60
LEO BERSANI
about. Her last hope gone, she returns home in a stupor, knocks her
daughter down in a fit of irritation, frantically worries about the
bruise on Berthe's cheek, but later that evening stares coldly at the
sleeping child and thinks how strange it is that Berthe should be
so ugly.
The absence of events thus produces rich enough psychological
sequences. But there are already signs in
Madame Bovary
that psy–
chological detail is merely incidental to what interests Flaubert most
deeply in novelistic character. The most original passages in the first
of the two sections I have been referring to are not analyses of
Emma's feelings, but rather some coolly precise descriptions of Tostes.
Emma watches, at an incalculable distance, the most ordinary events:
How sad she was on Sundays when the church bell rang for vespers!
She listened to each dull stroke with a kind of dazed attention. A
cat walking slowly across the roofs would arch its back in the pale
sunlight. The wind blew trails of dust along the highway. Some–
times a dog would howl in the distance. And the regular, mono–
tonous tolling would continue to float from the belfry, dying away
over the surrounding countryside.
More than Emma's self-punishing or sadistic fantasies, this kind of
thoughtless stupor in front of the world dramatizes the anxiety of
a consciousness living entirely off itself. Nothing in her fantasies
con–
nects with
her environment, and the juxtaposition of her dreams
with literal descriptions of that environment produces the effect of dis–
connectedness (it even accounts for the often awkward, enigmatic
divisions among chapters) characteristic of the Flaubertian narrative.
And not only is the world alien to Emma's dreams of romance; it
also offers no images which she can use as a relatively appeasing
spectacle of her anguish. When she retu rns from her fruitless visit to
church, she is struck by the calm immobility of the objects in her
house, "while she felt in herself so much tunnoil." Flaubert's extra–
ordinarily detailed and extraordinarily literal descriptions deprive
Emma of what might be called any metaphorical relief. Things
simply
are there,
much more so than in
La Nausee,
where the sup–
posedly alien nature of objects is belied by the sickening richness of
their metaphorical viscosity, a viscosity clearly projected on them by
a highly particularized psychology.
If
it is true, as Jean-Pierre Richard
has said, that Flaubert fears a perhaps similar absorption in a pasty
