DANILO KIS
377
shake: that there was a gap between his intentions ("No one has ever
imagined a more perfect type of prose than I") and his practice. Poor
Haubert believed the fault lay somewhere in him, in his talent; he did
not realize that after Stendhal and Balzac a certain
Jorm
of fiction was
on its way out. The genre itself, as the formalists would say, had begun
to weaken.
Flaubert appeared on the scene too early and, though within reach
of a solution, was unable to make a radical break with the tradition of
the realistic genre. His weakness stemmed from doubt: he sensed the arbi–
trary nature and the limitations of the psychological novel. Hence his
flight into the exotic, where - because the reader could not hold them
to the psychological standards of the age - characters had greater in–
tegrity, greater freedom of action.
Yet even in
Madame Bovary
he came to express implicit doubt as to
the omniscience of the narrator and the art of psychological portraiture,
those most pernicious and persistent of literary conventions. The further
the plot progresses, the more his doubt intrudes. As the psychology of
his protagonist eludes him, clear-cut statements ("she began to think of
Les Bertaux") are hedged ever more frequently by expressions of equivo–
cation ("Should she write to her father?
It
was too late, and
perhaps
she
regretted not having given herself to the man," or "She had let herself
be seduced by his words and even more by his voice, by his whole per–
sonality, so much so that she pretended to believe him or
perhaps
did be–
lieve the reasons for their parting").
One word,
perhaps,
was the first step on the road from psychological
to modern fiction. By pointing up the abyss between the omniscient and
the skeptical ("unreliable") narrator, it served as a sign that the genre was
aging, a strand of gray in the luxuriant tresses of the realist classics.
Had Flaubert compressed the vast edifice of his exotic novel into a
story reporting the contents of an imaginary and complex work entitled
The Temptation oj Saint Anthony,
had he reduced the material for
Bou–
vard and Pecuchet
to a story explicitly containing part of that material
(which is easy to imagine given that the Borgesian idea of "presenting
false bibliographic data as genuine" had in fact occurred to Haubert),
literature would not have had to wait a century for Borges's
Ficciones.
-1986
Translated
by
Francis Jones
