Stendhal's forebears (1)

By Tracy

I started an earlier series of blog posts called "Stendhal's heirs", looking at later texts that seem modelled on his The Red and the Black in connection with fictional crimes committed by characters who are social climbers or parvenus. This one instead considers a predecessor, Marivaux's Le Paysan parvenu (literally the peasant-parvenu or parvenu-peasant; the peasant made good, upstart peasant... though it's been published in English under completely different titles such as Up from the Country and The Fortunate Peasant).

Marivaux was a prolific playwright, but he also wrote novels. This one is unfinished but still substantial enough to have been influential -- and a good, rollicking read. The protagonist, "Jacob" (it's told in the first person & this is the name the narrator is willing to use!) is a handsome young peasant from a wine-growing village who's sent to Paris with deliveries and falls under the aegis of various older and better-off ladies.

It's not a novel in the sense that Stendhal's later masterpiece is, but it's one of those prototypical narratives (begun 1735) that must have influenced him: many of the basic elements are in place, and the "triangular desire" René Girard traces in Stendhal's novel is repeatedly made explicit in Marivaux's tale. Curiously, rather than committing a crime, Marivaux's Jacob is arrested for a crime he did not commit, so that we have prison and judicial scenes even though he's not strictly speaking a "criminal parvenu". (I won't tell the outcome; even an unfinished story can suffer from a spoiler...)

Part of my continuing research on these narratives is to ask why so many of these narratives of upward mobility have their "heroes" commit a crime. In earlier instances it tends to lead to courtrooms and prisons; in contemporary ones they may get off scot-free... on one level.

Is the criminal turn sometimes the result of a conservative ideological bent in the text? (They will be punished for their class-transgression, which makes them intrinsically criminal anyway; their true nature will be revealed as base; they will fall because they tried to rise?)

Or is it in fact something subtler and potentially progressive, critical of social inequality? (The very rigidity of the social and economic structures requires its transgression; the parvenu is criminal because a superior being, outside laws and mores?)

Or is it both? I'll keep you posted on what I uncover.

I've got my eye on another couple of early texts, but later than Marivaux's, which may be even more rollicking reads: Restif de la Bretonne's Le Paysan perverti (1775) and La Paysanne pervertie (1784) -- companion his-and-hers stories that are more directly about the moral corruption of peasants-who-go-to-Paris. The titles probably speak for themselves without translation. (Apparently the word "rétifisme", meaning shoe fetishism, comes from his name -- also spelled Rétif)...

Stendhal's heirs (1)

By Tracy

Stendhal's literary influence on subsequent writers is huge, so theoretically this topic could go on forever.

What interests me at the moment is the way so many narratives have picked up on the motifs of The Red and the Black and re-worked them into such different and often compelling stories, or films.

Julien is the paradigmatic upstart whose destiny is crime. I haven't read John Braine's novel Room at the Top, but I have seen the film -- first many years ago in Britain, and then again recently (VHS from Planet, almost the only place you'd find it in Perth!).

Room at the Top follows Joe Lampton as he attempts to make his way up in society. Joe has little in common with Stendhal's Julien except perhaps his youth, his humble origins, his ambition -- and the fact that he loves an older woman but pursues a young woman who's the daughter of a rich and socially important man.

What goes wrong as a result of this conflict is not quite in the vein of Julien's criminal trajectory, and the endings differ accordingly (I don't like spoilers, so that's as much as I'll say!).

But the story shows a clear inheritance from Stendhal's plot, transposed to 20th-century Britain and a different set of class circumstances, with many of the same mistakes and emotions.

It's a finely watchable movie with a poignant performance from Simone Signoret as the older woman and an appropriate cold, callous manner from Laurence Harvey as Joe Lampton.

Apparently a t.v. series based on the character of Joe Lampton, Man at the Top, also written by John Braine but set after the movie narrative's end, was screened in Britain some decades ago (thanks to G. for this info).

Pondering the parvenu

By Tracy

So I finished Piers Paul Read's The Upstart, and while it was mostly compelling, the wrap-up was ridiculous, perhaps deliberate bathos.

I won't go into it here, in order to avoid spoilers. But the story was "resolved" in a way that only a religious writer who wanted to get his "moral" in could do it.

Now I'm aware that he built in lots of ironies so as not to make it too pat; that the dénouement is more than half tongue-in-cheek. But it's also not, and you can't have it both ways.

In sum, I expected something more outlandish from a mostly outlandish book. The challenge, for the writer, was always going to be in the ending. You could argue that the "happy outcome" is the very anguish, is the punishment, that the protagonist deserves. But that's too easy. The book is unforgettable yet doesn't satisfy.

Saying more would ruin the experience for anyone who hasn't read it yet...

Starting The Upstart

By Tracy

I've never read any Piers Paul Read before, though I've been aware of him since my teens when I bought a cheap copy of Martin Seymour-Smith's Novels and Novelists (a guide I still sometimes dip into, nearly 20 years later, even though by now it's missing many later writers!).

I've begun Read's novel The Upstart (1973) because it fits into a narrative pattern I'm studying -- of the parvenu who is (self- or socially?)-driven to crime or transgression -- but it's unlike anything I've read before, except perhaps obliquely the bizarre, compelling short novel from 1970 by Muriel Spark called The Driver's Seat. (The memory of that one still makes my spine tingle. How surprising books can be. I think, though, that it has very different aims from those of The Upstart. But I haven't finished reading that.)

PP Read is disturbing -- the content is often misogynistic and homophobic, but then that content is placed in the mouth of a very unreliable narrator... and you don't realise he is so until quite well into the book. Like Spark, Read is a Catholic and to some degree this sits with the right-wing odour that pervades Read's book. (Not all Catholics are exactly right-wing, of course. I say that as one brought up Catholic myself, though long since "lapsed".) I don't like his politics but am aiming to read a wide selection of narratives with this kind of theme, so he's on my list.

To put it colloquially, this book messes with your head. Nasty but arresting, startling, and well-written. I will report again when it's finished.