Still rereading Stendhal’s On Love, I came across a really remarkable passage excerpted from the memoirs of the author’s “friend,” Salviati (in fact, a heteronym for Stendhal himself), which likens the experience of turning thirty without ever having loved to that of a soldier kept in the rear throughout a battle. The point, I take it, is that just as the soldier in reserve “knows” that he’s missing out on the chance of glory that the front lines offer, the non-lover “knows” that lovers have certain emotional experiences the depth of which someone in his position can never match. The question this raised for me was how “Salviati” came to know what he’s missing.
The answer, I suspect, is by reading, and in particular by reading novels. The genre, then still relatively new, was one that Stendhal elsewhere credited with miraculous and dangerous mind-expanding powers (cf. The Red and the Black). Through novels (and at that point in history only through novels), readers were exposed not only to the experiences but also to the internal lives of others far outside their social circles and in situations radically unlike their own. The FOMO that “Salviati” feels as a result of this exposure will become central to the abreaction of later writers, like Flaubert, against the sentimentality of an earlier novelistic tradition.
Flaubert’s intervention comes at the end of a long debate, now revived by modern critics, as to whether the habit novel-reading had a positive or a negative impact on the minds of those who practiced it. One side argued that novels created tiess of sympathy among a community of writers and readers; more perceptive minds noticed, however, that vivid and novelistic representations of foreign experience could give rise to a sense of lack, fear and envy on the part of their audience. In On Love, an essay where novels play an outsized evidentiary role, Stendhal generally seems to bridge the divide between these two positions. Or rather, he recognizes the split: In his own voice, he demonstrates how novels can produce a sympathetic engagement with other minds, while “Salviati” shows all the symptoms of a more pathological reading culture.
The debate still has urgency today, and not just for historians of European literary culture. You may have noticed that both parties to it frame their positions in ways analogous to those that have come to structure contemporary debates regarding social media: it connects us, but doesn’t it also fill us with envy and hatred for the other who, according to his or her facebook page, is supposed to be having a good time?
In fact, the debates are the same, and they’re really about human nature. We want to think that forming genuine sympathetic connections through media is a goal that humans can achieve, so that people who fail to do this, people in whom the mediated other only inspires a sense of envy or lack, should be stigmatized. But what if that’s not an achievable goal, and sympathy is only a pose that allows us to claim some ownership of the other that afflicts us? As far as individual psychology goes, I find the latter position much more plausible than the former, which is usually the one adopted by people who are trying to sell you something.
What’s heartening about the novelistic antecedent of today’s debates over social media is this: the world didn’t end then (although subjectivity did, somehow, certainly change), so it probably won’t end now either. What’s less encouraging is that the successful cooption of novelized subjects into civilization was never a foregone conclusion. It took hard work, particularly on the part of novelists like Stendhal and Flaubert who knew the destructive potential of the genre in which they were writing, to immunize us against being consumed by the FOMO that had come to constitute us as novel-readers. I don’t even know what a social media Flaubert would look like, and I doubt anyone else does either.