Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

by Jean Améry

  This selfsame Charles we meet in Flaubert’s company can easily be imagined happy: with a buxom wife who would have taken pleasure in the kisses from his fat lips; with Emma, even, had he only been intemperate enough to yield to the role of the passionate lover, which in fact he was (albeit, at the poet’s behest, and only after his wife’s death). This is not an absurd idea, nor even a completely unbourgeois one. It is rather that the author never truly troubled himself to engage critically with the bourgeoisie. And not with historicity either. He does not place his novel precisely in time; were there not talk of “the king” here and there, we would never know it was set in the era of Louis-Philippe. It is from this lack of historicity and social engagement, as well as the unbelievable nature of the country doctor’s story, that the temptation arises to fill in with glimmering colors the sharp-edged, caricaturesque contours Flaubert has sketched out. To his character, the poet has refused to concede that existential liberty written in invisible letters into the code of bourgeois society as well as in the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme. He has denied legitimacy to the bourgeois subject. Because in the end, the bourgeois subject is not only a prisoner to that duty that Charles Bovary fulfills when he rides out to see his patients, come rain or shine, it is also possessed of liberty and dignity (because it won them), not only with respect to the social ascent that Gustave Flaubert’s grandfather and father realized, but also to passion, which Charles, at the behest of Flaubert, suffers from but never fulfills. Gustave Flaubert wanted to confront the reality of this man neither in the belief or superstition of “scientific” insight, nor as lived subjectivity, a quality he reserved for his Emma, who was none other than himself. In place of analysis, which is subsumed completely into poetic metaphors bestowed upon the inner life of Emma alone, we have la fatalité—as if Charles had not also, in principle, been able to do something other than what he was made for, as if he had not also been, as man and bourgeois, free within the confines of his situation.

  “Look, Emma, you were not at Mlle. Lempereur’s! I’m onto you, and I will strike you dead with my own two hands, you and your lover both, if you don’t break with that lying scoundrel, anyway, he wouldn’t think twice about leaving you in the lurch!”

  It is conceivable.

  “Enough of these riding excursions with that imposter from La Huchette. Let him debauch himself with his degenerate floozies from Paris. So the farmer’s daughter Rouault isn’t good enough to be the wife of Monsieur, his false Excellency. Well she is too good and too precious to be his whore.”

  This is not inconceivable, rather the opposite: it suggests itself. For not even the petit bourgeois from the days following the Revolution would truckle under slavishly before someone who happened to live in a castle, go hunting, and dress in finery.

  The ball in Vaubyessard at the home of the Marquis d’Andervilliers:

  “My trouser straps will be uncomfortable for dancing. But no objections, my love! I will dance, as guest and as the doctor who, with a stroke of my lancet, freed the Marquis from an agonizing abscess in his highborn mouth, and if I step on the train of some countess, so what? It won’t be the end of the world.”

  “The operation turned out badly—what can you say? More than once in Rouen I’ve seen a patient meet his end in the operating room under the well-groomed hands of Dr. Achille-Cléophas Flaubert. That is how it goes in our line of work, which you don’t know a damned thing about. One time you get lucky, the next you don’t, that’s the end of the story. So undress and lie down next to me, and I will claim my conjugal rights, just as I perform my marital duties as a sound husband and provider. Not a word more! Unless you want a thunderstorm to break out in this house that will drown out the wails of poor Hippolyte. My father was an army surgeon under the Great Emperor, he could saw away at a Christian soldier like he was tearing into a plank of wood, get that into your head, once and for all!”

  All this can be conceived, from the ludic perspective, as the reality of Charles Bovary, and is no less legitimate than the woebegone failure we are acquainted with. No fool is only a fool, petrified as such and beyond redemption in his foolishness. Even supposing that Charles Bovary were shackled to his benevolent stupidity, failing to search for the way out that was due to him by his rights as a citizen, still, the duty he carried out every day by the sweat of his brow should have, ought to have, brought him greater respect. The wealth and merit of the bourgeoisie did not represent an irresolvable contradiction, and the latter was not always simply a veneer to cover up the absence of the former. Not to recognize the universality of the values of the bourgeois form of life, even where the particular interests of the bourgeoisie seem to exceed themselves, is an error that may be overlooked in the case of Marxist-dialectical speculations, which in the Hegelian triads of their hurried steps toward the vanishing point of complete human freedom are bound to skip awkwardly over much that lies in their way, but not for the son of a bourgeois who rigs his exquisite game from a position of wealth and favor. Such labors of reverie are only truly good and beautiful when their reality is not merely lexical, but also societal and moral: an acknowledgement of essences and their overarching reality. There is thus more human substance in the bourgeois tragedy Intrigue and Love than in the anti-bourgeois drama Madame Bovary. The reality of Luise Miller and her father, [41] with all the wanness of the woman sipping her lemonade and the pathos of her father stroking his cello, is of an order of brilliance and penetration far higher than the reality of Charles, Flaubert’s plaything.

  •

  Madame Bovary counted, for the author’s contemporaries, as a realist novel, which had a rather disreputable ring in the ears of the influential and which Flaubert himself rejected outright. I too, despite everything that may be marshaled in objection, believe this singular creation to be a realist book and masterpiece. Why, though, remains to be explained. First of all, we must determine what realist literature is, what it can be. This in turn invokes that pressing question, which leads into paradox, of the proper domains of the concept of reality, which so far has only been used in the ambiguous sense linguistic custom assigns it.

  For everyday language, in which being winds up merging with the social community at large, the matter is simple: one can only speak of the “real” in relation to the associated concept of the unreal. Real would be Emma’s existence as the petite bourgeoise wife of a country doctor; unreal her dreams, which place her in the line of great lovers from romantic and subromantic literature, all inevitably of a high social class. She was real as a bad mother, adulterous wife, negligent housekeeper; unreal were Charles’s philistine fantasies of a well-arranged home and a happy future in which Emma and the child Berthe, like two beautiful sisters, would be the joy of his old age. Real was Flaubert’s apothecary Homais as a garrulous wellspring of inept clichés; unreal was the apothecary’s self-consciousness, which made him conceive of himself as a heroic champion of bourgeois enlightenment.

  Everyday language strives for the self-preservation of the person and the maintenance of the social body. Its basis—though it may be suspended—can never be completely abandoned under the objection that it is nothing more than “naïve realism,” because it is, in truth, the substance of social fabrics of all kinds and of that bond that holds together the bundle of perceptions known as the I. On the other hand, not all epistemological philosophizing, which since Plato has been an integral part of civilization, is for this reason the idle play of thought; the progress of the exact sciences alone, not to mention of the metaphysical apprehensions that never abandon the thinking man, serve as witness to the fact that indeed, the problem of reality and of the true propositions that express it remains unresolved.

  Nothing is more ludicrous than the attempt, narrowly related to our search for the reality of the poor man from Yonville, to lay to rest that inquisitive bewilderment that the conditio humana (and if not this, then in any case the spiritual constitution of people from our cultural tradition) has made into our constant e
scort, a pallid doppelgänger as distressingly faithful to us as the anticipation of death. Let us merely jot something down, nonchalantly, in parentheses. It seems to me as if, in the present state of the mind and of research, there were two concepts of reality, both equally verifiable but each radically opposed to the other. The one comes to us from the natural sciences. It may be phrased thus: Reality is the sum of all empirically and logically inter-subjectively confirmable propositions concerning the macro-and micro-physical external world that are expressible in mutually consonant mathematical terms. These propositions concern us only indirectly. Whether there are or are not elementary particles, which one refers to as “quarks,” is indifferent to the world of personal experience so long, but only so long, as no propositions derived from the quark hypothesis lead to a change in the individual and social structures of existence. (Every newly discovered elementary particle, initially conceived only in terms of the hypotheses of physics, may in principle lead to the discovery of new weapons; hence, in the formulas of the General Theory of Relativity, the possibility of the atomic bomb was already contained.)

  And yet, as we have suggested, the intersubjective concept of reality only comes to us through a system of transmission we fail to grasp, and we are incapable of recognizing this reality in the incidents that concern us personally, for the qualitative and relational propositions of science are as foreign to the qualitative experiences we undergo as the millions of light years of cosmology from the stars that our eyes see, and so we are thrown back upon subjective reality and with it what is known in philosophical nomenclature as “subjective idealism.”

  •

  Literature has no language to capture intersubjective reality. Mathematical propositions are, as the poem says, speechless and cold for the man on the street; [42] and whether they even possess existential content for the mathematician, the physicist, the astronomer, or the molecular biologist is uncertain. What remains as an object for literature, particularly of the narrative sort, is subjective reality: this encompasses Emma Bovary’s unbridled reveries as well as her confrontation with the vertiginous array of invoices from the merchant Lheureux, Charles’s infantile fantasies for the future, and his late, hopeless quest for himself. Subjective reality inheres to Gustave Flaubert’s visionary metaphors and Homais’s clichéd turns of phrase. It encompasses both the mediocre and cloddish officier de santé and the lovesick man staring into the abyss, whose existence the present chronicle affirms. Hence, whether we examine a mere representation or an event taking place in space and time, which can only be shared in an intersubjectively valid way (through mathematical formulas or bare behavioristic protocols) by surrendering all that is human, it is what is real that remains at issue.

  What then, under such confused and confusing circumstances, should “realist literature” mean? Concerning the unsayable (the quality of feelings), there is nothing to be discussed. But it has been proven conclusively that one cannot withdraw into silence, as Wittgenstein wished, or into a “mysticism” redolent of the sibylline. Thus, realistic narrative—given that language is at once a bridge and an unbridgeable chasm—can only be a manner of proceeding that rough-and-ready understanding distinguishes from the hyper- or surrealistic sort. If we accept this, things provisionally fall into place: Balzac was a realist, Zola was one; Mallarmé was not a poet of reality. Platitudes triumph effortlessly over the epistemological ether. The banal becomes all that is real—and Tom, Dick, and Harry speak more reasonably than any Tomosopher and Harryologist. The commonsense equilibrium of everyday speech is the only safety net protecting the clever epistemological trapeze artist, so he doesn’t wind up broken and bloody on the sawdust of the circus floor.

  That is how things stand. Only when we acknowledge this do we have the right to speak about realist literature and, especially, to undertake the puzzling search for the reality of Charles Bovary. Certainly there pertains to what is colloquially understood as realist literature something more than the psychology Flaubert prided himself on, something more, something different from the style whose melodic and harmonic purity he strived after. Indispensable for realistic narration is the omniscience of the storyteller, which just yesterday was dismissed as dated and today is discreetly demanded. Whoever tells must know a great deal. Not only everything about his characters—even when he acts as though things were otherwise, and his putative lack of acquaintance is proffered as a slightly transparent stylistic technique—but also the social system of relations inside of which they act.

  Flaubert’s manner of reporting was certainly realistic when he described the agricultural exhibition in Yonville; beforehand, he studied catalogues and accounts of similar events and excerpted them in his work. He was a realist in his portrayal of the Rabelaisian feast at the Les Bertaux farm when Charles and Emma were married, and as a literary chronicler of the ball at Château de la Vaubyessard. He was no longer one when he plunged fully into the darkness of psychology, homing in on Emma and her world of pretty, ever-shifting images. In the end—or so it seems, in any case, for the time being—he left the soil of realism, insofar as he suppressed the reality of Charles Bovary, his inner and outer truth. What was the nature of it, then?

  We find out—putting aside for the moment the question of its probability—only through fleeting suggestions. All-too scant clues are planted here and there: the austere childhood; the drunken father with the clinking spurs, still living in his delusions of the First Empire; the sour, doughty mother; the teenage years of an awkward ridiculus, pushed out of his village into the metropolis of Rouen. The young man’s marriage to a much older, emaciated, lusterless woman. Afterward: unimaginative bourgeois pleasure with Emma’s beautiful body, and the fulfillment of his duties as payment, little different from servicing the invoices incurred at the Lheureux’s shop.

  One might argue that the country doctor’s inner and outer worlds were confined to a ridiculously narrow space. His experiences with the patients were always the same, and it didn’t matter whether one jumped up, cured on the spot, or had to be left to Abbé Bournisien with his extreme unction. He ate the same meals over and over with the same dependable hunger, embraced his wife at regular intervals, saddled his horse today as he had yesterday, the same way he would do tomorrow: bourgeois moderation is expressed through the metronome of the workday, along with occasional festivities, and this abrogates any feeling of temporality. Charles Bovary inhabited a world. But what he apprehended of it was an insubstantial excerpt. He lived a life. But this life was concealed from him; adages, stamped-out forms of being, pre-predetermined modalities of feeling, reifications of all sorts barred Gustave Flaubert’s country doctor from achieving self-discovery, and not even the omniscient narrator permits us some insight into the conditions of that system of social coordinates under which a bourgeois living under his bourgeois king may become knowable.

  Is it conceivable that, when he went to Rouen, to look for Emma at her piano lessons, Charles Bovary did not notice the factory chimneys we see in engravings from the time? That he never ran into a girl, in one place or the other, who worked for one of the city’s manufacturers? That it never occurred to him to demand, as payment for a skilled incision with the scalpel, more money of the Marquis than what he charged a poor peasant for the same work? That he never wondered whether the change the merchant Lheureux handed back to him was correct? That he never spoke with Homais, in the course of the agricultural exhibition, about the state of animal husbandry in the region, or about the councilor’s speech, in which the latter made the stirring affirmation that thanks to God, the bad days were past when peaceful citizens had to take up arms? Naturally it is conceivable: Flaubert’s Charles Bovary was a dimwit; such a person doesn’t reason, he takes things as they come, chimneys and change and corruption, same as wind and bad weather and the irritable impatience of his bride, when she said over and over amid his awkward approaches at tenderness and his prattling: Laisse-moi! But a realist storyteller would have had to fill in the empty gaps
. He would have been obliged to speak himself where his creation’s words failed him. Then a France would rise up before our eyes from the wintry dusk of Yonvillel’Abbaye, where emerging industrialization (the factory chimneys of Rouen!) coexists with feudalism (at Château de la Vaubyessard) and where the factory lord struggles against the Marquis and collaborates with him at the same time. The seed of revolt, planted in the “simple hearts” of the servant Félicité and the old woman Catherine-Nicaise-Élisabeth Leroux, who received a silver medal worth twenty-five francs for fifty-four years of faithful service on the same farm, would be laid bare: against the women’s self-awareness, in the legitimate name of social reality, which drives down to the lowermost depths of the unconscious.

  Actually, the country doctor’s reality was greater than his creator was prepared to give away. It added up to more than inner reality, for it seems unthinkable that his passion should not exceed his stupidity; it should materialize, moreover, for every man, even a wretched country doctor, is more than simply what he is. A person is indeed his lived subjectivity, but at the same time, (and this is not the same as scientifically exact intersubjectivity) he also contributes to and draws on the society around him. He does not understand this, but the realist novelist must show it all the same. What method is capable of responding properly to such demands? The terrain is impassible. The scientific approach to art that Zola boasted of, when viewed against the state of research today, is a meager, deficient instrument: as if one wished to carry out molecular biology with nothing but a microscope from 1860! The ways knowing and doing merge, cancel each other out, and yet complement each other; the way knowledge conditions action and action impends on knowledge can only be made clear by the newest theoretical physics, of which neither Flaubert nor Maupassant or Zola could have the least premonition. How the subject is determined through objective circumstances and yet remains a subject, endowed with full existential freedom: this would only be illuminated through dialectical reason, the totalization of knowledge that would not be systematically considered until one hundred years after the appearance of Bovary, by Jean-Paul Sartre.