The interplay between emotion and memory

Stendhal is one of the key writers of European realism, in particular when it comes to the nature of emotions and their relationship to memory. The young Stendhal’s ideas in Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817) and De l’amour (1822) are rooted in the old European notions of emotions as they were embedded in the theory of humors and classified as a fixed number of categories. The mature Stendhal, from Le rouge et le noir (1830) to the posthumous Vie de Henry Brulard (1890), points forward both to later writers like Robert Musil and to new research on the interplay between emotions and memory as it emerged in late nineteenth-century philosophy and psychology and was further developed in contemporary research, including recent neuroscience. This case study analyzes Stendhal’s work as a contrast to Émile Zola’s biological determinism and as a parallel to Robert Musil’s sophisticated engagement with the fluidity of, and microscopic movements and entanglement between, emotion and memory. The analysis attempts to embrace the main features of both the literary and the scientific developments in the understanding of emotion and memory through the nineteenth century into the twentieth century.