20
PARTISAN REVIEW
Octave's own mother remarks. And his uncle exclaims, "I conclude
that if you aren't the Messiah awaited by the Hebrews, you are
Lucifer in person, returning to this world expressly to addle my
brains." It is harder perhaps to detect it in Fabrizio, although he
is if anything the
victim-of
his family, of the Milanese police,
of Parma, and, most of all, of his own indefinite sensibility. He is,
in any case, alloted an early death. Lucien Leuwen too is martyr·
ized largely through his own incapacity to feel strongly enough to
make a choice in any situation. But in
The Red and the Black
the
note is sounded in the first description of Julien's treatment at the
hands of his brothers: "The jealousy of these rough laborers had
been so quickened by the sight of their brother's handsome black
coat, and air of extreme gentility, as well as by the sincere con–
tempt which he felt for them, that they had proceeded to thrash
him, leaving him there unconscious and bleeding freely. Madame
de Renal . . . saw Julien lying on the ground and thought him
dead." There can be no doubt that what we witness here is the
"superior being" at the mercy of the gross and uncomprehending
social group-Joseph and the brethren. And what is the whole
narrative up to the last explosion into febrile and pointless action,
as has already been suggested, but the
pathos
of ritual and tragedy
-the representation of the suffering that the hero brings upon
himself through the excessive assertion of his will? As a modern,
it is true, Julien's suffering comes before rather than after the
action; it is the malady of the split will itself that constitutes the
real suffering; and overt action is no more than a temporary and
unsuccessful anodyne. Pathos on the physical plane is mutilation
or dismemberment; and lest we think that Stendhal has limited
himself only to moral and psychological dismemberment we need
only recall the last scene of all, in which Mathilde places Julien's
head upon a marble table and kisses it. "A great number of priests
escorted the coffin and, unknown to all, alone in her draped car–
riage, she carried upon her- knees the head of the man whom she
had so dearly loved." Like Oedipus and Hippolytus, he will have
a grotto erected in his honor and presumably become a local cult
among the people.
How much of all this is deliberate in Stendhal and how much
the unconscious symbolization of his own old and deep-seated sense
