Afterlives of the Saints

by Colin Dickey

  If there is a posterwoman for this problem, it is Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary. As a young girl in a convent, Emma devours saints' biographies and romances, missing the moral instruction and fixating on the sensual images: "She had loved the church for the sake of the flowers, music for the words of the ballads, and literature for its power to kindle her passions; but her mind rebelled against the mysteries of faith, as she became ever more irritated by the discipline, which was a thing alien to her temperament." This inability to get the lesson, to take to her conditioning, to put her time to good use, in turn creates a dangerous imbalance in her, leading to her dissatisfaction with her husband's bourgeois provincialism, to her adultery, to her suicide, and all the rest— all of Madame Bovary's problems can be traced to a fixation on fantastical narratives and images that have no place in reality. Indeed, when it comes to her first extramarital infatuation, the young law student Léon, she prefers dreaming of him to his actual presence: "She was in love with Léon, and she sought solitude, the better to take her pleasure undistracted, in images of him. The actual sight of him upset these voluptuous meditations. Emma trembled at the sound of his footsteps; and, in his presence, the emotion subsided, leaving her with only an immense astonishment that finished in sadness." Emma's crime is only secondarily adultery; her real transgression is her surrender to the madness of novels, to the endless production of virtual images that have no correlation with the reality around her.

  The danger of the reader is that she (for it is always a she) conjures fantasies and images that have no real correspondence with reality; she engages in romance, in fantasies— she creates a surplus, a fictitious capital of images. None of these have exchange value, none have use value, and so they corrupt and defile.

  It was the creation of this woman obsessed with fantastical images that won Flaubert both fame and infamy— not just her story but the finely detailed, exacting prose that set the stage for the modern realist novel. This is the writer who, famously, nearly drove himself mad searching for le mot juste, the perfect word, the single expression that could tame and corral the visual imagination of his reader. As recently as 2008, critics like James Wood were still making the case for Flaubert's influence: "Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring," he writes; "it all begins again with him. There really is time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible."

  Thank not just Flaubert but his friends Louis Bouilhet and Max Du Camp, who steered him away from dangerously abstract romanticism toward the minutely detailed life of Emma Bovary. In the fall of 1849, the then unknown Flaubert invited Bouilhet and Du Camp — his two closest friends— to join him for a reading of what he believed would be his masterpiece, a retelling of the temptation of Anthony. The thirty-year-old writer had been working on The Temptation for four years, and he was excited finally to share it with the two men whose opinion he trusted most. Bouilhet and Du Camp were likewise excited. Even though Flaubert had yet to publish anything, they both knew of his extraordinary talent and were anxious to hear this masterwork, to be present at the first airing of a project that had consumed their dear friend for so long.

  Flaubert told them beforehand that he wanted their honest appraisal of the work. But just before he began, the author waved the manuscript pages in the air above his head and exclaimed, "If you don't howl with pleasure at this, you're incapable of being moved by anything!" Settling down, he began to read.

  He read the entire manuscript straight through, all 541 pages. Eight hours a day, in uninterrupted four-hour blocks of time, for four solid days. During that entire time, as he read his opus, these men whom he most loved and trusted— Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet— sat in silence.

  They would later remember those four days as the most painful in their lives. What they heard was no masterpiece but an unending morass of words that was by turns incompre hensible, banal, repetitive, childish, and plain boring. "As he read," Du Camp recalled, Flaubert warmed, but we, though we tried to share his enthusiasm, remained cold as ice. Words, words— harmonious phrases expertly put together, full of noble images and startling metaphors, but often redundant, and containing whole passages which could have been transposed and combined without changing the effect of the book as a whole. There was no progression— the scene always remained the same, though played by different characters. We said nothing, but Flaubert could easily perceive we were not favorably impressed, and from time to time he interrupted himself to cry: "Wait! Wait! You'll see!"

  After it was over, they did their best to put a good face on the experience, to let Flaubert down easily. But that was a difficult task, as they clearly felt that the author's last four years (and their own last four days) had been wasted on something unsalvageable. With as much tact as he could muster, Louis Bouilhet told Flaubert simply, "We think you should throw it into the fire and never speak of it again." Finally Du Camp, struggling to put a good spin on things, explained to Flaubert, "You proceed by expansion. One subject sweeps you toward another, and you end up forgetting the point of departure. A droplet becomes a torrent, the torrent a river, the river a lake, the lake an ocean, the ocean a tidal wave. You drown, you drown your characters, you drown the event, you drown the reader, and your work is drowned."

  At their urging, Foucault agreed to abandon the abstract and focus on careful, detailed observations of real life, writing Madame Bovary in a fraction of the time he'd spent on his desert saint. But if the adulterous woman was what he was to become known for, it was the ascetic hermit that remained his obsession; even after his humiliation at the hands of his friends, he continued to be tempted by the romanticism of his Anthony story. After the failure of that first attempt, he went to Egypt on an extended voyage with Du Camp, who had won a commission from the Academie d'Inscriptions to photograph architectural antiquities there.

  Accompanying Du Camp on such a mission was somewhat difficult for Flaubert since he disdained photography. Flaubert came of age in an era where culture was becoming increasingly visual— cheap lithographs and reproductions were available everywhere, and the new invention of photography was already vastly changing the cultural and artistic landscape. Flaubert hated all of it. For most of his life, he managed to completely avoid the camera's eye; he once wrote to his mother, "I would never allow anyone to photograph me. Max did it once, but I was in Nubian costume, standing, and seen from a considerable distance, in a garden." Indeed, Du Camp's photograph of Flaubert in the garden of the Hotel du Nil is the only known image of Flaubert as a young man. Flaubert's iconophobia was legendary; at the time, magazine caricaturists needed written permission from their subjects before publishing an image— a right that Flaubert never granted. As he told one illustrator, "I reserve my face for myself." And that he did. It seems almost inconceivable now that we have no definitive idea of what he looked like during most of his life, that someone of such historical importance managed so successfully to elude portraiture until well into his late life.

  As realism became the dominant mode of fiction, novelists from Dickens to James had contentious relationships with visual culture. But Flaubert is a special case. He plays Anthony to the temptation of the visual world before him— he seeks the singular word of the god-like author, le mot juste, perfectly placed and immovable for all time. But this word is always under threat from photographers and hack illustrators. The estrangement of word and image that Foucault saw beginning in the Renaissance reaches its climax here, with Flaubert, the hermit-like author resisting the temptations of a thousand images.

  But if Flaubert is a special case in this regard, it is because his loathing of the visual image went beyond his aesthetic. Put simply, Flaubert was terrified of images because he had epilepsy, and he believed that he had developed epilepsy because he masturbated, and he masturbated because he could not write his masterpiece, The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
/>   Flaubert worked on the Temptation off and on from 1845 until the eventual publication of the third and final version twenty-nine years later, in 1874. It was never easy, and its production was an almost constant struggle. Often, out of frustration, he turned to masturbation, which he was fairly casual about describing. "I'm gnawed by anger, impatience, impotence," he confided to a friend. " There are moments when my head bursts with the bloody pains I'm taking over this. Out of sheer frustration I jerked off yesterday, feeling the same bleakness that drove me to masturbate at school, when I sat in detention. The ejaculate soiled my pants, which made me laugh, and I washed it off. Ah! I'm quite sure Monsieur Scribe never stooped so low!" Masturbation was a foil to good writing both literally and figuratively; in his letters to female friends, he likened the frustrations of writing to "masturbating his head" in order to "ejaculate" a few sentences at a time. And in 1855 he wrote, "We take notes, we embark on voyages . . . we become scholars, archeologists, historians, doctors, cobblers and people of taste. But what about heart and verve and sap? We're good at licking cunt. But humping? Ejaculating in order to make a child?" Above all, Flaubert wanted to make something, to be a productive member of literary society through a great and popu lar work. Nothing threatened this more than his own Saint Anthony. Flaubert's obsession with the hermit was too esoteric, too idiosyncratic. The nineteenth century wanted the realism of Balzac; it had no taste for the romance Flaubert sought to create. His was a perverse, solitary obsession, self-centered in its scope and taste— no wonder it drove him to self-pollution.

  Flaubert was playing a dangerous game; in the nineteenth century, it was believed that masturbation presented far more serious dangers than simply bad writing. It was, quite simply, thought to be lethal. In the 1875 edition, Larousse's Grand Dictionnaire noted that "we find in the annals of medicine plenty of cases of five-, six-, and eight-year-old children dead as a result of masturbation." As Samuel Tissot, one of the foremost fighters against onanism, noted, "Too great a quantity of semen being lost in the natural course produces dire effects; but they are still more dreadful when the same quantity has been dissipated in an unnatural manner. The accidents that happen to such as waste themselves in a natural way are very terrible, those which are occasioned by masturbation are still more so." Masturbation, it was said, could lead to consumption or any number of nervous disorders, including epilepsy, which plagued Flaubert throughout his life. He suffered his first attack when he was twenty-one, on January 1, 1844, while riding in a carriage with his brother. With the onset of the seizure, Flaubert lost consciousness for ten minutes in what he later described as "torrents of flame" sweeping him away. He was to suffer from these episodes regularly throughout his life, and they so horrified him that he would never once use the word epilepsy to describe his condition.

  By Flaubert's time, such an attack no longer bespoke divine or demonic possession; Flaubert's seizures were quite a long way from Anthony's body wracked and tossed about the tomb in a cataclysmic spiritual battle. Convulsions and spasms like Flaubert's were, rather, understood to be the result of a serious moral failing, an ethical rather than divine transgression. And Flaubert seemed to agree with Tissot's diagnosis— he confided to a friend once how "madness and lust are two realms I've explored so deliberately. . . . But I've paid a price for it. My nervous malady is the scum of these little intellectual pranks. Each attack has been a kind of hemorrhage of innervation."

  Why did masturbation lie at the root of so much suffering? As Thomas Laqueur explains in his exhaustive history of masturbation, Solitary Sex, three things made onanism unnatural. First, it concerned a fantasy rather than a real object, and as such, "masturbation threatened to overwhelm the most protean and potentially creative of the mind's faculties— the imagination— and drive it over a cliff." Second, it was profoundly antisocial, or at least it was social "in all the wrong ways," as Laqueur suggests: "Wicked servants taught it to children; wicked older boys taught it to innocent younger ones; girls and boys in schools taught it to each other away from adult supervision." Third, it was uncontrollable; it could "neither be sated nor moderated. Done alone, driven only by the mind's own creations, it was a primal, irremediable, and seductively, even addictively, easy transgression. Every man, woman, and child suddenly seemed to have access to the boundless excesses of gratification that had once been the privilege of the Roman emperors."

  We know now what Anthony was doing in that cave and why he was tormented for it. Alone, in the deserted privacy of the desert, phantasms multiply and corrupt the mind, and the seminal work of the recluse gives birth not to healthy children but to unnatural demons. Alone, the imagination goes into overdrive— it produces multitudes— the heterodox excess that tempts Anthony is also the insatiable imagination of the masturbator, an excess without limit or reserve.

  But there was a deeper problem, particularly in those early days of the Industrial Revolution, for masturbation not only mocked traditional sexuality and marriage, it more insidiously parodied and threatened the developing system of market capitalism. Like credit, sexual fantasies could seem real but were in fact based on nothing. Behind every economic bubble lies the same masturbatory economy.

  And behind them all also lies Emma Bovary and her production of useless images that satisfy nothing but their own excess, leading to self-destruction and madness. And Laqueur notes that novels in particular "were even more threatening than the world of commerce; they were more purely the counterpoint of masturbation. Markets, however wild and speculative, had a bottom line, however hidden; bubbles burst, credit collapsed. No reassuring reality principle governed the world of novels." On this point, our good Dr. Tissot was no fool; he knew full well that novels and their writers led down the dangerous road to self-abuse: "The self-polluter perpetually abandoned to his obscene meditations is in this regard, something in the case of the man of letters, who fixes all his attention on one point."

  So it would seem that Emma Bovary, after all, is not so much an adulteress as a masturbator. And indeed, a hundred years after the novel's publication, another novelist, James Agee, put his finger on the button in a review of Billy Wilder's film Double Indemnity: "I have always thought— not very originally, I imagine— that the essence of Madame Bovary and her millions of greatgranddaughters is masturbation, literal as often as figurative."

  Reading and masturbation. Emma engages in both, literally and figuratively. In fact, the two vices are the same action: succumbing to a surplus of images that are not grounded in reality. Both threaten capitalism, and both were the lifelong pursuits of the epileptic Flaubert. Flaubert, who was to have begun a career in law and would have become a successful, productive member of bourgeois society. That is, before his epilepsy set in and spared him that fate.

  Epilepsy, after all, is not just one of many illnesses that could result from the solitary vice; it is in many ways the most emblematic. The epileptic suffers from the nightmare form of the masturbator's plethora of fantasies: attacked by an endless, ergotistic series of hallucinations from which he cannot escape. Here's how Flaubert explained it: "At twenty-one I nearly died of a nervous illness brought on by a series of irritations and troubles, by late nights and anger. It lasted ten years. (I have felt, I have seen everything in Saint Teresa, in Hoffman and Edgar Poe; people visited by hallucinations are not strangers to me.)" Flaubert was not Emma Bovary, in love with these useless images; he was Anthony, plagued by them, tormented by them.

  In the 1848 draft of Flaubert's Temptation, Anthony speaks for his creator, describing his temptations in the language of the epileptic: "I felt desperately unable to control my thought; it slipped the bonds with which I had tied it and escaped me. . . . Like a rogue elephant, my mind would race beneath me with wild trumpetings. Sometimes I'd lean back in fright, or else boldly try to stop it. But its speed stunned me, and I'd get up broken, lost."

  As Frederick Brown put it in his recent biography of Flaubert, " Since his memory for images was astonishingly retentive, mor
tal danger lay in those thrust upon him from without or in hallucinations independent of his will. The author who devoted himself stubbornly to a delirious anchorite was also the epileptic terrified of losing his mind and the lover fearful of being tyrannized by desire (all three combined to make up the man who, fighting shy of cameras, sat only once or twice, grudgingly and late in life, for a photographic portrait)."

  Flaubert's terror of images and his refusal to have his work illustrated, his masturbation, his epilepsy— all tap into a moment of iconophobia in the nineteenth century, one that is still with us today. A fear of a surplus of images, of too many pictures, many of them free-floating and without referents, unable to be entered meaningfully into a system of commodities, of exchange and use value— this is the terrifying truth: that our modern society is based on nothing but fantasy. The capitalist, the reader, the masturbator cower in Anthony's cave, beset on all sides by endlessly replicating pictures of madness.

  F I G U R E 1 0 : Temptation of Saint Anthony, from the Isenheim altarpiece (c. 1512– 1516), Matthias Grünewald MUSEE D'UNTERLINDEN, COLMAR, FRANCE/GIRAUDON/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

  Part Four: Demons of Belief