FLAUBERT
65
nonsensically productive states of consciousness I have been speaking
of from appearing as nonhuman inhabitants of the mind or as cancers
of reality is to treat them as metaphorical entertainments, or as thera–
peutic metaphors. But the death of metaphor is the search for an
original link -- the "real cause" - in a metaphorical chain. Proust
claimed, with some exaggeration, that he couldn't find a single beauti–
ful metaphor in Flaubert's work. Flaubert's startlingly clumsy similes
express his impatience with the epistemologically approximative na–
ture of metaphor : things were not to be
like
other things, but each
expression was meant to cover and absorb its hypothetically real sub–
ject with literal precision. Perhaps only in
La Legende de Saint Julien
l'H ospitalier
did Flaubert show that indulgence toward imaginative
versions of reality which consists in living by them while recognizing
them as fictive. The extraordinarily successful artifice of Proust is to
subvert the credibility of his characters as "real" people and to
demonstrate the kind of livable cohesion possible within a strictly
personal labyrinth of metaphorical correspondences. There are no
"causes" in
A fa Recherche du temps /Jc?'du,
which means that Proust,
unlike Flaubert, nc-ver had to cripple his inventiveness in an effort to
make of his work a tr:ll1sparent, intelligible tableau of the real world.
For to subordinate our imaginative excesses to autobiographical or
external sources is inevitably to reduce the richness of imagination
and
to see the world as poverty-stricken as Homais' Yonville. And
undoubtedly, in the same way, psychoanalytic explorations into the
fantasies of neurosis work effectively only
if
the past is considered not
as the cause of the present but as usefully supplemental occasions for
"symptoms." What we like to think of as living in harmony with
reality may be simply a knack for multiplying fictions, for accom–
modating new versions of expe;'ience to older ones so that we may
impose a personal if always tentative unity on the inexplicable richness
of being.
The alternative to this sort of submissiveness to our far-out
states of consciousness is the Flaubertian panic at the mind's decep–
tive inventions and the torture of trying to be "realistic." Flaubert
had the admirable dream of an ideally free language, of a literature
in which, as he writes in a letter, "form, as it becomes more artful,
is attenuated; it leaves behind all liturgy, all rules, all measured reg–
ularity. . . ." This "emancipation from materiality" would be the
