52
LEO BERSANI
Julien the saint appears to be a pious sublimation of Julien the self–
punishing murderer, both sainthood and sadism could be thought of
as creative fantasies equally capable of producing events. That is, they
are both versions of the same fable, and both add something sub–
stantial to history: on the one hand, the murder of Julien's parents,
on the other, the veneration of Julien the saint. In a sense, then,
remarkable as Flaubert's "case study" is, he goes beyond his own
psychological sophistication into an implicit equalization and critique
of
all
fictions. There is no need to question the events of Julien's life
since no representation of reality has priority over any other repre–
sentation. Psychology is as interpretive as hagiography, which is to
say that while they both may be metaphorical, neither one is more
"original" than the other. Thus the natural and the supernatural can
be treated almost as different aesthetic tastes in an unremittingly literal
narrative.
Madame Bovary
provides us with a more extensive illustration of
a psychological portrait which becomes a critique of analytical proce–
dures themselves, and this by virtue of the fact that the psychological
"mistake" being studied consists of an effort to equate reality with
its representations. Psychology is, of course, pitched at a much lower
key in
Madame Bovary
than in the Saint's legend; with Emma,
Flaubert's psychological originality shows itself not in anything as
sensational as Julien'S sadism, but in a deceptively modest portrait
of the pathology of boredom. I'm thinking especially of chapters in
the first half of the novel, before Emma's affair with Rodolphe, when
it is precisely the fact that nothing happens which creates in Emma
a kind of permanent floating anxiety. Now the importance of this as
a subject for literature is not merely in the new areas of psychological
exploration which
it
opens, but, perhaps more profoundly, in the
indifference it implies to the traditionally
explanatory
function of
literary fictions. Romantic anguish may be incurable, but it is gen–
erally not unintelligible; there
is
a "sufficient cause" for the suffer–
ing of Werther, Rene, Oberman, Ruy BIas and Chatterton, and the
rhetorical effort of romantic writers (especially in France)
is
aimed
less at the description of a specific state of mind than at a "justifica–
tion" of extreme states by a strenuous appeal to historical, psycho–
logical or metaphysical causes. Romantic despair
is,
as a result, dig–
nified and can even be optimistic. Behind those majestic poses lies
