garry’s subposthaven

As it turns out... quite a lot in the 20th century.

THIS MAKES ME ANGRY!

Seen, strangely, on the registration form for Blog World Expo. *shakes head in disgust* Someone actually wrote javascript to prevent me from filling out my form better. REALLY?

Hat tip Stephanie

Consider the romance of Fabrizio del Dongo and Clélia Conti in The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal’s hymn to his beloved Italy, published in 1839, just three years before his death. Fabrizio, a young Lombard aristocrat, is the book’s ambiguously heroic hero. As the story opens, he leaves his family to join Napoleon in the republican cause; he bumbles his way through Waterloo, wandering among the fields, buying horses and having them stolen, and eventually convalescing in an inn, partly from wounds suffered in a fight with fellow soldiers. This is hardly an auspicious beginning for a romantic lead, and it is never quite clear (and not in a particularly interesting way) whether Stendhal is parodying Fabrizio or not—this just one of the many infelicities the novel is so often criticized for, criticism made easier by the knowledge that it was written—dictated—by an infirm Stendhal in less than two months. But Fabrizio does redeem himself, and in a deeply Stendhalian way. Thrown in prison for an alleged murder that was in fact a very brave act of self-defense, he manages to land squarely in his life’s fundamental adventure: he falls in love. As he is being carried off to his cell, Fabrizio catches sight of Clélia Conti, who it turns out is the daughter of General Fabio Conti, the Minister of Police in Parma and therefore the Governor of the prison. Clélia’s face is a familiar one, however; seven years before, when Fabrizio was 16 and Clélia was just 12, the two met on the road from Lake Como to Milan. In a police mix-up, Clélia and her father had been pursued from the lake; since they now needed to go with the police to Milan, but were on foot, Fabrizio’s family offered to take Clélia in their carriage, saving her from an unpleasantly dusty walk. In a moment of confusion, while stepping on the footboard to climb into the carriage, Clélia accidentally fell into Fabrizio’s arms. Fabrizio thought to himself: “What a fellow-prisoner she would make … She would know how to love.” Later, in the carriage, they blushed with every glance.

This history is still fresh in the minds of the two when they meet again at the prison; when Fabrizio sees Clélia, he takes the opportunity to remind her of their common past, but she is stricken, unable to speak. Soon enough we discover that she didn’t need to speak, because her eyes have done all the work for her—Fabrizio is climbing the stairs to his prison in the sky, not yet even in his cell, when he discovers that the look of authentic, impassioned pity from her face has erased all the despair he might have felt at being imprisoned. He now cares only about seeing her again, and soon enough is given the opportunity. In one of the more charming inventions to have come from Stendhal’s spatial imagination (his autobiographical writings are filled with hand-drawn maps of houses and streets), Fabrizio’s cell is located in a tower that is itself placed on top of another tower: the tower-above-the-tower has its base 180 feet in the air. Arriving in his new home, Fabrizio discovers that he can see very clearly all the way to the Alps, almost a hundred miles away. But he can also see Clélia. Just as fantastical as a tower sitting on the roof of a tower (and just as fun), there is also a residence, sitting on the same tower: the General’s palazzo, in which his daughter is visible for a brief period of every day, tending to her birds. The two lovers begin an intricate visual courtship, with carefully rationed looks from Clélia and inventive attempts at communication from Fabrizio. When wooden blinds are installed in the cell to block the prisoner’s view of the Alps (and to destroy his morale), Fabrizio first bores a hole through them, inserting a wire to give Clélia a sign of his presence; then he cuts out an entire hand-sized chunk of the blind and pokes his face through. Later he writes letters on his palm with a piece of charcoal.

Details are laid upon details—the inner lives of the two characters are artfully wrapped around their physical circumstances. Clélia is convinced that Fabrizio is in love with his aunt, the duchess; Fabrizio is ignorant of the various rumors of his impending execution, and cannot understand the resulting fluctuations in Clélia’s mood; they grasp at the meaning of each other’s gestures, filling in the gaps with their own imaginations. Through it all, Stendhal convinces us that this love is of the utmost seriousness for both of its participants. When Fabrizio first removes the section of the blind that he has cut away and shows his face to Clélia, she trembles so much that she spills the water intended for her plants; and Stendhal tells us, matter-of-factly: “This moment was incomparably the finest in Fabrizio’s life.” Fabrizio, until this point in the narrative the master of every heart he encountered, “was all too aware that the eternal happiness of his life would oblige him to reckon with the Governor’s daughter, and that it was within her power to make him the most wretched of men.” It is sentiments like these that Stendhal claimed to find in the hearts of real Italians, and it is sentiments like these that help redeem Fabrizio. As Balzac puts it in a famous 1840 review, Stendhal, in order to uphold Fabrizio as his hero, “was under an obligation … to endow him with a feeling which would make him superior to the men of genius who surround him.” Fabrizio does not need genius: “Feeling, in short, is equivalent to talent.”

The best part is what I thought would be the best part: not having to worry about money. Before Viaweb I'd been living pretty hand to mouth, doing occasional consulting. It felt like treading water, in the sense that while it wasn't hard, I knew in the back of my mind that I'd drown if I stopped. Getting rich felt like reaching the shore.

What a great turn of phrase there -- reaching the shore. It is such a concisely visceral explanation.