IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
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the speaker
in
the scene from Petronius discussed
in
our second chap–
ter; but the means Flaubert employs are different. Here it is not
Emma who speaks, but the writer.
"Le poele qui fumait, la porte
qui criait, les murs qui suintaient, les paves humides"-all
that, of
course, Emma sees and feels, but she would not be able to sum it
all up in this way.
UToute l'amertume de l'existence lui semblait
servie sur son assiette"-she
doubtless has such a feeling but if she
wanted to express it, it would not come out like that; she has neither
the intelligence nor the cold candor of self-accounting necessary to
such a formulation. To be sure, there is nothing of Flaubert's life in
these words, but only Emma's; Flaubert does nothing but bestow the
power of mature expression upon the material which she affords, in
its complete subjectivity.
If
Emma could do this herself, she would
no longer be what she is, she would have outgrown herself and thereby
saved herself. So she does not simply see, but is herself seen as one
seeing, and is thus judged simply through a plain description of her
subjective life, out of her own feelings. Reading in a later passage
(Part II, chapter 12):
Ujamais Charles ne lui paraissait aussi desa–
greable, avoir les doigts aussi carres,
l'
esprit aussi lourd, ler fafons si
communes
. . . "
the reader perhaps thinks for a moment that this
strange series is the emotional collocation of the causes that time
and again bring Emma's aversion to her husband to the boiling point,
and that she herself is, as it were, inwardly speaking these words; that
this, then, is an example of "free indirect discourse." But this would
be a mistake. We have here, to be sure, a number of paradigmatic
causes of Emma's aversion, but they are collocated deliberately by
the writer, not emotionally by Emma. For Emma feels much more,
and much more confusedly; she sees other things than these-in
his body, his manners, his dress; memories mix in, meanwhile she
perhaps hears him speak, perhaps feels his hand, his breath, sees
him
walk about, good-hearted, limited, unappetizing, and unaware; she
has countless confused impressions. The only thing that is clearly
defined is the result of all this, her aversion to him, which she must
hide. Flaubert transfers the clarity to the impressions; he selects
three, apparently quite at random, but which are paradigmatically
taken from his physique, his mentality, and his behavior; and he
arranges them as if they were three shocks which Emma felt one after
the other. This is not at all a naturalistic representation of the con-
