The Temptation of (Saint) Flaubert
PAUL VALERY
I
ADMIT
to having a weakness for
The Temptati-on of Saint Anthony.
But why not say right at the start that neither
Salammbo
nor
Bouary
has ever carried me away, the first with its erudite, savage
and sumptuous imagery, the second with its "truth," that is to say,
its painstaking reconstruction of mediocrity?
Flaubert, like his whole epoch, believed
in
the value of "historical
evidence" and in the bald observation of present fact. But these are
worthless idols. The only reality in
art
is art itself.
The best of men, and the most serious of artists, but without too
much grace or profundity of mind, Flaubert was unable
to
resist the
very simple formula proposed by Realism, and took for granted
the naive authority which rests on immense learning and what is
called "criticism of texts."
The Realism fashionable in 1850 failed to distinguish clearly
between the precise observation of scientists and the crude, unselective
asseverance of things that occurs in ordinary vision; it confused these
two, and its policy was to oppose them both, as
if
they were identical,
to the passion for embellishment and exaggeration which it noted
and condemned in Romanticism. But "scientific" observation requires
definite operations able
to
transform phenomena into intellectually
usable products: one must convert things into numbers and numbers
into laws. Literature, on the other hand, which
aims
at immediate and
instantaneous effects, needs an entirely different kind of "truth", a
truth for everyone, which cannot, therefore, separate itself from the
vision of everyone and from what ordinary speech can express. But
ordinary speech is on everyone's tongue and the common vision of
things is valueless, like the air we
all
breathe, while the essential
ambition of the writer is necessarily to differentiate himself. This
opposition between the basic dogma of Realism--<:oncern for the
banal-and the will to exist on an exceptional plane and as a per–
sonality,
in
some way precious, resulted
in
turning the attention of
