Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Flaubert's aesthetics vis The Temptation of Saint Anthony - “He believes, like a brute, in the reality of things” - not quite!

I suggested to The Argumentative Old Git that Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony has a lot in common with Goethe’s Faust, Pt. II, and the result is a pop-up readalong of Goethe’s “play,” or whatever it is.  Join us, on Twitter, or wherever.  We are reading it next week, writing whenever.  The goal is to make both head and tail of it.  Both head and tail.  Don’t let books boss you around, right?

Young Flaubert read aloud his first version of Saint Anthony to his friends, who were bored and appalled, but made a brilliant suggestion, so good that Flaubert took it:  write, his friend said, a Balzac novel.  Write about the people and places around you right now, and use the form of the novel.

Some relevant commentary by Flaubert’s friends can be found in this old post, based heavily on Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary (1950).  In this new one, I predict I will repeat much of what is in the old one, but not as well, so, there we go.

The friend’s insight was two-fold: first, the constraint of form is good, and second, Flaubert was making some formal conceptual innovations that were independent of content, so it did not matter at all what Flaubert was actually writing about.  These innovations involved the deliberate construction of an elaborate pattern of motifs, images, words, and ideas, that form a deeper but somewhat hidden novel.  The pattern itself is a work of beauty, or perhaps the work needed to see it makes it so.  This is all quite Schopenhauer-like.  The artist is looking behind the veil of reality, or even creating the marvelous thing behind the veil.

I’ve just read Temptation once, so what do I know.  A problem with hidden patterns is that they are hard to see, especially once through when I have no idea what I should be looking for.  Most novels are read once, not studied, and Madame Bovary and Bely’s Petersburg and Nabokov’s Pnin are mostly read as the meaningful novels they certainly are, and the niggling question of “What is the deal with all these squirrel?” is not pursued.  Which is fine.  Again, that is the insight of Flaubert’s friends.

Searchable texts make it easier to pursue the patterns.  I quoted a passage yesterday that ends with a seemingly arbitrary sycamore, but that one is definitely something more, I think an anchor Anthony uses to return to reality, although at least one of these references baffles me.  I also have suspicions about the word “bluish” (“bleuâtre”).  And there are likely more words, or images not so closely tied to words.  Here is where translators get into trouble; here is where the mot had better be juste, or the whole thing vanishes.

And to see more than a hint of this the first time through a book, and then with my level of French, please.

“He believes, like a brute, in the reality of things,” says one of the devil figures* in Temptation (end of Ch, 4), but the devils in the book never quite understand Saint Anthony.  Anthony, like Flaubert, believes in the reality of things and the reality behind the reality.  I had been puzzled about Flaubert’s attraction to the subject of Saint Anthony in part because Flaubert has no religion.  But he has a metaphysics. 

Saint Anthony ends with a parade of animals (for example, “The Beasts of the Sea”) and plants and minerals, and Anthony just looks at them.

He lies down on his stomach, leans on his elbows; and holding his breath, he looks.

He sounds like an Epicurean more than a Catholic:

“O happiness! happiness! I have seen life born, I have seen movement begin….  I want to fly, swim, bark, roar, bellow…  I want to have wings, a shell, bark…, to snuggle up** with all the forms, to penetrate each atom, to descend to the bottom of matter – to be matter!”

Flaubert returns to Saint Anthony again and again because it is a vehicle for the purest expression of his aesthetic ideas, not actually abstract art, but as close as he can achieve with the imperfect medium of words, so deeply flawed because they always drag in something other than the pure thing itself.

 *  Apollonius, who we saw last week raising the dead in The Circus of Dr. Lao.

 **  Surely not, although I like it.  Curl up?  “me blottir sur toutes les formes”

8 comments:

  1. I'm not convinced by this hiding things in the text. Maybe it explains why I've never thought as much about Flaubert and Joyce as others do. Bely's another matter, of course - after all, he has a time-bomb; and is anyway just more generally interesting and entertaining.

    I'd join you in the Goethe read-through, but unfortunately I only have Faust II translated into rhyming doggerel, and I can't bring myself to read it. I need to get the Randall Jarrell translation, which I really liked for Faust I. I just looked it up and RJ refers to other translations as "rhymed doggerel", so quite close to my own view.

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  2. Flaubert was making some formal conceptual innovations that were independent of content, so it did not matter at all what Flaubert was actually writing about. These innovations involved the deliberate construction of an elaborate pattern of motifs, images, words, and ideas, that form a deeper but somewhat hidden novel. The pattern itself is a work of beauty, or perhaps the work needed to see it makes it so. ... The artist is looking behind the veil of reality, or even creating the marvelous thing behind the veil.

    This is of course Nabokov's approach as well, and why he valued Flaubert so highly. While I can appreciate the esthetic effects, the older I get the less enamored I am of that kind of writing. It seems to me quintessentially aristocratic/elitist: "I may have to toss a few bits of plot in for the rabble, but the elect, the only readers I care about, will read it a thousand times until they have grasped the true beauty I purvey." Pah!

    It doesn't help, of course, that I don't believe in any "veil of reality" or anything behind such a veil. What you see is what you get.

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  3. The "hiding" is almost a cognitive issue. The first reading, for most of us, at least, can only do so much. Of course plenty of books give up everything they have the first time. Nothing but surface.

    Himadri and I are both reading post-Jarrell translations. I have Stuart Atkins, who is careful to shift the verse around with Goethe and avoid rhyme, and Himadri has David Luke.

    It was a struggle for me to take Nabokov's ghosts seriously, within the texts, I mean. "Oh wait, they're not just a device, you mean it!" The jolly Schopenhauerian.

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  4. I was already thinking of Nabokov before you mentioned Pnin. I remember asking myself what was up with all the squirrels, and happily I asked on my blog, and someone was kind enough to tell me. My first inkling that Nabokov wrote fantasy novels. Novels as machines to display aesthetic and linguistic design. Or conceit, if you will.

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  5. That is one part of how my suspicions of Flaubert's supposed "realism" began. Flaubert literally wrote fantasy novels, several of them, including Temptation. So those "realistic" novels, maybe there is something going on there, too.

    My impression is that Flaubert was in pursuit of a more abstract beauty, while Nabokov was more committed to the pleasures of the form. Thus his crime novel parodies. He liked story and action, more than Flaubert (although Flaubert wrote one action-packed adventure novel). So in the multi-level Pale Fire, to pick the most obvious example, each hidden story, and there are at least two, is really a story. Kinbote as deposed king is a story, but so is Kinbote as mad adjunct.

    I don't think that exactly true with Flaubert, or too pick a more surprising example, George Meredith's The Egoist. The pattern may be there for its own sake.

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    1. And contrast with the patterns in Dickens, which while clever and artistic in terms of Dickens' shall we say visual imagination, all seem to reinforce the moral themes and would make a lot less sense as objects on their own.

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  6. Nabokov was more committed to the pleasures of the form. Thus his crime novel parodies. He liked story and action

    So the literary Godard then.

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  7. Pre-Maoist Godard, yes. You can often detect Nabokov's childhood reading - Verne, Doyle, Kipling.

    Sometimes I find it useful to think of Flaubert writing out a composition while Dickens improvises. Motifs versus riffs, maybe.

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