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PARTISAN REVIEW
what Bouvard and Pecuchet discover in their study of the science of
Celtic archaeology: "Some uttered prophesies, others chanted, others
taught botany, medicine, history and literature: in short, all the
arts
of their epoch. Pythagoras and Plato were their pupils. They in–
structed the Greeks in metaphysics, the Persians in sorcery, the Etrus–
cans in augury, and the Romans in plating copper and trading
in
ham." Then the passion of Bouvard and Pecuchet for antiquities,
their lust for old documents, and the cultural conclusions they base
on their investigations and accumulations are no different from those
of Ezra Pound, about whom Mr. Kenner has written so well; and
they have Mr. Pound's responsiveness to comprehensive schemes of
social and economic reform. Their knowledge of the emotions of the
Waste Land is no less intense than that of T. S. Eliot, and based on
a not dissimilar experience; with them as with him despair arises
from culture and leads to religion.
4
Readers of literary bent, who have as an element of their pathos
the belief that they are persecuted by science/ will set special store by
those parts of the novel that have the effect of exposing the arrogance
as well as the contradictions and absurdities of the physical science of
the day. Everyone who has ever studied literature knows that physical
science was the basis of the vulgar materialism of the nineteenth cen–
tury. In this regard it is well to remember that Flaubert had no prin-
4 Mr. Kenner's remarks on
Bouvard and pecuchet
appear in the essay "Pound
on Joyce" which serves to introduce Mr. Pound's essay "James Joyce and Pecu–
chet', as it is reprinted in the Autumn 1952 issue of
Shenandoah,
a review pub–
lished at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. It would make
an interesting exercise in cultural criticism to speculate on what Flaubert would
do with the contents of this issue of the review, which, so far as it is tenden–
tious, would seem to
be
much opposed to bourgeois democracy; in particular,
what he would do with the thirteen lines in which William Faulkner reviews
Ernest Hemingway's
The Old Man a.nd The Sea.
I raise the question not out
of the malice of my own tendentiousness, and certainly not out of any belief
that what is to
be
found in this issue of
Shenandoah
is unique in the appeal it
might make to Flaubert's sense of the absurd (it certainly isn't), but only to
enforce my point that
in
Bouvard and Pecuchet
we do not deal only with the
culture of the bourgeois democracy that Flaubert knew, but with any culture or
sub-culture that is committed to words-on-paper. And the proper reflection to
make on those incredible thirteen lines of Mr. Faulkner's is that a degree of
stupidity, even silliness, may be essential to genius. Which doesn't of course,
invalidate Flaubert's enterprise of naming stupidity and silliness when they appear.
5 It is not sufficiently understood that men of science have an analogous–
homologous ?-pathos to support them in their own troubles: they believe that
they are systematically persecuted by the humanities.
