BOO KS
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Mr. Hauser's long passage on Flaubert is built along the lines of
synoptic characterization, the classic resource of criticism.
It
is a master–
ful critical-historical
recit,
as are the passages on Rousseau, Richardson,
Stendhal, Balzac, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Of Madame Bovary he writes:
Flaubert's statement,
«Madame Bovary, c''est moi,"
is true in a double
sense. He must often have had the feeling that not merely the roman–
ticism of his youth but also his criticism of romanticism ... was a life–
fantasy.
Madame Bovary
owes its artistic veracity and opportuneness to
the intensity with which he experienced the problem of this life-fantasy,
the crises of self-deception and the falsification of his own personality.
When the meaning of romanticism became problematical, the whole
questionableness of modern man was revealed-his escape from the
present, his constant desire to be somewhere different from where he
has to be . . . because he is afraid of the proximity and responsibility
for the present. The analysis of romanticism led to the diagnosis of the
disease of the whole century, to the recognition of the neurosis, the
victims of which are incapable of giving an account of themselves, and
would always prefer to be inside other peoples' skins, not seeing them–
selves as they really are, but as they would like to be. In this self-decep–
tion and falsification of life . . . Flaubert seizes hold of the essence of
the modern subjectivism that distorts everything with which it. comes
in contact. The feeling that we possess only a deformed version of
reality and that we are imprisoned in the subjective forms of our think–
ing is first given full artistic expression in
Madame Bovary.
. . .
The
transformation of reality by the human consciousness, already pointed
out by Kant, acquired in the course of the nineteenth century the
character of an alternately more or less conscious and unconscious
illusion, and called forth attempts to explain and unmask it, such as
historical materialism and psychoanalysis. With his interpretation of
romanticism, Flaubert is one of the great revealcrs and unmaskers 0f the
century, and, therefore, one of the founders of the modern, reflexive
outlook on life.
L'Bducation sentimentale
Mr. Hauser analyzes as a novel of which
the true hero is time. Time serves in it in a double role, both as "the ele–
ment which conditions and gives life to the characters" and as the
principle by which "they are worn out, destroyed and devollred."
It
was romanticism which discovered creative, seminal time, while in the
reaction against romanticism time was discovered to be a corrupting
element, undermining and draining man's life. Thus "this gradual, im–
perceptible, irresistible pining away, the silent undermining of life,
which does not even produce the startling bang of the great, imposing
catastrophe, is the experience around which the
Education sentimentale
and practically the whole modern novel revolves"-an experience non–
tragic and undramatic and therefore appropriately cast in the narrative
mode. Here we have a key to the dominant position of the novel
in
