LEO BERSANI
of reality than a repetitively nihilistic one. Neither "side" of the
vision is allowed to settle into a definitive version of reality, although
both are presented with a kind of maddening literalness and atten–
tion to detail. And this explains the precarious comedy of Flaubert's
work, a comedy we might define in terms of the hackeneyed notion
of his impersonality. He is, in a sense, nowhere in his work; but if
he
is
constantly disassociating himself from it, it's perhaps less be–
cause of his famous disgust with life than because of his exasperated
sense of an autonomous richness in words which makes his efforts
merely to imitate reality in language look sickeningly absurd. Far
from standing back in order to let reality speak for itself, Flaubert
invades his narrative with a continuously recognizable voice which ex–
poses realism as a chimera. While Baudelaire drew from his anxiety
an almost exuberant theatricality, Flaubert (like Beckett today) gives
us the comedy of anxiety: the grotesque spectacle of "texts for noth–
ing," of literature as an interminable flow of an idle language richer
and emptier than both the self using it and the world which it tricks
us into believing it designates.
Rodolphe, Flaubert harshly notes, stupidly doubts Emma's love
because he has heard the same language of passion from his other
mistresses, "as though the fulness of the soul did not sometimes over–
flow into the emptiest phrases, since no one can ever express the
exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and
human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms
for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will
wring tears from the stars." An inadequate vehicle for our feelings,
language for Flaubert is no less resistant to adequate descriptions of
the world : weeks of tortuous revisions might finally produce a more
or less satisfactory passage describing the atmosphere of an agricul–
tural fair. An ineffable self, an ineffable reality outside of the self;
"between" the two, a language enigmatically indifferent to anything
but its own seductive suggestiveness. Thus, the gratuitous expressive–
ness of words, which gives us the marvelous airiness of Diderot's
neveu
(and, long before him, the "irresponsibly" light fancies of the
baroque poets), inspires in Flaubert an intriguingly tedious weighing
of words in order to coerce them into exact correspondences with
reality.
Now perhaps the only way to prevent the excessively and often
