FLAUBERT
63
and Flaubert rightly recognizes the fantastic heroine of
Madame
Bovary
as a fellow realist - minus the sense of comedy. When
Emma naively wonders what corresponds exactly in life to words like
"felicity," "passion" and "intoxication," which she had found so
appealing in books, she is repeating, in reverse, the question with
which Flaubert made a torment of art. He had, on the one hand, an
almost Platonic view of reality. He speaks in his letters as if "sub–
jects" existed somewhere outside of language, and the tortuous exercise
to which he condemned himself was to find the expressions which
would merely convert reality, without changing its nature, into lan–
guage. But in spite of the killing discipline to which he submitted
himself in order to reach this goal, Flaubert naturally couldn't help
but recognize the proliferating rather than the merely catalytic na–
ture of language. And so, while devoting his life to finding the "right"
words and the "right" rhythms, he came to have a polemical distrust
of
all
fictive versions of reality. Thc subject of all his fiction, in spite
of the obvious but superficial distinction between the realistic and the
nonrealistic works, is the excesses of imagination. He both reveled in
and deeply mistrusted those excesses.
!vIadame Bovary,
L'
Education
sentimentale
and
Bouvard et Pecuchet
are the equivalents, in
Flaubert's career, of that familiar stylistic "fall" which, in so many
of his sentences, deflates an eloquent fantasy with a prosaic detail.
Emma, Frederic and Bouvard and Pecuchet are the scapegoats
through whom Flaubert does penance for
La Tentation de Saint An–
toine
and
Salammb8;
scrupulously masochist, Flaubert sadistically
punishes these inferior versions of himself for his own intoxicating
inventions.
But Tostes and Yonville in
Madame Bovary,
while they are
meant to provide an ironic commentary on Emma's sense of life's
possibilities, strike us as hardly more real than Emma's dreams of
romance, in spite of their "material" existence. For both the dreams
and the bourgeois community get the same stylistic treatment. They
are both absorbed into the monotonous rhythms of Flaubert's writing,
into the
miroitement monotone,
as Proust called it, of Flaubert's style,
which means that they offer merely parallel manifestations of
his
verbal virtuosity. What Albert Thibaudet labeled as Flaubert's
vision
binoculaire
(the simultaneous perception of opposite poles of a sub–
ject which cancel each other out) is therefore less a corrective vision
