STENDHAL: THE OEDIPAL PALIMPSEST

I often feel it to be so; who can see himself? It's less than three years since I discovered the reason why.

STENDHAL, The Life of Henry Brulard

The Name of the Mother in The Life of Henry Brulard

Stendhal's oedipal struggle might be seen as the novelist's most typical representation of the double postulation of authority and subversion. For Stendhal, to use a pseudonym was to engage in an act of protest. In The Living Eye, Jean Starobinski showed that the young Henri Beyle concocted the most extraordinary reasons for denying any connection with the Beyle family:

A common illusion is to believe that our destinies and truths are inscribed in our names. To some extent Stendhal succumbed to this illusion. If he refused the name Beyle, it was because it signified a predestined fate of which he wanted no part. His name bound him to France, to Grenoble, to the bourgeois class, and to his father's world of hoarding and sordid calculation. By choosing a new name he gave himself not only a new face, a new rank in society with the noble particule de, new nationalities. Only in Italy, moreover, was happiness free to flourish, and in his young imagination young Henri Beyle established a whole genealogy for himself on his mother's side.

If the name is truly an identity, then repudiation of the patronymic is a substitute for parricide. It is the most discreet form of murder in effigy. To kill the father means also to supplant him; the filial challenge occurs with the paternal relationship and is sustained only by upholding the authority that its values come to threaten. The rejection of the name transmitted by his father is also a strategy aimed at retrieving the memory of his dead mother. Stendhal's love for his mother offers countless scenarios of the great oedipal passion tearing apart and yet resuscitating the maternal figure. Henri still contains the mother's name Henriette and systematically displaces the name of the father to the name of the mother: "for I considered myself a Gagnon and I never thought of the Beyles except with a distaste which I still feel in 1835" (car je me regardais comme Gagnon et je ne pensais jamais aux Beyle qu'avec une répugnance qui dure encore en 1835). The strong identification with the mother subverts the patronymic while bringing Stendhal's forbidden passion back through the names of his heroines. Stendhal's oedipal confession looms high in Vie de Henry Brulard (1836) and constitutes the horizon against which I want to examine the pattern Stendhal follows to retrieve the figure of the mother. Armance (1827), Le Rouge et le noir (1830), and Les Cenci (1837) describe the return to the maternal and its tragic ending. But at the start of the oedipal complex, the death of the mother is immediately recalled in Stendhal's memoirs. In Armance, Le Rouge et le noir, and Les Cenci, Stendhal performs his restorative work by giving tragic variants of his oedipal complex. I will examine how, in each of these three texts, Stendhal's maternal fictions originate from his oedipal confession in Vie de Henry Brulard and the ontological questioning it inspired.

Writing one's autobiography is, according to Stendhal, not only difficult but unavoidably incomplete, since one cannot say: "I was born/I died." Brulard's questions—"What sort of man have I been? Have I been a wit? Have I had any sort of talent?" (Qu'ai-je donc été? Ai-je été un homme d'esprit? Ai-je eu du talent pour quelque chose?) (Henry Brulard, 2-3/7)—are necessarily unanswerable. Failing a reply, he can only try to destroy the spell, to elude "the dazzling" character of such questions: "This is the only way I can hope to reach the truth about a subject which I cannot discuss with anyone" (C'est ma seule ressource pour arriver au vrai dans un sujet sur lequel je ne puis converser avec personne) (Henry Brulard, 12/19). Stendhal's story of his life becomes, of course, enmeshed with immortality and the pleasure of writing:

So my confessions will have ceased to exist thirty years after being printed if the I's and me's prove too boring for their readers; nevertheless I shall have the pleasure of writing them and of searching my conscience thoroughly.

Mes confessions n'existeront done plus trente ans après avoir été imprimées, si les Je et les Moi assomment trop les lecteurs; et toutefois j'aurais eu le plaisir de les écrire, et de faire à fond mon examen de conscience. (Henry Brulard, 5/10)

One wonders why Brulard, an unsuccessful lover, "an utter ignoramus," as Mr. Daru used to call Stendhal, is restlessly in quest of himself. The structure of Stendhal's desire for literary immortality, which Louis Marin describes as "auto(biothanato)graphy" from the Greek bios (life) and thanatos (death), also describes the fascination experienced by Stendhal in saying: "I was told that I died at ... in...." The Stendhalian "I died" is the "original 'gaze' of autobiothanatography when the subject appropriates and identifies himself from the unspeakable double border of his birth and death." But what exactly happened in this merging of birth and death? In which unnameable passion is Stendhal locked?

The lack of differentiation between life and death recalls the death of Stendhal's mother, Henriette Gagnon, in childbirth: "Please be kind enough to remember that I lost her in childbed when I was barely seven" (Qu'on daigne se rappeler que je la perdis par une couche quand à peine j'avais sept ans) (Henry Brulard, 22/29). The loss of the mother is irrevocably linked to Stendhal's oedipal desire. Stendhal's memoirs would then simply express the passion of a man who seeks in writing the power which might shelter him from the anguish he felt at his mother's death. The creation of Henry Brulard then becomes the strongest expression of his dread, for it is precisely the avowal of Brulard's oedipal desire which puts his memoirs at risk: "But I have too long deferred telling something which must be told, one of the two or three things perhaps which will make me throw these memoirs in the fire. My mother, Mme Henriette Gagnon, was a charming woman and I was in love with my mother" (Mais je diffère depuis longtemps un récit nécessaire, un des deux ou trois peut-être qui me feront jeter ces mémoires au feu. Ma mère, madame Henriette Gagnon, était une femme charmante et j'étais amoureux de ma mère) (Henry Brulard, 21/28). Brulard (from brûler, to burn) indicates that something within the name is "burning" (brûlant), that something unspeakable risks destroying the speaker's proper identity. By distancing himself from Brulard, Stendhal can thus undertake the task of analyzing his oedipal complex based on his recollections: "I wanted to cover my mother with kisses, and without...