Political Fiction, Ancient and Modern: From David’s Court to Fabrice’s Charterhouse

I would like to begin with a brief autobiographical anecdote. In the late 1970s, through circumstances not entirely of my devising, I found myself working on two large projects separated from each other by nearly three thousand years—a critical biography of Stendhal and a book on biblical narrative. From time to time, I would ask myself whether I might be a little daft to be doing this, wondering whether there could be any conceivable connection between the two subjects. On the biblical side, because the David story is one of the greatest pieces of extended narrative in the Hebrew Bible, I drew many examples from it for my book. With the passage of time, it dawned on me that because the David story and Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma are two of the supremely knowing narratives about politics in our literary tradition, there might be connections between them, for all the obvious differences. Let me first note the most salient of those differences. The David story is told by a narrator who, like his counterparts elsewhere in the Bible, makes a point of keeping a very low profile, not commenting on the characters and events, allowing actions and dialogue to speak for themselves. Stendhal’s narrator, by contrast, offers a good deal of commentary on the characters and often seems virtually to chat with the reader—a procedure Stendhal may have picked up from Fielding, whom he passionately admired—as he sets almost everything in a worldly ironic perspective. The satiric outlook of Charterhouse generates moments of high comedy, a quality entirely absent from the urgently intense biblical story. In addition to these differences, Stendhal’s novel of 1838 is even more strongly attached to European romanticism than it is to the scintillating acerbic prose of eighteenth-century England and France that it emulates. Its