by Jean Améry
All too systematically, one could say. For in dialectical totalization, where subject and objectivity attempt to meld, where the theorems bore into the country doctor’s little practice and the hermitage of the master from Croisset, the unmediated reality of an existence becomes lost. What arises if one links, on the basis of a certain grandiose, but not, for that reason, arbitrary system of thought, a single being with all the economic, social, philosophical, psychological manifestations of an era, is inevitably a kind of artwork of ideas. Sartre’s Flaubert is the consummate and consternating example. It is inimitable, because geniuses aren’t crowding the streets. Whether there is a need to imitate it, I cannot say. Totalizing dialectical reason, in its opposition to reason of the disintegrating, analytic sort, is a riddle, the rules governing which I see through, and the utility of which I increasingly doubt. Like all dialectical thinking, it depends on who is wielding it: in Jean-Paul Sartre’s hands, it became a fantastic (in both senses of the word) and sweeping instrument for thought; should an assiduous nobody usurp it, the result would be inhuman glossurgy. [43]
Gustave Flaubert knew nothing of dialectical totalization. His naïve rule of thumb was Buffon’s phrase: Bien écrire, c’est à la fois bien penser, bien sentir, bien dire. [44] Let us accept this bit of guilelessness: all simplicity contains utmost complexity and is legitimated thereby, even where it falls silent. But the inventor of the country doctor certainly did not think well: he was no philosopher, only an enormously erudite bourgeois eclectic.—Did he feel well? Of course, but only for Emma, deep down, whose poor heart beat in the same time as his. For Charles and that part of his reality conveyed to us, kind (that is to say, humanely benevolent) feeling may have been present, but it did not succeed in breaking through the conception of the work, for Charles was dumb and the bourgeois author eclectic and erudite, and he hated stupidity (or what he took to be such) with the same hatred he harbored for that sin which he, a bourgeois through and through, would not forgive even Emma, his beloved, his transformed I. Madame Bovary had to pay, just like the bankrupt merchant one throws in the debtor’s prison with a bourgeois clean conscience and sense of right. Bien dire: clearly there is nothing lacking here. Flaubert spoke beautifully, in metaphor, rhythm, even in contrapuntal arrangements, as in the scene of the comices agricoles, where the councilor from the prefecture’s perfectly absurd address alternates repeatedly with Rodolphe’s whispers, his coarse yet refined erotic innuendo.
So is Madame Bovary a realist novel, if its author has created an incomparable linguistic reality? Has he captured a tactile, visible, olfactory, gustatory, and auditory reality in the suspect “bien dire” on the grounds of which those who just yesterday were still calling themselves the new novelists chose him as their patron saint? Hardly. The reality of the word is not at all the mirror of the reality structure of the world: undeniable as an autonomous phenomenon, it is of a consternating nullity nonetheless. To the degree that Bovary’s master was a realist storyteller—and he was that, in fact, I cannot insist often or emphatically enough—he achieved realism not as a linguistic creator, not as the servant of a style, which was what he longed for with all his heart, but rather as a writer who never fully withdrew from everyday language, instead refining it, so that two sorts of subjective processes could be exposed: the inner (Emma’s reveries, her dreadful visions of suicide) and the outer (the fiacre’s journey to Rouen, where behind the drawn curtain of the swaying conveyance, Léon followed the path marked by the flesh through Emma’s linen-and-silk corset, that armor of good morals, to her body, which longed to be opened). The ladies’ prattling when they spied Emma desperately begging for a credit from the repugnant tax collector Binet, and then hissed that women of that kind should be whipped, is realism. The stupidly verbose councilor from the prefecture’s appearance and the grandiosity of the agricultural exhibition are reality colloquially disclosed. It is reality, and moving, when doleful Père Rouault travels to Yonville for his daughter’s burial, wiping his teary eyes with the sleeve of his blue smock, and the dye in the linen runs and leaves blue streaks on his slack farmer’s face. Lamentably, realist literature can be nothing more than colloquial communicative speech, and all that is permitted it is the refinement thereof. This insufficiency is not the fault of inept littérateurs, but of the epistemological paradoxes into which the concept of reality leads us.
Another matter is that, unlike the poor country doctor, Gustave Flaubert, despite being capable of so much, did not do what he could have, had he only been true to his genius and inclined to realize it fully. That he failed before Charles Bovary was at once his unfortunate destiny and his deplorable choice to lie down before it. Imposed on him: that the haut bourgeois should detest the petit, and the cultivated the lowbrow; for the barber-surgeon from Yonville, the famous doctor’s son could summon arrogant pity, but not sympathetic compassion. Blameworthy: that he neglected to shake off this imposed burden and free himself: from the laws of his haut bourgeois heritage, toward the acceptance of the bourgeois subject, who even in the paltry form of petty and pettiest bourgeois remains the value-bearer and scion of the Great Revolution and the Droits de l’Homme, and who, if he is made to play the pitiful role of the cuckold, deserves pathos, the highest blossoming of the strength of written art.—Menelaus can only be risible in an Offenbach operetta, his storied reality was great tragedy.
•
Flaubert did not deny this tragedy. But he confined it, cryptically and with a mind swollen with arrogance, within the boundary that, in the author’s eyes, the mediocrity of the unheroic Charles Bovary drew around him. Everything that could have been, that must have been the reality of Charles Bovary was wiped away, hidden behind all-too scarce allusions. In the hands of the master wordsmith, his grief over Emma was reduced to stammering and speechlessness. Naturally a country doctor from Emma’s story, situated vaguely around 1840, would not have been able to express his pain with that eloquence which in these pages takes the place of immediate feeling. But should the extraordinarily suggestive power of metaphor that made Emma immortal not also have been extended to that deceived and betrayed husband and petit bourgeois citoyen from whom everything else was stripped away? The image-as-word, borne of imaginative force, thanks to which Emma has survived more than a century and continues to fascinate us today—is it not also Charles’s human right, as a citizen, earned through the fulfillment of his duties?
The opportunities were numerous for fitting compensation for the officier de santé. He moved from Tostes, where he’d already made a name for himself among a narrow circle, to Yonville, for Emma’s sake. He arrived there weary, and it cheered him that his beauty found, in the nice little notary’s clerk Léon, an admirer on her level, who could talk to her as they leafed through the journal L’Illustration, where the pretty daguerreotypes of Parisian society life were reproduced. The unquiet heart of farmer Rouault’s daughter beat even harder than before in delight at the ways of life in the big city. And because the author’s words did not come to his aid, Charles did not think what he might have thought as the apothecary spoke to him, grave and intelligent, of the most common illnesses in the region. Léon moved to Paris to finish his studies. The lovers, who had not yet dared to love each other, share a gripping and trivial farewell.
Their eyes met a last time, then he vanished. The shy admirer was gone. Emma was crushed. Charles was sincerely sorry. What lay in this sorrow? The mere consequence of the departure of a good and helpful friend? Sadness that Emma now had no one with whom to read poetry and converse about Paris, the glistening capital? A dull sense of defeat that something already ordained in that first meeting between the young lad with the soft baby’s face and Monsieur and Madame Bovary had been left unfulfilled? Charles was not predisposed to jealousy, we learn—as if that explained everything! He was not jealous when Emma waltzed with the Vicomte at Château de la Vaubyessard, when she rode off with Rodolphe, when she ran into Léon, who had grown into a grisette-slayer in Paris, at the opera in
Rouen.
“Guess who I just saw up there in the foyer—Monsieur Léon!”
“Léon?”
“The very same. He’s coming over to give you his regards.”
This and nothing else. Nothing to indicate it was not only Emma’s heart that pounded harder, that brave Charles’s pulse was racing, too, because he was not merely an oaf, and not an oaf twenty-four hours a day, from daybreak to twilight to night; he had to have seen how the clouds were gathering over Rouen, darkening the waters of the Seine, bringing in the storm whose sheet lightning the theatergoers glimpsed briefly as they lapped at their juices and lemonades in the foyer. As if the duteous petit bourgeois citoyen, burdened by his hard daily labors, were not all the same a seeing, anxious man. There is no knowing the future: and this speculative anxiety harries even the stupidest man, and torments him ever more the deeper he loves.
When Emma was struck with meningitis—her broken heart after her betrayal by Rodolphe, with whom she wanted to run away, could lead, according to prevailing notions of the time, to brain fever—Charles was at her sickbed, as doctor and companion, and when his barber-surgeon’s knowledge was not enough, he called for Doctors Canivet and Larivière. It surely would have hit him, after the fact, that it was precisely at that point in time when Rodolphe left Yonville and set off on his worldly travels that Emma’s heart and brain forsook their legitimate functions. But no, nothing. He acquiesced to fatalité: his inventor did not accord him the human right of thought, not even when such a thing, transmitted through the medium of feeling, must be conceded to the poorest sap.
We are in misery, said the silkweavers in Lyon, that is not the will of God, and if God wills it so, then he’s a blackguard; [45] and they rose up, like the farmers in the days of the Jacquerie, when Jacques Bonhomme, Simple Jack, was already smart enough to know God only tried to sway them to his will through the mendacious lips of their masters.
“I will never forget you, believe me; and I will remain deeply devoted to you; but one day, sooner or later, our passion will begin to cool, that is the fate of all things human. . . . The world is dreadful, Emma. Anywhere we went, it would have hunted us down. . . . Adieu. . . . Cherish the memory of the unhappy man who lost you. . . . I will be far gone when you read these lines . . . later, perhaps, we will speak coolly with one another of our former love. Adieu!—Your friend.”
Then the detestable nobleman let a drop of water fall on the paper, to lead Emma to believe the words wiped away were testimony to the tears he’d wept for her. Indifferent to tears now, true or false, she laughed with the scornfulness of despair, fainted.
“Ma femme, ma femme!” Charles’s trembling cry. She was already in the barren no-man’s-land between life and death, a forlorn guest on the darkened earth, clinging to the table, until a second attack carried her away from the cruel world, from her cruel lover. Homais blathered on about the aroma of apricots, which likely affected the ill woman’s nervous system. Emma woke momentarily and cried, in a picturesque delirium:
“And the letter? The letter?”
And Charles thought nothing of it. In this way, Flaubert’s cruelty toward the poor fool was still worse than the unwarranted indifference with which Rodolphe pushed away his beloved, who was no longer beloved.
But why? Why? The hermit from Croisset did none of what he could or ought to have done. Charles Bovary’s reality was petrified. Things happened such and such a way because he was just that mediocre. There was no freedom of the subject, nor even realism as bare fidelity to the probable. Nothing but an endless supply of dimwitted goodwill from the cocu, about whom the author’s depraved, bourgeois intelligence, probably heated by alcohol, would gladly have cracked the same juvenile jokes as those philistines he loathed as an expression of his self-loathing and whose turns of phrase he preserved, for his own stupid diversion, in the Dictionnaire des idées reçues. How blind must one have been not to see that the palaver of the bourgeoisie contained, though degraded into banality through overuse, a number of incontestable truths, and that, setting these truths aside, the bourgeois as citoyen and person (a person precisely because a citoyen!) possessed, getting down to the heart of the matter, the freedom vouchsafed by society, the political order, and his education, to think out past himself, even if his language was lumbering.
“What’s the meaning of this, her howling about some letter? Who’s writing her letters that make her cry out in delirium? Certainly not Père Rouault, who does sometimes write to her, but only to report on the harvest and make sure things are going well for us, as a father should. Devil take it! This doesn’t add up, her falling faint over a basket of apricots, and Homais’s meddlesome babbling about the noxious effects of certain scents is rank nonsense; I’ve never read or heard anything about smells causing a reaction like that. Monsieur Rodolphe sends succulent fruits as an expression of friendship: that is all well and good, and there is nothing objectionable in it. He sets off on his travels, to visit his fellow hunters or to Paris or perhaps another country: and so? He leaves his estate from time to time, for dissipation, and by my word, I see nothing untoward in it. If a man is well-off and a bachelor to boot. . . . Besides, he is a good talker, our friend! A witty man. We tell each other men’s things, unsuited for women’s ears. Yet there is something suspect about her, his riding companion, collapsing when he leaves, and crying out for some letter in the midst of her fever! You’d have to be dimmer than the most empty-headed shepherd not to think through the implications. Admit it, Emma, in your enervation, which makes me fear for your dear life, admit it, even when you can’t say it, because the fever has deprived you of speech: What did you do with that fine gentleman while I was out in the heat and frost, performing my duty without reprieve? Did he whisper sweet words beguilingly into your shapely ear? I will take the joker to task when he returns, he owes me answers, no matter how big and strong he is, even if he does think he could knock me all the way to Rouen with a bump on the nose! There are justices of the peace in this country and still higher officials of the court.”
“You’re coming with me, sir, to see the Procureur du Roi. Do you know what that is, l’adultère? And if you so much as touch me with one of those hands you hunt and ride with, you’ll only get it that much worse! I am a citizen, my noble friend, and my father was a field doctor in the Grande Armée of the Emperor, who enshrined the rights of the citizen into his code. And His Majesty, who stands above us, is a citizen as well. I will bring down the law and court upon you, my equal! Adultère: an offense punishable by law. How will you feel when you hear the clink of the gendarme’s key! Your fists will be no more use to you than your riches.”
“Charles Bovary, officier de santé à Yonville-l’Abbaye, contre Rodolphe Boulanger, propriétaire à la Huchette.” [46]
Like against like, thanks to the undying principles of 1789.
But no. Not even in thought does the country doctor dare rebel against a regime that was still holy for the Abbé Bournisien and perhaps for Madame Leroux, l’Ancien Regime, where master was master and the serf a serf, forever and ever. His passion for Emma’s beauty tears him apart and makes him weep at her sickbed, but not a word against the pseudo-seigneur making travel plans in search of foolish and repugnant pleasures. Not a single rebellious thought. He was “not inclined to jealousy,” as the book says—for the love of God! Realism lowers its flag, psychology declares itself bankrupt before the reality of this poor man.
This reality may be reformulated, according to one’s preferences, though doing so might stoke disapproval. Charles knew more than Flaubert. He had something up his sleeve; what he learned in his chemistry lectures was not for nothing. The rights of the citizen, of the bourgeois, encompassed in a single formula, sealed in a phial, drops of which may be spilled into a wine glass just as Rodolphe spilled his false tears onto his stationery.
The country doctor belongs to all of us. What he was lies in our hands. What will he do in the end with what one has made of him? Patience. The last word wil
l soon be spoken.
J’ACCUSE
“IT’S JUST because I have to get some sleep again at any price. The pain has made rest impossible, so I am half-dead, as you can see. My clothing hangs loose on my body, my neck stretches furrowed from my shirt, like a plucked chicken’s. My weight loss must be considerable, and I feel weak as well, I can hardly gather the strength to shave my beard and must look bedraggled. The mere sight of my pale, ravaged face drives the patients away, it’s a real bit of good fortune that you have stood in for me valiantly in your back room, offering medical advice despite the laws crudely dividing the doctor’s art from the pharmacist’s. Our kind knows better than the gentlemen of the jury. We have experience. It has taught us that doctor and apothecary walk hand in hand, for the betterment of men in suffering. Hence I ask you, as a doctor and as your friend, to mix up for me with your crafty fingers this tranquilizer I have devised. If I just get a bit of sleep, I won’t feel so miserable, so pushed aside, so damned low.”
“Very well. I don’t have the slightest doubt that your knowledge of chemistry has sufficed for you to hit on the right combination. With my knowledge of herbs, I produce a sleeping tea that I sell in small doses, and for the farmers, it is quite enough. But finer organisms require other remedies. Still, I recommend caution. Your prescription is legally valid, and I am legally empowered, nay, required, to fill it. Naturally, it contains a poison. But what is poison? A quantitative concept. That is how Monsieur Gay-Lussac, a leading light of science, has defined the word, which only sounds frightful in the ears of the uncultured. Drink three liters of radish juice, and you’ll be poisoned; a liter bottle of fruit brandy swallowed in one go will bring a painful death. The progress of science is unstoppable. What was yesterday called poison is today, in precise doses and taken at the proper intervals, a priceless remedy. But you know all this yourself. I shall distill, mix, and crush the ingredients with my skilled hands, and afterward will wash them innocently. In any case, this must remain between us, though the law provides me un-impeachable shelter. Just think of the kind of farfetched ideas the gentlemen from the Palais de Justice in Rouen might cook up if something were to befall you just after the dreadful accident that took your dear wife! Abandoned by the serene gods of old, they could end up concluding the apothecary meant to bump off the country doctor in order to do away with the competition, to keep all the customers of Yonville and environs for himself as the lone healer in the region. And the Abbé? All is well, you will say, there is peace between the two of us, we tell each other bonjour and bonsoir; il fait bon ce matin. Flimflam. That is, in the best of cases, a cease-fire. He is a column of the Ancien Régime and braces himself against enlightenment and progress with all the powers of that body of his, which is almost licentious in its spryness. You know what he would do en cas d’accident? He would recommend that the sick man pray. On your knees! he would thunder from his pulpit. Then he’d send for some faith healer. He’d babble on about the blessed days when the master was master and the serf a serf, and the people in their great unwisdom would believe him and flee from science. We stand in the vanguard, you and I. I even more than you, for to my regret you have sunk so far into the depths of your misery that the ill and suffering now depend on me alone. Hence my craving for the cross with the red ribbon, which I wrote about to the king, by the by, and I didn’t hesitate to compare him to Henri IV. The Légion d’Honneur on the breast of the apothecary Homais, that will be a milestone for the progress of humanity. There won’t be enough holy incense smoke in the entire region to cloud over this glorious event. The good king, who enriches us and puts a chicken in the pots of the poor, will know to award my service to the fatherland and mankind. Just imagine the inconvenience then, should I be faced with some contretemps. It would have personal and political consequences. Silence, my dear man. I will mix your tranquilizer and dispense it in one of my best phials. To fulfill my duty and prepare this remedy is a labor in the spirit of equality, liberty, and fraternity. The doctor prescribes, the apothecary follows his recommendations methodically. You deserve your sleep just as I deserve my Legion of Honor. I will write down the dosages on a scrap of paper and will affix it to the bottle, though you know perfectly well when quantity ceases to be mere quantity and takes on the qualities of a toxin. It is up to you to decide whether you should call on Doctor Canivet in his capacity as consulting doctor or proceed on your own. . . .”