IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
299
episodes--but no one could see the scene at table as part of the
exposition for a love episode, just as no one would call
Madame
BovaTY
a love story
in
general. The novel is the representation of an
entire human existence which has no issue; and our passage is a
part of it, which, however, contains the whole. Nothing particular
happens in the scene, nothing particular has happened just before it.
It is a random moment from the regularly recurring hours at which
the man .and wife eat together. They are not quarreling, there is no
sort of tangible conflict. Emma is in complete despair, but her des–
pair is not occasioned by any definite catastrophe; there is nothing
purely concrete that she has lost or for which she wished. Certainly
she has many wishes, but they are entirely vague-elegance, love, a
varied life; there must always have been such unconcrete despair,
but no one ever thought of taking it seriously in literary works before;
such formless tragedy,
if
it may be called tragedy, which is set in
motion by the general situation itself, was first made conceivable as
literature by Romanticism; probably Flaubert was the first to have
represented it in people of slight intellectual culture and fairly low
social station; certainly he is the first who directly captures the
chronic character of this psychological situation. Nothing happens,
but that nothing has become a heavy, oppressive, threatening some–
thing. How he accomplishes this we have already seen: he organizes
into compact and unequivocal discourse the confused impressions of
discomfort which arise in Emma at sight of the room, the meal, her
husband. Elsewhere too he seldom narrates events which carry the
action quickly forward;
in
a series of pure pictures--pictures trans–
forming the nothingness of listless and uniform days into an oppres–
sive condition of repugnance, boredom, false hopes, paralyzing dis–
appointments, and piteous fears--a gray and random human destiny
moves toward its end.
The interpretation of the situation is contained in its descrip–
tion. The two are sitting at table together; the husband divines
nothing of
his
wife's inner state; they have so little communion that
things never even come to a quarrel, an argument, an open conflict.
Each of them is so immersed in his own world-she in despair and
vague wish-dreams, he in his stupid philistine self-complacency-–
that they are both entirely alone; they have nothing in common, and
yet they have nothing of their own, for the sake of which it would be
