Bookplanet: really nice review about Flaubert, the man who invented the unobtrusive omniscient narrator, and the modern novel

The Man Behind Bovary
Review by JAMES WOOD of
FLAUBERT A Biography by Frederick Brown

Novelists should thank Gustave Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it begins again with him. He is the originator of the modern novel; indeed, you could say that he is the originator of modern narrative — that the war reporter and the thriller writer owe as much to him as the avant-garde fictionist. The great bear of Croisset, the monkish aesthete who spent much of his life in one house, and a great deal of that time in one room, has sired thousands of successors.

Much of the time Flaubert's influence is too familiar to be visible. We so expect it that we hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert. And after Flaubert, it sometimes seems, this is all you can find.

Take the following passage, in which Frédéric Moreau, the hero of "Sentimental Education," wanders through the Latin Quarter, alive to the sights and sounds of Paris: "At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses' workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller's stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps." This was published in 1869, but might have appeared in 1969; many, perhaps most, novelists still sound essentially the same. Flaubert scans the streets indifferently, it seems, like a camera. Just as when we watch a film we no longer notice what has been excluded, so we no longer notice what Flaubert chooses not to notice. And we no longer notice that what he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness. How superb and magnificently isolate the details are — the women yawning, the unopened newspapers, the washing quivering in the warm air. Flaubert is the greatest exponent of a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of the habitual with the dynamic. Obviously, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the omnibus is coming down the street. Flaubert's details belong to different time-signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously.

And this is how he manages to suggest that these details are somehow at once important and unimportant: things have been both noticed and not noticed, as if out of the corner of the eye, because this is no more than how life goes on. The crime writer and war reporter (think of Hemingway or Stephen Crane) merely increase the extremity of this contrast between important and unimportant detail, converting it into a tension between the awful and the regular. Flaubert himself does this later in the same novel, when the revolution of 1848 comes to the Paris streets, and the soldiers are firing on everyone, and all is mayhem: "He ran all the way to the Quai Voltaire. An old man in his shirt sleeves was weeping at an open window, his eyes raised towards the sky. The Seine was flowing peacefully by. The sky was blue; birds were singing in the Tuileries."

Because Flaubert, like his details, is so visible and invisible, he needs to be cleaned of the glaze of his renown every so often and shown afresh; and he needs to be treated by someone who has himself a good eye for detail. Frederick Brown is the right candidate. As his 1995 biography of Zola demonstrated, he is an impeccable scholar with a talent for historical narrative, and the owner of a rich, flexible prose style. His magnificent new book is at once a history of 19th-century France and a brilliant exercise in character animation. A huge amount of research is the private income that gives this book its well-dressed assurance, and that encourages the reader to absorb it greedily; splendid mini-histories of 19th-century medicine and of the law, of relations between French governments and the people, of the development of Paris under Haussmann, of European attitudes toward the Orient, dissolve in the larger fizz of his vivacious story.

Brown's biography will clearly be the Life for this generation, and it grandly swipes away — mentioning it only in the bibliography — its most recent rival, Geoffrey Wall's rather academic and Freudian account of five years ago. Unlike Wall, Brown has no obvious agenda (he could in fact have benefited from one in his literary criticism); he simply opens himself up to Flaubert's colossal contradictions. From his earliest days, Gustave Flaubert was both a romantic and a realist, a dreamer and a debunker. He was the son of the chief surgeon of the hospital in Rouen, and never shied away from looking at unclothed truth: no one ever forgets the grotesque comedy of Charles Bovary's operation on Hippolyte's clubfoot. Of "Madame Bovary," the critic Sainte-Beuve would say in a contemporary review that Flaubert wielded his pen like a scalpel. But he also loved to surrender to romantic flights of fancy, to historical exoticism and erotic Orientalism. He was still unable to read at the age of 7, Brown tells us, because he was so enthralled by a local neighbor, an elderly man who told Gustave tales from "Don Quixote." "I find all my roots in the book I knew by heart before learning how to read, 'Don Quixote,' " he later said, and indeed the fantasist at war with reality is the dominant note of both "Madame Bovary" and "Sentimental Education."

He was drawn to historical fantasy: he labored over the novel "Salammbô," his reconstruction of ancient Carthage, and for most of his writing life, despite the animadversions of his friends, he kept on reworking his first love, "The Temptation of Saint Anthony," a gaudy, almost kitschy fictional account of the trials of the desert saint. He fell in love with older women, whose bosomy amplitude promised pneumatic bliss, but preferred to coddle his erotic memories privately, in the safety of his study; Brown rightly remarks on his "penchant for remote intimacy," and that "he would always feel most himself in the fastness of indefinitely unconsummated love, of longing, of bereavement." Yet he was a seasoned harlot-hound and brothel-bibber; on his famous trip of 1849-51, with Maxime Du Camp, to Egypt, Syria and Turkey, he took in as much flesh as antiquity. His letters are scandalously scatological.

At any moment, the realist could turn on the romantic and mock him. But the romantic could, in turn, see beyond the limits of the real. He and a schoolboy friend invented a figure named "the Kid," whose task was to taunt the bourgeoisie for their earnest clichés, and to shock propriety with disgusting pranks. In a sense, Flaubert would always remain the Kid, the boy who dropped out of law school and came home and never left again, the writer who likened writing to masturbation (and sentences to ejaculate), and who, late in his life, would claim that "two things sustain me: love of Literature and hatred of the Bourgeois." This is what Flaubert meant when he said that "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." His most famous novel oscillates between this realism and romanticism. On the one hand, Emma Bovary's dreams of escape, her reading of popular romances, are seen as deluded and vulgar; on the other, the "realists" who would condemn her are people like her dreadful mother-in-law and the pompous chemist, Homais. Flaubert scourges Emma and indulges her. He sees from her perspective, and seems to agree with her when she denounces life as "all lies."

The writing of "Madame Bovary," the isolation and patience of the endeavor, the aesthetic groaning and complaint, have become notorious. Flaubert undertook a long siege on his talent in order to starve it of its luxuriance. His friends Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp had heard him read aloud the overripe "Temptation of Saint Anthony," and had given him the thumbs down. Du Camp suggested instead something modern and thoroughly bourgeois: the pathetic true story of Eugène Delamare, a much cuckolded country doctor whose sexually peripatetic wife had poisoned herself; the distraught widower had killed himself in the same way, in order to join his beloved. Flaubert, just back from his two years in the East, wrote to his mistress Louise Colet that this new book would represent his third try at a great novel. "It's high time I succeeded or jumped out the window."

HE began writing "Madame Bovary" in September 1851, and delivered the manuscript in 1856, when he was 35. Brown is especially vivid in his recreation of Flaubert's work habits at this time. He lived with his widowed mother in the large family home in Croisset, a few miles down the Seine from Rouen. He rose late and worked from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m., in gray thickets of pipe smoke. Sentences were laid as carefully as fuses. Progress was excruciatingly slow. In six weeks, he wrote to Louise Colet, he had produced only 25 pages. He fretted that all he had were sentences, "a series of well-turned paragraphs that don't flow into one another." In the beautiful letters he wrote to Colet, his temperamental contradictions are palpable. He diligently researched scenes like the famous agricultural fair, in which, while Rodolphe seduces Emma in an upstairs room, the crowd outside the window talk about feed and manure — he wanted to get such details exactly right. He dreamed with his characters and suffered with them, claiming in later life that when Emma took arsenic he himself suffered from sympathetic stomach pains. But he complained of loathing his little bourgeois creations, of feeling imprisoned in his chosen world. The romantic in him wanted to soar above it all, to write a book of pure music, "a book about nothing," a book held together only by the "internal force of its style."

Thus "style" was born: this was Flaubert's second gift to novelists, and one they are as likely to curse him for as to thank him. Of course, writers before Flaubert had agonized about style: don't we feel that Jane Austen was a ruthless censor of superfluity? But no novelist agonized as much or as publicly, no novelist fetishized the poetry of the sentence in the same way, no novelist pushed to such an extreme the potential alienation of form and content (a book "about nothing"). And no novelist reflected as self-consciously on questions of technique. One Flaubert scholar rightly says that with Flaubert literature became "essentially problematic." Or just modern? Flaubert himself affected a nostalgia for the great unselfconscious writers who came before him, the beasts of instinct who just got on with it, like Molière and Cervantes; they, said Flaubert, were great because they "had no techniques." He, on the other hand, was betrothed to "atrocious labor" and "fanaticism." In different ways, we are all shadowed by that labor. The rich stylist — a Bellow, an Updike — is made newly self-conscious about his richness; but the plainer stylist — Hemingway, for example — has also become self-conscious about his plainness, itself now resembling a form of highly controlled richness. The realist feels Flaubert breathing over her shoulder: is it well written enough? But the formalist or postmodernist is also indebted to Flaubert for the dream of a book about nothing, a book flying high on style alone; Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, practitioners of the nouveau roman, were explicit about crediting Flaubert as their great precursor. The links between the comically questing clerks of Flaubert's last work, "Bouvard and Pécuchet," and Beckett's tramps and travelers, engaged in fruitless and convoluted tasks, are obvious; Beckett's novel "Mercier and Camier" is named in tribute.

Flaubert loved to read aloud. Bouilhet and Du Camp suffered all 32 hours it took to recite the "Temptation." And when he gathered with friends in Paris — the Goncourt brothers, Ivan Turgenev, Alphonse Daudet — he liked to read out examples of bad writing, exclaiming at the writer's poor sense of rhythm. Turgenev said that he "knew of no other writer who scrupled in quite that way." He assassinated repetition, unwanted clichés, clumsy sonorities. It is a pity that Frederick Brown, so scrupulous in other ways, does not discuss a passage of Flaubert's French. A single sentence, from "Madame Bovary," will do. Emma is pregnant, and Charles is stupidly proud of having got her that way: "L'idée d'avoir engendré le délectait." Literally, this is: "The idea of having engendered delighted him." Geoffrey Wall, in his recent Penguin translation, renders it as: "The thought of having impregnated her was delectable to him." This is perfectly respectable, but pity the poor translator. For the English sentence is a wan cousin of the French. Say the French out aloud, and you encounter four "ay" sounds in three of the words — "l'idée," "engendré," "délectait." Wall's version has not the slightest hint of that music. Yet an English sentence that truly tried to sound like the French would probably sound peculiar: "The notion of procreation was a delectation," for instance, sounds like hip-hop — bad hip-hop.

This was what Flaubert meant by rhythm, and indeed page after page of his prose sings with the distinctive "ay" sound of his favorite verb tense, the imperfect (which ends in "ait" or "aient"). The regular, repeating sound of this imperfect verb — which English translates as a verb of habit, as "he would do something" or "he was doing something" — is like a bell tolling the very sound of provincial boredom in "Madame Bovary." Proust said that Flaubert's one great innovation was his use of this verb.

But Virginia Woolf, in a characteristically Flaubertian moment of anxiety, said that we go to novelists not for sentences but for chapters, and "Madame Bovary," of course, holds together wonderfully. The details, the thousands of details, are stunning in their exactitude, their lyricism, their comedy, and yet they also make a perfect whole. How comic it is, for instance, when Flaubert reveals that the volumes of Charles Bovary's medical dictionary were "uncut, but with their bindings damaged from being bought and sold so frequently." How funny and painful it is when, after the great ball at La Vaubyessard, where Emma has tasted a life of glamour, Charles, on returning home, rubs his hands together and exclaims: "How nice it is to be back home again!" The great sentences, often aphoristic in their concision, come down like blades: "This life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks north; and boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart."

When the novel was prosecuted in 1857 for affronting religious morality, Flaubert was blamed for not condemning the adulteress, and for showing "nature in the raw." It was, indeed, a dangerous novel, perhaps beyond the incomprehension of the prosecutor. As Flaubert rightly said, it was not the details but "the whole of it that offends." It was not just Emma licking the last drop of liquid from the bottom of the glass, or sexily putting Rodolphe's pipe in her mouth, or taking the celebrated carriage ride with Léon during which the couple must be making love, since Léon puts out of the carriage window "a naked hand" (une main nue); no, it was not just these provocations that offended, but also perhaps the relentlessly nullifying vision of the book, which finally judges adultery to be as monotonous as marriage, which threatens, by making Homais the ironic victor, to turn the whole world into a mass of platitudes. When Homais receives his Legion of Honor, in the last line of the novel, the Kid seems to be sniggering at all of us.

Flaubert was old by 30, bearish, settled in his ways. Brown, after a tour-de-force description of the trip to the Orient, provides this marvelous sketch of the returned traveler, who had gotten fat on Turkish pastries: "Wearing baggy Turkish pants, a smock of Indian inspiration, a yellow cravat with silver and gold thread, he looked noticeably older. His hair had thinned — had in fact fallen out in clumps. His face showed a redness that could be taken for roseola. We know he was drinking syrup of mercury and would do so again whenever chancres reappeared, fearing, with good reason, that he had contracted syphilis. It cost him some teeth, though not as many as his eternal pipe would." He was an old young man. Large travels were over and the atrocious labor of 30 years would begin, the labor that, in addition to "Madame Bovary," produced "Sentimental Education," a third version of the "Temptation," the exquisite "Three Tales" and the unfinished "Bouvard and Pécuchet." This last work, with its comic catalog of fruitless endeavors, has its admirers, yet it is hard not to feel that here Flaubert's will-to-nullification imprisoned him in tautology, wherein the repetitive exposure of bourgeois stupidity condemned the novelist to a repetitive anthologizing of that very stupidity; "The Dictionary of Received Ideas," which rather tiresomely alphabetizes examples of bourgeois cliché, seems at times a joke on Flaubert rather than by him.

WE have George Sand, it seems, to thank for the existence of "A Simple Heart." In her last years this devoted correspondent goaded him to produce lofty and moral work. People had reviewed "Sentimental Education" poorly, she said, because he had not made clear which character was worth admiring. Flaubert replied that he did not feel he had the right to judge his characters in this way. Sounding like Chekhov, whose "Lady With the Little Dog" would owe something to "Madame Bovary," he wrote that: "Obscene books are immoral because untruthful. When reading them, one says: 'That's not the way things are.' " And in a characteristic coda: "Mind you, I detest what is conventionally called 'realism,' although I have come to be regarded as one of its pontiffs."

Nevertheless, in May 1876, he had begun a little tale about an illiterate servant, called (at first) "The History of a Simple Heart." He wrote to Sand that she might approve of the heroine. But Flaubertian labor was too slow and fanatical for the ailing Sand, who died a month later. Early risers, writes Frederick Brown in a beautiful passage, might have seen the writer standing at the window of his study, after a night of toil; and early risers might have heard passages of "A Simple Heart," "for in the absence of friends, he recited what he had written to the tulip tree, the moon and the river."

He died four years later. Flaubert, like his father, had received the Legion of Honor, and at his funeral a squad of soldiers saw him off, "the minimum assigned to all deceased members of the Legion of Honor: negligible pomp for one so great," wrote Émile Zola. Somewhere, the Kid was laughing.

(James Wood is a senior editor at The New Republic and a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University. His most recent work is a book of essays, "The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel”.)