8. EVOCATIVE NAMES
We have Krook, of course, and then there are Blaze and Sparkle, Jewellers; Mr. Blower and Mr. Tangle are lawyers; Boodle and Coodle and Doodle, etc., are politicians. This is a device of old comedy.
9. ALLITERATION AND ASSONANCE
The device has already been remarked in connection with repetition. But we may enjoy Mr. Smallweed to his wife: "You dancing, prancing, shambling, scrambling, poll-parrott" as an example of assonance; or the alliteration of the arch of the bridge that has been "sapped and sopped away" in Lincolnshire, where Lady Dedlock lives in a "deadened" world. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is, in a way, an absolute alliteration reduced to the absurd.
10. THE AND-AND-AND DEVICE
This is made a characteristic of Esther's emotional manner, as when she describes her companionship at Bleak House with Ada and Richard: "I am sure that I, sitting with them, and walking with them, and talking with them, and noticing from day to day how they went on, falling deeper and deeper in love, and saying nothing about it, and each shyly thinking that this love was the greatest of secrets...." And in another example, when Esther accepts Jarndyce: "I put my two arms round his neck and kissed him; and he said was this the mistress of Bleak House; and I said yes; and it made no difference presently, and we all went out together, and I said nothing to my precious pet [Ada] about it."
11. THE HUMOROUS, QUAINT, ALLUSIVE, WHIMSICAL NOTE
"His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable"; or, "The turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance (probably Christmas)"; or, "the crowing of the sanguine cock in the cellar at the little dairy in Cursitor Street, whose ideas of daylight it would be curious to ascertain, since he knows from his personal observation next to nothing about it"; or, "a short, shrewd niece, something too violently compressed about the waist, and with a sharp nose like a sharp autumn evening, inclining to be frosty towards the end."
12. PLAY ON WORDS
Some examples are "Inquest-Inkwhich" (tied up with fog); or "Hospital-Horsepittle"; or the law-stationer relates his "Joful and woful experience"; or " 'Ill fo manger, you know,' pursues Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture in an English stable." There is still a long way from here to Joyce's Finnegans Wake, that petrified superpun, but it is the right direction.
13. OBLIQUE DESCRIPTION OF SPEECH
This is a further development of Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen's manner, with a greater number of samples of speech within the description. Mrs. Piper testifies at the inquest on the death of Nemo by indirect report: "Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell. Mrs. Piper lives in the court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but one before the half-baptising of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the Plaintive—so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased—was reported to have sold himself. Thinks it was the Plaintive's air in which that report originatinin. See the Plaintive often and considered as his air was feariocious and not to be allowed to go about some children being timid (and if doubted hoping Mrs. Perkins may be brought forard for she is here and will do credit to her husband and herself and family). Has seen the Plaintive wexed and worrited by the children (for children they will ever be and you cannot expect them specially if of playful dispositions to be Methoozellers which you was not yourself)," etc., etc.
Oblique rendering of speech is frequently used, in less eccentric characters, to speed up or to concentrate a mood, sometimes accompanied, as here, by lyrical repetition: Esther is persuading the secretly married Ada to go with her to visit Richard: " 'My dear,' said I, 'you have not had any difference with Richard since I, have been so much away?'
" 'No, Esther.'
" 'Not heard of him, perhaps?' said I.
" 'Yes, I have heard of him,' said Ada.
"Such tears in her eyes and such love in her face. I could not make my darling out. Should I go to Richard's by myself? I said. No, Ada thought I had better not go by myself. Would she go with me? Yes, Ada thought she had better go with me. Should we go now? Yes, let us go now. Well, I could not understand my darling, with the tears in her eyes and the love in her face!"
A writer might be a good storyteller or a good moralist, but unless he be an enchanter, an artist, he is not a great writer. Dickens is a good moralist, a good storyteller, and a superb enchanter, but as a storyteller he lags somewhat behind his other virtues. In other words, he is supremely good at picturing his characters and their habitats in any given situation, but there are flaws in his work when he tries to establish various links between these characters in a pattern of action.
What is the joint impression that a great work of art produces upon us? (By us, I mean the good reader.) The Precision of Poetry and the Excitement of Science. And this is the impact of Bleak House at its best. At his best Dickens the enchanter, Dickens the artist, comes to the fore. At his second best, in Bleak House the moralist teacher is much in evidence, often not without art. At its worst, Bleak House reveals the storyteller stumbling now and then, although the general structure still remains excellent.
Despite certain faults in the telling of his story, Dickens remains, nevertheless, a great writer. Control over a considerable constellation of characters and themes, the technique of holding people and events bunched together, or of evoking absent characters through dialogue—in other words, the art of not only creating people but keeping created people alive within the reader's mind throughout a long novel—this, of course, is the obvious sign of greatness. When Grandfather Smallweed is carried in his chair into George's shooting gallery in an endeavor to get a sample of Captain Hawdon's handwriting, the driver of the cab and another person act as bearers. " 'This person,' [the other bearer, he says] 'we engaged in the street outside for a pint of beer. Which is twopence.... Judy, my child [he goes on, to his daughter], give the person his twopence. It's a great deal for what he has done.'
"The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of human fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of London, ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a 'Mission' for holding horses and calling coaches, receives his twopence with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed, and retires." This gesture, this one gesture, with its epithet "over-handed"—a trifle—but the man is alive forever in a good reader's mind.
A great writer's world is indeed a magic democracy where even some very minor character, even the most incidental character like the person who tosses the twopence, has the right to live and breed.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT (1821-1880)
Madame Bovary
(1856)
The opening pages from Nabokov's teaching copy of Madame Bovary
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.[*]
A child to whom you read a story may ask you, is the story true? And if not, the child demands a true one. Let us not persevere in this juvenile attitude towards the books we read. Of course, if somebody tells you that Mr. Smith has seen a blue saucer with a green operator whiz by, you do ask, is it true? because in one way or another the fact of its being true would affect your whole life, would be of infinite practical consequence to you. But do not ask whether a poem or a novel is true. Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no practical value whatsoever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a professor of literature. The girl Emma Bovary never existed: the book Madame Bovary shall exist forever and ever. A book lives longer than a girl.
The book is concerned with adultery and contains situations and allusions that sh
ocked the prudish philistine government of Napoléon III. Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Just imagine that. As if the work of an artist could ever be obscene. I am glad to say that Flaubert won his case. That was exactly a hundred years ago. In our days, our times.... But let me keep to my subject.
We shall discuss Madame Bovary as Flaubert intended it to be discussed: in terms of structures (mouvements as he termed them), thematic lines, style, poetry, and characters. The novel consists of thirty-five chapters, each about ten pages long, and is divided into three parts set respectively in Rouen and Tostes, in Yonville, and in Yonville, Rouen, and Yonville, all of these places invented except Rouen, a cathedral city in northern France.
The main action is supposed to take place in the 1830s and 1840s, under King Louis Philippe (1830-1848). Chapter 1 begins in the winter of 1827, and in a kind of afterword the lives of some of the characters are followed up till 1856 into the reign of Napoléon III and indeed up to the date of Flaubert's completing the book. Madame Bovary was begun at Croisset, near Rouen, on the nineteenth of September 1851, finished in April 1856, sent out in June, and published serially at the end of the same year in the Revue de Paris. A hundred miles to the north of Rouen, Charles Dickens in Boulogne was finishing Bleak House in the summer of 1853 when Flaubert had reached part two of his novel; one year before that, in Russia, Gogol had died and Tolstoy had published his first important work, Childhood.
Three forces make and mold a human being: heredity, environment, and the unknown agent X. Of these the second, environment, is by far the least important, while the last, agent X, is by far the most influential. In the case of characters living in books, it is of course the author who controls, directs, and applies the three forces. The society around Madame Bovary has been manufactured by Flaubert as deliberately as Madame Bovary herself has been made by him, and to say that this Flaubertian society acted upon that Flaubertian character is to talk in circles. Everything that happens in the book happens exclusively in Flaubert's mind, no matter what the initial trivial impulse may have been, and no matter what conditions in the France of his time existed or seemed to him to exist. This is why I am opposed to those who insist upon the influence of objective social conditions upon the heroine Emma Bovary. Flaubert's novel deals with the delicate calculus of human fate, not with the arithmetic of social conditioning.
We are told that most of the characters in Madame Bovary are bourgeois. But one thing that we should clear up once and for all is the meaning that Flaubert gives to the term bourgeois. Unless it simply means townsman, as it often does in French, the term bourgeois as used by Flaubert means "philistine," people preoccupied with the material side of life and believing only in conventional values. He never uses the word bourgeois with any politico-economic Marxist connotation. Flaubert's bourgeois is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. In a famous scene of our book when a hardworking old woman, getting a medal for having slaved for her farmer-boss, is confronted with a committee of relaxed bourgeois beaming at her—mind you, in that scene both parties are philistines, the beaming politicians and the superstitious old peasant woman—both sides are bourgeois in Flaubert's sense. I shall clear up the term completely if I say that, for instance, today in communist Russia, Soviet literature, Soviet art, Soviet music, Soviet aspirations are fundamentally and smugly bourgeois. It is the lace curtain behind the iron one. A Soviet official, small or big, is the perfect type of bourgeois mind, of a philistine. The key to Flaubert's term is the philistinism of his Monsieur Homais. Let me add for double clarity that Marx would have called Flaubert a bourgeois in the politico-economic sense and Flaubert would have called Marx a bourgeois in the spiritual sense; and both would have been right, since Flaubert was a well-to-do gentleman in physical life and Marx was a philistine in his attitude towards the arts.
The reign of Louis Philippe, the citizen king (le roi bourgeois), from 1830 to 1848, was a pleasantly dingy era in comparison to Napoléon's fireworks in the beginning of the century and to our own variegated times. In the 1840s "the annals of France were tranquil under the cold administration of Guizot." But "1847 opened with gloomy aspects for the French Government: irritation, want, the desire for a more popular and perhaps more brilliant rule.... Trickery and subterfuge seemed to reign in high places." A revolution broke out in February 1848. Louis Philippe, "assuming the name of Mr. William Smith, closed an inglorious reign by an inglorious flight in a hackney cab" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, 1879). I have mentioned this bit of history because good Louis Philippe with his cab and umbrella was such a Flaubertian character. Now another character, Charles Bovary, was born according to my computations in 1815; entered school in 1828; became an "officer of health" (which is one degree below doctor) in 1835; married his first wife, the widow Dubuc, in the same year, at Tostes, where he started practicing medicine. After losing her, he married Emma Rouault (the heroine of the book) in 1838; moved to another town, Yonville, in 1840; and after losing his second wife in 1846, he died in 1847, aged thirty-two.
This is the chronology of the book in a capsule.
Nabokov's notes on the layers theme in Madame Bovary with his drawing of Charles's cap
In the first chapter we pick up our initial thematic line: the layers or layer-cake theme. This is the fall of 1828; Charles is thirteen and on his first day in school he is still holding his cap on his knees in the classroom. "It was one of those headgears of a composite type in which one may trace elements of the bearskin and otterskincap, the Lancers' shapska [a flat sort of helmet], the round hat of felt, and the housecap of cotton; in fine, one of those pathetic things that are as deeply expressive in their mute ugliness as the face of an imbecile. Ovoid, splayed with whalebone, it began with a kind of circular sausage repeated three times; then, higher up, there followed two rows of lozenges, one of velvet, the other of rabbit fur, separated by a red band; next came a kind of bag ending in a polygon of cardboard with intricate braiding upon it; and from this there hung, at the end of a long, too slender cord, a twisted tassel of gold threads. The cap was new; its visor shone."[*] (We may compare this to Gogol's description in Dead Souls of Chichikov's traveling case and Korobochka's carriage—also a layers theme!)
In this, and in the three other examples to be discussed, the image is developed layer by layer, tier by tier, room by room, coffin by coffin. The cap is a pathetic and tasteless affair: it symbolizes the whole of poor Charles's future life—equally pathetic and tasteless.
Charles loses his first wife. In June 1838, when he is twenty-three, Charles and Emma are married in a grand farmhouse wedding. A set dish, a tiered cake—also a pathetic affair in poor taste—is provided by a pastry cook who is new to the district and so has taken great pains. "It started off at the base with a square of blue cardboard [taking off, as it were, where the cap had finished; the cap ended in a polygon of cardboard]; this square held a temple with porticoes and colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches studded with gilt-paper stars; there came next on the second layer a castle in meringue surrounded by minute fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of orange; and, finally, on the uppermost platform, which represented a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and nutshell boats, a little cupid sat in a chocolate swing whose two uprights had two real rosebuds for knobs at the top."
The lake of jam here is a kind of premonitory emblem of the romantic Swiss lakes upon which, to the sound of Lamartine's fashionable lyrical verse, Emma Bovary, the budding adulteress, will drift in her dreams; and we shall meet again the little cupid on the bronze clock in the squalid splendor of the Rouen hotel room where Emma has her assignations with Léon, her second lover.
We are still in June 1838 but at Tostes. Charles had been living in this house since the winter of 1835-1836, with his first wife until she died, in February 1837, then alone. He and his new wife Emma will spend two years in Tostes (till March 1840) before moving on to Yonville. First layer: "The brick front ran flu
sh with the street, or rather highway. [Second layer:] Behind the door hung a cloak with a small cape, a bridle, and a black leather cap, and on the floor, in a corner, there was a pair of leggings still caked with dry mud. [Third layer:] On the right was the parlor, which served also as dining room. Canary yellow wallpaper, relieved at the top by a garland of pale flowers, quivered throughout its length on its loose canvas; the windows were hung crosswise with white calico curtains, and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent between two silver-plated candlesticks under oval shades. [Fourth layer:] On the other side of the passage was Charles's consulting room, a little place about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office armchair. Volumes of the Dictionary of Medical Science, the leaves unopened (that is, not yet cut open) but the binding rather the worse for the successive sales through which they had gone, occupied almost alone the six shelves of a dea l bookcase. [Fifth layer:] The smell of frying butter could be felt seeping through the walls during office hours, just as in the kitchen one could hear the patients coughing in the consultation room and recounting all their woes. [Sixth layer:] Next came ["venait ensuite," which exactly copies the formula of the cap] a large dilapidated room with an oven. It opened straight onto the stable yard and was now used as a woodshed, cellar, and storeroom."
In March 1846 after eight years of married life, including two tempestuous love affairs of which her husband knew nothing, Emma Bovary contracts a nightmare heap of debts she cannot meet and commits suicide. In his only moment of romanticist fantasy, poor Charles makes the following plan for her funeral: "He shut himself up in his consulting room, took a pen, and after a spell of sobbing, wrote: " 'I want her to be buried in her wedding dress, with white shoes, and a wreath. Her hair is to be spread out over her shoulders. [Now come the layers.] Three coffins, one of oak, one of mahogany, and one of lead.... Over all, there is to be laid a large piece of green velvet.' "
Lectures on Literature Page 18