62
LEO BERSANI
What are the reasons for that sadness? Superficially, they are
obvious enough: Rodolphe and Leon are hopelessly mediocre, and
Emma's dreams of romance are so absurd that
no
lover could help
her to realize them. But how important is the content of her dreams?
The novels that have corrupted her are, on the whole, third-rate imita–
tions of the great romantic works, but while Flaubert is obviously
mocking those literary cliches of romance, nothing in any of his own
works suggests that so-called superior art can provide more accurate
images of reality. It matters very little that Emma's thought is trivial;
we might even say that her mediocrity is an advantage in the novel
in that it helps Flaubert to dramatize the essentially insignificant
nature of imagination. James, who obscured the insubstantiality of
imagination with the conjectures of enormously ingenious centers of
consciousness, understandably felt that Emma is not an interesting or
perceptive enough "vessel of experience"; her consciousness is "really
too small an affair" even for "a picture of the middling." But
Flaubert, as his later work shows even more clearly, is fundamentally
unresponsive to the appeal of a psychological or intellectual richness
to which he is still making some concessions in
Madame Bovary.
Emma's trivial mind ideally carries the weight - or the weightless–
ness - of the novel's self-destructive meaning. The astonishingly sym–
pathetic identification between Flaubert and Emma can be explained
by the simple fact that she lives in fantasy (any fantasy will do). The
mediocrity of her thought is less important than the artistic rigor of
her refusal to accept
any
equivalence between imagination and reality.
She intuitively understands what was for Flaubert the central fact
about literature: its fictions
resemble nothing.
The anxiety produced
by that awareness makes her an object of subtle clinical observation,
but her symptoms are irrelevant to the disease of imagination itself.
So is her limited intelligence: method and discrimination have noth–
ing to do with the life of the mind in its purest form, which explains
why Bouvard and Pecuchet are the ideal Flaubertian heroes. The
fact that they live only for knowledge explains Flaubert's uneasy
sympathy for them; their grotesqueness is part of their unenviable
integrity, that is, of their touchingly foolish attempt to derive a
"truth" from the aleatory, arbitrary, infinitely rich and infinitely
futile universe of words and ideas.
The
comedy
of imagination is the monstrosity called "realism,"
