FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
623
though not the same as, that of
Gulliver's Travels.
Just as we may not
lessen the depth of the pessimism of
Gulliver's Travels
by reading the
book as if it were only the response to Swift's eighteenth century, so
we may not lessen the depth of the pessimism of
Bouvard and Pecu–
chet
by reading it as if it were only the response to Flaubert's nine–
teenth century.
What does permit us to qualify the pessimism of
Bouvard and
Pecuchet
is the comic mode in which it has its existence. The book
is genuinely funny, and the comic nature of the two heroes invites
us to stand at a certain distance from their woe. Weare not dealing
with, say, Musset's Octave, he who so .advertised his self-pity by call–
ing his history that of "a child of the century," by which he invites
the reader to acknowledge a common paternity and thus approve his
self-commiseration. Bouvard and Pecuchet permit us to laugh at our–
selves in them and yet to remain detached from their plight. They
are a
reductio ad absurdum
of our lives in culture, but we are not
constrained to follow the reduction as far as it can take us.
They themselves qualify the pessimism of the book by their last
act. Another famous copying clerk, an American, Melville's Bartleby
the Scrivener, with the classic American pessimism which is more
entire than any that the French have contrived, when he perceives
the nothingness of society, simply curls up and wills to die, and dies.
But when all is lost to Bouvard and Pecuchet, all is not lost: they
procure the double copying desk, and the order of the day, which
had come to them like a revelation, is
«Copier comme autrefois."
And
so we last see them in the metamorphosis to which their lives entitle
them, a sort of bachelor Baucis and Philemon, rustling their leaves at
each other with a sweet papery sound. They have discovered the
«
travailler sans raisonner,"
the virtue of work without philosophizing,
which
Candide
inculcates. Yet the abrogation of abstruse research
does not mean the abrogation of mind, for what they copy from the
old papers which they indiscriminately buy up are the absurdities
they have learned to recognize. The results of their copying are to
constitute, according to Flaubert's plan, the last part of the novel.
Scholars have debated which of Flaubert's several collections of ab–
surdities was to appear as the fruit of their efforts. The weight of
the evidence seems to give that place to
The Dictionary of Accepted
Ideas,
and most readers will be willing to accept this conclusion if
