Thinking About Flaubert: An Essay, Some Questions, And A Fragmentary Conversation With Myself About Emma Bovary

this essay is not yet finished

The Science of Desire and the Dream of Reality:
Flaubert and the Modern Novel

”I would like to write a book about nothing,
a book without external links,
which would be held together by the internal force of its style …
just as the earth without being suspended moves in the air,
a book which would have almost no subject matter
or at least whose subject would be almost invisible
if that is possible.”

If we are prompted to describe Flaubert’s text as a ‘science of desire’, it is not to discredit his imagination or literary skill. Although the “emancipated student of Balzac” was acutely aware of his own literary tradition, he managed to transcend the massive figures that constituted it to forge a new conception of the novel and left behind him an incredible lineage of writers which include Joyce, Sartre, Kafka, Chekhov and Kundera among many others. This enormous achievement was singular not only in that he was able to compete with the likes of Balzac and Victor Hugo in a literary sense, but also in the way in which he managed to recontextualise old and introduce new literary devices and extend the role of literature beyond its well worn niche into the modern world of critique and science. The moeurs and mechanics of post Enlightenment Europe were changing radically and it is out of this environment that Flaubert’s aesthetic emerged.

By 1821, the date of Flauber’s birth, the French bourgeoisie had become rich and fearfully conservative; interest in the arts and literature stagnated and the the children of Flaubert’s generation grew up in an environment of commercialism where there was a general distrust for any kind of imagination or artistic creativity let alone deviation form the accepted social norms. The wealth that had been gained by the passionate revolutionaries of 1789 and the Napoleonic conquerers that followed them had turned the dynamism of french society in to a dull, lifeless monotony that left little place for artistic expression. There was, however, a group of young writers who began to turn out a steady stream of works that became increasingly bitter towards the bourgeois. Chief amongst the ranks of this new literary movement were Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. Their works could not have contrasted more sharply with those of Corneille or Racine in tone, content and in the harsh social criticism they put forward : if bourgeois society would not allow true literary imagination, literature would have to put itself in opposition to society. Motivated by the desire that this generation had to feel some of the passion that their parents and grandparents had experienced during the Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests as well as the disgust that they felt with the lifeless society in which they found them selves, the youth turned to the exotic and the passionate; the romance novels of George Sand2 became very popular and a romantic movement among the youth began to glow. Wives took lovers, people took to travelling and suicide became almost fashionable; perhaps warmed by Rousseau some 75 years earlier, Romanticism had caught fire in France.

As much as the young Flaubert felt himself to be a part of this new romanticism, he was also very critical of it and felt only scorn for those he heard ignorantly deriding the classics. Romanticism, for Flaubert, came from the awareness and cultivation of a deep natural drive and not simply from the act of mocking Montaigne or Rabelais. Although he greatly admired Hugo and Dumas, Flaubert was faced with a problem : the mode of this romantic expression itself was in the process of becoming stale but it seemed as though there was nowhere else to turn. There was a general mood among Flaubert and his contemporaries that the end of the road had been reached and that the form of the novel, such as it was, could no longer offer a medium for innovative expression. Flaubert realised that if he was to continue as a writer he would have to recontextualise the novel - both technically and conceptually - and as a result he began look to other disciplines for models by which he could frame and inspire his work. Above all, he seemed most interested in mathematics and the social sciences.

What then do we mean by this allusion to science as a method in the writing of Flaubert? How was this modern novel created and what does it tell us about the human condition? Flaubert had a clear understanding of the fact that he was living in a time that was approaching rapid change : the railroad and the increased access to the printed word via the steam driven printing press are only two examples of the many forces that were changing communication, economy, morals and life in general in the France and Europe of the mid 1800’s. These were the days of Hegel, Marx and Darwin and Flaubert wished to approach the novel with the appropriate geist :

“traiter l’ame humaine avec l’imparialité que l’on met dans les sciences pysiques.”3

Flaubert was suspicious of the ‘inspired artist’ and inspiration in general :

“méfions-nous de cette espèce d’échauffement qu’on appelle l’inspiration…”4

“Ecrire froidement”5

and:

“C’est pas avec le cour que on écrit, c’est avec la tete”6

Rather than rely on inspiration, he preferred to use a technique he called “la linge droite”7 , a kind anchor which would allow him to dig, “comme une taupe”8 , deeper and deeper into the work finally allowing him to emerge into a ‘reality’ of words and ideas. For Flaubert the work of writing was not founded on inspiration or genius but rather relied on an “apreté”, a kind of toughness or rigour that would allow him to create a work in which one would feel:

“une longue énergie qui court d’une bout a l’autre et ne fablit pas.” 9

As one would expect, the book did not come easily for Flaubert. For fifty-three months he agonised over every word - he poured himself into this book and when it was finished he declared: “La Bovary, c’est moi.” Flaubert wished to apply a new set of standards to the novel so that it could become a means by which one could examine the human condition from a point of detachment. Although Flaubert believed that literature should not be confused with the physical sciences, he hoped that what he called the “moral sciences” could take their place with the rest of the physical and emerging social sciences :

“Si les science morales avaient, comme les mathematiques, deux ou
trios lois primordiales à leur disposition elles pourraient marcher de l’avavnt. Mais elles tâtonnent dans les ténèbres…”10

Whether we can call Madame Bovary an object of science as much as we can call it a work of literature is open for question but Flaubert’s interest in science and scientific rigour does give us valuable insight into his motivation and crucial key insights into the construction and significance of his work.. There is no doubt that what Flaubert created was something new and mysterious, even viewed from the contemporary perspective; it is at once detached and passionate, cold and sensual. It is unlike anything that came before it and to this day continues to amaze and confuse readers who delight in its virtuosity and struggle to interpret its meaning.

As one digs deeper and deeper into the book, like Flaubert’s mole, one is struck with a strange sensation that becomes increasingly difficult to shake off. Flaubert seems have been to be able to ‘embed’ a kind of determinism into the very fabric of the text; the relations of the characters to each other and to their social and physical environment are dominated by it. This sensation seems to go beyond the mere fact that one might have read the text once or twice before - although this does seem to be a book that one should read at least once before reading it ‘for the first time’. Initially we can feel it more than we can intellectualise it, but as we get on this determinism, paradoxically, becomes the living pulse of the novel and as we approach the end it is this terrifying drive of self-realisation that dominates the story.

There are several letters exchanged between Flaubert and his friend Alfred de Poitteven11 discussing the deterministic nature of the universe and free will that are quite telling and, indeed, there are many references to the monotonous and deterministic nature of life within the book itself. If there is a certain machinal quality here it is certainly that of the highest order, like a magic clock or some other mysterious creation of the like. It is in this way that the book brings to mind the phenomenon of the Paper Theatre of the 1800’s12 , albeit in a very complicated and refined incarnation. While the characters in Flaubert’s story do seem to be limited to ‘two dimensions’ - created as they are almost entirely out of stereotype and cliché - the natural background is hyper-real and rendered with breath taking complextity and detail. As the novel progresses the initial pseudo-romantic expression of the physical environment is occasionally traded for an existential vision that touches the Sartrian.13 This existentialism is important because it represents the finest resolution of Flaubert’s gaze. In what amounts to a special kind of Flaubertian existential materialism, we find ourselves liminally bound on one extreme with the indifference of nature and on other - in the grandest image - a neutral, cosmic determinism. Flaubert moves us around in this world with staggering virtuosity : here we are looking down dispassionately on this world from above; there we find ourselves starting out inside someone’s’ private thoughts and feelings only to end up in the garden with the wood lice :

“Au fond de son âme, cependant, elle attendait un évévnment. Comme les matelots en détresse, elle promenait sur la solitude de sa vie des yeux déspérés, cherchant au loin quelque voile blanche dans les brumes de l’horizon…”14

and a page later :

“…dans le jardin… tout semblait dormir, l’espalier couvert de paille et la vinge comme un grand serpent malade sous le chaperon du mur, ou l’on voyait, en s’approchait se traîner des cloportes à pattes nombreuses…”15

Sometimes the very fragmentary descritptions of his characters physical attributes become almost indistinguishable from their surroundings. Flaubert shows us a natural world that is as strikingly beautiful as it is indifferent; one in which his creatures find themselves both interposed with and abstracted from their environment. He engages us in constant and subtle shifts of perspective which create a plurality of view points that make objective judgements very difficult. Additionally, the social environment in which the characters relate to each other is rendered in such a way that reference to it does not always need to be made in print although it is always clearly present.

This abundance of perspective and the ability to make understood what is not said is derived from the way in which Flaubert combines literary techniques and applies them towards the characters and events. Like lenses in a microscope or perhaps in a way analogous to how radioscopy allows us discern what lies under the surface, these techniques allows us to observe the events of the book on multiple levels. Three of these techniques are outstanding : Irony, Cliché and Free Indirect Discourse.

Cliché is the ‘material’ out of which all the characters are constituted and it shows itself both in situation and in the sparse dialogue. It is by this use of cliché that Flaubert is able to make clearly defined social and psychological objects out of his characters; it enables him to be categorical with them and to play these categories off of one another.

Charles Bovary opens the book with his emergence as the idiotic school boy and closes it with his pathetic death : he is the average bourgeois every man. Everything about him is mediocre and every desire that motivates him ends either in comfortable complacency, as is the case with his desire for Emma (at least in the short term), or disaster as is the case with his failed attempt to make a name for himself in trying to cure Hyppolites leg. He is the product of a nervous, nagging mother and a father who, although full of all kinds of grand statements, is as essentially complacent and mediocre as Charles himself. The final revelation of Emmas’ licentious activities and her death are impossible for him to comprehend as is everything that exists out side of his small sphere of comprehension - the Marquis’ ball for example. He seems completely oblivious to Emma’s passions but when he is finally made to face them they destroy him.

Homais is the incarnation of bourgeois values in the afterglow of the revolution : reason, ‘republican anticlericalism’, science and the printed word, all faded to empty rhetoric. He is the master at using the social ideals of the revolution (progress, humanism) to hide his lust for personal wealth. He is the empty ideologue and idealist and, as a result, is an abundance source of self-important nonsense. He is the spirit of Yonneville and epitomises the empty arrogance of the provincial Bourgeois.
Rudolphe - with all his contempt for the bourgeois - initially seems to stand in contrast to Homais but is, in the end, the other side of the same coin : he is the empty romantic and spouts out his own rhetoric as a result. His bold statements are completely self serving; he is the cliché of the fashionable romantic who uses romanticism as guise for lechery and self aggrandisement. Léon, Emma’s other love,r also shows these romantic tendencies but lacks the courage to act upon them decisively. He is just as empty as Rudolphe; where Rudolphe is brutish, Leon is timid. The cure and the merchant make for are equally stereotypical. Curé is completely useless in spiritual matters his existence is completely profane and completely useless and ignorant of all things spiritual. The draper Leureux masks his greed in obsequious, servile phrases and is completely shameless in his quest for money because in his world there is no shame in it.16

Cliché is also used in the description of Yonneville itself; it is the perfect stereotype of a backwards provincial town rendered with meticulous detail. Our arrival in Yonneville is like that of a lone spirit surveying a ghost town ; not a person is seen. As we begin the first chapter of part two, we fly in over the surrounding area moving over the beautiful landscape towards the centre of town which is described in intimate detail - we are even made aware of its backwards agricultural practices. We travel through the grave yard, through the church, the market in the main square until we reach the ‘Lion D’or.’ It is only then that we encounter the shadow - or rather the possibility of the shadow - of the pharmacist Homais bent over his desk. At this point the trip is over and we are taken directly to the cemetery where we encounter the sexton who has, in addition to burying the dead, taken to growing potatoes just next to the graves. We are then made privy to a fragment of a conversation in which the Curé says to him : “Vous vous nourrissez des morts.”17 We are then informed that:

“Depuis les événments que l’on va raconter, rien, en effet, n’a changé à Yonneville … les foetus du pharmacien comme des paquets d’amandou blanc, se pourissent de plus en plus dans leur alcool bourbeux…”18

There’s a sense in which Yonneville is a kind of eerie place out of time, a kind of 19th century ‘Pleasant Ville.’ Indeed, towards the beginning of our lonely flight into Yonneville we are told how, despite the construction of the construction of new roads in the area (ses débouchés nouveaux) the town has stood still and that from a distance it resembles a snoozing herd of cows.
Perhaps the most startling is Flaubert’s use of free indirect discourse or style indirect libre. moving the first person in and out of the third, creates a vertiginous effect and must have been very confusing for readers of the day who were not used to it. This effect seems to have been largely responsible for the moral confusion about the book. Certainly at times one can find oneself quite rightly asking : who is thinking this? the character? Flaubert? myself? He does it by maintaining the narrative in the third person but he puts <<<>>>

To this we must add Flauberts’ mastery of irony, which he uses equally well in the context of comedy as in pathos. <<<>>>>

Flaubert’s masterful and unrepentant use of cliché descends from the dialogue to permeate the very beings of the characters - it also creates the village Yonneville. Irony collides with these categorical characters moulded out of cliché and compel us, often subconciously, to move from our complacency into the position of critic. It is at the grand events of the novel that these elements of technique come together in all their majesty : the wedding, the ball, the agricultural fair and the cab ride though Rouen. Flaubert is always working his critical lenses and some of the most magical critical moments can sometimes be found hiding in the shadow of some larger event. What are we to make of the last phrase of part one, chapter two :“Elle l’avait aimé après tout”19 . Easily passed over, this sentence refers to Charles’ first wife - after her death - and begs the questions what? and who? : What kind of love is this - if it is love at all? Who is thinking this? Charles? Flaubert? Are we supposed to think it? Flaubert keeps us moving incessantly and often in multiple directions often snagging us on little hooks. All this is played out on a physical landscape that is at once the natural beauty of Normandy delivered to us with proper 19th century romanticism and the nausea of existential realism. In Flaubert’s world the material and the psychological ally themselves in a continual give and take….. join ….>>>>>

But what about Emma herself? What are we to make of her? What does she represent and where does she come from? As Flaubert’s own statement suggests, she is indeed none other than Flaubert himself but, like Charles’ hat “d’ordre composite”, she is a bizarre mix. She is Flaubert as he identified himself with his mother and his mistress, Louise Colet. His own transgressive drives mix with the domination his nervous mother had over him, the bourgeois society of which he was inextricably a part and his his bizarre relationship with the demanding Colet. After the death of Charles’ father and his sister - which occurred in rapid succession - Charles was left with his mother and his sister‘s baby daughter to care for. His mother was extremely nervous and hated for him to be away. He never broke with her, even after meeting Colet and went to great pains to keep them apart. After infrequent trips to Paris, or elsewhere, he always returned back to the tiny provincial town of Croisset where his family moved him after he began to be afflicted with bizarre epileptic attacks. Invariably he found his mother pacing nervously on the train platform, waiting for him to arrive. Flaubert showed almost no desire to leave or alter his situation and it seems almost as though he felt himself to be a willing prisoner to his circumstances.

The three Madame Bovarys - mother,first wife and Emma - that appear in the book are themselves a strange mixture of Flaubert, his mother and Colet. The patriarchal voice of Homais is, in part Falubert’s own father as well as the parochial voice of the bourgeois society. Léon is vaguely reminiscent of his admired friend, Alfred Le Pottevin, for whom he had so much hope and who in the end turned out to be a disappointment for Flaubert - as Léon was for Emma. There obsession with literature and the impossibility of escape for Emma (as for Flaubert himself) from the shackles of her environment and who she is - the escape into romantic literature was as endemic for Emma as it was for the youth of Fluabert’s generation. Everything in the book is an image or an artefact, a person or melange of different aspects of people and places that made up the physical, social and psychological material of Flaubert’s existence. With scientific rigour, he creates out of this material the most exquisite dream : instead of turning his gaze outwards, as his predecessors had done, he turns his focus inwards and lays his soul bare for examination. It is through the axial point of Flaubert that the characters and locations touch reality; that “linge droit” is dug inwards and the ‘reality’ of words and ideas it opens up exists deep inside Flaubert himself. He removes the outside world and creates (or finds) objects, from within himself, that resemble human instruments and activities; these objects become the loci of aesthetic contemplation : a critical dream of reality with each element perfectly placed to act out its part in the machine with exquisite precision. Still, there is something Emma that sets her apart. Her complete lack of conscious intentionality arouses something in us that is difficult to define in words. She finds her self in the middle of the most bizarre and self destructive activities often without seeming to know how she arrived there:

<<>>

She becomes increasingy estranged from the reality of her environment. Our conscious, rational minds are at pains to come to terms with her.

If, however, we consider that this object of Flaubert’s narrative is portrayed as a woman20 in parochial and patriarchal provincial France and, as such, is perhaps the perfect incarnation of subconsciously repressed desire - a desire with no chance of survival or full expression in the ‘conscious world’ that Flaubert presents to us and one that must constantly deny itself - we may be able to find some clues in deciphering the meaning of her character. Viewed in this light, Emma reveals herself as the incarnation of the psycopathological phenomenon of subconcious desire as it intrudes into the repression of everyday existence.21 His critique is of the society which, in its immaculate homogeneity, has raised reason to the status of religion; but this is a religion of profanity where transgression is not considered and the sacred no longer exisits : life and passion in the raw is repressed and expression of desire is channeled neurotically through the rational constructs of society. Desire manifests itself in other places and characters in the book but it is always restrained or is directed instrumentally towards the profanity of ‘reality’- towards money, status or sex : the drives of Rudolphe , Léon and Homais fade rapidly or change focus as they lose their practicality. Emma’s limitless passion is completly alien to them : even immediately after her gruesome death, the pharmacist and the curé continue with with their pointless and age old arguments over church and state and the characters continue as history has determined them showing little or no real sentiment over what has just happened - with the exception, of course, of Charles and the baby who are effectively destroyed by it but have absolutely no understanding of the situation. Emma’s desire is singular : it’s manifestation is transgressive to the extent that it removes her, quite literally, from the reality of society. It has no real tangible goal other than it’s own self realisation. Emma is passion that cannot or will not be mediated by society, made manifest in a society so repressed that understanding is impossible. She is all pathos, all Dionysian drive with no true Aplollonian vision to guide her - her romance novels will not suffice. All the while, as distubing as this all is, we recognise that there is something fundimental about Emma. Perhaps Flaubert is showing us that it is not reason or thinking that is the essence of being - as Descartes postulated - but rather desire.
Flaubert is pshycological in a way that was almost completely alien to the readers of his generation and Madame Bovary was put on trial for crimes against morality. He was aquitted after a lenghthy process that, by all accounts, Flaubert seemed to relish. <<>>Surrealism…

Questions,Other Notes and Ideas on Madame Bovary and Flaubert:

1. The Emotional Intelligence of Emma

“You must beware of turgid speeches
masking themselves as common
place passions”
Rodolphe p.177

Emma lives in a world apart which she has cobbled together from the language of romance novels. She uses romantic clichés – which have no grounding in reality – as the foundation of her thought and identity. Increasingly, this becomes all she sees and understands. When her world is challenged, her fear manifests itself as rage or retreat into piety; there’s an element here that’s almost bestial. Her self-delusion and laceration from the world reach such an extreme point that she is literally removed from existence. Although this is literature and Emma represents an extreme pathological case, her character does raise certain important points regarding the relationship between language and passion (as desire and emotion), and the ways in which we engage with the world through them.

– How is the nature of a given emotion dependent on the language we have to describe it? (metaphor etc.)

– If we had different language tools (or if our language functioned differently) would our experience of emotion be different?

– Are emotions in the mind or are they “in the world” (Decartes’ cogito vs. Heidegger’s Dasien) ? (passion/reason vs the ideas of mind and heart… chi)

– How do our assumptions – mind/body, inner/outer (dualism) or, our ideas of how love or anger “should be” – affect (or emerge from) our language and therefore influence our emotions?

– How are the passions related to personal and social narratives, and the drive to complete these narratives (consciously or sub-consciously) ? What’s the relation of the expression to the emotion?

– How does this narrative get out of control as it did with Emma?

How much choice (or control) do we actually have in deciding when and how we express our emotions? (Sartre’s mauvaise foi) Is it possible to change the nature of our emotions by changing our language; is our situation in it’s own way just as deterministic as Emma’s?

2. “Madame Bovary, C’est Moi” : What does this mean?

– Flaubert talked about burying himself in the work so that he could find the “straight line” (linge droit) which would allow him to dig “like a mole” (comme une taupe) and eventually emerge or open up a reality of ideas and words that was hitherto concealed.
– Flaubert detested the subject matter of this novel. Why did he write about it ?
– “méfions-nous de cette espèce d’échauffement qu’on appelle l’inspiration…” Flaubert was suspicious of inspiration and said, “write with the head, not the heart”, “…écrire froidment”
– “The highest point in art is not to make us laugh or cry, but to act in the fashion of nature and make us dream”
– “Treat the soul with the same impartiality that one uses in the physical sciences.”
– “ Don’t judge, show!”

What is he showing? Is this really – as it seems on the surface – a critique of french bourgeois provincial life (les moeurs de province) or something altogether different? How does Flaubert implicate us (our emotions) in the book? How does he set us dreaming?

– The novel raises issues about gender and the possibilities open to women with regards to self determination (Vargas’ bad girl). Is there is something deeper and more perverse going on here?

– Is Flaubert just making a statement about the plight of women or is he using this sexualization instrumentally to deal with a personal issue?

Baudelaire : “To accomplish this tour de force, it remained only for the author to divest himself of his sex, and to become a woman. The result is a marvel; for despite all his zeal as an actor he was unable to keep from infusing his male blood into the veins of his creation, and Madame Bovary, in the most forceful and ambitious sides of her character, and also the most pensive, remained a man.”

A Fragmentary Conversation About Emma Bovary with Myself:

– How do we interpret this book and Emma herself?
is it a critique of society?
do we sympathise with Emma for being caught in this situation, Do we detest her?
What is this book saying politically?
Is Flaubert making any kind of judgement at all or is this a kind of sadistic game?
What exactly is he playing at?
What do we think about Flaubert use of a female charater?

– Well, this is a complicated book and it’s made all the more difficult to access becuse of subtil way in which presents itself and the prejduces we might have in approaching it

– … that’s to say, how we might impose our own understanding of how a novel from this period should present itself and , in the grander scheme of things, what the role of litterature istelf should be in moral and aesthetic terms.

– Some still call this book as a “realist” novel or claim that it was a breakthrough because of the realistic way in which it describes mid 19th century society in Normandy.

– Certainly, this is part of it, and the novel – on the surface – does present itself in this way.

– And, without doubt we are reading something that has it’s basis in lived experience and obsevation… the very social material that makes up the charaters, thier motives and dialogue is taken from this environment that Flaubert knew so well

–I’m reffering to the social conformity, cold intrumental pursuit of wealth , fashionable romanticicm , the bougeois marriage (which was more about money and estate than love or passion), the place of women, the restrictions of class, social hypocrisy, blind allegience to the social doctrine of the day and the like .

– and certainly in his descriptions of the material world, Flaubert’s depth of detail can only come with a mode of obsevation that borders on the scientific in terms of its rigour.

– So I don’t think it to be entirely innacurate to call him a realist… However, I do think that this is just the begining with Flaubert and we know from his letters that he was interested in moving beyond this realist style of which he was obviously such a master..

– I think, we can say that actually that it is through of this masterful use realism that Flaubert takes us somewhere else all together , a place that litterature had not explored up until then or at least no in this way …

– and presents us with something that is so subtile that at first we have no idea what we’re dealing with, just perhaps and odd feeling that there is something unusual going on.

– So Let me see If I can roughy outline what I mean here

– Flaubert presents us with a kind of disconect between his characters and the natural world that surrounds them , this is most extreme in the estrangement of Emma’s inner voice and the reality of the natural world to which she has no emotional conection.
P34 …Convent Bginning of PT2 enrty into Yonneville

– in this way Flaubert accentuates of the evolving passionate narrative of Emma by posing it against, or lacerating it from the natural world, which is described with this breathtaking realism..

– Emmas passion is increasingly directed away from reality, towards her fantasies fuelled by romace literature P58 After the Ball , Trapped Etc … Down in her soul…

– as her passion reaches it’s peak, she becomes dislocated from society and even her lovers themselves. PAGE 100 (playing the virtuous housewife)

– now what’s interesting to notice here is how Flaubert paints these characters in relation to that of Emmma’s : they are categorical in a way, they fit into these very real social stereotypes that Flaubert detested somuch… they become almost 2 dimentional, unvarying, cliche and almost comic at times

– wheras the range of emma’s passion and the prodigious and uncontrollable nature of it’s evolution increasingly terrifies … these suppporting characters, pale in comparison to her.

WHERE DOES ALL THIS LEAD ?

– BY the end of the book she’s really is like a caged creature, desperate to maintain control, desperate to keep herself disengaed from the others…. she is tormented and killed, by her own desire…surrounded by all these pathetic and demonic creatures ….this is NOT Balzac . this, by the end, is like some kind of dream… seems more like a nightmare than anything else

SO what I’m Getting at here

– There’s a sense in which this realism is merely the surface of something or as Flaubert put it the “scaffolding” which “would allow him to dig like a mole , and to eventually emerge into a reality of ideas that was hither to unknown”

Explain … But Madame Bovary is, in a sense, his authorial judgment on such human frailties, a revelation of the fatality and fultility of living out such romantic dreams in the modern world.

– But Flaubert doesn’t stop there

– the accuracy and detail of Flaubert’s realism as well as his understanding of science allowed him to recognize that reality, or at least our understanding of it, could be brought into question by the change or suggestion of even the smallest things. And so we see him laying out these hooks for us – and sometimes they are very subtile. He’s drawing us into this “reality” he’s discovered – sometimes forcing us to question our very understanding of the things that make us most human, the very understanding of our emotioanl language PP…19 “She Loved Him, After All”

– In this way he Implicates us in the novel, forcing us to weave in our own thoughts and feelings, our own emotional “Mythology” with that of the book. He puts us in the thoughts of the charaters and forces us to make our own judgements

– Irony + Free indirect discourse 271… “But as She was Writing…”

– the combination of Flaubert’s nautural realism, the lacerated internal voice of Emma, the almost symbolic supporting characters and the ways in which Flaubert pulls us in to the book creates the sense that what we are dealing with is some kind of reality abstracted from itself … somekind of critical dream in which we the readers, are expected to play a crucial critical role. In this way Flaubert is realist in his technique, modern in his depiction of bourgeois values the kind of moral relativism he implies but, in a sense, also surreal in the way he engages us with the book PP …152 She Would Explore his room ….

– What then, if anything, does this book provide… what does it show us???

– Well I think for me the most striking thing that came to mind is the way that, personal and social narratives are created, accepted or used… and become accepted as truth or become (or create) objects of obsession

– It seems to me that dominant issue here is that of the relationship between language and emotion. I’d like to speak about this briefly, not in an attempt to offer somekind definitive of model as to how this relationship plays out but rather to open a path for investigation and discussion. I’ll then move on to examine a few points in the text that I found to be of interest in this regard

––Rousseau, sturuggling with language in his attempt to expess these feelings he had; to define them into something that we (or he for that matter) could understand as some kind of recognisable emotion.

––– how difficult it was for him to do this given, among other things, the bizarre nature of his relationship with Mme De Warrens and the unstable nature of his family life. I for one, felt quite sympathetic towards poor Rousseau in this regard, contantly striving as he was to pull emotion out of raw feelings, never able to constitute for himself the common narratives that define Mother, Lover, Protector, Father etc…

But, as sad as it was for Rousseau it’s also very interesting to think about how fragile our ideas about our emotions actually are, and that they might not be always exactly what we assume them to be. So, let’s pause here for a second and try to understand what we mean by this idea of a narrative as it relates to emotion.

–– Emotional Intellegence… We are linguistc creatures and we use language to understand and describe our world, to each other and to ourselves. Metaphor is one of our chief devices in this regard

– However, in a nutshell I think we can begin to undertstand it if we are willing consider the ideas that our emotions are engagement with the world, and that our emotions, such as we understand them, are in large part percived as they are due to accutulration and the language that goes along with it. A few points

– We engage with the world through emotion

– Emotion tends to involve desire which moves –sometimes in very complicated ways – within a narrative and compells the individual to engage with the world. (there’s always somekind of object or direction)

– This is Intentionality

– Emotions can be false. (physiological response just is but the understanding of the narrative may be misunder stood or it could change)

– Our langugage and acultration has a lot to do with the nature of the emotions we have. Metaphors we use the cliche’s we live by etc…

– The ways in which the subject responds to the pressures of these narrative can be intelligent depending on how the story of this narrative is pursued.

– Active engagement with these narratives can affect not only our behavior or our way of engaging in the world but also the world itself

Now, on one extreme one might not engage at all, it might not even come to mind that such a thing would be possible; on the other, one could neurotically over think the narrative. Like Hamlet for example: the locus of his desire lies in direct, clear , action, and is never questioned: he must, and will kill Claudius to avenge his father. However, Hamlet is so busy engaging, questioning, tweaking the narrative of his revenge and missing opportunities for satisfaction as they present themselves, that we begin to wonder if he’ll ever get around to actually doing the deed that honour demands of him. There is also this extreme case, as suggested by Flaubert, where the subject (or rather ltterary subject in Emma’s) attempts to completely replace one set of narratives for another which has been completely fabricated out of books , these romance novels etc

… I should also point out
this idea of narrative as it relates to our emotions is itself a kind of metaphor : If we took this idea litterally we’d be living in some kind of novel … so I’m not saying it’s definitive by anymeans as a model of how our emotions work, thing are more myserious than that. However, I think it’s quite helpful as a tool for litterary critique in trying to create a relation between the lived and the written.

SO , with all of this in mind I’d like to have a look at few parts of the book where we can see this emotional narrative taking place, being formed or manipulated. And also, more interestingly point out line here and there where Flaubert implicates us, the reader and our own narratives into the book and into the characters them selves.

Anger and Resentment – There’s this perverse way in which Emma seems to savour all her Emotions , Anger and resentment are no different P94 … Dirested against Charles, P101 she’s almost frustrated that her “narrative” of resent ment directed towards Charles is missing some of the elements it needed to make the narrative itself complete “ she wished that he would beat her…”

Ideas of Love – Emma, Leon, Rodolphe … 177 this contrast between Emma and Rodolphe’s ideas

Friendship – Homais P81