All this, of course, has a bearing on the story, and I do not know whether a present-day novelist, deprived of the right of auctorial intervention, could succeed in telling such a complicated story at all.
With Stendhal, the spokesman’s role is divided. In The Red and the Black, Stendhal speaks sometimes through Julien, sometimes on behalf of him, and sometimes about him. Julien, who has acute self-knowledge, is a far more intense and demanding center of interest for his creator than Victor Hugo’s and Balzac’s heroes were for them. Yet this stops short of complete identification. Stendhal and Julien are two separate people, which would not be the case today. Occasionally he leaves Julien and the other characters entirely behind, as in the long parenthesis containing the famous statement “A novel is a mirror on the highway.” This abrupt interruption of his own narrative is addressed to an imaginary reader: “Eh, monsieur, un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route.” But there are other interjections, less programmatic and that do not have parentheses around them, though in reality they are “asides,” as in a theatre. While noting the chronic dissatisfaction of Mathilde de la Mole, who “has everything,” he remarks that in the convent she had been given the idea that because of her advantages of birth and wealth she should be happier than the others; then he suddenly reflects: “Here is the source of the boredom and follies of princes—an idea that has been planted in them.” The aside could belong to La Rochefoucauld or even Montaigne. Sometimes the aside may be almost imperceptible as author’s commentary and yet have a whole ethos compressed in it. Of the old curé of the town of Verrières: “despite his age...his eyes sparkled with the sacred fire that betrays the pleasure anticipated in doing a beautiful and slightly dangerous action.” The play between asides and narrative, the contrast in texture among Julien’s own thoughts—often identical, one would guess, with Stendhal’s own (“En vérité, l’homme a deux êtres en lui, pensa-t-il”) and often naively divergent from what a grown man would think—give the novel a shot-silk or quicksilver quality, an elusiveness of final commitment that is typical of Julien himself despite his iron resolves. The poles of heart and head—the first being Mme de Rênal, the second Mathilde—exercise an alternating attraction-repulsion on Julien, and of course they are in Julien, who switches from heart to head in the course of a single hour. He prefers Mme de Rênal, just as he prefers the impulses of his heart when he is lucky enough to feel them to the calculations of his head, but it is the black—the head, if the heart is the red—that governs. One cannot help reading it as an irony that this youth wholly directed by his will should die on the scaffold for a temporary aberration that led him, when beside himself, to commit a crime passionnel.