by Jean Améry
But now I will fetch my beloved’s body from the earth, to press against my heart what tomorrow will be dust and bare bone. I am coming, Emma. What we were shall rise again in my laggard head: may the truth of how we were, of what we were, be seen again!
THE REALITY OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
BUT HOW is one to rescue from the morass of enigma, where it lies in disarray, the reality of Charles Bovary, from whom everything—love, his beloved, his possessions, even his memory—is taken away, just as he comes to realize he has lived badly? And what does this even mean: the reality of a figure of art? Can it signify anything beyond the bewildering reflections, flickering and shifting through the consciousness of millions of readers of the novel (not a novel, but the novel par excellence), that toy with the invented being, Charles Bovary, country doctor, and will go on doing so indefinitely? It is true, if we take the word “reality” with reference not to its epistemological content, but in the slip-shod—though not, for all that, arbitrary!—sense granted it by everyday usage, we may attempt to examine this person whose name no church registry records, who appears in no historical documents, who lives out his woeful existence in an imaginary tale, and inquire as to his possibilities.—Things had to be this way and only this way, says one; no, that can’t have been, says the other, disagreeing. No doubt, Charles abetted the two adulterous affairs of his Emma, whom he loved, in an implausible, suspect way. Well then, his considerateness showed his stupidity, as we have been assured, and more than once. But love sets a limit to stupidity. No one in his right mind—and the country doctor certainly was, or else he would never have reached the modest status of glorified barber-surgeon—behaves like the cocu, the cuckold of bad jokes the men in the Café du Commerce yelp and jeer about after taking their cognac. [18]
Consider the absurd account of Emma’s piano lessons. She travels regularly to Rouen, where she meets her lover, the gentle, handsome notary’s clerk, Léon. She takes her pleasure with her man in the big bed in the hotel, of mahogany, like one of her three coffins later on. Her husband thinks she is doing finger exercises at the piano with the music teacher Mlle. Lempereur, and one day he runs into her instructor—it is one of those coincidences engineered by fate. He thanks the lady courteously, congratulates her on her technique, overall one can see Emma has made good progress.
“Mme. Emma Bovary, a doctor’s wife from Yonville-l’Abbaye?” Mlle. Lempereur says regretfully. There must be some mistake, she has not had the pleasure of making the lady’s acquaintance.
Charles Bovary, afterward, to his wife, whom he loves with a passion not yet self-aware, because it lacks the words to apprehend itself:
“Tiens, it’s Mlle. Lempereur who gives you the piano lessons, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm, I’ve just met her, I spoke with her about you: she doesn’t know you.”
Nervously, Emma reassures him that she still has the receipts, but she can’t find them at the moment, the teacher must have forgotten her name. Her loving husband, soothingly: Perhaps there are two piano teachers named Lempereur in Rouen, and there’s no need for his beloved to go hunting for the blasted receipts.
No. That doesn’t work, no one believes that, the novelist’s invention is a bad one—this one, and so many more! That the country doctor failed to notice his wife’s first playful flirtations with Léon, that he eagerly advised her to go out riding with the notorious ladykiller Rodolphe Boulanger, that he, a bourgeois, didn’t worry more over the bills piling up, that nothing awakened suspicion in his heart—the reader can hardly accept all that. The masterpiece conceals from us what was real and determinate in the imagined life of poor Charles Bovary. How, then, shall we find some trace of what is hidden?
One way would be to pose the question to the one who cannot answer us: he has been dust for nearly a century now, in the family plot in Rouen, the lovely city the Norman conquerors raised to the first rank in the ninth century. When we pound at his gravestone, Gustave Flaubert is silent. But his reality we may surmise, even if it lingers only in thoughts, phantasms, the words of others, often those born long afterward. There is also testimony: the books, the letters, countless learned dissertations. It, this “reality,” which must be couched between dubious quotation marks, may help us in our quest for the hidden—by Flaubert—Charles Bovary, officier de santé, dupe, whom all our sympathy is owed, even if we do not wish to detract from our love for Emma, for Madame Bovary, who breaks free of the prison of her time and world, breaks free and falls to earth tragically, where her disconsolate widower wishes to dig her out with his bare hands, once more to press her cadaver to his sorrowful, passionate heart.
•
What there is to see: a stately country house, a small castle, almost, on the banks of the Seine, with Rouen on the other side. A dainty, eighteenth-century structure, unspoiled river water lapping at its base, poplars and fields stretching out before it, softly sloping hills with meadows, thickets, and loose sand. Inside, in a littered workroom, a man in his thirties, prematurely aged, with a body too large, already too heavy, thinning hair, a Gallic warrior’s moustache, and eyes slightly bulging under bushy brows. No longer handsome, not really: long past are the days when he, a beaming youngster of Norman roots, would walk arm in arm with his equally imposing sister into a theater hall in Rouen, and spontaneous applause would break out among the public, in tribute to nature and fate, which had smiled upon them both. Gone the beloved playmate, the little sister Caroline, whom the boy had acted out comedies with in their father’s billiard room, his very first attempt at mastering the world through words. The father dead, that omniscient, omnipotent paterfamilias, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, the esteemed chief physician of the département: a flawless man who inspired reverence in the boy, the adolescent Gustave. In the grave of unconscious memory, the one and only great love, Elisa Foucault-Schlésinger, around nine years his elder, whom Gustave met in Trouville, too young to be in passion’s thrall; Elisa, whom he loved as he loved no other woman in his life, save for his mother, who always hovered as a kindly but stern shadow over the house in Croisset.
So young—yet so much has passed! Literary first attempts. A fleeting affair with a creole in Marseilles. Friendships. Ill-fated law studies. Inadmissible sweet temptations of homosexual love. And above all: the first draft of the—as his discerning comrades assured him—thoroughly disastrous metaphysical novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
Gustave Flaubert as we have him before us, inventor of the tale of Emma and Charles Bovary, is both an old man and one who has not yet outgrown puberty. The premature aging—biographical studies affirm his arteriosclerosis was already evident when he was a mere thirty-five years old!—he could feel in his already corpulent body. He ignored his affliction, wolfed down immense meals like a man fearing starvation, drank heavily, smoked his long pipe with occasional fervor, thought nothing of forgoing the requisite physical activity; one need not be the son of a doctor, well-schooled in physiology oneself, to know that long walks are the indispensable corollary of a sedentary way of working and living. He lives badly, for the body is doomed no matter what. Syphilis? A disease typical of the time, seen as shameful, it’s true, but not so grave either, for society recognized it as the almost unavoidable travail of every young man from a better family. Worse is the “nervous illness,” the mysterious complaint that appears for the first time on a carriage journey with his brother in 1844, provoking a fainting fit. These abrupt attacks, which loom continually, and which competent people will later refer to as pseudo-epileptic states of hysteric origin, make him an outsider. That is terrible. It is also a godsend. His “weakness of nerves,” like the one Charles imagines he can diagnose in his Emma, is an excuse to turn his back on the world. Thanks, yes: thanks to that first, severe attack, Flaubert, with his father’s consent, could give up his hated law studies; thanks to his suffering, much was forgiven him, by his mother as well as by his gracious friends, even by his demanding mistress, the dame des lettres
Louise Colet. Extremely vulgar fits of rage, maussade taciturnity, tyrannical pedantry—alas, he is nerve-sick, there’s nothing to be done.
Everything said later about the illness of that man, who died suddenly in 1880, is mere speculation, plausible in the very best of cases. The most admirable, if certainly most capricious interpretation, is the one expounded by Jean-Paul Sartre in his redoubtable work on Flaubert, in the third volume, to be exact: there, when he speaks of the societally conditioned “objective neurosis” that history imposed not only on Flaubert, but on all of the authors who were his contemporaries, he sees nothing more nor less than the Hegelian world-spirit. This representation of Flaubert’s subjectivity, extremely thorough and faithful to the facts down to the least detail, offers an approach at once psychoanalytic and phenomenological, permitting us to decipher the hidden features of the author’s inner face, and places “Bovary’s master,” as we shall call Flaubert here, within an objectively historical system of coordinates—though in an utterly idiosyncratic way, more poetic than analytic in its reflections. There is no doubt: whoever strives to glimpse the reality of Gustave Flaubert, in order to grasp the reality of his creations, finds himself in a less than promising position. He must do all he can to forget Sartre’s poetic reflection, his roman vrai, as he has extravagantly termed his study of Flaubert. If not, he is defeated from the outset, and becomes slave to another who is more powerful in every instance. Still and all, his chances of success are minimal. Who can simply “suppress” an epoch-making work of unheard-of, indeed violent persuasive force, like some uncomfortable recollection from early childhood? What may be achieved, perhaps, is nothing more than this: to gaze at Sartre’s mountains of thought, but from a distance, so that only the contours are visible in the mental heavens, and not to get lost amid the peaks and valleys. Sartre’s Flaubert is the Sartre-Flaubert, and should remain such. It is now left to others to discover their own Flaubert-Flaubert according to the map each sketches out for himself. For what it’s worth, we have an example before us now.
He is, as we have indicated, a man marked by destiny. Naturally not a “family idiot,” even if, when he begins composing Bovary at around thirty years of age, he isn’t the kind who makes a good impression. His brother Achille, who shares his father’s forename, without having inherited his medical competence, and cuts a rather modest figure at the hospital in Rouen as a disciple of the deceased, remains, for all that, a practicing physician. Gustave, however, is a “case,” a comparatively late “budding writer,” who moreover is engaged in a profession bound to lead to penury; and he pursues it with unparalleled fanaticism, though with a lack of clear aspiration or results, that bewilders his literary friends, particularly the tirelessly supportive Maxime Du Camp. Admittedly, no pecuniary duress compels him to plunge into the hustle and bustle of the Parisian salons, editorial offices, and publishing houses where later, his one true disciple, Guy de Maupassant, disconcertingly similar to his bel-ami, will assert himself triumphantly. Maupassant was set on earning through his pen an ample day’s bread, which tasted bitter no matter how lavishly it was buttered. Oh world, let me say it, Gustave Flaubert can manage: thanks not to the Lord, but to the father, who left behind a substantial inheritance for his children. There is no need, as Sartre says much later, to be dans le coup, that is to say, immersed in the ferment of social and political reality, when the rents come in with gratifying regularity. To swear oneself to art and art alone is possible so long as the looming, refractory matter of everyday life, which Lheureux embodies in Madame Bovary, leaves one in peace. That service to ART, written in capitals, must be arduous if done properly, is another matter entirely; and that something approximating reality should arise out of this dedication is a nigh-Napoleonic victory for Flaubert’s genius. But more of that later.
When we observe him, this burdened, difficult man, suffering from himself and the world, working away at his Bovary, which will come to be seen as the insuperable summit of his poetic journey, a plain expression comes unexpectedly to our lips: he “drafts it one page at a time.” But this leads us astray, and must be corrected forthwith. This man is a consummate writer, in line with that dictum of Thomas Mann’s: one for whom writing is especially hard. Each sentence is sounded out for its melody, read histrionically aloud in a voice that booms by fits and turns: Flaubert remains the actor he had been as a boy in the billiards room. Does the cadence rise and fall as it should? One must rehearse it, over and over. Do the adjectives fit? There is always only one, he says; only one that works, and it must be found, and a whole night can pass over a single page, corrected to the point of illegibility. Are the metaphors, in their surrealistic singularity of a kind none has written after him, each and every one right and, once again, irreplaceable? One speaks of “inspiration.” But there is nothing here that in-spires—from anywhere! Where should it come from? A riddle!—instead, the search takes place under enormous exertion.—And yet it is afflatus, a breathing-into, to take the word literally, for the most assiduous research is useless where there is not a hard-to-define something guiding it along. And so the work proceeds, slowly. Almost five years for some 350 pages. Balzac would have dispatched a comparable labor in a matter of months.
Much material was gathered to form the basis for Emma and Charles Bovary’s story, in which, admittedly, only a terribly narrow space is left over for our Charles. An early recollection: Passion et vertu, a text written by a teenager, based on a story in the Journal de Rouen, a report on the fate of an adulterous bourgeoise whose passion made her a criminal. Then: the drama, which Flaubert lived through up close, of the sculptor Pradier, whose wife betrayed him and ruined him financially. Also: the wavering plan to write the life story of an old maid who turns into an ecstatic mystic. The project bears some relation Madame Bovary. Was Emma not a sort of mystic of passion? And to close: the true and sad biography of Delphine Delamare, the doctor’s wife from the village of Ry. A banal affaire d’adultère, probably discussed in the Flaubert household, which the author’s friends Bouilhet and Du Camp suggest to him as a theme for a novel. He must be “healed” of the superfluous phantasms in his first version of Saint Anthony, which even in its second and (for us) definitive version bears a peculiar relationship to the paintings of Salvador Dalí.—Plainly the author of the Tentation de saint Antoine moves uneasily through the lowlands of petit bourgeois triviality. This is plain to see, and has long been proverbial: he detests the bourgeoisie in all its varieties, haute, petty, pettiest. The things the bourgeois prattles on about are platitudes—of Charles Bovary, it is expressly stated that his conversation is flat as a paving stone—what he lives through is incurably banal, even when it is tragic. His thoughts are clichés of language, only good enough for assembling in that glossary of commonplaces, the Dictionnaire des idées reçues, which Flaubert composes to scoff at his own class’s stupidity. Yet once he has taken up the task, Flaubert does not retreat. He bears it as a burden and lives it as a pleasure, for in the end, whether he wants it to be or not, this novel of spiritual suffering emerges as the consummate hymn to passion. Petit bourgeois reality, transformed into language, grows far out beyond all that so-called “social conditioning” might suggest; Flaubert is not Zola: his commitment to society is weaker; he is immeasurably more and greater as an artist. This is said in full awareness of the dubious nature of the artistic vocation, of the societal irresponsibility devotion to language represents, of the ever-present problem of the genuine, irredeemable turpitude of certain of those artists immune to all social-philosophical cures. “C’est avec les bons sentiments qu’on fait la mauvaise littérature,” [19] to quote André Gide’s immoralist. To the danger of “good” sentiments—of melioristic conventionality, as found in bourgeois authors à la Romain Rolland and proletarian ones of the Martin Andersen Nexø or Maxim Gorky stamp—Flaubert refuses to be subject, for the simple reason that he does not have them. He detests mankind, if not individuals exactly, for he is a tender and obedient son, a faithful friend, and a l
oyal citizen, though this last quality makes him suspect from the perspective of humanity. His hatred of his class, of which, in his private life, he represents an ideal specimen, may be the simple projection of self-hatred. His obsequiousness before “art,” before “style,” embodies the existential situation of a man who despises a given societal reality but makes not the least attempt to transcend it or even to recognize the positive elements it contains. The reality of Gustave Flaubert is language, his language, and if, as Bovary’s master, he becomes the greatest realist writer of the century, he does so in opposition to his own aesthetic theories, in contradiction to his notion of his own artistic gestalt.