Back in the spring, as I was working through Stendhal’s very strange book “On Love,” I came to a chapter where Stendhal described the “conclusive answer of Del Rosso and Lisio on January 1820.” I searched the internet for an answer to this riddle and never came across one. But today, I noticed that Italo Calvino had actually written about this book and these names in in his book “Why Read the Classics?”
So here’s a long-ish excerpt from Calvino’s book that I believe provides a solution and some more context around a chapter that baffled me. I’ve added italics to highlight the part that seems most relevant to Montaigne:
The invisible line which divides every sign also passes through beauty, and we can distinguish an objective aspect — though this is difficult to define — and the subjective aspect of what is beautiful for us, which is made up of ‘every new beauty that we discover in the object of our love’. The first definition of beauty which the treatise provides (in chapter 11) is ‘a new capacity for giving you pleasure’. This is followed by a page on the relativity of beauty, exemplified by two fictitious characters in the book: Del Rosso’s ideal of beauty is a woman who at every moment suggests physical pleasure, while for Lisio Visconti it is a woman who at every turn must incite him to love as passion.
If we realise that Del Rosso and Lisio are both personifications of two aspects of the author’s psyche, then things become even more complicated, because the process of fragmentation pervades even the subject. But here we become involved in the theme of the multiplication of the Stendhalian self through pseudonyms. Even the ego can become a galaxy of egos: ‘the mask must become a succession of masks, and the use of pseudonyms a systematic use of multiple names’, says Jean Starobinski in his important article, ‘Stendhal pseudonyme’.
But let us not go any further down this road; instead let us consider the person in love as a single, indivisible soul, particularly as just at this point there is a note which is more precise about the definition of beauty as my beauty, namely what beauty is for me: ‘it is the promise of a character useful to my soul … and is more important than the attraction to my senses.’ Note that here we find the term ‘promise’ which in a note to chapter 17 forms part of his most famous definition: ’la beauté est la promesse du bonheur’ (beauty is the promise of happiness).
In the third paragraph above, Calvino tries to step away from the Montaigne-like aspect of Stendhal, the multiple personas and use of pseudonyms to illustrate the “bits and pieces” of himself that Montaigne described so well. Perhaps that is why I found Stendhal’s book so hard to understand. Sometimes he made a case for a multiplicity of definitions of love and beauty, other times he defined universals that apply to everyone in every situation.
I’m still not sure what to make of a lot of Stendhal’s theories, but at least now I know who Del Rosso and Lisio were. Stendhal too was a pseudonym, by the way.
And just to underscore that Stendhal and Montaigne are connected, later Calvino notes that the entire purpose of Stendhal’s book might have been to explain a moment of impotence, and led him to extensively quote Montaigne.
It could almost be said that the whole of Stendhal’s discourse on beauty revolves around the marque de petite vérole, almost as though only by confronting the symbol of absolute ugliness, a scar, can he arrive at the contemplation of absolute beauty. In the same way it could almost be said that his entire typology of passions revolves around the most negative situation, that of the fiasco of male impotence, almost as if the whole treatise On Love has its centre of gravity in the chapter ‘Des fiasco’ (On fiascos), and that this famous chapter was the sole reason for writing the book which the author subsequently did not dare publish and which only appeared posthumously.
Stendhal broaches his subject by quoting Montaigne’s essay on the same topic, but while for the latter this is just one example in a general meditation on the physical effects of the imagination, and inversely on the indocile liberté of the parts of the body which obey the will — a discourse that predates Groddeck and modern treatments of the problematics of the body — for Stendhal, who always proceeds by subdivisions and never by generalisations, it is a question of unravelling a knot of psychological processes, including amour propre, sublimation, imagination and loss of spontaneity. The most desirable moment for Stendhal, the eternal lover, the first moment of intimacy with a new conquest, can become the most anguished moment; but it is precisely upon such a consciousness of this glimpse of total negativity, of this vortex of darkness and void, that one can build up a system of knowledge.
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