Stendhal’s Muddy Realism

Abstract

This essay examines the role of mud in the work of Stendhal. It argues that what is often a stable marker of reality in his writing, as in Realist writing more generally, can also operate as a destabilizing element by pointing to the limits of metaphor and understanding. The essay begins by examining two famous passages from Stendhal’s major fictions. It argues that in the first, from Le Rouge et le Noir, the meaning of the mud metaphor is both pivotal and unclear, while in the second, from La Chartreuse de Parme, physical mud is presented as illegible to the protagonist. The novel Lucien Leuwen is then studied with a view to showing that mud becomes associated in that novel with traumatic blows to the protagonist’s sense of self, with a malfunctioning of metaphor and with an unstable social reality. Realist mud is drawn into association with the Lacanian Real.

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