Anastasia Platoff

Literary Diaries and Journals

Brooke Allen

Stendhal and the Representation of Self

What kind of man am I? Do I have common sense, do I have common sense and profundity too?
Am I remarkably witty? Truth to tell, I haven't the slightest idea.
Stendhal, 1892, p. 7

Memoirs of an Egotist is Stendhals literary representation of the self, across time and

context. His narrative emanates from the faculties of retrospection and imaginationrepositories

of meaning and knowledge that are never static, but flow in accordance with the motives,

sensibilities, and perceptions of the self in the present state. Stendhal writes from memory, and

although he is committed to truthful expression, his portrayals of the past are colored by his

visions of posterity and his understandings of the passage of time and the implicit present. These

subjective forces do not necessarily obstruct the truthfulness of his memoryrather, they

suggest that truth is neither stagnant nor impartial. Furthermore, in this work, Stendhal

demonstrates that the personal past, in memory and in writing, always contains traces of the

present self.

Stendhal is self-consciously direct, intentionally automatic, and passionately

dispassionate in his memoirs. While his contradictions, pleasures, faults, and fixations are boldly

displayed, and humiliating and egocentric moments are recounted openly, he eschews overt self-

definition. Stendhal frequently rejects his perceived social reputations and deliberately omits

periods of personal happiness between 1821 and 1830, thereby creating a persona that is

fragmented and based largely on who Stendhal believes he is not. In an effort to interpret these

elusive self representations, one must first consider Stendhals primary incentive for writing his

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memoirs: his imagined audience.

I confess that I wouldn't have any motive for writing if I didn't imagine that one day these days
will be printed, and read by sometime I love, a person such as Mme Roland or M. Gros, the
geometrician. But the eyes that will read this are barely opening to the light of day, I estimate that
my future readers are ten or twelve years old (7).

In this introductory passage, Stendhal plainly states that his emergent autobiographical

narrative is framed by mental projections of his ideal future audience. These internal models of

reference comprise certain revered individuals, as well as the children who, in Stendhals mind,

embody an upcoming enlightened generation. Through the lens of personal experience, Stendhal

is attempting to communicate his life story with an integrity that will transcend the egotism that

is inherent in writings on the self. He suggests, [In] writing this like a letter, thirty pages a

sitting, I can make it seem real without knowing. For, more than anything else, I want to be

truthful. What a miracle it would be in this century of play-acting (44). In this more natural

style of expression, Stendhal believes that he may be able to convey the human heart unbound

from social and historical context. However, by describing an epoch of intense emotion with a

muffled memory, by appointing his own audience to accommodate, and by designating his

writing process as the only truthful approach to self-portraiture, Stendhal constrains his own

striving for naturalness. Accordingly, the representation of self in Memoirs of an Egotist must be

analyzed as a conscious construction, despite its apparently free-flowing manifestation on paper.

Because Stendhals memoir is a retrospective, he is keenly conscious of perceived points

of discrepancy between his past and present selves, as well as between his social and personal

identities. By the same token, he is equally attentive to signs of temporal continuity. For

instance, he writes: It's only as I mull over it all so as to write it down what was happening in

my heart in 1821 starts to become clearer to my eyes. I've always lived, and still do, from day to

day, and without thinking in the slightest of what I'll do tomorrow (17). As an advocate of

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sensibility, Stendhal sees much of his life as governed by chance and passion, but these

serendipitous progressions do not prevent him from maintaining a contemplative orientation

toward the past.

In 1832, he characterizes himself as having been baroque in 1821 (19), a man with

a passionate revulsion for everything vilea mentality that has since become a source of

amusement. Further, he confesses, I was too much inclined to respect people in my youth

(28) and I detected every failing in myself; I would have liked to be someone else (51).

Stendhal portrays his younger self as tormented, naive, self-conscious, and contemptuous of

yet often reliant onthe attitudes and company of his contemporaries. He repeatedly states

that his memories of this period are scarce, and thus we can infer that Stendhals recollections

of the early 1820s are less grounded in facts, events, dates, and places than in his elaborated

remembrance of a feeling that now seems alien to him.

The forty-nine year old Stendhal, reflecting on himself at the age of thirty-eight,

remarks: Its obvious that I was only twenty years old, in 1821 (64). This self-deprecation,

while employed as a method of distancing his present self from his past sentiments, ironically

succeeds in reminding us of one of Stendhals foremost traits of consistency: he is still

perpetually insecure about his image in the eyes of others. While Stendhal may not broadcast this

attribute regularly, evidence of it unfolds in momentary self-appraisals throughout his memoirs.

For example, in the following passage, Stendhal addresses his readers in the hopes of correcting

their distorted impressions of hima predetermined, fearful expectation that is neither

guaranteed nor controllable in his audience.

Theres a certain pleasure in talking about . . . all those great men or at least those very
distinguished people it has been my good fortune to know and who have deigned to talk with me!
If the reader is envious like my contemporaries, he should console himself: few of these great men
I have so liked have managed to read my character. I even think they found me more boring than
another man; perhaps they saw me merely as a sentimental fellow prone to exaggeration. This is

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 the worst kind, after all. Its only since I developed my wit that I have been appreciated and far
more than I deserve (78).

After expressing his satisfaction at having interacted with social and intellectual

superiors, Stendhal appeals to his readers to refrain from the same jealousy that afflicts his peers.

His rationale for this suggestion is that these great men have proven themselves unable to fully

understand him; they, like many others, have mistakenly judged him as a simple man with a

tendency toward hypersensitivity. This statement insinuates that the insight often ascribed to

these luminaries may be a pretense. However, Stendhal concludes that his more recent formation

of wit has precipitated excessive admiration of his character within his social milieu. Thus

Stendhal seems to be straddling contradictory self-representations: a neurotic idealist, plagued by

feelings of humility, disgrace, and weakness, and an obstinate cynic, with perceptions of being a

misunderstood, idiosyncratic visionary. Together, these self-conceptions reinforce Stendhals

enduring struggle to resist the depravity of Parisian social convention even though his self-

assurance hinges on the members of this decadent collective. In other words, he attempts to

receive praise from notable people while preserving his public image of unpalatable singularity.

Indeed, in reference to his social naivet in 1822, he writes: I hadn't understood the full

importance of the answer to this question asked about any man who publishes a book that gets

read: 'What kind of man is he?' I was saved from scorn by this answer: 'He often goes to the

salon of Mme de Tracy' (89).

Among his rare admissions of personal achievement, Stendhals perennial source of pride

lies in his proclamation: I pick up at random what destiny places in my path (88). Despite its

reiteration within his memoirs, there are a number of instances in which this assertion of day-to-

day, coincidental living appears to be more of an ideal than a reality. Firstly, Stendhal asks his

readers to forgive him for the dreadful digressions that are imperative when one is writing to

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achieve truthfulness (29). Stendhal apologizes for previous digressions and makes preliminary

justifications for their future occurrence, further stating that his writing approach has a purpose

(that is, the achievement of truthfulness). Working in tandem, these elements indicate that

Stendhals involuntarily fragmented narrative is an orchestration of chance, used to reflect the

fortuity of his past and its oblique survival in memory.

In addition to these self-conscious digressions, Stendhal intermittently makes

unequivocal affirmations of the self, capturing a sense of stability and foresight that runs counter

to his usual rhetoric of endless self-questioning. He writes:

The only things I have passionately loved in my life are: Cimarosa, Mozart and Shakespeare. In
Milan, in 1820, I wanted to put these words on my gravestone. Every day I would think of this
inscription, firmly believing that I would have no piece of mind except in the grave . . . There [in
Milan] I wish to spend my old age, and die (49-50).

There is a tenor of equanimity in this passage that is striking for its unadorned

sincerity. In contrast to this papers opening quotationin which Stendhal muses on the

self with feigned ignorancethis simple remark from Stendhal illustrates that, although

his awareness of an audience precludes an unvarnished rendering of the self on paper,

there are marks of self-possession that are naturally revealed in the course of Stendhals

narrative. Even when Stendhals memories of the past are described with more self-

consciousness than he intends, there is a thread of continuous identity that weaves

through his written experiences. Because of this, the reader may unearth the true facets

of Stendhals identity by looking at the strands of self that carry themselves through his

divergent and contradictory representations.

Works Cited:
Stendhal, Memoirs of an Egotist. London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2003.