Stendhal, The Red and The Black

I have lost count of the many times I’ve picked up this book and read it from beginning to end. Yet every time it seems I find something new--something refreshing--in it. What is the eternal allure of The Red and The Black? By today’s standards the sex scenes are non-existent; imagine the main character spending hours, days, and nights debating whether to hold a woman's hand or not. The action is also non-existent. No cloak and dagger adventures. Yet, the novel sizzles! It must be the psychological aspect of the book. In this pre-Freudian novel, we can see the unconscious forces—libido, impulses, instincts, fixations, drives, obsessions, passions, and manias—at full throttle in the characters. But in particular we get a pretty good understanding of the incomparable and uncompromising Julien Sorel, the spoiled rich brat Mathilde de La Mole, and no less in importance: the naive and sexually inexperienced Mme. De Renal. The fatidic triangle. But I must admit it is a novel of intrigue, an intrigue that doesn’t get resolved until the very end of the novel, with the gruesome death of a main character. Given the time in which the story is set, the seduction scenes are more psychological than realistic. It is the high and the lows, the moodiness, the agreements and disagreements, the firmness and weaknesses of the trio that keeps the reader involved. Ah, something else: the pride. Pride is an essential ingredient and perhaps the most important propelling force in the characters’ psyches. There’s also comic relief, much as in Shakespeare’s tragedies where one laughs at the jesters' jokes rather than cry at the sorrowful plight of the players. If you like the bizarre, you will also find it here. The Red and The Black is a novel that will never go away, that will never get old, and that we will read and re-read over the years. What is the secret of it? It is impossible to tell. Eric Auerbach, a major critic, attempted to get to the bottom of it with his famous analysis entitled, “In the Hotel de la Mole” of his equally famous book: Mimesis—to no avail. And that is just fine with me, so that generations to come will go on enjoying the reading without anyone spoiling it for them. I do, however, have a theory as to the perennial allure of the novel: just as Don Quijote, Tarzan, Jay Gatsby, and Highly Golightly are prototypes, so is Julien Sorel. When an author invents a fictional prototype, the novel achieves immortality. Woe be to the authors whose characters fall a notch below prototypes--oblivion awaits them! The writing techniques I employ in this article are all explained in Mary Duffy's writing manual: www.write rivetingprose.com Augustine, City of God Austen J, Pride and Prejudice Austen J, "Marriage Proposals and Me" Austen J, Emma Borges, The Aleph C. Bronte, Jane Eyre Burroughs E,Tarzan Cervantes, Don Quijote Chaucer, Wife of Bath Coelho P,The Alchemist Coyle H, They Are Soldiers Dante, New Life Dickens C, David Copperfield Dostoevsky, Crime&Punishment ConanDoyle,Hound of Baskervilles Dubner S, Superfreakonomics DuMaurier D, Rebecca Ellis B. E. American Psycho Fitzgerald S, Great Gatsby Flaubert G, Madame Bovary Fleming I,Doctor No Freud S, Leonardo Da Vinci Friedan B, Feminine Mystique GarciaMarquez, Of Love & OtherDemons GarciaMarquez,OneHundredYrs Guerrero M,ThePoison Pill Grass G, The Tin Drum Harris T, Hannibal Rising Heidegger M,House of Being Ishiguro K, Remains of The Day Johnson S,Rasselas Kafka,Metamorphosis Kosinski J, The Painted Bird Lee H,To Kill a Mockingbird McBain Ed,Gutter and Grave Murakami H,Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Nabokov V, Lolita Meyer, S, Twilight Ortega,Dehumanization of Art Poe E A, Gordon Pym Prose F, Reading Like a Writer Rushdie S,Midnight Children Sabatini R, Scaramouche Spark M, Prime of Miss Brodie Stendhal, Red and Black Sterne L,Tristram Shandy Stevenson R, Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde Stoker B, Dracula Thackeray W,History of Pendennis Tolstoy L, Anna Karenina Trollope A, Autobiography Unamuno M, Tragic Sense of Life Voltaire, Candide Webb J, Fields of Fire Wharton E, The House of Mirth Woolf V, To The Lighhouse The secrets of 'no-doze' prose: Mary Duffy's Sentence Openers Image via Wikipedia Lindsey Vonn Back to main page

The Red and The Black&blog=bs"!>

---