Stendhal’s prophecies are the prophecies of a sphinx turned upside down, of a sphinx that, far from containing secrets, reveals or invents them. The chubby little man with a monk’s fringe, bulging cheeks, and bushy hands opens his book and his path to Proust, and the emaciated man with sunken cheeks enters the grounds that the former had cleared. Where Monsieur Brulard declares that his whole life has been an effort not to take his ideas for reality, Marcel need not worry. He knows that if he invents something, that invention is so organic to reality that to amputate it would be like amputating an arm or half a leg. Stendhal kills his color so that glare does not distort his world. Proust uses the fixed movement of moiré to better mirror reality. Who serves fewer fallacies—whether it is the century that wants to cling, through Stendhal’s eyes, to objectivity as a last resort, or the century that begins by becoming absorbed in a single point, under Proust’s gaze, and then suddenly reconstructs a thick swell of reality—is something that we, as long as we are servants of the first half of the century, cannot discern. Stendhal did not manage to be truthful; his objectivity, mixed with contained passion, appears cold and sure. But his objective is undermined by a small error: at the dawn of the century, reality could no longer be flayed without a trembling gesture. By protecting its last contours, he safeguarded consciousness—contained within it as in a case—from imminent collapse. What he was determined to hide, the very structure or summit harmony of his soul, was, for reality, the exorcism cast upon the monstrous presence that was already undermining it. When Stendhal wants to reduce a cathedral to its precise measurements of number and dimension, he throws, only with stammering knowledge, the strongest spear. Reality, on the other hand, could no longer exorcise itself from the burden that all the sentimentality and anarchic “inner life” had accumulated on top of it. Objects—a passion or a hatband; a feeling or a marshal’s mustache—melt into any environment with the same vague precision that atomizes and disperses a solid bottle of perfume into the formless air. Under this fog, Stendhal, frowning and restless, sees the ever-elusive, ever-ephemeral reality slip away.
[First published in the magazine Poeta, No. 1, November, Havana, 1942.
The original spelling of the text has been respected.]
