58
LEO BERSANI
world inadequate to her dreams of romantic excitement. But in treat–
ing this state of mind, which at first glance would hardly seem to
require a revolution in literary practice, Flaubert commits himself to
a kind of sustained meaninglessness which justifies his title as the
prophet of today's literature of boredom. He illustrates an imbalance
between the self and the world which most of the romantics, for all
their sense of being lost in a hostile or indifferent universe, were able
to avoid by dramatizing their despair, by seeing the world - espe–
cially certain aspects of nature - almost entirely as a metaphor for
their emotions. Thus literature, in the midst of crisis, could continue
to represent adequate and intelligible correspondences between the
self and the world. But while Emma is painfully aware of the un–
relieved drabness and monotony of Tostes and Yonville, her dreams,
absolutely unrepresentable in the world she inhabits, remain ideally
abStract. She does of course try to materialize those dreams. Her
richness as a "character" in the conventional sense depends largely
on an extraordinarily acute sensuality which both cheapens her
spiritual life and yet provides the only escape from the dubious
profundity of imagination. Since she is incapable of imagining oc–
casions for happiness which do not cater luxuriantly to the senses,
Emma rejects her ugly provincial world but she continues to think of
"felicity" as immediate sensual gratification. Her reckless spending
is a desperate attempt to make the fabulous decors of literary romance
believable by making them visible. She has an extravagant but ex–
ceptionally limited imagination: nothing is harder for her to con–
ceive of than the novelistic adventures which she greedily but rather
perplexedly devours. Therefore, the immediate cause of her suicide
is, appropriately, her debt, for money is the talisman with which
Emma tries to materialize love.
It
is as if luxury could give the
prestige of reality to literary fantasy. Hopelessly sentimental but, as
Flaubert says, impatient of anything which she can't immediately
"consume," which doesn't provide an instant "personal profit," she
seeks sensual stimulation from a fabulously rich world unavailable to
her senses. Bored with what she knows but unable to find pleasure in
what she can only think about, Emma tries to confuse perception
with imagination, to induce sensations from fantasies. The exhausted
debauchery into which she falls more and more deeply as the novel
proceeds is due less to her actual adventures than to this more
debilitating adventure of exciting her mind to satisfy her body.
