It isn’t the plot either – any American TV series will offer a storyline more intricate and exciting than the one Madame Bovary pursues: young woman marries, grows bored, seeks extramarital thrills, commits suicide.
Can it be the characters?
Um, no.
The main characters in Madame Bovary are types one would be thankful not to be seated beside at any dinner party. Charles Bovary is a mediocre, unimaginative plodder of a provincial physician, Emma Bovary is as insufferably banal as she is narcissistic, while their neighbor, the pharmacist Homais, is a smug, talentless espouser of progress. None of them either says or thinks anything remotely remarkable over the novel’s three hundred or so pages.
And yet it is the perfect novel. And yet it is the best novel that has ever been written.
The reason of course is that literary quality, lasting literary quality, has to do not so much with intrigue, character, and place description in themselves as with how much meaning is created within their spaces. For it is here, in the simple, easily graspable forms in which opposing forces collide and ambiguity is continually produced, that the life of a narrative arises – and indeed the life of all art. Think of the great white whale in Melville’s Moby-Dick, think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Woolf’s Orlando; think of the sanatorium in Mann’s The Magic Mountain, think of the meal in Blixen’s “Babette’s Feast.” Think, for that matter, of the biblical tales of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac. The forms may be simple but the stories are inexhaustible. This is so because the meaning is not found in the text but created within it. Generations to come will approach these stories with new assumptions and thereby they will yield yet more new meanings. This is what makes a classic a classic.
If this is true, the question provoked is: What forces collide in Madame Bovary? It might be contended that “forces” at once seems like the wrong word in this connection, immediately suggesting something eruptive, uncontrolled, Sturm und Drang–like, whereas the style of Madame Bovary is quite other, in fact nearly the opposite: it is controlled, slow, meticulous, exact. This is by no means insignificant. Before embarking on Madame Bovary, Flaubert had been working for some eighteen months on a novel called The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which included characters such as the Queen of Sheba and King Nebuchadnezzar, symbolic figures such as Lust and Death, Roman gods such as Pluto, Neptune, and Diana, mythological figures such as the Sphinx and the Chimera. The action takes place in beautiful, exotic locations, as in the following scene in which Saint Anthony goes to see the Emperor:
Along the walls may be seen, in mosaic, generals offering conquered cities to the Emperor on the palms of their hands. And on every side are columns of basalt, gratings of silver filigree, seats of ivory, and tapestries embroidered with pearls. The light falls from the vaulted roof, and Anthony proceeds on his way. Tepid exhalations spread around; occasionally he hears the modest patter of a sandal. Posted in the ante-chambers, the custodians – who resemble automatons – bear on their shoulders vermilion-colored truncheons.
At last, he finds himself in the lower part of a hall with hyacinth curtains at its extreme end. They divide, and reveal the Emperor seated upon a throne, attired in a violet tunic and red buskins with black bands.
Only a romantic and a dreamer could have written something like this. When the manuscript was completed in September 1847, Flaubert read it aloud to his friends Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet. According to Du Camp, the sitting lasted thirty-three hours. When the final page had been read, Flaubert said: “Now, tell me frankly what you think.” To which Bouilhet replied: “We think you should throw it in the fire and never speak about it again.”
After such a disappointment, which to an as-yet-unpublished writer must have been monumental, Flaubert embarked on a long journey to the Near East. On his return he had with him the outlines of three potential novels. Two of these seemingly pursued the same dreamy-romantic, escapist path as before – a novel entitled A Night of Don Juan and another he called Anubis, after the Egyptian god – whereas the third project, at the time untitled, was inspired by contemporary events: the recent death of a family acquaintance, a country physician by the name of Eugène Delamare, who had once studied under Flaubert’s father, a renowned surgeon. Delamare had been a poor student, had failed a number of his exams and as a result never fully qualified as a doctor, settling instead into a position as “health officer” in a small village outside Rouen. Delamare had been married twice, and of his second wife, Delphine, who died before him and must surely have been the source of Flaubert’s interest, scandalous rumors had abounded.
Flaubert spent the next four years writing this book, which he named after its main character and which would become his debut and his masterpiece, a novel which moreover would be read far into the future. Of course, he knew nothing of this as he sat and wrote, with his agonies and anguishes, his self-criticism and doubt. The scholarship surrounding the novel is ours, the privilege of we who inhabit that future – a scholarship concerning not only the novel’s destiny but also its genesis, for in the four years of its writing Flaubert corresponded frequently with Louise Colet. Anyone interested in how a novel comes into being should read these letters (particularly the selection edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller).
In the first months Flaubert is having trouble letting go of The Temptation of Saint Anthony. In that novel he wrote the way he wanted, as the person he was, whereas in the new novel he had to hold back and work against his every impulse. This, for instance, is what he writes on the evening of January 16, 1852:
In Saint Anthony, having taken a subject which left me completely free as to lyricism, emotions, excesses of all kinds, I felt in my element, and had only to let myself go. Never will I rediscover such recklessness of style as I indulged in during those eighteen long months.
In the same letter he writes that he contains two distinct literary personas:
one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of phrase and lofty ideas; and another who digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can, who likes to treat a humble fact as respectfully as a big one, who would like.
In other words, writing stopped being a project of profusion for Flaubert; writing his new novel was suddenly a matter of curbing himself. He curbed himself with respect to everything he liked, everything he wanted, everything he mastered. He did so because he wanted to describe the world the way it was, not the way it ought to be or could be. But fortunately he did more than that. He allowed the schism itself – on the one hand the dreamy romanticism that was so much a part of him, the world the way it ought to be or could be, and on the other the realistic world the way it is – to play out in the novel itself, to form its pivotal conflict. He placed all his escapist yearnings and exotic reveries in the figure of Emma Bovary – who of course is a self-portrait – though in such a way as to render them banal, and he allowed her to live them out in the most trivial and commonplace of contemporary realities he could imagine.
There was enough ambiguity in this domain to propel the novel all the way from 1857 to our present day without losing any of its forcefulness along the way.
The man who wrote Madame Bovary, the writer who “digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can,” is as filled with self-loathing as with self-knowledge, yet the book is not about him, for the forms he works into life – the characters, the action and the places in which the action occurs – push those original feelings and understandings in other directions; they establish new points of encounter and heighten the complexity, they make the unisonant many-voiced and are in that way given lives of their own, remote from their author’s. This is the great strength of the novel as a form: the way the subjective, the inner emotional and intellectual life of a person, is bestowed with a kind of objectivity, and may thus be seen and recognized as something in the world rather than something only in the individual
.
To arrive at this, Flaubert had to curb himself, his personal convictions and aesthetic preferences, at the same time as laying out those elements of his life to which he was not necessarily blind, but which at least lacked a horizon against which they could be discerned: desire, loathing, the yearning for beauty, vanity, ambition, the fear of failure. From this, then, comes a novel which is about truth and which asks what reality is.
For is this not the question around which everything in Madame Bovary gravitates?
Emma desires to live in another reality to the one that surrounds her and so she transforms it in her image, turning her two lovers, one irresolute, the other cynically self-seeking, into romantic, chivalrous men, and their trivial trysts into passionate rendezvous. Her husband, Charles, likewise inhabits two separate realities, for the happy situation in which he believes himself to be living, as a family man with a beloved wife and a small child, is an illusion. The true reality is quite different: Emma despises him, she deceives him constantly and cares not in the slightest for their child – something he neither sees nor understands. The pharmacist Homais transforms reality too, under the sign of progress, technology, and scientific optimism. The entire novel ebbs and flows between illusions about the world and the world itself, between what the characters believe or want to believe is happening and what is actually happening. And this goes not only for the characters but also for the objects by which they are surrounded, for if there is one thing that characterizes Flaubert’s portrayal of material reality in the novel – apart from his being so precise that the reader truly feels the objects’ physical presence – it is that objects nearly always represent something other than themselves. Not as symbols in the novel, but as signs for instance of the class, status, and ambition of its characters.
So although the reality we inhabit is completely different from that inhabited by Gustave Flaubert in 1857, the ground his book touches is the same for us as it was for his characters. Perhaps it is even more important and more salient to us in the present day. Certainly the versions of reality that are available to us have become more numerous with the impact of today’s global visual culture, and the illuminating power of our most familiar everyday objects (for which Flaubert’s novel would always have been remembered even had it been devoid of human characters and contained only things) has correspondingly waned.
If Madame Bovary were published today, there is no doubt in my mind that tomorrow’s reviews would be ecstatic and that no one would think it old-fashioned or outdated. I’m not sure I know of any other novel from the 1800s of which the same can be said. That means of course that it’s a very good novel, but it means too that the novelist of today continues to write in Flaubert’s shadow.
To Where the Story Cannot Reach
The work of the literary editor is conducted in a kind of shadow, cast by the name of the author. A few editors have stepped out of that shadow, becoming perhaps more infamous than famous, for the labels “editor” and “famous” seem like a contradiction in terms, essentially incompatible. An example is Gordon Lish, who became known known in the literary world as “Captain Fiction” and whose authors included Raymond Carver. Another is Maxwell Perkins, editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whose epithet was the “Editor of Genius.” One of the most celebrated editing jobs ever done was carried out by Ezra Pound, not in any formal capacity, but as a friend, his ruthless hand paring down an early version of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into the form in which we know it today. Gordon Lish’s editing was quite as unconstrained and uncompromising, the style we think of as Carver’s being in fact Lish’s work, Carver himself was rather ambivalent about it, though it unquestionably established his name as a writer. This became apparent when Carver’s own manuscript was published after his death, his stories there being quite differently ample and expansive, barely recognizable. There is little doubt that the editor’s Carver was better than Carver’s Carver, and how must that have made the author feel as he stood in the spotlight to receive his accolades, hailed as the great new name of American literature? The example is interesting, for the job of the editor is to exert influence, not for his own good, nor necessarily for the author’s, but for that of the book, and if we can suggest that Lish went too far, we must also ask in relation to what? After all, the book was certainly the better for it. Were the wounded feelings of its author more important? Without Lish, Carver’s books would have been poorer and he would have been a reasonably good writer rather than a brilliant one. This raises the question of what a writer is, and where the boundaries run between the author, the book, and the surrounding world.
America has a tradition of strong editors, though the issue is not specifically American: I know of Norwegian editors who to all intents and purposes move their author’s feet, so to speak, in the dance of their literary endeavors, who basically instruct them: left foot here, right foot there, left foot here, right foot there. And I know too of Norwegian writers at the exact opposite pole, who deliver print-ready manuscripts to their editors and would change publishers promptly at the suggestion of reworking anything.
Lish’s job on Carver is perhaps too extreme to serve as an example of the role of the editor, but what any kind of boundary breaking always does is to draw attention to the boundary itself – in this case between editor and writer, who together with the text form a kind of Bermuda Triangle within whose force field everything said and done disappears without trace. Had Lish not gone as far as he did, everything in Carver’s texts would have been attributed unequivocally to Carver, the way all novels, short stories, and poetry collections are attributed unequivocally to the writer. To understand what goes on in this shadowland, we could ask ourselves: What would the books have been like without their editors? In my own case, the answer is simple: there would have been no books. I would not have been a writer. This is not to say that my editor writes my books for me, but that his thoughts, input, and insights are imperative to their being written. These thoughts, this input, and these insights are particular to me and my writing process; when he is editing the work of other authors, what he gives them is something particular to their work. The job of editor is therefore ideally undefined and open, dependent on each individual writer’s needs, expectations, talent, and integrity, and it is first and foremost based on trust, hinging much more on personal qualities and human understanding than on formal literary competence.
I remember a time in my late twenties when I was working for a literary magazine, we had commissioned a contribution from an established poet, and I was given the job of taking care of it. I read the poem and responded with a few comments, some suggestions as to minor changes, and a tentative inquiry as to whether the poem might be developed a bit further in the same direction. The reply that came back can be summed up in a single question: “Who are you?” In fact, there may well have been an undertone in that reply warranting an even more forceful wording: “Who the hell are you?” I was vexed by this, my comments had been cautious and, as far as I could see, justified. It was how I was used to commenting on the works-in-progress of my writer friends. Surely a poet of such experience and standing could relate more professionally to their own writing?
But the reaction wasn’t about the poem. It was about a faceless editor wanting to change the poem, which I guessed was being construed as an attack. As if there was something wrong with the poem and this faceless young male academic thought he knew what was needed to fix it. Objectively, I think my comments were on the right track, but when it comes to writing there is no such thing as objective, it’s all about the person writing and the person reading. If I had met this poet a few times, if we had been able to gain an impression of each other, perhaps get an idea as to each other’s literary preferences, I think my comments might have been taken differently, perhaps even prompted changes to the work, though not necessarily in the way I had envisaged.
The situations in which creative writing takes place are often
complicated, to put it mildly – anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncracies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination – and working with writing in that kind of context means that a concept such as quality is a poor standard indeed, at least if we think of quality as an objective norm. In literary editing, quality is a dynamic entity, more a process than a grade, and one that will vary according to the individual writer and editor.
That the books that come out of this are treated in almost exactly the opposite way in literary criticism, which is very much about weights and measures and comparisons to other books, can often throw an author into shock and is something one never quite gets used to. It feels almost as if there are different books, one belonging to the editor, another to the critic, and for the author this can be difficult; should he or she listen to his or her editor, who will invariably say that critics don’t know what they’re talking about, that they are insensitive and stupid, driven by their own agendas, and so on, or to the judgment of the critics?
Erlend Loe exploits the comedy that lies in the difference between the work of editors and critics in his most recent novel, Vareopptelling (Stocktaking), which opens with an editor calling an aging poet and telling her how great the reviews of her latest collection have been, everything he says being more or less veiled with the intention of shielding her from the reality of the matter, after which she embarks on a personal crusade to erase the discrepancy between her own perception of the book and that of the critics. It’s funny because it’s recognizable, the editor’s attempts to deal with poor reviews, as well as the thoughts of vengeance they can give rise to in the mind of the author, it strikes a chord. Even a writer like Stig Larsson, who made a name for himself with his very first book and was canonized in his own lifetime, lets the poorer reviews get to him, he can’t let go of them, including in his collection of poems Natta de mina (Goodnight My Dear Ones) a grotesque fantasy in which a named critic is mutilated. And Paul Auster, a world-renowned author one would think to have been so acclaimed in his time that poor reviews would be like water off a duck’s back, expends a great deal of emotional energy in his recently published correspondence with J. M. Coetzee reacting to James Wood’s critiques of his books in The New Yorker, not with arguments, but with descriptions of what it feels like – which is like being mugged in broad daylight.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 27