FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
609
Bouvard and Pecuchet they exist, as I have suggested, as characters
in the actual world. Bloom's ideas are notions; they are bits and
pieces of fact and approximations and adumbrations of thought pieced
together from newspapers and books carelessly read; Bloom means to
look them up and get them straight but he never does. They are subor–
dinate to his emotions, to which they lend substance and color.
If
a
judgment is passed upon them by the author, it is of an oblique sort
and has to do with their tone, with their degree of vulgarity, not with
their inner consistency or cogency. But Bouvard and Pecuchet are
committed to ideas and confront them fully. They amass books and
study them. Ideas are life and death to them.
There is no necessity to choose between the two conceptions of
what Mr. Pound called "the man-type, the most general generaliza–
tion." Leopold Bloom represents much of the modern mind from the
lowest to the highest. His representativeness probably needs less to be
insisted on than that of Bouvard .and Pecuchet, who stand for the
condition of life of any reader of this book, of any person who must
decide by means of some sort of intellectual process what is the correct
theory
of raising his children, or what is the right
principle
of educa–
tion; or whom he shall be psychoanalyzed by, a Freudian, a Reichian,
a Washingtonian; whether he "needs" religion, and if so, which con–
fession is most appropriate to his temperament and cultural back–
ground; what kind of architecture he shall adopt for his house, and
what the true theory of the modern is; what kind of heating is best
suited to his life-style; how he shall feel about the State; about the
Church; about Labor; about China; about Russia; about India.
If
we try to say how the world has changed from, say, two hundred years
ago, we must see that it is in the respect that the conscious mind has
been brought to bear upon almost every aspect of life; that ideas,
good, bad, indifferent, are of the essence of our existence. That is why
Flaubert was made "rabid" by his perception of stupidity. And if we
look to see if anyone has matched Flaubert in the passion of his
response to ideas, we will not discover that person in any art and only
one
in
any other discipline-Nietzsche alone, I think, saw the modern
world as Flaubert did, and with Flaubert's intensity of passion.
But when we have become aware of the singularity of
Bouvard
and Pecuchet,
we must be no less aware of the tradition in which its
singularity exists. As for the novel's connection with Rabelais, this may
