I happened to be chatting with Sarah V just after I'd gotten to the midway point of this novel (the end of part 1) and at the time I said that it had, thus far, confounded and delighted me; her response was that I hadn't seen anything yet...I mention this because, taken as a whole, that little conversational snippet pretty neatly sums up my response to Scarlet and Black. I enjoyed it greatly and was pulled along by it despite my unfamiliarity with the milieu it depicts - early-mid 19th century France, moving from the provinces to the glittering drawing rooms of Paris and back, the nation still gasping after the changes brought by Napoleon and rent by the increasingly gaping chasm between the Liberals and the Ultra-Royalists, the Church (and its internescine disputes) a shadowy but overt influence over everything. Tone is lucid and witty in the novel's observation of manners and mores and the depictions are severely cutting in many respects; characters are revealed to us and follow their own developmental arcs concurrently and Julien, Madame de Rênal and Mathilde are all psychologically complex and believable figures...Stendhal tells us much and (I think) shows us more, but still we're left wondering about some of their actions, only to find our answer in the intensity of the passions, conflicts and inevitabilities which grip and impel them and the extremities of their characters.
To me, Julien seemed a bit of a Steerpike character, though more sympathetically rendered - almost a pure embodiment of will, endlessly calculating and manipulative, powerfully driven and utterly relentless, forcing his way by main cunning upwards from the lower echelons of a society bound by suffocating tradition, rigid hierarchy and decaying splendour. The difference, needless to say, is the role played by love and affection in Scarlet and Black; in the end, it's that as much as, and in conjunction with, the class divide which bring him undone - and then, too, that which has a (precisely?) commensurate role in Julien's coming into himself as, I think, a self-realised, admirable and tragic figure at the end. (Shades of The Outsider in the ending, too.)
Also - does every single work of French literature feature direct addresses to the reader by the author? Its recurrence here made me wonder if there was something about the language that made its writers more - or earlier - inclined to efface that assumed boundary -- but that's a thought to be pursued another day, I think.
