Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  Flaubert’s irony is present in the eloquent juxtapositions he creates between the “poetic” and the brutally commonplace, with an effect that is sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking, but that always draws us up short, breaks the “mood,” whether of romance or grief, that another author might have chosen to sustain. An exquisite passage—often a description of nature—will be undercut, as though, here, Flaubert is also undercutting his own lyrical impulse, by what immediately follows it, a banal, mundane comparison or action. There are numerous examples.

  Emma, for instance, is lying on the ground in the woods, still tremulous from her first lovemaking with Rodolphe, in tune with the natural landscape around her, which is fully and sensuously described; but the passage concludes with the flat statement that Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, is mending a bridle. Much later in the story, in a boat with Léon, Emma feels a chill at the thought of Rodolphe with other women; the boatman, who has unknowingly upset her, spits into his palm and takes up his oars. Crushingly, pathetically, after Emma’s death, as she is being laid out, one of the women working over her admires her beauty in rather glib terms—how alive she looks!; immediately after, as she lifts Emma’s head to set the wreath on her, black liquid runs out of the dead woman’s mouth. Flaubert the obdurate antiromantic could not be more clearly in evidence than at this moment.

  As in the above examples, it is the incisive specificity of the poetic details and then the abruptness with which Flaubert “cuts” to the equally specific but disturbing or brutal details that jolts us so.

  Some of these ironic juxtapositions produce not horror, or pathos, but humor.

  For instance, during the scene at the agricultural fair, the poetic and romantic exchanges between Rodolphe and Emma, who are observing from a window above, in the town hall, are punctuated (without authorial comment) by the sober announcements of awards for agricultural advancements in such areas as “manure” and “use of oilseed cakes.”

  There is humor, also, in the juxtaposition of disproportionate elements, as, for instance, in the case of the writings of Homais, who is a journalist as well as an apothecary: sometimes it is the grandiosity of his style that is out of keeping with the banality of his subject (for instance, cider); or, as he reports the festivities, it is the glorious colors in which he paints them in his article that have little relation to what we know of them in all their paltriness and insufficiency.

  Then again, the disproportion may lie not in Homais’s writing, but in his manner—between his pomposity, in a moment of embarrassment with the grieving Charles, and the obviousness of his statement: “Homais thought it suitable to talk a little horticulture; plants needed humidity.”

  Yet complicating our reactions to these moments is, in one instance, during the awards ceremony at the agricultural fair, some modicum of respect for the concerns of the proponents of advances in agriculture, and, in another, as Homais waters Charles’s plants after his tactless question about the funeral, some sympathetic understanding of the pharmacist in his moment of embarrassment. Our emotional responses to the incidents of the novel are never entirely unmixed, which is of course one of the sources of its power.

  Because Homais is something of a writer, and a character obviously much enjoyed by Flaubert (who refers to him affectionately in his letters as “my pharmacist” and occasionally likes to use an expression Homais might have used), it is hard not to think that he must represent a comment on the role or the practice of the writer, or one aspect of it. In fact, late in the novel, Flaubert the great reviser insinuates a moment of self-parody that would be comical if it weren’t subsumed by the drama of Emma’s fatal illness. As Emma nears her end, Homais must send word by messenger to the two doctors who might be able to save her. He goes home and bends to his task, but although speed is of the essence, he is so agitated (and so particular about his prose style) that he requires no less than fifteen drafts to find the right wording.

  Twice, at least, we are allowed to experience an event and then to read Homais’s written version of it. Homais’s material (like Flaubert’s) is mundane and subject to lapses into mediocrity—the fireworks at the conclusion of the agricultural fair are damp and they fizzle, a complete failure. But he transforms this material, inflates it, gives it importance and success, by a grandiloquent style that Flaubert, tongue in cheek, describes in a letter as “philosophic, poetic, and progressive”—and by his outright lies. A piece of writing, Flaubert seems to be demonstrating, may always be false: the writer has the power to transform reality as he wishes. Words, particularly in print, have the perfidious power to misrepresent and betray. And eloquence is especially dangerous: the better one can write, the more persuasively one can lie.

  Although Homais is the only “professional” writer in the book, other styles of writing appear in the course of it: Emma’s father’s letters; the speeches of the officials; Rodolphe’s farewell note to Emma; Charles’s instructions for the coffining. Flaubert, entering fully, always, into his characters’ points of view, shifts gears convincingly as he moves in and out of these other styles, no less alien to him, perhaps, than the style of narration of the novel as a whole. His own natural style, after all, he says in one letter, is that of Saint Anthony: what he wishes he could be writing are “grand turns of phrase, broad, full periods rolling along like rivers, a multiplicity of metaphors, great bursts of style.”

  What he is trying to achieve in this book, instead, is a style that is clear and direct, economical and precise, and at the same time rhythmic, sonorous, musical, and “as smooth as marble” on the surface; with varied sentence structures and with imperceptible transitions from scene to scene and from psychological analysis to action.

  Though he did not write poetry himself, in a letter to Colet (a poet) Flaubert complains: “What a bitch of a thing prose is! It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”

  Yet Proust, in the course of his vehement response, in 1920, to a negative article about Flaubert, commented admiringly on what he called Flaubert’s “grammatical singularities,” which, he said, expressed “a new vision”; our way of seeing external reality was radically changed by Flaubert’s “entirely new and personal use” of the past definite, the past indefinite, the present participle, certain pronouns, and certain prepositions. He went on to talk about other singularities: Flaubert’s unprecedented manner of using the imperfect tense and indirect discourse, his unconventional handling of the word and—omitting it where one would expect it and inserting it where one would normally not look for it—his emphatically “flat” use of verbs, and his deliberately heavy placement of adverbs. But it was Flaubert’s innovative use of the imperfect tense that most impressed Proust: “This [use of the] imperfect, so new in literature,” said Proust, “completely changes the aspect of things and people.”

  The imperfect, or imparfait, tense in French is the form of the past tense that expresses an ongoing or prevailing condition, or a repeated action. It is most usually conveyed in English by would or used to. Expressing a continuing state or action, and thereby signaling the continuity of time itself, it perfectly creates the effect Flaubert was seeking—what Nabokov, in his lecture on the novel, describes as “the sense of repetition, of dreariness in Emma’s life.” Thus, early in her marriage, Charles’s (tiresomely predictable) habits are described using a string of verbs in the imperfect: “He would return home late.… Then he would ask for something to eat.… He would take off his frock coat.… He would tell her one by one all the people he had met … he would eat the remains of the beef hash with onions … then go off to bed, sleep on his back, and snore.”

  While the imperfect, as agent of “background” description and habitual activity, was traditionally, before Flaubert, subordinated to the simple past tense, used to narrate finite action, with Flaubert, the habitual and the ongoing
are foregrounded, and the division between description and action is blurred, as is the division between past and present, creating a sustained immediacy in the story. Even the speeches of the characters are often reported indirectly in the imperfect (as, for instance, in the mayor’s wife’s comment quoted above: “Madame Bovary was compromising herself”), allowing Flaubert to slip seamlessly into a character’s point of view without abandoning the detachment of the third-person narration. The narration remains dynamic despite the fact that a large proportion of the book, in Flaubert’s view at least, is exposition or preparation for action.

  In a letter to Colet of January 15, 1853—sixteen months into the writing of the book—Flaubert worries about proportions: “I have now lined up five chapters of my second part in which nothing happens.” This was an exaggeration, of course, but he felt there was going to be a great quantity of exposition, or prologue, and then very little unfolding action, before the conclusion. This, too, had not been done before—telling a story with so little action. He believed that those proportions were true to life: “A blow lasts a minute but is anticipated for months—our passions are like volcanoes: always rumbling but only intermittently erupting.” Yet he worried that the demands of aesthetics required something different.

  If Proust calls A Sentimental Education “a long report” in which the characters do not really take part in the action, Flaubert calls Madame Bovary a “biography,” one that takes the form of an extended analysis of one woman’s psychology. But he believed that it could, even so, have the pace of action: “It also seems to me not impossible to give psychological analysis the rapidity, clarity, passion of a purely dramatic narration. This has never been tried and would be beautiful.” It would seem, in fact, that this was just the sort of action that really interested Flaubert: the subtle shifts of feeling created in a reader by description and by psychological analysis. “I maintain that images are action,” he says. “It is harder to sustain a book’s interest by this means, but if one fails it is the fault of style.”

  * * *

  Another striking characteristic of his psychological portraiture is the evenhandedness with which he gives validity to multiple points of view at the same time, without promoting one over another, and thus reproduces, remarkably and unusually, the multiple conflicting self-interests that occur in real life all the time.

  Abruptly, without comment, he “cuts” from one character’s preoccupation to another’s. Just when we are wholly absorbed in Léon’s impatient vigil in the cathedral, for instance, we are recalled to the very lively emotions of the tiresome verger, whom Léon is slighting, and the reality of his “fury”—after all, a large part of his identity is involved in showing people the cathedral’s points of interest. Or we remain captivated, imaginatively, by Emma’s lingering bliss after her “honeymoon” with Léon until we are deflected by Homais’s equally real anger at Justin during the jam-making scene. And then there is Homais’s comical but heartless preoccupation, as Emma is dying, with producing a good lunch for the visiting doctor; or the blind man’s arrival at Yonville in search of the promised cure for his terrible deformity just as Emma breathes her last; or the innkeeper’s distraction, as she worries about the competition from a rival inn, while Charles is trying to unburden his grief to her.

  At such moments, Flaubert is constantly reminding us that even as we are caught up in one drama, another, of real importance to someone else, is taking place right next to us—as in life. But through his abrupt changes of point of view he is also manipulating us, as readers: just when we are most absorbed in one character’s drama—as when we are losing ourselves in a lyrical description—he interrupts and undercuts it.

  * * *

  Many of Flaubert’s transitions are indeed imperceptible, while others are abrupt; at still other points in the novel the narration suddenly makes a rapid advance, covering months or years in a paragraph or two. But there is a tight unity to the novel as a whole, rising not only from its extreme economy—in which every element serves more than one function—but also from its recurring words, phrases, images, and actions. A small sampling would include butterflies (actual and metaphorical, as in the passages quoted above); constructions in layers (Charles’s schoolboy cap, the wedding cake, Emma’s nesting coffins); Emma’s fitfully recurring attraction to religious faith; Homais’s quoted writings; Charles “suffocating” with emotion twice near the end of the book and the theme of suffocation in general; the same phrase—bloquer les interstices—used first literally, to describe “filling the gaps” between Emma’s body and the sides of the coffin; and then figuratively during the awkward last conversation between Rodolphe and Charles.

  Particularly prevalent are recurring images involving water, the sea, and boats. These include the “skiffs by moonlight” in Emma’s convent reading; the gondola in her daydream of a future life with Rodolphe; the actual “skiff by moonlight” in which she and Léon go to the island each evening of their three-day “honeymoon”; and the gondola-shaped bed in the hotel room where they meet thereafter every week.

  Most striking, however, is the repeated image of a sealed vessel (carriage, casket, coffin) tossed about in the waves of a troubled sea. Its first notable appearance is in the opening speech of the agricultural fair, as a pompous official pays homage to the king, “who guides the Chariot of State amid the unceasing perils of a stormy sea.” Later, as Emma gives herself to Léon during the prolonged ride through the city, the king is replaced by the driver of the hackney cab, steering (rather carelessly) “a carriage with drawn blinds that kept appearing and reappearing, sealed tighter than a tomb and tossed about like a ship at sea.” Here, Flaubert has taken the speechifier’s mixed metaphor and added the simile (another layer) of the sealed tomb. Finally, he repeats the comparison at the end of the novel, as Emma’s nesting coffins, hammered and soldered, are borne to the cemetery: “The bier moved forward in little jolts, like a boat pitching with every wave.”

  Such is the tight construction of the novel, and the utter conviction of the detailed descriptions and psychological portraits throughout, that we compliantly ignore, most of the time, any passing questions we may have either about inconsistencies in the plot or about implausibility in plot elements, the most conspicuous being that Charles never suspects any of Emma’s betrayals, never notices the sound of the sand striking the shutters as he and she sit reading, never receives an anonymous letter from a busybody. (And how does he, deeply in debt by the end of the novel by reason of Emma’s extravagances, pay for her three coffins?) If space and time as handled in the novel are both “elastic,” as has been said by some critics, so is plausibility. And yet this is not a distraction as we read—it is barely noticeable. The requirements of psychology take precedence over plausibility and consistency in time and space, and the psychology is entirely persuasive.

  2010

  VISUAL ARTISTS: EARLY TOURIST PHOTOGRAPHS

  Boys with cart on beach. The Dutch boys—variously in sweater, smocks, shirt with bib, and clogs—are nestled around or perched on the shafts of a sturdy cart equipped with baskets that must have something to do with fishing for shrimp, eel, oysters, or fish, or with gathering seaweed. In the background, holidaymakers, either foreign or Dutch, stand at the shoreline in more cosmopolitan dress, and a horse is partly visible, there either to pull a “bathing machine” or, more likely, to assist with some aspect of the fishing industry.

  Dutch Scenes: A Portfolio of Early Twentieth-Century Tourist Photographs

  Just as there is no single type of lace bonnet in Brittany, but rather many variants, there is no single Dutch national costume, despite what we might think from looking at the illustrations on cookie tins or the outfits on little Dutch dolls. Beginning as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, each region—sometimes each island or even village—in the Netherlands developed its own characteristic way of dressing: a small, close-fitting white cap here, a large-winged black cap there; a striped apron here, black stockings
on Sunday there; a several-stranded coral necklace in many areas but not all. In the nineteenth century, as Holland evolved from a number of provinces under one central government into a more unified single entity, the traditional costumes, in response to this threatened loss of identity, became even more individual and more locally particular.

  One influence on the development of distinctive dress seems to have been the relative isolation of the different communities. Many communities in the coastal parts of the Netherlands were originally established on islands only later joined to the mainland through the ever-ongoing land reclamation that has been so integral to the creation of the Netherlands. The combination of this isolation and the requirements of climate and work—farming and fishing for the men, household care and market vending for the women—led to the development of such costume elements as stout, waterproof, roomy woolen pants for the men, warm skirts with multiple petticoats for the women, always a cap of some sort to keep the head warm, wooden clogs. Different religious groups within the same region would be characterized by their own distinctive dress, just as, in the United States, the Amish and Hutterian communities continue to dress in their characteristic fashions. The enforced leisure in winter and stormy weather may well have encouraged the development of the elaborate ornamentation characteristic of some costumes: the embroidery on a bodice or the quantity of lace in the voluminous “fall” of a head covering. One more element in the costume was the display of wealth: silver coins on the men’s jackets or pants, jewelry on the women’s caps.