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to say, it made itself too available: it is the rare person who can receive
the full news of the inherent social immorality without injury to
his
own morality, without injury, indeed, to his own intellect-nothing
can be so stultifying as the simple, unelaborated belief that society
is
a fraud. Yet with the explicit social intelligence of the great French
novels we dare not quarrel-it
is
a
given
of our culture, it
is
one of
the
ineluctable elements of our modern fate, and on the whole one of
the nobler elements. What
Bouvard and Pecuchet
adds to this general
fund of social intelligence
is
the awareness of the part that is played
in our modern life by ideas--not merely by assumptions, which of
course have always played their part in every society, but by ideas as
they are formulated and developed in books. The originality of Flau–
bert's perception lies
in
its intensity; other novelists before Flaubert
had been aware of the importance of ideas in shaping the lives of
their heroes, and Flaubert himself, in
A Sentimental Education,
had
shown Frederic Moreau living in a kind of ideological zoo-Senecal,
Regimbart, Deslauriers, Pellerin, all have learned from books the roar
or squeal or grunt by which they identify themselves. But in
Bouvard
and Pecuchet
the books themselves are virtually the
dramatis personae;
it is they, even more than the actual people of the Norman village,
that constitute reality for the two comic heroes. Through this extrava–
gance Flaubert signalizes the ideological nature of modern life.
No one has followed Flaubert in his enterprise. In the essay to
which I have referred Mr. Pound was bringing, in 1922, the first news
of Joyce's
Ulysses
to the readers of the
111ercure de France,
and he
spoke at some length of the connection that
is
to be found between
Ulysses
and
Bouvard and pecuchet.
"Between 1880 and the year
Ulysses
was begun," he says, "no one had the courage to make a gigan–
tic collection of absurdities, nor the patience to seek out the man-type,
the most general generalization"-and he goes on to speak of Leopold
Bloom as being, like Bouvard and Pecuchet, "the basis of democracy,
the man who believes what he reads in the papers." The connection
between the two novels is certainly worth remarking, but although
Ulysses
does indeed resemble
Bouvard and Pecuchet
in
its encyclopedic
effect, the use made of the absurdities they collect
is
very different in
the one novel and in the other. The difference
is
defined by the dis–
similar intellectual lives of Leopold Bloom and Bouvard and Pecuchet.
To Bloom, ideas are the furniture or landscape of his mind, while to
