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”

Flaubert's Saint Anthony - all together these horizontal and perpendicular lines, indefinably multiplied, would resemble a monstrous skeleton

American and Irish fantasies last week; French this week, beginning with the Gustave Flaubert’s semi-novel, his obsessive folly, La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874).

Saint Anthony, in his Egyptian desert hermitage, is tormented by loneliness, lust and either a series of demons or his own hallucinations.  Or both, they could be both; this is a fantasy; why I am imposing rules.  Few of the temptations are in any way tempting.  By the end of the novel he feels better.  Or I should say “anti-novel,” since there is not much of what anyone would expect in a novel.  Prose poem, maybe.  Screenplay treatment.  I don’t know.

Saint Anthony is so lonely at the beginning of the book that he wishes he had a jackal for a friend:

One alone remained, which held itself on its hind legs, its body half-bent and head to the side, in a pose full of defiance.

“How nice it is!  I would like to pass my hand over its back, gently.”

Anthony whistled for it to come over.  The jackal disappeared.  (Ch. 1, all translations mine)

In every old French edition that I have seen, including the one I read, Anthony’s speech is identified not by quotations marks but by larger type.  Speech is in large type, description in small type.  Heck if I am going to try to reproduce that.

The long Chapter 4 is a Walpurgisnacht of early Christianity, with a series of heresiarchs and lunatics dancing across the stage, shouting slogans at Anthony.  This chapter is deadly:

                                ANTHONY

What, then, is the Word? Who was Jesus?

                                THE VALENTINIANS

He was the husband of repented Acharamoth [or “the repented husband” – this is Gnosticism, so who knows]

                                THE SETHANIANS

He was Shem, son of Noah!

                                THE THEODOTIANS

He was Melchisedech!

                                THE CERINTHIANS

He was nothing but a man!

Quite a lot of the stuff in this chapter is Gnosticism, actually.  Anthony is not tempted in the sense that his orthodox Christian faith is in doubt.  He is only tempted to argue.  A little of this kind of thing feels like a lot, and Saint Anthony has a lot.

A reader of other works by Flaubert may wonder if these excerpts have anything to do with the famous “mot juste,” the exact word that caused Flaubert so much anguish.  Maybe it sound more perfect in French.  “C’était Sem, fils de Noé”; “Ce n’était rien qu’un homme.”  Can you hear it?  Maybe this is the wrong kind of passage.  Here is a beautiful fig tree:

And Anthony saw clearly above the bamboo a forest of bluish-gray columns.  They are tree trunks coming from a single trunk.  From each of the branches descend other branches which sink into the ground, and all together these horizontal and perpendicular lines, indefinably multiplied, would resemble a monstrous skeleton, if it did not have, here and there, a little fig, with a blackish leaf, like that of the sycamore.

If my French is ever good enough to hear how Flaubert’s mots are any more justes than those of any number of his French contemporaries, I will feel I have learned some French.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony is in form, more than anything else, a series of tableaux, or a masque.  Representational figures parade through the scene, whether they are heretics or vanquished Greek and Roman gods or varieties of animals.  I watch them along with the Saint, who occasionally comments.

Why on earth did Flaubert write this?  He wrote three versions before publishing one of them.  I think I will save that question for tomorrow.

The French of Saint Anthony was surprisingly straightforward, but as I have noted before, Flaubert’s prose is often, against his reputation, awfully plain.  Even the more baroque parts of Saint Anthony were more difficult because of words I would have had to look up in English, like “des barques thalamèges” – boats like that one up above.  Flaubert has a poet’s love of old words and names.  But otherwise his French is clear.

19th century French fiction crammed into one post

What happens next?  The French novel, French fiction as we know it, finally comes to life in a blast of coffee-fueled energy.  Balzac, Sand, Stendhal, Hugo, then Dumas, Flaubert, Verne, and then Zola and Maupassant, just to stick to the most famous, lots of terrific books that are still widely read and have all kinds of continuity with the French fiction written today.

I’ll blast through them myself, just making a few notes about reading them in French.  Heaven knows if you want to know what I think about Flaubert, that is easy enough to find.  Much of this is familiar to anyone who has taken advanced French.  These are familiar writers, familiar texts.

1.  Almost all of these writers are ideally suited for the punishing or educating of French schoolchildren.  They have written texts of a variety of lengths and difficulties allowing all sorts of clever paths connecting this book to that.

Start Balzac with one of his many short stories or novellas, with Colonel Chabert, move up to Eugénie Grandet, end with Père Goriot.  Maybe put that one on the Bac.  I read one of the possibilities in French, “The Elixir of Long Life” (1831), my fortieth work in the Human Comedy, and the first and only in French.  It is a Don Juan story that otherwise goes pretty much where you would guess from the title.

This year, the big 19th century novel on the Bac is Stendhal, The Red and Black.  The standard shorter Stendhal is Vanina Vanini, which I have not read.  Italian stuff.  For Sand, it’s La Marquise (1832), where the title woman is in charge, pursuing the actor she desires, not a masterpiece but an antidote to the masculinity of a lot of French fiction.  For Flaubert, it’s the Trois Contes (1877), or maybe just the first and easiest story, “A Simple Heart.”  What a triumph, when I finished it – I had read Flaubert in French.  And my French was not that good.

2.  So what do we do with Hugo?  His novels are monsters.

First, there is “Claude Gueux” (1834), a heart-wrenching story about a prisoner, friendship, cruelty, the death penalty – distilled Hugo, champion of the powerless.  As art, if that matters, I thought it was better than the propagandistic novella Diary of a Condemned Man (1829).

Second, French pedagogists have carved up Les Misérables (1862) into many books, not just into abridged editions of a variety of lengths, but more curiously into rearrangements of the novel, often focused on specific characters, so that there is Cosette’s Les Misérables and Gavroche’s Les Misérables.  There is a book titled Jean Valjean (A Journey around some Misérables), like it is a city or a park.  One can imagine an entire Hugo-based curriculum.

There is at least one of these for Balzac, too, The Novel of Vautrin, pulling together scenes featuring Balzac’s great proto-superhero character from many novels.

I don’t know that I approve of this butchery, but I am amazed that it exists.  It is an interesting idea, taking a novel like Les Misérables and returning to it from different directions.  I don’t know that any French teacher is really doing this, but the books exist, and are in print right now.

3.  Zola’s short story “Le grand Michu” (1870) surprised me because of its multiple connections to later French fiction, the whole line of French schoolboy stories, and also to Jean Vigo’s 1933 anarchic masterpiece Zéro de conduite.  The riot at the end of Zola’s story is enacted by Vigo and his little maniacs.  No idea if this is in English.

4.  I discovered that I have more to say, or can babble at greater length, about Guy de Maupassant than I had realized, so let’s cut all that and write more about Maupassant some other time.  He is obviously perfect for infliction upon schoolchildren and French language learners.  His French, at least in his newspaper stories, is pretty darn easy.

The best French books of my year - Flaubert, Baudelaire, Sophocles, the usual stuff

My study of French has shifted my reading.  The point of reading in French is to learn French, so it hardly matters what I am reading as long as it is hard enough, yet the point – a point – of learning French is to read in French, so I sometimes indulge.  Meaning, gimme the good stuff.

I had wanted to get to the point where I could read Ubu Roi (1896).  And I did.  Similarly, Flaubert.  And thus Alfred Jarry’s muck-smeared puppet travesty and Flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877) – especially, of course, “A Simple Heart” – are among the best things I read all year.

My reading in French is poor, full of errors in understanding that would bother me if I only knew what they were.  Ubu Roi is built out of all kinds of abuses of language, while “A Simple Heart” is an example of something close to perfection.  Was reading them in the original language better than reading a translation?  I don’t know.  Different.  But how well did I read them, really?

Sometimes my eyes were bigger than my stomach, so to speak.  Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Country, 1939), the poet’s angry poetic investigation of his experiences when he returned to Martinique from Paris, founding text of Négritude, would likely be one of the best books I read this year, but it was too hard for me.  I suspect it is not so easy in translation, either.  All right, next time.

Another special case was Oedipe roi by Sophocle, or as I would normally say, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, except that I read it in French, in the translation of Didier Lamaison.  I also read Oedipe roi by Didier Lamaison (1994), a transformation of the play into a detective novel, a polar.  It does not take much transforming.  King Oedipus is not what you would call a great detective, but he sure gets his man.

Any year I read a Sophocles play it will go on my Best of the Year list.  The detective novel was pretty good, too.

I should include Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), Paul Verlaine’s Romances sans Paroles (Songs without Words, very funny, 1874), some but not all of the Molière plays I read – maybe Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman, 1670) – keeping in mind that I have not quite dared the really good ones.

Jacques Prévert’s Paroles (1946) was at times like the Césaire book, and otherwise the opposite.  Prévert wrote a spray of playful little lyric poems many of which are readable and enjoyable by people with elementary French.  I knew about those.  I was looking for those.  His famous first book has scores of them.  But they surround giant blocks of prosy, slangy satirical poems that made me work.  Well, this is how we learn.

I read several short Louis Aragon books, Feu de joie (Fire of Joy, 1920) from the early days of Surrealism and a couple of later volumes with some wartime poems, Le Crève-Cœur (The Heartbreak, 1941) and Le Nouveau Crève-Cœur (The New Heartbreak, 1948), the former so playful, the latter so sad.  Some of the war poems are available in English in the Poetry magazine archive.  Not much else, though.  Maybe I should try to write a bit about Aragon next year.

I have an idea that next year I might write something about a number of the books I have read in French.  I read all kinds of surprising things, most of which were not among the best books of the year.

through the very fact of his existence - one of Flaubert's saints

As much as Eça de Queirós’s Saint Christopher puzzled me – why did he write this? what is it? – I knew one thing that it was: an imitation of Gustave Flaubert’s short hagiography “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller” (1877), one of the Trois Contes.

Flaubert’s Julian is another medieval saint who has a series of picaresque adventures.  Julian is born to nobility, while Christopher is born to peasants.  Christopher pursues good works ought of a boundless sense of charity while Julian is atoning for a curse.  Both stories end with the saint working as a poor ferryman; both culminate in a final sacrifice, the character’s death, from carrying Christ across the river.

Flaubert’s story is short, twenty of thirty pages, so Eça has lots of room for expansion.  But he pretty well loots Flaubert:

Long rain-spouts, representing dragons with yawning jaws, directed the water towards the cistern, and on each window-sill of the castle a basil or a heliotrope bush bloomed, in painted flower-pots.  (Flaubert)

At the corners of the house, tall, thin-winged dragons turned their wide-open gullets toward the courtyard.  The rainwater would pour through them into the gutters of the cistern.  The lantern of a servant passing through the terrace lit up the thick row of pumpkins set out on the parapet to dry in the sun.  (Eça, 3-4)

Lots of touches like this.  Eça is the great imitator of Flaubert, an imitator of great originality.

I have never really understood Flaubert’s religious fiction.  Luckily, he says, in the last line of the story, why he wrote “The Legend of Julian”:

And this is the story of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, as it is given on the stained-glass window of a church in my birthplace.

Not a word of either quotation about the rain-spouts is necessary to tell the lives of these saints, but Flaubert is trying, with the tools he has, to recreate the beauties of the stained glass that he had admired for as long as he could remember.

The hagiography must have also had a special appeal to Flaubert because it is a genre of great cruelty.  Julian becomes addicted to hunting at a young age, and a frightening, bizarre hunting scene, in which masses of animals seem to approach Julian to be killed, is the source of his curse:

… after he had slain them all, other deer, other stags, other badgers, other peacocks, and jays, blackbirds, foxes, porcupines, polecats, and lynxes, appeared; in fact, a host of beasts that grew more and more numerous with every step he took.  Trembling, and with a look of appeal in their eyes, they gathered around Julian, but he did not stop slaying them; and so intent was he on stretching his bow, drawing his sword and whipping out his knife, that he had little thought for aught else.  He knew that he was hunting in some country since an indefinite time, through the very fact of his existence, as everything seemed to occur with the ease one experiences in dreams.

Quite strange, that last sentence.  Sainthood, for Flaubert, is a frightening condition.  None of this hunting business is actually in the Rouen Cathedral stained glass, as far as I can see.

I read the version of the story in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, third edition, presumably translated by someone; don’t know who.

That’s enough saints for a while.  Like I know from saints.

the stupidity of people agreeing to get bored together for a day - general impressions of La Regenta

To remind myself how to write, I will gather some general notes about Leopoldo Alas’s gigantic 1885 novel La Regenta, perhaps still the focus of a readalong event.  Such a post is worth writing after my vacation, put perhaps not worth reading.  I will point the interested to this omnibus post by Dwight at A Common Reader and this post at seraillon.

The leading lady of Vestustan society, Ana, the judge’s wife, La Regenta, is changing confessors, upgrading to the powerful, corrupt vicar general, who quickly falls in love with her.  Meanwhile, the town Don Juan is in pursuit of her as well.  Ana’s husband, a fool who prefers hunting and abstract ideas of honor to the physical reality of his beautiful wife, is the fourth major character.  Dozens of minor characters populate the town, which is described thoroughly.  Alas makes Oviedo, in Asturias sound quite appealing to the tourist, but miserable to the Professor of Roman Law trapped among all of these vulgar rubes.  Alas is a recognizable type, the big city prof teaching at a cow college.  In Asturias, a fish college, I guess.

The novel is written in the great 19th century tradition of Iberian imitations of French fiction, payback for the great French looting of 17th century Spanish theater.  Flaubert, Flaubert, Flaubert.  La Regenta is in some deliberate ways an imitation of Madame Bovary, including its satire of provincial Philistinism, its fluidly shifting points of view, its emphasis on physical detail, and the basic setup of the restless wife, dope of a husband, and flashy pursuer.

Big differences:

1.  Bulk.  The novel is 700 pages in John Rutherford’s Penguin edition, but the type is so small, the pages so large; the book is 900 or 1,000 pages in Spanish editions.

2.  Depth and intelligence (of characters, not authors).  The portrayal or even discovery of the interiority of the shallow, a Flaubert specialty, is one of the great contributions of modern fiction.  Several characters in La Regenta continue this fine tradition, include the Don Juan figure and the husband, who is not a simpleton like Charles Bovary but is nevertheless as great a fool.

But the heroine, Ana, is no Emma Bovary.  She is intelligent, mystical, even a little weird, with a visionary imagination.  There is a hint that she is synesthetic.

3.  Satire.  I argue that Flaubert’s satire is incidental to his art, a vengeful bonus of writing about Normandy.  Alas is much more interested in blood.  “There’s almost too much satire” says Dwight,correctly.

They talked about the horse, the cemetery, the sadness of that afternoon, the stupidity of people agreeing to get bored together for a day, the uninhabitableness of Vetusta.  (Ch. 16, p. 361)

And those are the characters!  The narrator is crueler.  seraillon has some amusing examples of the narrator who is anything but invisible – “a quagmire of triviality” and so on.  I was thankful when he got tired of mocking characters for their bad Latin.  The Professor of Roman Law who wrote the book found that a lot funnier than I did.

4.  What is important for Flaubert is creating elaborate patterns underneath the surface of the novel, patterns likely to be invisible upon the first reading of a book, even more so in one as huge as La Regenta.  My first guess is that Alas was not working at that artistic level, that he was writing a more ordinary novel, but I have obviously written myself into a trap.  How would I know? But right now, I don’t see it.  Whatever I write about for the next few days, it won’t be that.  Maybe someone else will.

They procured several books and settled on a system - Flaubert attacks knowledge in a book packed with everything he knows

Bouvard and Pecuchet, Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished 1882 conceptual novel, is what I have here.

The two title characters are Paris clerks who become friends, come into some money, and retire to the Normandy country side to pursue – well, what exactly?  They need something to do, so they do everything.

Bouvard and Pecuchet are good comic characters, and their adventures as city fools in the country – ruining their farm, offending their neighbors – have enough of the manner of a story to make Bouvard and Pecuchet something of a novel.

The bulk of each chapter, however, is more akin to a list.

“Six months later they had become archaeologists, and their home looked like a museum” (first line of Chapter 4, p. 87).  A couple of pages describe the contents of the museum in Flaubertish detail.  “The frame of the mirror was decorated with a black velvet sombrero, and an enormous clog, full of leaves, held the remains of a bird’s nest” (87), etc.  Then comes the activity.  B & P visit churches, fortresses, manors; they buy or dig up all sorts of artifacts; they investigate lots of tedious questions.  “No effort or sacrifice was too great” (90).  Faced with difficulties, some caused by their own folly, their enthusiasm for architecture and history wanes and is replaced by – let me move to the next chapter – a passion for literature.  “First they read Walter Scott” (first line of Ch. 5, 115).

Repeat.  Chapter 3 was about science.  Chapter 6 is about politics – 1848 intrudes.  Chapter 7, love.  Chapter 8, medicine.  Exercise, first, actually.  “Pleased with their regimen, they decided to improve their constitutions with gymnastics” (first line of Ch. 8, 170).  The failure of exercise leads to medicine, the failure of medicine leads to philosophy, the failure of philosophy leads to religion, the failure of religion leads to education.  “They procured several books about education and settled on a system” (first line of Ch. 10, 245).

The novel is as repetitive as it sounds, in places close to mechanical.  B & P clumsily grind through a field, preceded by the author who read the same books, and more, in order to extract little chunks of knowledge with which to pelt his characters.  One field after another, to exhaustion.  I had not realized that Flaubert had written an Omnibook, but here it is.

Flaubert is satirizing amateurism, which is painful enough, but more broadly he is satirizing the pursuit of knowledge, the value of knowledge, which is a rough message.  What drives B & P crazy is uncertainty.  Even the experts don’t agree!  They can’t even follow Voltaire’s advice to cultivate their garden, since no two sources agree on fertilizing techniques.

Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. (205)

Everything ends wells at least.  The novel is unfinished, but there is an outline up to the end.

The friendship of the two characters is a treat, and there are the usual scattering of fine Flaubertian lines – “Dusk was falling; crows dropped into the furrows”  (25) is a particular favorite, the second verb making the translator do some work.

But the novel is conceptually pretty pure, even for Flaubert.

Page numbers and translations are from Mark Polizzotti’s outstanding recent version of the novel.

rising like flowers blossoming out - I admit that Flaubert is a realist - the true reality is in the writer's language

One last note on Flaubert’s plain style.  In this passage, something terrible has happened.  An infant has just died:

She [the mother] sank on to the edge of the divan, where she sat with her mouth open and tears pouring from her staring eyes.  Then a torpor came over her and silence fell on the room.  The furniture had been overturned.  Two or three napkins were lying on the floor.  Six o’clock struck.  The night-light went out.  (3,4)

The clipped sentences and imprecise number of napkins are all in the French original.  Thousands of subsequent “minimalist” writers have tried to recapture the effect of this moment.  The same flat style that is tedious when describing a dinner party becomes sublime in the presence of death.  Who would criticize such a scene for lacking ornament?  Many of those later writers, especially those who wrote short fiction, thought something like “Why not just cut out the boring dinner party scene and just keep the really powerful moment?”  And some succeeded in doing just that, while others only managed to make emotionally rich moments dull.

4.  Beauty.  Such moments are among the easiest in Sentimental Education to call beautiful, as are the moments of elevated language, the garden of asparagus “which looked like a little forest of feathers” (2, 5) and so on.  I could imagine an aesthetic in which the flatter, plainer, duller passages are meant to contrast with – pump up the significance of – the heightened moments.  A risky strategy, boring the reader. 

Men sitting at a narrow table were placing lumps of paste on revolving disks in front of them; their left hand scraped out the inside while their right stroked the surface, and vases could be seen rising like flowers blossoming out.  (2, 3)

Flaubert, though, considers the novel to be beautiful all the way through.  Any surface dullness is of no consequence because he can see the hidden patterns he has carefully constructed underneath the flat surface.  They are always there somewhere, they are beautiful.

I have increasingly wondered why Flaubert was so committed to the form of the novel.  Why do so much research if the good part is the part you make up?  Why not write prose poems, or Finnegans Wake, or The Rings of Saturn?  The latter gives me a clue.  Flaubert, I am often told, is a “realist.”  And he is.

5.  Metaphysics.  Here I need help.  I am going to get it from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946, tr. Willard Trask).

Auerbach describes Flaubert as a kind of mystic of reality, the devotee of a theory “of a self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality” (486).  The purpose of the artist is “to transform reality through style; transform it so that it would appear as God sees it, so that the divine order – insofar as it concerns the fragment of reality treated in a particular work – would perforce be incarnated in the author’s style” (357-8).  The representation of reality by the artist is more beautiful and meaningful than reality because the representation is more real.

There is a strong dose of Schopenhauer here, although I doubt he is Flaubert’s source.  The artist – the great artist? – is, in a limited way, able to glimpse the real reality behind the usual false reality which he then represents as a new false but improved reality.  And that’s the best you can hope for.  Thus the subject does not matter, the characters do not matter (although being able to take jabs at some bourgeois enemies is a pleasant bonus), or they only matter arbitrarily as material for the creation of the marvelous new object.  “[I]n his book [Madame Bovary] the world consists of pure stupidity, which completely misses true reality, so that the latter should properly not be discoverable in it at all; yet it is there; it is in the writer’s language…” (489).

No one is obligated to believe any of this to read Flaubert successfully.  I believe Flaubert believed it.  A number of later writers, too.

He praised its cathedral and its pies - the aesthetic sensibility of an idiot - or, a gesture towards meaning

What do the patterns, repetitions, and obscurely linked details in Sentimental Education mean?  Oh, so many things.

1.  Individual psychology.  Some of the patterns are created by the characters, perhaps unconsciously.  They are also created by Gustave Flaubert, but they are given to the characters.  It is Frédéric who always notices ribbons and who associates them with his love affairs.  He may not realize he is doing this.  He is not especially perceptive.

2. Heightened perception.  But sometimes he is more perceptive.  Flaubert signals these moments with his signature semicolon lists.

Cisy recalled the happy days when, mounted on his sorrel, with a monocle in his eye, he had ridden along beside carriage doors; these memories intensified his anguish; an unbearable thirst scorched his throat; his feet sank into the sand; it seemed to him that he had been walking for eternities. (2,3)

Poor Cisy is about to fight a duel in which he assumes he will die (he is incompetent) so all sort of trivia becomes intensely interesting to him (“At the corner of a path a woman in a madras kerchief was talking to a man in a smock”).  Meanwhile Frédéric is experiencing something similar, even if he is less certain or terrified of death.  So we have not just one but two characters who are suddenly unusually alive and perceptive, and the entire passage, a famous one, is written accordingly.  “A ray of sunlight, passing through the leaves, fell upon them; and to Cisy’s eyes they seemed to shine like silver vipers in a pool of blood.”  The sacking of the Tuileries Palace is another good example (dog alert!).

Love and death, those are the cause of heighted sensitivity in the characters, when they become – well, when they become more like Gustave Flaubert, when even a dip like the novel’s hero develops an aesthetic sensibility.

Actually, there is a simpler impulse that has a similar effect, hunger, thus the frequent menus of multi-course meals.  It is not quite right to say that Flaubert describes the dishes.  He writes as if he were the waiter.

Food reminds me of one of my favorite lines in the novel.  I have nowhere to put it, as an aside:

And, when it was pointed out that she was a native of Chartres, he went on:

‘Chartres!  Now that’s a pretty town.’

He praised its cathedral and its pies…  (2,4)

Frédéric is an idiot.  Also, I missed the pies when I was in Chartres and now feel cheated.

To my initial point, the use of random details to create moments or states of heightened emotion and as the kinds of semi-conscious patterns people construct to make meaning out of their lives – “Then a vague memory occurred to him of other evenings like this, with similar silences,” to repeat a quotation I used yesterday – is psychologically sharp and fairly new as a technique of characterization, or new when used to this extent.  Not actually new; what ever is?  Meanwhile, Leo Tolstoy has discovered, from different aesthetic grounds, how to do the same thing.

Note that none of what I have described really requires a reader to consciously perceive the patternings any more than the characters do.  Sentimental Education can be successfully read and enjoyed as if it is not a radical avant garde anti-novelistic gesture (see Himadri do just that), in part because it is still a novel with all of the usual features – characters, plot, meaning.  Flaubert, anticipating the French theorists of a century later, is aware to an unusual degree that he is simulating characters and meaning within an artificial form, but no reader has any obligation to notice.

#3 on the list will be Beauty and #4 will be Metaphysics.  And I have one more point to make about heightened perception, this time of the reader.

Flaubert's dogs and ribbons - The dog’s barking went on

Ribbons and dogs in Sentimental Education.  Flaubert drops them into his novel frequently.  I have mentioned several examples of both.  A river bank is like “two wide ribbons,” the protagonist Frédéric disturbs a “couple of sportsmen with their dogs” before, in the next sentence, first seeing and falling instantly in love with Madame Arnoux.  The pink ribbons of her hat are the second detail in her description (the first is the hat).  Then her hair, her dress, her sewing (the character’s motif), and finally her face.  Four pages later, while Frédéric is walking home, I find the next dog, and perhaps also the next ribbon.

A broad, deep-red band of colour lit up the western sky.  Huge corn-ricks, standing in the midst of the stubble, cast gigantic shadows.  A dog started barking on a distant farm.  He shivered, seized with a nameless anxiety.  (Pt. 1, Ch. 1)

It is entirely natural to mention ribbons when describing the attire of French women at this time, just as it is natural to plop in a dog or two now and then.  But as much as Flaubert is known for his sensory descriptions, what he mostly does is omit the scenery.  He just picks out a few things, the things he is going to use and reuse.

The ribbons, real and metaphorical, connect Frédéric’s women.  This time, the courtesan Rosanette:

At last they would come back by the Arc de Triomphe and the great avenue, drinking in the air, with the stars above them, and all the gas-lamps down to the end of the vista lined up like a double string of luminous pearls.

Frédéric always had to wait for her when they were going out; she spent ages arranging the two ribbons on her bonnet round her chin; and she would smile at herself in her wardrobe mirror.  (Pt. 3, Ch.3)

The water metaphor is repeated with Rosanette, too.  “The sun shone on the cascade, and the greenish stones of the little wall over which the water was flowing seemed to be covered by a never-ending ribbon of silver gauze” (Pt. 2, Ch. 5).  There is at least one more of these (“the dusty paths looking like greyish ribbons,” 3,4).  I have not sorted out the colors, but it looks like there is a scheme.

The third (or fourth) of his women is Madame Debreuse, a wealthy married woman.  From the moment of seduction:

Madame Debreuse closed her eyes and he was astonished at the ease of his victory.  The tall trees in the garden, which had been rustling gently, stood still.  Motionless clouds streaked the sky with long red ribbons, and the whole universe seemed to have come to a standstill.  Then a vague memory occurred to him of other evenings like this, with similar silence.  Where could it have been?...  (3,3, ellipses in original)

Once I looked for it, I was not surprised to find a dog earlier in this scene, although an imaginary one.  Rosanette has an actual pair of dogs, which are pulled into the plot at one point.  Madame Arnoux is associated with the dog in the distance.  The barking dog mentioned above, and Frédéric’s nameless anxiety, are on, roughly, page 7 of the novel.  It is 270 pages later, and the point of view moves to Madame Arnoux:

… she had dreamt that she had been standing for a long time on the pavement in the Rue Tronchet.  She was waiting there for something indefinite yet important, and without knowing why, she was afraid of being seen.  But a horrible little dog which had taken a dislike to her was worrying at the hem of her dress.  It kept coming back to her and barked louder and louder.  Madame Arnoux awoke.  The dog’s barking went on.  She strained her ears.  The noise was coming from her son’s bedroom.  (2,6)

The scene is one of the moral pivots of the novel, a turning point for Mme Arnoux and in consequence Frédéric, foreshadowed in the first few pages of the book in a passage that might make a reader shiver once he knows what Flaubert is doing.

Next I will try to make Sentimental Education look a bit less like a word association puzzle.

From the beginning of Sentimental Education to about four pages in - or why Ford Madox Ford says I have to read the novel 14 times

The first line, and paragraph, of Sentimental Education announces a date, time, and the names of a dock and a ship, with “clouds of smoke pouring from its funnel,” a detail that fills me with dismay, but I will have to hold that thought.

The next paragraph, also a single line, introduces the central artistic device of the novel, the accretion of details separated by semi-colons:

People came hurrying in, out of breath; barrels, ropes and baskets of washing lay about in everybody’s way; the sailors ignored all inquiries; people bumped into one another; the pile of baggage between the two paddle-wheels grew higher and higher…

No hint of whose point of view is represented or why these details are chosen in place of all of the other possibilities.  The next line (and also paragraph) does something new:

At last the boat moved off; and the two banks, lined with warehouses, yards, and factories, slipped past like two wide ribbons being unwound.

The novel’s first metaphor!  And a good one.  When Flaubert wants to be, he is a master of figurative language.  How frustrating that, if I understand his method of composition, he spent so much time excising metaphorical language from his fiction.  He wrote ‘em then killed ‘em.  Aside from ordinary uses of language, there is not a hint of metaphor for another two pages (a “curtain” of “pale poplars” on the shore).

And this from pages that have almost nothing but sensory detail, as when Flaubert writes that “it was the custom in those days to put on one’s oldest clothes for travelling,” and then describes the clothes of the passengers:

Here and there a coffee-stained calico shirt showed under a knitted waistcoat, gilt tie-pins pierced tattered cravats, and trouser-straps were fastened to list slippers.  [More clothes]  The deck was littered with nutshells, cigar stubs, pear skins, and the remains of sausage-meat which had been brought along wrapped in paper.  [More people, more clothes] To get back to his seat, Frédéric pushed open the gate leading to the first-class section of the boat, disturbing a couple of sportsmen with their dogs.

It was like a vision:

At this point, amidst all of this random and perhaps arbitrary detail, callow Frédéric sees and instantly falls for Madame Arnoux and the novel gels.  What is the book about?  This:

She was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, with pink ribbons which fluttered behind her in the wind.  Her black hair [a sentence about her hair, another about her dress].  She was busy with a piece of embroidery; and her straight nose, her chin, her whole figure was silhouetted clearly against  the background of the blue sky.

Is this not just one more arbitrary list of plain details or even just nouns (“her chin”)?  Everything I skipped is more of the same, except that among the details I have chosen to include, there are some that I know have particular artistic significance, that are going to be repeated at key moments all through the novel.  To my knowledge the coffee-stains and pear skins are merely incidental detail, atmosphere, so I can set them aside, while the ribbons and dogs I am going to need.  Remember that the ribbons first appeared in the metaphor in the third sentence.  I think these are the first dogs.  These motifs are going to be used by Flaubert to create a hidden pattern of correspondences behind the surface of the novel.  My next post, which may not appear for a couple of days, is going to be nothing but ribbons and dogs.

My little howl of frustration in the first sentence of the post come from realizing at that moment that the smoke from the ship’s funnel is the beginning of – the smoke theme? no, how absurd – the feather theme that I completely missed.  The link is one of those outstanding but rare metaphors that appears 368 pages later – “the smoke of a railway engine stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away.”  The ostrich feather theme is a sub-theme of the feather theme.

All of this is completely invisible except by chance the first time through the novel.  Ford Madox Ford claimed, in a quotation – not even that, a paraphrase, for which I have never seen a real source, so it is likely nonsense – that one has to read Sentimental Education fourteen times to really get it.  I am not even close.

They chatted about the subject under discussion - Sentimental Education's boring triumph - actually I'll write about the triumph later

Flaubert hammered Sentimental Education until it was flat, even flatter than Madame Bovary.  A line that epitomizes the flatness: “They chatted about the subject under discussion” (Pt. 1, Ch. 5).  I can think of a number of later writers working in Flaubert’s tradition who would not have allowed such a line in their books except as some kind of grotesque joke.

If you are thinking of blaming the translator, Robert Baldick: “Ils causèrent de ce que l’on disait.”

Received criticism praises Flaubert for his beauty – I hated Emma Bovary, I hated spending time with these horrible people, but of course the writing is beautiful – and I will argue later that Flaubert creates works of great beauty, but the beauty is only occasionally at the level of the sentence.  The search for le mot juste is a destructive process.  Flaubert builds up a scene, fills it with adjectives and metaphor, and then strips them out before I or anyone else gets to see them, pounding the prose back to flatness.

In fairness, I will note that Sentimental Education is aesthetically more radical than Madame Bovary, more unforgiving.

When Eça de Queirós wrote his version of Sentimental Education’s relatively vivid horse race scene he made every sentence interesting, packing everything in the novel into one magnificent long chapter.  Zola worked in the same way; so did Proust.  Flaubert is the father of this kind of maximalism but oddly also of minimalism.

I am on the same page as “They chatted etc.”:

The party stopped beside a fisherman, who was cleaning some eels in a tank for live fish.  Mademoiselle Marthe wanted to see them.  He emptied his box on to the grass; and the little girl went down on her knees to catch them, laughing with pleasure and screaming with fright.  They were all lost.  Arnoux paid for them.

If you were thinking of blaming the translator: “Toutes furent perdues.  Arnoux les paya.”  Baldick does have his troubles.  “A good many began singing.  Spirits rose.  Glasses were brought out and filled” (Pt. 1, Ch. 1), which in French is “Beaucoup chantaient.  On était gai.  Il se versait des petits verres.”  I guess “Many sang” sounded too primitive or ugly, although the next sentence makes up for it.  It was at this point – on page two – that I began spot-checking the French.  Oh come on, I thought, having forgotten how this book works, Flaubert did not write “Spirits rose”!  But he did, or close enough.  I do not know why Baldick did not want the glasses to be little.

The flat descriptive prose is accompanied by conversations, about politics, business, art, or nothing, that are even less interesting:

There were not many quadrilles, and the dancers, judging by the listless way in which they dragged their feet, looked as if they were performing a duty.  Frédéric heard snatches of conversation such as these:

“Were  you at the last charity ball at the Hotel Lambert, Mademoiselle?”

“No, Monsieur.”

“It’s going to be terribly hot soon.”

“Yes, absolutely stifling.”

“Whom is this polka by?”

“I really don’t know, Madame.”  (Pt. 2, Ch. 2)

“What to do when the novel triumphs by boring you?” asks Miguel at St. Orberose.  Admittedly this particular passage is really rubbing it in.  Miguel suggests focusing on the good bits – metaphors, imagery, satirical jabs – some of which are extraordinary.  I’ll do some of that tomorrow.  Then I’ll work a little on the other way to read Sentimental Education, even though it is a bit beyond me cognitively.  I am never actually bored by Sentimental Education.  It always gives me something to do.

he resolved to lead a selfish life - Sentimental Education has characters and a story

A shallow young man falls in love with a married woman he has barely met – he is in a heightened and susceptible emotional state at the time.  The chance meeting and strange reaction influence or even determine almost everything he does for the next decade of his life.

Or more accurately everything he does not do, since Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869) is the great nineteenth century novel of missing the main event.  More events almost happen than happen, if that makes sense.  Or they happen elsewhere, with our hero – is that ever the wrong word – Frédéric Moreau just missing them.

Flaubert does not quite have nothing at all happen, but he comes as close as he dares.  Frédéric repeatedly almost begins a sexual affair, with the woman he meets on the first page or with someone else, or almost marries, or almost finds himself involved in some kind of revolutionary activity (the novel hinges around 1848).  He is involved in a duel which turns into a farce, so it is too much to say he fights in a duel.  He is present at the 1848 sacking of the Tuileries Palace, a great scene, although as a witness more than a participant.

The Tuileries scene is so memorable that I remembered the novel as having far more scenes of political violence than it really does.

People slipped in the mud on clothes, shakos, and weapons; Frédéric felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey overcoat who was lying face down in the gutter.  The wine-merchants’ shops were open, and every now and then somebody would go in to smoke a pipe or drink a glass of beer, before returning to the fight.  A stray dog started howling.  This raised a laugh.  (Part 3, Ch. 1)

So much of what Flaubert is doing in Sentimental Education, his radical aesthetic method, is visible in this passage, but I want to save that for the next few days.  Keep an eye on that dog.

The dubious, amoral Frédéric is a predecessor of Proust’s Marcel in that his behavior and thoughts, if that is the right word, always make him seem several years younger than he really is.  The novel is full of jokes at his expense.  “And in a sudden burst of animal health, he resolved to lead a selfish life” (Pt. 2, Ch. 1).  The joke is that a quarter of the way into the novel I had yet to see him live any other way.  Pure self-delusion.  Or see this one, when Frédéric realizes that he has a chance of an affair with a wealthy woman: “Greedy, in all probability, for power and action, and married to a mediocrity who she had served devotedly, she wanted a man of strong personality to guide her” (Pt. 3, Ch. 3).  Fifty pages from the end of the novel, I can be certain that if she is interested in Frédéric it is cannot possibly be for his strong personality.

What Proust’s protagonist has that Flaubert’s lacks is an aesthetic sensibility.  And people call Sentimental Education “autobiographical”!  For the next few days, nothing but aesthetics.  Nothing but style.  Frédéric will reappear only to be mocked.

I read Robert Baldick’s translation in the same Penguin Classics edition I read twenty-five years ago.  

The Goncourts on Flaubert - his style, his innovations, his jam jars

The issue with the Goncourt brothers and Gustave Flaubert is that all three writers were working on related aesthetic problems, and the Goncourts in some sense got to them first, with their first novel published in 1851, five years before Madame Bovary began to be serialized.  Yet it was Flaubert who was immediately understood to be an innovator; it was Flaubert who attracted disciples; it was always Flaubert.

Now, it is possible that Edmond de Goncourt was simply mistaken about exactly how critics were differentiating between Flaubert and the Goncourts, or it is possible that he was exactly right, except that what later critics, those writing now, for example me, value in Flaubert is not the same thing critics at the time valued; in other words, we can all be right.  This is one of the benefits of the humanities.  Or maybe the Goncourt novels really are second-rate compared to those of Flaubert and his disciples Zola and Maupassant.  It is as if there is not enough room in English for four French writers sharing a period and style.

I don’t know.  I should read a Goncourt novel someday and see for myself.

Anyway, that is the source of a passage like this:

Nowadays, among literary writers, style has become so affected, so selective, so eccentric as to make writing practically impossible.  It is bad style to place fairly close to one another two words beginning with the same syllable; it is bad style to use the word of twice in the same expression, and so on and so forth.  Poor Cladel, a victim of this modern malady of perfectionism, has just started rewriting for the fifth time a novel in which he has not yet reached page sixty.  (3 March, 1875)

Léon Cladel (1835-92), “novelist”; your guess is better than mine.  This is the result of everyone imitating Flaubert rather than Goncourt, although Goncourt does single out “the nebulous Mallarmé,” “a madman madder than the rest,” and Mallarmé ain’t Flaubert’s fault.

The argument goes back twenty years:

After that [an argument about metaphors] a tremendous argument over assonance, which Flaubert said had to be avoided even if it took a week to eliminate a single example.  The Flaubert and Feydeau started discussing a thousand different recipes for style and form, pompously and earnestly explaining little mechanical tricks of the trade, and expounding with childish gravity and ridiculous solemnity ways of writing and rules for producing good prose.  They attached so much importance to the clothing of an idea, to its colour and material, that the idea became nothing but a peg on which to hang sound and light.  We felt as if we were listening to an argument between grammarians of the Byzantine Empire.  (11 April, 1857)

That last simile is so good I am doubly tempted by a Goncourt novel, but I am warned away by the suggestion that they might possibly have ideas in them.   But of course I am a disciple of Flaubert.

Regardless, this is sublime:

Flaubert makes himself out to be the most extravagant and careless of men when it comes to handling money; but in fact he has no tastes to indulge, never buys anything, and has never been known to allow a sudden whim to make a hole in his pocket.  Flaubert makes himself out to be the most extraordinary of innovators in matters of interior decoration; but in fact the only idea he has had so far has been to use jam-jars as flower-vases, something of which he is inordinately proud.  (3 May, 1873)

On the one hand, see what I said above, on the other, I don’t care, I want this to be 100% true.

Being used to puddles - the puddle theme in L'Assommoir

Zola, in L’Assommoir, uses arbitrarily chosen objects within the world of the novel to create elaborate patterns that reinforce or undermine or comment upon the surface meaning of the story.  The objects are not necessarily symbolic in whatever sense critics use that word, although they may become symbolic in some way to one or more of the characters.  Or the characters may not notice them at all; only the author and the more attentive readers can see the pattern.

Zola learned to do this from Gustave Flaubert.  I wrote about the technique in the context of Madame Bovary a couple of years ago.   I do not know if anyone believed what I wrote, since it is contrary to a lot of ideas about what fiction should do.

Thus:

To the right of the water tanks the steam engine’s slim smokestack exhaled puffs of white smoke in a strong, steady rhythm.

Being used to puddles, Gervaise did not bother to tuck up her skirts before making her way through the doorway, which was cluttered with jars of bleaching water.  (Ch. 1, 18-19)

Gervaise has entered a laundry, that is all that is happening here, but Zola has now introduced, right next to each other, the Puddle Theme and the Steam Engine Theme.  I should probably only follow one of them in this post.  Puddles it is.  A few pages later, the Puddle Theme is expanded into the Colored Puddle Theme:

When she was through, she went over to a trestle and hung upon it all her things, which began to drip bluish puddles onto the floor.  (I, 24)

What is this besides ordinary, and kinda dull, detail about a Parisian laundry?  Why even notice it?

In the next chapter, Gervaise first enters the tenement where she will spend most of the rest of the novel.

Down the center of this entranceway, which was paved like the street, a rivulet of pink-dyed water was flowing.  (Ch. 2, 51)

To get through the entranceway she had to jump over a wide puddle that had drained from the dye shop [thus, the pink].  This time the puddle was blue, the deep blue of a summer sky; and in it reflections from the concierge’s small night lamp sparkled like stars.  (Ch. 2, 71)

Maybe a reader remembers the blue puddles from the laundry, maybe not.  At this point, I was looking for them, although I do not think I caught them all.  Here is another, from Chapter 6, the chapter that greatly develops the novel’s romantic subplot, a great positive moment in Gervaise’s life:

Over a puddle of muddy water that barred the way two planks had been thrown.  She finally ventured onto the planks, then turned to the left,…  (Ch. 6, 183)

One of the things she sees on the other side of that puddle is a big steam engine; also a man who “could feel within himself as much damn power as a steam engine” (189).

Now, the end.  Gervaise has hit bottom.

She had to step over a black stream, the overflow from the dyers, that went streaming and cutting its muddy way through the whiteness of the snow.  Black was the proper color to go with her thoughts.  The lovely soft pinks and blues of other days had flowed far away!  (Ch. 12, 466)

A number of other themes have been pulled together, as I would expect in a climactic scene.  I believe I see  a difference from Flaubert here: Zola actually reminds his readers of (some) of the earlier colored puddles.  Flaubert is a harsher master.  I’m supposed to be paying that kind of attention.  And in fact, under the tutelage of Flaubert and Nabokov and a few other writers, I have trained myself to at least try to keep up with this kind of patterning, which, frankly, is awfully hard to do the first time through a novel, and often leads to a lot of dead ends and red herrings.

Not the puddles, though.  For the re-read, someday, I will track down the ones I missed, and the near puddles and slant puddles.  I have a crackpot idea about Gervaise’s sensitivity to color.  I need another trip through the novel to support (or discard) this idea.

Ah, this is the fun stuff.  The posts will all be downhill from here.

The Best Books of 1862 - And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.

Emily Dickinson was in the middle of a creative rush that had lasted several years and would last many more.  Or so it looks now – she was having doubts.  In 1862 she sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson who had just published an article in The Atlantic giving advice to new writers about publishing their work.  Dickinson asked “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”  He said it was, yet Dickinson did not try to publish.

The hidden and lost works of the past, the ones that survive by chance and magic, make for such interesting stories.  But this is not the story of the Best Books of 1862.  1862 was the Year of the Best-seller.

The big bookish events in France were 1) the publication of Victor Hugo’s massive Les Misérables, his first novel in thirty years, and 2) controversial upstart Gustave Flaubert’s followup to Madame Bovary, the gory and insane Salammbô.  Flaubert was understandably nervous that he would be crushed by Hugo, but both novels were hits.  Hugo’s audience was broader, a genuine mass readership, and much more international.  Salammbô has never had much luck outside of France.

Another international hit, albeit with a much smaller audience than Hugo’s, was Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.  I believe this was the novel that really introduced Russian literature to Europe.  It also began within Russian literature a chain of attacks and responses that is unlike anything I know in any other literature, but that story has to wait until 1863.  One of the participants was Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose House of the Dead is from 1862.

Meanwhile the new craze in English fiction was the Sensation Novel: Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, No Name by Wilkie Collins, and even Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope.  The latter two could easily have been titled Lady _____’s Secret, and in the case of the Trollope should have been, since Orley Farm is a crummy title.  Trollope was only a half-hearted Sensationalist, divulging the secret about halfway through the novel, but at least he tried.

Lady Audley’s Secret was a dead book for a while, but scholars interested in women writers and so-called genre fiction resurrected it.  I just finished it and may write about it a bit after the holiday.

If the Collins and Trollope novels feel a bit second-tier compared to their best-known books, as does George Eliot’s Romola (which began serialization in 1862), English poetry was anything but.  Lucky Victorian poetry readers enjoyed, amidst the mound of poetry that now looks tediously unreadable,  George Meredith’s Modern Love, posthumous collections by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough, and the almost shockingly assured debut of Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems.  Here is one of the others, the first half of “Song”:

When I am dead my dearest,
    Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
    Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
    With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
    And if thou wilt, forget.

Édouard Manet’s 1862 “Music in the Tuileries” is in the London National Gallery.

The meaning of Flaubert's meaninglessness - he condemned the ideas but admired the style

Madame Bovary’s preposterous philistine pharmacist M. Homais has four children, all with meaningful names:  “Napoléon stood for fame, Franklin for liberty; Irma was perhaps a concession to Romanticism; but Athalie was a tribute to the most immortal masterpiece of the French stage” (I.3).  The Irma business has me stumped, but I have read Racine’s Athalie (1691) and get the joke.  The play is sincerely religious and Homais is a free-thinker, but as a “man of discrimination” he “condemned the ideas but admired the style, abhorred the conception but praised all the details.”

Generally anything Homais does or thinks is a target of scorn, but here he seems to be describing a large number of the readers of Madame Bovary.  Also, perhaps, its author.

Madame Bovary is actually the fourth novel Flaubert wrote, if I am counting correctly.  The third, the first version of The Temptation of St. Anthony, barely has any story or characters or any of the usual novelistic apparatus but is just, as Flaubert’s friend Maxime du Camp wrote, “harmonious phrases expertly put together…, noble images and startling metaphors” (Steegmuller, 163), and nothing else.  Another friend, Louis Bouilhet, planted the seed of the real-life incident on which Madame Bovary is based as a vehicle to constrain Flaubert and allow him to correct his faults. But:

How could he [Flaubert] bear to spend several years describing such people as those?  The prospect revolted him. (Steegmuller, 260)

More than one reader of Flaubert says “Hey – me, too!”  But the subject obviously worked as a purgative.

The obstacle here is the notion of creative expression.  The artist  - any artist – is presumably trying to express something, and in a novel it is generally safe to assume that the characters and events of the story are a significant part of what he is trying to express.  They take up so much room.

But what if the incidents and insights are only in the novel because the form of the novel requires them?  Say that Flaubert chooses to write a novel, and as a result of that choice seeks to perfect every necessary element of the novel, but that whatever meaning he is trying to express is inherent in the creation of the object.  Rohan Maitzen, champion of Middlemarch and a tradition not just different than but antithetical to Flaubert’s, wonders if Madame Bovary’s achievement lies “in its perfect realization of its own concept, perhaps.”  Yes, I think so, and here we see the difference between the amateur and the professional.  I had to read four books by Flaubert culminating in the sublimely absurd Salammbô to get this point; the English professor only needed one.

Flaubert’s purpose resembles that of his neighbor Claude Monet.  Monet did not paint two dozen grainstacks because he wanted to express an idea about Normandy agriculture, nor did he paint his series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, the setting of the one of the best scenes in Madame Bovary, because of an interest in religion or architecture or the novels of Gustave Flaubert, but in both cases because the forms of the haystack and cathedral allowed him to explore changing light and shadow effects.  Flaubert is creating a novel, though, not a series of paintings or a symphony, so he includes signifiers of novelistic meaning.  It’s the light effects and harmonies he is after, though.  That’s where whatever he is trying to express can be found.  The opportunity to mock the Normandy bourgeois who irritate him so is just a bonus.

White and black butterflies & Flaubert's visible narrator

The unadorned Flaubert I mentioned yesterday was a necessary piece of what Mario Vargas Llosa calls in The Perpetual Orgy the Invisible Narrator, “a glacial, meticulous observer who does not allow himself to be seen” (188), the narrator who resembles a movie camera.  I always think of the cab scene (III.1) as the perfect example, the scene that the journal publishing the Madame Bovary serial suppressed as obscene even though the camera shows us nothing but 1) the exterior of an enclosed carriage, 2) the face of the “demoralized” cabbie, and 3) the streets of Rouen, sometimes from the perspective of the cabbie, sometimes, seemingly, from the air, sometimes perhaps on a map.  A film version might resort to animation.

I am amazed to note that the famous scene is only two pages long.  The narrator keeps his cool, never glancing in the carriage, avoiding adjectives and metaphors until the end, when he gives us a useful one that serves as a naughty punchline:

Along the river front amidst the trucks and the barrels, along the streets from the shelter of the guard posts, the bourgeois stared wide-eyed at this spectacle unheard of in the provinces – a carriage with drawn shades that kept appearing and reappearing, sealed tighter than a tomb and tossing like a ship.

The cinematic version of the scene places the camera among the bourgeois, perhaps in a café.  Prose allows Flaubert to compress the appearances of the carriage into three words.  Having changed the path of the fictional sex scene forever, Flaubert indulges himself with a showstopper (Emma is discarding a letter she had written to Léon):

At a certain moment in the early afternoon, when the sun was blazing down most fiercely on the old silver-plated lamps, a bare hand appeared from under the little yellow cloth curtains and threw out some torn scraps of paper.  The wind caught them and scattered them, and they alighted at a distance, like white butterflies, on a field of flowering red clover.

Silver, yellow, white, red.  Re-readers, or first-timers with a better memory than mine, will remember the black butterflies that went up the chimney back in I.9.

Aspiring and impressionable writers of a certain temperament read this passage, these sentences, and swore fidelity to Gustave Flaubert.  This was what they would write.  Hugo is too crushingly present, Balzac is too sloppy, Stendhal too – well, I do not understand Stendhal so well.  Different models, all “realists” in their own way, for different creative tendencies.

And anyway Flaubert is not all that invisible in Madame Bovary.  Reading this astringent novel after the all-Hugo, all-the-time Toilers of the Sea perhaps exaggerated the difference.  Vargas Llosa identifies “no more than half a hundred” (194) intrusions by the Philosopher Narrator.  I included one of the strongest yesterday, Flaubert’s lament for the dancing bears, but others are more ambiguous and amusing:

Here they make the worst Neufchâtel cheese in the entire district; and here farming calls for considerable investment: great quantities of manure are needed to fertilize the friable, sandy, stony soil. (II.1.)

The objective narrator, almost an agronomist here, cannot resist the chance to attack their cheese.  Who among us could?

We long to make music that will melt the stars - Flaubert's plain prose

We now start to enjoy yet another masterpiece, yet another fairy tale. Of all the fairy tales in this series, Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary is the most romantic. Stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do. (Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 125)

Given that last sentence, and it is easy enough to find other critics saying the same thing, it can be surprising how ordinarily well written so much of Madame Bovary can be.  An obsessive attention to the perfect sentence and most original metaphor is one of the legacies of Flaubert, perhaps a bad one.  Descendants of Flaubert like Marcel Proust and Nabokov and John Banville strive to make every sentence intensely interesting and to make every metaphor new.  Sometimes they succeed.  So shouldn't their ancestor be more dazzling?

Flaubert, in his letters, whines, moans, and howls, accurately, it seems, about the difficulties of producing single sentences.  He tested his sentences by “bellowing” them, as did his friend and collaborator, the poet Louis Bouilhet, scrutinizing not just the images or words but the assonances, alliterations, and rhythms.  The music of the writing is obviously impossible to capture in English and no one tries, although I would love to read a translator’s attempt at a passage of imitation Flaubertian verse.  Herman Melville is the only fiction writer working in English before Flaubert whose prose does what poetry is supposed to do, whose prose can frequently be converted to verse.  Melville risked – and achieved! – the incoherence of compressed verse; Flaubert was nothing if not clear.  He could write plain prose as well as fancy.

Rohan Maitzen has assembled a sampling of some of Madame Bovary’s striking metaphors.  Every one is good – the snake-like hiss of the corset string is a favorite of mine.  Maitzen emphasizes Flaubert’s restraint.  His imagery and metaphors are not written in the interest of bee-yoo-tee, and he is only lyrical or, worse, luminous, on special occasions.  Flaubert savagely expunged metaphors, adjectives, and effusive description from Madame Bovary.  He wrote lots more than he kept.  This is what André Gide was getting at when he criticized as inartistic Victor Hugo’s “uninterrupted mobilization of all the possible resources,” for “not spar[ing] us a single one.”  Hugo gives us every metaphor he can think of; Flaubert only keeps the best one, the one that best serves the novel.  Or such is the idea.

Look at me go on and on, without offering a single sentence of Flaubert’s, brilliant or indifferent.  All right, another favorite.  The first sentence belongs to Emma’s first lover Rodolphe, the “he”; the second is one of the novel’s rare direct addresses to the reader, the purest merging of narrator and author in the book, a barely concealed statement of purpose:

Since he had heard those same words uttered by loose women or prostitutes, he had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them now:  the more flowery a person’s speech, he thought, the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.  Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.  (II.12)

I am relying on Francis Steegmuller’s biography of creativity Flaubert and Madame Bovary (1950) for any biographical details.

Fishmongers, cigars, knives, and broken bridles - Madame Bovary's motifs

Gustave Flaubert uses imagery and ordinary objects to create an elaborate pattern that complements the surface meaning of the novel, or ironically comments on the surface meaning, or is perhaps completely independent of it but nevertheless neato, interesting or beautiful or meaningful for its own sake.  I know, I know, everyone does this.  Everyone does it now, in 156 AMB (Anno Madame Bovary).

Flaubert was not really the first fiction writer to build up this kind of pattern – he was never the inventor of any of the innovations critics, and I, commonly associate with him – but he thoroughly systematized a number of elements of the novel into something more or less new.  This is what I mean by Madame Bovary being less fun to write about.  So I’ll drop it.

No, one digression.  Mostly an innovation in fiction is little more than a new emphasis on some aspect of fiction that was there all along, perhaps inherent even in the act of storytelling.  But hasty and easily distracted readers like me have to be trained by an especially insistent novelist to see what has always been right in front of me.  Thus the strange phenomenon of discovering that Cervantes and Don Quixote already did everything.

An example of the patterning, a guest at the wedding of Charles Bovary and Emma Roualt:

The bride had begged her father that she be spared the usual pranks.  However, a fishmonger cousin (who had actually brought a pair of soles as a wedding present) was just beginning to spurt water from his mouth through the keyhole when Roualt came along and stopped him, explaining that the importance of his son-in-law’s position didn’t permit such unseemliness.  (I.4)

Early in her marriage Emma, dissatisfied with provincial life, becomes obsessed with the idea of Paris.  I think this is the only other fishmonger in the novel:

At night when the fishmongers passed below her window in their carts, singing La Marjolaine, she would awaken; and listening to the sound of the iron-rimmed wheels on the pavement, and then the quick change in the sound as they reached the unpaved road at the end of the village, she would tell herself: “They’ll be there [Paris] tomorrow!”  (I.9)

So not only do we have a pair of passages with fishmongers, but in both cases they are associated with waking Emma.  Flaubert is using what at first seems like an unnecessarily fussy detail to link the two scenes.  At a high point in Emma’s life, a fishmonger was beneath her, while later she absurdly associated them with glamour and escape.  For good measure, throw in a curious scene near the end of the novel in which Emma is awakened by the “metallic clang” of “a wagon laden with long strips of iron” (III.6), just after Emma has experienced a sort of parody of the life she imagined in Paris.

The entire novel is built like this.  Returning from the ball in I.8 “they had to stop: the breeching broke, and Charles mended it with a rope,” while the romantically indulgent finale of Emma’s seduction (“her blood flowing in her flesh like a river of milk” and so on) is punctured by “Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending a broken bridle with his penknife” (II.9).  Back in the first scene, Charles discovers a fancy cigar case, lost by the nobleman who hosted the ball, so again Flaubert gives me two chances to remember the connection.  Later Emma gives Rodolphe a cigar case; she also gives him an expensive riding crop, which takes me back to the riding crop in the scene where Charles and Emma first meet (I.2).  A riding crop and a broken bridle are just part of the elaborate horse motif (Vladimir Nabokov tears into it with gusto in Lectures on Literature).

And is there not a scene in which Emma, not yet seduced, is embarrassed that her oafish husband  (“like a peasant!”) carries a knife? There is: II.5.

Little of this is visible on a first pass, even though Flaubert makes use of so many strands.  It was only near the end this time that I discovered the barking dog motif.  I would figure out how the scenes with barking dogs were connected if I had kept track of where they were.  Next time.

This is what I usually mean when I say someone writes like Flaubert.  It is really very difficult to do.

All quotations from the Francis Steegmuller translation.