FLAUBERT
201
what elusive charm, all of which are to be found in the first
Educa–
tion Sentimentale,
which Flaubert wrote at twenty-three.
In the second
Education,
written in middle age, a heavy, precise,
adult's vision removes from Frederic's love for Madame Arnoux the
down of youth that would have made all those empty longings fed on
false mystery acceptable. This realistic vision rubs off on Frederic's
love and, as a result, it is too often made to appear as a sort of ridi–
culous subservience to a prevailing mode, to pure convention. We are
surprised to see that Flaubert seems to lack perspective about these
sentiments nurtured on bad literature. But it is evident in his book
that psychological reality is not what interests him. For us, reading
it today, there remains the interest aroused by the re-creation of an
epoch, the portrayal of a certain society.
The fact that Lukacs, like many before him, should have con–
sidered this novel as one of the masterpieces of literature is also
surprising. For Lukacs, what gives it its exemplary character is time.
Time, he says, "unifies the fragments of reality ... which are merely
juxtaposed in their rigidity, their incoherence, their isolation." Tlffie
gives them a reality which exists as such: a concrete, organic con–
tinuum, dynamic and alive, thus conferring upon the novel an
authentically epic quality.
But in what way does this time that extends over a long period
and carries with it, in an uninterrupted flow, dissimilar elements
subjected to a chronological order differ from the other time of the
traditional novel, which gave so many works of fiction, bOth good and
bad, their unity, as well as their factitious, heart-rending melancholy?
And so, people
will
say, that's all there is to Flaubert? A pom–
pous, frigid style that makes us evoke and fabricate cheap mental
images? A lack of psychological complexity that makes
SalammbO
a
picture book for children and reduces the
Education Sentimentale
to
a ponderous portrayal of manners and customs? A curious naivete that
makes him consider respectfully and portray seriously passions which,
because of their prosaically conventional nature, occasionally border
upon the ridiculous?
This, then,
is
the work of Flaubert? And my answer is : Yes.
But in spite of this, and even to a certain extent because of it, Flaubert
is
one of the great precursors of the modem novel. For all of these
defects made
it
possible for
him
to write a masterpiece:
Madame
Bovary.
