206
NATHALIE SARRA UTE
There is a sudden letdown, the cliche appears:
He admired her spiritual exaltation and her lace-trimmed
skirt. Besides, was she not in fashionable society, and a married
woman! a real mistress,
in
short? ... She was the
inamorata
of all the novels, the heroine of every play, the vague
she
in all
the poetry books. . . .
But everywhere in this book there
is
the subtlest art, the only
exceptions, it seems to me, being the beginning and the ending where,
as it happens, Madame Bovary does not appear. These lack, there–
fore, her vision of life, which, by constantly causing reality to oscil–
late, exposes it as
trompe-l'oeil.
The beginning and the ending of
Madame Bovary
become fixed in commonplace descriptions treated
with oversimplified, occasionally crass realism.
This
beginning and this ending could lead us to believe, as could
SalammbO
and the
Education Sentimentale,
that Flaubert was not
entirely aware of his discovery and of its rare achievement. I myself
believe this. It
is
not possible for a living work based entirely upon
pure sensation, as is every authentic work of art, for a work with its
roots extending deep into the unconscious from which it derives its
sap to exist entirely, with its profound meanings and repercussions, in
the clear consciousness of its author.
It
is neither possible nor desirable.
And no better proof of this could be found than in that other
novel by Flaubert,
Bouvard et Pecuchet,
in which everything that had
been confusedly foreshadowed in
Madame Bovary
is clearly conceived.
Here again inauthenticity constitutes the substance of the novel.
However, there is no longer any question for Flaubert of re-creating
complex, ambiguous, extraordinarily subtle sensations; it is rather of
carrying out the intellectual project of showing the futility of know–
ledge on the level of popularization. The result is a platitudinous de–
scription of the efforts made by two "little men" to equip their empty
lives and minds by successively studying and putting into practice all,
or nearly all, of the branches of learning of their day: agronomy,
chemistry, history, archaeology, medicine and hygiene, politics, educa–
tion, religion, etc.
It is so obvious that the residue of any debased, half-digested
human knowledge
will
be composed of platitudes that I, for one,
find this long demonstration tedious. This kaleidoscope of rudimentary
