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PARTISAN REVIEW
had had his say about ancient philosophy in
The Temptation of St.
Anthony.
But they go back at least as far as the seventeenth century.
"The famous
cogito
bores me," says Bouvard, just like any truthful
person who has read Descartes. He and Pecuchet attempt Spinoza.
They feel that "all this was like being in a balloon at night, in glacial
coldness, carried on an endless voyage towards a bottomless abyss, and
with nothing near but the unseizable, the motionless, the eternal. It
was too much. They gave it up." AB who does not? Their response to
the
Ethics
is not foolish, not trivial; they have caught most accurately
the emotion that Spinoza enforces upon us, and they know that it
is impossible to live with. Yet Flaubert, at the time of writing the
novel, had a devoted admiration for Spinoza, as we all have.
What is being mocked? For even literature, the great palladium
of Flaubert's life, is not proof against the corrosive action of the
simple, lucid, mediocre minds of Bouvard and pecuchet.
It
is not
merely bad literature that bores them after their first afflatus of en–
thusiasm; it is literature itself. The elements of each author that at
first enchant them-the tone, the idiom, the system of distortion and
extravagance-come to be the ground of their eventual boredom.
The more we consider
Bouv·ard and Fecuchet,
the less the novel
can be thought of as nothing but an attack on the culture of the
nineteenth century. Bourgeois democracy merely affords the setting
for a situation in which it becomes possible to reject culture itself.
The novel does nothing less than that: it rejects culture. The human
mind experiences the massed accumulation of its own works, those
that are traditionally held to be its greatest glories as well as those
that are obviously of a contemptible sort, and arrives at the under–
standing that none will serve its purpose, that all are weariness and
vanity, that the whole vast structure of human thought and creation
are alien from the human person. Descharmes concludes his study of
Bouvard and Fecuchet
with the statement that the import of the
novel is comprehended in a verse from Ecclesiastes which Flaubert
might well have used as an epigraph: "And I set my mind to search
and investigate through wisdom everything that is done beneath the
heavens.
It
is an evil task that God has given the sons of men with
which to occupy themselves." The relevance of the pessimism of
Ecclesiastes goes well beyond this single text.
The pessimism of
Bouvard and Fecuchet
is comparable with, al-
