The Stendhalian project of writing one's life tends to bring together the disparate events of a discontinuous experience in a totalizing narrative, to impose a form on them, of which Souvenirs d'égotisme and the Life of Henry Brulard illustrate the quest, always unfinished and always begun anew, rather than the outcome. The project of a truth and an identity that the life story would be responsible for bringing to life is announced at the very beginning of Henry Brulard : "I should write my life, I may finally know, when it is finished in two or three years, what I have been". Galen Strawson, classifying Stendhal as an episodic writer, nonetheless acknowledges his "diachronic flashes": those moments when the autobiographical narrative reveals the permanence of the self, and which form the fabric of The Life of Henry Brulard.
Another example is when Stendhal recalls his first readings of bad novels, which for him marked the discovery of voluptuousness, and to which he attributes the birth of his "vocation": "I feel that in 1835 as in 1794", he says. These pages on literary vocation mock the young Brulard's emphatic ambition to "live in Paris and [to] make comedies like Molière". Despite the permanence of a character forged in the reading of the time, the rejection of emphasis and "self-importance" distinguishes the Stendhal of 1794, dreaming of himself as an accursed poet, from the Stendhal of 1835, who treats the "egotism" of Chateaubriand and Rousseau with irony. This reticence also translates into an inability to talk about emotions, particularly moments of happiness. The Life of Henry Brulard runs up against aphasia and the refusal to "make a novel": the narrative abolishes itself in "an interval of mad and complete happiness" that remains open, with Stendhal postponing the narration "to another day", considering for a moment "drawing up a summary" and enjoining the reader to "skip fifty pages", before finally giving up the project of writing happiness.
The failure of the autobiographical project lies in the refusal to put into narrative what cannot be said without irony, to take oneself for a character in a novel and to pretend to conceive one's life as a destiny. So, even in episodic minds like Stendhal, Proust and Montaigne, who reject the emphasis of narrative, the permanence of the self is built on "capitons", to borrow a word from Lacan, "precipitous facts" as Breton defined them, or "anamneses" as Barthes would have said.
