A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, perfection was not so much achieved by the return to antiquity, but rather by appealing to the transformative power of the future: it is the future, and no longer the past, that becomes the reference as power of perfectibility. The present, no longer held back by a constant comparison with the distant past (the ancients versus the moderns), finds itself propelled on a time line that resembles an acceleration track for a train of history that is already on the move and that is literally on the way to getting off the ground by the end of the century, with the advent of aviation. This process is analyzed by the sociologists of acceleration as well as by the historians of speed—mindful of the passage of a world that is structured (if we are to believe the words of Chateaubriand) by a “strange harmony between the rotation of the planets, the kicking of the feet, and the intimate vibrations,” a world conceived and perceived in relation to the slowness of walking, where the only speed remains that of the horse throughout the duration of equestrian civilization, until the end of this millennial agreement between the human body and the toil that is physical movement.

  However, let us now slow down the conceptual race car for a moment and reread Chateaubriand’s words, while wondering whether the speaker has already let himself be drawn in by the general movement of the century or, to the contrary, whether he is keeping his balance and, as it were, has become dizzy at seeing the temporal abyss in front of him. If, for Chateaubriand/René, the past remains an “incomplete statue” and the future is a “perfection” that will soon give its shape to the present, Chateaubriand, that swimmer between two shores, nonetheless still remains in between these two moments of history: in a strange present that is neither formatted by the ancient conception of historicity, nor yet integrated with the modern conception. It is a kind of present implied from the discourse, slightly stagnant—a viscous time, to use the recent terminology of a historian of the Middle Ages, a time that sticks unnoticed to that of the enunciation, and that may well be the slow tempo of Romanticism (in Patrice Loraux’s sense of the term), one in which the narrator of Alfred de Musset’s Confession d’un enfant du siècle seems to get bogged down.

  The life offered to the youths of that time was made up of three elements: behind them was a past that was never destroyed and which still stirred about its ruins, with all the fossils of the centuries of absolutism; in front of them was the dawn of a vast horizon, the first light of the future; and in between these two worlds … something similar to the Ocean which divides the old continent from the young America, something vague and floating, a stormy sea full of shipwrecks, crossed from time to time by some white sail or by some ship blowing heavy steam. In other words, the present century, which separates the past from the future, which is neither one nor the other and which resembles both at once, where one does not know, at every step, whether he is walking on a seed or on remains.

  This “something vague and floating” that enables Musset to extend the oceanic metaphor gives shape to a fluid present, which is vast and somewhat viscous, like a terrible infinity in which thought stays stuck in a time that is becoming, where nothing is definite yet, neither past nor future, neither seed nor remains, a time that is in limbo, so to speak, suspended, waiting for some kind of status—in brief, it is a time in need, which is all potential and restraint before it transitions into action. It is this suspended time that gives rise to the Romantic movement and its search for the foundation of things beyond the classical rules.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Agamben, Giorgio. Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? Translated from Italian by Maxime Rovere. Paris: Rivages, 2008.

  Aristotle. Poetics. Translated and edited by S. H. Butcher as Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1894; rev. ed., 1911.

  Balzac, Honoré de. Le colonel Chabert. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

  ———. Illusions perdues. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.

  Barnett, Marva A., ed. Victor Hugo on Things That Matter: A Reader. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

  Barthélémy, Dominique. Nouvelle histoire des Capétiens. Paris: Seuil, 2012.

  Baudelaire, Charles. Le spleen de Paris. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

  Chateaubriand, François-René de. “Atala” et “René.” Montreal: Beauchemin, 2012.

  Gautier, Théophile. Histoire du romantisme, followed by Notices romantiques and by a study on Le progrès de la poésie française depuis 1830 (1874). Paris: Ressouvenances, 2007.

  Halsall, A. W., et al. Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

  Hartog, François. Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du présent. Paris: Seuil, 2003.

  Hugo, Victor. Les contemplations. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.

  ———. Hernani. London: Grant & Cutler, 1982.

  ———. Notre-Dame de Paris. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1988.

  ———. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 1: Cromwell. Amy Robsart. Hernani. Marion de Lorme. Le roi s’amuse. Lucrèce Borgia. Marie Tudor. Angelo, tyran de Padoue. La Esmeralda. Edited by Anne Ubersfeld. Paris: Robert Laffon, 1985.

  ———. Vol. 2: Ruy Blas. Les Burgraves. Torquemada. Théâtre en liberté. Les jumeaux. Mille francs de récompense. L’intervention. Edited by Arnaud Laster. Paris: Robert Laffon, 1985.

  Lamartine, Alphonse de. Méditations poétiques. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1969.

  Las Cases, Emmanuel de. Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. Paris: Seuil, 1968.

  Maurois, André. Victor Hugo and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1966.

  Musset, Alfred de. Les caprices de Marianne—On ne badine pas avec l’amour—Lorenzaccio—Le chandelier—Il ne faut jurer de rien. Paris: GF Flammarion, 1988.

  ———. La confession d’un enfant du siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.

  Robb, Graham. Victor Hugo: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

  Roche, Daniel. La culture équestre de l’Occident XVIe–XIXe siècle. 3 vols. Paris: Fayard, 2008.

  Rosa, Hartmut. Acceleration: Une critique sociale du temps. Translated from German by D. Renault. Paris: La Découverte, 2010.

  Stendhal. Histoire de la peinture en Italie. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.

  ———. Racine et Shakespeare. Paris: Kimé, 2005.

  ———. Le rouge et le noir: Chronique de 1830. Paris: Gallimard, 2002.

  Studeny, Cristophe. L’invention de la vitesse: France, XVIIIe–XXe siècle. Bibliothèques des histoires. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.

  Ubersfeld, Anne. Le drame romantique. Paris: Belin, 1993.

  Volney. Les ruines ou méditations sur la révolution des empires. Plassan: Desenne, 1791.

  Flaubert and Madame Bovary

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  Madame Bovary is the only true “realist novel” of the French nineteenth century. By the time the novel was published, in 1857, “realism” was a much-discussed concept, still controversial. A number of novels would claim the label. Yet many novelists we may think of as the greatest realists, especially the earlier Balzac and the later Zola, tend as well toward the mythic and the allegorical—tendencies that Flaubert robustly resists. There’s a paradox here, since Flaubert disliked the label “realist” and found “the real” itself mostly boring when not downright nauseating. But when he chose to leave the more exotic subjects and locales of some of his other fiction, when he set out to situate his story resolutely in “life in provincial France,” to paraphrase the subtitle of Madame Bovary, he fought things out within the realm of the real more completely than anyone else. His act of representation is firmly anchored in the things of reality.

  This claim for Flaubert’s realism is grounded in three qualities of Madame Bovary: the novelist’s choice of impersonality and impassivity, that is, his refusal to announce a position or pass a judgment in his own voice; the patient accumulation of detail that largely constitutes the narrative; and the very thematics of the novel, which show Emma Bovary’s dreams in their
conflict with the real, and their defeat by it.

  When T. S. Eliot said that “all great art is impersonal,” that it involves “an extinction of personality,” he demonstrated that he had absorbed the lesson of Flaubert, as indeed nearly all the great modernists did. Flaubert pronounced on this impersonality in a number of his letters (he never wrote literary criticism or other essays), and these statements were later made famous by the writers of the twentieth century, who saw in him the master craftsman who made the novel a serious art form. Many of these pronouncements in fact came during the writing of Madame Bovary. “The artist in his work must be like God in his creation, invisible and all-powerful: let him be everywhere felt but nowhere seen.” What does this mean? It is not a prescription for a kind of simple phenomenological description of the world but rather a plea to make dramatized characters and situations carry the burden of meaning without explicit authorial intervention of the kind that Balzac was famous for (“Here is why Lucien was unable …”; “To understand what Rastignac felt …”). The dramatized life of the novel should be allowed to speak for itself—to show us, not tell us, in a distinction that is now familiar to every student of narrative writing.

  The impersonality and impassivity of the novelist do not mean his lack of involvement, but rather his investment of his own self into his created worlds. In another letter, Flaubert wrote of the pleasures of being no longer oneself but rather free “to move around in the whole of one’s creation. Today, for instance, as both man and woman, at the same time lover and mistress, I rode horseback in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, and the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.” This must be one of the best descriptions ever of the process of novel writing: the sinking of one’s own self into others, the capacity to subdue the ego into other persons and animals and things. Flaubert’s whole philosophy of creation is captured in this comment. It explains his stylistic choices—for instance, why he makes such large use of free, indirect discourse, staying within the consciousnesses, the sensations, and the language of his characters rather than speaking in his own voice—and also why Madame Bovary was such a radically new creation and why it created a scandal, such that Flaubert was put on trial for outrage to public morality. The absence of authorial censure of Emma, the studied refusal to make normative judgments, was deeply disturbing. It explains also the apparent contradiction of the exclamation by this exponent of authorial impersonality, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”: she is me, I am her, because he has sunk himself into her experience of the world.

  That experience seems to take place first of all at the level of the detail, for the reader as well as the heroine. Implicitly, Flaubert seems to say that reality comes to us as a kind of noticing of things, often small things, and also a bumping into them. We as readers first meet Emma Bovary when her future husband goes to treat her father’s broken leg. Pause for a moment to note this curious feature of the novel, which starts us off with Charles Bovary, an initially ridiculous figure who manages to become a country doctor. He has been married already and widowed. In fact, Emma is the third “Madame Bovary” mentioned in the novel, after Charles’s mother and his first wife, which in retrospect may seem ominous. So we come to meet Emma only as an apparently ancillary figure, Charles’s patient’s daughter, through Charles’s noticings of her. As they stand at the door of her father’s house waiting for the doctor’s horse, “the fresh air surrounded her, lifting in disarray the stray wisps of hair on the nape of her neck or tossing her apron strings so that they snaked like banners about her hips.” When she drinks from a glass that is nearly empty, “the tip of her tongue, passing between her delicate teeth, licked with little stabs at the bottom of the glass.” Our picture of Emma seems to be largely constructed from such minute details: the whiteness of her fingernails, her pink cheeks, the tip of her ear emerging from under her hair, the sound of her clogs on the scrubbed farmhouse floor, the little drops of sweat on her bare shoulders. We are not given any full-length portrait of her, as a whole. The world, Flaubert seems to say, must be described. That is the most honest approach to representing it. And honest description focuses on the visible detail, the thing as it meets our senses.

  Description of detail can capture the beauty of a moment and a corner of reality. During a winter thaw, Emma goes to get her parasol: “The parasol, of dove-gray iridescent silk, with the sun shining through it, cast moving glimmers of light over the white skin of her face. She was smiling beneath it in the mild warmth; and they could hear the drops of water, one by one, falling on the taut moiré.” This is the kind of descriptive moment that made Henry James comment about Madame Bovary that “expression is creation, that it makes the reality … the image is thus always superior to the thing itself.” James perceives that the ordinariness of the everyday detail is both that and something more when it becomes language, something fixed in another, enduring medium.

  But the descriptive detail can be more disturbing as well. Charles, infatuated following their marriage, “could not refrain from constantly touching her comb, her rings, her scarf.” Or, when Emma has become Rodolphe’s mistress: “It was for him that she would file her nails with the care of an engraver, and that there was never enough cold cream on her skin, nor patchouli on her handkerchiefs. She would load herself with bracelets, rings, necklaces.” This accessorizing of herself suggests something artificial, factitious in her self-definition, as in her affair. Such a conclusion becomes hard to avoid when we reach her second lover, Léon: “He admired the sublimity of her soul and the lace on her petticoat.”

  This last example, linking sublime soul and lace petticoat, raises problems. The perception is ascribed to Léon, and one can say that the limitations in the way Emma is seen have to do with the limited perceptive powers of her lovers. Charles, Rodolphe, and Léon are all mediocre people. Their love for Emma can go no further than their own narrow capacities. In this sense, the limitations to the reader’s perceptions of Emma, seemingly an assemblage of details rather than a coherent whole, are part of the novel’s realism. We know her as she becomes an object of desire to others in her world, and it’s a narrow world. Consider the stable boy Justin’s fascination with Emma’s undergarments, which the maid is ironing: “he would stare avidly at all these women’s things spread out around him: the dimity petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawstring pantalets, vast at the hips and narrowing lower down.” Justin is then sent to clean Emma’s boots, enhancing our sense that articles of her clothing are invested with an erotic charge, that they are fetishes. The eros created around Emma makes the details by which we know her something like fetishes. In another example: as Rodolphe follows her into the woods for their first sexual encounter, she lifts her skirt and he gazes “at her delicate white stocking, which showed between the black cloth and the little black boot and seemed to him a part of her naked flesh.”

  Yet the details by which her lovers know her may also constitute the way she knows herself, and as well the way we readers come to know her, almost exclusively—and perhaps even the sole way her creator knows the world. What I mean to suggest here is that Flaubert’s vision of the world tends to come to rest on perspicuous details, things that become invested with the desire and the meaning that we might expect rather to inhere in her person or character. And here is one of the great reasons that Madame Bovary seems to us so modern, so fresh after more than a century and a half. Emma is not wholly known, not a fully upholstered character of the sort we associate with nineteenth-century fiction. She is a bundle of details, perceptions, feelings barely held together, not so much a self as someone in search of what a self might be. Something of this comes through in Flaubert’s title as well: not Emma Bovary, but Madame Bovary. She from the outset seems to be deprived of the requisites of selfhood, to be defined by the husband and society from which she is alienated. Her definition as “wife” is set against her search to becom
e, though what is as unclear to her as it is to us.

  When we learn at the time of her marriage to Charles that she “would have liked to be married at midnight, by torchlight,” we may, like her father, find that idea incomprehensible. But its sources become clear as we read on—past the wedding itself, with its plenitude of Norman eating and drinking—to learn of her reading. Chapter 6 of part 1 details her literary education, from the romantic idyll of Paul et Virginie through Christian tracts to Walter Scott. It’s the same problem that we encounter in Don Quixote: reading matter that produces a distorted view of reality, one that sets Emma up for constant disappointment. Her second attempt at a grand passion, following Rodolphe’s treachery, takes shape during a performance of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor, based on a Walter Scott novel, a drama of heightened emotion that gives her a momentary high that exalts her above sordid reality.

  That reality comes to us, as to Emma, piece by piece, especially in an iterative form, as the habitual, the routine that never changes. Flaubert’s descriptive use of the imperfect tense, the tense of habitual, repeated action, notably gives us a feeling of inescapable and nauseating depression. One example among many, the object of a commentary in Erich Auerbach’s celebrated study of the representation of reality in literature, Mimesis, records her mealtimes with Charles: “But it was most of all at mealtimes that she could not bear it any longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the stove that smoked, the door that squeaked, the walls that seeped, the damp flagstones, all the bitterness of life seemed to be served up on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled meat, there rose from the depths of her soul other gusts of revulsion.” And the passage continues in that vein. Those who want to judge Emma as shallow and self-deluding cite such moments as examples of her false expectations of life, her demand for a romance that exists in books but not in reality.