The first edition of Bouvard et Pécuchet appeared in March 1881. In April, Henry Ceard attempted this definition: “a kind of two-man Faust.” In the Pleiade edition, Dumesnil confirms: “The first words of Faust’s monologue, at the beginning of the first part, are the entire plot of Bouvard and Pécuchet.” Those are the words in which Faust deplores having studied philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and alas! theology, all in vain. In any case, Faguet had already written: “Bouvard and Pécuchet is the story of a Faust who was also an idiot.” We must keep that epigram in mind, for the whole intricate polemic may in some way be read in it.
Flaubert declared that one of his aims was to pass all modern ideas in review; his detractors argue that the fact that the review is carried out by two imbeciles suffices, in all rigor, to invalidate it. To infer the vanity of all religions, sciences, and arts from the mishaps of these two buffoons is nothing but an insolent sophistry or a crude fallacy. The failures of Pécuchet do not entail a failure by Newton.
This conclusion is customarily refuted by a denial of its premise. Digeon and Dumesnil invoke a passage from Flaubert’s close friend and disciple Maupassant in which we read that Bouvard and Pécuchet are “two fairly lucid, mediocre, and simple minds.” Dumesnil emphasizes the adjective lucid, but the testimony of Maupassant—or of Flaubert, if it could be found—will never be as convincing as the text of the work itself, which appears to impose the term “imbeciles.”
The justification of Bouvard and Pécuchet, I would venture to suggest, is of an aesthetic order, and has little or nothing to do with the four figures and nineteen modes of the syllogism. Logical rigor is one thing and the (now) almost instinctive tradition of placing essential words in the mouths of simpletons and madmen is another. Let us not forget the reverence Islam pays to idiots, in the understanding that their souls have been snatched away from heaven; let us not forget the passages in Scripture where we read that God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. Or, if concrete examples are preferable, we might think of Chesterton’s Manalive, who is a visible mountain of simplicity and an abyss of divine wisdom, or of John Scotus Erigena, who argued that the best name for God is nihilum (nothing) and that “he himself does not know what he is, because he is not a what. . . .” The emperor Montezuma said that fools teach more than wise men because they dare to speak the truth; Flaubert (who, in the final analysis, was not constructing a rigorous demonstration, a Destructio Philosophorum, but a satire) may well have taken the precaution of confiding his final doubts and most secret fears to two mental incompetents.
A deeper justification may also be glimpsed. Flaubert was a devotee of Spencer; in the master’s First Principles we read that the universe is unknowable, for the clear and adequate reason that to explain a fact is to relate it to another more general fact, a process that has no end,78 or that conducts us to a truth so general that we cannot relate it to any other, that is, explain it. Science is a finite sphere that grows in infinite space; each new expansion makes it include a larger zone of the unknown, but the unknown is inexhaustible. Flaubert writes: “We still know almost nothing and we would wish to divine the final word that will never be revealed to us. The frenzy for reaching a conclusion is the most sterile and disastrous of manias.” Art, of necessity, operates by symbols; the largest sphere is a point in infinity; two absurd copyists can represent Flaubert, and also Schopenhauer and Newton.
Taine repeatedly told Flaubert that the subject of his novel demanded an eighteenth-century pen, the concision and mordancy ( “le mordant”) of a Jonathan Swift. Perhaps he spoke of Swift because in some way he felt the affinity between these two great, sad writers. Both hated human stupidity with a minutious ferocity; both documented that hatred with trivial phrases and idiotic opinions compiled across the years; both wanted to demolish the ambitions of science. In the third part of Gulliver, Swift describes a grand and venerated academy whose individuals propose that humanity abstain from oral language so as not to wear out the lungs. Others soften marble for the fabrication of pillows and pin-cushions; others aspire to propagate a breed of naked sheep, with no wool; others think to resolve the enigmas of the universe by means of a wooden frame with iron handles that combines words at random, an invention that goes against Llull’s Ars magna. . . .
Rene Descharmes has examined, and reproached, the chronology of Bouvard and Pécuchet. The action requires about forty years; the protagonists devote themselves to gymnastics at the age of seventy-eight, the same year in which Pécuchet discovers love. The book is full of events, yet time stands still: outside of the attempts and failures of the two Fausts (or of the two-headed Faust), nothing happens; the common vicissitudes of life and fatality and chance are all absent. “The supernumeraries of the book’s out come are those of its preamble; no one travels, no one dies,” observes Claude Digeon. On another page he concludes, “Flaubert’s intellectual honesty played him a terrible turn: it led him to overburden his philosophical tale, to write it with his novelist’s pen.”
The negligences or disdains or liberties of the final Flaubert have disconcerted the critics; I believe I see in them a symbol. The man who, with Madame Bovary, forged the realist novel was also the first to shatter it. Chesterton, only yesterday, wrote: “The novel may well die with us.” Flaubert instinctively sensed that death, which is indeed taking place (is not Ulysses, with its maps and timetables and exactitudes the magnificent death throes of a genre?), and in the fifth chapter of the work, he condemned the “statistical or ethnographic” novels of Balzac and, by extension, of Zola. That is why the time of Bouvard and Pécuchet tends toward eternity; that is why the protagonists do not die and will go on copying their anachronistic Sottisier near Caen, as unaware of 1914 as they were of 1870; that is why the work looks back to the parables of Voltaire and Swift and the Orientals, and forward to those of Kafka.
There is, perhaps, another key. To mock humanity’s yearnings, Swift attributed them to pygmies or apes; Flaubert, to two grotesque individuals. Obviously, if universal history is the history of Bouvard and Pécuchet, everything it consists of is ridiculous and insignificant.
[1954] —Translated by Esther Allen
Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny
In an article intended to abolish or discourage the cult of Flaubert in England, John Middleton Murry observes that there are two Flauberts: one, a large-boned, strapping man, lovable, rather simple, with the look and laugh of a rustic, who spent his life agonizing over the intensive husbandry of half a dozen dissimilar volumes; the other, an incorporeal giant, a symbol, a battle cry, a banner. I must say that I do not understand this opposition; the Flaubert who agonized to produce a precious and parsimonious body of work is identical to the Flaubert of legend and (if the four volumes of his correspondence do not deceive us) of history. This Flaubert is more important than the important literature he premeditated and carried out, for he was the Adam of a new species: the man of letters as priest, ascetic, and almost martyr.
Antiquity, for reasons we shall examine, could not produce this figure. In the Ion we read that the poet is an “ethereal, winged, and sacred thing who can compose nothing until he is inspired, which is to say, mad.” Such a doctrine of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth (John 3:8) was hostile to a personal appreciation of the poet, who was reduced to a fleeting instrument of divinity. A Flaubert is inconceivable in the Greek city-states, or in Rome; perhaps the man who most closely approximated him was Pindar, the priestly poet who compared his odes to paved roads, a tide, gold and marble carvings, and buildings, and who felt and embodied the dignity of the literary profession.
To this “romantic” doctrine of inspiration professed by the classics,79 one fact may be added: the general feeling that Homer had already exhausted the possibilities of poetry, or in any case had discovered its utmost form, the heroic poem. Each night, Alexander of Macedonia placed his knife and his Iliad beneath his pillow, and Thomas De Quincey tells of an English pastor who sw
ore from the pulpit “by the greatness of human suffering, by the greatness of human aspirations, by the immortality of human creations, by the Iliad, by the Odyssey!” The wrath of Achilles and the rigors of Ulysses’ voyage home are not universal themes, and posterity based its hopes on that limitation. To superimpose the course and configuration of the Iliad on other plots, invocation by invocation, battle by battle, supernatural device by supernatural device, was the highest aspiration of poets for twenty centuries. It is very easy to make fun of this, but not of the Aeneid, which was its fortunate result. (Lempriere discreetly includes Virgil among Homer’s beneficiaries.) In the fourteenth century, Petrarch, a devout follower of the glory of Rome, believed he had found in the Punic Wars the durable subject of the epic poem; in the sixteenth, Tasso chose the first crusade, to which he dedicated two works, or two versions of one work. The first—the Gerusalemme liberate—is famous; the other, the Conquistata, which attempts to stay closer to the Iliad, is barely even a literary curiosity. In the Conquistata, the emphases of the original text are muted, an operation which, when carried out on an essentially emphatic work, can amount to its destruction. Thus, in the Liberata (VIII, 23), we read of a valiant, wounded man who still resists death:
La vita no, ma la virtu sostenta quel cadavere indomito eferoce
[Not life, but valor sustained the fierce, indomitable corpse]
In the revised version, hyperbole and impact disappear:
La vita no, ma la virtu sostenta
il cavaliere indomito eferoce
[Not life, but valor sustained the fierce, indomitable cavalier]
Milton, later, lives to construct a heroic poem. From childhood, per haps before ever writing a single line, he knows himself to be dedicated to letters. He fears he was born too late for the epic (too distant from Homer, and from Adam) and in too cold a latitude, but he schools himself in the art of versification for many years. He studies Hebrew, Aramaic, Italian, French, Greek, and naturally, Latin. He composes Latin and Greek hexameters and Tuscan hendecasyllables. He practices self-restraint, because he feels that profligacy might waste his poetic faculty. He writes, at the age of thirty-three, that the poet ought himself to be a true poem, “that is, a com position and pattern of the best and honourablest things,” and that no one unworthy of praise himself should dare to sing high praises of “heroic men or famous cities.” He knows that a book mankind will not let die is to emerge from his pen, but its subject has yet to be revealed, and he seeks it in the Matière de Bretagne and in the two Testaments. On a casual scrap of pa per (today called the Cambridge Manuscript) he notes down a hundred or so possible subjects. Finally he chooses the fall of the angels and of man—a historical subject in that century, though today we consider it symbolic and mythical.80
Milton, Tasso, and Virgil consecrated themselves to the composition of poems; Flaubert was the first to consecrate himself (and I use the word in its full etymological rigor) to the creation of a purely aesthetic work in prose. In the history of literatures, prose is later than verse; this paradox was a goad to Flaubert’s ambition. “Prose was born yesterday;’ he wrote. “Verse is the form par excellence of the literatures of antiquity. The combinations of metrics have been used up; not so those of prose.” And in another pas sage: “The novel awaits its Homer.”
Milton’s poem encompasses Heaven, Hell, the world, and chaos, but remains an Iliad, an Iliad the size of the universe; Flaubert did not wish to repeat or surpass a prior model. He thought that each thing can be said in only one way, and that the writer’s obligation is to find that way. As classics and romantics waged thundering debates, Flaubert said that his failures might differ but his successes were the same, because beauty is always precise, always right, and a good line by Boileau is a good line by Hugo. He believed in the pre-established harmony of the euphonious and the exact, and marveled at the “inevitable relation between the right word and the musical word.” This superstitious idea of language would have made another writer devise a small dialect of bad syntactical and prosodical habits, but not Flaubert, whose fundamental decency saved him from the risks of his doc trine. With sustained high-mindedness, he pursued the mot juste, which of course did not exclude the common word and which would later degenerate into the vainglorious mot rare of the Symbolist salons.
History has it that the famous Lao Tzu wanted to live in secret, without a name; a similar will to be ignored and a similar celebrity mark the destiny of Flaubert. He wished to be absent from his books, or barely, invisibly, there, like God in his works; and it is a fact that if we did not already know that one and the same pen wrote Salammbô and Madame Bovary, we would not guess it. No less undeniable is the fact that to think of Flaubert’s work is to think of Flaubert, of the anxious, painstaking workman and his lengthy deliberations and impenetrable drafts. Quixote and Sancho are more real than the Spanish soldier who invented them, but none of Flaubert’s creatures is as real as Flaubert. Those who claim that his Correspondence is his masterpiece can argue that those virile volumes contain the face of his destiny.
That destiny continues to be exemplary, as Byron’s was for the romantics. To an imitation of Flaubert’s technique we owe The Old Wives’ Tale and O primo Basilio; his destiny has been repeated, with mysterious magnifications and variations, in Mallarmé (whose epigram “Everything in the world exists to end up in a book” voices one of Flaubert’s convictions), in Moore, in Henry James, and in the intricate and near-infinite Irishman who wove Ulysses.
[1954] —Translated by Esther Allen
Book and Movie Criticism
Books: Reviews and Prologues
William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
I know of two kinds of writers: those whose central preoccupation is verbal technique, and those for whom it is human acts and passions. The former tend to be dismissed as “Byzantine” or praised as “pure artists.” The latter, more fortunately, receive the laudatory epithets “profound,” “human,” or “profoundly human,” and the flattering vituperation “savage.” The former is Swinburne or Mallarmé; the latter, Celine or Theodore Dreiser. Certain exceptional cases display the virtues and joys of both categories. Victor Hugo remarked that Shakespeare contained Gongora; we might also observe that he contained Dostoevsky. . . . Among the great novelists, Joseph Conrad was perhaps the last who was interested both in the techniques of the novel and in the fates and personalities of his characters. The last, that is, until the tremendous appearance of Faulkner.
Faulkner likes to expound the novel through his characters. This method is not entirely original—Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868) details the same crime ten times, through ten voices and ten souls—but Faulkner infuses it with an intensity that is almost intolerable. There is an infinite decomposition, an infinite and black carnality, in this book. The theater is the state of Mississippi: the heroes, men disintegrating from envy, alcohol, loneliness, and the erosions of hate.
Absalom, Absalom! is comparable to The Sound and the Fury. I know no higher praise.
[1937] [EW]
William Faulkner, The Unvanquished
It is a general rule that novelists do not present a reality, but rather the memory of one. They may write about true or believable events, but these have been revised and arranged by recollection. (This process, needless to say, has nothing to do with the verb tenses they employ.) Faulkner, however, at times wants to recreate the pure present, neither simplified by time nor polished by attention. The “pure present” is no more than a psychological ideal—and thus some of Faulkner’s decompositions are more confused—and richer—than the original events.
In earlier works, Faulkner has played powerfully with time, deliberately shuffling chronological order, deliberately complicating the labyrinths and ambiguities. He did it to such an extent that there were those who insisted that his virtues as a novelist were entirely derived from those involutions. This novel—direct, irresistible, straightforward—will destroy that suspicion. Faul
kner does not try to explain his characters: he shows us what they feel and what they do. The events are extraordinary, but his narration is so vivid that we cannot imagine them any other way. “Le vrai peut quelquefois n’être pas vraisemblable,” said Boileau. (What is true may sometimes not be plausible.) Faulkner heaps his implausibilities in order to seem truthful, and he succeeds. Or more exactly: the world he imagines is so real that it also encompasses the implausible.