Tuesday, August 1, 2023

The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary, by Mario Vargas Llosa

The investigation by the Peruvian narrator explores three different approaches to Flaubert’s text: in the first part, with an autobiographical tone, Vargas Llosa portrays himself as an enthusiastic and passionate reader. The second part is an exhaustive analysis of “Madame Bovary,” examining the skillful combination of rebellion, violence, melodrama, and sex in this work and its significance. The third part traces the relationship between Flaubert’s work and the history and development of the most representative genre of modern literature: the novel.

Mario Vargas Llosa proves to be as adept a literary critic as he is a storyteller. The encounter between the narrative intelligence of the Peruvian novelist and the most important work of one of the essential authors in universal literature gives birth to an essay that is worth an entire literature course.

Dedication

To CARLOS BARRAL

the penultimate Francophile

Epigraph

Le seul moyen de supporter l’existence,
c’est de s’étourdir dans la littérature
comme dans une orgie perpétuelle.

[The only way to endure existence is to stupefy oneself in literature, as in a perpetual orgy.]

(Letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, September 4, 1858)

Prologue

On one hand, there is the impression that Emma Bovary leaves on the reader who approaches her for the first (second, tenth) time: sympathy, indifference, or disgust. On the other hand, there is what constitutes the novel itself, independent of the effect of its reading: the story it tells, the sources it draws upon, and the way it shapes time and language. Finally, there is what the novel signifies, not in relation to its readers or as a sovereign object, but from the perspective of the novels written before or after it. Developing any of these options means choosing a form of criticism. The first, individual and subjective, predominated in the past, and its proponents call it classical; its detractors call it impressionistic. The second, modern, aims to be scientific, analyzing a work objectively based on universal rules, although the nature of these rules varies according to the critic (psychoanalysis, Marxism, stylistics, structuralism, combinations). The third is more related to the history of literature than to criticism proper.

In reality, critics of all times have used all three perspectives simultaneously. The difference lies in the fact that each era, person, and tendency emphasizes and focuses predominantly on one of them. The ancients, judging based on their sensitivity, believed they personified a model of value, and thus, their opinions had universal validity. The contemporary knows that their reason and knowledge are stimulated and guided — even if only in choosing the subject of their study — by their subjectivity, the wound that this particular work causes in their spirit. On the other hand, impressionists and scientists have always sought to place a work in its tradition, indicating what it means in relation to the past and future of its genre.

In this essay, I intend to carry out the three attempts separately, and that is why it is divided into three parts. The first is a one-on-one between Emma Bovary and myself, in which, of course, I talk more about myself than about her. In the second part, I intend to concentrate exclusively on Madame Bovary, summarizing, with a semblance of objectivity, its gestation and birth, what it is, and how it is as a novel. Finally, in the third part, I attempt to situate it by talking mainly about other novels, to the extent that their existence was made possible and enriched thanks to it.

Part One

Chapter 1: An Unrequited Passion

On simplifierait peut-être la critique si, avant d’énoncer un jugement, on déclarait ses goûts; car toute oeuvre d’art enferme une chose particulière tenant à la personne de l’artiste et qui fait, indépendamment de l’exécution, que nous sommes séduits ou irrités. Aussi notre admiration n’est-elle complète que pour les ouvrages satisfaisant à la fois notre tempérament et notre esprit. L’oubli de cette distinction préalable est une grande cause d’injustice.

(We might simplify criticism if, before expressing a judgment, we declared our tastes; for every work of art contains a particular element related to the artist’s personality, which, independently of its execution, either seduces or irritates us. Thus, our admiration is only complete for works that satisfy both our temperament and our intellect. Neglecting this preliminary distinction is a significant cause of injustice.)

(Prologue to Dernières chansons by Louis Bouilhet)

I have always considered certain the phrase attributed to Oscar Wilde about a character from Balzac: “The death of Lucien de Rubempré is the great drama of my life.” A handful of literary characters have left a more lasting mark on my life than many flesh-and-blood beings I have known. Although it is true that when fictional characters and human beings are present, in direct contact, the reality of the latter prevails over that of the former—nothing has as much life as the tangible, palpable body—the difference disappears when both become past, memory, and with considerable advantage for the former over the latter, whose dissolution in memory is inevitable, while the literary character can be indefinitely resurrected with the minimal effort of opening the pages of the book and stopping at the appropriate lines. In that heterogeneous and cosmopolitan circle, a gang of friendly ghosts that renews itself according to the times and mood—today, I would mention in a hurry: d’Artagnan, David Copperfield, Jean Valjean, Prince Pierre Bezukhov, Fabrizio del Dongo, the terrorists Cheng and The Professor, Lena Grove, and the tall convict—none is more persistent and with whom I have had a relationship more clearly passionate than Emma Bovary. That story may perhaps contribute, with a minimal example, to illustrate the much-discussed and enigmatic relationships between literature and life.

My first memory of Madame Bovary is cinematic. It was 1952, a hot summer night, a newly inaugurated cinema in the bustling Plaza de Armas in Piura, palms rustling: James Mason appeared as Flaubert, Rodolphe Boulanger was the lanky Louis Jourdan, and Emma Bovary took shape in the nervous gestures and movements of Jennifer Jones. The impression must not have been great because the movie did not prompt me to seek the book, even though it was precisely during that time that I had started reading novels eagerly and voraciously.

My second memory is academic. On the occasion of the centenary of Madame Bovary, the University of San Marcos, Lima, organized a tribute in the Aula Magna. The critic André Coyné questioned, impassively, Flaubert’s realism: his arguments vanished amid the cries of “Viva Argelia Libre!” and the vociferations with which a hundred Sanmarquinos, armed with stones and sticks, advanced through the hall toward the platform where their target, the French ambassador, awaited them, livid. Part of the tribute was the publication, in a booklet whose letters remained on the fingers, of Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, translated by Manuel Beltroy. It was the first thing I read by Flaubert.

In the summer of 1959, I arrived in Paris with little money and the promise of a scholarship. One of the first things I did was to buy a copy of Madame Bovary in the Garnier Classics edition at a bookstore in the Latin Quarter. I began reading it that very afternoon, in a small room at the Wetter Hotel, near the Cluny Museum. That’s when my true story begins. From the first lines, the book’s power of persuasion acted on me with stunning force, like a powerful spell. It had been years since any novel had so rapidly captivated my attention, erasing the physical surroundings and immersing me so deeply in its substance. As the afternoon turned into night, and dawn approached, the magical transference became more effective, replacing the real world with the fictional one. Morning had come—Emma and Léon had just met in a box at the Rouen Opera—when, dazed, I put the book down and prepared to sleep. Even in the difficult morning dream, there continued to exist, with the veracity of reading, the Rouault farm, the muddy streets of Tostes, Charles’s good-natured stupidity, Homais’s pedantic Rioplatense character, and, above all these people and places, like an image foreseen in a thousand childhood dreams, guessed since my first adolescent readings, Emma Bovary’s face. When I woke up, ready to resume reading, it is impossible not to have had two certainties like two flashes of lightning: I already knew which writer I would have liked to be, and from then until death, I would live in love with Emma Bovary. She would be, for me, in the future, as for Léon Dupuis in the early days, “L’amoureuse de tous les romans, l’héroïne de tous les drames, le vague elle de tous les volumes de vers” (“The lover of all novels, the heroine of all dramas, the vague she of all volumes of verse”).

Since then, I have read the novel about half a dozen times from beginning to end and have reread chapters and individual episodes many times. I have never been disappointed, unlike what has happened to me when revisiting other beloved stories, and, on the contrary, especially when rereading the crucial moments—the agricultural fair, the carriage ride, Emma’s death—I have always had the sensation of discovering secret aspects, unpublished details, and the emotion has been, with variations in degree that depended on the circumstances and the place, the same. A book becomes a part of a person’s life for a sum of reasons that are simultaneously related to the book and the person. I would like to find out some of these reasons in my case: why Madame Bovary stirred such deep layers of my being, what it gave me that other stories could not.

The first reason is probably that inclination that has led me to prefer, since childhood, works constructed with rigorous and symmetrical order, with a beginning and an end, that close in on themselves and give the impression of sovereignty and completion, over those open works that deliberately suggest the indeterminate, the vague, the in-process, the half-done. These latter may be truer images of reality and life, always unfinished and perpetually in progress, but precisely what I have instinctively sought and enjoyed finding in books, movies, and paintings has not been a reflection of this infinite partiality, of this immeasurable flow, but rather the opposite: totalizations, sets that, thanks to a bold, arbitrary but convincing structure, give the illusion of synthesizing the real, of summarizing life. This appetite must have been fully satisfied with Madame Bovary, an example of a closed work, of a circular book. On the other hand, a preference that had until then been nebulous but growing in my readings had to be fixed thanks to that novel. Between the description of objective life and subjective life, of action and reflection, I am more seduced by the former than the latter, and I have always considered the description of the latter through the former to be a greater achievement (I prefer Tolstoy to Dostoevsky, realistic invention to fantastic, and among unrealities, the one closest to the concrete rather than the abstract, for example, pornography to science fiction, romance literature to horror stories). While writing Madame Bovary, Flaubert, in his letters to Louise, was sure he was creating a novel of “ideas,” not actions. This has led some, taking his words literally, to argue that Madame Bovary is a novel where nothing happens except language. It is not so; in Madame Bovary, as many things happen as in an adventure novel—marriages, adulteries, dances, trips, walks, scams, illnesses, shows, a suicide—only that they are generally petty adventures. It is true that many of these events are narrated from the emotion or memory of the character, but, due to Flaubert’s obsessively materialistic style, subjective reality in Madame Bovary also has consistency, physical weight, just like objective reality. The fact that thoughts and feelings in the novel seemed like “facts,” that they could be seen and almost touched, not only dazzled me: it revealed a deep predilection.

These are formal reasons, derived from the structure and conception of the book. Those related to the subject are less articulated. A novel has been more seductive to me to the extent that it combined, skillfully within a compact story, rebellion, violence, melodrama, and sex. In other words, the greatest satisfaction a novel can give me is to provoke, throughout the reading, my admiration for some nonconformity, my anger at some stupidity or injustice, my fascination with those situations of distorted drama, of excessive emotionalism that romanticism seemed to invent because it used and abused them but have always existed in literature, because they undoubtedly always existed in reality, and my desire. Madame Bovary is generous in these ingredients; they are the four great rivers that bathe its vast geography, and in the distribution of these contents, the novel exhibits the same equity as in its formal division into parts, chapters, scenes, dialogues, and descriptions.

In Emma’s case, rebellion does not have the epic aspect of the virile heroes of the nineteenth-century novel, but it is no less heroic. It is an individual rebellion and, apparently, selfish: she violates the codes of her milieu driven by strictly personal problems, not in the name of humanity, a certain ethics, or ideology. It is because her fantasies and her body, her dreams and her appetites, feel confined by society that Emma suffers, commits adultery, lies, steals, and, finally, commits suicide. Her defeat does not prove that she was in the wrong and the Yonville-l’Abbaye bourgeoisie were right, that God punishes her for her crime, as Maître Sénard, the novel’s defender, argued in court (his defense is as Pharisaical as the accusation of Prosecutor Pinard, the secret writer of pornographic verses). Instead, her defeat merely shows that the fight was uneven: Emma was alone, and, because of her impulsiveness and sentimentality, she often took the wrong path, engaged in actions that ultimately favored the enemy (Maître Sénard, with arguments that Flaubert himself must have placed in his mouth, stated in court that the moral of the novel is: the dangers of a girl receiving an education superior to her class). That defeat, fated due to the conditions in which the battle was fought, has elements of tragedy and melodrama, and that is one of the blends to which I, poisoned like her by certain readings and spectacles of my adolescence, am most sensitive.

But it is not only the fact that Emma is capable of confronting her environment—family, class, society—but the reasons for her confrontation that force my admiration for her elusive figure. Those reasons are very simple and have to do with something that she and I share closely: our incurable materialism, our preference for the pleasures of the body over those of the soul, our respect for the senses and instinct, our preference for this earthly life over any other. The ambitions for which Emma sins and dies are those that Western religion and morality have most barbarously combated throughout history. Emma wants to enjoy, she refuses to repress in herself that deep sensual demand that Charles cannot satisfy because he doesn’t even know it exists, and she also wants to surround her life with superfluous and pleasant elements, elegance, refinement, materialize in objects the appetite for beauty that her imagination, sensitivity, and readings have aroused in her. Emma wants to know other worlds, other people; she does not accept that her life should run its course solely within the obtuse horizon of Yonville; she also wants her existence to be diverse and exalting, featuring adventure and risk, the theatrical and magnificent gestures of generosity and sacrifice. Emma’s rebellion arises from this conviction, the root of all her actions: I do not resign myself to my fate, I do not care about the doubtful compensation of the hereafter, I want my life to be fully realized here and now. There is undoubtedly a chimera in the heart of the destiny Emma aspires to, especially if it is turned into a collective pattern, a human project. No society will be able to offer all its members such an existence, and, on the other hand, it is evident that for communal life to be possible, humans must resign themselves to restraining their desires, to limiting the transgressive vocation that Bataille called Evil. But Emma represents and defends in an exemplary way an aspect of the human experience brutally denied by almost all religions, philosophies, and ideologies, presented by them as a reason for shame for the species. Its repression has caused unhappiness as widespread as economic exploitation, religious sectarianism, or the thirst for conquest among men. Over time, increasingly extensive sectors—now even the Church—have come to admit that man had the right to eat, to think and express his ideas freely, to health, to secure old age. But still, as in Emma Bovary’s time, the same taboos remain—and in this, the right and the left shake hands—that universally deny men the right to pleasure, to the fulfillment of their desires. Emma’s story is a blind, tenacious, desperate rebellion against the social violence that suffocates that right.

I remember having read, in the initial pages of a book by Merleau-Ponty, that violence was almost always beautiful in image, that is, in art, and I felt some tranquility. I was then seventeen years old and I was scared to find that, despite my peaceful nature, explicit or implicit, refined or crude violence, was an indispensable requirement for a novel to persuade me of its reality and be able to excite me. Those works exempt from some dose of violence seemed unreal to me (I have always preferred that novels feign reality just as others prefer them to feign unreality) and unreality usually bores me to death. In Madame Bovary, violence permeates the story and manifests on many levels, from its physical form of pain and blood —the operation, gangrene and amputation of Hippolyte’s leg, Emma’s poisoning—, or the spiritual one of meticulous plundering (the merchant Lheureux), of selfishness and cowardice (Rodolphe, Léon), or in its social forms of human animalization by the vile work and exploitation (the elderly Catherine Leroux, who has taken care of farm animals for fifty-four years, receives, paralyzed with confusion before the crowd of agricultural elections, a silver medal worth 25 francs; the neighbors hear her murmur, as she walks away, that she will give it to the priest to say masses for her), and, mainly, in its most generalized form of stupidity and the traps that men make for themselves: their prejudices, their envies, their intrigues. Against this backdrop stand out, like snow in the darkness, Emma’s fantasy, her appetite for a world different from the one that shatters her dream. It is precisely that scene, the most violent in the book, where Madame Bovary’s defeat is consummated by her own hand, that moves me the most. I know that chapter by heart, which begins with Emma advancing in the declining day towards Rodolphe’s castle, to attempt a last resort that will save her from ruin, from shame, from Charles’s forgiveness that would force her to change, and that ends the next day with Emma entering death like a nightmare with the vision of the purulent Blind Man crossing Yonville humming a vulgar song. These are pages of an amazing narrative wisdom and of a terrible cruelty —Maître Sénard could not lose the case by showing in what an atrocious way, by means of arsenic, the sin was punished— that have simultaneously provided me suffering and pleasure, that have filled my sentimentality and my literary sadism a hundred times. Moreover, I have a particular gratitude for this episode; it is a secret between Emma and me. Some years ago, for a few weeks, I had the feeling of a definitive incompatibility with the world, a tenacious despair, a deep disgust for life. At some point the idea of suicide crossed my mind; another night I remember having wandered (fatal influence of Beau geste), in the vicinity of Place Denfert-Rochereau, the offices of the Legion, with the idea of inflicting on myself, through the most odious of institutions, a romantic escape and punishment: to change my name, my life, to disappear into a rough and vile job. The help that Emma’s story gave me, or rather, Emma’s death, was invaluable during that difficult period. I remember having read in those days, with anguishing eagerness, the episode of her suicide, having turned to that reading as others, in similar circumstances, turn to the priest, drunkenness or morphine, and having drawn from those heartbreaking pages, each time, consolation and balance, disgust for chaos, taste for life. The fictitious suffering neutralized the one I was experiencing. Each night, to help me, Emma entered the deserted castle of La Huchette and was humiliated by Rodolphe; she went out into the field where pain and impotence brought her closer to madness for a moment; she slipped like a sprite into Homais' pharmacy, and there, Justin, innocence turned accomplice of death, watched her swallow the arsenic in the twilight of the capharnaüm; she returned to her house and suffered the unspeakable Calvary: the taste of ink, the nausea, the cold in her feet, her tremors, her fingers embedded in the sheets, the sweat on her forehead, the clattering of her teeth, the wandering of her eyes, the howls, the convulsions, the vomiting of blood, the tongue that her mouth spits out, the final death rattle. Each time, to sadness and melancholy was mixed a curious sensation of tranquility and the consequence of the lacerating ceremony were for me admiration, enthusiasm: Emma killed herself so that I could live. On other occasions of annoyance, depression or simple bad mood I have turned to this remedy and almost always with the same cathartic result. This experience and others similar have convinced me of how debatable the theories that defend an edifying literature for its results are. It is not necessarily the happy stories with an optimistic moral that lift the spirit and gladden the heart of readers (virtues attributed in Peru to “Pisco Vargas”); in some cases, like mine, the same effect can be achieved by stories as unhappy and pessimistic as Emma Bovary’s, thanks to their somber beauty.

But Emma is not just a rebel immersed in a violent world; she is also a sentimental and somewhat cheesy girl and her story also includes a certain bad taste, a moderate dose of gruesomeness. I deeply appreciate these aberrations, they exert on me an irrepressible appeal, and, although I cannot stand pure literary melodrama —I do tolerate cinematic melodrama, and it is possible that this weakness of mine was forged by the Mexican melodrama of the forties and fifties that I viciously frequented and still miss—, on the other hand, when a novel is capable of using melodramatic materials within a richer context and with artistic talent, as in Madame Bovary, my happiness knows no bounds. I should clarify more about what I’m talking about, to avoid misunderstanding. My fondness for melodrama has nothing to do with that intellectual, disdainful and superior game, which consists of aesthetically reclaiming, through a noble and intelligent interpretation, the ignoble and the stupid, as for example, Hermann Broch did with kitsch and Susan Sontag with camp, but an identification with that matter that is, above all, emotional, that is, a full obedience to its laws and an orthodox reaction to its incitements and effects. Melodrama may not be the exact word to express what I mean, because it has a connotation linked to theater, cinema, and the novel, and I am alluding to something more vast, which is present above all in things and men of reality. I speak of a certain distortion or exacerbation of feeling, of the perversion of taste enshrined in each era, of that heresy, counterpoint, deterioration (popular, bourgeois and aristocratic) that in each society suffers the models established by the elites as aesthetic, linguistic, moral, social and erotic patterns; I speak of the mechanization and thuggery that emotions, ideas, human relations suffer in daily life; I speak of the insertion, by the work of naivety, ignorance, laziness and routine, of the comic in the serious, of the grotesque in the tragic, of the absurd in the logical, of the impure in the pure, of the ugly in the beautiful. Each country, social class, generation introduces variations and contributions to cheesiness (in Peru it is called “huachafery” and it is one of the domains in which Peruvians have been truly creative), one of the most persistent and universal human expressions. That matter does not interest me intellectually but sentimentally. A movie like The Last Couplet, with all its elephantine stupidity, does not attract me like a spider to an entomologist, to study through a magnifying glass that phenomenon, but because during the hour and a half of screening, that web is able to catch me in its threads just like the black widow in hers to the unsuspecting fornicator and provokes in me an identification, a recognition similar to Emma watching in Rouen the performance of Lucie de Lammermoor (“La voix de la chanteuse ne lui semblait être que le retentissement de sa conscience, et cette illusion qui la charmait quelque chose même de sa vie”). Simply, in the case of The Last Couplet, when the cause disappears, the effect disappears, comes the reflection and, in the light of reason and perspective, stupidity shines as strict stupidity. But that happens —as in Corín Tellado, The Right to be Born or Simply Marta— because in that work reality only is melodramatic, only there is bad taste in life: exclusivity makes unreality sprout. Since, without a doubt, this inclination of mine has to do, in the end, with the realist fixation: the melodramatic element moves me because melodrama is closer to the real than drama, tragicomedy than comedy or tragedy. When a work of art includes, in addition to the others, interspersed with them (which are their opposites), this cheesy, pathetic, parodic, ruinous, alienated and stupid side, and does it without taking an ironic distance, without establishing an intellectual or moral superiority, with respect and truth (that medieval hero who prepares some buns with the nails and hairs of his beloved and eats them, that other one who kisses the princess in the mouth three times in homage to the Holy Trinity, the romantic swordsman whose eyes are moistened by a violet perfume, the pink little panties in which the maid invests her savings to impress the driver), I feel an emotion identical to the one produced by the literary representation of rebellion and violence.

In Madame Bovary, this aspect appears especially in that braid of episodes, situations, and beings that come, for the most part, from the arsenal of the romantic novel, from the premonitory signs of fatality that, throughout the story, announce Emma’s end, to characters like the ragged and sore Blind Man, symbol of the tragic destiny, or Justin, another constant nineteenth-century character, the boy silently in love with the unattainable woman. I like very much that Madame Bovary can also be read as a collection of clichés, that there are type-clichés in it: that the merchant Lheureux is greedy, anti-Semitic, and rapacious, that the notaries and officials are sordid and wicked, and the politicians garrulous, hypocritical, and ridiculous. But above all, I like Emma’s ambivalence, who, just as she plans audacities and excesses with coldness, gets emotional like a simpleton with naive readings, dreams of exotic postcard countries adorned with all the commonplaces of the time, gives the man she loves a stamp that says Amor nel cor, asks him “at midnight think of me” and sometimes pronounces those grand phrases (“Il n’y a pas de désert, pas de précipices ni d’océan que je ne traverserais avec toi”) that irritate the practical Rodolphe. I love the novelistic coincidences of the novel, like that sublime one, during the river walk of Emma and Léon, new lovers, when the boatman remembers having carried a group of gentlemen and ladies who drank champagne a few days earlier and Emma, with a shudder, discovers that one of them was Rodolphe, or that ineffable image of Charles Bovary smelling tenderly and praising the bouquet of violets that Léon has given Emma after possessing her. I have very much in mind the scene of Justin, alone, sobbing in the darkness next to Madame Bovary’s grave, and I find it moving that Emma, when the world starts falling on her, spends her last five francs throwing them at a beggar, and of course I find it perfect that the culmination of the carriage episode is only a woman’s bare hand scattering in the wind the breakup letter that she did not deliver.

On April 24, 1852, Flaubert comments to Louise Colet on a novel by Lamartine (Graziella) that he has just read: “And first of all, to speak clearly, does he fuck her or not? These are not human beings, but mannequins. How beautiful are these love stories in which the main thing is so shrouded in mystery that we do not know what to think, with sexual union systematically relegated to the shadows like eating, drinking, peeing, etc.! The bias irritates me. Here is a fellow who lives continuously with a woman who loves him and whom he loves, and never a desire! Not a single impure cloud comes to obscure this bluish lake! O hypocrite! If he had told the real story, how much more beautiful it would have been! But the truth requires hairier males than Mr. de Lamartine. It is indeed easier to draw an angel than a woman: the wings hide the hump”. I have often reacted to a story in a similar way: that a novel omits the sexual experience irritates me as much as reducing life exclusively to the sexual experience (although the latter less than the first, I have already said that among unrealities I prefer the most material). I need to know if the hero is excited by the heroine (and vice versa) and it is essential that their mutual excitements infect me so that these heroes seem plausible to me. The treatment of sexuality in narrative is one of the most delicate, perhaps the most arduous along with politics. As in both matters there is for the author and for the reader such a strong load of preconceptions and convictions, it is extremely difficult to feign naturalness, to “invent” these matters, to give them autonomy: one is inevitably inclined to take a stand for or against something, to demonstrate rather than to show. Just as, according to certain theologians, more men go to hell through the fly of their pants, many novels rush to unreality through the same place. In no other theme is Flaubert’s mastery as evident as in the dosage and distribution of the erotic in Madame Bovary. Sex is at the base of what happens, it is, along with money, the key to conflicts, and sexual life and economic life are intertwined in such an intimate plot that one cannot understand one without the other. However, to overcome the limitations of the time (the sinister puritanism of the Second Empire’s cassock brought the two great books of his time: Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal to the dock) and the threat of unreality, sex is often present in an ambushed way, bathing the episodes from the shadow of sensuality and malice (Justin trembles as he contemplates Madame Bovary’s intimate garments, Léon adores her gloves, Charles once Emma is dead relieves his longing in the objects that she would have liked to possess), although sometimes it breaks out triumphantly: unforgettable scene of Emma untangling her hair like a consummate courtesan in front of Léon, or taking care of her person for love with the refinement and foresight that the Egyptian Ruchiuk Hânem must have had. Sex occupies a central place in the novel because it occupies it in life and Flaubert wanted to simulate reality. Unlike Lamartine, he did not dissolve into spirituality and lyricism what is also something biological, but he did not reduce love to this latter. He strived to paint a love that was, on the one hand, feeling, poetry, gesture, and, on the other (more discreetly), erection and orgasm. On September 19, 1852, he wrote to Louise: “This brave genital organ is the foundation of human tenderness; it is not tenderness, but it is the substratum as philosophers would say. No woman has ever loved a eunuch and if mothers cherish children more than fathers, it’s because they have come out of their belly, and the umbilical cord of their love remains in their heart without being cut”. This philosophy, which with Freud would reach scientific dignity, contaminates the story of Emma Bovary. Indeed, the “brave genital organ” clarifies the behaviors and psychologies of the characters and is often the fuel that drives the plot. The discouragement, the unease that, little by little, turn Emma into an adulteress, are a consequence of her marital frustration and this frustration is primarily erotic. Emma’s fiery temperament does not have a match in the health officer and these insufficient nights of love precipitate the fall. In contrast, Charles experiences the opposite. That beautiful and refined woman pleases him so much, him who aspires to so little in that field (he comes from the bony arms of Heloise, a hag whose cold feet gave him chills when he got into bed) that, paradoxically, it nullifies in him all unrest, all ambition: he has everything, why would he want more. His sexual happiness largely explains his blindness, his conformism, his persistent mediocrity.

In the same letter in which he discussed Lamartine’s novel, Flaubert crudely summarized to Louise his opinion of women: “They are not honest with themselves; they do not admit their senses; they mistake their ass for their heart and believe that the moon exists to illuminate their boudoir” (Corresp., vol. II, p. 401). I see no reason why the same could not be said of men: they also tend to deceive themselves, hide their senses and confuse their heart with their “ass” (or the equivalent). Emma, on the other hand, tries to take advantage of her “limitations” and, turning vice into virtue, the rule into the exception, breaks the conditions that weigh on her person (her sex) and starts a process that is, without a doubt, a dark, instinctive process of liberation. It’s impossible not to admire Emma’s aptitude for pleasure; once stimulated and educated by Rodolphe, she surpasses her teacher and her second lover and wraps the novel in warm eroticism from chapter IX of the second part. As in the libertine literature of the 18th century —Flaubert was an enthusiastic reader of the Marquis de Sade—, love is linked to religion, or rather, to the Church and to objects of worship. Emma’s sexual awakening occurs in a nunnery, at the foot of the altars, amidst the incense of ceremonies (something that drove Prosecutor Pinard mad), and her first date with Léon, which inflames the couple and precedes the great erotic scene of the fiacre, takes place, at Emma’s suggestion, in Rouen cathedral. Seduction is intertwined, according to a system of communicating vessels where the erotic becomes contaminated with religiosity and religion with eroticism, with the Swiss man’s description to the imminent lovers of the cathedral’s beauties and treasures. One of the concepts that criticism repeats about Emma (from Maître Sénard and Flaubert himself) is that she is a miserable, pitiable person. In reality, her fate is more human and desirable than that of those fertile matrons of Yonville —Madame Langlois, Madame Carón, Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, Madame Homais—, who seem to live only to fulfill certain domestic functions and who undoubtedly think, like Emma’s mother-in-law, that women should not read novels under penalty of becoming évaporées. Although she dies young and has a horrendous death, Emma, at least, thanks to her courage to accept herself as she is, lives profound experiences, which the virtuous bourgeois women of Yonville, in their existence as routine as that of their chickens and dogs, do not even foresee. I celebrate that Emma instead of suppressing her senses tried to satisfy them, that she had no qualms about confusing the “ass” and the “heart”, which are, in fact, close relatives, and that she was capable of believing that the moon existed to illuminate her bedroom.

The presence of sex in a novel does not interest me as a cold observer, to study it I prefer a manual. Every time a censorship issue arises, the defense of the accused book is based on certain basic statements (such as those of Maître Sénard responding to Maître Pinard) that are hypocritical: the literary description of sexual actions and organs, the invention of erotic situations would be done with a scientific purpose, to instruct the reader, or with a moralizing intent (to paint sin to combat it), or the beauty of the form has sublimated sexual matter in such a way that it can only provoke lofty spiritual pleasures; only commercial pornography seeks to excite readers, a function incompatible with authentic literature. What nonsense! In my case, no novel gives me great enthusiasm, enchantment, fulfillment, if it does not act, even in a minimum dose, as an erotic stimulant. I have found that the excitement is deeper to the extent that the sexual is not exclusive or dominant, but is complemented with other matters, is integrated into a complex and diverse vital context, as it happens in reality: a book by Sade excites me less, where monothematic desexualizes sex and turns it into something mental, than, for example, the erotic episodes (very few) of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, by Balzac (I remember above all the rubbing of knees in a carriage), or those that pepper One Thousand and One Nights in Dr. Mardrus’s version. In Madame Bovary, the erotic is fundamental, but, although Flaubert wanted to tell everything, he was forced to take precautions to avoid the pitfalls of censorship (not only official: his own friend, writer Maxime Du Camp, supported the cuts he made to the book La Revue de Varis). But just because the sexual is more implicit than explicit does not mean that those hidden data, those facts narrated by omission, are less effective. The erotic climax of the novel is a brilliant hiatus, a sleight of hand that manages to enhance the material hidden from the reader to the maximum. I’m referring to the endless journey through the streets of Rouen of the fiacre in which Emma gives herself to Léon for the first time. It is remarkable that the most imaginative erotic episode in French literature contains not a single allusion to the female body nor a word of love, and is only an enumeration of streets and places, the description of the turns and twists of an old rental carriage. But not only the erotic silences form my best memories of Madame Bovary. I think about Thursdays at the Hotel de Boulogne, at the port of Rouen, where the meetings with Léon take place, when all the elements of the tragedy are closing in on Emma and that feeling of danger, that premonition of the catastrophe seems to multiply her sensuality. Many times I have waited for her in that plush room, seen her arrive always “more inflamed, more eager”, heard the hissing sound of a snake as the lace of her corset falls, spied on her running on tiptoe to see if the door was closed, and then, with what joy, seen her strip off the dress and move forward, pale and serious, into the arms of Léon Dupuis.

It’s curious that, among the vast Flaubertian bibliography, no enthusiast has yet produced an interpretation titled “Flaubert and the Fetishism of the Boot.” Because there is ample material for such a study. Here’s a sample, with data collected at random. Albert Thibaudet recounts that, as a child, Flaubert used to remain entranced contemplating women’s boots1 and that, therefore, it is somewhat autobiographical the episode in Madame Bovary where Justin begs the maid to let him polish Emma’s boots, which the boy touches with reverent love, as sacred objects. Sartre points out where the shoe motif first appears in Flaubert’s work (and adds “so important in the life and work of Flaubert,” but doesn’t speak more about the matter: one of the many loose ends in his cyclopean essay):2 in Mémoires d’un fou, in chapter IX, where a beautiful woman’s foot is finely described: “her cute little foot wrapped in a pretty high-heeled shoe adorned with a black rose.” It is known, on the other hand, that Flaubert kept in his desk, among letters and certain garments and objects of his lover, the slippers that Louise Colet had worn on their first night of love and that, often, as he tells her in his letters, he took them out to caress and kiss them.

On the other hand, the theme of the foot and the shoe often appears in his correspondence and sometimes in a curious way. There is, for example, a letter to Louise, written in Trouville on August 26, 1853, in which he tells her, jokingly, that if he were a professor at the Collége de France he would give "a course on this great question of Boots compared to literatures. ‘Yes, the Boot is a world’, I would say, etc.". The entire extensive letter is a diversion around this motif, several pages of surprising, witty, and vaguely vicious digressions (it’s about men’s footwear here) about the shoe as a symbol of cultures, civilizations, and epochs—China, Greece, the Middle Ages, Louis XV—and as an emblem of books and authors—Corneille, La Bruyère, Boileau, Bossuet, Molière, etc. It’s a game, no doubt, but unsettling, symptomatic of an inclination: what allows him to fantasize with such erudition on the topic reveals that in his readings and observations he has always been very alert to the appearance of that member, the foot, and its social wrap, the shoe.

This is proven by another letter to Louise, a few days earlier. Just arrived in Trouville, to spend his vacation there, Gustave has gone to the beach to see “the ladies bathing.” His letter (from August 14, 1853) shows him horrified at how ugly women become hidden in those bags and caps they put on to go into the water; but what depresses him even more is what they leave exposed, that is, their feet: “And the feet! Red, thin, with bunions, calluses, deformed by the boot, long as shuttles or wide as beaters.” There is no doubt, he was a connoisseur. And it is significant that the name of the supreme father of foot fetishism—who has given his name to it as well—, whose voluminous novelistic and autobiographical work has as its backbone this delicate female extremity and its sheath, appears scrawled by Flaubert in the manuscripts of Madame Bovary that the Municipal Library of Rouen preserves: the picaresque melody that the Blind man of the novel sings was taken from a book by Restif de la Bretonne.

Still under the effect of the enormous impression of the novel, I immediately read, one after another, as episodes of a series, the other books by Flaubert recruited by Garnier in his collection of yellow covers. Some more, others less, all moved me and consummated my addiction. I remember some Olympian discussions, that summer of '59, with friends who laughed when I furiously assured: “Also, Salammbô is a masterpiece”. Everyone agrees that this book has aged and that today no one can withstand, without yawning and smiles, the story of the girl who committed the sacrilege of touching Tanit’s veil, with its operatic backdrops and that multicolored antiquity that somewhat resembles that of Cecil B. De Mille. It is true, a good part of the book is dated, tributary of the worst romanticism, like the love story, insubstantial and topical, of Mâtho and Hamilcar’s daughter. But another aspect of the novel has not lost its vigor: the epic, the actions of the multitude, which no other novelist, except Tolstoy, has known how to carry out as effectively as Flaubert. (In Madame Bovary there is a major example of this mastery in the chapter of the agricultural elections: the entire people of Yonville is present, almost all the characters appeared so far speak and evolve and the synthesis of the general and the particular, the alternation of the collective and the individual, is impeccable). The banquets, the feasts, the ceremonies — hallucinating, unforgettable immolation of children in the jaws of Moloch— and, above all, the battles of Salammbô preserve intact a dynamism, a plasticity, and an elegance that have not been seen again in literature; yes, on the other hand, in the cinema, for example in the great westerns of John Ford (another early vice that I remain faithful to). But although all the other books by Flaubert pleased me, the only one that shook me in a way similar to Madame Bovary was L’Éducation sentimentale. For a long time, I thought it was Flaubert’s great novel, in which he had encompassed more, and this opinion is valid in a certain sense: what in Madame Bovary is a woman and a village, in L’Éducation sentimentale is a generation and a society. The whole is richer, there is a social variety and more complex historical matter, a more diversified representation of life, and, from a formal point of view, an originality and witchcraft alike. And yet, no: the census, so varied and splendid, of L’Éducation sentimentale does not have a character like Emma. The shy Frédéric Moreau and the elusive, maternal Madame Arnoux are admirable, but neither they nor the fauna that surrounds them —bankers, artists, industrialists, gallant women, journalists, workers, nobles— resist the comparison because none become a human type, in the Cervantes or Shakespearean sense that Flaubert himself defined so well: “Ce qui distingue les grands génies, c’est la généralisation et la création. Ils résument en un type des personnalités éparses et apportent à la conscience du genre humain des personnages nouveaux” (Letter to Louise, September 25, 1852). It’s the case of Emma Bovary. She, like Don Quixote or Hamlet, summarizes in her tormented personality and her mediocre adventure, a certain permanent life stance, capable of appearing under the most diverse robes in different times and places, and which, while universal and durable, is one of the most proprietary postulations of the human, from which all the exploits and all the cataclysms of man have resulted: the capacity to fabricate illusions and the mad will to realize them. Also Salammbô, Saint Antoine, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Saint Julien l’Hospitalier harbor extraordinary illusions and formidable wills to concretize the chimera, but their ambitions have to do with God or with Science: Emma’s utopia, on the other hand, is rigorously human. In the early morning of May 22, 1853, Flaubert wrote to Louise: “Une âme se mesure a la dimension de son désir, comme l’on juge d’avance des cathédrales à la hauteur de leurs clochers”. His glory will have been to have created, in the small and versatile character of Emma Bovary, the best demonstration of this truth, one of the bell towers that dominate the plain of human existence.

In 1962 I began to read Flaubert’s Correspondance. I remember the exact date; I had just earned some money with a novel and my first investment was to buy, from a bookseller in Tours, the thirteen volumes published by Conard. Aside from the interest in following step by step a human life as difficult and harsh, and the thrill for the Flaubert addict3 to recreate the Homeric gestation of his works from the author himself, to closely know his readings, hatreds, frustrations, to have the sensation of, breaking time and space, having penetrated into the circle of intimates, the witnesses of his life —Maxime, Bouilhet, Louise, George Sand, Caroline—, I believe that Flaubert’s correspondence constitutes the best friend for a budding literary vocation, the most useful example a young writer can count on in the fate he has chosen. Those who have read them will find it strange that I call stimulating letters in which the darkest pessimism reigns and curses sparkle against mankind in general and against many particular men and where humanity seems, with a few exceptions (almost all writers), a scoundrel and grotesque mass. But at the same time as these thunderous fits of rage with which the great man vented the nervousness and fatigue of the previous ten or twelve hours of work4, the letters show better than anything the humanity of his genius, how his talent was a slow conquest, how, in the task of creation, man is entirely left to himself, for worse (no one will come to dictate in his ear the appropriate adjective, the happy adverb), but also for better, because, if he is capable of emulating the patience and effort that those letters reveal, if he is capable of “dissecting himself alive” like Flaubert, he will also, like that ranting and bachelor provincial, write something durable. This smallness and poverty that are gradually becoming height and wealth, this process in which constancy and conviction play such an important role, can be a great incentive for a writer, a powerful antidote against discouragement. It is in the times when I had the most difficulties writing that I have read the most —at leaps and bounds, always blaspheming against the cuts that Caroline, his niece, inflicted on the Correspondance— Flaubert’s letters, always with tonifying effects5.

I practice literary fetishism: I love to visit the houses, tombs, libraries of the writers I admire, and if I could also collect their vertebrae, as believers do with saints, I would do it with great pleasure. (In Moscow, I remember, I was the only one in the group of invitees who made the endless Tolstoyan pilgrimage without despair, the only one who sniffed with pleasure from the babushkas and samovars to the last goose feather). I have not forgotten the frustration that my visit to Croisset meant. We had been in Rouen before, with Jorge Edwards, taking a look at the scene of his childhood, the Hôtel-Dieu, imagining the autopsy room, wanting to believe that it was that little window through which he and his sister spied on their father’s meticulous dissections, and we had taken a walk through the cemetery without finding the tomb, and we thought that Croisset would put the perfect finishing touch to the Flaubertian Sunday. Sordid image: the house had been demolished and replaced by a factory, the environment was ugly and oppressive, with sooty chimneys; the river, dammed up, no longer passed along the house and there were pyramids of coal everywhere, an atmosphere of soot. The museum was only the surviving pavilion where you could see a stuffed parrot that served him as a model for Un Coeur simple and one of the carved stones he brought from Tunisia when he was writing Salammbô. There were also a few yellowed photographs and everything was shabby and sad. The only moving thing was to walk along the famous “allée des gueulades”, the small tree-shaded avenue (“the same ones,” the guide insisted) where the Norman giant roared every afternoon —hunting for assonances and consonances, for the maddening cacophonies— the phrases written the night before.

A true lover does not just enjoy his beloved, but, as they wished in the Middle Ages, orders his life around that love and fights all battles for the lady he loves. (End of 1960. Violent discussion with a Bolivian friend that he ended this way: “You are intractable when it comes to Cuba or Flaubert”. Fourteen years later, I admit with a more flexible spirit to the criticisms of the Cuban Revolution; my intransigence on the subject of Flaubert, on the other hand, remains total). The addiction led me not only to devour all of Flaubert’s books but also whatever critical or parasitic literature around him fell into my hands, and Flaubert has in many cases been the thermometer that has served me to measure other authors, the factor that decided my enthusiasm or my rejection. Thus, I am sure that my abhorrence for Barbey d’Aurevilly has as its reason his attacks on Flaubert, and that my little sympathy for Valéry or Claudel (who described the beautiful beginning of Salammbô as the most flat prose in French literature) is due to the same thing, and that the sudden change of opinion towards Henry James, whose novels greatly impatient me before, began when I read his intelligent essay on Flaubert. My lack of respect for current literary criticism is based, in large part, on having known, thanks to the pious works of René Dumesnil, what the magazines and newspapers said about the appearance of Flaubert’s books, and my conviction that, generally, creators have had a better nose than critics to discover the new is based on Baudelaire’s article about Madame Bovary. I want to recall here the insolent assertion of Ezra Pound in ABC of reading, which I read (as they say) with a leap in the heart, assuring that, unlike the poet, who to have adequate training must read a copious list of authors starting with Homer, the prose writer could simply start with the author of Bouvard et Pécuchet.

The criticism of his time was unjust and short-sighted with Flaubert. Even Madame Bovary, which was a public success — motivated, in large part, by the scandal that the trial meant —, deserved harsh attacks from Parisian gazetteers, but, at least in this novel, Sainte Beuve and a few others got it right. In contrast, the other books were misunderstood and provoked real journalistic riots (Barbey d’Aurevilly always set the record, who, for example, declared that La Tentation de Saint Antoine was as indigestible as the second part of Faust), where ignorance and insensitivity often mixed with resentment and bad faith. The next generation, however, vindicated Flaubert and, although he always opposed taking the place that Zola and the naturalists reserved for him, considered him a master. But then French literature despised Flaubert — Claudel is not an exception — and until the 1950s, writers and critics gave a bit of the impression of remembering Flaubert only to denigrate him. The existentialists, convinced that literature is a form of action and that the writer must participate with all his weapons, starting with the pen, in the struggle of his time, could hardly tolerate his fanaticism for form, his disdainful isolation, his art purism, his contempt for politics. Forgetting that the essence of Flaubert is the work and not his moods and personal opinions, they extended the displeasure they felt for that hermit of Croisset, who battled against words while the world was falling apart, to the novels. This attitude finds its most enraged expression in Sartre’s words against Flaubert, in Situations, II, an essay that I had read with fervor, years before contracting the addiction, and that retroactively produced a kind of anguish, a collision of loyalties.

In the 1960s, the valuation of Flaubert in France changed radically; contempt and oblivion turned into rescue, praise, fashion. The French, at the same time as me, became addicts and, with an attitude between jealous and pleased, I saw in those convulsive years of Gaullism, Algerian war, OAS and, for me, galloping schedules of literature and radio (the ORTF was my subsistence work), the spread of the Flaubertian passion. I very much remember the satisfaction, as if a relative or friend had been the one honored, with which I read the prologue by François-Régis Bastide for the reprint that Éditions du Seuil made of La Première Éducation sentimentale, known until then only by an academic audience, and which ended with this statement that I would not have hesitated for a second to nail on the door of my house: “We already knew, but now we know once and for all: the real Patron is Flaubert”.

In the French literary scene, the engagés were succeeded by a heterogeneous series of novelists now grouped under the label of “nouveau roman” by critics. Although most of them bored me, with the exception of Beckett (included in the group due to sharing the same publisher), who also bored me but seemed justified in his case, I always sympathized with them because they proclaimed Flaubert’s importance for modern novels. However, the first to theoretically analyze this connection was not a novelist but a scholar, Geneviève Bollème, who, in 1964, published an essay titled La Leçon de Flaubert, highlighting the aspects in Flaubert’s work that the new narrators focused on in their experiments: artistic consciousness, descriptive obsession, textual autonomy, in other words, Flaubert’s “formalism.” Her essay was an applied demonstration of a bold conviction: that in Flaubert, and especially in Madame Bovary, the essence is description, which undoes the story, and that “describing” rather than “narrating” was for him the unique experience capable of expressing “the movements of life.” It was a clever way to bridge the gap between Flaubert and the new novelists, all of whom were fierce describers and rather apathetic storytellers. In interviews, articles, or lectures, Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, and Claude Simon had recognized Flaubert as a precursor of modernity. But the one who officially crowned him as the master of the new novel was Nathalie Sarraute, in a brilliant and biased article in the magazine Preuves (February 1965) titled “Flaubert le précurseur” (“Flaubert the Precursor”). As I read it in a bistro in Saint-Germain, I was stunned. I was pleased with some statements (“At this moment, Flaubert is the master of all of us. There is unanimity around his name; he is the precursor of the current novel”), but when the article went on to explain the reasons for this leadership, I felt like I was dreaming. By taking a paragraph from a letter to Louise out of context (“What seems beautiful to me, what I would like to do, is a book about nothing, a book without external ties, which stands on its own by the internal force of its style, like the earth stays in the air without support, a book that would have almost no subject, or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible”), Nathalie Sarraute confused Flaubert’s desire with the reality of his work and reached this extraordinary conclusion: “Books about nothing, almost without a theme, liberated from characters, plots, and all the old accessories, reduced to a pure movement akin to abstract art.” It was difficult to go further in misinterpretation; never has Borges' phrase been truer: every author creates their precursors. However, a reader has the right to find what they put into what they read. The quote from Nathalie Sarraute comes from a letter written when Flaubert was deeply engaged in Madame Bovary, and those who have followed the development of this novel or others know the meticulous attention he paid to the story - the situations, the setting, the characters, the events - and the care with which he crafted the plot. Hundreds of quotes could be extracted from the Correspondance about the importance he attached to the material (which he called the “ideas” of a novel), as can be inferred, for example, from his opinion about Lamartine’s Graziella. His desire for “a book about nothing, a book without external ties” is more accurately understood, on one hand, as an outburst of enthusiasm for style, and on the other hand, as a further defense of the autonomy of fiction - in a novel, everything, its truth and falsehood, its seriousness or banality, is determined by the way it materializes - the need for a novel to be persuasive through its own means, namely through words and technique and not merely through its fidelity to the external world (although he knew that the confrontation is inevitable once the book is in the hands of the reader, who can only appreciate, understand, and judge based on that external world to which they belong). The quote is an argument in favor of narrative objectivity, not a denial of the anecdote. If Nathalie Sarraute had continued to review the Correspondance, she would have found that a year and five months after the paragraph she quoted, Flaubert wrote - again to Louise - another passage that began with the same idea (books about nothing) and then corrected and completed it in the opposite sense: “I would like to write books where I would only need to write sentences (if I can say that), just as to live one only needs to breathe air. What bothers me are the sly plans, the combinations of effects, all the underlying calculations - which are, of course, part of Art since the effect of style depends on them, exclusively” (Letter from the early hours of June 26, 1853; I emphasize). As clear as day: the exciting part for him was working on the style, the choice of words, solving problems of naming, using adjectives, euphony, and rhythm. The other part he liked less - the “sly plans,” the “combinations of effects,” the “underlying calculations” are obviously related to issues regarding data, the order of anecdotes that compose the story, the organization of material in a temporal system - but he didn’t deny that they were artistic or important. On the contrary, Flaubert asserted that the “effect of style” depends on all of that, and he added, categorically: exclusively. An author may not be fully aware of the full significance of their work, and it could have happened that Flaubert, ambitious to write novels that were only words, books without a story, might have contributed to the modern novel with inventions that have more to do with narrative technique - the arrangement of the story - than with the use of words. I am glad to be able to prove that this is not the case; besides being, in practice, a great storyteller, Flaubert was perfectly aware of the function of the anecdote in narrative and even considered that the effectiveness of prose (which, for him, meant its beauty) exclusively depended on it. To have found this quote, which confirms my own idea of the novel, is one of the pleasures that reading the Correspondance has given me, especially in these days when so many narrators viciously attack the “story” in fiction. Another, even more personal pleasure, is the joy with which any admirer of Amadis de Gaula and Tirant lo Blanc discovers that Flaubert once wrote: “You know that it’s one of my old dreams to write a chivalry novel. I believe that’s feasible, even after Ariosto, by introducing an element of terror and broad poetry that it lacks. But what do I not feel like writing? What kind of pen lust doesn’t excite me!” (Corresp, vol. III, p. 245).

But the important thing was that, albeit somewhat adulterated, Flaubert was returning to the literary scene rapidly. The adulterations did not solely come from the formalist sector. Almost simultaneously with Nathalie Sarraute’s article - right-wing deviationism - I read, with equal surprise, in Recherches Soviétiques (Cahier 6, 1956), the translation of an essay by a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, A. F. Ivachtchenko, who proposed a left-wing deviationist interpretation: Flaubert turned out to be one of the founders of critical realism.

During those years, Sartre also began something that could be considered a laborious and monumental self-critique. From the summary judgment of Flaubert in Situations, II to the effort of situating him within his familiar, social, and historical environment, in an interpretation that combined Marx, Freud, and existentialism to comprehensively address the social and individual aspects of creation - which were “Question de méthode” (in Critique de la raison dialectique, 1960) - and the articles from 1966 in Les Temps Modernes,6 there was a considerable turn, a transition from contempt to respect, a different willingness to understand than the initial ukase. This process has culminated in the three volumes of L’Idiot de la famille (Sartre announces a fourth one dedicated to Madame Bovary, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the work remained unfinished, as has happened with other series of his) which represent the apotheosis of the interest in Flaubert that characterized French literature in the 1960s. The most unyielding of his critics, the most determined enemy of what Flaubert represented as an attitude towards history and art, dedicates twenty years of his life and three thousand pages to studying his “case” and acknowledges that the man from Croisset, along with Baudelaire, laid the foundations for modern sensibility. This reconciliation resolved a personal dilemma for me. Sartre is one of the authors to whom I feel indebted the most, and at one point, I admired his writings almost as much as Flaubert’s. Over the years, however, his creative work has faded from my memory, and his statements about literature and the role of the writer, which once seemed like articles of faith to me, now appear unconvincing - it is his essays dedicated to Baudelaire, to Genet, his polemics, and articles that I find most vibrant in his work. On the other hand, his moral stature has continued to grow for me, in the crises and dilemmas of these difficult years, due to the lucidity, honesty, and youthful courage with which he has confronted not only fascism, conservatism, and bourgeois traps but also the authoritarianism and clerical spirit of the left.

My opinion of L’Idiot de la famille is not excessively enthusiastic; the book interests the Sartrean more than the Flaubertian; after the two months of reading required by the essay, one is left with the feeling of a gigantic task that never fulfills the design stated in the prologue —to explain the roots and nature of Flaubert’s vocation through an interdisciplinary investigation in which all the human sciences of our time would come together to show what can be known today about a man. It doesn’t matter if a literary essay —Sartre’s is only half— departs from the object of its study to discuss other topics, as long as the result justifies the displacement. But in L’Idiot de la famille, this is not the case: in the end, the impression is one of atomization, of an archipelago of disconnected ideas, of a noticeable disproportion between the means employed and the achieved end. The book is extraordinarily uneven, alternating between acute analysis and brilliant discoveries with blatant contradictions. It is strange, for someone so fervent about the concrete and the real like Sartre, that a good part of the book is pure speculation, with a weak anchor in reality. In the first volume, for example, while the relationship between Gustave and his father, Doctor Flaubert, appears plausible and supported by solid texts, the relationships described between Flaubert and his sister Caroline, and later between Gustave and Alfred Le Poittevin, are based on presumptions, some highly doubtful. Another unexpected aspect of the book is that, although in the preview contained in “Question de méthode,” the study’s perspective aimed to be simultaneously existentialist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic, in L’Idiot de la famille, except for occasional moments —some of great brilliance, such as the description of the found social and ideological origins of Flaubert’s father and mother, or the examination of social classes during the Second Empire—, the bulk of the interpretation is strictly and, one might say, orthodoxly Freudian, albeit dressed in existentialist vocabulary. I don’t say this as a reproach, but as a curiosity. Moreover, perhaps the best pages were achieved thanks to the Freudian method: the psychoanalytic explanation of the “crisis of Pont-l’Évêque,” that is, the endlessly debated question of the exact nature of Flaubert’s illness —epilepsy, hysteria, etc.—, a debate to which Sartre, with his theory of neurosis, contributes a massive, complex, and imaginative though not entirely persuasive point of view. It is in this second volume, above all, where the essay departs almost completely from literature to become solely psychology. Instead of “explaining” Flaubert and his work from that meticulously dismantled neurosis, Sartre seems to use Flaubert’s person and writings to illustrate the mechanisms of a neurotic personality. It is instructive and fascinating to learn about mental pathology, the Oedipus complex, castration, and symbolic displacements, but it clarifies very little about Flaubert’s work, which, according to its explicit purpose, the essay should have focused on. Furthermore, in this second volume, even more than in the first, there are exasperating repetitions, and one sometimes gets the feeling, as the prose repeats, retraces, undoes, and deals with the same idea a hundred times, that Sartre has become a prisoner of his own web, that he is —to use an image he is fond of— trapped in his labyrinthine construction. The same could have been said in half the number of pages. This certainty is further emphasized in the last volume, the most scattered of the three. Except for the section entitled “Névrose et programmation chez Flaubert: le Second Empire,” Flaubert has vanished, and the book becomes eternal, describing with a rhetorical at times pompous process, independent psychic processes, detached from their particular case: the general has erased the singular, the abstract from the concrete. The last part, however, is the most interesting, especially the comparison between Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle —the summary of what Parnassianism meant and the links between its aesthetics and Flaubert’s theory of art are admirable— and the same can be said of the seductive analysis of the relationships between Flaubert and the Second Empire, although Sartre’s thesis that the representative writer of this society was the author of Madame Bovary, who would have identified himself viscerally with what Louis Bonaparte’s regime signified, is not entirely proven. At the same time, this historical-social analysis is such a sharp break with what came before —which moved exclusively on the psychological and psychic level— that it seems to be the beginning of another investigation, a rupture rather than a complement. The book ends abruptly, as if fatigue had surprised the author halfway through the race, realizing that he had set a distance too great for his strength, for the strength of any single man. In the end, it is disheartening to see that the texts of Flaubert studied with the most diligence are hardly the writings of childhood and adolescence, that the effort put into examining these texts —most of them of little literary value, mere prehistoric indications of a vocation— has exhausted the time and energy of the critic, who, at the end of the voluminous text, due to erroneous planning, has not even reached the point of studying the first novel published by Flaubert. Thus, the finished work turns out to be what undoubtedly should have been the preliminary considerations for an interpretation in Sartre’s original plan. Unlike that character in Camus' The Plague, who never writes a novel because he can never decide how to structure the first sentence of the book, here the writer has started writing with such fury, developed the prolegomena with such detail and incidental considerations, that he has lost the perspective of the whole, and suddenly discovers that the work has taken such proportions that he will no longer have time —nor, undoubtedly, the desire— to complete the enterprise. The result is a monstrous baby, a giant child, a frustrated yet brilliant product. This is what is called, of course, falling with all honors, being defeated by excessive audacity: only those who climb high roll deep.

Naturally, the comparison between what happened to Sartre in this book and what happened to Flaubert in his last one is obligatory. Is there a greater resemblance, a failure so equally admirable and for such identical reasons as in L’Idiot de la famule y Bouvard et Pécuchet? Both are impossible attempts, enterprises destined to fail because they had set themselves an unattainable goal from the outset, burdened with a somewhat inhuman ambition: totality. The idea of representing in a novel the entirety of humanity—or, if you will, the totality of stupidity, but for Flaubert, both terms expressed almost the same thing—was a utopia akin to capturing the entirety of a life in an essay, explaining a person by reconstructing all the sources—social, familial, historical, cultural, psychological, biological, linguistic—of their history, all the tributaries of their visible and secret personality. In both cases, the author attempted to unravel a tangle that has a beginning but no end. However, it is evident that in both cases, the merit lies in the defect, that defeat constitutes a kind of victory, and that in both cases, the recognition of failure can only be made from acknowledging the greatness that explains and made that failure inevitable. Because having insisted on such an adventure—to have incurred the crime of Lucifer: wanting to break the limits, go beyond the possible—means having set a higher standard for the novel and criticism.

And thus, I reach the end of my love story. It is sad and grand, like every respectable romantic story, those that Emma liked and that I like. It is sad because this long and faithful passion was born condemned, for the wretched reason of existence, to pour itself in one direction only, to be solicitude without response, and because the last image of the story mimics the first: the lover, alone, the heart accelerated with desire, eyes fixed on the book he holds tenderly, and in his mind, like a rat with carnivorous teeth lurking in a deep cave, the terrible certainty that the most earthly of women will never leave her subtle refuge to come to the rendezvous. But the lover does not give up because this lady has filled his life in a way undoubtedly less glorious but perhaps more enduring than what shared love allows, where, as Emma learned, one is always exposed to realizing that everything is transient. And because his lady, although she has never taken shape or been in his arms, will continue to be born for him in a lost farm in the country of Caux, repeating her adventure as many times as he asks, with marvelous docility, showing no signs of fatigue or boredom.

The ending of the story is grand because in recent years, this Norman peasant girl has gained popularity that shows no signs of stopping and will probably continue to grow in the years to come. She has been admired by men and women of the most diverse backgrounds; austere professors have dedicated their lives to studying her, young iconoclasts want to do away with all past literature and start anew with her, wise philosophers who had offended her make amends in thick volumes that will serve as the base of her statue. This not only happens in her country but in many others as well. Now, it is also happening in the Spanish-speaking world where, after having been forgotten for a long time, she is once again within reach of many eyes, hands, and hearts through a worthy translation. I should be jealous, but I am not; like certain wicked old men with their young wives, I am greatly flattered by that persistent solicitation, that multitudinous favor, that tingling excitement surrounding the girl I love. I know that in the territory where she lavishes her beauty, no one, except for the health official, Rodolphe, and León, will enjoy her, and in this place where I find myself, no one else can give more than what she has given me.

Part Two

Chapter 2: The Pen-Man

Je suis un homme-plume. Je sens par elle, à cause d’elle, par rapport à elle et beaucoup plus avec elle.

[I am a pen-man. I feel through it, because of it, in relation to it, and much more with it.]

(Letter to Louise Colet, February 1, 1852)

1. What was the starting point of Madame Bovary?

Apparently, a frustration. In mid-September 1849, Flaubert summons his friends Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet to his home in Croisset, near Rouen, to read them a manuscript he had begun on May 24, 1848, and finished a few days earlier, on September 12, at twenty past three on a sunny, windy afternoon: the first Tentation de Saint Antoine. The idea for this book was suggested by the painting by Breughel that he had seen in Genoa in the spring of 1845, although, in reality, the theme of hell and Satan had been haunting him since childhood, when he would see the mystery of Saint Anthony performed every autumn in Rouen, at the Saint-Romain fair, in the booth of a famous puppeteer in the region, the père Legrain. At fourteen, he had written, in biblical verses, a Voyage en enfer, the most distant milestone of that satanic cycle that spans almost forty years of his life (the definitive version of Tentation appeared in 1874); two years later, a Réve d’enfer; in 1838, a Danse des morts, which features the Devil as a character, and in 1839, Smarh, an extensive Luciferian mystery, infused with Byronic romanticism. The anxiety with which Flaubert awaits the verdict of his friends is not only due to the importance of the subject matter of this book, a demon that has been prodding his vocation for fifteen years. It happens that he has worked on this first Tentation de Saint Antoine with rigorous discipline (to the sixteen months were added almost three years of documentation, in which he consulted all kinds of books: medieval incunabula, theologians like Swedenborg and mystics like Santa Teresa, histories of the beginnings of Christianity, treatises on religion) and with pleasure, without those anguishes and depressions that will turn the drafting of his later books into calvaries. Years later, immersed in the doubts and fever of Madame Bovary, he will confess to Louise: “Saint Antoine has not demanded a quarter of the mental tension that Bovary causes me. It was an outlet; I only had pleasure in writing, and the eighteen months I spent writing the 500 pages were the most deeply voluptuous of my entire life” (Letter of April 6, 1853).

There are other reasons why this reading is very important to him. Some months ago, Madame Flaubert authorized her son Gustave to undertake a long journey to the Orient with Maxime Du Camp, but Flaubert postponed the departure until he finished this manuscript. Thus, the journey through the lands of antiquity, the supreme ambition for a young man educated by romantic readings and eager for exoticism and local color, became a reward for those sixteen months' effort. On the other hand, he wrote this first Tentation under very different conditions from what he had done, those texts — the first Éducation sentimentale, Novembre, Mémoires d’un fou, Smarh — that remain unpublished, because he considers them failures. His previous work is from a time when Gustave seemed destined to join society through some liberal profession, like his father and his brother Achille, both doctors. These are texts written stealing hours from school, like Mémoires d’un fou or Smarh, or from university, like the first Éducation sentimentale and Novembre. Gustave already knew then that the only thing he was interested in was literature, and the idea of having a bourgeois future, any activity other than writing, tormented him, as his adolescent letters attest, but Dr. Flaubert did not allow any escape: he had to follow the path indicated by that (God) Father whose finger pointed to the faculty of Law. In those years Flaubert is a half-writer, a young man whose time and energy are divided between literature and occupations that he considers an obstacle. But when he writes the first Tentation his destiny has turned: literature now occupies the terrain as queen and lady. One dark night in January 1844, in the vicinity of Pont-l’Évéque, Gustave had the first crisis of that disease that, suffered or chosen, very opportunely comes to free him from the law studies, from the obligation to “carve out a future” that was driving him mad. The chief surgeon of the Rouen hospital has no choice but to bow: Gustave will leave the university and remain at home, living the life of an invalid. Two years later, his liberation is consolidated: Dr. Flaubert dies, the crushing shadow that could still darken his freedom (it is said that the bitterness of seeing his son become useless for action accelerated his death). Flaubert’s future is drawn from then on in the direction he wanted: he will live with his mother, from the income left by his father, dedicated exclusively to reading and writing. The first work of creation, a product of this new existence dedicated to literature (the travel book through Brittany, written jointly with Maxime Du Camp, is merely a style exercise), is that Tentation that the handsome Norman giant with blond hair and blue eyes, who will soon turn twenty-eight, is preparing to read to his friends Bouilhet and Du Camp, who are also writers. It is understandable that he is filled with joy, uneasiness, fear, as he begins the reading.

2. How was the reading carried out, and what was the reaction of the friends?

The reading of the enormous manuscript - the first Tentation doubled the pages of the final version - took place in Gustave’s bedroom and study, following a strict schedule and staging. It was agreed from the beginning that Bouilhet and Du Camp would not make any comments until the end. The ceremony lasted four days, each divided into two reading sessions of four hours: from noon to four in the afternoon and from eight to twelve at night. Gustave was the only reader, and he “modulated, sang, and chanted” his text while Bouilhet and Du Camp listened in silence, occasionally exchanging quick glances. On the first day, before starting the reading, in a burst of enthusiasm, Gustave waved the manuscript in the air, saying, "If they don’t shout with enthusiasm, nothing can move them!". Madame Flaubert did not attend the sessions, but she roamed the hallway, anxious, and sometimes, unable to contain herself, she would call Louis and Maxime aside, asking, "And?". They replied evasively. But privately, the two friends decided to be honest with Flaubert. Until then, they had a false idea of the book; they imagined a monologue of the hermit recounting his experiences or a historical novel about early Christianity. Those eight hours of daily reading were etched in Maxime’s memory as something “painful.” At midnight on the fourth day, Gustave read the last sentence and, undoubtedly hoarse, banged the table: “Well, it’s your turn. Tell me frankly what you think.” Louis Bouilhet, a shy man who, according to Du Camp, could be ruthless when it came to literature, pronounced the verdict: “Our opinion is that you should throw it into the fire and never speak of it again.” Flaubert reacted like a wounded animal. Throughout the rest of the night, the friends argued, with Gustave defending his book and Louis and Maxime criticizing it. Finally, Flaubert surrendered: "Perhaps you’re right. I got absorbed in the subject, became enthusiastic about it, and lost clarity. I admit, the book has the flaws you point out, but these flaws are in my nature. What can I do?". They replied, “Abandon those themes, so diffuse and vague that you cannot control them, that you cannot concentrate on. Since you have an invincible tendency toward lyricism, find a subject in which lyricism would be so ridiculous that you’ll be forced to restrain and eliminate it. Choose some trivial matter, one of those incidents that abound in bourgeois life, something like La Cousine Bette or Le Cousin Pons by Balzac, and strive to treat it naturally, almost familiarly, discarding those digressions, those beautiful digressions, beautiful in themselves, but which are useless side dishes to the development of the conception and are bothersome to the reader.” Flaubert, “more defeated than convinced,” murmured, “It won’t be easy, but I’ll try.” It was eight in the morning, the light and sounds of the day invaded the spacious mansion, and as they left the room, Du Camp caught sight of a black woman’s dress disappearing down the stairs: Madame Flaubert had been listening, with her ear against the door. She was even less satisfied than her son with the verdict; she bore a grudge against Bouilhet and Du Camp and lived convinced that this opinion (especially Maxime’s) was born out of the envy they had towards Gustave.

The next day, after that sleepless and tense night, the three friends walked in the garden of the house in Croisset, gazing at the waters of the Seine, uncomfortable due to the events of the previous day. Suddenly, Bouilhet turned to Gustave and said, “Hey, why don’t you write a novel based on Delaunay’s story?” Flaubert raised his head, happy: “What a great idea!”

That would be the birth of Madame Bovary.

3. What is the degree of truth in this anecdote? Was Du Camp and Bouilhet’s opinion fair or unfair?

My impression is that the general outline of the anecdote is true, but the details have been colored or invented. The only source of the episode is Maxime Du Camp, who recorded it in the memoirs he published when Madame Flaubert, Gustave, and Bouilhet were already deceased.7 Du Camp’s testimony is considered dubious by critics and biographers, as they believe, just as Madame Flaubert intuited, that Maxime was jealous of his friend: he made or approved the cuts to Madame Bovary in La Revue de Varis, declared L’Éducation sentimentale a failure, and also recommended dozens of suppressions. Moreover, after Gustave’s death, Du Camp portrayed him in a sinister light, downplaying his talent while presenting himself as responsible for Flaubert’s literary successes, thanks to his suggestions and critiques. The truth is, I’m not entirely convinced by this viewpoint. Maxime Du Camp, a mediocre writer who achieved everything he aspired to - social and literary success, decorations, membership in the Academy - could hardly understand Flaubert’s attitude toward his vocation, let alone appreciate his genius. It is likely that, deep down, his opinions genuinely reflected his feelings for Flaubert: a friendly disdain, paternal deference toward a friend who, despite his efforts (and perhaps due to his epilepsy, as he wrote), never managed, like him, to “succeed” in seeking popularity, honors, and power. Maxime would undoubtedly be surprised to know that his presence in literature is solely due to his friendship with Gustave, except for the few specialists who mention him as a precursor of futurism for some poems he composed celebrating progress, the city, and the machine.

In any case, their testimony is accurate regarding the extremely severe judgment they passed on the first Tentation. Present-day critics, in their accommodating ease of praising the established, accuse Du Camp and Bouilhet of blindness for not having recognized the genius in those four days of reading. Many judge the first Tentation based on the purified and condensed version of 1874, whose value is indisputable. However, regarding the 1849 version, my opinion is not far from that of the two friends. It is a shapeless and uneven book, tediously verbose, where eloquence, repetition, and metaphorical mania suffocate the stylistic innovations. There is an ease that the author abuses, an uncontrolled and verbose lyricism, and in the organization of the book, negligence, disproportion, spontaneity - all flaws that Flaubert, precisely from Madame Bovary onwards, would fear like the plague. It is surprising that those who admire the “Flaubertian” literary virtues - the right word, impersonality, objectivity, rigorous composition, rational control of intuition - do not reason as follows: if Bouilhet and Du Camp had not dealt such a harsh blow to Gustave, he might have persevered in a type of literature of exacerbated lyricism and oratory, with blind faith in inspiration, for which he was predisposed, and we would have never had the books we love most from him. Flaubert starts becoming a great creator when he reacts against that lyrical, sentimental, and romantic inclination that dominates his early writings, and it was on that long night in Croisset when Maxime and Louis’s verdict played a crucial role. Their judgment was not only quite fair; above all, it was useful: it helped Flaubert transform into a different writer.

4. How did Flaubert’s literary transformation, culminating in Madame Bovary, take place?

The disappointment was profound, and Flaubert took time to recover. On January 5, 1850, from Cairo - a few days after the reading, Maxime and Gustave embarked on their journey to the East - a letter to his mother shows him full of doubts: “Is Saint Antoine good or bad? That’s what I often wonder. Which one of us or the others made a mistake?” He resisted accepting his friends' verdict, but he was also unsure of himself: “I am full of doubts and irresolutions.” The wound did not heal, and it became a source of reflection, or as we would say today, self-criticism. Shortly before the first anniversary of the episode, from Damascus, Gustave reminded Bouilhet of how terrible it was for him: “Nevertheless, I recovered (not without difficulty) from the terrible blow that Saint Antoine dealt me. I don’t boast of not still being a little stunned, but I am no longer as sick as I was during the first four months of my journey. I saw everything through the veil of boredom with which this disappointment had enveloped me, and I repeated the stupid phrase you sent me: 'What’s the point?’” (Letter dated September 4, 1850). His travel companion reproached him in his memoirs for being apathetic and withdrawn during their journey through Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Turkey, and Greece, attitudes Du Camp attributed to a lack of curiosity and homesickness for his family and Rouen. However, the true reason for this detachment (which, by the way, is evident in the Notes de voyage) was the bitterness Flaubert carried due to the “terrible blow.” References in future letters from the Correspondance reveal that, at a distance, he gradually took a more serene view of Bouilhet and Du Camp’s judgment. In October 1851 - just as he was starting Madame Bovary - he takes out the Tentation and reads some passages again to Bouilhet, who insists on his unfavorable opinion: “Bouilhet’s objection to its publication is that I put all my flaws and some of my qualities into it” (Letter to Du Camp, October 21, 1851). Four months later, Flaubert has a clear awareness of the value of the first Tentation; half a year of work on Madame Bovary has led him to condemn improvisation and defend the “planning” of a novel. He tells Louise, who has read the Tentation manuscript and praised it: "It’s a failed work. You talk about pearls. But pearls don’t make the necklace; it’s the thread. In Saint Antoine, I was Saint Antoine himself and forgot about it. He’s a character to create… Everything depends on the plan. Saint Antoine lacks it…"8 (Letter dated February 1, 1852). The final observation is particularly interesting: that lack of “plan,” of structure, is something that will not occur in the novel he is writing; at the same time, he will try not to “forget” himself in the character; he will strive to maintain a distance between him and his creation in order to better compose it - describe it, move it, make it think and feel. In other words, Flaubert is developing a method for Madame Bovary in a negative function of the Tentation; based on the limitations of the latter, he invents the virtues of the former. This becomes evident eight days later, in another letter to Louise, in which, although he still claims, hurt, that Bouilhet and Du Camp judged his Saint Antoine “lightly,” he adds: “I am now in a completely different world, that of attentive observation of the most mundane details. I have my eyes fixed on the moldy moss of the soul. It is a far cry from the mythological and theological flamboyance of Saint Antoine. And just as the subject is different, I am writing in a completely different manner. I want not a single movement or a single reflection of the author in my book” (Letter dated February 8, 1852). The theory of impersonality - this is the first time he mentions it - is born, in a way, out of rejection, out of the desire to do something different from that first Tentation in which the overwhelming intrusion of the narrator’s subjectivity prevented his hero from coming to life and the work from existing sovereignly. As he repeats to Louise on March 28 of that year, the novel he is writing will be diametrically opposed to Saint Antoine, but he believes its style will be of a deeper art.

According to Du Camp, Flaubert not only maintained his intention to write a novel with a banal theme, inspired by the “story of Delamare” (Du Camp mistakenly wrote Delaunay) while in the East, but it was also there that he found a name for his heroine. The revelation supposedly came in Lower Nubia, on top of Mount Abucir, while the two travelers were contemplating the second cataract of the Nile. Suddenly, Gustave shouted, “Eureka! I’ll call her Emma Bovary!” He supposedly repeated the name several times, savoring it.

Here is the uncertain part of Du Camp’s testimony: nothing confirms that the idea for Madame Bovary was born the day after reading the first Tentation, or that Flaubert thought of writing a novel about the “history of Delamare” during his trip to the Orient. His letters from those two years and the Notes de voyage make no mention of this matter. Instead, they refer to other projects that Flaubert shared with Bouilhet. For example, from Constantinople, he writes to him on November 14, 1850, hesitating between three themes, which might ultimately be one: (1) Une nuit de Don Juan, an idea that came to him while visiting the lazaretto of Rhodes; (2) the story of Anubis, the woman who wanted to be loved by God (the germ of Salammbô), and (3) a novel set in Flanders, about a virgin and mystical girl who lives and dies in a small provincial town, at the end of a cabbage-planted garden. Five weeks earlier, he enthusiastically talks about putting into practice, upon his return, the old idea of a Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Letter from Damascus, September 4, 1850). And according to Maxime, in Turkey, he conceived the idea of a roman comique about the modern Orient, after listening to the thousand and one adventures of the Europeans he met during the journey. Among all these purposes, the one that seems to prevail the most is that of Don Juan since he still thinks about it in Rome and tells Bouilhet that he has even made some sketches (Letter from April 9, 1851).

Flaubert returns to France at the end of June or the beginning of July of that year, with immense desires to write, but he is not yet entirely decided on telling the “history of Delamare.” Upon his arrival in Croisset, he corrects and organizes his travel notes. However, by then, he is already toying with the idea of a novel on that subject. A letter he receives in July from Maxime Du Camp confirms this, as Maxime asks, "What are you writing? Have you made up your mind? Is it still Don Juan? Is it the story of Madame Delamarre [sic], which is very beautiful, and how do you know about it?"9 Some believe this letter contradicts Maxime’s account in his memoirs about the origin of Madame Bovary. If the day after reading the Tentation “Bouilhet suggested to Flaubert the ‘history of Delamare’,” why does Maxime ask him in 1851 how he came to know that same story? However, the challenge is not definitive. Upon his return to Croisset, Flaubert could have learned new details about the Delamare story— they existed: Eugène had died during Gustave’s journey— and perhaps Maxime’s curiosity was about the origin of the new information. Flaubert and Maxime had separated in Rome in April, so between that date and Du Camp’s letter, Gustave was torn between two themes: Don Juan and the story of Delamare. Maxime came to spend a few days in Croisset at the end of July, and undoubtedly the matter was discussed by the friends. By the time Maxime returns to Paris, Gustave has already chosen the name of his heroine, and he has discarded Don Juan, as indicated in another letter from Du Camp, who, in August, sends him a personal drama and concludes, "I could give you, for your Bovary, everything that happens to me; I am sure it will be useful to you."10 Though he has made up his mind by then, Flaubert only starts the novel a few weeks later. The date and time are written by his own hand in the manuscript: September 19, 1851, at night.

5. What can be concluded about the origin of Madame Bovary?

The novel has, as its remote cause, the frustration that the verdict of Bouilhet and Du Camp on the first Tentation de Saint Antoine meant for Flaubert. Although he found it difficult, he partially accepted their opinion, which led him to choose a different theme and form for his next novel than the condemned book. It is not impossible that Bouilhet suggested the “history of Delamare” on that occasion, a regional scandal known throughout Rouen. Perhaps Gustave only vaguely accepted this advice, as he was too disheartened at that time to express the enthusiasm attributed to him by Du Camp. While traveling in the Orient and recovering from the failure, Flaubert considered various projects, both old ones like the Dictionnaire and new ones like Don Juan, Anubis, the comical novel, and the Flemish story, not dwelling too much on the adventures of Delphine Delamare but not forgetting them either. This matter must have been dormant and postponed but alive, a little demon that made its way as the journey continued, fueled by Gustave’s longing for his home, the landscape, and the people of Normandy, who were the setting and actors of the Delamare story. Upon returning to Rouen, Bouilhet himself or Madame Flaubert undoubtedly told him about Eugène’s death, which brought the drama to a close, and perhaps this detail sealed the choice. He must have made inquiries, discovered new information while correcting the Notes de voyage, and communicated all this to Maxime, which is referred to in his friend’s question in the letter of July 23. The decision to set Don Juan aside for Emma Bovary must have been made at the end of July, perhaps while Du Camp was with him in Croisset.

My assumption that the idea of writing a novel based on the Delamare story gradually took hold of Gustave is not so much based on Maxime Du Camp’s testimony as on the fact that Flaubert never, throughout his life as a writer, chose a theme suddenly and impulsively. All his other novels resulted from experiences and purposes he had long cherished, meditated on, reconsidered, sometimes written, abandoned for a long time, and rewritten with significant modifications. He was a creator for whom the gestation of a theme was always slow, a gradual contamination, a progressive obsession. If this happened with his other books, it is highly improbable that the choice of Madame Bovary, which represented such a significant change from his previous work, was made abruptly in just a few days or weeks. It is more plausible that, like the others, this novel started as a tiny seed that slowly germinated, nurtured by melancholy and the difficult acceptance of defeat, over those twenty-some months. While indulging in the “panzada de colores” in the Orient, as he says in his letters, he contracted syphilis, began to lose his hair, and approached the age of thirty.

6. How long did it take Flaubert to write Madame Bovary, and what are the characteristics of the manuscript?

He began writing it on the night of Friday, September 19, 1851, and finished it on April 30, 1856, according to autograph dates found on the manuscript protectors, making it a duration of four years, seven months, and eleven days. This does not account for the corrections and deletions he made in all the editions published during his lifetime, some of which were quite significant. For instance, the first single-volume edition by Lévy in 1862 contains 208 changes introduced by Flaubert to the original edition, as discovered and counted by Madame Claudine Gothot-Mersch.11

The entire work is preserved in the Municipal Library of Rouen: (1) 46 large sheets of Scénarios, the plan of the work, including the plot, characters of the personages, division into chapters, etc.; (2) 1788 sheets of drafts written on both sides, sprinkled with annotations in the margins, erasures, and additions, and (3) 487 sheets, which constitute the final manuscript.

7. What sources are available to follow Flaubert’s work during these years?

The primary source is his correspondence with Louise Colet. They met and began their love affair in 1846, but they broke up in 1848. Fortunately, they reconciled a few days after Gustave’s return from the Orient, and through his letters to Louise— a minimum of two per week, often three or even four— one can almost follow the making of the novel day by day. Louise’s letters to Gustave were burned by his niece Caroline because they contained “too many horrors,” earning her the everlasting hatred of all the supporters. The letters to Louise cease in April 1854, due to the final dispute between the lovers. From then on, the main source is Flaubert’s letters to Louis Bouilhet, who was living in Paris at that time. In those five years, Gustave also wrote occasionally to his childhood friend Ernest Chevalier, to Du Camp (with whom his friendship had cooled, and as Maxime’s literary opportunism became more noticeable, Flaubert expressed more sarcasm in his letters to Louise), and, on occasion, although without mentioning his work to them, to Victor Hugo and Maurice Schlésinger. This part of the Correspondance— three out of thirteen volumes of the Conard edition— is as interesting as Flaubert’s best novels. On the one hand, the letters are of extraordinary literary and anecdotal richness: written offhand, they contain Flaubert’s political, artistic, and social opinions, his judgments and prejudices about the people he was meeting or remembering, and the emotional ups and downs that his work produced. On the other hand, and most importantly, they develop his theory of the novel, which gradually took shape during those years as a result of the creative praxis.12 This is a much more reliable history than what could be compiled from a “Diary of Madame Bovary” if Flaubert had kept one, as there was no literary premeditation in these letters, only complete spontaneity and freedom. Flaubert was not aware that these letters would be read by anyone other than their recipient, nor that he was recording the history of his novel and outlining the most revolutionary literary theory of his century.

8. Did Flaubert work continuously or with interruptions during those four years, seven months, and eleven days?

The interruptions were minimal, and I estimate that, combined, the days he didn’t work amounted to only one-tenth of the total time. For instance, in 1851, shortly after starting the book, he traveled to London for a few days, accompanying his mother and niece to an international exhibition. Later that year, between November and December, he spent three weeks in Paris, where he witnessed and was almost a victim of the coup d’état on December 2, which established Louis Bonaparte as Emperor. In the summer of 1853, he spent a month of vacation in Trouville with his family, during which he didn’t work, as he could only write in his own domain. The other interruptions were short. His relationship with Louise didn’t take up much of his time, as he imposed a unique regimen: every three months, he would make a trip to Mantes, where she would join him; they would spend a few hours together at an inn or, at most, one night. Sometimes, these rapid quarterly encounters took place in Paris, where Flaubert stayed for only two or three days. It is noteworthy that, despite consenting to this arrangement for years, biographers criticize Louise Colet for being dominant and difficult; the truth is that, if they were lovers, Louise was quite understanding to accept Gustave’s almost exclusively epistolary love system. They also criticize her for being unfaithful, but they are overly strict: his letters show how little Flaubert was concerned about this issue, as he sometimes advised Louise to be more accommodating to her admirers.

9. Did Flaubert experience attacks of his nervous illness during the years of Madame Bovary?

At times, excessive work and the tremendous excitement of a particular episode or stylistic problem put him in a state of emotional imbalance, frenetic anger, and he came close to nervous collapse. For example, on December 23, 1853, he worked for twelve consecutive hours— with only a 25-minute break to eat something— on the scene of Emma and Rodolphe’s walk in the forest. Around 6 p.m., he was so exalted, reading his own sentences aloud and feeling “so deeply what my little wife was experiencing,” that the moment he wrote “attaque de nerfs” on the paper, he was on the verge of having one. He got up, staggering toward the window, and remained there, breathing in the river breeze, until he calmed down. He was left with a sore body (Letter to Louise, December 23, 1853). However, these states of euphoria were different from his old attacks; apparently, he didn’t experience them during those years. The few times he referred to his “illness,” he spoke of it as something past, which supports the theory of those who consider the malady to be neurotic, with selective attacks. The literature, in any case, was his best therapy. It is unlikely that he would have hidden the attacks from Louise out of modesty since he spoke naturally about other illnesses that sometimes hindered his work. In addition to flu and colds, in August 1854, he suffered from mercury poisoning (he took a remedy containing mercury as treatment for syphilis). For nearly three weeks, his tongue was severely swollen, so much so that he couldn’t speak and could barely eat. He was treated with ice, enemas, and leeches.13 Also, during those years, boils appeared on his skin for the first time— undoubtedly a consequence of the progression of syphilis— which would torment him greatly in the future.

10. What was Flaubert’s working method?

On December 26, 1858, Flaubert wrote to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie: “A book has never been for me anything but a way of life in some milieu or other. That is what explains my hesitations, my anxieties, and my slowness.” This sentence wonderfully sums up Flaubert’s method: the slow, scrupulous, systematic, obsessive, stubborn, well-documented, cold, and fiery construction of a story. Just like his poetics, Gustave discovered (invented) his working system while writing Madame Bovary; although his previous texts had demanded effort and discipline—especially the first Tentation—only from this novel onwards would that combination of routines, quirks, concerns, and occupations that allowed him maximum productivity be perfectly defined. A way of living in a given milieu: this profound interpenetration with a “milieu,” to verbally recreate it, is something that Flaubert achieves through the absolute commitment of his energy and time, his will and intelligence, to the creative task. A few months after the aforementioned letter, he uses the same formula to explain his work to Mme. Jules Sandeau: “A book has always been for me a special way of living, a means of immersing myself in a certain milieu” (Letter of August 7, 1859).

He wakes up around noon and, after having breakfast with his mother, or alone with his dog, and reading the correspondence (Louise’s letters arrived daily), he spends an hour teaching grammar, history, and geography to his niece Caroline, whose education he insisted on personally overseeing. At two in the afternoon, he locks himself in the adjoining rooms that serve as his bedroom and study; the latter has a terrace from which he can see the (then) beautiful and peaceful landscape: the waters of the Seine, the fertile land, the gentle hills with poplars. He stays in the study, where, in front of the window, his large round table and an oak bench are placed. The table is covered with a green cloth to prevent the maids Julie and Narcisse from tidying up the strict disorder of cards, notebooks, and papers that clutter it. A bunch of goose feathers stands in a container next to the inkwell, which is a crystal frog. There are bookshelves, a couch covered with the hide of a white bear, and here and there, many of the objects he brought back from the East: a hookah, many pipes, an embalmed crocodile. In winter, he keeps the fireplace lit, and in summer, he works with the windows open, usually dressed in a white silk dressing gown that reaches his feet. He writes until seven or eight in the evening, when he goes out to have dinner with his mother and then spends some time with her. He returns to the study, where he remains absorbed in the novel until two or three in the morning. At that time, he still has the energy to write long letters to Louise, in which, sometimes, he shows excitement because he has worked well, and other times, mostly, he is furious because he has spent hours trying to improve just one sentence.

Until October 1853, this rigid schedule changed slightly on weekends when Louis Bouilhet came to stay with him at Croisset. The friends would spend the entire Sunday locked in the study, reading and mercilessly critiquing each other’s work from the past week. Gustave had complete confidence in Bouilhet’s opinion and usually followed his advice; throughout the writing of Madame Bovary, Bouilhet served as a second critical conscience for Flaubert. But Gustave and Louis also spent many Sundays commenting in detail—and correcting them, sometimes reworking entire stanzas—the poems that Louise Colet sent them. Bouilhet’s visits, whom Flaubert always cherished, were one of the few distractions from his monastic life, a respite he eagerly awaited during the lonely and exhausting week. When Bouilhet left for Paris in October 1853, Sunday became just like any other day.

There were times when the difficulties and the feeling of powerlessness he had to face were so great that one might think he would lose his mind. The critical period was the four months of the agricultural meetings, a chapter that, in some parts—such as the speech of the Conseiller—was rewritten seven times. In this seclusion, there were days when the characters seemed to materialize and influence him. This happened dramatically when he was writing Emma’s death, as he told Taine: "My imaginary characters affect me, haunt me, or rather, it is I who am in them. When I was writing Emma Bovary’s poisoning, I had such a strong taste of arsenic in my mouth, I was so thoroughly poisoned myself that I had two indigestions in a row, two very real indigestions, as I vomited my entire dinner."14

He often smoked many pipes a day, sometimes up to fifteen. It is known that the perpetually lit windows of his house served as a beacon for the region’s crab fishermen. He rarely visited Rouen, except for work-related matters. For instance, he went to the Hôtel-Dieu to have his brother Achille advise him on the pathology of a deformed foot while narrating Hippolyte’s operation, and he made another special trip to gather information at the hospital and library about arsenic poisoning before describing Emma’s suicide.

11. Does Flaubert’s documentary itch in this novel reach the extremes he had in Salammbô, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet?

No, the travels, readings, consultations, and verifications Flaubert made for Madame Bovary were not as extensive as those in his later works, such as the fifteen hundred books he is said to have read and annotated for Bouvard et Pécuchet. However, even in the making of this book, we can observe a fundamental aspect of Flaubert’s method: the conscious plundering of real reality to construct fictional reality. For example, to describe Emma’s childhood readings, he reviewed the old story and history books he and his siblings had read as children. Before starting the agricultural meetings, he attended such an event in the village of Darnétal, taking paper and pencil with him, and to understand the disease of the Blind Man and the remedy that Homais recommends, he consulted Louis Bouilhet, who had been a medical student, and asked him to consult specialists. Similarly, in order to be “truthful” regarding Emma’s economic stranglehold by Lheureux, he went to Rouen to be instructed by a lawyer and a notary about promissory notes, seizures, auctions, and amortizations.15 On the other hand, among the multitude of exegetes who have been disputing for a century about the models for Tostes and Yonville—fictitious names—none have been able to prove that Flaubert traveled specifically to map out his plans in any of the towns that claim the (dubious) privilege of being the settings of the novel.

12. Did he engage in any sports during these five years?

As a boy, he was an excellent swimmer, and swimming was the only exercise he occasionally did on good weather days. In the evening, as the heat subsided, he would often take a dive and swim in the Seine in front of his house. At one time, he had enthusiastically practiced sailing, but he gave it up at his mother’s insistence. She must have asked him to do so, not out of fear of an accident, as he mentioned in a letter, but due to his nervous attacks. The doctors had prescribed absolute rest.

13. What was his sexual life like from 1851 to 1856?

It mainly consisted of sporadic encounters with Louise, which in those five years must not have exceeded twenty times (in some, the lovers were limited to quarreling). It is proven that in the summer of 1853, he briefly slept with the sculptor Pradier’s ex-wife, Louise d’Arcet, with whom he had had a friendly relationship for years. The first romantic attempt with Louise d’Arcet, as it happened with Louise Colet, was a failure, but he redeemed himself and even allowed himself certain indiscretions, such as advising Bouilhet to try to seduce Madame Pradier in turn: he assured him that he was more efficient in bed than the Muse.16 It is also said that in 1854, during a trip to Paris, he may have had relations with the actress Beatrix Persion, although there is not very convincing evidence.17 Sartre believed that he frequently masturbated, but this only seems evident, judging from his letters, during the first period of his love affair with Louise Colet (1846-1848), before the trip to the East. (In a drawer of his desk, he kept slippers, a handkerchief, a lock of Louise’s hair, and a green twig that fell on the Muse’s hat during their first meeting in Mantes, and while writing the first Tentation, many nights he interrupted his work to caress these objects in a state of intense excitement). However, in the second stage of their love affair, the years of Madame Bovary, there is no evidence of such practices, but instead, there are indications that he went through periods of total lack of appetite. For instance, he confessed to Louise on the morning of April 13, 1854: “You tell me that ideas of voluptuousness hardly torment you. I must make the same confession to you, for I admit that I no longer have a sex, thank God. I will find it again if necessary, and that is what is needed.” Years later, Flaubert became convinced that intense sexual activity was detrimental to literary creation and that, on the contrary, a certain restraint benefited the novelist. He repeated this to his friend Ernest Feydeau, an unrestrained gentleman, to whom Gustave gave advice of this kind: “But be careful not to ruin your intelligence in the company of women. You will lose your genius at the bottom of a womb… Reserve your priapism for your style, fuck your inkwell, calm yourself about meat, and be well convinced, as Tissot (from Geneva) says (Traité de l’onanisme, page 72, see the illustration), that: an ounce of lost sperm fatigues more than three liters of blood” (Undated letter, from early February 1859).

It would be a mistake to interpret these pieces of advice as a puritanical sermon. Flaubert did not find sexual pleasure and literary creation to be incompatible. Instead, in his case, both experiences were sometimes one and the same; his lack of appetite does not mean that he gave up sex, but that he temporarily replaced women with literature as the focus of desire and source of pleasure. Writing—in his case, an intense and total commitment similar to sexual intercourse—was for Flaubert an “orgy”: “The only way to endure existence is to get lost in literature like in a perpetual orgy” (Letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, September 4, 1858). Therefore, it is not surprising that he used sexual metaphors to describe his work. For instance, he explained that Salammbô had taken off: “Finally, the erection has come, sir, after whipping and masturbating myself. Let’s hope there will be a celebration” (Letter to Ernest Feydeau, December 19, 1858).

14. What authors did he read during these years?

The revolutionary of form, the founder of the narrative vanguard of his time, was a dismissive reader of current events and passionate about the classics. His greatest admiration, the author he returned to time and again and who always elicited trills of joy from him for the richness and “impersonality” of his world, was Shakespeare: “The entirety of his works has an effect on me of astonishment and exaltation, like the idea of the sidereal system. I see only immensity where my gaze gets lost in brilliance” (Letter to Louise Colet, after rereading King Lear, March 30, 1854). Among the French, the author he loved most and reread the most was Montaigne: he called him “my nurturing father,” quoted him from memory, and paraphrased him in his letters. Critics say that Montaigne taught him skepticism, but I believe that he actually civilized a raw skepticism that Flaubert already possessed. Immediately after, his great passion was Rabelais, for his unbridled inventiveness, his perception of the grotesque, and his world of liberated appetites. He also read, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Racine, Rousseau (whom he tolerated during these years but would later detest), Boileau (whom he felt a “formal” attraction to, but would also renounce years later), Buffon, Ronsard, Voltaire (whose entire theater he had studied with paper and pencil), Goethe, and Byron—loves from his adolescence—and, among modern authors, Victor Hugo, whom he respected all his life, and Balzac, whom he often spoke of without much esteem because he was annoyed by his style (he believed it lacked substance). He occasionally immersed himself in a Greek author, such as Plutarch (he read Latin easily), as he persevered during these five years in his desire to study classical Greek to read Homer in the original (although he never managed to do so). However, his numerous readings of Greek and Latin authors are from the periods of La Tentation de Saint Antoine, Salammbô, and Hérodias. During these years, he also reread Don Quixote, another classic for which he always felt devotion. He had read it before his trip to the East, and the memory remained very vivid in him: he mentioned it occasionally, associated with a planned trip to Spain that never materialized. Among the contemporary works he read were all the issues of La Revue de Paris (of which he was co-director with Maxime Du Camp), which generally put him in a bad mood. And besides the readings done out of friendship (Louise Colet, Bouilhet, Maxime), there were also functional readings: medical books for certain episodes in the novel and textbooks used in Caroline’s lessons.

15. How did Flaubert write Madame Bovary? What are the stages of the novel’s elaboration?

Flaubert answered this question, metaphorically but justly, in a letter to Ernest Feydeau: "books are not made like children, but like pyramids, with a premeditated plan, and by bringing large blocks one on top of the other, with force of effort, time, and sweat."18 The first step is the dessin premedité or plan of the work: to outline a synopsis where the main lines of the story are sketched. The central concern of this first stage is the plot: the characters, the dramatic trajectory, the main anecdotal incidents. During this phase, reflection on the form is absent; Flaubert is devoted to summarizing the theme of the book in scenes, chapters, and drawings, while immersing himself in this material. He explains this to Louise: “One must ruminate on their objective before thinking about the form because it only arrives well if the illusion of the subject obsesses us” (Letter of November 29, 1853). The 46 pages of Scénarios19 allow us to verify two things: (1) this initial plan is very detailed and precise, even the most insignificant facts are detailed, indicating that Flaubert wants to push premeditation to the extreme, eliminating all spontaneity, and (2) the plan is modified as the writing progresses, not in its general lines, but in the content of the tableaux, those blocks he mentions in his letter to Feydeau and which are the thematic units of the book.

Once the general project of the work and the rigorous plan of the first chapter have been outlined, the writing process begins. Now, formal concern dominates and torments Flaubert: “Style is only achieved with atrocious labor, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness” (Letter to Louise, August 15, 1846). Since he only talks about “style” in his letters, most critics understand that Flaubert’s formal obsession is exclusively related to language. In reality, he is just as meticulous about the structure—the order of the narrative, the organization of time, the gradation of effects, the concealment or exhibition of data—as he is about the writing itself. His great contribution to the novel is both technical, concerning the use of language, and concerning the distribution of narrative materials. I hope to demonstrate this by analyzing some of the components that make the “machine” (his own words) of Madame Bovary function.

Flaubert likely works with two blank pages side by side. On the first page, he writes—using even and small handwriting, leaving large margins—the first version of the episode, undoubtedly quickly, developing ideas as they come, not worrying too much about the form. Thus, he scribbles a few sheets. Then, he goes back to the beginning and starts the meticulous, slow correction, sentence by sentence, word by word. The page becomes covered with erasures, additions, repetitions, overlapping layers of words that make it incomprehensible. Then, he writes that same page, which he hasn’t touched until now, neatly. He progresses very slowly, and this new version is subjected to the test of the gueuloir, which would be more accurately called the “ear test.” His conviction is as follows: a sentence is successful when it is musically perfect. “The more beautiful an idea is, the more sonorous the sentence; be sure of it. The precision of thought creates (and is itself) that of the word” (Letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, December 12, 1857). Therefore, when a sentence seems more or less finished, he reads it aloud, interprets it, raising his tone, pacing around the room, gesturing like an actor. If it doesn’t “sound” good, if it’s not melodious and enveloping, if its sonic potential doesn’t hold value in itself, then it’s not correct; the words are not right; the “idea” has not been precisely expressed. Thus, the sheets accumulate in pairs: the recto of one is the first version of the verso of the other. A good day of work may only yield half a definitive page; but there are days devoted to composing—one might say that is the right verb—a single sentence. It’s a genuine five-year war, during which his enemies multiply little by little, black beasts that become the material of nightmares and the target of his most bilious outbursts of anger: consonances and assonances, cacophonies, certain prepositions that tend to repeat like que. His letters use vivid imagery to describe the incidents of this long struggle. The “words” materialize in this belligerent declaration: “One must turn over all the words, scrutinize them from all sides, and do like the Spartan fathers, pitilessly cast into nothingness those with lame feet or narrow chests” (Letter to Louise, March 26, 1854). As for the higher instance of the word, which is the “sentence”: “Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their resemblance” (Letter to Louise, April 7, 1854). Each tableau emerges simultaneously as a narrative unit and a musical unit. When a picture is finished, he reads it out loud in the open air, in the “alameda de la gritería,” and usually, this examination reveals disharmonies in the whole that once again compel him to rewrite what he has written. His devouring concern for musicality leads him to anguish over the change of the title Le Journal de Rouen to Le Progressif de Rouen, proposed by Frédéric Baudry to avoid sensitivities because there was already a newspaper with the former name: “It’s going to break the rhythm of my poor sentences! It’s serious” (Letter to Bouilhet, October 5, 1856). But he finds a substitute with the same number of syllables and the same ending: Le Fanal de Rouen.

He doesn’t move on to write the next tableau—sometimes, as in Emma and Charles’s wedding and the agricultural elections, the tableaux cover a chapter, but generally, they contain several episodes—until he has a satisfactory version of the one he is currently writing. (I use the term tableau, which he used, to highlight another aspect as important as the musical one in Flaubert’s form: the visual). In this way, the novel progresses slowly, but each part completed is final.

After finishing each tableau, he spends one or several days creating a developed outline of the elements that will be the subject of the next one. This usually means adding details and anecdotes to the matter mentioned in the general plan, but in some cases, it profoundly alters the original idea. He never starts a tableau without having meticulously designed its content, without knowing in advance, in great detail, what he is going to narrate. He calls this: “faire du plan” (making a plan). When he finishes one of the Parts, he gives it a general reading to verify the linkage of the tableaux and to work on what he calls the “proportions.” To illustrate the extent to which Flaubert is concerned with the plot and how his formal consciousness pertains to structure, not just style, consider his impression of the first nine chapters of Madame Bovary after rereading them: “Yesterday I reread the entire first part. It seemed thin to me. But it works (?). The worst part is that the psychological, picturesque, grotesque preparations, etc., which precede, being very long, demand, I believe, a development of action that is in line with them. The prologue must not carry the narrative away (no matter how disguised and fused the narrative may be), and I will have a lot to do to establish a proportion that is roughly equal between the adventures and the thoughts. By diluting all the dramatic elements, I think I can achieve this more or less” (Letter of December 10, 1853). It is evident that he doesn’t neglect the effects of the narrative, and these effects, in his view, depend on the arrangement of the elements that make up the story.

Once he has completed the manuscript, he does a general reading, and before sending it to Du Camp for La Revue de Paris, he makes changes mainly consisting of deletions: he removes about thirty pages and many isolated sentences. In the pruning, “three big tartines by Homais, an entire landscape, the conversations of the bourgeois at the ball, an article by Homais, etc., etc., etc.” perish (Letter to Bouilhet, June 1, 1856). In La Revue de Paris, the novel appears (dedicated to Louis Bouilhet) with numerous mutilations, some of which Flaubert reluctantly accepted, while others were imposed by the directors by force. Gustave demands the publication of a note in which he distances himself from the text. The first book edition (April 1857) restores the parts suppressed by La Revue de Paris, but there are new changes by the author, which will happen in all the other editions published during Flaubert’s lifetime. This means that Flaubert’s perfectionism is, in a way, an infinite operation. The system in which this perfectionist need materializes is simple: a book, at a given moment, is published, but it is never finished. It would never be completed without the author’s death, that accident. The situation with Bouvard et Pécuchet is symbolic. If Flaubert had died ten years later, it is possible that the novel would have remained unfinished: due to its characteristics and the nature of Flaubert’s method, it required almost nothing short of the author’s immortality.

16. Did Flaubert use real elements in Madame Bovary? Was he aware of it?

In a letter to his friend Mme. Roger des Genettes, Flaubert explained something evident to those who write novels but harder for others to comprehend: the decisive intervention of the irrational factor in the choice of a theme, that domain over which will and consciousness have no control, but rather obey, and from which certain key experiences, stored there and often forgotten, secretly influence human actions, thoughts, and dreams, like their remote root, like their profound explanation. Flaubert referred to this when he stated that writers do not freely choose their themes: "One is not at all free to write this or that. One does not choose one’s subject. That is what the public and critics do not understand. The secret of masterpieces lies there, in the harmony between the subject and the author’s temperament."20 Eight years later, he would say exactly the same thing to George Sand: “As for my work obsession, I will compare it to an itch. I scratch and cry out. It’s both a pleasure and a torment. And I don’t do what I want! Because one does not choose their subjects, they impose themselves” (Letter of January 1, 1869). This means that a novelist does not create from nothing, but based on their experiences, and the starting point of fictional reality is always the real reality as the writer experiences it. Certain themes are imposed upon them, such as love and suffering, desires, and nightmares. This does not mean, of course, that “inspiration” descends upon them like a heavenly effluvium, but simply that they have a past and a present, a sum of experiences, some of which serve as materials for their work. Certain subjects touch deep fibers of their being, stimulate their sensitivity, and provoke in them the will to create, while others leave them indifferent. Why some and not others? Because those themes that consciously stimulate them preexist in embryonic and vague form in their subjectivity. They fascinate the writer because they give shape, anecdotal wrapping, and symbolic figure to experiences that are the very origin of their vocation, radical disappointments of life that have given rise in them to the need to recreate life, experiences that, by estranging them from reality, awakened in them that vocation to create imaginary realities. It is symptomatic that the most rationalist and premeditated of writers, the one who trusted the entire creative process to willpower, points to the “concordance between theme and temperament” as the secret of a successful work. This also means that the discordance between the two—the author who, for example, imposes a theme unsuited to their temperament for moral or political reasons—can explain, in many cases, the failure of a work.

If the choice of a theme is indeed an “acceptance,” then the materials that will serve Flaubert in his work and that he has “recognized,” where do they come from, where are they found? Around him, in the life of which he is a part. His first operation as a novelist consists of a systematic plundering of everything within the reach of his sensitivity. This is the meaning of the famous phrase he wrote to Louise shortly before completing two years of work on Madame Bovary: “Everything one invents is true, be sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. Induction is as good as deduction, and then, at a certain point, one no longer makes mistakes regarding anything concerning the soul. My poor Bovary, no doubt, suffers and weeps in twenty villages in France at the same time, right now” (Letter of August 14, 1853). And it is also what he means by his other famous phrase about this book (“Madame Bovary is me”): that the novelist only invents stories based on their personal history.

The level of awareness that the novelist has of their thefts varies, of course, and it is not rare for an author to be unconscious of the plunder supporting their work. On the other hand, it is difficult for a novelist to become fully aware of everything they have used to create because this plunder is not only vast but also extremely complex. A novel does not result from a theme stolen from life but, always, from a conglomeration of experiences, significant, secondary, and minuscule, which, occurring at different times and circumstances, pooled at the bottom of the subconscious or fresh in memory, some personally lived, others merely heard, others rather read, gradually flow into the writer’s imagination, which, like a powerful mixer, will undo and redo them into a new substance to which words and order give another existence. From the ruins and dissolution of real reality, something very different will emerge, a response and not a copy: fictional reality.

Flaubert is one of the most lucid writers regarding this process of converting the real into fictional. From a very young age, he clearly held that his vocation not only allowed him to consider the world as a quarry but demanded it of him. He was 21 years old when he told his companion Ernest Chevalier that for him, people were “nothing more” than pretexts for books, and that this curiosity applied equally to the “good” and the “bad” because the truth was in “everything.” It is worth reading this youthful quote carefully; it contains three early elements of his novelistic theory: (1) that the writer uses all of reality without scruples; (2) the totalizing ambition, and (3) the idea that the novel should show, not judge: “One must get used to seeing in the people around us only books. The sensible man studies them, compares them, and makes a synthesis of all that for his use. The world is nothing more than a harpsichord for the true artist; it is up to him to draw from it sounds that delight or freeze with terror. Both good and bad society must be studied. The truth is in everything. Let us understand everything and blame nothing” (Letter of February 3, 1842). The conviction that reality is only a material for work is manifested, of course, in Flaubert’s mania for documentation, taken to titanic extremes. But books, newspapers, and specialists he consults are not the only sources of his work. He turns into literature everything that happens to him; his entire life is cannibalized by the novel. When he was engaged in the final editing of L’Éducation sentimentale, he explained to his niece how, as he has always done, everything he sees and feels is used for fiction: “In the midst of all this, I constantly think about my novel; I even found myself on Saturday in one of my hero’s situations. I bring everything I see and feel into this work (as is my habit)” (Undated letter, January 1864).

We have evidence that he put these ideas into practice while writing Madame Bovary. In June 1853, the mother of a friend, a doctor named Pouchet, died in Rouen, and Gustave, who was preparing to attend the funeral, wrote a saddened letter to Louise, beginning with somber reflections on his friend’s grief. And suddenly, without transition, naturally, he adds that, as one must take advantage of everything, he hopes that the atmosphere of the funeral and Pouchet’s grief will provide him with elements for the novel: "As one must, moreover, take advantage of everything, I am sure that tomorrow it will be very dark and dramatic, and that this poor scholar will be pitiful. I might find some gods for my Bovary there."21 There is no cynicism in this. Flaubert will go to the funeral because he feels that death and because he wants to make a gesture towards his friend. At the same time, he knows something inevitable: the ceremony might be useful to him. A novel is made by these kinds of subtractions. If they are unavoidable, there is no reason to be ashamed; it is better to accept them as a necessary element of creation. This means that in the writer, there is a constant doubling, coexisting two men: the one who lives and the one who watches the other live, the one who suffers and the one who observes that suffering to use it. This duality of the novelist, living and sharing human experience while at the same time being a cold and greedy exploiter of their own and others' lives, is something of which Flaubert became aware during his trip to the East. The condition of the creator - a man who participates without participating, who is in life without being in it - seemed to him a “monstrosity.” His reflections appear in a letter to his mother, written in Constantinople: “When one wants, whether young or old, to meddle in the works of the good Lord, one must begin, if only from a hygienic point of view, by putting oneself in a position not to be taken in. You will paint wine, love, women, glory, provided, my little man, that you are neither a drunkard, nor a lover, nor a husband, nor a fool. Mixed with life, one sees it poorly; one suffers from it or enjoys it too much. The artist, according to me, is a monstrosity, something beyond nature. All the misfortunes with which Providence afflicts him come from the stubbornness he has in denying this axiom. He suffers from it and makes others suffer from it” (December 15, 1850). The use of formulas derived from the romanticism of his adolescence - “monstrosity” meaning something akin to ‘marginality’ - does not prevent Flaubert’s vision from being accurate. From that time on, he assumed his vocation in this way: he made life a literary supply, and when addressing writers he respected, he did not hesitate to remind them that their misfortunes could be profitable for them. (For Flaubert, who repeated his whole life that he wrote to “avenge” reality, it was above all the negative experiences that were artistically stimulating). In October 1859, he knows that Ernest Feydeau’s wife is dying. Immediately, he writes a few lines of anticipated condolence to his friend, in which he also warns him of the opportunity he will have to make use of that family tragedy: "Poor little woman! It’s dreadful! You have had and will have ‘good’ paintings and you will be able to make ‘good’ studies! It’s dearly paid for. The bourgeois hardly suspect that we offer them our hearts. The race of gladiators is not dead, every artist is one. He amuses the public with his agonies."22 The truth is that, in writing about them, the “agonies” are mitigated: literature exorcises them or makes them bearable.

This “monstrous” vocation, by which a man comes to consider life as a mere pretext for literature, grants the writer an extraordinary freedom: they can use everything for their work. But it is a double-edged sword: the dizzying abundance could also paralyze them. However, not all experiences are incentives; only those that originated and sustain their vocation, and in Flaubert’s case, this means “human misery.” No novelist saw as clearly as he did—and in none was it truer—that this vocation, like vultures, feeds primarily on carrion. He told Louise Colet, without shame: “When one has their clear model before their eyes, one always writes well, and where else is the truth more clearly visible than in those beautiful presentations of human misery? They have something so raw about them that it gives the mind cannibalistic appetites. It rushes to devour them, assimilate them. How often I have remained in a prostitute’s bed, gazing at the scratches on her sheets! / How many fierce dramas I have built at the Morgue, where I used to go in the past, etc.! I believe, moreover, that I have a particular faculty of perception in this place; when it comes to the unhealthy, I know about it” (Letter of July 7-8, 1853). The carrion he speaks of so enthusiastically here is of a dark romantic nature: brothels, hospitals, corpses. The one that served as raw material for Madame Bovary is less showy.

17. In the census of elements stolen from reality by Madame Bovary, which ones have been identified?

A complete exegesis of the real materials used by Flaubert is not only impossible; it would be so extensive that it would occupy generations of sleuths: when one starts to trace the sources of a fiction, it is discovered that each source refers to others, and these in turn to others, so that the totality eventually connects with the entire history of mankind. On the other hand, it is not interesting to trace back to its origins the real genealogy of fiction because what matters is not what the writer uses, but how he uses it and what he transforms it into: only the last two stages concern literature. To perceive this alchemy, the main models are enough.

The most important of all is the story of Eugène and Delphine Delamare, which, as Enid Starkie has said, is the grain of sand in the center of the pearl, the handful of paper flowers that, when immersed in water — the mind of genius — would flourish like the gardens of Babylon. If there are doubts about the moment when Flaubert decided to use this story —the day after reading the Tentation or upon his return from the Orient— there is no doubt, however, that he did: the main anecdotal features of the novel correspond to those of this provincial event. However, it is difficult to know precisely Delamare’s story, as it is not written anywhere before the novel that made it famous; then, it was distorted to resemble the fictional story. I summarize what has been ascertained. Eugène Delámare studied medicine in Rouen, was among the disciples of Flaubert’s father at the Hôtel-Dieu, and, as soon as he became an “officier de Santé” —a title lower than that of a surgeon but granting the right to practice medicine— he settled in Ry, about twenty kilometers from Rouen. There, in April 1836, he married an older woman named Mutel, who became a widow the following year. Twenty months later, he married a 17-year-old girl, Delphine Couturier, the daughter of well-off farmers. The marriage had a daughter. Delphine died on March 6, 1848 (the death certificate does not indicate the cause of death) and received a Christian burial in the cemetery of Ry. Eugène died in 1849. In these events, the central episodes of Charles Bovary’s life are recognized: he also studies medicine in Rouen and, once he obtains the title, settles in the provinces where he first marries an older woman, becomes widowed, and then marries Emma, who also gives him a daughter before dying before him. But Flaubert did not choose this model for Charles, but for Emma, as indicated by Du Camp’s letter of July 23, 1853, in which he asks if he is going to write “the story of Mme. Delamarre [sic] who is very beautiful.” About this story, the only certainty is that it was “scandalous.” In the circle of Ry and its surroundings, Delphine caused much gossip due to her amorous adventures, and people claimed she had committed suicide. At the beginning of the century, Dr. Brunon, director of the School of Medicine in Rouen, located a woman who had been a servant of the Delamares. According to the old woman, Delphine scandalized the people of Ry with her airs of grandeur and her sumptuous excesses; the yellow and black curtains in her living room, in particular, aroused envy. Like Emma, she would have been a voracious consumer of novels borrowed from the libraries of Rouen. As for her lovers, René Dumesnil identifies two: the first, a powerful farmer, Louis Campion, who was ruined by gambling and women and who shot himself in a street in Paris; the second, a notary’s clerk, who died around 1905 in the department of l’Oise. If these data are accurate (which is not certain), Flaubert took from the Delamare story, apart from the models of Charles, Heloïse, Emma, and Berthe, those of Rodolphe Boulanger and Léon Dupuis. In any case, it is evident that the story of Delphine circulating in the local gossip provided him with the skeleton of the novel, that anecdotal core that is summarized in the first Scénario and to which he will adhere, although he makes changes elsewhere: the story of a young woman who marries an older wretch and, in the town where she lives, dreams of love, luxury, and travel, has two lovers, incurs debts, and when she is left without love and ruined, commits suicide. Her husband, heartbroken, dies shortly after.

But if the Delámare story provides Gustave with the outline of Emma’s life, another female drama, in which dissipation and economic problems are mixed, serves to thicken the material of his novel. And there is certainty about this source because it is written: it is the Mémoires de Madame Ludovica. Gabrielle Leleu discovered them in 1947 among the folders and papers that Flaubert used for Bouvard et Pécuchet. They consist of forty handwritten pages in both directions, with elementary syntax and spelling, whose author presents herself as the wife of a carpenter and someone close to Madame Ludovica. The identification of the character hidden behind the pseudonym Ludovica is not difficult, as the author of the manuscript, who initially uses only an initial “P.” for the surname, later forgets that precaution and writes it in full: Pradier. It is Louise d’Arcet, sister of a schoolmate of Flaubert and daughter of a prominent chemist, a friend of Dr. Flaubert. Louise d’Arcet, after being widowed very young from a first marriage, married the sculptor James Pradier. She was an extravagant and easy woman; she had numerous lovers and ruined her husband, who obtained a legal separation from her in 1845. The Mémoires de Madame Ludovica narrate —the verb is generous for the ill intention and clumsy prose, it would be more appropriate to say denounce— the gruesome story of Louise d’Arcet from her first marriage to her divorce from Pradier, insisting on her crazy love affairs and her tricks and financial troubles. Several critics suppose that the text was dictated by Louise d’Arcet to a servant, which makes no sense; one only needs to read it to discover that its author is full of resentment and envy towards Louise, whom she portrays from the most negative angle. It is absurd to think that Louise d’Arcet herself sent that text to Flaubert; it is most likely that she did not even know it had been written.

18. Why was it written, and how did it end up in Flaubert’s hands?

One can hypothesize by relating what we know, on the one hand, about Flaubert’s working system, and on the other, about the connections that existed between him and Ludovica (apparently, that was the name given by close friends). All the data from Flaubert’s correspondence regarding Louise d’Arcet are later than her separation from the sculptor Pradier (1845). The first letter is from April of that year. Flaubert, traveling to Italy with his family, stops in Paris, and on the 2nd, he writes to Le Poittevin that he visited Louise Pradier in her very modest apartment on Rue Laffite. The sculptor’s ex-wife is going through a critical moment; separated from her husband, she has lost custody of her children, lives in poverty, and has just discovered that the parents of her lover — a teenager — are having her followed by the police. Gustave tells Alfred that, pretending to be worldly, he declared himself a defender of adultery and amazed that “lost woman” with his indulgence. Ludovica’s situation sparks literary curiosity in Flaubert, judging by this phrase (the same he uses in other letters to designate experiences that seem usable): “Ah! the beautiful study I have made there!” (Corresp. , vol. I, p. 162). Flaubert also tells Le Poittevin that Louise d’Arcet invited him for lunch upon his return from Italy. In his response, Alfred encourages him to accept the lunch invitation and, after asking if he has any literary projects in mind, suggests interrogating Ludovica.23 Le Poittevin undoubtedly senses something implicit in Flaubert’s letter: the story of the “lost woman” could be a good subject. This was happening when Flaubert was 24 years old, six years before he began Madame Bovary, and we do not know if that lunch took place after his return from Italy or if he conducted the interrogation around that time. But it is certain that he continued to see Ludovica because, in February 1847, six months after becoming Louise Colet’s lover, she has a violent fit of jealousy at Du Camp’s house because Flaubert has seen Louise d’Arcet. The dispute continues, and there is a censored letter from Flaubert in the Correspondance, in which he denies having any interest in Ludovica other than literary. He claims to have only a vague friendship with her and wants to “analyze” her because she seems to him the prototype of a woman of instincts, an orchestra of feminine feelings.24 There is undoubtedly literary interest, but by this time, he also starts showing interests of another kind. Towards mid-1847, after returning from a trip to Brittany with Maxime, Flaubert finds out where Madame Pradier is living and plans to visit her in Paris. Du Camp informs him that she is moving and will not be able to see him. During the period between that trip to Brittany and the trip to Egypt — from August 1847 to October 1849 — an intimate relationship is established between Maxime Du Camp, Louise d’Arcet, and Gustave. When he makes short trips to Paris, he not only sees Louise Colet but also Ludovica. Maxime suspects that Ludovica is attracted to his friend. He tells him on December 25, 1848, in a letter in which he recounts that one night he and Louise d’Arcet were on the verge of making love but resisted the temptation because Ludovica was afraid of hurting Gustave.25 Ludovica also writes to Gustave, jokingly, that she will come to live in Rouen to be close to him. In October 1849, when he embarks on a journey to the East, Flaubert goes to bid her farewell. Until then, their relationship has been maliciously friendly. Benjamin F. Bart discovered the exact period when Ludovica became Flaubert’s lover: in the summer of 1853.26 The relationship was very short and existed precisely while Flaubert was writing Madame Bovary. Afterward, a distant cordiality prevailed between them; there is a letter from Flaubert to Louise d’Arcet dated February 17, 1857, announcing that the court has acquitted her novel, and towards the end of 1862, he sends her one of the first copies of Salammbô. What can we infer from this data? From 1845, when an uninhibited relationship between them was established, and especially from 1853, when they became lovers, Flaubert could have heard from Louise d’Arcet herself the story of her life. However, he might have suspected that Ludovica’s life was more “literary” than she confessed and then asked a servant — the person who could obtain her confidences — for a secret report. I think it is most likely that Flaubert did this during the time of the letter to Le Poittevin (1845), as the Mémoires end with Ludovica’s life in 1844 when Pradier abandoned her; Flaubert would have thought of using them for some story and then forgotten them until he started writing Madame Bovary. But he could also have commissioned it when he had already decided to write Emma’s story.

This is, in summary, the life of Madame Ludovica. She married very young to free herself from paternal authority, and her first marriage, a failure, ended with her husband’s death. The sculptor Pradier falls in love with the beautiful widow, who, believing herself also in love, marries him. Everything goes wrong from the beginning; their three children do not solve anything. Ludovica distracts herself with countless lovers, successive or simultaneous, while leading a lavish lifestyle, spending money she doesn’t have on her lovers. She accumulates debts. By deceit, she obtains a notarial power to dispose of Pradier’s assets and then signs promissory notes, mortgages, gradually reaching a critical situation. She is threatened by the law. Her assets are seized and put up for sale to reimburse creditors. Desperate, Ludovica turns to her ex-lovers, sending a trusted person with heartbreaking letters. They all respond with denials and don’t even give plausible excuses. One day, her husband returns home to find an auction notice on the carriage door. Only then does he discover the catastrophe he is a victim of: he is stupefied and half-crazed. Shortly afterward, he obtains a legal separation from Ludovica.

Flaubert has made crosses and underlined in the manuscript the facts and situations that would become the events in Emma Bovary’s life. Ludovica’s story is almost literally used in all the financial drama of Emma, who, like Ludovica, will always feel the need to marry adultery with luxury and extravagance, procuring money by resorting to usurers, not hesitating to steal from her husband and finding her furniture seized by the authorities. Like the sculptor Pradier, Charles Bovary discovers one day, upon returning home, that he is a ruined man and discredited by the follies of his wife. Gustave made a mark in the manuscript of Madame Ludovica where the meanness of the ex-lovers is mentioned (“pas un de ces hommes ne mit même de politesse dans le refus qu’ils faisaient”). The episode in the novel is essentially the same, although it has been even more dramatized; instead of sending a maid, Emma will personally plead to Léon and Rodolphe for help, emphasizing the vileness of both men and her humiliation. There are other details that Flaubert used: the manuscript talks about Ludovica’s “weakness,” who could never resist male temptations, and it is true that Emma offers little resistance to her two gallants. The men who obtained Ludovica’s favors are branded as insignificant; those who obtain Emma’s are also seen as such: among Ludovica’s gallery of lovers is a notary’s intern, like Léon Dupuis. Nadeau observes that Emma abandons herself to reverie while listening to the tenor Lagardy in the theater and surrenders the next day to Léon, just as Ludovica falls in love with the tenor Mocker and yields the next day to a certain Charles Puis.27 Ludovica does not commit suicide when she cannot pay her debts, but she thinks of throwing herself into the Seine, and she has a dream about Italy that resembles Emma’s exotic fantasies.

The stories of Delphine and Ludovica attracted and merged because they had an affinity: the defeat of a woman whose desire to live beyond the constraints imposed on her situation first leads to adultery and then to disaster. This theme was an old demon that haunted Flaubert since adolescence. He encountered it in real life for the first time on October 4, 1837, thanks to an article in La Gazette des Tribunaux, titled “La moderne Brinvilliers” (or perhaps he read it the next day in Le Journal de Rouen), about an adulteress who had just committed suicide. The story was sensational. The heroine, a married woman, had fallen in love with a young man who became her lover. Later, to free herself from an uncomfortable situation, he flees to Brazil. From there, he writes to the woman asking for forgiveness and trying to convince her that he had no other choice, as their love would have been a source of remorse and unhappiness. The woman decides to be free to marry her lover and employs expedient methods. She poisons her husband without anyone discovering it, but when her children also die, the authorities become suspicious and have her arrested. Upon arriving at her home, the police find her lifeless body, with a vial of prussic acid in her hand. This event impressed Gustave so much that he wrote a “Conté philosophique” based on it; he finished it on December 10, 1837, just before turning 16, and named it Passion et vertu. It is the best fiction of his adolescence and somewhat like the first draft of Madame Bovary. When he sequestered himself in Croisset for his long novelistic adventure, perhaps he did not recall that article he read fourteen years earlier or the story he wrote. But the tragedy of the suicide — consciously or unconsciously — would also lend its help to the slow elaboration in which he found himself, collecting here and there facts, names, situations, to forge the material from which Emma Bovary would emerge. From the envenenadora’s life, Flaubert transposes key episodes to the novel: Emma, like her, is abandoned by a lover who, instead of breaking up in person, uses a letter; for both, the end is suicide by poison. Emma has also usurped the unfortunate woman’s strong character, audacity, and ability to undertake daring actions. In Passion et vertu, Flaubert modified the real story, and the alterations would be repeated in Emma’s story. La Gazette des Tribunaux presented the lover as a sensible man and her as the culprit of the drama; in the story and the novel, the roles are reversed, and while the lover is shown as a despicable man (Ernest Vaumont has the self-assurance of Rodolphe Boulanger, his spirit is dry and calculating), the woman’s psychological motivations mitigate her faults and give her a certain moral stature. In reality, there was one letter; in the story, two: Mazza receives the second when she is about to elope with her lover, exactly like Emma when she prepares to elope with Rodolphe. The letter, in both cases — Mazza on the top of the cliff, Emma in her attic — provokes a crisis: Mazza kills herself, and on that occasion, Emma first thinks of suicide. Like Emma, Mazza is a dreamer and eager for passion, and there are moments in the story — Mazza lying on her bed, voluptuously carried away by her dreams; Mazza filled with hatred every afternoon when her husband returns home, kisses her, and tells her about his workday — that seem like primitive versions of moments in Emma’s life.

Delphine Delamare, Ludovica, the poisoner (three real characters) and Mazza (one fictitious): a sponge in motion that absorbs from all planes of reality, Flaubert steals from others and steals from himself, he documents issues that are suggestive to him and at the same time his memory brings back submerged images that come as much from life as from the changes that his youthful imagination already then inflicted, obeying intimate impulses, to those early literary lootings. Thefts of thefts, changes of changes, mixtures of mixtures, where will and subconscious operate in unison, where observation and deformation of reality are simultaneous: thus emerges, from these complicated alliances and impossible reductions to fully reconstruct, made of patches, tracings, patchings, readings, gossips, combinations —all this factory under the baton of a wound that wants to close, a distaste for reality so senseless that it seeks to destroy it to rebuild it, that appears to recreate it when in the background it wants to abolish it—, the plot of Madame Bovary.

But there is another poisoner —a crime in fashion during the 19th century, one of the medieval restorations that romanticism carried out— that could also have been plundered by Flaubert. He, in March 1852, when he is neck-deep (the metaphor is his own) in Emma’s young girl’s dreams, receives a letter from Louise advising him to read the memoirs of the widow Lafarge, imprisoned for poisoning her brutish husband who kept her captive in a lost village. “Je suis presque fâché que tu m’aies conseillé de lire les mémoires de Mme. Lafarge, car je vais probablement suivre ton avis et j’ai peur d’être entraîné plus loin que je ne veux,” Flaubert answers Louise on March 21. And a week later, on the 27th, he talks to her again about the matter: “Tu n’as pas besoin de m’envoyer les mémoires de Lafarge. Je les demanderai ici”. That he read the thick volumes titled Les Mémoires de Marte Cappelle (1842) seems certain, although he does not speak more of it in the Correspondance, because there are affinities between the poisoner and Emma, starting with the character. The Mémoires reveal a being deeply maladjusted to life; her dissatisfaction is nourished by daydreams and, at the same time, has made her a woman of action. This is Emma’s case. The scrutiny authorizes the critic to think that certain scenes from the Mémoires served at least in part as a model for episodes of the novel: there is a rural wedding, a dance at the Palais Royal, and a portrait of the death by poisoning of Marie Cappelle’s husband that could have influenced Emma and Charles' wedding, the Vaubyessard ball, and Madame Bovary’s agony. Likewise, a widow’s premonition about her daughter’s future could be the seed of the health officer’s fantasizing about Berthe transforming from a baby into a girl, from a girl into a teenager, and from a teenager into a woman.

Another police-judicial event could have provided ingredients for the novel. When Gustave was 24 years old, Rouen had been the scene of a noisy trial — “l’affaire Loursel” — in which a man was accused of having murdered his wife and a maid to marry the woman he loved: a certain Esther de Bovery. She turned out to be the most striking figure of the trial. Of passionate and novelistic temperament, she wrote bold love letters to Loursel that were used against him, but the defense lawyer — none other than Maître Sénard, the future champion of Madame Bovary — argued that the fire and excesses of these letters were an effect of the romantic literature in vogue. Maître Sénard achieved a resounding victory: Loursel was acquitted for lack of evidence. It is thought that Flaubert kept in memory the surname Bovery, Esther’s feverish temperament, as well as some details of the drama exposed in the trial. For example, the death of the maid reported before the court coincides in several aspects with that of Emma: the young woman was attended by a health officer as inept as Charles and as Dr. Canivet, who, like them, only resorted to a capable doctor when it was too late.28

Esther de Bovery is one of the roots attributed to the surname of the health officer of Yonville. There are many others, and it is amusing to review the constellation of theories woven by exegetes on the real origin of the surname. There is the linguistic theory, according to which Bovary is a name invented from the Latin words bovarium, boarium, related to the ox: Flaubert would have wanted to hint in the patronymic at the dense, bovine, inelegant characteristics of Charles' spirit. There is the family theory: genealogists have hunted, among Flaubert’s distant maternal ancestors, a gentleman named Anne de Boveri, from whom Gustave would have taken the surname. There is the regionalist theory: it has been found that, in 1843, the orchestra conductor of the Rouen theater—where Flaubert sets an important episode of the novel—was named Boveri. There is the sophisticated hybrid theory: Flaubert knew as a child a Madame Bouvard, manager of a tobacco shop in the vicinity of Rouen cathedral, and would have crossed her name with that of Delphine Delamare’s village (Bouvard + Ry = Bovary) to baptize his heroes, before imposing it on the copyist of the last novel. Even Flaubert proposed a theory. On March 20, 1870, he wrote to Madame Hortense Cornu that he had invented the name Bovary “by distorting that of Bouvaret”, patron of a hotel where he stayed in Cairo, a former actor who, according to the Notes de voyage, had decorated the place with prints of Gavarni published in the magazine Charivari (this led René Dumesnil to claim that in one of these prints from 1833 a schoolboy wears the hat that was a model for the famous description of Charles Bovary’s “strange hairstyle of a composite order”, a far-fetched but not impossible hypothesis). Flaubert’s theory is no more valid than the others; regarding his sources an author usually knows less than his exegetes and it would not be difficult to complicate it with any of the others, explaining that Flaubert believed to distort the name of Bouvaret when what he was doing was using a conscious stimulus —Bouvaret— to rescue from the subconscious the name of an ancestor, a tobacco seller, an orchestra director or a Latin class from his childhood… The fact is the importance that Flaubert attached to names: he took his time to choose them, made inquiries to avoid hurting susceptibilities, but once he made a decision he did not turn back. In the years of L’Éducation sentimentale, his friend Louis Bonenfant discovered a Moreau family in Nogent and suggested him to change Frédéric’s surname. Flaubert refused: “A proper name is a capitule thing. You can no more change a character’s name than its skin. It’s like wanting to whitewash a negro”.29 And in the Carnets, where his literary projects between 1862 and 1874 are found (published in an excellent book, where erudition wonderfully agrees with intelligence, by Marie-Jeanne Durry),30 you can see how often, next to the projected character, Flaubert writes the name and surname of the living model.

19. How was Flaubert’s personal and family life projected in Madame Bovary?

Flaubert did not limit himself to delving into other people’s lives for his fiction; his own experience extends like a stain into the fictional reality, manifesting itself in the most diverse situations and characters and sometimes in the most unsuspected way. At least two of the women he loved contributed to the making of Errima. Madame Bovary has some of the sensuality of Eulalie Foucaud, the mysterious lover of the Marseille hotel who taught Flaubert the intoxication of pleasure and the thrill of forbidden love when he was 18 years old. Eulalie’s lack of inhibitions and voluptuous aptitude (at least attributed to her by Gustave in Novembre) are part of Madame Bovary’s personality. Also noteworthy is Emma’s debt to Louise Colet, the lover of the years of the book’s writing, whose somewhat masculine and stormy character, as well as her southern disposition towards truculence and gesture constitute striking traits of the heroine of Yonville. There is also the possible use of more transient experiences. For Emma’s adulteries and Charles’s image, the adventures of Madame Roger des Genettes, who would later be his friend, could have been useful to him. But when he is writing Madame Bovary, he speaks pestilence of her to Louise and pities the cheated husband: “I have seen père Roger walking down the street with his coat and his dog. Poor man! ... How little he suspects! Have you ever thought about this quantity of women who have lovers, these quantities of men who have mistresses, all these households under other households? What lies this supposes! What maneuvers and betrayals, and tears and anxieties!” (Letter of December 23, 1853). The figure of père Roger makes one think of Charles. Thibaudet believed that Emma’s atrocious boredom in Tostes and Yonville transubstantiates the one Gustave felt during his trip to the East and for which Du Camp reproached him so much.31 When Flaubert had been working on Madame Bovary for fifteen months, Louise let him know that she might be pregnant, due to their last encounter in Mantes. It was a false alarm, but Flaubert spent three weeks of desperation and wrote fierce sentences against fatherhood ("The idea of giving birth to someone horrifies me. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh, no, no, no!").32 In the image and likeness of these feelings, Emma feels between indifference and outright disgust for motherhood.

The doctor Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, Gustave’s father, was also helpful to Madame Bovary. However, this influence serves not so much to clarify the book as the other way around: the novel provides insights into Gustave’s relationship with the chief surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu. Biographers, assuming that children adore their parents, believed that by using Dr. Achille-Cléophas as the model for Dr. Larivière, Gustave paid a nostalgic homage to his father. Doesn’t fiction suggest that the arrival of the illustrious doctor in Yonville causes more excitement among the neighbors than the appearance of a god? They read that portrayal of Dr. Larivière with too much good faith, which is of a Machiavellian ambivalence (and a novel, when compared to the reality that nourishes it, cannot be read with good faith without mistakes), and one can draw the most opposite conclusions from it.

Like Dr. Achille-Cléophas, Larivière is an eminent scientist, liberal and philosopher, beloved by his disciples, who imitate him even in dress, a man in love with his profession and disdainful of honors, who travels the world with the nonchalant majesty that the consciousness of his talent, his fortune, and forty years of irreproachable existence give him. This is the positive profile of the portrait. And here is the other side. The sage professes a fanatical love for his profession, and those fleshy and beautiful hands that have never worn gloves “as if to be more ready to delve into miseries” also have something sadistic. This liberal man is prone to terrifying outbursts of anger, and the narrator’s indication that he would have taken him for a saint “if the sharpness of his mind had not made him fear like a demon” – isn’t that a way of calling him cruel? Sartre is quite right when he says that this phrase, applied to Dr. Larivière, sheds light on Gustave’s genuine feelings towards his father: “His gaze, sharper than his scalpels, went straight into the soul and disarticulated all lies through allegations and modesty.” That is the secret image that Gustave had of Achille-Cléophas: an authoritarian god who read his soul, a will before which he could only surrender.

Moreover, what role does Dr. Larivière play in Emma’s story, this epitome of medical science? It is true that he is called late, and it could be true that when he arrives, his knowledge allows him to see at a glance that the fate of the poor woman is already sealed. Nevertheless, it is strange that he does not even examine the victim, does not make the slightest attempt to fight the poison, and after that quick glance, he goes to eat with so much appetite and leaves the town without a care. Although the characters and the narrator assure us of his great talent, his actions do not provide the slightest proof of it, and instead, the reader is left with a sense of mere appearance, false prestige, coldness, and little professional conscience. By using his father as the model for Dr. Lariviere, was Gustave paying him homage or taking revenge? And where it could hurt him the most: his “science.” Because there is another theft that consolidates the hypothesis of this (perhaps unconscious) revenge of Flaubert against his father. Dr. Achille-Cléophas once tried to cure the deformed foot of a girl named Marlin, keeping her in bed for several months with her foot enclosed in an iron brace. His experiment failed. This is undoubtedly the source of the grotesque foot operation that Charles Bovary performs on Hippolyte, who, after being punctured, is subjected to an identical regimen (which ends in gangrene and amputation). Thus, the merits and demerits of Achille-Cléophas nourish at least two doctors in the fictional reality: Larivière and Charles.

Flaubert’s father, often called upon for consultations by his former students established in Norman villages, used to take young Gustave on those professional trips. These memories, which Gustave preserved very vividly, form the basis of the continuous journeys of the public health agent through the countryside to attend to his patients.

Not only do the good memories that nostalgia turns into wounds support a fiction; it is primarily the sores that still fester in the spirit, the demons that spur and enliven the imagination of a writer. Is a tortuously prolonged Oedipus complex, as Sartre believes, the explanation for Gustave’s difficult relationship with his father and the remote cause of his illness? Until the crisis of Pont-l’Évéque, Dr. Achille-Cléophas constitutes the most serious obstacle Gustave encounters to embrace what he is truly interested in: literature, and the practice of which he conceives solely as an exclusive commitment. There is no doubt that it is the father who advises (which, for a docile son, is no different from an order) the study of law. Those two years at the Sorbonne (1842 and 1843) were a very harsh experience for Gustave, and his letters from that period are the main support for the thesis that he “chose” his illness to free himself from the fate of becoming a lawyer. The nightmares caused by the Codes still haunt his letters to Ernest Chevalier: “Sacré nom de Dieu de merde de nom d’une pipe de vingt-cinq mille putains du tonnerre de Dieu, sacre nom… que le diable étrangle la jurisprudence et ceux qui l’ont inventée!… Axiome sur l’étude et le métier d’avocat; l’étude en est embétante et le métier ignoble” (May 21, 1842); “Le Droit me tue, m’abrutit, me disloque, il m’est impossible d’y travailler. Quand je suis resté trois heures le nez sur le Code, pendant lesquelles je n’y ai rien compris, il m’est impossible d’aller au delá: je me suiciderais…” (June 25, 1842); “Le Droit me met dans un état de castration morale étrange à concevoir” (August 1, 1842). One could add dozens of similar quotes. His work will be full of people practicing this “ignoble profession,” and that will be his revenge for the two years of torment: lawyers, notaries, and judges will always represent the sordid, the routine, the base, in the fictional reality. In Madame Bovary, several people whose activity is related to law are present, and it is certain that to shape Maître Guillaumin and Léon Dupuis, Flaubert used plenty of his memories from the Sorbonne. In Léon, a timid and sentimental student who ends up becoming a prosperous and morally contemptible notary in Yvetot, Flaubert put something of himself and much of a childhood friend—precisely the recipient of those outbursts against the legal profession—Ernest Chevalier. He had been an enthusiast of literature, a schoolboy who carried a concealed dagger like the heroes of romantic novels, but later became a model of a successful bourgeois: he built a career in the courts as a prosecutor and even became a deputy. Léon Dupuis resembles Flaubert not only because of Flaubert’s years as a Law student in Paris but also because, in his relations with Emma (in which a reproduction of an Oedipal situation is guessed), he manifests a constant sentiment of Flaubert: loving older women (his three lovers were several years older than him: Eulalie Foucaud, Elisa Schlésinger, and Louise Colet).

Weeks before turning two in his novel, Flaubert spent a vacation in Trouville and stayed at a pharmacist’s house. From a description he gave to Bouilhet of the atmosphere and people in that home, it can be deduced that much of what he saw and heard there inspired the setting and the character of Homais: “Admire here one of these providential politenesses that make one believe. Whom am I staying with? With a pharmacist! But whose student is he? Dupré! He makes, like him, a lot of seltzer water. ‘I am the only one in Trouville who makes seltzer water!’ Indeed, from eight o’clock in the morning, I am often awakened by the noise of corks popping unexpectedly. Pif! Paf! The kitchen is also the laboratory. A monstrous still bends among the saucepans. The frightening length of its copper fumes, and often the pot can’t be put on the fire due to pharmaceutical preparations. To go into the yard, you have to step over baskets full of bottles. A pump spits water that wets your legs. The two boys rinse jars. A parrot repeats from morning till night: ‘Did you have a good breakfast, Jacko?’ And finally, a boy of about ten, the son of the house, the hope of the pharmacy, practices feats by lifting weights with his teeth.” (Letter of August 23, 1853)

The reader of Madame Bovary recognizes in this description the pharmacy (which is also the home) of Homais: the industrious rhythm, to which the whole family contributes, and, above all, the confusion between the domestic and the professional. When reading that in Trouville’s kitchen, remedies take the place of pots, one inevitably recalls the image of the Homais family preparing jam in the pharmacy, which surprises Emma on the day she is informed of her father’s death. The disorder, that kind of inevitable gaiety, those children cleaning vials that could be Atala and Napoleón, and the bourgeois vanity of the real pharmacist (“I am the only one in Trouville who makes seltzer water,” are things that Homais would have said with the same words), as well as that “hope of the pharmacy,” which is a magnified anticipation of Justin, indicate that those vacations were very useful. In a previous season also spent in Trouville, Flaubert had had as a neighbor at a banquet a priest who suddenly began to talk very excitedly about the champagne-filled life and actresses that students led in Paris. This is the source, acknowledged by Flaubert, of the mythical idea about the Parisian life of university students that Homais makes public when Léon leaves Yonville, and in which Gustave gathered, as he told Louise, “all the nonsense that is said in the province about Paris.”

But when Flaubert was staying at the pharmacy in Trouville, Homais already existed in his mind with clear features (the letter to Bouilhet refers to a coincidence). The character had come from a long time ago. Perhaps from his childhood when Gustave and his friends from the Rouen lyceum took turns embodying that puppet they had named “Le Garçon”? The Goncourt brothers believed that Le Garçon was the prototype of Homais, and although many deny it (no character has excited exegetes as much as the pharmacist from Yonville: they have searched all of France for his model), I think they are not entirely wrong. 33

Le Garçon was an articulated doll whose strident and frenzied laughter shattered restraint, reason, and good manners, and brought about bloody farce, absurdity, dislocation, and anarchy. It is evident that this aspect of Le Garçon is not reflected at all in the pharmacist with the Greek cap, who never leaves the world of formality and intellectual, moral, and social conventions. But Le Garçon was also a traveling ventriloquist of clichés and fashions. For example, when passing by Rouen Cathedral, he marveled at the beauties “that one should marvel at” and said about the Gothic “what one should say.” At the same time, like a fierce Mephistopheles materializing to prove that life is grotesque and deceitful, Le Garçon was the spokesperson of the “rhetorical level” of his time: he embodied the sayings, the stock phrases, the formulas that express the institutionalized and inert thinking of society. There is no doubt that this is also a central aspect of the formidable personality of Homais: to store and grant satisfied and pompous citizenship to the commonplace, to be an epiphenomenon of the established. On the other hand, during his school years—the time of Le Garçon—Flaubert wrote a “physiology” in the manner of Balzac, about a social type, the “Commis” (clerk), and this satire of his fifteen years is to Homais what “La Mazza” is to Emma: the rudiment. 34

The presumed models for Homais are numerous. For a time, it was taken for granted that he was a caricature version of the pharmacist of Ry in Delphine Delamare’s time, a man named Jouanne, whose pharmacy, according to Raoul Brunon, resembled the one described by Flaubert. This thesis was challenged with the argument that Jouanne, unlike Homais, had been a determined cleric (as if Flaubert couldn’t have taken over his pharmacy while leaving his ideas intact). René Dumesnil, following this lead, found a rabidly anticlerical pharmacist in Forges-les-Eaux, where Flaubert had spent a few months in 1848. During the 1848 revolution, this pharmacist “sacrificed his silverware on the altar of the Fatherland,” and Flaubert, attracted by the picturesque character, went to observe him. Gérard Gailly, on the other hand, produced another model, focusing more on the traces of stupid pomposity. He demonstrated that in the small village of Veules, Flaubert had met a pharmacist who bore the programmatic name Esprit Bellemère, who, as the mayor of the place, once received Victor Hugo with a phrase that indeed would not have been out of place in Homais' mouth: “Vous, Monsieur Victor Hugo, si digne de ce nom!” It has also been said that the model was literary. Enid Starkie thinks that Joseph Prudhomme, the famous character created by Henri Monnier who symbolized comic pedantry and clichés for half a century, was the precursor of Homais. 35 Flaubert mentioned Joseph Prudhomme many times, especially when thundering against the bourgeoisie, and there are undoubtedly similarities between the garrulous figure of Yonville and the pretentious Parisian. However, while Monnier’s play “Grandeur et décadence de Joseph Prudhomme” premiered in 1853 (Flaubert does not mention it during those years), the “Mémoires de Joseph Prudhomme” were published only after “Madame Bovary” (1857). Homais, like other characters, is the result of many grafts; Flaubert could have taken the type from villages or found it in the streets of Rouen, excellent suppliers of materials for his book. In a letter to Bouilhet, Flaubert, who has just made a study trip to Rouen, tells him that, as the novel will be a portrayal of that city, it is essential that “cheminots,” turban-shaped buns typical of the region, enter the fictional reality, and they will do so through Homais: they will be his “only” human weakness (May 24, 1855). Ultimately, they will become Madame Homais' weakness too, as her husband occasionally buys “cheminots.”

On the other hand, the supposed models for the antipode and complement of Homais, Abbot Bournisien, are scarce. It was said that he had been modeled after an Abbot Lafortune from Ry, but this hypothesis was shattered when it was demonstrated that there had never been a priest with that name in the entire diocese. It is a fact that the name Bournisien, like that of other characters—the tax collector Binet and the gravedigger Lestiboudois—were chosen with a veristic intention: they are typically Norman and popular. Just like Homais and Emma, Bournisien was already nesting in Flaubert’s mind long before he started writing the novel. Perhaps inspired by his early anticlericalism—which never waned and explained his constant admiration for Voltaire—the figure of the ignorant and down-to-earth priest, devoid of all spirituality, appears in his adolescent writings. In a story at the age of 16, “Agonies, pensées sceptiques,” the narrator, a nihilist, goes to a priest in a moment of despair seeking advice, but the clergyman is more interested in the potatoes boiling in the adjoining kitchen than in listening to him. This pedestrian priest and the cited scene obviously prefigure Father Bournisien when Emma has a crisis of religiosity, and he is unable to understand what she is saying, as he transforms everything he hears into something banal and is more attentive to the catechism children than to his visitor.

At the age of fifteen, Gustave attended a ball hosted by a wealthy landowner, the Marquis de Pomereu, at his castle in Héron, and he used this experience in a youthful story, “Quidquid voleris.” He had a romantic idea of the party and remembered it during his journey through the East: “Je ne m’étais pas couché et le matin j’avais été me promener en barque sur Fétang, tout seul, dans mon habit de collège. Les cygnes me regardaient passer et les feuilles des arbustes retombaient dans l’eau” (Letter to Louis Bouilhet, March 13, 1850). Twenty-six months later, immersed in “Madame Bovary,” he reaches the ball at La Vaubyessard: “Il faut que je mette mon héroïne dans un bal. Il y a si longtemps que je n’en ai vu que ça me demande de grands efforts d’imagination. Et puis c’est si commun, c’est tellement dit partout! Ce serait une merveille que d’éviter le vulgaire, et je veux l’éviter pourtant” (Letter to Louise, May 2, 1852). There is no doubt that the main example of the ball that changes Emma’s life—when she comes into contact with opulence and is forever “inquiétée” by it—was that adolescent party that Gustave remembered, a languid boat ride among swans and withered leaves. The morning after the ball, Emma also takes a solitary walk, examining her life, through the gardens of La Vaubyessard.

As in this case, it is possible to trace in Flaubert’s life the seed of other episodes in the novel. It is said that Madame Flaubert used to lull Gustave in the cradle with the picaresque song that the Blind Man hums when Emma is dying, and at the same time, it is proven that Flaubert read that song in Restif de la Bretonne’s works. A researcher has discovered that Emma’s lapdog, Djali, has the same name as Esmeralda’s goat in “Notre-Dame de Paris,” a novel that had enchanted Flaubert and his schoolmates. 36 The episode of the carriage, in which Emma surrenders to Léon, is possibly based on Flaubert’s own love affair with Louise Colet. Gustave told the Goncourt brothers in 1862 that the Muse had “begun” to surrender to him one night while he was escorting her home in a carriage, and the memoirists recorded his confession with Flaubert’s crude words: “La baisade fut ébauchée dans une reconduite en fiacre” (Letter of December 6, 1862). However, it is also known that while Flaubert was writing “Madame Bovary,” Louise had almost been violated in a carriage by the lecherous and veteran Alfred de Musset: the matter was discussed by the lovers and perhaps exploited by Gustave when narrating the episode. He may have also used, for the same purpose, a mediocre semi-erotic novel by the knight Andrea de Nerciat, a military man and pornographer of the 18th century, who, in “Felicia ou mes fredaines” (1775), devotes an entire chapter to describing the love affair of a couple in a carriage crossing Paris.

Flaubert was born and grew up as a child and adolescent in a hospital; his father and brother were doctors. His memory was filled with images of patients, physical suffering, blood, and death. There is a famous letter of his where he tells Louise Colet that he and his sister Caroline used to spy on the corpses in the Morgue from the garden of the Hôtel-Dieu, on which flies buzzed; sometimes, Dr. Flaubert caught them peeping during a dissection and ordered them to leave. When “Madame Bovary” appeared, Sainte-Beuve was the first to associate Flaubert’s family background with the “scientific” style and the descriptive minuteness—the autopsies—of the book: “Fils et frère de médecins distingués, M. Gustave Flaubert tient la plume comme d’autres le scalpel. Anatomistes et physiologistes, je vous retrouve partout!” It is an intelligent observation—in an otherwise mediocre chronicle—and all critics have adopted it. Undoubtedly, the atmosphere of the Hôtel-Dieu, the early familiarity with the decay of the body, contributed to giving a certain appearance to the fictional reality. In it, illness and medicine play a prominent role: there is Hippolyte’s deformed foot, the operation, the corrective treatment, the gangrene, the amputation; there are Charles’s less audacious and more successful interventions: curing “père” Rouault, his future father-in-law, and bleeding the farmer for Rodolphe; there is the festering Blind Man and the remedies suggested by Homais, who, besides being a pharmacist, is also a secret physician and deals with prescriptions and organic ailments; Emma’s poisoning is the subject of scientific excitement—the arrival of the doctors Canivet and Lariviére in Yonville—and a detailed description of agony and death. Illness, cures, operations are always described with precision: we saw how, in at least two cases, Flaubert consulted doctors so as not to make mistakes. But not only at this anecdotal level does the family background influence “Madame Bovary,” but also, as Sainte-Beuve supposes, in the author’s worldview and style. The objectivity that Flaubert aspired to, that impersonality achieved through a certain technique, amounts to considering the novel as a scientific product, the result of a combinatory operation of ingredients that, chosen and dosed according to the creator’s precise intelligence, attain the independent life of a positive truth. Flaubert’s supposed coldness in narrating the fortunes and misfortunes of the characters was the attitude with which Achille-Cléophas examined, prescribed, amputated, cured, or declared his patients lost. But at the same time, among the ideas and suggestions gathered in the family background, there are also those that emerged in a broader circle, the revolution that took place in philosophy and science in France during those years. Flaubert wrote “Madame Bovary” at the same time that Auguste Comte proclaimed that the “scientific” attitude is the only valid one to understand man and thought, in books convinced that society explains the individual and not vice versa, as the “metaphysicians” believed, and that Claude Bernard initiated lectures and investigations that would culminate in the dogma of experimentation as the only path to discovering truth. The objectivity, social determinism, rejection of metaphysics and intuition, faith in intelligence and reasoning—all of these elements that contribute to the elaboration of “Madame Bovary”—are notions that permeate Flaubert’s entire generation, as they began to impose themselves in France during his youth and early maturity.

If the doctors and patients of his childhood served for his novel, isn’t it logical to suppose that his own illness also reverberated in Madame Bovary? Sartre believes that the physical disorders that Emma’s romantic disappointment with Rodolphe brings are a literal reproduction of Flaubert’s illness. Sartre argues that the “maladie de nerfs” was a psychosomatic response or solution to the terrible crises that plagued Gustave’s childhood and youth, and, after quoting this autobiographical phrase about the attacks: “La souffrance ne reste pas dans la boite crânienne: elle se glise dans les membres et, reprise en charge par le corps, devient convulsionnaire”, he makes this suggestive comparison: “Flaubert n’a cessé de considérer sa névrose comme le fait le plus hautement significatif de sa vie: cette ‘mort et transfiguration’ loin d’y voir un accident, il ne la distingue pas de sa propre personne: c’est lui, as he has become what he was; he never thought, as Dumesnil believes, that he was adapting or would adapt to his illness but, on the contrary, that his illness was, in itself, adaptation: in short, he considered it a response, a solution. The proof is that his Bovary, later on, will explicitly make a somatization-response: abandoned by Rodolphe, she falls into illness, a terrible bout of fever seems to put her days in danger; and then, after a few weeks, she finds herself cured of both the fever and love at once. Or if you prefer, love has become fever to liquidate itself through its physical disorders”.37 Thus, Sartre finds in Madame Bovary arguments for his hypothesis of the neurosis chosen by Flaubert as a solution to his problems. His case is not the only one. Two doctors, proponents of the epilepsy theory, claim that the type of hallucinations produced by this disease has marked the style of Madame Bovary. According to doctors Galeran and Alen, one of the symptoms of epilepsy that has its focus in the temporo-occipital lobe are multicolored visions, and this explains, in their view, Flaubert’s obsession in the novel with adjectives that describe color, with visual images.38 It is true that in Madame Bovary the pictorial is as important as the musical, but what weakens this assertion is that many other authors of the romantic and post-romantic era had a similar propensity towards the plastic —Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire— without epilepsy being adduced as a reason in their case. But there is no doubt that the nervous attacks were cannibalized by fictional reality. The similarity of certain hallucinations suffered by him during his crises and one suffered by Emma is striking. On June 7, 1844, Gustave tells Ernest Chevalier about the attacks of those days: “Il ne se passe pas de jour sans que je ne voie, de temps à autre, passer devant mes yeux comme des paquets de cheveux ou de feux du Bengale”. Upon leaving the Huchette castle, after being humiliated, Emma, alone at night, has a hallucination in which she sees the same balls of fire: “Il lui sembla à coup que des globules couleur de feu éclataient dans l’air comme des bailes fulminantes en s’aplatissant, et tournaient, pour aller se fondre sur la neige, entre les branches des arbres”.

20. What are the main literary sources of Madame Bovary?

If the living models (true or false) are countless, something similar happens with the literary ones. Also in this order it would be chimeric to try to exhaust the proven or probable filiations. I will limit myself to pointing out a few examples. A parallel that all commentators, from Thibaudet to Lukacs, have insisted on is that of Emma Bovary and Don Quixote. The man from La Mancha was maladjusted to life because of his imagination and certain readings, and, like the Norman girl, his tragedy consisted in wanting to insert his dreams into reality. The abundant references to Cervantes in the Correspondance indicate that the story of Don Quixote dazzled Gustave as a child, when Uncle Mignon told it to him, and that every time he reread it as an adult it had the same effect on him. The affinities between the two novels are not limited to the condition of the protagonists (whose drama does not consist, as has been said, in being unable to perceive reality accurately, in confusing their desires with objective life, but in trying to realize these desires: therein lies their madness and their greatness); in both works there is the admirable symbiosis that Flaubert saw in Don Quixote: “Ce qu’il y a de prodigieux dans Don Quichotte c’est l’absence d’art et cette perpétuelle fusion de l’illusion et de la realité qui en fait un livre si comique et si poétique”.39 In Madame Bovary the same mix of illusion and reality occurs: what happens objectively is as important as what only happens in Emma’s imagination, just as in the story of Alonso Quijano.

Another obligatory approach taken by critics when discussing Madame Bovary is Balzac. Gustave had mixed feelings towards the creator of La Comédie Humaine. He learned about Balzac’s death during a trip to the East, and on November 14, 1850, he wrote some heartfelt words to Louis Bouilhet: “Why did Balzac’s death deeply affect me? When a man one admires dies, one is always sad. We hoped to get to know him later and be loved by him. Yes, he was a strong man who had keenly understood his time.” Other times he was less understanding and referred to him as a second-rate genius. The truth is that, on one hand, he admired the extraordinary scope of Balzac’s world, that boiling imagination capable of giving life to crowds and smoothly evolving characters from one fiction to another. On the other hand, he did not forgive his perfectionism, his mania for detail, and his “artistic” conception of writing. He couldn’t overlook the ease with which Balzac wrote, and his repetitions, grammatical errors, and cacophonies made him think that Balzac lacked style (though the truth was that he had a style different from his own). Balzac is one of the authors Flaubert read during those five years. He referred to him many times. One of these allusions sums up his ambivalent attitude: “What a man Balzac would have been if he knew how to write! But that was the only thing he lacked. An artist, after all, wouldn’t have done so much; he wouldn’t have had such scope” (Letter to Louise, December 17, 1852). There is some truth in this. If Balzac had the Flaubertian conception of style, he would never have written everything he wrote. But the opposite is also true: with Balzac’s stylistic and structural conceptions of the novel, Madame Bovary would not have been born. Therefore, the parallels that can be drawn are primarily thematic in nature. For example, Jean Pommier has shown that Balzac’s “provincial novel” La Muse du département develops the theme of the ill-married woman in a similar way to Madame Bovary: like Emma, Balzac’s heroine is deadly bored in a remote village and dreams of a superior life. However, unlike Madame Bovary, she manages to leave the province and settle in Paris with her lover. 40 More interesting is a connection discovered by Claudine Gothot-Mersch, where she argues that the different phases of Emma and Charles’s married life faithfully match Balzac’s description in Physiologie du mariage (a book Flaubert praised in 1839) of the successive stages of marital failure. 41 But the differences prevail far above the similarities. Ernst Robert Curtius saw clearly what separates the two narrators: 42 Balzac’s optimism and Flaubert’s pessimism pervade their respective novelistic worlds. In the former, man still manages to make his imagination come true and renew life. In the latter, imagination is a crime that reality punishes, shattering those who try to live it. Curtius says, “In Flaubert, the desire to live conflicts with the actualization of living, and the conflict ends in an incurable division. In Balzac, we find exactly the opposite: boundless fantasy that manages to penetrate the entire reality and assimilate it.” It is also true that Balzac finds life logical and Flaubert finds it absurd, but unlike Curtius—a liberal optimist who can’t hide his antipathy for the party-pooper that Flaubert is—I don’t believe this gives greater contemporary relevance to Balzac. Curtius concludes his comparison: “Balzac feels a burning interest in life and infects us with his fire; Flaubert, with his nausea.” That’s right, and that is precisely the reason why Flaubert is the first modern novelist.

As critics soon discovered that Madame Bovary was the novel of “disenchanted romanticism,” they hastened to search for its romantic sources. Almost everyone highlighted Chateaubriand. Dumesnil hears a clear echo of Atala in the landscape descriptions of Madame Bovary, but to me, this analogy seems more like an antagonism. 43 The romantic landscape is a projection of the character’s feelings and emotions, a reality that is entirely subjectivized, and this is true in Chateaubriand more than in anyone else. In Flaubert, it happens the other way around, and that was one of the great innovations of Madame Bovary: in it, the natural order infects the human; thoughts and passion are objectively described. In Chateaubriand, trees and lakes are humanized; in Flaubert, joy and nostalgia become things. This absolute inversion in the representation of landscape and man is, rather, what links the two writers: their respective originality lies in their differences.

What further evidence is there that Flaubert constructed Madame Bovary with his life, that of his family, and his society, than the fact that its quarry was the reality of his time? And yet, we face the quotations where Flaubert acknowledged drawing from his experiences, numerous quotes in which, with equal conviction, he denies any personal connection in Madame Bovary and claims that it is a completely “invented” story. On December 18, 1853, he writes to Louise: “… in imagining, one reproduces generality, while by attaching oneself to a true fact, only something contingent, relative, and restricted comes out of your work.” The novel he writes will be the product of pure imagination, not contaminated at all by his experiences, and there will be nothing “true” in it. He emphatically assured Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, “Madame Bovary has nothing true. It is a story completely invented; I have not put anything of my feelings or my existence into it. The illusion (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the impersonality of the work. It is one of my principles not to put oneself into one’s work. The artist must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must feel him everywhere, but not see him.” 44

The statement that Madame Bovary has nothing of him is as true as the one that he only wrote true things. Experience is a starting point (the gestation process); the destination (the completed work) consists of the transformation of that material. The sum of experiences that constitute the basis of fiction is not the fiction itself; the fiction always differs from its materials because it is, above all, a writing and an arrangement, and in the verbal mention and technical distribution, those ingredients inevitably become something else. This is what we should see now, what is truly important: how the novel emancipated itself from its sources, how the fictional reality contradicted the real reality that inspired it.

Chapter 3: The Added Element

I. ALLIANCES AND SUBSTITUTIONS

On August 26, 1853, Flaubert writes to Louise: “I am now devoured by a need for metamorphoses. I would like to write everything I see, not as it is, but transfigured. The exact narration of the most magnificent real fact would be impossible for me. I would need to embroider it even more.” The quote summarizes the two movements of novelistic creation, the relationship between fiction and reality: (1) the starting point is the real reality (“everything I see”), life in its broadest sense (what I see can be what I hear, read, dream); (2) but this material is never narrated “exactly,” it is always “transfigured,” “embroidered.” The novelist adds something to the reality that he has turned into work material, and that added element is the originality of his work, what gives autonomy to the fictional reality, what distinguishes it from the real.45

One of the cardinal characteristics of the world of Madame Bovary is materiality, the extraordinary importance that physical reality, the inert, has in it. The root of this fact is, according to some critics, in the influence that Flaubert’s scientific and incredulous father, won over by recent ideas of experimentation and positive philosophy, and his childhood and adolescence at Hôtel-Dieu, among patients and corpses, must have had on him. In any case, despite his contempt for materialist philosophers, Flaubert often maintained that for him, the physical prevailed over “the moral”: “I declare that for me, the physical prevails over the moral. There is no disillusion that hurts like a decayed tooth, no foolish remark that annoys me as much as a creaking door, and that’s why a phrase of the best intention misses its effect as soon as it contains an assonance or a grammatical wrinkle” (Letter to Louise, February 19, 1854). Each novelist recreates the world in his image and likeness, corrects reality based on his demons: that subjective materialism of Flaubert is in the fictional reality an objective fact.

The instrument through which the transfiguration takes place is style. Indeed, in Madame Bovary there is a kind of descriptive frenzy, avid words pour over everything and appropriate everything to expose it to the reader with its complexities, reliefs, and details. Universal, cannibalistic, it overflows barriers and tirelessly describes objects, people, landscapes, feelings, actions, thoughts, and even other words, as in the chapter of the Opera of Rouen where the narrator’s words describe —which is different from reproducing— the words of the actors who are performing Lucie de Lammermoor. This descriptive frenzy is not an end in itself but a procedure used by the narrator to undo reality and recreate it differently. The verbal substance that seizes countless real data does something more insidious than stating the properties of men and things; its intention is rather to equalize, imposing on them properties that belong to the word itself: formal properties. Thus, the materiality of the fictional world is the consequence of an adulteration, perpetrated by the word, of those objects, people, feelings, actions, thoughts, and even words. In the fictional reality, the boundaries that separate them fall; the descriptive system of the novel, applied in a tendentious way to men and things, produces that marvelous inversion whereby, in Emma Bovary’s world, unlike that of the reader, emotions and ideas give the impression of having body, color, flavor, and objects possess a mysterious intimacy, a spirit. While no great novel can be called, without a certain contradiction, realistic—because, either they all are, as they all feed on real data, or none of them is, since even the most mediocre ones perform a minimum transfiguration of their material to turn it into fiction—it is surprising that for more than a century, Madame Bovary, a novel where spirit becomes matter and matter becomes spirit, has been considered an example of realism, understood in the sense of mere literary duplication of the real.

(a) HUMANIZED THINGS

Why do certain objects of fictional reality survive in memory as clear and suggestive as true flesh-and-blood characters? Because they have been torn from the dead world of the inert and elevated to a higher dignity; endowed with unsuspected qualities, such as a hidden psychology, an ability to communicate messages and evoke emotions that make them, despite their motionless, stony, blind, and mute bodies, beings imbued with profound animation, with secret life. From the first pages of the novel, one of these humanized objects, Charles Bovary’s cap, establishes, thanks to a memorable description, a distinctive characteristic of fictional reality: the aptitude of certain things to impose themselves, by their striking appearance, richness of nuances, meaningful power, and symbolism, as equally complex, mysterious, durable, and sensitive entities as their owners: “It was one of those composite caps where you can find elements of a bearskin bonnet, a Cossack hat, a round hat, an otter cap, and a cotton nightcap, one of those poor things whose mute ugliness has depths of expression like the face of an imbecile. Ovoid and swollen with whalebones, it began with three circular rolls; then diamonds of velvet and rabbit fur alternated, separated by a red strip; next came a kind of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon, covered with elaborate soutache embroidery, from which hung, at the end of a too thin cord, a little cross of gold threads, like a tassel. It was new; the visor shone.” That is what Flaubert’s famous coldness condemned by the critics when the book appeared consisted of. The novel upset the traditional customs of narrative that demanded different attitudes from the narrator depending on whether he described things or human beings. In Madame Bovary, the narrator pays the same meticulous and respectful attention to things as was reserved for men, and entrusts them with functions that seemed prerogatives of the character, unthinkable in objects whose sole obligation until then was to constitute a backdrop, a background, a scenography within which that absolute monarch, lord of action, intelligence, and feeling: man, monopolized all the adventures of the soul and body. In Madame Bovary, through description, certain things, like Charles' cap, are more loquacious and momentous than their owners, and reveal to us, better than their words and actions, the personality of the master: their social status, economy, customs, aspirations, imagination, artistic sense, beliefs. The cap is humanized not only because it is capable of conveying a considerable amount of information, because it speaks, but also because, due to certain adjectives ("poor thing," “mute ugliness”) and comparisons (“depths of expression like the face of an imbecile”), it has been loaded with a particular idiosyncrasy, is susceptible to suffer human misfortunes and, for that reason, just like a human being, deserves compassion, affection, solidarity. The description of the cap is meticulous, scientific, objective, but not cold: there is an underlying tenderness in that desire to specify its hybrid nature, a discreet love in the perfection with which it is recreated by the word. That object, inconspicuous in real reality, prodigiously transfigured by language, is the demonstration of something that Flaubert discovered at the age of 24 and hastened to share with his friend Le Poittevin: "To make something interesting, you only need to look at it for a long time."46

But the object, in Madame Bovary, not only exhibits individual human characteristics; at certain moments, it replaces man as a social being whose nature can only be determined in a situation, according to the place he occupies and the functions he performs within a community of peers. The objects then constitute a parallel society: they reflect classes and interests, levels of fortune, the degree of refinement of groups and families. In one of the craters of the book, Emma’s wedding, the narrator, who is describing the heterogeneous composition of the guests, suddenly abandons the men and women who arrive at Bertaux Farm to concentrate on the clothes, a rich and diverse social collectivity, structured according to firm hierarchies that reproduce those of human society: “According to their different social positions, they wore frock coats, tailcoats, waistcoats, frock-coats: —fine suits, surrounded by all the consideration of a family, and only taken out of the cupboard for solemn occasions; frock coats with long tails floating in the wind, with a cylindrical collar, and wide pockets like sacks; frock-coats made of thick cloth, which usually accompanied a cap surrounded with copper on its visor; very short frock-coats, with two buttons close together on the back, and whose tails seemed to have been cut out of a single block, with a carpenter’s ax. Some of them (but those, of course, had to dine at the lower end of the table) were wearing ceremonial smocks, which is to say, with the collar turned down on their shoulders, the back gathered in small pleats, and the waist tied very low with a sewn belt.” Men contaminate things, and things contaminate men; the boundaries between the inert and the animated vanish, and within that brotherhood between objects and owners, the narrator chooses some to describe others. In this way, he not only alters real reality, where such confusion is impossible, but at the same time, he accomplishes the design of the entire novel: totalization, the desire to construct a reality as vast as the real one. By describing men as objects and objects as men, the narrator unites into one two orders of independent reality that, in a way, are enemies. As in the case of the dresses, there is also a shift from owners to things with the letters that Rodolphe received throughout his life as a seducer: “Thus, strolling among his memories, he examined the handwriting and style of the letters, as varied as their spellings. They were tender or jovial, facetious, melancholic; there were some that asked for love, and others that asked for money.”

The narrator’s egalitarian attitude towards men and things reaches its peak in the episode of the fiacre, when Emma gives herself for the first time to Léon in a carriage that, with the curtains drawn, tirelessly traverses the streets of Rouen. Here, the confusion of orders is extraordinarily useful. This substitution of the couple for the fiacre in the narrator’s attention, who limits himself, stubborn and obsessive, to describing the erratic comings and goings of the carriage through the streets, squares, and intersections of the city, without taking a glance at what is happening inside, has the virtue of transforming that absence—the action replaced by its setting in the description—into a fiery presence: what happens inside the carriage is enriched with the garments that the reader’s activated imagination deposits in the hidden interior of the carriage. The displacement of the couple by the object is plausible, it does not give the impression of artifice, because it occurs within a context in which we have been accustomed to similar substitutions. The exchange of properties is very visible in this episode. From the beginning, the carriage is described as a being with its own will and mobility: “And the heavy machine set off.” Throughout the three pages, one gets the impression that it is the fiacre, not the coachman, who takes the initiatives: “The carriage set off… left the gates… trotted gently… went along the river… it leaped forward… it wandered.” The coachman, sweating, anxiously looks at the bars, despairs of boredom and incomprehension; he seems to be the one taken, not the one who takes, while the carriage appears, with all its “heaviness,” diligent and spirited. In the massive armament, one ends up perceiving a spark of intelligence, one that never emerges in the poor coachman, incapable of deciphering the caprice of his customers; it seems that the fiacre, on the other hand, understands and, accommodating, mischievous, lends a hand to the lovers.

Charles' loquacious cap, the social clothes of the wedding guests, the erotic fiacre: a minimal sample of the varied multitude of objects that, in fictional reality, through description, become imbued with unprecedented potentialities, alternate with men on an equal footing, or relegate them to the background as protagonists of an episode. Letters, stamps, clothes, furniture, decorations, books, carriages, doorknobs, houses, statues, stones, villages, cities: sometimes mentioned in passing, sometimes meticulously and extensively detailed, their presence in fictional reality is never negligible or casual and always demands from the reader a minimum of consideration, if not appreciation, because the word has imposed on those objects, along with an aesthetic value, a kind of human dignity.

(b) OBJECTIFIED MEN

This elevation of the object to the human has not been possible without a simultaneous operation of lowering man to the object: for them to fraternize, they had to travel an equitable distance. While in Madame Bovary things spiritualize and animate, the materiality of men is accentuated and, at many moments, the description, by adhering to their external features, makes them a physical form, a still and silent presence, things. But mere carnal appearance and concealment of intimacy are not enough; the objectification mainly results from a complementary procedure, which consists of dismembering the figure and describing only one or some of its parts omitting the others: these loose pieces—usually faces, heads, but also hands, trunks—, detached from human architecture by the narrator’s descriptive surgery and displayed as units of dominant or exclusive physical value, cease to live, become inanimate beings, border on the inert. The guests at Emma’s wedding, for example, are this gallery of ears and epidermises: «Tout le monde était tondu à neuf, les oreilles s’écartaient des têtes, on était rasé de près; quelques-uns même qui s’étaient levés des avant l’aube, n’ayant pas vu clair à se faire la barbe, avaient des balafres en diagonale sous le nez, ou, le long des mâchoires, des pelures d’épiderme larges comme des écus de trois francs, et qu’avait enflammées le grand air pendant la route, ce qui marbrait un peu de plaques roses toutes ces grosses faces blanches épanouies». Severed from trunks and limbs, these faces have also lost another attribute: individuality, they are serial and interchangeable like consumer goods. This is another resource that the narrator uses to make the men of the fictitious reality appear like things: to describe them as sets in which, by disappearing the particular and privative and highlighting only the general and shared, they adopt a uniform and identical character, an indistinguishable nature, which is characteristic of the products of the industry, mechanical reproduction of an archetypal matrix. This is why the objectification of the human is especially visible in episodes where collectives are described: the wedding, the Vaubyessard ball, the agricultural elections, the Rouen Opera show, Emma’s funeral. On these occasions, through the astute and egalitarian word with which the narrator describes, the stiff and the alive approach until they almost confuse. In the ball scene, objects and mutilated members of their owners come together in a round in which fans and faces, hands and gloves, flowers and hair parade as different forms of an indivisible substance: «Sur la ligne des femmes assises, les éventails peints s’agitaient, les bouquets cachaient à demi le sourire des visages, et les flacons à bouchon d’or tournaient dans des mains entrouvertes dont les gants blancs marquaient la forme des ongles et serraient la chair au poignet. Les garnitures de dentelles, les broches de diamants, les bracelets a médaillon frissonnaient aux corsages, scintillaient aux poitrines, bruissaient sur les bras nus. Les chevelures, bien collées sur les fronts et tordues à la nuque, avaient, en couronnes, en grappes ou en rameaux, des myosotis, du jasmin, des fleurs de grenadier, des épis ou des bluets. Pacifiques a leurs places, des mères à figure renfrognée portaient des turbans rouges». Both orders exchange properties: while the fans wave, the flower bouquets hide smiles, the perfume bottles spin in the hands, the gloves mark the shape of the nails, the bracelets quiver, twinkle and rustle —active, dynamic verbs—, hands, chests, wrists, nails, hair remain immobile and passive, letting themselves be done all this by restless and nervous things, under the watchful eyes of those granitic statues, the mothers, whose only truth seems to be wearing red turbans. In a few lines we see here that inversion of the terms of reality that is one of the key constituents of the added element in Madame Bovary.47

While the external landscape becomes animated, the interior of feelings becomes visible, takes consistency. As Léon leaves Yonville, Emma is deeply upset; she confines herself to the memory of the young man, to whom she associates everything that happens and whom she tries to revive with the new experiences she lives. However, this love fades over time until it ceases. All this is expressed in the novel by means of a metaphor, the longest in the book, and undoubtedly one of the longest in literature. The memory of Léon in Emma’s memory is compared to a bonfire that blazes on the steppe, and the permanence of that memory, the eagerness with which Emma treasures and revives it, despite which it languishes and dies, is the description of this fire whose flames rekindle new materials, until finally they go out, “soit que la provisión d’elle-même s’épuisât, ou que l’entassement fût trop considerable”. The image (twenty-two lines in the Garnier edition) is so complex and meticulous that, in a way, it constitutes a series of metaphors, an allegory. This material reality—the bonfire that burns, lasts, revives, decreases and ends—whose function should be to explain the other, that spiritual reality of which it is a symbol, ends up rather by absorbing it. From being a reference, the bonfire becomes the referred, the explanation becomes the explained. A typical change of fictitious reality occurs, in which, just as clothes come to life, love literally ignites, crackles, dances in red and yellow and blue flames, devours trunks and dry leaves and, then, turns into grey ashes. Another example of the crystallization of feeling into a visible landscape is the description of Emma’s intimacy, after having given herself to Rodolphe, as a geography of majestic peaks and gorges unfolded under the blue sky: «Elle entrait dans quelque chose de merveilleux où tout serait passion, extase, delire: une immensité bleuâtre l’entourait, les sommets du sentiment étincelaient sous sa pensée, l’existence ordinaire n’apparaisait qu’au loin, tout en bas, dans l’ombre, entre les intervalles de ces haute

(c) MONEY AND LOVE

At a moment in history, the narrator, describing Léon’s feelings for Emma, tells us that the notary’s intern “admired the exaltation of her soul and the lace of her skirt.” This does not speak poorly of the young man; it does not mean that he is incapable of distinguishing between a woman’s soul and her clothes. In the fictional reality, there is no essential difference between these things; the spirit and objects belong to the same category—existence—and there is no reason why they should not awaken similar feelings. Thus, his first wife, Heloise, used to ask Charles Bovary “for some syrup for her health and a little more love.” Men and things are on an equal footing, complementing each other, and the latter are inseparable, for example, from emotional states like enthusiasm or boredom. Regarding love, objects not only adorn the stage of love but the erotic passion, in the case of the protagonist, is inextricably linked to a possessive passion, a desire to have more and more things. In the novel, there is an intimate connection between love and money (symbol of things), and especially in Emma and Léon’s relationship, one cannot speak of one without the other.

At the beginning of her stay in Yonville, Emma falls in love with the young man but does not let it show. This repressed love torments her as much as her unsatisfied ambition for wealth, and the narrator points out that both frustrations merge into the same suffering: “Then, the appetites of the flesh, the desires for money, and the melancholies of passion all merged into the same suffering.” Later on, love and money will blend into the same pleasure for her. Emma’s first trip to Rouen to spend three days with her new lover (Part III, chap. III) also serves to handle with a notary the authorization that will give her the right to decide about Charles’s inheritance. One might think that the latter is just a pretext, something secondary that Emma forgets during those passionate three days, but at the end of the chapter, it is revealed—in a hidden hyperbaton—that, amidst caresses, Emma has discussed the matter of the power with her lover many times, for when she left, Léon, while walking through the streets of Rouen, thought: “But why does she hold on so tightly to this authorization?” This collusion of the erotic and the monetary lasts as long as their love affair, one thing infiltrates the other until it becomes something irreducible. Shortly after, Léon, impatient and in love, goes to Yonville, and the lovers can enjoy some moments alone in the back alley of the Bovarys. The farewell is tender, and Emma promises to find a way to go to Rouen. The narrator adds: “Besides, she was full of hope. Money was coming to her.” And indeed, Emma starts shopping, redecorating her home, spending with enthusiasm: “Thus, she bought for her room a pair of yellow curtains with broad stripes that M. Lheureux had praised for their low price; she dreamed of a carpet…” Love and money support and activate each other. When Emma loves, she needs to surround herself with beautiful objects, embellish the physical world, create around her a setting as sumptuous as her feelings. She is a woman for whom pleasure is not complete unless it materializes: she projects the pleasure of the body onto things, and in turn, things increase and prolong the pleasure of the body. In the following chapter, where Emma and Léon’s passion reaches its climax, the suppressed sexual appetites simultaneously awaken in Madame Bovary extravagant appetites for luxury; she desires, to travel from Yonville to Rouen, “a blue tilbury, harnessed with an English horse, and driven by a groom in top boots.” It is this material greed that will lead to her downfall; as her love affair with Léon grows in audacity and refinement, her debts with the merchant Lheureux increase, who skillfully stimulates and satisfies Emma’s whims until he ruins her.

However, Emma’s desire to possess objects is not only linked to her loves; it is also connected to her disappointments and boredom. It is a more subtle relationship, less emphasized than the previous one, but in certain periods of her life, it is clearly perceived. A hundred years before her flesh-and-blood counterparts, Emma Bovary, in a Norman village, tries to counteract a vital insufficiency by acquiring objects, resorting to industrial products in search of the help that men cannot provide. In Madame Bovary, it points to the alienation that a century later will seize developed societies of men and women (but especially the latter, due to their living conditions): consumerism as a release for anguish, an attempt to fill the void that modern life has installed in the individual’s existence with objects. Emma’s drama is the interval between illusion and reality, the distance between desire and fulfillment. On two occasions, she believes that adultery can provide her with the splendid life her imagination longs for, and in both instances, she is disillusioned. Her ideal of love is destroyed by “the stains of marriage and the disillusionment of adultery.” Even at the time when her love with Léon thrives without shadows, Emma discovers with each trip to Rouen that reality is always below her dreams: “She continually promised herself profound happiness for her next trip; then she confessed that she felt nothing extraordinary. This disappointment quickly faded away under a new hope, and Emma returned to him more inflamed, more avid.” Emma despairs over this sabotage her mind exercises against her happiness. She wonders: “Where does this insufficiency of life, this instant rot of the things she leans on, come from?” The answer is: from her imagination, which always leads her to desire things that are beyond mere objects. This abyss between desire and reality perhaps explains Emma’s possessive inclination, that appetite for objects which, if initially seems like a means—to beautify her surroundings, to distract from the monotony of her days—later becomes an end, a buying for the sake of buying, a spending for the sake of spending. Like modern advertising, Lheureux is the wise orchestrator of this process, directing Emma’s concerns toward his business. In Emma Bovary’s case, that extraordinary phenomenon of the modern world is already announced, whereby, from being servants and instruments of men, things will become their masters and destroyers.

(d) MADAME BOVARY, MAN

But in the fictional reality, not only do things become men and men things. There is another inversion of substances, equally subtle: some women and men swap their sexes. Emma is a fundamentally ambiguous character, in which coexist opposing feelings and appetites - at one point the narrator says of her “one no longer distinguished between her selfishness and charity, or corruption and virtue” - and this, which when the book first appeared could have seemed absurd to critics accustomed to the Manichean distribution of vices and virtues in different characters, seems to us today the best proof of her humanity. But her indeterminacy is not only moral and psychological; it also has deeply to do with her sex. Because, beneath the exquisite femininity of this girl, a determined man is concealed.

Emma’s tragedy is not being free. Slavery appears to her not only as a product of her social class - petty bourgeoisie mediated by certain ways of life and prejudices - and her provincial condition - a minimum world where the possibilities of doing something are scarce - but also, and perhaps above all, as a consequence of being a woman. In fictional reality, being a woman constrains, closes doors, condemns to more mediocre options than those of the man. During the romantic dialogue with Rodolphe, in the context of the agricultural elections, when the seducer talks about that kind of beings to which he belongs, to whom dream and action, pure passions, and furious joys are essential, Emma contemplates him as someone who has been through “extraordinary countries” and responds bitterly, on behalf of her sex: “We don’t even have that distraction, we poor women!” It’s true: in fictional reality not only is adventure forbidden to women; the dream also seems to be a male privilege, for those who seek imaginative escape, for example through novels, like Madame Bovary, are looked down upon, considered “vaporous”. Emma is keenly aware of the inferior status of women in the fictitious society - a typical “phallic chauvinist society”, as the current feminist vocabulary would designate it - and this is evident when she becomes pregnant. She fervently hopes her child will be a boy “and this idea of having a male child was like the hopeful revenge of all her past impotences”. Then, through the elusive free indirect style, the narrator makes the following reflection that unequivocally corresponds to Emma and in which he describes the discriminatory regime that exists for the sexes: “A man, at least, is free; he can explore passions and countries, overcome obstacles, bite the most distant happiness. But a woman is constantly hindered. Inert and flexible at the same time, she has against her the weaknesses of the flesh with the dependencies of the law. Her will, like the veil of her hat held by a cord, flutters in all winds; there is always some desire that leads, some convenience that restrains”. Being a woman - especially if you have fantasy and concerns - turns out to be a real curse in fictional reality: it’s no wonder that when she learns she has given birth to a girl, Emma, frustrated, loses consciousness.

But Emma is too rebellious and active to be content with dreaming a vicarious revenge through a possible male child, of the impotencies to which her sex condemns her. Instinctively, gropingly, she fights this female inferiority in a prescient way, not much different from certain forms chosen a century later by some women’s emancipation fighters: by assuming attitudes and outfits traditionally considered masculine. A tragic feminist - because her fight is individual, more intuitive than logical, contradictory because she seeks what she rejects, and doomed to failure - Emma harbors an intimate desire to be a man. It is more than a mere coincidence, therefore, that during her visits to the Huchette castle, her lover’s residence, she plays at being a man - “she combed her hair with his comb and looked at herself in the shaving mirror” - and, even in a failed act that an analyst would label as characteristic of phallic nostalgia, she usually puts “the stem of a big pipe” of Rodolphe between her teeth. This is not the only occasion when gestures appear in Emma’s life that reveal an unconscious will to be a man. Her biography is full of details that make this attitude a constant from her adolescence to her death. One of them is her attire. Emma usually gives her outfit a masculine touch, wears male garments, which, incidentally, is attractive to the men around her. When Charles first meets her, at the Bertaux farm, he observes that the girl “wore, like a man, between two buttons of her bodice, a tortoiseshell lorgnette”. On the first horseback ride with Rodolphe, that is, the day her liberation from the bonds of marriage begins, Emma is symbolically wearing “a man’s hat”. As her love with Rodolphe progresses and she becomes more daring and reckless, these outward signs of her identification with the masculine begin to multiply: to “shock the world”, says the narrator, Emma walks with a cigarette in her mouth, and one day we see her get down from L’Hirondelle “her waist cinched in a vest, like a man”: that masculine vest is so inconceivable that those who doubted her infidelity “doubted no more”.

Emma’s propensity to break the boundaries of her gender and invade the opposite one is naturally reflected in facts less adjectival than clothes. It is implicit in her dominant character, in the speed with which, as soon as she notices a symptom of weakness in the man, she takes on masculine roles and imposes feminine attitudes on him. In her relationships with Leon, for example, the roles change very quickly and she takes all the initiatives: it is Emma who goes to Rouen to see him and not him to her; it is Emma who asks him to dress in a certain way to please her, who advises him to renew the curtains of the apartment, who orders him or little less to write her verses. As Leon is inhibited and stingy, Emma ends up sharing the costs of the hotel where they love. The passive element is Leon, she is the active one, as the narrator points out: “Il ne discutait pas ses idées; il acceptait tous ses goûts; il devenait sa maîtresse plutôt qu’elle n’était la sienne” (He did not discuss his ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he became her mistress rather than she was his). But precisely because Leon accepts so easily this role reversal, the feminine role that the energy of his lover imposes on him, Emma feels frustrated and despises him for she sees him as a woman; thus, her identification with the male mentality is total. It happens the day when Leon leaves her stranded because he can’t get away from Homais; she then thinks that the notary’s clerk is “incapable d’héroïsme, faible, banal, more soft than a woman, avaricious besides and pusillanimous” 48. Emma is always doomed to frustration: being a woman, because a woman in fictional reality is a being subjected to whom dream and passion are forbidden; being a man, because she can only achieve it by making her lover a null being, incapable of arousing in her admiration and respect for those supposedly virile virtues that she does not find in her husband and that she seeks in vain in adultery. This is one of the insoluble contradictions that make Emma a pathetic character. Heroism, audacity, prodigality, freedom are, apparently, male prerogatives; however, Emma discovers that the men around her — Charles, Leon, Rodolphe — become soft, cowardly, mediocre and slaves as soon as she assumes a “masculine” attitude (the only one that allows her to break the slavery to which those of her sex in fictional reality are condemned). Thus, there is no solution. That horror of having a daughter, so criticized by the self-righteous, is a horror of bringing a female being into a world where life for a woman (like her, at least) is simply impossible.

Also in her conjugal relations, the female-male roles are very quickly reversed; Emma becomes the dominant personality and Charles the dominated one. She sets the tone, her will is always done, at first only in domestic matters and then in other domains: Emma takes charge of collecting the patients' bills, obtains a power of attorney to make all decisions and becomes the master and lord of the family. She achieves this hierarchy almost always by good means, as a little cunning, some pampering is enough to turn the weak Charles into an instrument; but, if necessary, she does not hesitate to resort to force, as when she puts her husband between a rock and a hard place by giving him to choose between her and his mother-in-law. Emma’s dominance over Charles, rather than ceasing with death, reaches its climax after suicide. The first thing Charles does when she disappears is to decide on a sumptuous and romantic funeral, according to Emma’s tastes. Then he contracts the prodigal habits, the refined whims of his wife, which ends up precipitating him into ruin, exactly like her. The narrator summarizes this situation in a poignant image: “Elle le corrompait au-delà du tombeau” (She corrupted him beyond the grave) 49.

For the rest, in fictional reality, Emma’s case is not unique; there are other women who take on male roles without feeling as frustrated as Madame Bovary. In both cases, these are matriarchs who become the men of the marriage due to the weakness of the husbands. Charles Bovary’s mother becomes the head of her household as soon as the marriage is ruined, and the same for Charles' first wife, who, as soon as they marry, as the narrator specifies, “fut le maître” (was the master). There is a difference, of course. These matriarchs are not properly feminists, there is not in them the slightest rebellion implicit in the role reversal, but, rather, resignation. They assume the man’s role because they have no other choice, since their husbands have renounced it and someone has to make the household decisions. In Emma, virility is not only a function that she assumes to fill a vacancy, but also an ambition for freedom, a way of fighting against the miseries of the female condition.

(e) A BINARY WORLD

Fictitious reality also bears a distinctive mark: a mysterious ordering based on the number two. It is organized in pairs: everything that exists gives the impression of being one and its double, life and things, an unsettling repetition. In this binary world, one is two, which means everything is one and its replica, sometimes identical, sometimes distorted. Almost nothing exists on its own; almost everything duplicates in something that confirms and denies it. This symmetry can be traced in the characters and actions, in the places and objects. Unlike real reality, the fictitious one does not give the impression of growing and multiplying freely and chaotically; rather, it adheres to an inflexible planning, functioning under an immanent law or universal virtuality from which nothing and no one can escape. It has replaced individuality with duality as the primal cell of life. The fateful dynamic of mating folds the living and the inert to form a relational system that is not rationally explicable. In this sense, fictitious reality is not historical but magical.

A constant dramatic element in Emma’s story is the struggle between objective reality and subjective reality. Emma cannot differentiate between them; she can only live reality illusorily or, rather, live the illusion and try to materialize it. Illusion and reality are opposing versions of the same thing, two inseparable sisters (one beautiful, the other ugly). Reality reveals its sordidness in contrast to the embellished image drawn by Emma’s fantasy, aided by romantic novels. Simultaneously, this subjective reality unveils its color, elevation, and richness (its illusory nature: its impossibility) when juxtaposed with its gray and meager objective version. Thus, one is indispensable to the other in the constitution of fictitious reality, resulting from the dialectic between the “real” and “ideal” aspects of life. Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet on March 21, 1852: “The entire value of my book, if it has any, will be in having walked straight on a hair suspended between the double abyss of lyricism and the vulgar (which I want to merge into a narrative analysis).” Having achieved this is not everything, but it is one of the merits of the novel, which is indeed constructed from opposites that, while complementing each other intimately and necessarily, do not lose their specificity, giving the fictitious world an original nature. Also, in this conjunction of opposites—reality and illusion, or as Flaubert says, the “lyrical” and the “vulgar”—Madame Bovary fulfills, in its own way, the totalizing vocation of the novel: in fictitious reality, not only existing things form life; even non-existent things contribute to that mission. One of the most widespread beliefs regarding Madame Bovary is that it canceled Romanticism and inaugurated the realistic movement. It would be more just to speak of a completed rather than a negated Romanticism. The Romantics described exclusively (Lamartine, Chateaubriand) or predominantly (Victor Hugo) the subjective version of the real, replacing reality with illusion. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert extended that mutilated reality by adding the half abolished by Romantic fantasy (but without suppressing the former, as Zola, Huysmans, and Daudet would later do). The novel contains the components of romantic love: sentimental exuberance, tragic fate, and rhetoric of fervent lyricism. If taken out of context, the love dialogue between Emma and Léon that composes almost the entire first chapter of the third part seems prototypical of a romantic novel. However, the context reveals the immense dose of unreality contained in the lovers' beautiful phrases: the voluntary or involuntary lies they tell, the traps and self-deceptions they fall victim to, the distance between their words and actions. The space the narrator establishes between reality and illusion does not imply the inevitable condemnation of one by the other; the scene is not a mockery. Those delicate falsehoods they utter are always moving because they reveal their thirst for the absolute, for pleasure, for beauty—the need for illusion—and their effort to bridge the gap between their ideals and their true condition.

The system of dualities organizing fictitious reality does not consist of what dialectical thought calls the identity of opposites but rather in their reciprocity: they do not merge into a higher synthesis but coexist as different elements that, however, only achieve their full reality in relation to each other. When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, he showed Louise Colet his Notes de voyage from the Orient, and Louise was displeased with the description of Ruchiuk-Hânem, a famous Egyptian prostitute with whom Gustave had had only one but intense night of love. Louise considered that the courtesan was humiliated by the portrayal, which included not only her refined adornments but also her lice. Here is Flaubert’s response: “You tell me that Ruchiouk-Hânem’s bedbugs degrade her; that is what enchants me. Their nauseating odor mixes with the perfume of her sandal-covered skin. I want bitterness in everything, an eternal whistle amid our triumphs, and even desolation within enthusiasm. It reminds me of Jaffa, where, upon entering, I simultaneously smelled the scent of lemon trees and that of corpses; the devastated cemetery revealed half-rotted skeletons, while green bushes swung their golden fruits above our heads. Can’t you sense how complete this poetry is, how it constitutes the great synthesis? All appetites of imagination and thought are satisfied at once; it leaves nothing behind” (Letter of March 27, 1853). Flaubert’s formula (“the great synthesis”) can be confusing. The nauseating odor excites him because it blends with the scent of sandalwood, and the sandalwood because it contrasts with the odor, but neither of them disappears into an intermediate, hybrid perfume. It is the presence of these two dissonant, mutually irritating elements, coexisting in the body of the prostitute, that defines each other, and it is this relationship of enemy brotherhood, of rough proximity (like the smell of lemons and human carrion in Jaffa), that enchants Flaubert. As his memories of the Nile courtesan and the Palestinian cemetery demonstrate, these dualities are possible in real reality. In fictitious reality, they will be necessary. In real life, they can occur; in the fictitious world, things, people, and events will give the impression of only happening through dualities, through contrast, as in these cases, or through similarity. The quote is also interesting because it shows how Flaubert envisions achieving a totalizing purpose through the association of opposites: to appease all appetites of imagination and thought, to reject nothing. This ambition is also expressed in fictitious reality through the binary system: each object, event, or person is both itself and its opposite, and in each part of the story, a synthesis equivalent to what the whole aspires to represent is manifested. This totalizing urge in Flaubert did not arise with Madame Bovary; five years before he began the novel, he told Louise: “I seek the ugly foundations beneath beautiful appearances, and I try to discover, beneath ignoble surfaces, unrevealed mines of devotion and virtue. It’s a rather good mania that makes you see the new where you wouldn’t suspect it exists” (Letter of September 5, 1846). This approach to human affairs, in addition to revealing the new, prevents the schematic distribution of vices and virtues, leading to an understanding that goodness and wickedness can be attributes of the same person at different times and for different matters, and advocating for the contradictory complexity, the versatility of life.

One of the domains where the reality-illusion dichotomy is systematically manifested in the fictitious world is language. The same things, when spoken or written, change their nature and become antagonistic. When reality is transformed into writing, it becomes a lie. Correspondence, journalism, and books are all agents of unreality in Madame Bovary. If we were to rely solely on what novels, the press, or letters say, we would have a false version of fictitious reality; we would know certain events not as they actually happened but as the characters believe or want others to believe they happened. In the fictitious reality, writing is always deceitful; it is the realm of fantasy. Emma’s inability to adapt to life is in good part a result of her readings, of those romantic stories that have shaped an ideal reality in her mind, which does not fit into the real world (meaning that these novels falsify life). Therefore, sensible people, like Charles’s mother, fear Emma’s fondness for novels. They are not mistaken. Emma’s dissatisfaction is rooted in literature, as is evident in the episode that immediately follows her surrender to Rodolphe. Madame Bovary believes she is entering the world of fictional heroines, certain that illusion will finally become reality: "Then she recalled the heroines of the books she had read, and the lyrical legion of these adulterous women sang in her memory with the charming voices of sisters. She became herself a true part of those imaginations…". It is possible that if Emma had not read all those novels, her destiny would have been different (just as Don Quixote’s would have been different if he had not read chivalric romances). Perhaps she would have endured her fate with the calm and unawareness of the other bourgeois women in Yonville. The lies of fiction filled her head with desires, restlessness, and dreams. Like literature, journalism in the fictitious world is another great creator of illusions, with the difference that those in novels are beautiful and noble, while those in journalism are dirty and vile. The press appears as something pretentious and base; it spills Homais’s pedantry, hyperbolically distorting and embellishing the agricultural elections in Yonville with classical citations. The novel shows both planes on which this event is recorded: the historical and the rhetorical; what happened and its verbal distortion perpetrated by the pharmacist. What was a popular festival full of absurdities and tragicomic elements in reality becomes a ceremony of supreme refinement, a celebration of patriotism, progress, and science in words. Even worse are the lies propagated by Le Fanal de Rouen, when Homais, acting upon what the narrator justly calls “the wickedness of his vanity,” writes venomous pieces against the Blind Man he hates because he couldn’t cure him. The newspaper is an effective provider of that moral atmosphere in which the characters move: lies. Therefore, educated beings—the most widely read—are the worst liars. Those who tell the truth are often fools, like poor Charles Bovary, or rustics, like Emma’s father. On the other hand, Léon, Rodolphe, Emma, and Homais constantly deceive each other and deceive themselves. And when they use written words, they excel at fabricating, at turning reality into unreality. In this sense, Rodolphe’s breakup letter to Emma, written on the eve of the scheduled flight, is exemplary. With the same mastery as in the episode of the agricultural elections, the narrator shows us, in two admirable pages, one of those contradictory dualities typical of fictitious reality: the lies and the truth of a situation. The letter to Emma that Rodolphe is writing systematically contradicts what he is thinking and feeling, and vice versa. His hand writes melancholic, suffering, generous sentences, describing the sacrifice he is willing to make so that Emma does not make the imprudent decision to elope with him. His mind, however, only thinks about getting rid of a lover who has become tiresome. The antagonism between his words and feelings reveals Rodolphe’s true personality. In the fictitious world, there is always a divorce between what is lived and what is written; both embody those elements from whose conflict the novel draws its dramatic power: reality and illusion.

If we analyze the scenario in which the story of Emma Bovary unfolds, we discover that the places are constituted symmetrically, in affinitive or antithetical pairs. The life of the Bovarys unfolds in two twin towns. What distinguishes Tostes from Yonville? Normans, tiny, with their long and unique street lined with neighbors' houses, and their typical characters, their monotonous life, both surrounded by an identical countryside where the farmers' houses are scattered and the network of roads tirelessly travels, serving their patients, the health officer, one seems the repetition of the other. When, after Emma’s crisis, the Bovarys move from Tostes to Yonville, the setting changes its name, not its substance: topographically and sociologically, it remains the same. But Tostes is only one of the points of reference in Yonville; the other is Rouen. If Tostes is its double, Rouen is its antithesis, the city of diverse and multiple life, where Emma finds consolation from the stifling village: from there come the magazines and novels that allow her to dream, from there Lheureux brings the objects and clothes with which he tries to dress her emptiness and anguish; there are dances and shows, space and people enough to pass unnoticed and live forbidden love. Yonville/Rouen are the two poles between which - starting from her affairs with Léon - Emma’s life rebounds, the addresses of her duplicity. Each of these settings reflects, in its size and character, the two lives of the protagonist. Yonville, the village, is the marital flatness, boredom, reason, and prejudices, the routine of domestic obligations, composure, and the restraint of instinct, the sordid calculation of bills and debts. Rouen, the city, with its cathedral and hotels, restaurants, squares, islands, is the exuberance of adulterous passion, extravagance, freedom of instincts, celebration, carefreeness, madness. Between Yonville and Rouen, there is a relationship of communicating vessels: each reveals its physiognomy in contrast to the other. Just as Emma’s double life finds, in a certain way, geographical materialization in the duality of Yonville/Rouen, her two love affairs are also linked to a fixed decor. Rodolphe is the Château de la Huchette, and Léon is the Hôtel de Boulogne. Both places, in their contrasts, suggest those of the lovers: the castle, in its cold stones, deserted corridors, and elegant bedrooms, the refinement, power, aristocracy, and calculating spirit of the former; the hotel, a place of transit and refuge, the instability of Léon, his habits, and his bourgeois mentality. In the fictional reality, there are two castles: the Château de la Huchette is a modest version of the Château de Vaubyessard. But, in contrast, Yonville, despite its smallness, has the luxury of having two identical inns, each with its billiards, located opposite each other, and which, irreconcilable enemies, vie for the limited local clientele: the Lyon d’Or of Widow Lefrançois is replicated by Tellier’s Café Français. This duplication of places also means there are two farms: Bertaux, where Emma was born and spent her childhood, and Maison Rolet, on the outskirts of Yonville, where Berthe Bovary is raised. The dual system can also be traced in the opposition between countryside and city, which underlies the entire book; the symmetry that governs the novel ensures that the descriptions are rigorously balanced between the rural and the urban. Thus, the famous description of Rouen, as it appears to Emma’s eyes upon the arrival of L’Hirondelle at the top of the hill overlooking the city, has its equivalent in the description that opens the second part, of the countryside located on the borders of Normandy, Picardy, and Ile-de-France, where Yonville is situated. This distributive justice in the description of the countryside and the city wants Emma to surrender for the first time to each of her lovers in one setting and the other: to Rodolphe in the midst of nature, in a scene where the narrator intertwines the description of the couple’s dialogue with that of the plants, trees, flowers, and sky surrounding them, and to Léon, in the streets of a city, during an episode that is little less than a catalog of Rouen. The sets of the scenes that inaugurate Emma’s adulteries correspond to what the lovers are socially and professionally: Rodolphe, an aristocratic farmer, feudal residue, makes love on the grass, near the horses, in the open air; Léon, a notary, a natural product of the city, bureaucracy, makes love in the center of a city.

The Tostes/Yonville, Yonville/Rouen, country/city pairs are the settings where the action objectively takes place. But there is another scenographic binary, also antithetical, that, although it only appears at times, is very significant because, like the lived and the written, it embodies this basic opposition of the fictional world between reality and illusion. This is the province and the capital. Paris does not appear on an objective plane, but on a subjective one: through the myths, inventions, exaggerations with which that distant and unreachable name resonates for the provincials. The province is reality; Paris, the illusion to which, in the early days of her marriage, to combat the emerging suffocation and frustration, Emma imaginatively moves with the help of a map: closing her eyes, she travels the ideal boulevards, makes purchases in the chimeric shops, hears around her how the dreamy carriages tremble on the cobblestones and how the ghostly gas lanterns flicker in the darkness. And Paris is that city that Homais’s topical imagination turns into an orgy of masked dances, where actresses drink champagne and make love with students and where these, favored by the high society, seduce the opulent ladies of Saint-Germain who sometimes marry them; but it is also the dangerous territory where one can lose virtue and be robbed by seasoned criminals. For Dr. Canivet, who, unlike Homais, hates progress, Paris is the place where the “infernal innovations” come from. Paris, in the fictional reality, is not a physical place but mental, a creation of the provincials where they project their terrors and appetites, it is the opposite of the reality where their lives unfold.

If in places the pairs are mostly antithetical, the double objects of fictional reality, on the other hand, tend to be identical. This is the aspect of the novel where criticism has noticed the binary system of Madame Bovary the most.50 But, in general, critics, unconsciously biased by the itch for fidelity, reproach Flaubert for his “mania” for duplication (the accusation is from Duchet). The assumption is that, as in real reality this systematic duality does not occur, neither should it occur in the fictional. The truth is that if this were a mere photograph of that, it would not be a work of creation, but of information. It is the added element, the rearrangement of the real, which gives autonomy to a novel world and allows it to critically compete with the real world. The duplication of objects —like that of scenarios, facts, or characters— is a tactic aimed at endowing the fictional reality with its own qualities, to emancipate it from its model.

On the outside of the houses in Yonville, two identical objects appear as emblems or decorations: “deux bocaux rouges et verts” in the window of the pharmacist Homais, “deux vases de fonte” on the porch of the notary Guillaumin, “deux banderoles d’indienne” in front of the shop of the merchant Lheureux and “deux tringles” in the sign that announces the hairdresser. More subtle are the two pairs of erotic slippers that slip into the story: the first were given by Léon to Emma, and the second, also a “gift of love”, are worn by the notary Guillaumin. The same object can appear twice, in antagonistic circumstances, like Emma’s wedding dress that, on the day of the bridal procession, shines happily in the middle of the field as a symbol of the girl’s illusions, and which, years later, during the wake, serves as her shroud. An object can be duplicated by the work of greed, like the “deux caisses de voyage” that Lheureux delivers to Emma despite her having asked for only one, and an object of the same class inaugurates and closes an era: upon arriving in Tostes, newly married, Emma spots the bouquet of Charles’s first wife; the last thing she does, before leaving for Yonville, is to burn her own bouquet of bride that she found in a drawer, yellow from dust. Claude Duchet has discovered that in the chapter of agricultural elections, the number two appears eighteen times, escorting the loving dialogue of the “deux pauvres âmes” and that duplication is even recorded on the platform flanked by “deux longs ifs” and in Homais’s toast “à l’industrie et aux beaux-arts, ces deux soeurs”. The list is endless: in the fireplace of the Hotel de Boulogne stand out “deux de ces grandes coquilles roses où l’on entend le bruit de la mer”; the dining table of the notary Guillaumin boasts “deux réchauds d’argent” and on his tie shine “deux épingles de diamant”; Charles Bovary’s boots “avaient au cou-de-pied deux plis épais” and those of the tax collector Binet, due to his bunions, “avaient deux renflements parallèles”; the number two also frames Emma when “elle restait accoudée sur le bord, entre deux pots de géranium” or with “le coude au bord de son assiette, entre les deux bougies qui brûlaient”. The double objects would pass as mere chance if duplication were not also a feature of other domains of fictional reality. It is not a coincidence, but a fate. In that world, everything tends to be dual, in pairs whose members are affirmations or denials of each other.

If we move from places and things to the story, we see that the magical law of the double is equally fulfilled in it: events tend to repeat themselves. Emma has two lovers, Charles two women, and he becomes a widower both times. Hippolyte undergoes two operations: the one Bovary performs on his foot to straighten it, and the other by Canivet when it becomes gangrenous and must be amputated. There are two seduction scenes involving Emma, both constructed in the same way: in one, Rodolphe’s amorous words during the agricultural elections are intertwined with conventional speech phrases; in the other, at Rouen Cathedral, Léon’s words to Emma are interwoven with the guide’s praise of the church’s beauties and curiosities. The wedding procession that initiates the Bovarys' marriage has a counterpart in the funeral procession in Yonville that closes the couple’s story. There are two dances: the one at the Vaubyessard castle and the masked ball attended by Emma and Léon in Rouen, which is like a plebeian version of that aristocratic gathering. There are two rural festivals, abundant, verbose, and somewhat grotesque, culminating in lavish feasts: Emma’s wedding and the agricultural elections. Madame Bovary’s suicide has a precedent: she feels the desire to kill herself for the first time and is about to do so the day she receives Rodolphe’s letter giving her excuses not to run away with him. And there are two deaths: one illusory and one real. In the first, Emma imagines she is dying, surrounded by flowers, candlesticks, prayers, on a carefully arranged bed, just like a heroine in a romantic novel. The second, the real one, contrasts brutally with the first: the poison causes excruciating pain and distorts her features before the desperate Charles and the two poor souls witnessing the scene. On the other hand, Emma’s poisoning is announced by an illusory poisoning on the day Madame Bovary catches Homais scolding Justin for taking a container from the capharnaüm for the currant sweet; the enraged chemist recalls that the container was near the arsenic, and horrified Madame Homais thinks of a tragedy: the whole family could have perished. The children then begin “à pousser des cris, comme s’ils avaient déjá sen ti dans leurs entrailles d’atroces douleurs”: those roars will be uttered by Emma when she poisons herself for real. A famous binomial in the novel is the parallel dreams of Emma and Charles, in which each one’s free fantasy constructs images reflecting their abysmal differences in ambition and character. While Charles imagines a placid, sedentary, and domestic future where happiness would come from the repetition of the same acts and gradual material progress—Berthe would grow up, increasingly resemble her mother, become a magnificent housewife, wear the same straw hats as Emma, and people in the distance would mistake them for sisters, then she would find a good husband who would make her happy—, Emma dreams of a future that means a violent break with her present life, where there is no place for Yonville, Charles, or their daughter. Her fantasy leads her, with her lover, to distant regions full of color, where splendid cities with white marble cathedrals and sharp bell towers are followed by lemon tree forests, delightful fishing villages, and a tropical cabin surrounded by palm trees: the landscape and climate there are as torrential as passion. Each dream takes on its full significance thanks to the other: Emma’s splendor reveals the shallowness of Charles’s dream, her selfishness becomes evident due to the family’s absorbing presence in it, and so on. In no other binomial in the novel is the symmetrical sense that characterizes fictional reality as strict as in this one, in which the narrator has dedicated almost the same number of words to each dream. 51

Situations, events, images, and forms are repeated (although the contents differ). The arrival of Doctor Canivet in Yonville to amputate Hippolyte’s leg foreshadows the arrival of Doctor Larivière when Emma is dying: in both cases, the doctor’s visit is an event that causes agitation and admiring curiosity among the neighbors, and both doctors give an impression of impetuosity, dominance, and superiority, as if they were coming to take possession of the place rather than to treat a patient. Gestures are repeated: in their last meeting, Emma and Rodolphe hold hands for a while; they undoubtedly did so many times during their affair, but the narrator specifies that this gesture is an exact repetition of another one, the one on the first day: “Comme le premier jour, aux Comices!” Thus, their relationship starts and ends with the same image: two hands clasped. Old Rouault loses Emma twice, and both times it provokes the same reaction in him. When Emma gets married, the old man accompanies the newlyweds for a part of the way. He bids farewell, starts to return, but when he reaches the top of a hill—on the road to Saint-Victor—he turns around to watch them disappear in the distance and cries. He does exactly the same when he leaves Yonville, where he went to bury his daughter. The narrator emphasizes the repetitive nature of the episode: “Mais, quand il fut au haut de la cote, il se détourna, comme autrefois il s’était détourné sur le chemin de Saint-Victor, en se séparant d’elle”. Emma’s marriage and death culminate in two identical postures: the old man scrutinizing the landscape from the top of a slope, with tears in his eyes and his heart filled with melancholy. Here, one person does the same thing twice; there are cases where an event is carried out twice by different people. Charles finds Rodolphe’s breakup letter in the barn, the same place where Emma ran to seek refuge the day she received it, and he becomes as horrified and pale as she was years ago: “Et Charles demeura tout immobile et béant à cette même place où jadis, encore plus pâle que lui, Emma, désespérée, avait voulu mourir”.

One form of the binary system of fictional reality is duplicity, the characters' ability to be two distinct beings at the same time without others noticing. It is not the prerogative of some but of all. Men and women, under certain circumstances, and in response to certain stimuli, split themselves. They do not always do it intentionally to conceal their feelings from others; sometimes, this invisible parthenogenesis happens spontaneously, as it does to Charles the first time he visits Bertaux farm. It is dawn, and the health officer is dozing on his horse when suddenly he dreams that he is two Charleses at once, living two situations and two times simultaneously. He sees himself “double”: "...lui-même se percevait double, a la fois étudiant et marié, couché dans son lit comme tout a l’heure, traversant une salle d’opérés comme autrefois. L’odeur chaude des cataplasmes se mélait dans sa tete à la verte odeur de la rosee; il entendait rouler sur leur tringle les anneaux de fer des lits et sa femme dormir…". This duplication is illusory; it occurs in a drowsy mind. Some time later, Charles is going to transform into behavior and a heart that repel each other. Heloïse Bovary, sensing danger, forbids him from going to Rouault’s farm, and the health officer complies. But as soon as he stops seeing Emma, he starts loving her and imagining her: “la hardiesse de son désir protesta contre la servilité de sa conduite, et, par une sorte d’hypocrisie naïve, il estima que cette défense de la voir était pour lui comme un droit de l’aimer”. This incongruity, that a person acts opposite to what they feel and think (as we saw with Rodolphe writing the breakup letter)—in other words, being two people, one for themselves and another for others—is a recurring motif in the novel. When Emma discovers she is in love with Léon during her early days in Yonville, her immediate reaction is to become the model wife in front of everyone, including Léon himself (and it is when seeing this diligent, simple, kind, contented lady that Homais delivers his memorable sentence: “C’est une femme de grands moyens et qui ne serait pas déplacée dans une sous-préfecture”); no one—except herself and the reader—knows that beneath this appearance of perfection and domestic happiness lies a woman “pleine de convoitises, de rage, de haine”. Emma’s life from this point on unfolds under the sign of duplicity; until her death, there will always be two Emmas: the one known to Charles and the people of Yonville, and the one known to herself and, at times, Léon, Rodolphe, and Lheureux.

Duplicity can be shared, an operation by which two people duplicate themselves to, on one hand, maintain appearances and, on the other, fulfill their desires. This is what happens the first time Léon and Emma are alone; their words weave a banal dialogue, while their eyes, minds, and hearts engage in the real dialogue: “N’avaient-ils rien d’autre chose à se dire? Leurs yeux pourtant étaient pleins d’une causerie plus sérieuse; et, tandis qu’ils s’efforcaient à trouver des phrases banales, ils sentaient une même langueur les envahir tous les deux; c’était comme un murmure de l’âme, profond, continu, qui dominait celui des voix”. This division of the human being, to satisfy desires without violating social conventions, is something the characters do instinctively; only Rodolphe gives theoretical foundations to duplicity. According to him, there are two moralities. One is that of mediocrities, petty and mean, and the other, for certain chosen ones, authorizes all liberties and excesses: “La petite, la convenue, celle des hommes, celle qui varié sans cesse et qui braille si fort, s’agite en bas, terre a terre, comme ce rassemblement d’imbéciles que vous voyez. Mais l’autre, l’éternelle, elle est tout autour et au-dessus, comme le paysage qui nous environne et le ciel bleu qui nous éclaire”. In reality, Rodolphe is a cynic, and he is developing his seduction method here; he probably doesn’t believe much in that superior morality, but Emma does.

The theme of the double in general, and that of duplicity in particular, is not gratuitous. It probably originates from the constant splitting that narrative vocation implies. One who assumes it, on one hand, experiences things like others do; on the other hand, they observe and take advantage of them. This makes them both identified and not identified with those experiences while living them, and while writing, they desperately try to relive what was lived in order to “lie” about it better. This duality undoubtedly explains why the themes of the double and duplicity are permanent in narrative, and something similar happens with marginality, a theme in which the novelist projects the social condition imposed by their vocation. Flaubert often said that there were two people in him. He was not only referring to the two literary tendencies of his vocation – the lyrical and romantic, eager for history and exoticism, and the realistic and contemporary – but also to the different persons that were in him, the man who lived and the one who created. He responded to Louise Colet once when she reproached him for having written to Eulalie Foucaud: “You tell me that I loved this woman seriously. That’s not true. Only, when I wrote to her, with the ability I have to get moved by the pen, I took my subject seriously; but only while I was writing. Many things that leave me cold, either when I see them or when others talk about them, enthuse me, irritate me, hurt me if I talk about them, and especially if I write about them.” [^59] Six years later, he repeated the same idea: “Yes, it’s a strange thing, the pen on one side and the individual on the other” (Letter to Louise, July 27, 1852).

Also, among the characters, there is a predisposition of fictional reality to dualism. They often come in pairs that suggest the crystallization of the same essence in two different people. This is the case with the in-laws, the respective parents of Emma and Charles: they are the most sympathetic men in the story, the least shady, the most consistent in their way of living. The scatterbrained and jolly Monsieur Bovary is a fresh and cheerful being, devoid of calculation and deceit, very similar, in a moral sense, to the good-natured and simple father Rouault. Both fathers-in-law escape, each in their own way, from the two curses that almost all inhabitants of the fictional society succumb to: lies and stupidity. The two doctors in the story (Charles is only a health officer), Doctor Canivet and Doctor Larivière, have much in common, although the latter is more prestigious than his colleague: the superior and arrogant air with which they arrive in Yonville and treat the neighbors, their granite-like certainty, their professional coldness bordering on inhumanity, their excellent appetite. Emma has two real lovers, but if one carefully examines her sentimental life, it can be seen that the stages it consists of are occupied by pairs or couples, in which the true lover has an illusory complement, an ideal figure with which Emma associates him: in the first stage in Yonville, Léon is linked in Emma’s mind to the already distant and somewhat mythical figure of the viscount from the Vaubyessard castle, and this character also hovers in her head when her romance with Rodolphe begins; in the third stage, when she meets the clerk again at the Opera in Rouen, Emma fantasizes romantically about the figure of the tenor Lagardy and relates him to Léon as she did with the viscount before. It is as if Emma, to love a specific man, needs the initial stimulus of an illusory man – although the viscount and the tenor exist, Emma attributes to them a purely imaginary life – of which they should be a materialization (the fact that they are not is her eternal defeat).

But the best example of this binary nature of fiction is, of course, the Homais-Bournisien tandem. They are inseparable, symmetrical and equivalent expressions of ideological sectarianism and spiritual conformism. The pharmacist repeats positivist dogmas, using the most rudimentary formulas and the most hackneyed arguments, without providing the slightest personal contribution to that philosophy, exactly as the priest pours Catholic dogmas through clichés and crude examples. Both, adhering to apparently opposing ideologies, have done something identical: a comfortable act of faith that exempts them from thinking for themselves, that provides them with simple and schematic answers for all circumstances, they have immersed themselves in the sea of self-complacency, and both, fundamentally, in their deism or materialism, represent the same form of human abdication. They both embody the worst example of Flaubertian “bêtisse”: intellectual stupidity. It has been said, with some basis, that in Homais and Bournisien, Flaubert parodied the two ideologies that coexisted within his family: the secular and Voltairean scientism of his father and the maternal Catholicism, and that he did so from the perspective, equally critical of both, which was his own, that of skepticism. The truth is that Homais and Bournisien are two sides of the same coin, and this is masterfully theatricalized in the chapter of Emma’s death when, like two little figurines moved by the same puppeteer, they snore synchronically next to the corpse, or, according to their particular ideology, one sprinkles holy water around the room to scare away demons while the other pours chlorine to exterminate microbes.

Chapter 4

Quelle lourde machine à construire qu’un livre, et compliquée surtout!

(Letter to Louise Colet, September 13, 1852)

But the “element added” does not come exclusively from the theme and the characters; it also comes from the way the story is narrated. The distances we have noticed in fictional reality regarding the real – the humanized things and objectified men, women as men and men as women, the magical law of duality – contribute to shaping its autonomy; even more decisive for it is the form. Every novel that does not aim to abolish history must solve two problems: temporalization and point of view. The mass of events, people, places, emotions must have an order of presentation, constituting a chronology. The temporal structure of a novel is always a primary factor in the “element added” because fictional time is never identical to real time (even if only because the “read” chronology has a variable time, depending on the aptitude and will of each reader). On the other hand, the data that make up fictional reality do not proliferate spontaneously: they are told by someone. This fateful existence in all fiction, the narrator, is not only responsible for fictional time – the arrangement of the data – but also for the words that describe places and things and those that people say. The narrator establishes the method of formulating the data of the story – presenting them, hiding them, relating them to each other – and the nature of this data. Visible or invisible, singular or multiple, reliable or deceptive, the narrator, with their attitudes – the points of view of a novel – imposes their own characteristics on fictional reality.

Chronology and words, time and the narrator are, naturally, an indestructible unity; their separation is artificial, but there is no other way to show how the “heavy and complicated machine” works, allowing fiction to give the illusion of truth, to pretend life.

II. THE FOUR TIMES OF MADAME BOVARY

Time in Madame Bovary is not a homogeneous flow where events occur slowly and irreversibly, like the waters of a river seen by the reader, never changing in speed. Instead, it is a heterogeneous unfolding, which, while constituting a progression—a before, a now, and an after—consists of movements and immobilities, roundabouts and changes of nature, making the events and people of the fictional reality have different degrees of certainty depending on the four planes that integrate the novel’s temporal system. Sartre distinguishes two types of duration in Madame Bovary: "One of the singular and inimitable charms of Madame Bovary is to present to us simultaneously the two durations, one lived in its repetitive slowness, in its tedious languor, the other all oracular but hidden, theatrical temporalization underlying the novelistic temporalization, which, manifesting itself from time to time through intersigns, reveals to us, in those moments of lightning, that Emma is rushing to her ruin and is determined to fulfill her destiny of the damned."52 It is accurate: the novel alternates periods of calm development, slow succession of minor events, with sudden accelerations, where the action condenses, precipitates, multiplies into an excessive event, and then returns to that calm, methodical periodicity. But these events, though of different duration—for example, Emma’s numerous trips to Rouen and the moment she swallows the arsenic—belong to a single temporal plane, constituting the same time, even if their importance differs. The four temporal planes I refer to establish a division among the data of the story that is not about durability but about substance, and it is to the transitions that the narrator operates, moving the narrative from one plane to another, that the fictional world owes much of its complexity. The fact that there are four temporal planes does not mean, of course, that the boundaries between them are sharp. The narrator conceals these transitions; the reader is hardly aware of the continuous rotation of the narrative material. They only register the consequences of these transitions: the density and ambiguity that permeate the actions, the personal movement they inflict on the story. It is important that the narrator had the cleverness to create four distinct times, but even more important is the way in which he distributed the narrative material in them to build the fictional reality.

(a) A SINGULAR OR SPECIFIC TIME

Let’s look at the events that inaugurate and conclude the story. This is the first thing the narrator recounts:

“We were at the study when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy dressed in bourgeois style and a class lackey carrying a large desk. Those who were sleeping woke up, and everyone stood up, seemingly surprised in their work.”

And this is the last (referring to Homais):

“He has just received the Legion of Honor.”

First of all, there is no doubt about the reality of these events. The narrator does not hesitate in the slightest; he is categorical in his revelations. In the opening scene, we see the door of a classroom open, the headmaster enter followed by a new student and a servant carrying a desk, and the boys rising as if surprised in their tasks. And in the final scene, the same certainty: the pharmacist of Yonville has obtained—in a past very close to the present in which the narrator situates himself—the coveted decoration, the “Legion of Honor,” now shining on that vain chest. In addition to being certain and having occurred at two different moments in the past—the first being remote and the second being immediate—regarding the time in which the narrator has placed himself, in both cases, they are events of which the uniqueness and sovereignty are beyond question: they happened, occupied a specific and transitory moment in the course of time, consisted of a particular conjunction of gestures, attitudes, and movements that cannot be repeated, ceased to happen, and are now there, unmistakable, fixed in the development of the story, with their colors, volume, solidity, anecdotal value, moral significance, and their varied range of connections with other events in the novel. No one can question their truth, originality, uniqueness, or their place in the fictional chronology. They exist on an objective level of reality, not depending on the subjectivity of the characters. Both represent action and presuppose a passing, an ordered and progressive chain of events, in which they were, at first, nothing but a future possibility, then a present materialized in them, and finally, a memory that endures, a past that recedes.

A significant number of events in Madame Bovary appear, like these two examples, with the characteristics of objectivity, specificity, mobility, and transitoriness. They constitute the singular or specific time of the fictional reality, and we recognize that the narrative is situated in this temporal plane when the narrator uses the past tense (or equivalent periphrastic forms: “He has just received the Legion of Honor” is the same as “He received the Legion of Honor recently”). When the narrator employs this grammatical tense, the novel achieves its greatest dynamism and agility because it is the privileged time of action and movement; it is primarily used to narrate the events that advance the story, the transitions, the episodic changes. It primarily consists of human activities and also perceptions and sensations that the narrator wants to highlight for their exceptionality and instantaneous nature. This temporal plane includes the novel’s surprises, concrete events such as marriages, deaths, operations, adulteries, spectacles, as well as minor events like a character’s precise movements from one place to another and their sudden reactions to certain stimuli. It also includes dialogues that reveal new elements and some scarce references to the landscape and objects that do not form a permanent setting but rather serve as accidental, fleeting, and ephemeral presences. When the narrative material is in this temporal plane, the fictional reality is in a state of maximum animation and anecdotal effervescence; it is activity, generally exteriority, human action, and “history” in the sense that what the narrator tells has happened exactly as narrated, once, and will not happen again.

(b) CIRCULAR TIME OR REPETITION

Interposed with the singular events, the narrator recounts others that are essentially different due to their repetitive character and a nature that could be called abstract. These are scenes that do not exhibit a specific action but a serial, recurring activity, a habit, a custom. For example, this is how Charles’s days typically end during the time the Bovary couple resides in Tostes:

“He would return late, at ten or sometimes midnight. Then he would ask for food, and as the maid was already in bed, Emma served him. He took off his coat to dine more comfortably. He recounted, one after the other, all the people he had met, the villages he had been to, the prescriptions he had written, and satisfied with himself, he ate the remainder of the hash, peeled his cheese, bit into an apple, emptied his carafe, and then went to bed, lay on his back, and snored.”

In the previous case, the narrative time was a progression in a straight line; in this case, it is a circular movement. The story moves but does not advance; it revolves around the same place, it is repetition. The difference between this paragraph and those cited as examples of singular or specific time is that in Charles Bovary’s arrival at the school and Homais’s decoration, there was total identity between what happened and what was narrated—the event that occurred was the event narrated and vice versa. In contrast, there is now a gap between the two: there are connections between what happens and what is told, but they are different things. What happened were many nights over weeks and months during which Charles, after visiting his patients, returned home, had dinner, and went to bed. Each of those nights was a particular and unique event, with certain intransferable characteristics—the different menu, the different clothes he took off, the different words he used to describe his day to his wife, the different gestures, the different number of yawns each time. However, these particularities and differences have disappeared in the narrative. Instead of describing each one individually, the narrator has summarized them into an archetypal scene that does not represent any of the actual occurrences but condenses and symbolizes all of them. To compose this summary scene, the narrator abstracted from the specific and referred to the general, the common and permanent features of that sum of nights. There is now a relative rather than absolute coincidence between what the characters experienced and what the narrator tells: the text now reflects the events uncertainly, not as a faithful portrait, but as a painting inspired by them, creating its own images.

The typical verb tense of this temporal plane is the imperfect of the indicative. Many critics, starting with Thibaudet, believe it is the quintessential Flaubertian tense, the one in which he narrated most comfortably and from which he knew how to extract the most. He gave it extraordinary flexibility and a diversity of functions that it had not had in the novel before. Entire episodes of Madame Bovary are narrated using this system of abstractions that allows the narrator to reduce a maximum of events into a minimum of words, synthesize a long series of actions into a single one, while conveying the idea of duration, recurrence, and the advancement of the story. The three days of love that Emma and Léon spend in Rouen—part three, chapter iii—are almost exclusively narrated in this circular time:

“They went into a small room in a café, which had black nets hanging at the door. They ate fried smelt, cream, and cherries. They lay down on the grass; they kissed in seclusion under the poplars; and they would have liked, like two Robinsons, to live perpetually in that little place, which in their bliss, seemed to them the most magnificent on earth. It was not the first time they had seen trees, blue skies, grass, or heard the water flowing and the breeze blowing in the foliage; but they had undoubtedly never admired all of this as if nature had not existed before or had only begun to be beautiful since the fulfillment of their desires.”

What the narrator describes here is generic rather than specific, plural rather than singular: images that summarize actions repeated several times by the lovers until they became a certain routine, which later, in their memory, will undoubtedly be the ideal graphic representation of those three full days. Thus, what the narrator recounts happened and did not happen: they are compendiums, figures, essences of acts. The material narrated in this temporal plane is not objective, like that of the specific temporal plane; it is both objective and subjective at the same time: its feet are grounded in the objective world, it is fundamentally “history,” as its starting point is always events that have occurred, but the upper half of its body is purely subjective, an interpretation made by the narrator as he abstracts the common features of a series of events into an image and excludes the differential elements of each unit. When I say events, I am limiting the truth; the narrator also describes feelings, thoughts, and, in the example mentioned—the three days of Emma and Léon in Rouen—we can see how freely he crosses the boundaries between the external and the internal world, narrating within the same circular movement what the couple did and felt.

This circular or repeated time is the time of reflection, of moods, which shapes the characters' psychologies, the motivations that will later lead to sudden events, and the detailed processes of routine life, social or familial. In contrast, the exceptional, unique, and ephemeral events of the singular plane will stand out even more. This is the plane of boredom and monotony, predictability, and social aspects (while the previous plane was primarily about individual aspects), and thanks to this temporal plane, the fictional reality has its particular duration, calm, rhythmic, and majestic, reaching its formidable extensiveness, as the images of circular time allow the narrator to multiply the material—each narrated event represents many occurrences—without multiplying the words. This is the time of permanent places and objects, of the rural, urban, and domestic landscape that has stability as it frames many actions or prolonged actions.

Where fictional reality is most admirably described in this circular time —it all gives the impression of a slow and powerful whirl, of an incessant circular flow— is in the account of the months that Emma and Léon’s love affairs last (third part, chapter v). Emma went to see Léon on Thursdays, under the pretext of piano lessons; she spent the day with him in Rouen and returned to Yonville at nightfall. The narrator reduces these dozens of trips made by Emma to spend the day with her lover to an ideal Thursday —pattern Thursday or matrix Thursday— and incorporates into this abstract day, frontman of the others, even minor incidents, such as the mechanical gestures Emma made when Hivert’s stagecoach arrived at the city gate: "Emma unbuckled her wooden shoes, put on other gloves, adjusted her shawl, and, twenty paces farther, she got out of the Hirondelle". Nor have the dialogues been omitted; the narrator symbolizes in a fervent exchange of words the thousands of things the lovers must have said to each other in these weekly encounters:

She leaned towards him and whispered, as if suffocated with intoxication:

—Oh! don’t move! don’t speak! look at me! There’s something so sweet coming out of your eyes, it’s doing me so much good!

She called him a child:

—Child, do you love me?

The reader is not certain that an identical scene, composed of the same gestures and the same words, ever occurred, but understands that, many times, in the room of the Hotel de Boulogne, there have been approximate scenes, where things like this have been said and equivalent gestures made. In this way, the narrator has achieved several things at once: to relativize the narrative, to impart a special uncertainty, a somewhat mysterious nature —since the images take distance from what they represent, they no longer serve the things but serve themselves— and to suggest an idea of permanence in movement, of static movement. All this enhances the originality of the fictional world.

When the narrator places himself in this plane, a relationship similar to that between real reality and the fictitious one is established between the narrative and what occurred. Just as the latter is not a servile reflection but an image that, although forged with materials taken from the former, constitutes an autonomous entity, so the narrator’s word in moments of repeated time is a verbal entity that, although it feeds on the fictitious matter, does something more than narrate it: it also exists as a distinct reality.

(c) THE STILL TIME OR PLASTIC ETERNITY

There are other moments in the fictional reality where time is neither linear and fast, nor slow and circular, but seems to have evaporated. The action disappears, men, things, places remain immobile and as if subtracted from the nightmare of chronology, they live an eternal instant. The fictional reality shown on this plane is externality, form, perspective, texture, color: a plastic presence, a body that exists only to be contemplated. Its grammatical time is the present indicative and its best example are the pages that, at the beginning of the second part, describe Yonville:

At the bottom of the hill, after the bridge, starts a path planted with young aspens, which leads you straight to the first houses of the village. They are backed by hedges, in the midst of yards full of scattered buildings, presses, cart-houses and distilleries, scattered under bushy trees bearing ladders, poles or scythes hung in their branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps pulled down over eyes, descend to about a third of the low windows, whose large convex glasses are furnished with a knot in the middle, like the bottoms of bottles…

Nothing moves, time does not pass, everything is matter and space as in a painting. When men are described on this temporal plane, they become a posture, a grimace, a gesture caught by the lens of a camera, and the fictional reality becomes one of those backdrops inhabited by the stiff figurines of wax museums. In the castle of Vaubyessard, Emma comes across, when passing by a room, this image: “Emma saw around the game men with grave faces, chins resting on high cravats, all decorated, and who smiled silently, pushing their tails. On the dark woodwork of the paneling, large gilded frames bore, at the bottom of their border, names written in black letters”. The same substance seems to give body to the gilded frames, to the black letters and to the petrified knights decorated who, with their jaws sunk in cravats and a frozen smile on their lips, have been stopped by the description in this theatrical, disturbing and grotesque pose, when they were about to hit the balls with their cues. In this case, the freezing operation is carried out by a character: Emma’s eyes capture the scene and eternalize it, tearing these players from the flow of time, making them a plastic group. In many other moments it is the narrator himself who interrupts the course of the action, installs the characters in a given attitude and, like the painter with his model, keeps them static, posing, while he paints them: “She [Emma] was unpicking the lining of a dress, whose scraps were scattered around her; Mother Bovary, without looking up, made her scissors squeak, and Charles, in his border slippers and his old brown coat which served him as a dressing gown, kept both hands in his pockets and didn’t speak either; near them, Berthe, in a little white apron, was scraping with her shovel the sand of the paths”. The imperfect in this example, as in the previous one, equates to a present: these figurines, while the description lasts, are these fixed attitudes, this relationship of harmony, careful disposition and distance that separates them, the silence that bathes them. The characters, like those in a Flemish interior family portrait, are not there, they are thus: their presence is their essence.

The beings that belong to this imaginary time have a coherent nature: they are “romantic” stylizations of objective reality, due to readings, as is the case with Emma, or due to naivety and prejudices, as is the case with Léon, Homais or Rodolphe. We saw that, with the help of a plane, Emma traveled to Paris without leaving her house in Tostes: “elle fermait ses paupières, et elle voyait dans les ténébres se torde au vent des bees de gaz, avec des marchepieds de caléches, qui se déployaient à grand iracas devant le péristyle des théâtres”. These are stamps that her fantasy assembles with materials that come from the novels of her adolescence, from the stories that the ruined aristocrat who came to work with the religious ones told at school, from the magazines and books that the “cabinets de lecture” in Rouen lend her. This relationship between the real and the imaginary is seen very clearly when, after giving herself to Rodolphe, Emma is sure to become “une partie véritable de ces imaginations” and to be a sister of “les héroines des livres qu’elle avait lus”. And it is seen, in dramatic terms, because in this case one can measure the abyss between the real model (Léon) and the phantom (the man to whom Emma believes she is sending her letters), when the love relationship between them is already in ruins, but Emma continues to write to him: “Mais, en écrivant, elle percevait un autre homme, un fantóme fait de ses plus ardents souvenirs, de ses lectures les plus belles, de ses convoitises les plus fortes; et il devenait à la fin si véritable, et accessible, qu’elle en palpitait émerveillée, sans pouvoir néanmoins le nettement imaginer, tant il se perdait, comme un dieu, sous l’abondance de ses attributs. Il habitait la contrée bleuátre où les échelles de soie se balancent à des balcons, sous le souffle des fleurs, dans la ciarte de la lune. Elle le sentait près d’elle, il allait venir et l’enléverait tout entière dans un baiser. Ensuite elle retombait a plat, brisée; car ces élans d’amour vague la fatiguaient plus que de grandes débauches”. In the paragraph, one sees the importance that the imaginary has for Emma; it is in her a vocation so powerful that not even the evidence of the real stops her. It is enough that she takes up the pen, thinks or dreams, for the dull notary to desert his carnal envelope, his earthly gravity, and transform himself into an extraordinary being, to whose existence Emma’s “most ardent memories”, “most beautiful readings”, and “strongest desires” contribute. This substitute reality makes Emma a rebel, it gives her strength to live, and, in the end, to kill herself.

If the other temporal planes correspond to a grammatical time (explicit or implicit), this one, on the other hand, is indifferent to any: its verbal time is subordinated to the one in which the character who produces it is narrated. In most cases, unreality is a future illusion, as in the parallel dreams of Emma and Charles, when they both imagine a future to their measure, but there are others where it is a present illusion, like the phantom into which Léon is gradually becoming as Emma writes to him, and it can even be past, when Emma’s imagination unrealizes what has been lived, embellishing her childhood memories.

I said earlier that this temporal structure constitutes an indestructible unit. That is to say, the fundamental thing is not the existence of these four planes that give the narrative matter different speed, certainty, and nature, but their interdependence, the changes from one to another, the way they modify and complement each other. It is this system of alliances and disagreements, the complexity of the whole, that gives effectiveness to the temporal structure. A large orchestra of musicians provided with the best instruments, would be useless without a director capable of organizing that material and those dispositions. The beautiful concert is, in the end, something more, something different than the mere sum of the elements that have made it possible. After the instruments and the musicians, let’s now see how the orchestra director acts.

III. THE NARRATOR’S SHIFTS

Who tells the story of Madame Bovary? Multiple narrators whose voices subtly take turns in a way that the reader barely notices the shifts in perspective and gets the impression that there’s only one narrator. Just like in temporal planes, the existence of multiple narrators —the distinct function assigned to each one— is as important as the way these shifts from one narrator to another are carried out. The timing and discretion of these shifts are as decisive as their occurrence for giving the narrative material a persuasive power. These are the narrators of Madame Bovary, or rather, the different masks of the protoplasmic narrator:

(a) A PLURAL NARRATOR-CHARACTER: THE MYSTERIOUS “NOUS”

Who is the narrator that, ambushed behind the first person plural, begins the story? It’s someone who is there, part of the narrated world. They are in that class where Charles arrives, preceded by the school director, hears and undoubtedly joins in the mockery with which the students welcome the provincial boy; later, they coexist with him throughout his years at school: “Il serait maintenant impossible à aucun de nous de se rien rappeler de lui. C’était un Garçon de tempérament moderé, qui jouait aux récréations, travaillait à l’étude, écoutant en classe, dormant bien au dortoir, mangeant bien au réfectoire”.53 There’s no doubt, the speaker has been more than an observer: an active participant, an accomplice, a character in the story. This spatial point of view —the narrator situated within the narrated world—, as old as the novel itself, seems to be chosen by a craving for realism, to bolster the verisimilitude of the story. This is the case in the picaresque novel, where the protagonist tells their own life; the story gains a greater degree of certainty because it is told by a privileged witness, someone who tells it from firsthand experience: I was there, I know, I lived what happened. The narration takes on the semblance of historical testimony.

But here things don’t happen in the same way. That inhabitant of the narrated world doesn’t speak of themselves but of another, of others, of everyone else but themselves. They are there and we don’t see them, they are only a point of reference, a vision and a memory that transmits what they saw and knew at a certain moment, without exposing themselves. Their identity is mysterious not only because of their reticence regarding themselves, but because they speak from the plural, which perhaps indicates that they are not one but several characters. It could be a collective narrator: the nous of the first chapter maybe conceals the whole group of school students or a subset of them. But it could also be one of these students using the plural out of modesty and a desire for anonymity. This uncertainty is essential to the narrator-character who opens the story; they name themselves only seven times, all in the first chapter, and then they disappear never to return. This spatial point of view, in which there is no distance whatsoever between the narrator and the narrated, inaugurates the novel by establishing a great closeness between the reader and the story; throughout the entire first tableau —Charles’s arrival to the class, the mockery, the casquette episode, the punishment imposed by the professor—, in which the plural narrator-character is the dominant perspective, it seems that we are going to read a confidence, an autobiography. At the same time, the vagueness of the narrator —who is there but doesn’t show themselves, who only lets us know that they are a citizen of the fictional world— arouses a curiosity parallel to what they are narrating. In addition to giving, in accordance with the traditional function of the narrator-character, an impression of verisimilitude, the initial narrator of Madame Bovary, due to the grammatical form behind which they hide, imbues the narrative material with a certain mystery, surrounds it with an unsettling aura.

The fog that envelops the plural narrator-character, facilitates their replacement: they fade away and it’s not noticed because they were already almost invisible. After Charles’s arrival to the class, another narrator is going to recount something that the enigmatic nous can’t know: Charles’s previous life, his parents' marriage, the first lessons he received from his village priest, until his arrival in Rouen. Then the plural narrator-character reappears to sum up, in the phrase I quoted, what life was like at school for this submissive, hardworking and mediocre student, and then fades away, this time for good. Another narrator recounts what happened to Charles when he graduated, became a medical student, received his health officer’s degree, married the widow Heloise Dubuc and settled in Tostes. This narrator, with whom the plural narrator-character alternates during the first chapter thanks to those four shifts, is

(b) THE OMNISCIENT NARRATOR

The omniscient narrator bears the primary responsibility for the story, as they narrate almost everything that happens and describe nearly everything in the fictional reality. They do not belong to the narrated world; rather, they remain external and speak from the third person singular. Their attributes are ubiquity, omniscience, and omnipotence. However, despite being everywhere, knowing everything, and having all powers, they always use these divine faculties in a meticulously planned manner, following a coherent rational system whose rules they only violate on very rare occasions (those violations are always venial and so scarce that they never endanger the system). They equally and effortlessly witness and recount events in the external world and the secret intimacy of the characters. They move seamlessly through time, as seen in the first chapter, where they leap backward to tell the story of Charles Bovary’s parents and then forward to return to Rouen, and likewise through space, as in the same chapter, when they shift from Rouen to the anonymous village “sur les confins du pays de Caux et de la Picardie,” where Charles’s father seeks refuge after failing as an industrialist and farmer, and then swiftly back to Rouen. The omniscient narrator shoulders the great tactical decisions that define the narrative strategy of Madame Bovary: determining which information is communicated to the reader and which is withheld, for how long, the temporal planes in which each episode, description, or motif is situated, and when the narrative shifts to the voice of the characters, their thoughts, feelings, movements, the landscape, and the things that surround them. Their extraordinary freedom—far greater than that of a character-narrator—is also their greatest danger: any abuse, inconsistency, or capricious use of their unlimited powers diminishes or nullifies the persuasive power of the narration. In Madame Bovary, they employ this freedom by self-imposing precise guidelines to either conceal their existence or reveal it in deliberate and indispensable circumstances. Thus, this omniscient narrator is not one but two, depending on their degree of visibility and intrusion into the narrated world:

1. The Invisible Narrator

Most of the narration from the third person singular is conveyed through a loquacious absence, a cold and precise observer who remains unseen, blending with the object or subject of the narration. The rule that allows them to be invisible is objectivity: they describe what happens but refrain from making judgments, merely transmitting what the characters do, refrain from doing, say to themselves or to others, without ever revealing their own thoughts, reactions to the narrated world. Devoid of subjectivity, they are indifferent, like a cinematographic camera capable of filming the invisible; their purpose is not to demonstrate but to display. By scrupulously adhering to this inflexible law of objectivity, they achieve their design. The reader believes they do not exist, with the impression that the narrative matter generates itself before their eyes, being both its beginning and its end:

“Her father, M. Charles-Denis-Bartholomé Bovary, formerly an assistant-surgeon-major, compromised, around 1812, in conscription affairs, and compelled at that time to leave the service, had taken advantage of his personal advantages to capture a dowry of sixty thousand francs, offered by the daughter of a haberdasher, who fell in love with his appearance. A handsome man, boastful, jingling his spurs, wearing mustaches connected to his whiskers, fingers always adorned with rings, and dressed in flashy colors, he had the appearance of a brave man, with the easy enthusiasm of a traveling salesman.”

The invisible narrator is the linchpin of Flaubert’s theory of impersonality, the instrument that allowed him to put that idea into practice. It was while writing Madame Bovary that Flaubert became convinced that a work of art must give the impression of self-sufficiency and that to achieve this, the narrator must disappear: “The artist must arrange things in such a way that he makes posterity believe he has not lived” (Letter to Louise Colet, March 27, 1852). This invisibility demands from the narrator an impassive attitude toward what they narrate, prohibiting any interference in the story to draw conclusions or pronounce judgments. Their function is to describe, not to absolve or condemn. In the same letter to Louise, Flaubert asserts that all literature with a moral is inherently false: “There would be a fine book to write on demonstrative literature; the moment you prove something, you lie. God knows the beginning and the end; man, the middle. Art, like Him in space, must remain suspended in infinity, complete in itself, independent of its producer.” From that time on, his correspondence is filled with similar quotes; he tells the same to his friends Louis Bouilhet, Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, George Sand, and the Goncourt brothers. His belief that the narrator (Flaubert used terms like “the author,” “the producer,” “the artist,” which has caused significant misunderstanding) must be absolutely impartial extends not only to the ethical or social aspect of the story but also to celebrating the joys of the characters or pitying their miseries: their sole obligation is to communicate them. It is not surprising that readers accustomed to the romantic novel, where the narrator frequently describes both the characters' misfortunes and their feelings of sympathy or anger (and expects readers to share these emotions), accused Flaubert of being “cold,” “dehumanized,” and “performing autopsies” when reading, for example, the agony of Emma, narrated with utmost objectivity by the invisible narrator:

“Her chest immediately began to heave rapidly. Her whole tongue came out of her mouth; her eyes, rolling, paled like two lamp globes going out, to the point of appearing already dead, were it not for the frightening acceleration of her ribs, shaken by a furious breath, as if the soul were leaping to detach itself.”

Who becomes invisible, narrating from the third person, maintaining an impregnable neutrality regarding what happens in the fictional reality, not opining, not deriving moral or social teachings from the story, not being moved by the experiences of the characters, is the narrator of the novel, not the author. The narrator is always someone different from the author, another creation of the latter, just like the characters, and, undoubtedly, the most important, even in cases where it is an invisible narrator, because all the others depend on this secret character. The author of a novel bifurcates, invents a narrator (or several), and it is this one who adopts those attitudes of impassivity and objectivity, or others, for example in a romantic novel, where the omniscient narrator tends to be a visible presence, a subjectivity that while narrating the story narrates itself. This distinction is not made by Flaubert’s critics and therefore they give a questionable notion of his theories. It does not excuse them that Flaubert himself did not make a clear separation between author and narrator in his letters: it is enough to read his novels to know that he practiced it. His theories make sense and are valid if both gentlemen are differentiated; if they are confused, they are carried away by the wind, they become senseless. Because, just as it is chimerical to think that an author can create completely disregarding his experience, it is no less so to conceive that a man of flesh and blood, with a certain intellectual and emotional life, can, at the moment of creation, abolish his ideas, passions, instincts, obsessions, to become an impersonal narrator, a data communication machine. Impassivity and objectivity are, solely, astute and surreptitious ways of pouring that subjectivity into the narrated, a strategy in which conclusions, demonstrations, and sentimental reactions to what happens in the fictional reality seem to naturally transpire from the story to the reader and not be imposed by a dictatorial narrator. Instead of opining directly, the author does so from invisibility, sinuously: organizing the matter in a given way, chaining the episodes in a certain way, illuminating and obscuring the characters' behaviors at the right moments, choosing certain revealing events, provoking certain dialogues, making certain descriptions. Many years after having published Madame Bovary, Flaubert understood this and let George Sand know in an incomparable formula: “Je ne crois même pas que le romancier doive exprimer son opinion sur les choses de ce monde. Il peut la communiquer, mais je n’aime pas à ce qu’il la dise”.54 Indeed, thanks to the invisible narrator, he does not say it: he communicates it by osmosis, contaminating the narrative material with it, turning his subjective world into the objective world of fiction.

The invisible narrator existed in the novel before Madame Bovary, but usually only took charge of the narration for short periods, almost by the author’s oversight, who —especially the classic novelist— entrusted most of the narration to an intrusive, omniscient narrator, who is constantly alternating with the characters and who is sometimes an overwhelming presence in the fictional reality. The invisible narrator had never had the paramount role that it had in this novel and no author before Flaubert had achieved such effective techniques to disguise the existence of the narrator.

But the invisible narrator, although the main one, is not the only omniscient narrator of Madame Bovary. Despite having such firm ideas about impassivity and objectivity, Flaubert, fortunately, did not apply them dogmatically. He was a creator who sometimes theorized, not a theorist who wrote novels, and in the realm of creation, as in history, practice always overflows theory. There are moments when the omniscient narrator ceases to be invisible; the absence becomes a presence. These are carefully planned appearances, which fulfill a function within the narrative strategy. These are the moments when the invisible narrator is replaced by

2. The philosopher-narrator

The omniscient narrator, sometimes —it must be emphasized that these are few—, manifests himself with intrusions that reveal, for the brief space of a word or a phrase, the existence of a foreign being in the fictional reality. Some of these intrusions are, clearly, involuntary, failed acts of the narrator, like when, in the middle of an impersonal description of the region where Normandy, Picardy, and L’Ile de France blend, he sticks his nose in to opine that “C’est la que l’on fait les pires fromages de Neufchâtel de tout l’arrondissement”, or, a little later, when he concludes the account of the brief period of affection and attention from Emma towards her daughter, in the early days of Yonville, by ironically stating: Madame Bovary’s lyrical maternal outpourings, he says, “à d’autres qu’a des Yonvillais” would have reminded them of “la Sachette de Notre-Dame de Paris”.

But there are times when the omniscient narrator deliberately pushes aside the characters and objects to take the foreground of the narrative and pronounce, professorially, a philosophical sentence, a moral conclusion, a proverb or aphorism, a rule of life that finds a concrete example in the fact that he has narrated or is about to narrate: “car tout bourgeois, dans l’échauffement de sa jeunesse, ne fût-ce qu’un jour, une minute, s’est cru capable d’immenses passions, de hautes entreprises. Le plus mediocre libertin a rêvé des sultanes; chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d’un poète”. No character speaks, the narrator himself formulates this general and unappealable law of bourgeois behavior to explain Léon Dupuis’s conformity, his transition from the romantic young man he was in Yonville to the calculating and prudent man he is now in Rouen.

Momentary interruptions of the action or description, so that the authoritative voice of God the Father summarizes what has been narrated in an ethical, sociological, psychological, or historical norm, are a classic procedure in the novel, and in this regard, Flaubert follows a tradition. But not mechanically, instead, he gives this procedure a personal touch. The philosopher-narrator only takes form at certain important moments and their appearance is always brief, their presence elevates the fictional reality to a plane of solemnity and abstraction for only a few seconds, so that the progression of the narrative is not obstructed, dispersed, distracted by the intrusion. In addition to being brief, the voice of the philosopher-narrator has another invariable characteristic: its decisiveness. It never doubts, it speaks in a categorical manner, as when, after the invisible narrator relates that Léon, upon his return from Paris, is no longer the shy young man that Emma had known, but a confident man sure of his appeal, the story pauses so that a divine voice can instruct us thus: “Assurance depends on the environments in which it settles: one does not speak on the mezzanine as on the fourth floor, and the rich woman seems to have around her, to guard her virtue, all her banknotes, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.”

To the old resource of the intrusion of the master-narrator, Flaubert gives his own coloring: he reduces their interventions to certain opportune circumstances (I have not found more than about fifty appearances of the philosopher-narrator), gives them permanent qualities —brevity, generality, imperativeness— and ensures that these final verdicts, generic conclusions from the particular or partial moral lessons from the story, punctuate the narrative rhythmically. In the end, it becomes evident that the collection of assertions by the philosopher-narrator shapes a plane of the fictional reality: the ideological. Not the ideology of this or that character, but the general one, immanent to that society, the basic system of ideas in which the characters are born, live and die, and which is sufficiently lax to admit within it contradictory ideologies of classes, social groups, and even individuals. Thus, these sentences are a valuable part of the fictional reality, an indispensable complement to the material conveyed by italicized words. Together, they form the moral, political, religious, and metaphysical parameters within which the men and women of the novel move, the roots of their behaviors and feelings. Although both converge to design the rhetorical or philosophical level of the fictional reality, these italicized words and these masterful sentences are not the same thing. The former have a restricted scope, expressing relative and concrete truths, the beliefs, myths, or prejudices of a particular group —a family, a school, a professional sector, a sex, a social class, a region—, against which the omniscient narrator sometimes takes a critical and ironic distance (in these cases the italics underline the character of vicious, perverse deformation of reality that this cliché, proverb or linguistic formula has), while the philosopher-narrator always expresses abstract and absolute truths, unilateral; their phrases aim to be the human reality captured in a verbal formula, as when it begins the chapter that follows Emma’s agony thus defining men’s reaction to death: “After someone’s death, there is always a stupor that emerges, it is so difficult to understand the arrival of nothingness and to resign oneself to believe it.”

The philosopher-narrator expresses something more permanent and universal than the sayings and proverbs in which the ideology of a community is reflected: certain innate qualities, a general human essence that is prior to people and within which concrete existences take shape, represent a variant or modality. For example, when Emma, ruined, goes to Rodolphe to ask him for three thousand francs and he tells her that he doesn’t have them, the philosopher-narrator materializes to let us know that when money is mixed with love, it is at risk, as pecuniary matters tend to cool it down and kill it: “He was not lying. Had he had them, he would have given them, no doubt, even though it is generally unpleasant to do such grand gestures: a pecuniary request, of all the storms that fall on love, is the coldest and most uprooting.” While italics are the rhetorical level on a subjective plane —characters' beliefs and ideas—, the thought that the philosopher-narrator expounds is so on an objective plane: what he says aspires to be scientific knowledge, a mathematical formulation of human nature. Both planes, combined, structure the world of ideas and beliefs from which they judge, carry out good and evil, succeed or make mistakes, are vile or noble, ordinary or unusual, conformist or rebellious, the beings of the fictional reality.

(c) SINGULAR CHARACTER-NARRATORS

This refers to the voices of the characters themselves during brief periods when, without the intervention of the omniscient narrator, dialogue or monologue replaces description. This happens when the dialogue is not “described”, but directly exposed to the reader’s experience, through a short but total muting of the invisible narrator. In most cases, the silence is detectable by graphic signs: the dialogues are preceded by a dash, placed between quotation marks or separated by paragraphs and do not carry stage directions. In the episode of the agricultural competitions, three character-narrators replace the omniscient narrator to briefly and rotationally tell themselves from the first-person singular. The alternating voices are of Emma and Rodolphe (who are on a balcony), and the President, who, down on the stage, is calling out the awards of the competition:

—Sometimes, for example, when I came to your house…

“To M. Bizet, from Quincampoix”.

—Did I know that I would accompany you?

"Seventy francs!".

—Many times I wanted to leave, and I followed you, I stayed.

“Manures”.

—As I would stay tonight, tomorrow, the other days, all my life!

"To M. Caron, from Argueil, a gold medal!".

—For I have never found in anyone’s society such complete charm.

"To M. Bain, from Givry-Saint-Martin!".

—Also, I will take your memory.

The omniscient narrator has evaporated, his distant voice and invisible gaze have been displaced by the proper and immediate voices of the characters who narrate themselves. To the main change —character-narrators instead of an omniscient narrator— secondary changes are added, those of the three characters who take turns as narrating voices (Rodolphe, the President, Emma). In other cases, a character’s speech, even accompanied by a note from the invisible narrator (“said”, “affirmed”, “replied”), is so extensive that that reference is lost; the character’s voice submerges that of the omniscient narrator and it can also be said that there has been a change. For example, this speech from père Rouault comforting Charles over the death of Heloïse Dubuc, although it carries at the beginning the mark of the invisible narrator (“he said”), lasts so long that it becomes a monologue, a narration in the first person:

—I know what it’s like! he said, slapping him on the shoulder; I’ve been like you, me too! When I lost my poor late wife, I went into the fields to be alone; I fell at the foot of a tree, I cried, I called to God, I said foolish things to him; I wished I could be like the moles, which I saw on the branches, with worms wriggling in their bellies, burst, in short. And when I thought that others, at that very moment, were with their good little wives, holding them embraced against them, I hit the ground with my stick; I was almost mad, I wasn’t eating anymore; the idea of even going to the café disgusted me, you wouldn’t believe it. Well, slowly, one day chasing the other, a spring on a winter and an autumn over a summer, it flowed thread by thread, crumb by crumb; it’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone down, I mean, because you always have something left at the bottom, as if… a weight, there, on your chest! But since it’s all our fate, we shouldn’t also let ourselves wither, and, because others are dead, want to die… You have to shake yourself, Mr. Bovary; it will pass! Come see us; my daughter thinks of you from time to time, you know, and she says like this that you forget her. Spring will soon be here; we’ll make you shoot a rabbit in the warren, to distract you a bit.

It is not accurate, as some critics claim, that dialogue is insignificant in Madame Bovary. In the first chapters the dominant form is certainly description, and, except in the initial scene, the voice that is heard almost all the time is that of the omniscient narrator. But things change from the Bovarys' arrival in Yonville, which opens, precisely, with a great collective conversation at the Lyon d’Or. From then on the voices of the characters are heard more frequently, and this is accentuated in the third part of the novel —from the beginning of Léon and Emma’s love to the end—, where dialogue becomes, without a doubt, the main form of narration. Thus, the function of these character-narrators gains importance as the story progresses.

These are not the only cases where there are changes from the omniscient narrator to character-narrators. Sometimes this happens, in a less evident but more original way, within the same paragraph, when, without the prior notice of a new paragraph, a dash or quotation marks, an involved voice in the action, that is, that of a character, ends a sentence that the invisible narrator has started. However, this also has a graphic indication: the phrase or word of the character-narrator is

These are not the only instances where there are shifts from an omniscient narrator to character-narrators. Sometimes this happens, in a less evident but more original way, within the same paragraph, when, without the previous notice of a new paragraph, dash or quotation marks, a voice involved in the action, that is, the voice of a character, finishes a sentence that has been started by the invisible narrator. This, however, also has a graphical indication: the phrase or word of the character-narrator is in italics.

(d) ITALICIZED WORDS: THE RHETORICAL LEVEL

In Madame Bovary, there are just over a hundred words or phrases that, to differentiate from the others, the author had printed in italics. In some cases, this typographical distinction obeys a traditional custom and Flaubert uses it, like other authors of his time or the past, for the titles of a book, a newspaper or the name of an opera, for an Anglicism, an Italianism or a Latinism from Homais, or for a regionalism, like those turban-shaped rolls, the cheminots, that are eaten in Rouen during Lent; for nicknames, for a group idiom (the students of Rouen call nouveau the rookie student) or to specify that it is a phonetic writing: Charbovari.

But these cases comprise a minimal part of the words in italics. The other constitutes a proper use, audacious, an innovation from the narrative point of view. Critics do not seem to have noticed it. The only one who stopped to consider the curious fact of italics was Thibaudet, who pointed out that they indicate that these words are not part of the author’s language, but are examples of the clichéd language used by the neighbors of Yonville. Elsewhere, he observes that through these clichés Flaubert quotes the bourgeois as others quote Latin and that they prefigure the Dictionnaire des idées reçues.55 Both observations are fair but insufficient. The function of these italics is richer, affecting that axis of the novel structure that are the narrator’s shifts.

Here is an example. The mother has taught Charles Bovary, as a child, to read, play the piano, and sing some romances:

Mais, à tout cela, M. Bovary, peu soucieux des lettres, disait que ce n’était pas la peine! Would they ever have enough to support him in government schools, buy him a position or a business fund? Besides, avec du toupet, un homme réussit toujours dans le monde. Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child wandered around the village.

Free indirect style—the only technical contribution of Flaubert that criticism highlights—consists very clearly of a form of ambiguous narration, in which the narrator narrates so close to the character, that the reader has the impression, at times, that the one speaking is the character itself (for example, in that paragraph, the sentence: "Would they ever have enough to support him in government schools, buy him a position or a business fund?"). The root of the free indirect style is ambiguity, that doubt or confusion of the point of view, which is no longer that of the narrator but is not yet that of the character. A simple glance at the example I cite is enough to verify that in the case of the phrases in italics it is something different. Here ambiguity has given way to certainty: in the paragraph, for a very short time but without a doubt, there is a substitution of narrator, a double change of voices. At the beginning of the paragraph, who is telling is the omniscient narrator, but in the middle of that first sentence an intrusive voice is added and superimposed on his. Monsieur Bovary has said “ce n’est pas la peine” that his wife teaches all these things to the child and the narrator picks up that voice and repeats with him what he has said, but always manifesting his existence: that’s why he uses the imperfect. Thus, in the first phrase in italics, two narrators coexist:

(1) A single character-narrator, M. Bovary, whose presence is betrayed by the italics, typographic signal by which the invisible narrator takes distance, moves away from the story without disappearing completely, and

(2) The omniscient narrator, a voice that narrates to another voice, elusive shadow but still detectable, by that verbal tense that is his (the imperfect), that distinguishes him from the intrusive voice.

Then, the invisible narrator continues narrating until the next phrase in italics. There is no longer coexistence, the double voice becomes one, the omniscient narrator is relieved by the character narrator. There is no doubt, who says avec du toupet, un homme réussit toujours dans le monde is Monsieur Bovary. In addition to italics, the verbal tense has changed and that indefinite past consummates the exile, for the fleeting span of the sentence, of the invisible narrator. But he returns immediately to report that Madame Bovary bit her lips and that the child wandered around the village. Thus, in a few lines of text, we have witnessed several changes of narrator. Two voices have allied, without the need for separate or followed points—the prior notice of the traditional novel—to tell us that episode. The point of view has changed five times; we have been brought closer and taken away from fictional reality: we start seeing it from the outside, with the invisible narrator, then we were introduced into it to hear what happened from the voice of a character, we returned to the outside, we returned to the voice of the same character and we returned once more to the outside.

That is the importance of italics. In many cases, such as this one, they signal a change of narrator, a swift shift in perspective. Of course, italics were unnecessary; Flaubert could have done without them, like a modern novelist who does not hesitate to mix the voices of an omniscient narrator and character-narrators in the same sentence if they believe it necessary. This flexibility of viewpoint is now possible thanks to someone, one day, doing it for the first time. And the person who began to make these changes — highlighting them with a graphic signal to avoid confusion, perhaps frightened by his audacity, perhaps without fully realizing the revolution he was initiating by breaking the rigid separation between omniscient narrator and character-narrator, who before never shared the same sentence — was Flaubert, in Madame Bovary. I do not need to insist on the advantages that these changes bring to the story: they speed it up, condense it, and at the same time — an essential fact for the totalitarian nature of the novel — allow the part (the sentence, the paragraph) to reproduce that totality that the novelistic whole aspires to achieve. A small text narrates a fact simultaneously from two perspectives, that of an impartial observer and that of the actors themselves. Here, for example, is how the invisible narrator and Charles’s mother take turns telling the bad impression that Emma makes on her mother-in-law: "Elle lui trouvait un genre trop relevé pour leur position de fortune; le bois, le sucre et la chandelle filaient comme dans une grande maison, and the amount of embers burned in the kitchen would have sufficed for twenty-five dishes!".

But italics not only signify changes in the narrator; in many cases, the voices of characters that enter the voice of the narrator and silence it for a moment, say, as Thibaudet observed, commonplaces. That is, these sentences compose the rhetorical level of the fictitious world: they are expressions coined by a community, not by isolated individuals, in which prejudices, beliefs, a way of seeing reality and living it have been imprinted. “Avec du toupet, un homme réussit toujours dans le monde”: This sentence from Monsieur Bovary, father, expresses a pragmatic and optimistic philosophy, of fierce individualism, the mentality of the winner who believes that in life to want is to be able. This formula to which Charles’s father unconsciously appeals, shows what Marx called a “fetish,” an element of the ideological superstructure of fictitious reality, which, precisely, Emma’s life — the historical level of that reality — denies. Madame Bovary’s story proves that wanting is not being able, that it is not enough to be bold and imaginative to succeed in what one proposes. When we read this opinion of Charles’s mother about Emma: "Elle lui trouvait un genre trop relevé pour leur position de fortune," that voice not only pronounces a picturesque phrase, characteristic of a certain moment and place in the history of the French language. Above all, it speaks to a narrowly prejudiced mentality. An entire conformist and classist class, prudent, convinced that everyone should be content with what they have and not try to leave the economic-social box they occupy, which advocates resignation as a virtue, speaks through her mouth. That is, when the characters utter these phrases, they de-individualize, they embody a community. Thus, curiously, these voices that constitute the most vivid and dynamic part of the narration — the character speaking directly to the reader — are at the same time the most dead; these are robots, through which a numerous and abstract ventriloquist speaks: a family, a guild, a religion, a moral. In this sense, italics simultaneously mean another change, in addition to the narrator’s: the level of reality. From a psychological, or historical plane, the narration, when these voices appear, rises (or descends) to that rhetorical level in which, through crystallized forms of language, the intellectual and moral patterns of a community are expressed.

The particular movement that changes of narrator and level of reality, these quick and discreet substitutions, give to the narration, is creating the special substance that is the fictitious reality. This process of becoming, developing, organizing, completing according to rigorous and coherent temporal, spatial and reality-level changes, transforms its collected elements, all of which come from real reality, into something different. The countless changes become natural thanks to Flaubert’s style, to its versatile nature that carries them out always within a continuity, that makes the permanent and the provisional, the break and the stable, compatible.

(e) OBSTRUCTIVE IMAGES

Style was Flaubert’s great obsession, the root of the enormous suffering that each book entailed for him. His correspondence is filled with testimonies of his struggle against “the affronts of style,” and it is astonishing to see in his manuscripts the meticulousness with which each sentence has been made, unmade, and remade, meticulously attending to the requirements of sound, harmony, precision, and visual appeal. However, when he predicts in his letters that his great merit in Madame Bovary will have been to give prose an artistic level that until then only poetry had achieved, he does not think of what, for me, is the greatest achievement of his style—what I would call its functionality—but rather, he thinks of formal virtues not directly dependent or inevitably linked to what seems to me the primary obligation of the novelistic prose: the narrative. He thinks, without a doubt, of the ability of that prose to move the reader’s sensibility through its music and plasticity, regardless of its narrative task. This is the explanation for the images—that are quite numerous—that stand here and there like solid and striking sculptural groups in the fictional territory. They are constructed with care and usually conclude a description or an event. Sometimes, in addition to being effective, they are useful because the accuracy of the comparison makes the psychological, moral, or symbolic connotations of an episode more visible, such as the metaphors that appear in the description of Emma and Léon’s erotic carriage, “plus close qu’un tombeau et ballotée comme un navire.” But the truth is that there are too many of them, and many are artificial, with a contrivance that clashes with the perfectly feigned naturalness of the style. Instead of reinforcing the power of persuasion, they weaken it. At some point, Flaubert realized the danger and wrote to Louise that his novel was filling up with metaphors like lice: “Je crois que ma Bovary va aller; mais je suis gêné par le sens métaphorique qui décidément me domine trop. Je suis devoré de comparaisons, comme on l’est de poux, et je ne passe mon temps qu’á les écraser; mes phrases en grouillent” (Letter of December 27, 1852). He didn’t kill enough of them. Instead of elevating the “artistic” level of the novel, those images give, at times, a mannerist, period-like aspect to his style, and some of them are even facile and of questionable taste, like the one that compares Charles’s happiness after his second marriage with digestion: “le coeur plein des felicites de la nuit, l’esprit tranquille, la chair contente, il s’en allait ruminant son bonheur, comme ceux qui máchent encoré, après diner, le goût des truffes qu’ils digérent.”

In contrast, Flaubert does not seem to have been aware of the importance of his great discovery: free indirect style. I have not found in his correspondence a single “theoretical” formulation of this narrative method, which is precisely the key to the flexibility of his style, allowing the constant shifts, the harmonious blending of different perspectives that structure the fictional reality on many planes at once. I do not mean to say that he didn’t know what he was doing when using this stylistic device in Madame Bovary, but rather, it was probably, above all, a practice for him—something he cared about because of the effects he obtained—not like metaphors, valued for their own sake—and he may not have suspected how subversive this technique would be in the history of the novel.

(f) FREE INDIRECT STYLE

Flaubert’s great technical contribution consists of bringing the omniscient narrator so close to the character that the boundaries between them evaporate, creating an ambivalence where the reader doesn’t know if what the narrator says comes from the invisible storyteller or from the character who is mentally monologuing: “Où done avait-elle appris cette corruption, presque immatérielle à forcé d’être profonde et dissimulée?” (Where did she learn this corruption, almost immaterial due to its depth and secrecy?). Who is the subject thinking? Is it the invisible narrator or Léon Dupuis, the author of this unsettling question about Emma’s nature? The cleverness lies in having cut back the omniscience of the narrator; they no longer know everything, they have doubts, their power has diminished tremendously, becoming identical to that of a character. And since there is a character—Léon Dupuis—who, depending on the context, perceives and suffers Emma’s “corruption” more and more, the reader has the impression that a transubstantiation has occurred, that it is perhaps Léon and not the invisible narrator who asks the question.

This style is used to narrate intimacy (memories, feelings, sensations, ideas) from within, that is, to bring the reader and the character as close as possible. Before Madame Bovary, novels included monologues, of course. At certain moments, characters spoke to themselves and recounted what they felt, thought, or remembered. The difference lies in how they did it: they spoke, they didn’t think. Even when the narrator adds “Fulano thought” and then withdraws from the narration, what remains in the story is a voice, a character theatrically reciting their inner life, describing their subjective life from the outside, using a logical discourse—which rarely differs grammatically or conceptually from that of dialogues—to represent it. The free indirect style, by relativizing the point of view, achieves a pathway to the character’s interiority, an approach to their consciousness, which is even greater because the intermediary—the omniscient narrator—seems to vanish. The reader has the impression of having been received into the very heart of that intimacy, of listening and seeing a consciousness in motion before or without the need for it to become an oral expression, in other words, feeling that they share subjectivity. Flaubert’s method to achieve this is a wise use of verb tenses and, above all, of interrogation. Here’s an example in which the happiness Charles experienced in his marriage with Emma is described; the free indirect style makes the entire description seem (is it?) a silent monologue of Bovary himself:

Jusqu’à présent, qu’avait-il eu de bon dans l’existence? Était-ce son temps de collège, où il restait enfermé entre ces hauts murs, seul au milieu de ses camarades plus riches ou plus forts que lui dans leurs classes, qu’il faisait rire par son accent, qui se moquaient de ses habits, et dont les mères venaient au parloir avec des pâtisseries dans leur manchon? Était-ce plus tard, lorsqu’il étudiait la médecine et n’avait jamais la bourse assez ronde pour payer la contredanse à quelque petite ouvrière qui fût devenue sa maîtresse?

Critics have pointed out that the free indirect style relies on a specific use of the imperfect tense; it is this Machiavellian use of this verb tense that subtly shifts the narration from the external world to the character’s inner world and vice versa. The interrogative form is almost always a complementary resource to facilitate this transition from one plane to another, so that the shift from omniscient narrator to character-narrator is unperceived, avoiding disruptions in the narrative. Moreover, the imperfect tense is not absolutely essential; in certain cases, to represent the character’s mental life for just an instant, like a flash, the suppression of the verb is sufficient: “Le père Rouault n’eût pas été faché qu’on le débarrassât de sa filie, qui ne lui servait guère dans sa maison. Il l’excusait intérieurement, trouvant qu’elle avait trop d’esprit pour la culture, métier maudit du ciel, puisqu’on n’y voyait jamais de millionaire” (Father Rouault would not have minded being rid of his daughter, who was of little use to him at home. He excused her internally, thinking she had too much spirit for farming, a cursed profession, since one never saw millionaires there). There is no doubt that the one speaking at the beginning and end of the quote is the omniscient narrator, and it is the invisible narrator describing what Father Rouault thought of his daughter. In this paragraph, there is a process of approaching the character’s consciousness. The first sentence is distant, the narrator describes something they know and that is far from them. However, in the second sentence, the character is closer to the invisible narrator and the reader (the clue is the adverb intérieurement), and doesn’t the underlined sentence seem like an exclamation thought by Father Rouault himself? But no, of course, his conclusion (“puisqu’on n’y voyait jamais de millionaire”) makes it clear that the omniscient narrator speaks again. The prose of Madame Bovary owes its foldable, extensive, and reductive quality to the free indirect style, which allows it to carry out all those shifts in space and time without altering the narrative rhythm and unity.

The indirect free style is logical. Later, Joyce will break those logical rules to give a more approximate equivalent of the mental life, creating what has been called the stream of consciousness. This would not have been possible, no doubt, without Flaubert’s invention. The free indirect style was the first major step of the novel in directly narrating the mental process, describing intimacy not through its external manifestations (actions or words) interpreted by a narrator or oral monologue but by representing it through writing that seemed to domicile the reader in the center of the character’s subjectivity.

Part Three

Chapter 5: The First Modern Novel

If the book I am writing with so much difficulty turns out well, I will have established through its execution two truths, which for me are axioms: first, that poetry is purely subjective, that there are no beautiful subjects of art in literature, and that Yvetot is as good as Constantinople; and, consequently, one can write anything as well as anything else. The artist must elevate everything; he is like a pump, with a large pipe descending into the depths of things, into the deep layers. He sucks and gushes out into the sun in giant sprays what was flat underground and what was unseen.

(Letter to Louise Colet, June 25-26, 1853)

I. THE BIRTH OF THE ANTIHERO

On May 26, 1845, Flaubert writes to Le Poittevin: “You know that beautiful things suffer no description.” This is a great lie; at that time, the romantics did nothing else but describe beauty exhaustively. For them, it is true, the beautiful consisted of the poles of reality: Quasimodo and the lovely gypsy girl. In romantic novels, men, things, and events are either beautiful or horrible, attractive or repulsive. The sublime, the monstrous, the lofty, the atrocious are the great romantic appropriation of life and its novelistic conversion into something dignified and artistically enchanting. What is excluded from the romantic novel is that zone of the human where faces, objects, and actions are not as repulsive as Quasimodo nor as charming as Esmeralda: the overwhelming percentage that constitutes normality, the routine backdrop against which the outstanding figures of heroes and monsters rise. This intermediate limbo is metamorphosed into “beauty” in Madame Bovary, where everything equidistant from those extremes corresponds to the dull, flat, and sad existence of ordinary people. I am not saying that Flaubert initiated the novelistic representation of the petite bourgeoisie, as the romantic novel had described a feudal and aristocratic world. Balzac’s novels are full of characters representing all strata of the bourgeoisie—including provincial rural bourgeoisie—and yet that does not prevent his heroes (at least many of them) from having the antithetical character—being admirable or execrable—typical of the romantic novel. It is not the world of the bourgeoisie, but something broader, which transversely covers social classes, that Madame Bovary turns into the central material of the novel; the realm of mediocrity, the gray universe of the man without qualities. Only for this reason, Flaubert’s novel deserves to be considered the founder of the modern novel, almost entirely erected around the slender silhouette of the antihero.

Flaubert reached the conclusion that mediocrity was deeply representative of humanity several years before writing Madame Bovary. This theme floated in his letters as early as 1846: “Denying the existence of lukewarm feelings because they are lukewarm is like denying the sun as long as it is not at noon. The truth is as much in the half-tints as in the strong tones” (Letter to Louise, December 11, 1846). “It is not the great misfortunes that cause unhappiness, nor the great joys that cause happiness, but the fine and imperceptible fabric of a thousand banal circumstances, a thousand dull details that make up a life of radiant calm or infernal agitation” (Letter to Louise, March 20, 1847). Five months later, he returns to the same subject with similar words: “Indeed, it is not the great misfortunes that one should fear in life, but the small ones. I fear more the pinpricks than the saber blows. Just as we do not need dedications and sacrifices at all times, but we always need from others, semblances of friendship and affection, attentions, and manners in the end” (Letter to Louise, August 29, 1847). This conviction that life is not only made up of antipodes, that in most cases happiness and misfortune are simply the gradual and imperceptible accumulation of small and trivial facts, that the small and the opaque are more characteristic of humans than the grand and the radiant, means that when Bouilhet and Du Camp, after reading La Tentation, suggested a “common” theme for his novel, they were formulating something that existed as a potentiality in the mind of their friend. Because these ideas had been linked from the beginning—as everything in Flaubert’s life—with literature. In 1847, he assured Louise Colet: "Beautiful subjects make mediocre works."56 He was exaggerating, of course, as a well-executed “beautiful subject” can produce an extraordinary work, but it is interesting to note that four years before Madame Bovary, he was already defending plebeian themes. Undoubtedly, he did it in the name of a realistic conception of the novel: the vulgar and the poor seem legitimate to him because they are true, they represent human experience. When he was writing Madame Bovary, he states it firmly, in a precursor image to Faulkner’s famous one that speaks of men on earth as a handful of insects on a dog’s body that it can shake off at any time: “But is not Society the infinite fabric of all these pettinesses, these subtleties, these hypocrisies, these miseries? Humanity swarms like a dirty handful of lice on a vast clod” (Letter to Louise, June 25-26, 1853). Madame Bovary is indeed a world of beings whose existences are composed of trivialities, hypocrisies, miseries, and minor dreams. This, in addition to signifying a break with the eponymous worlds of the romantic novel, inaugurates the contemporary novelistic era, where mediocrity will systematically flood the heroes, diminishing their moral, historical, and psychological greatness, until, in the end, in our days, in a culmination of this process of deterioration, they become, in the works of writers like Beckett or Nathalie Sarraute, residues, living entities in a larval state, in an agitation of vegetal tropisms, or even further, in the novels of a Sollers, barely a noise of words. This progressive decrease of the character—which will not end with the death of the novel, as some pessimists fear, but probably in a contrary process of reconstruction, yet on different foundations, of the novelistic hero—undoubtedly began with the first published novel of the man who in the final years of his life boasted of having built a narrative based on “normality”: "I have always strived to penetrate the soul of things and to stop at the greatest generalities, and I have purposely turned away from the accidental and the dramatic. No monsters and no heroes!"57

However, this incorporation of the rule is not carried out in Madame Bovary, despite what Flaubert says, at the expense of the exception: Quasimodo also briefly crosses the streets of Yonville transformed into a blind man with pustules, and Emma owes some of her traits to the precious romantic gypsy girl. That is why I said that Flaubert’s “realism” is more a completed romanticism than a rejected one. Madame Bovary extended the prevailing idea of realism in its time and gave a new impetus to the totalizing design of the novel genre. Precisely in the middle of writing the novel, Flaubert wrote to Louise that everything in life should be a subject for creation: “Formerly, it was believed that only sugarcane gave sugar. Sugar is now extracted from almost everything; it is the same with poetry. Let us extract it from anything, for it lies in everything and everywhere: not an atom of matter that does not contain thought; and let us get used to considering the world as a work of art whose procedures we must reproduce in our works” (Letter, March 27, 1853).

II. THE NOVEL IS FORM

To make beautiful what until then seemed by antonomasia an anti-artistic theme, Flaubert made use of form, of course. This meant arriving at the certainty that there are no good or bad subjects, that all can be one or the other depending solely on their treatment. This may seem obvious to us today, but at the time, this formalist profession of faith made to Louise was subversive: “That’s why there are neither beautiful nor ugly subjects, and one could almost establish, from the point of view of pure Art, that there are none at all, since style alone is an absolute way of seeing things” (Letter of January 16, 1852). The romantic novelists, like their predecessors, had always put this theory into practice, but they had not intellectually considered it; on the contrary, they had always said that the beauty of a work depended on factors such as sincerity, originality, and the feelings implied in the subject. Moreover, even in the 19th century and earlier, some poets had reflected on the absolute importance of form, but this had not happened among novelists, even the greatest ones. It should not be forgotten that until then, the novel was still considered the most plebeian and least artistic genre of literature, the food of common minds, while poetry and drama were the elevated and noble forms of creation. There had already been brilliant novelists, of course, but they were intuitive geniuses who gladly accepted their role as second-class creators (sometimes after failing as first-class creators, composing poems and tragedies), whose mission, according to the popular level of their audience, was to “entertain.” With Flaubert, a curious paradox occurs: the same writer who turns the world of mediocre men and base spirits into a novelistic theme, warns that, just as in poetry, in fiction everything essentially depends on form, that it decides the ugliness and beauty of the subjects, their truth and falsehood, and proclaims that the novelist must be, above all, an artist, an tireless and incorruptible worker of style. It is a matter, in short, of achieving this symbiosis: to give life, through a purified and exquisite art (aristocratic, he says), to mediocrity, to the most shared experiences of men. This is what he enthusiastically praises in Louise Colet’s story “La paysanne”: “You have condensed and realized, in an aristocratic form, a common story, the substance of which belongs to everyone. And that, for me, is the true mark of strength in literature. The commonplace is handled only by fools or by the very great. Mediocre natures avoid it; they seek the ingenious, the unexpected” 58. I do not know if Musa actually achieved this alliance in her story, but there is no doubt that Flaubert achieved it in Madame Bovary, and it is one of the feats of the book, as Baudelaire saw it, according to whom the novel demonstrates that “all subjects are indifferently good or bad, depending on how they are treated, and that the most common can become the best” 59.

To vindicate the common theme for the novel was simultaneous in Flaubert with the highest demand for mastery of language, with a purpose repeated a thousand times in his letters of those years, which he summarized in this formula: to give narrative prose the artistic status that until then only poetry had achieved. He knew that if he succeeded, he would have made the “ordinary lives” he narrates in his novel rise to the level of the epic: “Wanting to give prose the rhythm of verse (leaving it prose and very prose) and to write ordinary life as one writes history or epic (without distorting the subject) is perhaps an absurdity. That is what I sometimes wonder. But it is perhaps also a great and very original attempt!” (Letter to Louise, March 27, 1853). Just as he wanted to dispute poetry for the virtues of sonority, precision, harmony, and rhythm, at other times he said that his prose should have, like drama, speed, clarity, and passion: “What a damn thing prose is! It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. However, I believe that one can give it the consistency of verse. A good prose sentence should be like a good verse, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous. At least that’s my ambition (one thing I’m sure of is that no one has ever had a more perfect prose type in mind than me; but as for execution, what weaknesses, what weaknesses, my God!). It also seems to me not impossible to give psychological analysis the speed, clarity, and impetuosity of purely dramatic narration” 60.

These two concerns—utilizing the common theme and obsessively caring for form—were inseparable in the author of Madame Bovary. Strangely, both close and distant disciples will divide these attitudes and take sides for one against the other. Even in our days, this double lineage of novelists, irreconcilably at odds with each other, recognize Flaubert as their master. The war between “realists” and “formalists,” who equally consider Madame Bovary as a precursor, began during Flaubert’s lifetime. The most immediate influence that the novel had was on the generation of Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, Huysmans—writers who always saw it as a model of the kind of realism they officially enshrined in French literature. Maupassant, in the preface to Pierre et Jean, claims to have learned from Flaubert himself the naturalist axiom: that anything can be a good literary theme, even the most mundane and trivial, because “the slightest thing contains a bit of the unknown,” and Emile Zola dedicates to Flaubert the most enthusiastic study in Les Romanciers naturalistes. For this movement that made everyday themes the primary subject of narrative and sought to substitute exceptional characters with ordinary men who faithfully reflected a social environment, the grand literary fresco in which Charles Bovary, Homais, Bournisien, Rodolphe, Léon, and above all, Emma, were portrayed, became an object of worship and imitation. This also holds true for other literatures where naturalistic theses took hold, such as Spain, where the best novel of the 19th century, La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas, owes much to Madame Bovary. However, the naturalists did not practice the notion of realism embodied in Flaubert’s novel in an orthodox manner. The novel extended the unexplored areas of human experience for fiction but without excluding those that had been the body of narrative for centuries. This totalizing process stopped and impoverished because the naturalists exclusively focused on describing the everyday and the social and because they adopted formal habits that were mechanically repeated from novel to novel. Some books by Zola are still readable, and there is no doubt that Maupassant’s stories have notable artistic quality, but, considered as a whole, naturalism left a lesser mark because the novelists often neglected form. “To make something interesting, it is enough to look at it for a long time,” Flaubert had said 61. Yes, but in his case, what was interesting as a literary subject was subjected to a scrupulous formal treatment capable of endowing it with artistic status. The mediocre—the ordinary—only becomes alive in literature if the creator manages to imbue it with a certain exceptionality (just as the exceptional only lives in literature if it appears with the features of a certain normality), that is, as a privileged and unique experience. What is remarkable about Madame Bovary is that its vulgar beings, with their pedestrian ambitions and problems, impress, through the structure and writing that create them, as beings out of the ordinary within their common way of being. Many movements that proclaimed themselves realists failed because for them, realism consisted of taking pieces of common and generic reality and describing it with the utmost fidelity and minimal artistic elaboration. One thing does not exclude the other: the choice of a “realistic” theme does not exempt a narrator from formal responsibility because, regardless of the subject on which he writes, everything in his book will ultimately be subject to form. Flaubert noticed in the writers who considered themselves his disciples a disdain for the purely aesthetic factor, and this horrified him. Therefore, he refused to assume the role of founder that they conferred upon him and often denounced realism (“They believe me to be in love with reality, while I abhor it; for it is in hatred of realism that I undertook this novel,” he said to Madame Roger des Genettes regarding Madame Bovary, 62 not because the word suggested a theme that repulsed him, but disinterest in “style” and “beauty,” which were, for Flaubert, the reason for literature’s existence. He explained this to George Sand, who had mentioned to him the enormous influence he had among young writers: “Regarding my friends, you add ‘my school.’ But I am wearing myself out trying not to have a school! A priori, I reject them all. Those whom I see often and whom you designate seek everything I despise and are hardly concerned with what torments me. I consider the technical detail, the local information, the historical and exact aspect of the gods to be very secondary. Above all, I search for beauty, of which my companions are barely in pursuit. I see them indifferent when I am ravaged with admiration or horror” 63.

This all-consuming aesthetic passion is as essential to Madame Bovary as its incorporation of the theme of mediocre life. A whole series of writers, including some of the greatest modern prose writers, admire this formal aspect with denial or forgetfulness of the other, declaring themselves Flaubertians for reasons opposite to those of Zola or Maupassant. The foremost among the great ones is the novelist-artist par excellence, the most intelligent and refined of the narrators of his time, the master of point of view acrobatics, the magician of ambiguity: Henry James. He had the opportunity to personally know Flaubert in the last years of his life and left an emotional image of what Sunday afternoons were like in Flaubert’s small apartment on Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where writer friends would come to chat. In a study published in 1902, James crowned Flaubert as “the novelist of novelists,” highlighting almost exclusively the artistic splendor that, thanks to the author of Madame Bovary, the novelistic genre acquired 64. A subtle and penetrating essay, as partial and arbitrary as Zola’s (though for opposite reasons), it accurately summarizes what form meant to Flaubert and his method of work, which James said consisted of finding a style in order to “feel” a subject, as opposed to the romantic novelists who believed that one had to “feel” a subject to be able to express it adequately. Less persuasive—but symptomatic—is James’s thesis that in Madame Bovary, the form is rich and the material poor, and frankly absurd is the reproach that Flaubert was unable to create “rich and interesting” characters in that novel (he actually wanted to do the opposite). Although Henry James objected to some of Flaubert’s books (in 1883, in French poets and novelists, he made a barbaric statement: that L’Éducation sentimentale was of no interest), he was the first to recognize, in The art of fiction, that thanks to Flaubert, the novel had become one of the great artistic forms in Europe. The estheticist reading of Flaubert has a lineage that reaches to our days, where, as I mentioned before, French authors of the “nouveau roman,” staunch formalists, considered him their precursor for having posed literature, a century before them, as a language problem. A significant step in this line of “artistic” descendants (to oppose them, with a schematic formula, to the “realists”) is Proust, for whom Flaubert is above all the master of style, a narrator capable of identifying with what he describes, of disappearing into the object of his description, which, he says, is the only way to give life and truth to the described. The author of À la recherche du temps perdu admired Flaubert less than Balzac, but it is likely that his debt to the former is greater than to the latter. The descriptive method of Flaubert, the free indirect style, as we saw earlier, opened a door to the character’s subjectivity and allowed for the direct representation of the life of the mind for the first time. In Madame Bovary, this system is almost always used to show how, from any stimulus from reality, the human mind rescues extinguished experiences through memory, how every sensation, feeling, or deeply lived event is not an isolated thing but the opening of a process to which memory will add senses and meanings over time as new experiences occur. Memory, erected as indelible, a determined battering ram against time, recapturing from each new incident what has already been lived, is a constant element in Madame Bovary, and in this respect, the book becomes a precursor of Proust’s prodigious adventure: to recreate reality based on this predominant level of experience, memory, which organizes and reorganizes the real, perpetually rebuilding what its great enemy and provider, time, is destroying.

III. INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

Regarding narrative technique, unanimous criticism has highlighted the importance of the free indirect style, invented by Flaubert, for the modern novel. Thibaudet was the first to point it out: "Today, the free indirect style is circulating everywhere, and it is certainly to Flaubert, imitating Flaubert, that we owe it."65 It is not merely an imitation, at least not in the case of authentic creators capable of using external forms in an original way (thus making those forms no longer external but their own). Imitation in literature is not a moral problem but an artistic one: all writers use, to varying degrees, previously used forms, but only those incapable of transforming these borrowings into something personal deserve to be called imitators. Originality not only lies in inventing procedures but also in giving one’s own enriching use to the already invented ones. The significance of the free indirect style does not merely stem from its usage by countless contemporary novelists with characteristics similar to those used by Flaubert but rather because it became the starting point for a series of procedures that revolutionized traditional narrative forms, allowing the novel to depict mental reality and vividly represent psychological intimacy. The free indirect style is, on one hand, a precursor to the Proustian discourse for the slow, oily reconstruction of the past through memory and, on the other hand, the most immediate predecessor of interior monologue as first conceived by Joyce in the final episode of Ulysses and later perfected and diversified (to represent not only the development of a “normal” consciousness but also various forms of psychological “abnormality”) by Faulkner. In this way, the entire vast psychologistic sector of the modern novel, where the dominant perspective in fictional reality is the human mind, owes its debt to Madame Bovary, the first novel that attempted to represent the functioning of consciousness without relying, as had been done until then, on its external manifestations.

IV. OBJECTIVITY TECHNIQUES: THE BEHAVIORIST NOVEL

Criticism has overlooked, however, perhaps due to the prevalent Manichaeism in contemporary thought, which demands everything to be univocal, nothing to partake of two opposing principles simultaneously, the relationship between Flaubert and the branch of contemporary narrative that is adversarial (superficially speaking) to the psychological trend. I am referring to the so-called behaviorist novel, where actions predominate over motivations, and the primary perspective of the narrative is not the inner world of ideas and feelings but the external world of behaviors, objects, and places. This novel describes without interpreting, shows without judging, and emphasizes the visual factor, aspiring to be “objective.” Does it not have an irremediable kinship with the tireless preacher of impersonality and impassivity, and thus, with the first novel in which these theories were embodied? Impersonality, which Flaubert demanded for the novel, also tempted some poets of his time. The Parnassians, led by Leconte de Lisle, aimed to eliminate the subjectivity of the author and advocated for a serene art, a poetry with the solid and visible beauty of a natural landscape or a sculptural group. However, poetry soon changed direction, and subjectivity regained its place. In modern poetry, the objective tendency is undoubtedly the least valuable. In contrast, it has persisted in the novel until our days, and in some periods and countries—such as the United States during the period between the World Wars—it dominated the narrative and produced talented novelists like Dos Passos and Hemingway.

The objectivist tendency generally involves the predominant use of the perspective of an omniscient narrator, which I refer to as the “invisible narrator,” and the crucial role played by description. Some critics attribute the invention of the invisible narrator to Hemingway due to the brilliant use he made of this point of view, while others argue that its appearance in the novel was a consequence of cinema. In reality, as we saw before, it is the hegemonic point of view in Madame Bovary, and Flaubert was the first to employ certain writing techniques to make it possible. As for description, I want to quote a phrase by Geneviève Bollème about how this technique evolved in the novel thanks to Flaubert: "Until him, description only entered the narrative to support it, to make it more truthful, and its role was only episodic. But for him, it became the unique experience through which it seemed possible to express the movements of life. Description is the narrative because it is the analysis and expression of the feelings that things symbolize or support, merging with them and them with it."66 Geneviève Bollème establishes a genealogy between Flaubert and those writers who, like Robbe-Grillet, an avid observer, have reduced the novel to this single procedure. Starting from Madame Bovary, description became a prominent function in novels narrated by an invisible narrator, precisely because one of the most effective tactics to conceal the existence of the omniscient narrator is to present it as an impartial and meticulous gaze, eyes that observe fictional reality from a distance that never shortens or lengthens, and a mouth that relates what those eyes see with scientific precision, total neutrality, and without suggesting any interpretation of what is described. Flaubert used the invisible narrator to grant autonomy to the narrative, making the fictional world appear sovereign. This intention caused description to become more than a complement to the narrative (Geneviève Bollème says it was his “unique” instrument; I would say it was the main one, as dialogue and interior monologue also have a role in Madame Bovary). The same is true for the modern behaviorist novel for similar reasons. For instance, the narrator of El Jarama by Sánchez Ferlosio and most novels of the critical realism that were in vogue in Spain during the 1950s and early 1960s is an incessant describer of the objective world. The detailed, impersonal, seemingly disinterested enumeration of behaviors, objects, and places erases the presence of the narrator. Countless modern novelists, like Flaubert in Madame Bovary, have employed objective description to make the narrator of fiction invisible. In their novels, the verisimilitude of what is narrated depends on this invisibility, contrary to classical novels where verisimilitude often relies on the persuasive capacity — that is, the presence — of the omniscient narrator, an intruder who is often more visible and active than the characters themselves.

V. BERTOLT BRECHT AND FLAUBERT OR THE PARADOX

However, there is an important area of contemporary literature—more related to theater and poetry than to the novel—that strongly disagrees with Flaubert’s theories about the creator’s impassivity and neutrality, his condemnation of “demonstrative” literature, and the autonomy of the work of art from life. I refer to the pedagogical and ethical current that considers historical truth and artistic truth inseparable and assigns literature the responsibility of educating people ideologically, describing the problems they face, providing them with the correct interpretation of their causes and effects, and the tools to remedy them. The greatest figure within this trend— not only due to the high artistic level of his work but also because he theorized most clearly and lucidly the foundations of this aesthetic— has been Bertolt Brecht. I have always been tempted to compare him to Flaubert because, curiously, despite representing opposite extremes in their understanding of the writer’s vocation and the nature of literary work, they seem to share something: in each case, they achieved results in their respective works that were opposite to what they intended when conceiving them.

Both were, at the same time, great creators and great theorists of their art (although Flaubert’s theories are scattered only in personal letters and a few pages of a preface); their works represent the pinnacle of the trends they founded or significantly contributed to. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine two artists more opposed to each other. Their starting point, however, has something in common: the hatred of the “bourgeois.” Yet, in Brecht, the bourgeois signifies an exploitative social class, the owner of the means of production, while in Flaubert, it is little more than a synonym for man. The exception is a handful of writers ("I understand by this word ‘bourgeois’ the bourgeois in smocks as well as the bourgeois in frock coats. It is we, and we alone, the educated, who are the People, or to put it better, the tradition of Humanity.")67 Brecht was a person with generous social ideas, a man sensitive to the injustice suffered by the majority, and, at the same time, an optimist: he believed that this situation could change with a revolution and that literature would contribute to the change by opening people’s eyes and awakening their consciences to the “truth.” Saying and spreading the truth was his main mission for literature, and one of his most famous theoretical texts is precisely the analysis of the Five Difficulties that a writer must overcome to fulfill this obligation victoriously. These ideas underpin his theories on epic theater, his condemnation of Aristotelianism—the mimetic art of nature—and the techniques of alienation. In contrast, Flaubert was profoundly selfish when it came to social injustice, and throughout his life, he only concerned himself with issues that affected him personally and literature. Under the pretext of hating the bourgeois, he hated and despised humanity; he loved literature because it seemed like a way to escape from life and take revenge on it. Regarding history, he was terribly pessimistic: the future would always be worse than the present, which was worse than the past, and nothing had a remedy, which, moreover, he did not find unfair, as people did not deserve anything else. This catastrophic and arrogant skepticism about human destiny is perhaps the hidden explanation of his theory of impassivity, his defense of an indifferent and objective art where everything happens without emotion or external intervention, and of a literature without a moral. “Humanity is like this; the goal is not to change it, but to know it,” he wrote to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie.68

The paradox lies in the fact that the artistic products of both opposing attitudes are also contrary to the theories of their authors. The democratic Brecht wrote works that, in practice, seem to assume the childishness or ineptitude of his audience: everything must be explained and emphasized to avoid any misunderstanding or incorrect interpretation. Literature takes the form of a class in which the author, a rigorous teacher, explains a lesson that includes certain stories and their teachings, fables and the exclusive truths they illustrate. The “message” is imposed on the reader or spectator (often with brilliance) along with a story and characters, leaving no room for escape or choice. Literature thus becomes, like dictatorships, something that allows no other option but total submission or rejection. Proselytizing and paternalistic, it resembles an art, in a deep sense, religiously oriented, not only because it addresses people as believers or catechumens but also because it demands from them—from their emphatically rationalistic physiognomy, primarily—an act of faith: the acceptance of a single truth that predates the work of art.

On the other hand, the disdainful Flaubert, in practice, produced a work that presupposes (to the extent that it demands) the reader’s maturity and freedom. If there is one truth in the literary work (because there may be several and contradictory ones), it is hidden, dissolved in the structure of elements that constitute the fiction, and it is up to the reader to discover it, to draw ethical, social, and philosophical conclusions from the story that the author has placed before their eyes. Flaubert’s art respects above all the reader’s initiative. His technique of objectivity aims to minimize as much as possible the inevitable “imposition” inherent in any work of art. Of course, this does not mean that Flaubert’s novels lack ideology or that they do not propose a certain vision of society and humanity. Rather, in his case, these ideas are not the cause but rather the effect of the work of art. They are conceptual structures inherent in what has been created and not something that precedes it. They lie deep within the story, and both the author and the reader have exactly the same rights to explore and bring them to light. Flaubert’s artistic creation always introduces a relativizing principle, an ambiguity of interpretation, by excluding any explicit message from the work of art. This approach rules out univocal readings; interpretation will always be external to the creation, an addition that may vary depending on how the work resonates with each era or individual. It is the reader who must, based on their intelligence, convictions, and experiences, relate fiction to reality, connect (or disconnect) the imaginary with the lived. Paradoxically, the novelist who despised humanity conceived a literature respectful of the reader, where the reader is treated as an equal and shares with the author the task of completing the work by deciphering its meaning. On the other hand, the writer who loved humanity conceived a literature that implies disdain or, at least, a tenacious mistrust toward the reader since it only demands obedience and credulity.

VI. LITERATURE AS NEGATIVE PARTICIPATION IN LIFE

There is another aspect in Flaubert that strikes me as particularly relevant. It does not concern the contributions of Madame Bovary to the novel, but rather the example Flaubert can be for contemporary novelists who still hold a high conception of their craft. Today, narrative literature tends to split into two disquieting branches due to the specialization brought about by industrial development and the establishment of modern society. One branch consists of literature for mass consumption, executed by professionals with varying degrees of technical skill, who churn out works serially using mechanical procedures, repeating the past (in terms of themes and forms) with a slight modern makeover. Consequently, this literature preaches the most abject conformism to the established order (both in the capitalist world of bestsellers and in the jingoistic, complacent, and official literature of the socialist world). The other branch represents an experimental and esoteric literature of the catacombs, which has willingly abandoned the pursuit of a wide audience and maintains a level of artistic rigor, adventure, and formal innovation, often at the cost of isolation and loneliness.

On one hand, the mechanisms of supply and demand in the industrial society, along with the flattery and coercion of the state-patronage system, turn literature into a harmless activity, a benign form of entertainment. It is stripped of its most crucial virtue, which has always been critical questioning of reality (achieved through representations that simultaneously revealed and negated reality by capturing all its atoms). Writers become tamed and predictable producers who propagate and endorse official myths, fully subservient to reigning interests: success, money, or the meager rewards of power and comfort that the State grants to obedient intellectuals. On the other hand, literature has become a specialized, sectarian, and remote domain – an exclusive mausoleum for word saints and heroes. They have arrogantly left writers-eunuchs to face the public and bear the mandate of communication. These literary figures entomb themselves while claiming to be devoted to the rigorous task of verbal investigation and the invention of new forms. However, in practice, they only multiply the locks and keys of this enclosure in which they have imprisoned literature. Deep down, they foster the terrible conviction that only within this secluded space, far from the promiscuous confusion dominated by mass media, advertising, and pseudo-artistic products of the publishing industry that cater to the general public, can an authentic literature of creation thrive clandestinely – an exquisite orchid, preserved from degradation by hermetic codes, accessible only to certain steadfast comrades.

Flaubert is an instructive case in relation to this problem. He wrote during a period when the industrial growth was leading to an enormous expansion of the literary market and the novel was becoming the most popular genre among the social classes attracted to reading. For the first time, there arose the danger of the emasculation of literary vocation due to its dependence on the industry – that is, the professionalization of writers, which, in practice, could mean, in many cases, their reappropriation by society and a much more effective control of their work than the ancient patronage system. Flaubert had an anguished intuition of this danger. Hence, he had a phobia of “publishing” what he wrote. His letters throughout his life are replete with statements that he wrote with the firm decision not to be published later – reasons that were always somewhat unclear, even to himself. Yet, probably, the obscure fear was that falling into the industrial mechanism would endanger his freedom. Flaubert was horrified by the industrial revolution, the emergence of new classes in economic and political positions, and the democratization of education and culture in France. Even George Sand, who had progressive leanings, received his vehement reproach and irony against universal suffrage – an extravagance and absurdity, according to him – and against political participation by the majority, representative institutions, or the mere idea of the universalization of culture. Flaubert’s morale was shattered by the fall of the Second Empire, as he believed that bourgeois democracy would leave no place for art – the “useless endeavor,” as he called it – which was, in essence, his life. This anarchistic mandarin often stated that literature was not a public service for him but a therapy against despair, an imaginary and pusillanimous way of venting the deep impulses of his being: “Je suis né avec un tas de vices qui n’ont jamais mis le nez à la fenêtre. J’aime le vin; je ne bois pas. Je suis joueur et je n’ai jamais touché une carte. La débauche me plaît et je vis comme un moine. Je suis mystique au fond et je ne crois à rien,” he wrote to Louise Colet while recounting the story of a woman trying to rebel against similar repressions.

There is a letter, particularly cited by his enemies, containing a proud individualistic affirmation, a lordly contempt for other men: “Je suis tout bonnement un bourgeois qui vit retiré à la campagne, m’occupant de littérature, et sans rien demander aux autres: ni considération, ni honneur, ni estime même, ils se passeront donc de mes lumières. Je leur demande en revanche qu’ils ne m’empoisonnent pas de leurs chandelles. C’est pourquoi je me tiens à l’écart.” A few months later, to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, he wrote: “Le seul moyen de supporter l’existence, c’est de s’étourdir dans la littérature comme dans un orgie perpétuelle.” Ten years later, to Princess Mathilde: “A défaut du réel, on tache de se consoler par la fiction,” a statement that, when complemented with another three years later to the same Princess Mathilde, explains what I call the “added element”: “Quand nous trouvons le monde trop mauvais, il faut se réfugier dans un autre.” Two years later, he was even more explicit in saying to George Sand that literature was his passion because it enabled him to escape life: “Des que je ne tiens plus un livre ou que je ne rêve pas d’en écrire un, il me prend un ennui à crier. La vie ne me semble tolérable que si on l’escamote.”

I believe these quotes suffice to demonstrate the extent to which Flaubert considered himself a societal outsider and how he always believed that his literary vocation was a direct consequence and affirmation of this marginality. I think the upheaval caused by the emergence of industrial society and the rapid development of the upper and middle bourgeoisie were as important to explain Flaubert’s hermit-like nature as his family situation. In any case, it is evident that the conditions were present for his desperate individualism regarding vocation to give rise to an aesthetics of incommunicability or the suicide of the novel – an art in which the artist’s social and psychological marginalization would find a formal equivalent, a form of art characterized by the particular, the fragmentary, the inexpressible, and destruction. A vocation grounded in a fierce rejection of fellow men could have spawned a literature in which words were not a meeting place but rather shields, borders, tombs, and evidence of the impossibility of reconciling art and dialogue in the new tumultuous society.

Yet, no, Flaubert was not the brilliant gravedigger of the novel. His pessimism did not translate into a literature of silence, solipsistic virtuosity, or an aristocratic linguistic game inaccessible to public scrutiny. From his separate world, Flaubert engaged in an active polemic with the detested world through literature, turning the novel into an instrument of negative participation in life. In his case, pessimism, disenchantment, and hatred did not hinder essential communication, the very thing that can elevate literature beyond being a mere luxury or an elevated pastime. Rather, these sentiments gave birth to a tense, hazardous, endearing, and above all, seditious dialogue between creator and society. Flaubert, at the age of 18, wrote: “Si jamais je prends une part active au monde, ce sera comme penseur et démoralisateur” – a statement that he rigorously upheld. In doing so, he indicated the daring but essential mission literature could fulfill in that new society where the concentration of power and technological development tended to plan, control, orient, and centralize everything. Literature’s role would be to embody negativity (what Bataille would call “evil”) – the ever-uncontrollable bastion of dissatisfaction and criticism, the corrosive margin from which everything is questioned, relativized, or challenged – the ultimate stronghold of freedom.

For Flaubert, literature offered the possibility of transcending the limitations imposed by life: “Voilà pourquoi j’aime l’Art. C’est que là au moins, tout est liberté, dans ce monde des fictions. On y assouvit tout, on y fait tout, on est à la fois son roi et son peuple, actif et passif, victime et prêtre. Pas de limites; l’humanité est pour vous un pantin à grelots que l’on fait sonner au bout de sa phrase comme un bateleur au bout de son pied…,” he wrote to Louise Colet. This means that whenever he took up the pen, a certain confidence enveloped him, a feeling of security and belligerent exaltation replaced disillusionment and paralysis. The wounds and disappointments he received (or believed he received) from others were transformed, through literature, into attacks against society: “Sacre nom de Dieu! il faut se raidir et emmerder l’humanité qui nous emmerde! Oh! je me vengerai! je me vengerai! Dans quinze ans d’ici, j’entreprendrai un grand roman moderne où j’en passerai en revue!” he exclaimed to Louise. This fury, at times paroxysmal, was actually healthy. It made Flaubert build a literary bridge – even if it was built on insults – to the society from which he felt exiled. Consequently, his vocation produced a work that epitomized what great literature has always been: both a cause and an effect of human dissatisfaction, an endeavor through which a conflicted individual finds a way to live, a creation that revises, questions, and deeply undermines the certainties of an era (beginning with morals and customs in Madame Bovary and ending with culture and the very notion of knowledge in Bouvard et Pécuchet, the novel he was working on when he died). In Flaubert’s case, anger was constructive: “Je sens contre la bêtise de mon époque des flots de haine qui m’étouffent. Il me monte de la merde à la bouche comme dans les hernies étranglées. Mais je veux la garder, la figer, la durcir; j’en veux faire une pâte dont je barbouillerai le dix-neuvième siècle, comme on dore de bouse de vache les pagodes indiennes, et qui sait? cela durera peut-être?” These words have indeed endured, and curiously, the product of so much animosity has become an irreplaceable source for fully understanding the society that inspired that work. It has also become a paramount contribution to shaping the modern spirit. Over time, it has acquired a positive and benevolent significance. As Flaubert predicted, those who condemned his work in the name of moral and aesthetic values found themselves in an awkward position. He stated to Dr. Jules Cloquet, when Madame Bovary was about to be judged, “De cette bouche qu’ils voudraient clore, il leur restera un crachat sur le visage.” It is possible that this anger saved Flaubert from falling into hermetic aestheticism, infusing his books with a negative virus that is the key to their accessibility: for a novel to be harmful, it must be read and understood. Perhaps this is a useful lesson that writers today can learn from Flaubert. The author of Madame Bovary understood that genuine literature would always be “dangerous” and declared that it should be accepted as such – a counterbalance to normality: “L’anormalité est aussi légitime que la règle.”

In all of Flaubert’s works, even those considered historical escapades, the novel remains an invitation from one man to others to meet in the realm of verbal imagination. From there, they could collectively comprehend life’s insufficiency, which those marvelously rescued and impugned works simultaneously saved and condemned. Without relinquishing his pessimism and despair but rather using them as raw material and inspiration for his art, Flaubert wrote a novel capable of harmonizing originality and communication, sociability and quality. For this stringent formalist, form was never divorced from life; it was his most powerful advocate.

When Flaubert saw Madame Bovary printed for the first time in La Revue de Paris, he dishearteningly wrote to Louis Bouilhet, “Ce livre indique beaucoup plus de patience que de génie, bien plus de travail que de talent.” One hundred and eighteen years later, rephrasing the master’s words, we can formulate a fairer statement about the book we cherish: its genius is the result of patience, and its talent is the product of hard work.

Elviria, Málaga, April 1974

About the Author

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA. He was born in Arequipa in 1936. His childhood was spent between the cities of Bolivia, Piura, and Lima. At sixteen, he debuted as a writer by writing a drama “La huida del Inca”. (1952). He entered the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos to study literature. He traveled to Europe where he worked at a French radio station and was a teacher at a school in London.

Mario Vargas Llosa is a literary critic and this is reflected in his essays such as: “García Márquez: historia de un deicidio” and “La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary”. (1975). In 1976, along with José María Gutiérrez, he co-directed the film version of his novel Pantaleón y las visitadoras. In 1977, he was named a member of the Peruvian Language Academy and a professor of the Simón Bolívar chair at Cambridge. A proponent of the Democratic Front party, Mario Vargas Llosa, ran as the top candidate in the Peruvian elections of 1990, in which he was defeated by Alberto Fujimori.

Mario Vargas Llosa received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 1986, the Planeta Award in 1993 for Lituma en los Andes, and the Cervantes Prize in 1995. Since 1984 he is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. In December 2010 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Main works by Mario Vargas Llosa:

  • Los jefes (1959).
  • La ciudad y los perros (1962).
  • La casa verde (1966).
  • Los cachorros (1967).
  • Conversación en la catedral (1969).
  • Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973).
  • La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977).
  • La guerra del fin del mundo (1981).
  • ¿Quién mató a Palomino Moreno? (1986).
  • Historia de Mayta (1984).
  • Elogio de la madastra (1988).
  • Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997).
  • El sueño del celta (2010)

Recently, his work La fiesta del chivo has been awarded in Spain as “Work of the Century”.

  1. Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert, Paris, Gallimard, 1968, p. 115.↩

  2. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille. Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857, Paris, Gallimard, vols. I and II, 1971, and vol. III, 1972. The reference is in vol. II, p. 1525.↩

  3. And how sad it is, for those in love with Emma, to discover that Flaubert sometimes thought of her in an insulting way: “she is somewhat perverse, a woman of false poetry and false feelings,” he assured Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie (Letter of March 30, 1857).↩

  4. These fits of rage sometimes move him to unexpected overreaches, to set limits for the verification of his talent. He has been working on the agricultural elections for several weeks and suddenly writes to Louise: “I give myself another fifteen days to finish. At the end of this time, if nothing good has come, I will indefinitely abandon the novel…” (Corresp., vol. III, p. 369). The episode, 29 pages, would actually take him four months of work.↩

  5. It is possible that this willfulness is false, that literary achievement depends very secondarily on will, that there are decisive innate or casual factors. It does not matter: from the point of view of someone who wants to write, it will always be preferable to believe that all doors are open to him and that everything will depend on his lucidity and effort, rather than processes that totally escape his control, and in that sense, there is no better model than Flaubert.↩

  6. “La Conscience de classe chez Flaubert” and “Flaubert: du poète à l’artiste,” in Les Temps Modernes, May-June 1966, and August 1966.↩

  7. Máxime Du Camp, Souvenirs littéraires, vols. I and II, Paris, Ha-chette, 1882-1883. The episode is narrated in vol. I, chap. XII.↩

  8. The underlining is by Flaubert.↩

  9. Letter of July 23, 1851, published in the Bulletin des Amis de Flaubert, n.º 14, 1959.↩

  10. Letter of August 3, 1851, preserved in the Spoehlberch de Lovenjoul collection and cited by Enid Starkie, in Flaubert. The making of the master, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, p. 188.↩

  11. Madame Bovary. Sommaire biographique, introduction, note bibliographique, relevé des variantes et notes par Claudine Gothot-Mersch, Paris, Garnier, 1971, pp. 359-364.↩

  12. Flaubert discovered, around the beginning of 1854, the interaction between the theory and practice of literature, meaning that every work of creation implicitly contains, whether the author perceives it or not, a general conception of textual writing and structure and the relationships between fiction and reality. After two and a half years of working on Madame Bovary, he wrote to Louise: “Chaque oeuvre à faire a sa poétique en soi, qu’il faut trouver” (emphasis his) (Undated letter, January 1854, Correspondance, vol. IV, p. 23).↩

  13. Unpublished documents from the Spoehlberch de Lovenjoul collection, consulted by Benjamín F. Bart, Flaubert, Syracuse, N. Y., Syracuse University Press, 1967, pp. 249 and 758.↩

  14. Undated letter, probably from 1869, Correspondence, vol. V, p. 350. The underlining is Flaubert’s.↩

  15. Letters of August 31 and September 17, 1855.↩

  16. Unpublished documents cited by Benjamín F. Bart, op. cit., pp. 258-259.↩

  17. Maurice Nadeau, Gustave Flaubert, escritor, Barcelona, Editorial Lumen, 1971, p. 370.↩

  18. Letter without a date, from late November or early December 1857, Corresp., vol. IV, pp. 239-240.↩

  19. The Scénarios have been published by Gabrielle Leleu in Madame Bovary, ébauches et fragments inédits, 2 vols., Paris, Conard, 1936, and in the critical edition by Gabrielle Leleu and Jean Pommier published in Paris by Corti in 1949.↩

  20. Undated letter, probably from the end of 1861, Corresp., vol. IV, p. 464.↩

  21. Letter of June 6-7, 1853. The emphasis is Flaubert’s.↩

  22. Undated letter, mid-October 1859, Corresp., vol. IV, p. 340. The emphasis is Flaubert’s.↩

  23. Alfred Le Poittevin, Une promenade de Bélial et Oeuvres inédites, avec une Introduction et des notes par René Descharmes, Paris, Les Presses Francaises, 1924, p. 190.↩

  24. Letter cited by Benjamin F. Bart, op. cit., p. 156.↩

  25. Letter published by Jean Pommier and Claude Digeon in “Du nouveau sur Flaubert et son oeuvre”, in Mercure de France, Paris, May 1952.↩

  26. Benjamin F. Bart, op. cit., pp. 258-259.↩

  27. Maurice Nadeau, op. cit., p. 160.↩

  28. This possible source has been carefully studied by Jean Pommier, “L’Affaire Loursel”, in Les Lettres Françaises, Paris, April 11, 1947.↩

  29. Undated letter, from the end of 1868, Corresp., vol. V, p. 427. The emphasis is from Flaubert.↩

  30. Marie-Jeanne Durry, Flaubert et ses projets inédits, Paris, Librairie Nizet, 1950.↩

  31. Albert Thibaudet, op. cit., pp. 63-65.↩

  32. Letter to Louise Colet, of December 11, 1852. The emphasis is from Flaubert.↩

  33. It will be noticed that regarding models, I follow a maximalist and liberal policy: everything convinces me except exclusivism. My assumption is that there is never a single real model but always several, and that hybridization is such a complex process that it can never be fully resurrected.↩

  34. “Une leçon d’histoire naturelle. Genre Commis” appeared in a school magazine in Rouen, “Le Colibri,” on March 30, 1837. Parenthetically, Flaubert’s school years undoubtedly provided the initial material for the novel: Charles arriving at school after his classmates and becoming the target of their mockery. Gustave also joined school late and was subject to hostility.↩

  35. Raoul Brunon, “À propos de Madame Bovary,” in “La Normandie Médicale,” December 1, 1907; René Dusmenil, op. cit., p. 68; Gérard Gailly, “À la recherche du pharmacien Homais,” 1939; Enid Starkie, op. cit., p. 330.↩

  36. See René Descharmes and René Dumesnil, “Autour de Flaubert,” 1912, vol. I, p. 306, and René Dumesnil, op. cit., pp. 63-80.↩

  37. Sartre, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 1809-1810.↩

  38. Dr. Galeran, “Flaubert vu par les médecins d’aujourd’hui”, in the number of Europe dedicated to Flaubert, Paris, September-October-November of 1969, pp. 108-109.↩

  39. All the underlines are mine.↩

  40. Letter to Louise Colet, dated November 22, 1852.↩

  41. Jean Pommier, “La Muse du département et le thème de la femme mal mariée chez Balzac, Mérimée et Flaubert,” in L’Année Balzacienne 1961, Paris, Garnier, pp. 191-221.↩

  42. Claudine Gothot-Mersch, op. cit., pp. XII-XIII.↩

  43. In an essay from 1950, “Reencuentro con Balzac,” included in Ensayos críticos sobre la literatura europea, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1972, pp. 209-232.↩

  44. La Vocation de Gustave Flaubert, Paris, Gallimard, 1961, p. 209.↩

  45. Letter of March 18, 1857. (The underlines are Flaubert’s). It should be noted that this quote combines two ideas. On one hand, Flaubert seems to say that one can do without one’s own experiences to write a novel, which is impossible. On the other hand, it is indeed possible that the narrator is a presence that is not seen. Objectivity and impartiality are not moral precepts but exclusively a narrative technique.↩

  46. The added element , or manipulation of the real, is not gratuitous: it always expresses the conflict that is the origin of the vocation and may be little or not at all conscious on the part of the writer. Naturally, the added element is detected by the reader based on their own experience of reality, and, as this is changing, the added element also changes, according to readers, places, and times.↩

  47. Letter s. f., September 1845, Corresp., vol. I, p. 192.↩

  48. According to Sartre, the theme of man’s “becoming-thing” fascinated Flaubert throughout his life, and this is manifested in the autopsied corpses (bodies turned into things by death and the scalpel) that appear in his work: Margante, a character from a teenage story, ends up on the dissection table and in this novel Charles Bovary’s autopsy is performed (Sartre, op. cit., vol. II, p. 1867).↩

  49. The only one who saw, with his usual critical lucidity, that one of the major attractions of Emma’s personality was the mix of masculinity and femininity in her, was Baudelaire. In his review of the novel he wrote: Flaubert “n’a pas pu ne pas infuser un sang viril dans les veines de sa créature” (Flaubert could not but infuse a virile blood into the veins of his creature) and “pour ce qu’il y a en elle de plus énergique et de plus ambitieux, et aussi de plus rêveur, madame Bovary est restée un homme. Comme la Pallas armée, sortie du cerveau de Zeus, ce bizarre androgyne a gardé toutes les séductions d’une ame virile dans un charmant corps féminin” (for what there is in her of more energetic and ambitious, and also dreamer, Madame Bovary remained a man. Like the armed Pallas, coming out of the brain of Zeus, this strange androgyne has kept all the seductions of a virile soul in a charming feminine body). The review appeared in L’Artiste on October 18, 1857, and was later included in L’Art romantique.↩

  50. See, for example, Claudine Gothot-Mersch, La Genèse de «Madame Bovary», Paris, José Corti, 1966, p. 266; Marie-Jeanne Durry, op. cit., p. 180, and, primarily, Claude Duchet, "Román et objets: l’exemple de Madame Bovary", in Europe, September-October-November, 1969, pp. 172-201.↩

  51. At least in lines: thirty each in the Garnier edition.↩

  52. Jean-Paul Sartre, op. cit., vol. I, p. 781.↩

  53. The emphasis is mine.↩

  54. Letter of August 10, 1868. The underlining is Flaubert’s.↩

  55. Albert Thibaudet, op. cit., pp. 204 and 275.↩

  56. Letter undated from 1847, Corresp., vol. II, p. 49.↩

  57. Letter to George Sand, undated, December 1875, Corresp., vol. VII, p. 281.↩

  58. Letter of July 2, 1853. The emphasis is Flaubert’s.↩

  59. Charles Baudelaire, op. cit.↩

  60. Letter to Louise Colet, undated, July 1852, Corresp., vol. II, pp. 468-469.↩

  61. Letter to Le Poittevin, undated, September 1845, Corresp., vol. I, p. 192.↩

  62. Letter undated, October or November 1856, Corresp., vol. IV, p. 134.↩

  63. Letter undated, late December 1875, Corresp., vol. VII, p. 281.↩

  64. Henry James, “Gustave Flaubert,” included in Notes on novelists, New York, Scribner, 1914.↩

  65. Albert Thibaudet, op. cit., p. 246.↩

  66. Geneviève Bollème, op. cit., p. 268.↩

  67. Letter to George Sand, undated, May 1867, Corresp., vol. V, p. 300.↩

  68. Letter of May 18, 1857. The underlining is Flaubert’s.↩

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