UCLA

Stendhal's conception of le naturel has long been defined in opposition to the theater: for the narrators and the authentic heroes and heroines of his fiction, there is nothing so vile as the histrionic personality who does not live life so much as perform it. But while most critics have interpreted the theatricality of Stendhal's fictional characters and that of his own authorial performance as an accidental lapse into the sort of hypocrisy he spends his oeuvre simultaneously denouncing, this dissertation argues that his naturalism was not an inadvertent "comédie de sincérité," as Valéry suggested, but rather a carefully constructed "Theater of Authenticity." This theater comprises three performances of authenticity: the social, the private, and the written. To each performance corresponds one part of the Stendhalian self, which simultaneously inhabits three roles: actor, spectator, and narrator. Before these performances were staged in his novels and short stories, they were both rehearsed and intellectually scrutinized in Stendhal's para-fictional writings--his "nonfiction," autobiographies, and private journals. I contend that these genres should be read as an atelier du roman--the literary space in which Stendhal worked out the règles du Je of the authentic self, and how these rules are most authentically transformed into literature. Unearthing this process of intellectualization dispels many Shibboleths of Stendhal's naturalism as well as of the concept of authenticity itself--namely, that both are predicated on the suspension of rational, analytical faculties in order to liberate the raw passion required to fuel spontaneity and improvisation. While authenticity has been understood to be a problem of modern subjectivity, I argue that it is first and foremost a crisis of literacy: a problem of self-consciousness in the relationship between subject and language, which may be traced back to the invention of the phonetic alphabet in Ancient Greece. This self-consciousness is a narcissism of the word rather than of the image, and the source of Stendhal's anxiety of authenticity is his fear of indulging in what he famously called "cette effroyable quantité de Je et de Moi." As such, Stendhal's para-fiction should also be read as an atelier du romancier, for they provide a narrative to the author's overcoming of this anxiety: after decoding the rules of authenticity, Beyle himself had to perform them in order to become Stendhal, the novelist.