Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn

Author:Daniel Mendelsohn [Mendelsohn, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-59017-609-2
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

III. CREATIVE WRITING

AFTER WATERLOO

WHAT NOVEL COULD be so essential that even the dead feel compelled to know what it’s about? At the beginning of Jean Giraudoux’s Bella (1926), the narrator, attending a memorial service for schoolmates who fell in the trenches of World War I, begins to hear the voices of his dead comrades. For the most part, they talk about mundane, soldierly things: the discomforts of war, annoying commanding officers. But the last voice the narrator hears is different—it’s the voice of a young man tormented by the thought that he’d never had a chance to read a certain seventy-five-year-old novel. What the dead youth wants is for the narrator to summarize the book “in a word.” In a word, because “with the dead, there are no sentences.”

The book in question is Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, an epic and yet intimate tale of political intrigue and erotic frustration, set in the (largely fictionalized) princely court of Parma during the author’s own time. Almost since the moment it appeared, in 1839, Stendhal’s last completed work of fiction has been considered a masterpiece. Barely a year after the book was published, Balzac praised it in a lengthy review that immediately established the novel’s reputation. “One sees perfection in everything” was just one of the laurels Balzac heaped on Charterhouse, in what was surely one of the world’s great acts of literary generosity. Sixty years after Balzac, André Gide ranked Charterhouse among the greatest of all French novels, and one of only two French works that could be counted among the top ten of world literature. (The other was Les Liaisons Dangereuses.) The encomia weren’t restricted to France—or, for that matter, to Europe. In an 1874 article for The Nation, Henry James found Charterhouse to be “among the dozen finest novels we possess.”

At first glance, the bare bones of Stendhal’s story suggest not so much a literary masterpiece as a historical soap opera. The novel recounts the headstrong young Italian aristocrat Fabrice del Dongo’s attempt to make a coherent life for himself, first as a soldier in Napoleon’s army and then, more cynically, as a prelate in the Roman Catholic Church; the attempts of his beautiful aunt Gina, Duchess of Sanseverina, and her lover, the wily (and married) prime minister, Count Mosca, to help establish Fabrice at court, even as Gina tries to fend off the advances of the repellent (and repellently named) Prince Ranuce-Erneste IV; Fabrice’s imprisonment in the dreaded Farnese Tower for the murder of a girlfriend’s protector, and his subsequent escape with the help of a very long rope; and his star-crossed but ultimately redemptive love affair with his jailer’s beautiful (and, it must be said, rather dull) daughter, Clelia.

So what, exactly, makes all this so indispensible to Giraudoux’s soldier? Why, in the words of one contemporary Stendhal scholar, does Charterhouse exhale “some incomparable air of which every human being needs absolutely to have taken at least one breath before they die”?

As it happens, we’re now almost exactly as

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