最大の秘密、すなわち心理的リアリズムの骨法なのである。

　ところで、小説中の特権的なレンズにほかならぬ主人公を、彼はどのように設定したか。いうまでもなく自己の分身としてである。スタンダールの主人公は作者の理想化された姿だとよくいわれるが、作者自身の内面の矛盾や、明敏を志しつつ感性の発作に足をすくわれるという失敗のパターンは、作中人物においてなんら緩和されていない。むしろ小説の筋は、多く主人公の失敗にその原動力を負うている。作者は、主人公の失敗を通じてかつての自己の失敗を分析することに皮肉な快楽を味わう一方で、失敗せざるをえなかった自己の本性を確認し、容認する契機をみいだす。理想化されたのは、実は自己認識のための視点にほかならない。不惑の年を越えた作者が青年主人公のうちに投影された過去を生き直す――作品中における作者のこの奇妙な二重生活こそ、スタンダールの多くの小説に共通する構成の秘密である。作者が「若き主人公の社会へのデビュー」というテーマを飽かず繰り返したゆえんであろう。

　主人公への揶揄(やゆ)ないし注釈という形で頻出する作者介入の技法、内的独白の多用、人物の「驚き」をなぞるように、鋭角的に屈曲する跳躍的文体、原因抜きに結果だけを述べ、あるいは逆にまったく結果を省略する、しかし心理的にはきわめてリアルな叙述法、スタンダールは実にさまざまな非連続的手法によってその小説を構築していく。発想と手法の斬新(ざんしん)さのために生前多くの理解は得られなかったが、まさにそのゆえに、自ら予言したとおり、死後50年、100年を経て、彼の作品はますます多くの読者を獲得していったのである。

［冨永明夫］

『桑原武夫・生島遼一編『スタンダール全集』全12巻（1968～1973・人文書院）』▽『小林正著『「赤と黒」の成立過程の研究』（1962・白水社）』▽『チボーデ著、河合亨・加藤民男訳『スタンダール論』（1968・冬樹社）』▽『大岡昇平著『わがスタンダール』（1973・立風書房）』▽『室井庸一著『スタンダール評伝』（1984・読売新聞社）』

[参照項目] | 赤と黒 | パルムの僧院 | 恋愛論

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