Shock of Recognition: Auerbach on the Politics of Boredom

One measure of the power of an artist is the response he induces in others--the "shock of recognition," as Thoreau Melville (and Edmund Wilson) said. Stendhal--vain, chubby, self-absorbed, probably a stalker, who said he wouldn't be appreciated for 100 years--has an almost unmatched knack for provoking this kind of response, beginning with his peer Balzac, who saluted him Balzac was already famous and Stendhal was still an unkown: "never before have the hearts of princes, ministers, courtiers, and women been depicted like this," said Balzac, of Charterhouse of Parma.

In Mimesis, on of the monuments of 20th Century literary criticism, Eric Auerbach offers an appreciation of Stendhal's other great novel, Le Rouge et le Noir. In particular, Auerbach shows how precisely Stendhal captures a specific moment in time--Paris, on the eve of the 1830 Revolution:

Even the boredom which reigns in the dining room and salon of [the Hôtel de la Mole] is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable. Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. In the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, the corresponding salons were anything but boring. But the inadequately implemented attempt which the Bourbon regime made to restore conditions long since made obsolete by events, creates, among its adherents in the official and ruling classes, an atmosphere off pure convention, of limitation, of constraint and lack of freedom, against which the intelligence and good will of the persons involved are powerless. In these salons the things which interest everyone--the political and religious problems of the present, and consequently most of the subjects of its literature or that of the very recent past--could not be discussed, or at best could be discussed only in official phrases s mendacious that a man of taste and tact would rather avoid them. ... [L]ife is governed by the fear that the catastrophe of 1793 might be repeated. As these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe in the thing they represent, and that they are bound to be defeated in any public argument, they choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip. In addition, they are obliged to accept as allies snobbish and corrupt people from among the newly-rich bourgeoisie, who, with the unashamed baseness of their ambition and with their fear for their ill-gotten wealth, completely vitiate the atmosphere of society.

So much for the prevailing boredom.

--Eric Auerbach, Mimesis 455-6 (Princeton Paperback 1968)