Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (21 page)

Flaubert said of
L'Education sentimentale
that he wanted “to hold the ocean in a carafe.” Lottman's Flaubert is more like a ship in a bottle: all the working parts are there, but what it is doing in the bottle, what waters it inhabits, and where it might be sailing are mysteries. Two small but interesting matters remain unground by Lottman's gizzard: Flaubert's height, and the colour of his eyes. On page 44 the novelist is “just under six feet,” and on page 78 his passport shows him at % m 83 (which tallies); but by page 142 Flaubert is quoted as telling Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie that he is “five feet eight inches” tall. Has he shrunk by four inches? Is he perhaps playfully fictionalizing to a correspondent whom he was never actually to meet? Neither: Flaubert didn't say he was “five feet eight inches,” he said he was
cinq pieds et huit pouces.
Over the years th
e pied
and the
pouce
have varied slightly in size as units of measurement, and at this time didn't translate exactly into their English equivalents.

As for the eyes: on page 51 Flaubert has “sea-green” eyes, which change, without comment from Lottman, to “blue eyes” on page 78. The first colour was supplied by Maxime Du Camp in his memoirs (the English translator of these added yet another tint, wildly translating
ses yeux enormes, couleur vert de mer
into “large eyes grey as the sea”). The second colour comes from Flaubert's passport. Which do you prefer?

(b) Novelist

What does Madame Bovary look like? We know that she has dark hair and eyes of a complicated colour, but what of her nose, her chin? Does she tuck neatly into your shoulder? Are her ankles trim? How do you visualize the set of her shoulders?

Of all the great fictional heroines, Emma is probably the one about whose appearance readers are most likely to disagree. We cannot, as with Dickens, refer to some foxed engraving in an early edition, since Flaubert hated and forbade illustration of his works. Nostalgic moviegoers might picture Emma as Jennifer Jones, but since this would entail Flaubert himself resembling James Mason, it doesn't take us very far. Mario Vargas Llosa fell deeply in love with Emma from the moment he first read
Madame Bovary
—in Paris in 1959—and at the start of
The Perpetual Orgy,
his unconventional, shiningly intelligent, and fiercely sensible homage to Flaubert, he confesses that ever since he has been in thrall to Emma's social rebelliousness, her erotic power, her vulgarity, and her promise of violence. But at no point does he describe her physically. Is it possible to be in love with a woman and not know what she looks like? Or perhaps he is jealously guarding his image of her from the rest of us.

It is important to take Vargas Llosa's opening declaration of love seriously, not as a mere critical conceit, a smart way into the book for him. “A handful of fictional characters,” he observes, “have marked my life more profoundly than a great number of the flesh-and-blood beings I have known.” One advantage of fictional characters over real ones is their summonability: they can always be brought to life and friendship again, anywhere, any time, merely by snapping open the book. Their power can be as decisive as the power of real people, too. Purveyors of generous-hearted commercial fiction occasionally report that fans have thanked them for saving their lives, for stopping the suicidal hand. This is an extreme extension of one useful function of the novel, that of saying you're not alone out there after all. But this salvationist capacity doesn't necessarily stop when you enter the Classics section of your bookshop. Vargas Llosa explains without any affectation how, when he was in despair and even tempted by suicide, the story of Emma—and in particular the death of Emma—brought him “consolation and a sense of proportion, a revulsion against chaos, a taste for life … The fictional suffering neutralized the suffering I was experiencing in real life.”

Others might, when in despair, be more tempted to listen to the direct voice of Flaubert in his letters (“Sadness is a vice,” he tells us, for instance) and even be surprised by the notion of a consolatory Emma. But then others are not quite so in love with her as Vargas Llosa is. Others will also note that his portrayal of her in his first section seems slightly Hispanicized, even Carmenized: he stresses her melodrama and flashiness. There is a wry comparison to be made between Flaubert's expressions of weariness with Emma in his letters (“a woman of false poetry and false sentiments”) and Vargas Llosa's paean to the woman who flamencos around in his mind and memory. If Emma Bovary came off the page and into his life, she would run through his money in a few months, bore him stiff with her chatter, and decamp with his best friend. But you sense that he knows this already, and would almost savour the humiliation.

The love for Emma expands into a love for Flaubert: not the simple business it might seem. Loving a writer often results in a ferocity of defence not evidenced in “more serious” areas of life, like politics or marriage. Vargas Llosa recounts how in 1960 a friend told him that there were two subjects on which he refused to give an inch: Cuba and Flaubert. Fourteen years later
(The Perpetual Orgy
first appeared in 1974) he finds he can tolerate criticism of Cuba, but remains adamant on the author of
Madame Bovary.
For the lover of Flaubert, other writers and critics are judged by their response to the great novelist. Vargas Llosa, for instance, rightly loathes Barbey d'Aurevilly (the nineteenth-century critic and novelist who wrote that Flaubert would pollute a stream by washing in it). For myself, I find it hard to forgive Thackeray for finding
Madame Bovary
“heartless” and “coldblooded.”

Most of
The Perpetual Orgy
is a discussion of the genesis, execution, structure, and technique of
Madame Bovary.
It is the best single account of the novel I know. Flaubertistes will instantly set it alongside Francis Steegmuller's 1939 classic
Flaubert and Madame Bovary;
students of literature who want to know how a novel works could not be better advised than to watch and listen as Vargas Llosa hunches over this masterpiece like some vintage car freak over the engine of a Lagonda. Yet it's more than a question of valves and pumps and tubes—of sophisticated engineering. Vargas Llosa rightly and keenly stresses the irrational factor in writing, the organic element, the part that may hide itself even from such a scrupulous and self-conscious creator as Flaubert.

His discussion of sources, for instance, is impeccably instructive. The writer—any writer—absorbs information from many different levels (the novelist as sponge); this information is processed into a transformed substance (the novelist as Magimix). Sources, once used, become unimportant and uninteresting to the writer, who may end up knowing less about them than a ferreting biographer. With a novel such as
Madame Bovary
there are many possible sources for incidents and characters, often conflicting with one another; but where a thoughtful critic might dutifully weigh up one against the other and conclude that the one true source of so-and-so was such-and-such, Vargas Llosa, having seen the business of fiction from the other side, takes what he calls a “liberal, maximalist” position. “Everything convinces me, except exclusivism.” This may irritate those who see novels as things to be solved, like crossword puzzles; but it more accurately reflects the reality of making fiction.

Vargas Llosa enlightens us on so many aspects of the novel: on Emma's mannishness, on Emma as prototype of the twentieth-century consumer, on the
style indirect libre
(that subtle rendering of indirect thought which Flaubert never refers to in his correspondence, yet which we now consider his greatest technical achievement), on the puzzle of the “we” narrator who opens the novel and vanishes after seven appearances. Central to
The Perpetual Orgy
is a large, well-argued section on the “descriptive frenzy” of Flaubert's realism, in which things are described as carefully as people, and emotions like happiness and nostalgia become things. This “reification of the human” and its counterpart, the humanizing of the object, also help explain how we may come to differ over what Emma Bovary looks like: for the novel evokes her as much in terms of her clothes as in terms of her person. We get a rhapsodic account of her hair style where another novelist might offer a long description of her face; her parasol is as important as her fingertips, and equally seductive.

Rival lovers of Flaubert are bound to quarrel over a few things. Some will pause over Vargas Llosa's ascription to Louise Colet of a “willing obedience” to Gustave's amatory rules, or over his odd dismissal of
Salammbô
as “dated.” But the only area where I would seriously part company with
The Perpetual Orgy
is in the matter of Flaubert's epilepsy. Following Sartre, Vargas Llosa maintains at several points that the novelist “chose” his illness, that at some deep level he “willed” it. Sartre on Flaubert followed Freud on Dostoevsky, suggesting that his subject's epileptic symptoms, while real, were the product of neurosis rather than a brain lesion: they offered “the option of hysteria” (which in Flaubert's case made it easier for him to evade life and become a writer). Current opinion among epileptologists, however, is that the concept of affective as against organic epilepsy is a sensational fabrication. Flaubert “merely” had epilepsy: it was as simple as that.

Flaubert left no direct literary descendants, though any number of paternity suits have been brought against him over the last hundred years. Vargas Llosa discerns two streams of claimants: on the one hand, realists and naturalists (who all too often lack Flaubert's sense of form), and on the other, formalists like the proponents of the
nouveau roman
(whose interest in theme is often dismayingly minimal). Might there be an argument that Flaubert, like Milton, was a great writer who had a bad influence? Perhaps. But among his other descendants are writers who hear very precisely what he says yet do not necessarily obey. The true influence of a great writer is to say, simply and repeatedly, across the years: Go thou and do otherwise.

(c) Theorist

Jean-Paul Sartre's
The Family Idiot,
an intense, unfinished, three-volume growl at Flaubert, is mad, of course. Admirable but mad—to abduct Sartre's own phrase about Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. A work of elucidation couched in a lazily dense style; a biography seemingly concerned with externals but in fact spun from inside the biographer like a spider's thread; a critical study which exceeds in wordage all the major works of its subject put together …
“On n'arrête pas Voltaire,” de
Gaulle said of Sartre in 1968; and perhaps those down at Gallimard imagined they heard a pun. One does not arrest Voltaire … and you can't stop him either.

Who started him? Roger Garaudy, it seems, with an inviting bet in 1954: “Let's try and explain the same character, I according to Marxist methods, you according to existentialist methods.” So began a project whose aim Sartre expresses on the first page of
The Family Idiot
as: “What, at this point in time, can we know about a man?” To which he gives the answer: a lot more than you might imagine. The traditional, academic approach to biography—the search for documentation, the sifting of evidence, the balancing of contradictory opinions, the cautious hypothesis, the modestly tentative conclusion—has run itself into the ground; the method has calcified. Sartre decides to reinvent the genre, using three principal techniques: Marxist analysis of the social background, Freudianish analysis of the personality, and freewheeling imaginative hypothesis to fill in any gaps. Not surprising, then, that it took a decade of his life, or that it brought upon the comrade of 1968 certain inevitable reproaches.

But why Flaubert? After all, Sartre recorded in
Les Mots
how, as a child, he was “poisoned” by the “old bile” and the “abstract hatred of mankind” of Flaubert, Gautier, and the Goncourts: they were responsible for confusing “literature” with “prayer.” A harsh excommunication was also pronounced in
Qu'est-ce que la littérature?
It was Flaubert's dazzling correspondence which converted Sartre from antipathy to empathy; moreover, the letters struck him as ideal psychobiographical material—an almost perfect example of free-associating from a pre-Freudian couch.

There is, also, a personal element in the choice of Flaubert.
The Family Idiot,
for all its “scientific” method, is a tellingly personal, almost autobiographical work as well: psychoanalysis, whatever else it does, in part defines the psychoanalyser. Sartre liked to fob off comparisons between his childhood and Flaubert's, but the evidence was against him: in particular, his own evidence,
Les Mots.
Both writers came from provincial bourgeois families—austere, hard-working, traditional, practising virtue without too much believing in it. Sartre's maternal grandmother, in her seventies, was still complaining about the leek salad she and her husband had shared at a station buffet on their honeymoon half a century earlier: “He took all the white and left me the green.” A way of life rich in matured rancour. Sartre also records how his paternal grandfather, a country doctor, discovered on the day after his wedding that his wife's family—supposedly rich Périgord landowners— were in fact penniless. From that moment on, the deceived doctor never spoke to his wife again, expressing himself at table by means of gesture; undaunted, the couple still contrived to produce three children, and lived together for forty years; in their old age the grandmother used to refer to her unforgivingly silent husband as “my paying-guest.” This sort of family texture, acrid and enduring, was shared by the two provincial novelists, while some members of their immediate families also echoed one another. Sartre's god-like grandfather, who amused himself by crushing the life out of his sons, recalls Flaubert's father Achille-Cléophas—or, more precisely and more interestingly, recalls Sartre's portrait of Achille-Cléophas; while the pinched virtue of his grandmother, who “thought straight and thought wrongly,” reminds us inevitably of Mme Flaubert.