Mar

25

Philip Roth & Stendhal’s Nut

Filed Under Feuilletons |

So I was walking on the 95th Street toward Broadway yesterday, taking my daughter home from school, and guess who I see, kind of staggering down the street Philip Roth. Uh-huh. For some reason, he looked really disoriented & wind-blown. I really wanted to say hello, but he didn’t look like he was doing so good, so just passed him. For a few blocks, I kicked myself for not having said ‘hi.’ And in the meantime, my mind had somehow started referring to him as Zuckerman, and it was really then that it occurred to me: perhaps no one had quite pulled off the fiction/reality entrechat like Philip Roth had over the past few decades. Pretty remarkable.

henry-brulard-map.jpgI was reading Stendhal’s delightful and brilliantly quirky autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard, and I think he may have had a similar experience of encountering a person who seems like fiction embodied: he met, in one of those Parisian parties which he claims to have despised (yeah, right), an old woman named Mme de Montmaur, a character upon which Mme de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons is based -

I had met with society, and then only at long range, only at Mme de Montmaur’s, the original of Mme de Merteuil in “Les Liaisons dangereuses.” She was by then old, rich and lame. Of that I am sure; as for morality, she objected to them giving me only half a crystallized nut when I went to see her in Le Chevallon, she always made them give me a whole one. “Children take it to heart so,” she used to say.

That was all the morality I had met with… This detail about Mme de Montmaur, the original of Mme de Merteuil, is out of place here perhaps, but I wanted to use the anecdote of the crystallized nut to show what I knew of society.

What a fantastic passage! It’s weird, it’s funny, and most of all - it’s cryptic. What the fuck is Stendhal talking about with this crystallized nut anecdote What kind of “morality” is he talking about here, through this metaphor Pardon the pun, but seriously, this is a hard nut to crack. On the surface level, it does seem like Stendhal’s taking a pretty straightforward shot at the flippant morality of the society, but one has to take into account that he does so by using the crystallized nut as a metaphor. He strangely but pointedly mentions this incident as the “crystallized nut anecdote” at the end of the passage, as if by reiterating the phrase “crystallized nut,” he is pointing toward a hidden code. There’s a definite nudge there, but one has a tough time deciphering to what Stendhal is nudging us toward. He frustrates the easy, straightforward interpretation of the morality of the society.

Some of you may recall that Stendhal’s notion of “crystallization” expounded upon in Love is pivotal to his aesthetic theory. In Chapter 2 of Love, Stendhal describes a couple of lovers throwing a twig into the salt mines of Salzburg -

Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable… What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.

Simply put: it’s seeing your loved one everywhere, in everything. Then through the process, an ordinary person (a twig) becomes perfected in the lover’s eyes (as crystals). But Stendhal extends this metaphor into his theories on art & on literature… the process of making & perfecting art, too, the evocative power of the artist, is a crystallization process, according to Stendhal.

W. G. Sebald was preoccupied with Stendhal’s episode of the salt mine crystallization in Vertigo; apparently, he kept up his strange obsession with it: the crystallization/crystal metaphor becomes crucial in Austerlitz, and elsewhere (see Sebald’s description of Sir Thomas Browne’s crystalline quincunx in The Rings of Saturn; it relates to both Stendhal’s and his own “crystal” project.)

Back to Stendhal standing in front of Mme de Montmaur. He must have felt that he really was standing in front of Mme de Monteuil, as in a few paragraphs before, he admits that he used to believe in those days that he really was at once “a Saint-Preux and a Valmont.” He watches this fiction incarnate commanding people to give him a whole crystallized nut instead of a mere half, and concludes: “That was all the morality I had met with.”

As of now, I can’t unwrap this mystery. How much of his statement is ironic, how much is sincere Is he saying anything about art and its relation to morality, too, especially in consideration of his theory on “crystallization” Almost impossible to gauge. Maybe this joke isn’t meant to have a punchline. And let’s not forget that I may be reading way the fuck too much into this thing, as usual. But to me, this is Stendhal at one of his most inscrutable, delightful turns. I can’t stop thinking about this moment, want to see through to his heart.

P.S. - There are many film incarnations of Les Liaisons dangereuses, but you may not have seen the Korean adaptation of it, called 스캔들 (Untold Scandal), set in the Chosun Dynasty. Perhaps it’s my favorite film version of the Laclos’ tale, and Jeon Do-yeon, who won this year’s best actress at Cannes for her devastating performance in 밀양 (Secret Sunshine), is great in this movie, as are the rest of the cast.

(Image: one of many incomprehensible hand-drawn maps/diagrams from Stendhal’s The Life of Henry Brulard; for a vaguely and tangentially related post, go to Terry’s entry on Sebald’s useless map, which is actually more of a critique on the limitations of cultural-studies approach to reading Sebald…)


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