A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  So in January 1857, Flaubert was hauled into court, to listen to Maître Pinard denounce his work for outrage to public and religious morality. The prosecutor’s tactic, following his plot summary of the novel, was largely to read selected passages, then to exclaim over their evident immorality. He provided in this manner something of a literary commentary, a reader’s response to the effects produced by the novel. He lingered over the scene of Emma’s seduction by Rodolphe, predictably; he was especially outraged by the passage describing Emma’s beautification by adultery, the paragraph that begins: “Never had Madame Bovary been as lovely as she was during this time.” It continues:

  Her desires, her sorrows, her experience of pleasure, and her ever-youthful illusions had had the same effect as manure, rain, wind, and sun on a flower, developing her by degrees, and she was at last blooming in the fullness of her nature. Her eyelids seemed shaped expressly for those long, loving glances in which her pupils would disappear, while a heavy sigh would widen her delicate nostrils and lift the fleshy corners of her lips, shadowed, in the light, by a little dark down. Some artist skilled in depravity might have arranged the coil of her hair over the nape of her neck; it was looped in a heavy mass, carelessly, according to the chance dictates of her adulterous affair, which loosened it every day.

  And it goes on from there. This makes adultery merely good fertilizer for a woman’s beauty, the inevitable matter in which nature will do its work. The “artist skilled in depravity” seemed to stand in for Emma’s creator, who gives this passage a final whiplash by ending with the bewitched gaze of the deceived husband: “Charles, as in the early days of his marriage, found her delicious and quite irresistible.” The prosecutor indeed recognized the skill with which the depraved artist works: his portraits were “admirable so far as talent,” but “execrable from a moral standpoint.” Concerning Flaubert, he continued, there is “no covering, no veils, it’s nature in all her crudity!”

  That was something of a salute to Flaubert’s realism—but in a context in which “realism” was still problematic. The court acquitted Flaubert, and his publishers, but not without a short sermon on the goals and the limits of novelistic representation: “the mission of literature should be to embellish and restore the spirit in uplifting intelligence and in purifying manners, more than imprinting disgust in offering a picture of the disorders that may exist in society.” The judges considered themselves fully qualified to pronounce on “systems” of literature, ways of going about it. The pretext of painting characters and settings does not permit one to “reproduce” the errors of the chosen characters. Such a system applied to literary works and to painting “would lead to a realism which would be the negation of the beautiful and the good.” Flaubert was guilty of “a vulgar and often shocking realism.”

  The court’s judgment on Madame Bovary indicates how radical a concept realism still was in 1857. Though we now tend to extend the term backward—and Auerbach’s Mimesis demonstrates the various ways in which reality has been represented since antiquity—the term really came into use in the 1850s. Balzac, for instance, who died in 1850, began to be called “a realist” around 1853. Then came the decisive contribution (which Flaubert’s judge had in mind) of the painter Gustave Courbet, who at the time of the Exposition Universelle of 1855, designed to showcase Napoleon III’s Second Empire, set up his own exhibit in what he labeled the Pavillon du Réalisme. His cause was taken up by the short-lived journal Réalisme, edited by Edmond Duranty, and his collaborator Champfleury (Jules Husson), whose article on Courbet in 1855 (later a book chapter) became the manifesto of a new movement. Courbet’s paintings in his “House of Realism” do at times seem to be pictorial counterparts of Madame Bovary, especially his Burial at Ornans (fig. 1), which uses the size and scale of heroic history painting to portray a bedraggled group of bourgeois and peasants at a country funeral, pictured in an uneven line next to a hole in the ground that stands directly before the viewer of the canvas. Ugly, was the prime reaction to the Burial. Courbet’s painting was faulted on three grounds at once: its subject matter was vulgar, ugly, inappropriate; its manner of representation was inept, unharmonious, poorly composed and executed; and its very choice of what painting should be used for was unacceptable: what claim to attention can this outsized painting make on us? Courbet’s realism was a scandal, and so was Flaubert’s.

  Flaubert’s later novels in the realist mode (setting aside his works on “exotic” subjects, such as ancient Carthage in Salammbô or the various early Christian sects and heresies of The Temptation of Saint Anthony) are less perfect in their outcome than Madame Bovary, though equally challenging. Sentimental Education, which he described as the history of his own generation, pushes Flaubert’s impersonality and impassivity further still. Life, experience, and history (the novel takes on a major historical event, the Revolution of 1848) are grasped more and more by way of the language that various actors use. Flaubert’s indirect discourse becomes so pervasive that everything asserted in the novel seems to be ascribed to someone—or no one: to that generalized on. It is often difficult to say who is responsible for any given utterance. Who speaks here? The reaction to the novel was largely negative and, especially, baffled. Readers wanted a clearer statement of the author’s intentions. By the time of Bouvard and Pécuchet, language itself seems to have become the protagonist. The two copyists at the center of the novel take language with excessive literalism, attempting to realize its indications in reality, always with dismal results. That Flaubert apparently planned to make his sottisier—his collection of clichés that became known as the Dictionary of Received Ideas—part of the second volume of the novel reinforces our sense that it is not so much the world itself as the world as it is spoken that is now the prime object of Flaubert’s realism. That, of course, was already on the way in Madame Bovary. “Emma was rediscovering in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.” Marriage is conceived as a platitude, that is, a banal way of saying things, a cliché, a flatness of speech that then becomes the thing itself.

  Figure 1. Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849). Musée d’Orsay; photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

  The scandal of Flaubert’s realism continues to have force today because the language in which he creates it is so perfect to the task. I have often taught Madame Bovary to students and found that it remains fresh, radical, and unsettling today. We don’t read Madame Bovary in the same context as Flaubert’s contemporaries; the world has changed in so many ways since. And yet Emma’s predicament remains astonishingly of our moment. The lessons of feminism have made her aspirations and frustrations only the more pertinent, her fate only the more disquieting. The court wanted Flaubert to show life, love, religion, and morality enhanced by more decorous lighting. We have been disillusioned of that enhancement (though we still yearn for glamor), forced to accept as true much of what Flaubert was the first to demonstrate. We are all, women and men, Emma Bovary.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Note: Speeches of the prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge at Flaubert’s trial are in almost all French editions of the novel, but not in the English translations. I cite these passages from the French edition, my translations.

  Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953.

  Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, 1920.

  Flaubert, Gustave. Correspondance. Edited by Jean Bruneau and Yvan Leclerc. 5 vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1973–2007.

  ———. Letters of Gustave Flaubert. Translated by Francis Steegmuller. 2 vols. London: Picador, 2001. (Quoted are letters to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, March 18, 1857; and to Louise Colet, December 23, 1853.)

  ———. Madame Bovary. Paris: Folio Classique, 2001.

  ———. Madame Bovary. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York: Viking
, 2010.

  Gaillard, Françoise. “Gustave Courbet et le réalisme: Anatomie de la reception critique d’une oeuvre; ‘Un Enterrement à Ornans.’” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 6 (1980): 978–96.

  James, Henry. “Gustave Flaubert” (introduction to Madame Bovary, 1902). In James, Literary Criticism, vol. 2. New York: Library of America, 1984.

  Madame Bovary in the original French is available in a number of paperback editions, including Folio and Garnier/Flammarion. The best English translation is the latest, by Lydia Davis, used here, though that by Geoffrey Wall (for Penguin) is also fine.

  The best way to extend acquaintance with Flaubert is through his wonderful letters, which contain most of his comments on his craft: see the two-volume selection of letters in English translation by Francis Steegmuller, The Letters of Flaubert (see above). See also Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966). A recent biography is Frederick Brown, Flaubert (New York: Little, Brown, 2006). The best biography is Michel Winock, Flaubert (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), still untranslated. A classic study of realism in Madame Bovary can be found in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (see above). Also pertinent is Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 54–70. Among the most important books on Flaubert in English (and offering radically opposed views of him) are Victor Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); and Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). An interesting study of the trial that followed publication is Dominick LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). An important study in social theory of the novel as defined by Flaubert is Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). See also Hugh Kenner, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962); Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987); and Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval and Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud

  Poetry, Consciousness, and Modernity

  CLIVE SCOTT

  History creates its own anxieties, creates a need to recognize evolutions and locate turning points. It is comforting to be able to identify Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) as the essential pivot between a Romantic past and an emergent modernism, and then to propose that Verlaine and Rimbaud consolidated his initiatives. In his notes on Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue, a poet celebrated for his adoption by Pound and Eliot, obligingly uses the phrase “[He was] the first [who] [to] …” eight times. If the revolution of 1848, in which Baudelaire briefly took part, failed to establish republicanism, it shifted the sense in which poetry itself might be revolutionary: not as an incendiary vehicle of moral indignation or exhortation, but as the linguistic engineer of a revolution in being and consciousness. Baudelaire was the diagnostician of a new existential condition, which might principally be traced to displacements in urban mentality, in a Paris undergoing radical change at the hands of Napoleon III’s prefect of the Seine, Georges Haussmann. This condition was animated and tormented by inner contradiction, by moral unsteadiness, by sudden temperamental shifts between cruelty and apathy (spleen),1 by spiritual aspiration and dyspeptic cynicism, by mysticism and critical lucidity in creation (note the influence of Poe on Baudelaire’s compositional thinking), by selflessness and hypocrisy, by impulsiveness and addiction, and by an irony that was as much a lifeline as a rite of self-laceration. Irony is one of the weapons of dandyism, that “cult of the self” and of the will, that “pleasure of shocking and proud satisfaction in never being shocked,” which Baudelaire cultivated as a necessary defensive carapace. Correspondingly, the poet’s relationship with his reader is fundamentally changed: “Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère” (Hypocrite reader, my fellow creature, my brother) (“Au lecteur” / “To the Reader”). With the possibility of mutual contempt, the old contract of complicity between poet and audience turns to distrust, and the nagging fear of reciprocal indictment promotes nervous suspicion and unease.

  These are some of the respects and senses in which we can identify Baudelaire as the first of the “modernists.” But this condition, and the new relationship with the reader it entailed, might not only be expressed, it might also be transformed, by the power of language. Language, for Baudelaire, also has the capacity to found a new inclusivity, to create “correspondences” and morphings between the senses (synesthesia), between the natural and the surnaturel,2 between the material and spiritual worlds, by the device of what Laforgue calls his “immense comparisons,” by universal analogy, and indeed by the appropriation of suggestive triggers from the world of women (perfume, hair, deportment, jewelry). Thus, just as Baudelaire takes possession of himself, concentrates the human condition in his own self-consciousness, so equally he cultivates a multiplication of self, a dissolution of self into other kinds of consciousness. Sometimes this free migration of consciousness relates to the surnaturel, an expansion and intensification of the perceptual capacity, often associated with the “artificial paradises” of drugs, but by no means dependent on them:

  Edgar Poe says … that the effect of opium on the senses is to endow the whole of nature with a “supernatural” interest that gives every object a deeper, more willed, more despotic meaning. Even without resorting to opium, who has not known these admirable hours, … when the sky, of a more transparent blue, opens up depths like an abyss more infinite still, where sounds have musical resonances, where colors speak, where perfumes tell of worlds of ideas? Well, Delacroix’s painting seems to me the translation of these fine days of the spirit. … Like nature perceived by ultrasensitive nerves, it reveals surnaturalisme.

  At other times, however, this self-multiplication has a social orientation and becomes what in the prose poem “Les Foules” (“Crowds”) is called “un bain de multitude” (immersion in the multitude), a “universelle communion” (universal communion), a “sainte prostitution de l’âme” (sacred prostitution of the soul), or, more specifically, the pride “d’avoir vécu et souffert dans d’autres que moi-même” (of having lived and suffered in individuals other than myself) (“Les Fenêtres” / “Windows”). Writing itself, almost by its very nature, is the encounter of the prostitute and the dandy, where being spoken by language, and surrendering to it, is an indivisible partner of linguistic mastery and self-control: “Of the evaporation and centralization of the Self. That phrase says everything,” as Baudelaire puts it in his intimate journal Mon cœur mis à nu (My Heart Laid Bare).

  Barbey d’Aurevilly’s article on Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) of July 1857, designed to add weight to the poet’s case in answering the charge of offending public morals, attributes to the collection “a secret architecture.” In December 1861, in a letter to Vigny, Baudelaire declares that the only praise he looks for in relation to Les fleurs du mal is that it should be recognized not “purely as an album” but as a properly framed structure, with beginning and end. Many studies have devoted themselves to revealing this architecture, picking out the intricate thematic weave and tracing the existential progress of an unquiet mind. I want briefly to suggest the foundations of an architecture more secret still, Baudelaire’s writerly metabolism, the operations of his linguistic psyche, the drives of his creative organism, to which he himself refers when he speaks of rhetorics and prosodies as “a collection of rules necessitated by the very organization of the spiritual being.” This acute sense that the forms of poetic language have psycho-existential origins, that these forms are not sublimations of drives, nor achievements of self-transcendence, but descents into the instinctive self, is a watershed in the history of poetic writing. Not only does it compel us to recast formal conventions as profound expressive needs, it also alerts us to the reconfiguring of consciousness in the invention of new forms. Over the coming pages,
some of the indices of these psycho-existential connections will be traced, in all three of this chapter’s poets, in the details of punctuational habits, syntactic and rhythmic propensities, and lexical and acoustic choices.

  We might begin by considering Baudelaire’s attraction to the exclamation mark and his deep mistrust of enumeration. For Baudelaire, the exclamation mark is not just that sign of vocal amplitude that accompanies apostrophe, or the imperative, or indeed the exclamatory; it is also part of a neurotic condition and a hyperbolic imagination, with other modal values: for example, the urgently revelatory:

  Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le cœur

  Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!

  (“L’ennemi”)

  (And the shadowy Enemy who gnaws at our hearts

  Thrives and grows strong on the blood we shed!)