On the savage follies of youth in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma
When you look at it from the outset, The Charterhouse of Parma is a messy, messy book, messier than your average five year old birthday party who invited all his multicultural friends and their parents. There is not really any discernible narrative structure; the pacing of the novel is jarring to say the least, where a character can have entire pages of soliloquys but important events will often pass as rapidly as a bishop covering the entire diagonal of the chessboard.
It is one of those books with a medium to fat thickness that you might venture to finish in about a week (barring distractions), but for whatever reason you’d take double that time, trudging through the muddiness of Stendhal’s prose, with its too chummy narrator who might as well be drunk when telling his story. Although he recounts the story in third person, it is a voice which you won’t mind listening to but which oftentimes can drag on a little, as you feign interest in his stories before you fall asleep midway. At times, the twist and turns of the plot will leave your stomach churned and you might spew out whatever it was you just had for brekky. Thus, it is a very much imperfect book full of glaring weaknesses, like uneven grooves on a golf ball.
And yet, it is a book that will leave you glad that you have read it. It is a book which you might take with you on your travels and the one you might keep for months afterwards. For all its shortcomings, it is a book that stands on its own and it is a masterful piece of work which arguably remains underrated two hundred years after its publication. The Charterhouse of Parma is as whimsical as its capricious protagonist in Fabrizio del Dongo. Though we at times absolutely loathe his decisions, we can’t help but being drawn into him.
Fabrizio follows his Italian passions, things fall apart.
Our young hero is born in the Emilia Romagna, famous even at that time for its prosciutto and cheese, which has remained even to this day, a small city in the Italian peninsula. In his younger days, up to his teenage years, his influences were mainly feminine with his mother and young aunt giving him as much freedom as humanly possible, though he remained distant with his father and elder brother who for reasons undescribed in the novel, hates his guts.
His first great impulse was borne from the sense of patriotic duty to Napoleon, vying for the position of Emperor of the human world at the time, and who was on the verge of capturing that title in Waterloo in 1815. We all know how that went (not bloody well, I tell you), but Fabrizio managed to drown himself in adventure after getting robbed, being arrested as a spy, fighting beside General Nye and miraculously surviving the war. He came back only to be put under warrant from his brother, which forced him to escape into a monastery while patiently waiting for the tides to cool down.
His aunt, who would soon to be his strongest sponsors were already scheming for Fabrizio’s ascent in the social circles of Parma, as he was destined to be an archbishop one day. This is not before he met with an unfortunate incident where he killed a man in self defense, who out of jealousy wanted to murder Fabrizio. Thus our hero fled once again, whilst his aunt and her simp, the ageing but charming Conte Mosca battled out the politics of the Parmesan aristocracy so that Fabrizio would be able to receive a fair trial one day and restore his reputation.
But Fabrizio was only a pawn in the game, as his downfall would secure the promotion of Marchesa Raversi who had been plotting the downfall of Conte Mosca and the Duchessa for some time. The duchessa, sleek in her manouevring of the Prince’s passion, managed to earn Fabrizio safe passage to Parma. Sadly, this was a mere bluff and Fabrizio was arrested again heading back to Parma.
His imprisonment was not at all doom and gloom (for him at least) as he fell in love with the daughter of his warden, Clelia. This love was reciprocated gradually, to the point that Clelia thwarted assassination attempts planned on Fabrizio. But outside, the tectonic plates are shifting and the Duchessa is planning Fabrizio’s escape attempt lest the next assassination attempt would result in a different outcome than the first.
The fickle nature of human politics
Say what you’d like about the book, but you won’t read another novel like it save perhaps, Stendhal’s other masterpiece The Red and the Black which I cannot claim to have read at this time myself. It is different then as it was at the time of the publication, published during a volatile time in European history. The defeat of the battle of Waterloo is still fresh in the French minds, and the 1830 revolution was only less than a decade before. France was still a mess teetering between mob rule and decaying monarchs holding on the final vestige of their powers. Europe was in a precarious state, but it was also in a way, a small Renaissance in the continent where some of the great arts were generated regularly in a conveyor belt-like efficiency.
Yet, the novel mentions very little of France and instead, used the more volatile, passionate and unpredictable Italians. Napoleon’s influence on the region is unavoidable, and his brief rule over the Milanese in the 1810s was briefly covered in the novel. But for the rest, the novel is much more contained, largely to the courts of Parma, ruled by Prince Ernesto IV. Most importantly, it determines how the smallest actions and impressions in these courts can sway the fates of those subjected under them.
The Charterhouse of Parma is a deeply political novel, but not in a way that it explores political ideologies. It studies the human politics which has equally greater implications (arguably more than the ideologies themselves). It is a world which Stendhal is familiar with, as he navigated through the muck of this tangled fibre of relationships in the courts of Trieste and Civitavecchia, where he was a consul until the end of his career.
But Italy had already got hold of Stendhal, somewhat disenchanted by his own patria: “To make this course of action clear to my French readers, I must explain that in Italy, a country very far away from us, people are still driven to despair by love”. Having an attachment to Italy and that part of the region myself, I agree with Stendhal and the statement still holds true.
And this temperamental nature of the characters determine each other’s fates, and how one can manoeuvre other character’s temperament can hold sway to their own personal agendas. No passage better portrays this than the duchessa’s threat to the Prince to leave Parma to join Fabrizio, as she learned of her nephew’s condemnation, fully knowing that she held the prince’s heart who, despite having already been married, obsessed over her. It was one of the most badass moments in literature.
There are ideologies playing on a larger field, imposing labels such as “Jacobite” or liberal, though these are only used for personal gains as opposed to an actual opposition to the actual ideology. In the courts of Parma, the prince labelled Fabrizio as a Liberal after the discovery of his killing, only to spite the duchessa who was out of favour at the time. Marchesa Raversi who has vested interest in Fabrizio’s case, after killing a man in self-defense, blew the incident out of proportion in order to block him from the seat of the Archbishop, where he would be the lynchpin of Conte Mosca and the duchessa.
Realism, but not as you know it
Stendhal, ironically, referred to Fabrizio as “our hero” early on in the novel. Though he may be a protagonist or anti-hero, Fabrizio del Dongo is a piss poor prototype of what a hero should be, or at least, what we understand heroes to be. In a novel which follows conventions like how a teenager follows her parent’s instructions, those who had expected to root for Fabrizio might face disappointment. Mind you, the conventions of the novel were not really well established and writers were still experimenting.
True to his Italian nature, Fabrizio is passionate, whimsical and mercurial. He is as much of a hero as the weak as piss Leopold Bloom is in Ulysses. It is difficult to like the decisions that he makes sometimes in the service of his passions. For example, refusing to leave his imprisonment despite all the preparation from his benefactors, so that he can continue to see Clelia and be nearby her presence. Even during his estrangement from Parma, where he has a real chance of being arrested, he followed the succubus Fausta to you guessed it, Parma, and not informing his beneficiaries in Conte Mosca and the duchessa that he was out and about like a pig in an abbattoir. Fabrizio is equal parts selfish and dumb, which is frustrating.
But isn’t this realism reflective of what we know human nature to be? The modern readers of the novel are perhaps too used to seeing the heroes winning the day, instead of making fallible decisions. I’d venture to say that there are no lessons to be learned from Fabrizio, and in a nihilistic manner, we can say the same about the novel. The essence of the novel is opaque, difficult to pierce and would laugh at you as Fabrizio would if he had known of the reader’s existence (that’s us). So call me lazy, but I’m not going to dig deep for life lessons in The Charterhouse of Parma.
Yet, the whimsical nature of Fabrizio follows a palpable realism familiar to us. The follies of Fabrizio’s youth is our follies when we were teenagers, and young and dumb, like moving to Cambodia for a girl you’d barely knew after a few broken conversations with her over the internet. It is the same folly that one may regret, but makes the substance of our lives — what gives it that creamy, unhealthy, but delicious filling. In this way, we can forgive Fabrizio for his missteps, and likewise the other characters in the book.
In terms of its meandering plot, the events of the book do not follow any discernible structures, acts or flows; just another way Stendhal beat our understanding of the conventions of the novel. Yet, the smallest events in the novel can have the largest impacts to the flow of the story. If Fabrizio was not carrying a weapon to hunt for birds and had met Giletti in Casalmaggiore, they would not have had the duel which led to the Giletti’s death — an incident in which the three main characters try to address in order to restore the equilibrium. For many novels during the period, The Charterhouse of Parma is often known to be one of the first realist novels, and though some would disagree, I feel that this Stendhalist realism that is perhaps a little exaggerated, a little bit messy, is still refreshing.
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Most readers might take longer than the time Stendhal took to write the novel in its entirety. If you finished the novel within 52 days then well done. And the novel is not a novel that you can breeze through that easily. In fact, it is an exhausting novel to read. Yet it is an enjoyable novel, exhilirating at times: the scenes of Waterloo, which is briefer but comparable to Hugo’s in Les Miserables, the escape from Farnese Tower, the duchessa wringing the neck of the prince with her mere cunning.
It is a novel as perplexing as its title. The “Charterhouse of Parma” only appears in the final page of the novel, as a refuge for Fabrizio before his passing. And even after having finished the novel, reading up on it, watching videos on it, I still don’t have a fucking clue what a charterhouse is. The original French in “chartreuse” is a Carthusian monastery, to become bastardised as “charterhouse” when a Carthusian monastery was converted into The Charterhouse of London. I suppose this follows the etymological roots, but it still doesn’t make fucking sense.
Regardless of where that “charterhouse” comes from, in my interpretation, the charterhouse is where Fabrizio’s memories of his life comes together, where he was able to reflect on the past, thus providing the foundation of his reflections for which the book would not exist. By this logic, the invisible author of the book is not Stendhal but Fabrizio himself, writing in third person to make sense of his life, knowing that it is rapidly fading. And perhaps, Fabrizio also completed this feat in 52 days.
Most readers who had attempted or completed the novel would have strong opinions of the book. In fact, with a humble rating of 3.79 in Goodreads, many people seemed to have disliked it. But many classics are divisive and it is not a bad thing. I loved the novel for its uncompromising fuck you to the novel as a medium, for its deeply imperfect but mesmerizing lead in Fabrizio del Dongo who was plagued by his follies, and for Stendhal’s difficult but mesmerising prose, difficult to find and difficult to imitate.
