300
PARTISAN REVIEW
worthwhile to be alone. For privately each of them has an idiotic false
world, which cannot be reconciled with the reality of his situation,
and so they both miss the possibilities life offers them. What is true
of these two, applies to almost all the other characters in the novel;
each of the many mediocre people who act in it has his own world of
mediocre and silly stupidity, a world of illusions, habits, instincts, and
slogans; each is alone, none can understand another, or help another
to insight; there is no common world of men, because
it
could only
come into existence if many should find their way to their own
proper reality, the reality which is given to the individual-which then
would be also the true common reality. Though men come together
for business and pleasure, their coming together has no note of united .
activity; it becomes one-sided, ridiculous, painful and it is charged
with misunderstanding, vanity, futility, falsehood, and stupid hatred.
But what the world would really be, the world of the "intelligent,"
Flaubert never tells us; in his book the world consists of pure stupidity,
which completely misses true reality, so that the latter should properly
not be discoverable in it at all; yet it is there; it is in the writer's lan–
guage, which unmasks the stupidity by pure statement; language, then,
has criteria for stupidity and thus also has a part in that reality of
the "intelligent" which otherwise never appears in the book.
Emma Bovary, too, the principal personage of the novel, is
completely submerged in that false reality, in
«la betise humaine/'
as is the "hero" of Flaubert's other realistic novel, Frederic Moreau
in the
Education sentimentale.
How does Flaubert's manner of
representing such personages fit into the traditional categories "tragic"
and "comic"? Certainly Emma's existence is apprehended to its
depths, certainly the earlier intermediate categories, such as the
"sentimental" or the "satiric" or the "didactic," are inapplicable, and
very often the reader is moved by her fate in a way that appears
very like tragic pity. But a real tragic heroine she is not. The way in
which language here lays bare the silliness, immaturity, and disorder
of her life, the very wretchedness of that life, in which she remains
immersed
((toute l'amertume de l'existence lui semblait servie sur
son assiette"),
excludes the idea of true tragedy, and the author and
the reader can never feel as .at one with her as must bel the case with
the tragic hero; she is always being tried, judged, and, together with
the entire world
in
which she is caught, condemned. But neither is
