Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  The theme of daydreaming surfaces again in the romantic names she thinks of bestowing on her daughter. "First she went over all those that have Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better." The other characters are faithful to themselves in the names they propose. "Charles wanted the child to be named after her mother; Emma opposed this." Monsieur Léon, says Homais, " 'wonders why you do not choose Madeleine. It is very much in fashion now.'

  "But Madame Bovary senior cried out loudly against this name of a sinner. As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for names that recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a humane idea...." One should note why Emma finally chooses Berthe. "At last Emma remembered that at the chateau of Vaubyessard she had heard the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; from that moment this name was chosen...."

  The romantic considerations in naming the child contrast with the conditions under which she had been farmed out to nurse, an extraordinary custom of those days. Emma strolls with Léon to visit the child. "They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it. Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuces, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and all round were several nondescript rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country."

  The ups and downs of Emma's emotions—the longings, the passion, the frustration, the loves, the disappointments—a chequered sequence, end in a violent self-inflicted and very messy death. Yet before we part with Emma, we shall mark the essential hardness of her nature, somehow symbolized by a slight physical flaw, by the hard dry angularities of her hands; her hands were fondly groomed, delicate and white, pretty, perhaps, but not beautiful.

  She is false, she is deceitful by nature; she deceives Charles from the very start before actually committing adultery. She lives among philistines, and she is a philistine herself. Her mental vulgarity is not so obvious as that of Homais. It might be too hard on her to say that the trite, ready-made pseudoprogressive aspects of Homais's nature are duplicated in a feminine pseudoromantic way in Emma; but one cannot help feeling that Homais and Emma not only phonetically echo each other but do have something in common—and that something is the vulgar cruelty of their natures. In Emma the vulgarity, the philistinism, is veiled by her grace, her cunning, her beauty, her meandering intelligence, her power of idealization, her moments of tenderness and understanding, and by the fact that her brief bird life ends in human tragedy.

  Not so Homais. He is the successful philistine. And to the last, as she lies dead, poor Emma is attended by him, the busybody Homais, and the prosaic priest Bournisien. There is a delightful scene when these two—the believer in drugs and the believer in God—go to sleep in two armchairs near her dead body, facing each other, snoring in front of each other with bulging bellies and fallen jaws, twinned in sleep, united at last in the same human weakness of sleep. And what an insult to poor Emma's destiny—the epitaph Homais finds for her grave! His mind is crammed with trite Latin tags but at first he is stumped by not being able to find anything better than sta viator; pause, traveler (or stay, passenger). Pause where? The end of this Latin tag is heroam calcas—you tread on a hero's dust. But finally Homais with his usual temerity substituted for hero's dust, your beloved wife's dust. Stay, passenger, you tread upon your beloved wife—the last thing that could be said about poor Charley who, despite all his stupidity, loved Emma with a deep, pathetic adoration, a fact that she did realize for one brief moment before she died. And where does he die? In the very arbor where Rodolphe and Emma used to make love.

  (Incidentally, in that last page of his life, not bumblebees are visiting the lilacs in that garden but bright green beetles. Oh those ignoble, treacherous, and philistine translators! One would think that Monsieur Homais, who knew a little English, was Flaubert's English translator.)

  Homais has various chinks in his armor:

  1. His science comes from pamphlets, his general culture from newspapers; his taste in literature is appalling, especially in the combination of authors he cites. In his ignorance, he remarks at one point " 'That is the question,' as I lately read in a newspaper," not knowing that he is quoting Shakespeare and not a Rouen journalist—nor perhaps had the author of the political article in that newspaper known it either.

  2. He still feels now and then that dreadful fright he got when he was almost jailed for practicing medicine.

  3. He is a traitor, a cad, a toad, and does not mind sacrificing his dignity to the more serious interests of his business or to obtain a decoration.

  4. He is a coward, and notwithstanding his brave words he is afraid of blood, death, dead bodies.

  5. He is without mercy and poisonously vindictive.

  6. He is a pompous ass, a smug humbug, a gorgeous philistine, a pillar of society as are so many philistines.

  7. He does get his decoration at the end of the novel in 1856. Flaubert considered that his age was the age of philistinism, which he called muflisme. However, this kind of thing is not peculiar to any special government or regime; if anything, philistinism is more in evidence during revolutions and in police states than under more traditional regimes. The philistine in violent action is always more dangerous than the philistine who quietly sits before his television set.

  Nabokov's notes on Emma Bovary's loves

  Let us recapitulate for a moment Emma's loves, platonic and otherwise:

  1. As a schoolgirl she may have had a crush on her music teacher, who passes with his encased violin in one of the retrospective paragraphs of the book.

  2. As a young woman married to Charles (with whom at the beginning she is not in love), she first has an amorous friendship, a perfectly platonic one technically, with Léon Dupuis, a notary clerk.

  3. Her first "affair" is with Rodolphe Boulanger, the local squire.

  4. In the middle of this affair, since Rodolphe turns out to be more brutal than the romantic ideal she longed for, Emma attempts to discover an ideal in her husband; she tries seeing him as a great physician and begins a brief phase of tenderness and tentative pride.

  5. After poor Charles has completely botched the operation on the poor stableboy's clubfoot—one of the greatest episodes in the book—she goes back to Rodolphe with more passion than before.

  6. When Rodolphe abolishes her last romantic dream of elopement and a dream life in Italy, after a serious illness she finds a subject of romantic adoration in God.

  7. She has a few minutes of daydreaming about the opera singer Lagardy.

  8. Her affair with vapid, cowardly Léon after she meets him again is a grotesque and pathetic materialization of all her romantic dreams.

  9. In Charles, just before she dies, she discovers his human and divine side, his perfect love for her—all that she had missed.

  10. The ivory body of Jesus Christ on the cross that she kisses a few minutes before her death, this love can be said to end in something like her previous tragic disappointment since all the misery of her life takes over again when she hears the awful song of the hideous vagabond as she dies.

  Who are the "good" people of the book? Obviously, the villain is Lheureux, but who, besides poor Charles, are the good characters? Somewhat obviously, Emma's father, old Rouault; somewhat unconvincingly, the boy Justin, whom we glimpse crying on Emma's grave, a bleak note; and speaking of Dickensian notes let us not forget two other unfortunate children, Emma's little daughter, and of course that other little Dickensian girl, that girl of thirteen, hunchbacked,
a little bleak housemaid, a dingy nymphet, who serves Lheureux as clerk, a glimpse to ponder. Who else in the book do we have as good people? The best person is the third doctor, the great Lariviere, although I have always hated the transparent tear he sheds over the dying Emma. Some might even say: Flaubert's father had been a doctor, and so this is Flaubert senior shedding a tear over the misfortunes of the character that his son has created.

  A question: can we call Madame Bovary realistic or naturalistic? I wonder.

  A novel in which a young and healthy husband night after night never wakes to find the better half of his bed empty; never hears the sand and pebbles thrown at the shutters by a lover; never receives an anonymous letter from some local busybody;

  A novel in which the biggest busybody of them all, Homais—Monsieur Homais, whom we might have expected to have kept a statistical eye upon all the cuckolds of his beloved Yonville, actually never notices, never learns anything about Emma's affairs;

  A novel in which little Justin—a nervous young boy of fourteen who faints at the sight of blood and smashes crockery out of sheer nervousness—should go to weep in the dead of night (where?) in a cemetery on the grave of a woman whose ghost might come to reproach him for not having refused to give her the key to death;

  A novel in which a young woman who has not been riding for several years—if indeed she ever did ride when she lived on her father's farm—now gallops away to the woods with perfect poise, and never feels any stiffness in the joints afterwards;

  A novel in which many other implausible details abound—such as the very implausible naivete of a certain cabdriver—such a novel has been called a landmark of so-called realism, whatever that is.

  In point of fact, all fiction is fiction. All art is deception. Flaubert's world, as all worlds of major writers, is a world of fancy with its own logic, its own conventions, its own coincidences. The curious impossibilities I have listed do not clash with the pattern of the book—and indeed are only discovered by dull college professors or bright students. And you will bear in mind that all the fairy tales we have lovingly examined after Mansfield Park are loosely fitted by their authors into certain historical frames. All reality is comparative reality since any given reality, the window you see, the smells you perceive, the sounds you hear, are not only dependent on a crude give-and-take of the senses but also depend upon various levels of information. Flaubert may have seemed realistic or naturalistic a hundred years ago to readers brought up on the writings of those sentimental ladies and gentlemen that Emma admired. But realism, naturalism, are only comparative notions. What a given generation feels as naturalism in a writer seems to an older generation to be exaggeration of drab detail, and to a younger generation not enough drab detail. The isms go; the ist dies; art remains.

  Ponder most carefully the following fact: a master of Flaubert's artistic power manages to transform what he has conceived as a sordid world inhabited by frauds and philistines and mediocrities and brutes and wayward ladies into one of the most perfect pieces of poetical fiction known, and this he achieves by bringing all the parts into harmony, by the inner force of style, by all such devices of form as the counterpoint of transition from one theme to another, of foreshadowing and echoes. Without Flaubert there would have been no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland. Chekhov in Russia would not have been quite Chekhov. So much for Flaubert's literary influence.

  Flaubert had a special device which may be called the counterpoint method, or the method of parallel interlinings and interruptions of two or more conversations or trains of thought. The first example comes after Léon Dupuis has been introduced. Léon, a young man, a notary's clerk, is brought in by the device of describing Emma as he sees her, in the red glow of the fireplace at the inn which seems to shine through her. Farther on, when another man, Rodolphe Boulanger, comes into her presence, she is also shown through his eyes, but Emma as seen through Rodolphe's eyes is of a more sensual quality than the on the whole pure image that Léon perceives. Incidentally, Léon's hair is described later as brown (chatain); here, he is blond, or looks so to Flaubert, by the light of the fire especially kindled to illume Emma.

  Now comes the contrapuntal theme in the conversation at the inn on the first arrival in Yonville of Emma and Charles. Exactly one year after his starting to compose the book (eighty to ninety pages in one year—that is a fellow after my heart), Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet on 19 September 1852: "What a nuisance my Bovary is.... This scene at the inn may take me three months for all I know. At times I am on the brink of tears—so keenly do I feel my helplessness. But I prefer my brain to burst rather than to skip that scene. I have to place simultaneously, in the same conversation, five or six people (who talk), several others (who are talked about), the whole region, descriptions of persons and things—and amid all this I have to show a gentleman and a lady who begin to fall in love with each other because they have tastes in common. And if I only had enough room! But the fact is that the scene should be rapid and yet not dry, ample without being lumpy."

  So in the large parlor of the inn a conversation starts. Four people are involved. On the one hand, a dialogue between Emma and Léon, whom she has just met, which is interrupted by monologues and sundry remarks on Homais's part, who is conversing mainly with Charles Bovary, for Homais is eager to get on good terms with the new doctor.

  In this scene the first movement consists of a brisk interchange among all four: "Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his cap, for fear of catching a cold in the head; then, turning to his neighbor—

  " 'Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in our "Hirondelle." '

  " 'That is true,' replied Emma; 'but moving about always amuses me. I like change of place.'

  " 'It is so dreary,' sighed the clerk, 'to be always riveted to the same places.'

  " 'If you were like me,' said Charles, 'constantly obliged to be in the saddle—'

  " 'But,' Léon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, 'nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant [than to ride]—when one can,' he added." (The horse theme slips in and out here.)

  The second movement consists of a long speech by Homais, ending in his giving some tips to Charles about a house to buy. " 'Moreover,' said the druggist, 'the practice of medicine is not very hard work in our part of the world ... for people still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the doctor or druggist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad, and we even have a few men of ninety in our parish. The thermometer (I have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees, and in the hottest season rises to 25 or 30 degrees Centigrade at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the Saint-Jean hills on the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapors given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which pumping up the humus from the soil, mixing together all those different emanations, unites them into a bundle, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long-run, as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata,—this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come—that is to say, the southern side—by the southeastern winds, which, havihg cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like breezes from Russia.' "

  In the middle of the speech he makes a mistake: there is always a little chink in the philistine armor. His thermometer should read 86 Fahrenheit, not 54; he forgot to add 32 when switching from one system to the other. He almost makes another fumble in speaking of exhaled air but he recovers the ball. He tries
to cram all his knowledge of physics and chemistry into one elephantine sentence; he has a good memory for odds and ends derived from newspapers and pamphlets, but that is all.

  Just as Homais's speech is a jumble of pseudoscience and journalese, so in the third movement the conversation between Emma and Léon is a trickle of stale poetization. " 'At any rate, you have some walks in the neighborhood?' continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.

  " 'Oh, very few,' he answered. 'There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset.'

  " 'I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets,' she resumed, 'but especially by the side of the sea.'

  " 'Oh, I adore the sea!' said Monsieur Léon.

  " 'And then, does it not seem to you,' continued Madame Bovary, 'that the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?'

  " 'It is the same with mountainous landscapes,' continued Léon."

  It is very important to mark that the Léon-Emma team is as trivial, trite, and platitudinous in their pseudoartistic emotions as the pompous and fundamentally ignorant Homais is in regard to science. False art and false science meet here. In a letter to his mistress (9 October 1852) Flaubert indicates the subtle point of this scene. "I am in the act of composing a conversation between a young man and a young woman about literature, the sea, mountains, music, and all other so-called poetic subjects. It may all seem to be seriously meant to the average reader, but in point of fact the grotesque is my real intention. It will be the first time, I think, that a novel appears where fun is made of the leading lady and her young man. But irony does not impair pathos—on the contrary, irony enhances the pathetic side."