The politics of sympathy and social advancement is always a tricky question.
Many stories feature characters with humble origins overcoming set-backs and challenges in order to rise to positions of prominence traditionally unthinkable for people from their social class. Consider, for example, d’Artagnan from Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers novels; who would have thought that that nearly penniless member of the provincial nobility who crept into Paris on a sandy-coloured horse would wind up, thirty years later, as Marshal of France? Stories in which sympathetic characters rise to the top of their societies serve to redeem those societies. Indeed, the message to be taken away from the Three Musketeers is what while Louis XIII may have been a weak and easily-manipulated King who was cuckolded by the Prime Minister of his nation’s greatest military rival, he did at least preside over a society in which the cream could rise to the top. Cardinal Richelieu is a sinister and ruthless presence but he can recognise talent when he sees it and this capacity for well-deserved social advancement means that Louis XIII’s France, much like its King, deserves a reputation for being ‘Just’. If only a little bit. The flip side of this depiction of heroic cream rising to the top is to be found in the genre known as the Picaresque novel. Characterised by such works as the autobiography of Bienvenuto Cellini and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), the Picaresque novel frequently features a roguish and frequently unsympathetic character achieving wealth and status through under-handed means. The implication being that if Barry Lyndon achieved wealth and position by being a scoundrel, it is probably safe to assume that the same is true of anyone in that society who possesses either wealth or status.
The difference between works such as The d’Artagnan Romances and The Luck of Barry Lyndon demonstrate that by adopting a different stance towards their protagonists, authors can adopt entirely different attitudes towards the societies they are describing. A sympathetic character who rises to the top redeems his society by his accomplishment while an unsympathetic character damns his.
Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir walks a fine line between these two approaches to social advancement. Stendhal tries hard to make his protagonist Julien Sorel appear sympathetic but despite being intelligent, ambitious, capable, romantic and democratic in sentiment, Sorrel’s rise to the top of French society constitutes one of the most vicious and wide-ranging social satires imaginable. Stendhal’s book leaves the period of the post-Napoleonic Bourbon Restoration looking hysterical, preposterous and profoundly unjust.
Ruthless Culture 