The Red and the Black Read Free

something of the energy and directness of its lowborn protagonist. While
he later felt that he might have gone
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too far and that his prose in The Red and the Black had been too angular and staccato in effect, he need not have feared,
because he succeeded in producing a narrative whose lean and
vigorous tone and constant forward impetus not only suggest the
no-nonsense approach of the young man in a hurry but have also
prevented the novel from dating. We may no longer have an immediate
sense of the boldness of the novel's topicality, but we cannot fail to
be aware of its principal stylistic hallmark: its presentness.
    This presentness is apparent from the very first page of the novel.
You are there walking up the main street of Verrières, you can see M.
de Rênal, you can hear the dreadful din of his nail factory. The first
chapter and a half of the novel are in the present tense, but even
after the narrative has moved through a series of subtly modulated
changes of temporal gear into the conventional mode of a
story-in-the-past, the sense of presentness remains and is constantly
reinforced throughout the novel. The present tense dominates The Red and the Black .
It is the tense of the narrator and his ubiquitous interpolations, be
they geographical (about Verrières, Paris, or even the Rhine),
sociological (about the behaviour patterns of provincials or Parisians
or about how seminarists eat a boiled egg), sententious (life is like
this, or that) or simply chatty (by the way, I forgot to tell you, I
must confess that...). It is the tense also of the putative reader to
whom reference is periodically made in the course of the novel (you
think Julien is being silly, you don't like these reception rooms),
and it is the tense of the characters themselves--in their dialogue,
their interior monologues, and their letters.
    The sense of urgent actuality which is so characteristic of The Red and the Black --and
which makes it such a good read--is created in further ways. There is
almost no anticipation of subsequent events in the novel, so that the
narrator comes over not as someone already in the know but as one who
is as eager as we are to get on with things. The future, it seems,
is as unpredictable for him as for us. By the same token he takes care
not to delay us with flashbacks. There are a number at the beginning,
inevitably, when he has to fill us in on some of the background, but
mostly the narrative obeys the
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rules of the chronicle, which by definition is 'a detailed and continuous register of events in order of time' (OED) .
On five occasions, however, it is almost as if the narrator has been
overtaken by events, and we find him being obliged to interrupt the
onward surge of the narrative to go back and supply supplementary
detail. These five occasions are five key moments in the plot:
Julien's first visit to M me de Rênal's bedroom, Mathilde's declaration of love to Julien by letter, the shooting of M me de Rênal, the day of the trial, and the execution of Julien. In each
case the shock value of a major turning-point is preserved by
postponing narration of the preliminary events which immediately lead
up to it.
    Throughout the novel we are
continually being surprised and kept on our toes in this way. The
pace of the narrative is extraordinarily rapid, in places quite
implausibly--and entertainingly--so, and the viewpoint from which the
events are recounted varies constantly. One minute we are immersed in
Julien's thoughts, the next he has already written the letter he was
thinking of and we are learning of the recipient's reaction.
Sometimes such a switch will occur within a single sentence, and there
may be several within the shortest of paragraphs. By the sheer speed
and unpredictability of its unfolding The Red and the Black creates that very excitement and imaginative zestfulness which it finds so deplorably absent from the world it describes.
    The