Criticism would be simplified if, before setting forth, the critic declared his tastes. Every work of art is informed in a particular way by the ‘person’of the artist, that, independent from considerations of execution, manages to charm or alienate us. Thus, the works we end up admiring are inevitably those that satisfy the twin demands of our intellect and our individual temperament. The failure to address these two distinct concerns has rendered so many aesthetic discussions inadequate.

Louis Builhet

‘The death of Lucien de Rubempré is the great drama of my life,’ Oscar Wilde is said to have remarked about Balzac’s character. I have always regarded this statement as being literally true. A number of fiction characters have affected my life more profoundly than most of the real people I have known. In the heterogeneous, cosmopolitan circle of my literary imagination, a handful of friendly ghosts regularly come and go – today, for instance, I might casually include d’Artagnan, David Copperfield, Jean Valjean, Prince Pierre Bezukhov, Fabrizio del Dongo, the terrorists Cheng and the Professor, and Lena Grove. But no character has been more persistently and passionately present than Emma Bovary.

My first memory of Madame Bovary is derived from a film. It was 1952, a stifling hot summer night, at a recently opened cinema in Piura, on the Plaza de Armas with its swaying palm trees. James Mason played Flaubert; the lean Louis Jourdan was Rodolphe Boulanger; and Emma Bovary appeared through the nervous energetic gestures of Jennifer Jones. I could not have been terribly impressed, because afterwards – during a time when, as a voracious reader, I was staying up nights to devour novels – I was not compelled even to track down a copy of the book.

My second memory is academic. On the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Madame Bovary, the University of San Marcos in Lima organized a ceremony to honour the occasion. The critic André Coyné was impassively questioning Flaubert’s reputation as a realist when his arguments suddenly became inaudible amid the cries of ‘Viva Algeria Libre!’ and the shouting of more than a hundred San Marcos students, armed with stones, making their way through the hall toward the platform where their target, the increasingly pale French ambassador, awaited them. Part of the celebration in honour of Flaubert was the publication, in a little booklet whose ink rubbed off on our fingers, of an edition of Saint Julien I’Hospitaller, translated by Manuel Beltroy. That was the first work by Flaubert I read.

In the summer of 1959, with little money and the promise of a scholarship, I arrived in Paris for the first time. One of the first things I did was buy a copy of Madame Bovary in the Classiques Garnier edition, in a bookshop in the Latin Quarter. I began reading it that afternoon, in a small room in the Hôtel Wetter near the Cluny Museum. It was at that point that my story begins. From the first lines, the book began to work on me, charming my mind like a potent magic. It had been years since any novel had captivated my attention so immediately and so exclusively, blotting out my surroundings and sinking me so deeply into its narrative. As the afternoon wore on, as night fell, as the sun then began to rise, the novel’s literary magic increased, subordinating my real world to the authority of the imaginary one. It was morning – Emma and Léon had just met in a box at the Rouen Opera – when, dizzy with fatigue, I put the book down and went to bed. During my curiously troubled sleep, the book continued to exist and above its various scenes – the Rouaults’ farm, the streets of Tostes, good-natured and stupid Charles, Homais and his ponderous pedantry – was the face of Emma Bovary, like an image anticipated in childhood dreams or obscurely prophesied through the many books of my adolescence. When I woke up to resume reading, I was struck by two incontrovertible realizations: I then knew the writer I would have wanted to have been; and I then knew that I was to develop a special relationship with Flaubert’s creation: until my death I would be in love with Emma Bovary. Informing virtually everything I would then go on to do, she would be for me, as for Léon Dupuis at the beginning of their affair: ‘l’amoureuse de tous les romans, l’héroïne de tous les drames, le vague elle de tous les volumes de vers.’¹

Since then, I have read Madame Bovary a dozen times, and, unlike so many other cherished works, it has never disappointed me; on the contrary, re-readings always seem to reveal more of it. A novel becomes part of a person’s life for a number of reasons related to the book and the individual. I would like to investigate, in this particular case, why Madame Bovary has succeeded in affecting me unlike any other narrative I have come across.

Iam obsessed with form, and surely much of my admiration for Madame Bovary derives from my preference for works rigorously and symmetrically constructed – completed, perfect, finished – over those that are carefully and deliberately left open-ended, suggestive of the indeterminate, the vague, the ‘process’. What I have sought (and what pleases me to find) in books, films, and paintings is not infinite incompleteness – however faithfully it might image one aspect of our continuous, always unfinished existence – but the opposite: the ‘totalizations’ which, with their bold, arbitrary but convincing structures give the illusion of felt experience and come closest to the comprehensive representation of it. My appetite was fully satisfied by Madame Bovary, the exemplar of the closed work, the perfect circle. But, more important, Madame Bovary defined for me what I value in literature: reading the book, that is, taught me how to read. I am, I discovered, attracted more by action – in a very conventional sense – than reflection; more by ‘objective’ representations of experience than the subjectively expressed responses to it; I prefer Tolstoi to Dostoevski; invention grounded in real experience to that originating in fantasy; and, among unrealities, what is closer to the concrete than to the abstract. I prefer pornography, for instance, to science fiction, and sentimental stories to horror tales.

In his letters to Louise Colet, while writing Madame Bovary, Flaubert was confident he was writing a novel of ‘ideas’ instead of one of ‘action’. The terms are problematic and have led a number of critics to maintain that Madame Bovary is a novel in which nothing happens except on the level of language. Madame Bovary is rich linguistically; but it is also rich dramatically, and is virtually as busy and as varied as generically determined adventure novels, even when the many events it develops turn out to reveal the petty or the sordid. True, most of this appears to us through the subjectively organized and articulated perceptions of the individual characters, but because of Flaubert’s maniacally materialistic style, the subjective reality in Madame Bovary possesses a solidity, a physical weight, as palpable as the objects of lived experience. That thoughts and feelings could convey the authority of facts, that they could be, it seemed, almost touched impressed and dazzled me, revealing an important aspect of my literary disposition.

For me, literary satisfaction is directly correlated to the emotions a work is able to elicit and manipulate. In Madame Bovary my admiration is evoked on a number of levels, one of which is derived from Emma’s determined, morally reckless rebellion. Her conduct is motivated not by an ethic or an ideology but by appetites and dreams, her fantasies and her body – for the uninhibited expression of which she suffers, lies, commits adultery, steals, and ultimately kills herself. Her defeat is not, in the novel’s context, morally significant, proving for instance that her end is a kind of ethical punishment, as Maître Sénard claimed as the attorney for the defence at the trial of Madame Bovary (his defence of the novel contributed to the legal travesty as much as the accusation against it brought forth by Fiscal Pinard, the Public Prosecutor, a clandestine composer of pornographic verse); instead, her defeat merely reinforces our sense of her particular solitary struggle. Emma is, in every possible way, alone; impulsive, sentimental, and indulgent, she is fundamentally a-social.

What matters most, of course, is not the defiance but its causes, originating in an attitude that she and I share intimately: our incurable materialism, our predilection for the pleasures of the body over those of the intellect, our respect for the senses and the instincts, our commitment to an unequivocally earthly existence. The pleasure Emma craves is sexual; her sensuality will not be inhibited or repressed, unlike Charles who fails to satisfy it because he fails to recognize its existence. The pleasure she craves is also aesthetic: she wants to surround her life with pleasing, superfluous things – the manifestations of elegance, refinement–to ‘objectify’ and ‘externalize’ the appetite for the beautiful cultivated through her imagination and inculcated through her reading. Emma’s world is a romantic’s, organized by the senses, and crowded with adventure, risk, and theatrical gestures of generosity and sacrifice. Her rebellion constitutes a rejection of everything but the physically urgent, the here and now; her aspiration, that is, is politically irresponsible: no society could tolerate this existential license, forever moving past those limits the transgression of which Georges Bataille describes, simply and unequivocally, as Evil. Emma, however, is a being not of society but humanity, defending what virtually every religion, philosophy, and ideology disavow: the unrepressed satisfying of desire.

I remember reading, in the opening pages of a book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that violence is almost always an image of beauty. The statement was tremendously reassuring. I was seventeen then, and it disturbed me to note that despite my peaceful nature, violence – implicit or explicit, refined or raw – was absolutely necessary for a novel to persuade me of its reality and its power. Those works that lacked any suggestion of the violent seemed unreal, and unreality I find ‘mortally’ tedious. The narrative of Madame Bovary is organized by violence, manifest on a number of levels, ranging from the purely physical one of pain (the operation, gangrene, Hippolyte’s amputation, Emma’s poisoning) to the spiritual one of ruthless rapine (the merchant Lheureux), or selfishness and cowardice (Rodolphe, León), to its social forms in the exploitation of human labour (old Catherine Leroux) or the exploitation in interpersonal relationships: the violence, at its most generalized, inherent in prejudice and social envy. Emma’s fantasy, in this context, her longing to be separated from the debilitating environment around her, stands out as special and important. And, appropriately, the most violent scene – in which Emma kills herself – is the most moving. The chapter, ineluctably etched in my memory, plays and replays in my mind, as Emma walks to Rodolphe’s chateau at dusk, the last manoeuvre that may save her and keep her from having to change, until the next day when she, overcome by the vision of the Blind Man crossing Yonville humming his vulgar song, enters death like a nightmare. For me, these pages – painful, sadistic, and terribly cruel – constitute one of the most satisfying and pleasing passages in literature.

Madame Bovary is a novel of a peculiar sexual cruelty; it is also, importantly, an extraordinarily indulgent book, given to instances of dramatic overstatement. Emma is sentimental, coarse, vulgar and, in each excess, undeniably attractive. My attitude toward her is clear; my attitude toward melodrama in general – and Madame Bovary is certainly a specific example of it – is more ambivalent and requires explanation. In the novel, unqualified by literary pretence, the melodramatic is insupportable. In the cinema, curiously, there is nothing I’d rather witness – a weakness derived, I suspect, from the forties and fifties, when I regularly and depravedly spent my time watching the Mexican films that I still miss so much today. My vulnerability to the melodramatic does not develop, I should add, from the contemporary intellectual sport that through self-consciously sophisticated reinterpretation aesthetically reclaims the ignoble and the stupid – as Hermann Broch does, for instance, through his concept of kitsch and Susan Sontag through camp – but, rather, from an absolute, undetached, and emotional identification with the material of narrative. My difficulty here may largely be semantic, and melodrama may not convey enough of what I am trying to say, suggesting as it does a specific genre of artistic activity whereas I refer to what characterizes all emotional interaction, only one example of which is represented in artistic melodrama. I am speaking, really, of the careful perversion of what each era recognizes as ‘good taste’ – the rhetorical gesture and the affront. I am speaking of the disruptions of the refinements of the dominant social ideology. I am speaking of the mechanization and distortions to which so many emotional and ideational aspects of human relations are so regularly subjected; I am speaking of the intrusion of the comic in the serious, the grotesque in the tragic, the absurd in the logical, the impure in the pure, the ugly in the beautiful. This material does not interest me intellectually, but emotionally. A crude but typical example is in the popular Spanish film El Último Cuplé, which with all its elephantine stupidity attracts me not as an entomologist to a spider – as a phenomenon to be examined and scrutinized – but as a creature to the spiderweb in which I find I’m unwittingly trapped. I am caught, lost in unintellectual identification, akin to what Emma recognizes in her experience of Lucie de Lammermoor in Rouen (‘La voix de la chanteuse ne lui semblait être que le retentissement de sa conscience, et cette illusion qui la charmait quelque chose même de sa vie’.² In El Último Cuplé, however, the engagement does not outlast what has occasioned it. Reality – as in other sentimental Spanish films, El Derecho de Nacer by Corín Tellado or Simplemente Maria – is available to us only as melodrama, to the exclusion of everything else.

Nevertheless my inclination for overstatement is no doubt symptomatic of my uncompromising commitment to realism: I am moved because melodrama approaches my conception of the real more adequately than drama, as tragi-comedy does more than pure comedy or pure tragedy. And for me, it is an achievement of the highest order when a work of art can admit, without detached, ironic statement, the sloppy and the sentimental, and persist to the completion of its depiction without having to draw back uneasily from its subject.

Madame Bovary seems to go out of its way to be heavy-handed – from the relentless series of premonitory signs that bode Emma’s end to the ragged Blind Man covered with sores to, even, Justin, the romantic commonplace, secretly in love with the unattainable woman. Madame Bovary is peopled with stock characters: Lheureux the shopkeeper is greedy, anti-Semitic, and rapacious; the notaries and functionaries are, of course, wicked and sordid; and the politicians garrulous, hypocritical, and ridiculous. Emma herself, coldly planning her excesses, exists in the Quixotic world of the books she reads, dreaming of exotic countries with picture postcard scenes, and relying on the grandiloquence of a cliché rhetoric (giving the man she loves the signet Amor nel cor, asking him ‘to think of me at midnight’ and reminding him that ‘Il n’y a pas de désert, pas de précipices ni d’océan que je ne traverserais avec toi’).³ I am delighted by all the cheap serial coincidences of the novel or the unapologetically stock scenes: Justin, alone, sobbing in the shadow of Madame Bovary’s tomb, or Emma, as her world is collapsing, tossing her last five francs to a beggar, or the fiacre ride ending with the simple image of a woman’s hand scattering in the wind the torn bits of the letter breaking with her lover.

On 24 April 1852, Flaubert, having just read a novel by Lamartine (Graziella), wrote to Louise:

Et d’abord, pour parler clair, la baise-t-il ou ne la baise-t-il pas? Ce ne sont pas des êtres humains, mais des mannequins. Que c’est beau, ces histoires d’amour où la chose principale est tellement entourée de mystère que l’on ne sait à quoi s’en tenir, l’union sexuelle étant reléguée systématiquement dans l’ombre comme boire, manger, pisser, etc.! Le parti pris m’agace. Voilà un gaillard qui vit continuellement avec une femme qui l’aime et qu’il aime, et jamais un désir! Pas un nuage impur ne vient obscurcir ce lac bleuâtre! O hypocrite! S’il avait raconté l’histoire vraie, que c’eût été plus beau! Mais la vérité demande des mâles plus velus que M. de Lamartine. Il est plus facile en effet de dessiner un ange qu’une femme: les ailes cachent la bossa.⁴

Any novel that excludes the sexual is as distorting as one that reduces experience exclusively to it (although, given my predilections, I prefer an absolute sexual obsession to its absolute exclusion). The treatment of sexuality constitutes one of the most delicate problems in fiction, and is rarely emancipated from the network of prejudice and conviction that both author and reader sustain: more than a few novels, in the familiar theological metaphor, have been sent to hell by way of their trousers. But in Madame Bovary, the erotic is mastered with intelligence and care. Sexuality is the dominant concern informing the narrative (rivalled perhaps only by money, although it is impossible to separate the sexual from the economic). Nevertheless, sexuality is generally present only through oblique expression, a sensuality shadowing the book’s development (Justin contemplating Madame Bovary’s undergarments; Léon adoring her gloves; and, after Emma’s death, Charles acquiring the objects she would have liked to have possessed), and surfaces explicitly only on isolated but significant occasions: the unforgettable scene of Emma like a courtesan letting her hair down for Léon, or preparing for making love with the refinement that the Egyptian Ruchiuk Hânem must have possessed. Sexuality occupies the dramatic centrality that it does in life; unlike Lamartine, Flaubert does not eclipse the biological by the halo of lyrical spiritualism; nevertheless, the biological does not dominate only. Flaubert’s depiction of love partakes of sensibility, poetry, and gesture, and, concurrently, of erection and orgasm. On 19 September 1852, he wrote to Louise: ‘Ce brave organe génital est le fond des tendresses humaines; ce n’est pas la tendresse, mais c’en est le substratum come diraient les philosophes. Jamais aucune femme n’a aimé un eunuque et si les mères chérissent les enfants plus que les pères, c’est qu’ils leur sont sortis du ventre, et le cordon ombilical de leur amour leur reste au coeur sans être coupé.’⁵ The brave organe génital ‘motivates’ the narrative development of Madame Bovary. The hopelessness which little by little drives Emma into adultery originates in her frustration as a wife, a frustration that is fundamentally sexual. The officier de santé is no match for Emma, and her dissatisfaction precipitates her end. Precisely the opposite happens to Charles, whose appetite is sated and ambition destroyed by the introduction of Emma into his life. His blindness, his conformism, his stubborn mediocrity, I am suggesting, results largely from his sexual contentment.

In the same letter to Louise, Flaubert dismisses the traditional, feminine notion of sexuality: ‘Elles ne sont pas franches avec elles-mêmes; elles ne s’avouent pas leurs sens; elles prennent leur cul pour leur coeur et croient que la lune est faite pour éclairer leur bourdoir.’⁶ The complaint is, of course, applicable to men, whose regular dishonesty obscures their own sensuality, misrepresenting the penis for the heart. The development of Emma’s character in contrast charts the conflict between an individual’s conditioning and the determination to be liberated from it. It is impossible not to be moved by Emma’s aptitude for sexual pleasure; once stimulated and educated by Rodolphe, she surpasses her teacher and her second lover, and from the ninth chapter of the second part the novel is enveloped in a passionate eroticism. Moreover, as in eighteenth-century libertine literature – and Flaubert was of course an enthusiastic reader of the Marquis de Sade – love is linked to religion, or rather, to the Church and the trappings of worship. It is noteworthy that Emma’s sexual awakening takes place in a school run by nuns, at the foot of an altar, amid the incense of a Catholic Mass (a fact that gave the Public Prosecutor fits), and her first rendezvous with Léon, preceding the erotic scene in the fiacre, takes place, at Emma’s suggestion, in the cathedral at Rouen. Conflating the religious and the erotic, the seduction develops as the couple is guided through – and offered detailed descriptions of – the cathedral. Emma’s sexuality, that is, occasions her transcendence, her escape from the relentlessly repressive bourgeois community of Yonville whose women – Madame Langlois, Madame Caron, Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, Madame Homais – exist, like a breed of tame animals, only to be domesticated. Emma’s curiously religious sexual emancipation is offered, in the context of the novel, as the only available choice of conduct, even though this choice proves fatal. Instead of inhibiting the satisfaction of her desires, Emma indulges them, perceiving clearly the distinction between ‘coeur’ and ‘cul’, and understanding that the moon exists only to light her bedroom.

It is a curious feature characteristic of the history of sexual censorship cases that the defence (such as that, for instance, put forward by Maître Sénard in rebuttal to Pinard’s requisitory) always distorts the actual erotic experience of the reader, invariably arguing that sexual scenes are really inventories or objective descriptions that exist to educate or edify (depicting sin in order to combat it); or that the beauty of the form has so sublimated the content that its sexual elements invoke only a spiritual or intellectual pleasure; or – assuming the authority of generic determinants – that only commercial pornography seeks to excite, a function incompatible with the genuinely literary. For me, no novel can engage my attention or enthusiasm unless it acts to some measurable extent as an erotic stimulant – expressed not necessarily exclusively but obliquely, integrated with experience: a book by Sade, for instance, where the obsession devitalizes the sexual, making it a putative not a physical act, excites and interests me less than the (very few) erotic episodes in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (I remember especially the knees rubbing against each other in a carriage), or those found here and there in the pages of The Thousand and One Nights. In Madame Bovary the erotic element is fundamental, even though much was suppressed to avoid censorship (and not only official censorship: Flaubert’s friend, the writer Maxime Du Camp, favoured the textual cuts made by La Revue de Paris). That the book’s sexuality is implicit does not diminish either its presence or its power. The erotic climax, the interminable journey through the streets of Rouen in the fiacre, is an inspired hiatus, a sleight-of-hand trick of genius that contrives to give the material hidden from the reader the maximum possible charge. It is remarkable that the most imaginative erotic episode in French literature does not contain a single allusion to the female body or a single word of love, that it simply enumerates the names of streets and places, describing the aimless wandering through the town in an old coach for hire. But there is more to Madame Bovarythan erotic silences. I recall for instance the Thursdays at the Hôtel de Boulogne, in the port district of Rouen, where the trysts with Léon take place, when Emma’s intuition of imminent catastrophe appears only to heighten her sensuality. Many times I have waited for her in that yielding room. I have seen her arrive, each time ‘plus enflammée, plus avide’. I have heard the hiss with which her corset-lace falls to the floor. I have spied her running to make certain that the door is locked. And then, I have watched her, as her clothes drop, and she, pale and serious, enters the arms of Léon Dupuis.

In Flaubert, sexuality underlies everything we touch, smell, see; sensuality emanates from the details of the physical objects that crowd our daily existence, until those objects acquire a significance many times greater than what we normally assign them. I want to examine more closely Flaubert’s special relationship with his physical world, and want especially to look at his curious treatment of one particular object in it. This constitutes, I realize, something of a tangent, but it is such an extraordinary one that I feel it is entirely justified.

It is interesting that, amid all the critics and bibliographers of Flaubert’s work, no addict has yet produced a paper entitled ‘Flaubert and Shoe Fetishism’. There is an abundance of material. I offer a sample of what I have chanced to come across. Albert Thibaudet tells us that as a child Flaubert often fell into rapt contemplation of a woman’s high buttoned shoes, and hence the scene in Madame Bovary in which Justin begs the maid’s permission to polish Emma’s shoes, which the boy touches reverently as though they were sacred objects, is more or less autobiographical. Sartre points out the passage in which, for the first time in Flaubert’s works, the theme of footwear appears (‘si important dans la vie et l’oeuvre de Flaubert,’ he adds, though he has no more to say on the subject: one of the many loose ends never tied up in his Cyclopean essay7) in the lines in Chapter IX of Mémoires d’un fou in which Flaubert delicately describes a beautiful woman’s foot: ‘son petit pied mignon enveloppé dans un joli Soulier à haut talon orné d’une rose noire.’⁸ It is a well-known fact, moreover, that Flaubert kept in a desk-drawer, along with letters from his mistress and certain garments belonging to her, the slippers that Louise Colet wore on their first night of love which, during the course of writing his correspondence with her, he often took out to caress and kiss.

Feet and footwear emerge in Flaubert’s letters, often in a most curious fashion. In the letter to Louise of 26 August 1853, he mentions, casually, that if he were a professor at the College de France he would give ‘un cours sur cette grande question des Bottes comparées aux littératures. “Oui, la Botte est un monde,” dirais-je.’⁹ This long letter, a divertimento on the subject, consists of pages of surprising, ingenious, and vaguely perverted ramblings on the shoe as a symbol of culture, civilization, and even historical epochs – the Chinese, the Greeks, much of the middle ages, and especially Louis XV figure prominently here – or on various types of shoes that serve as emblematic analogues for authors and their books – Corneille, La Bruyère, Boileau, Bossuet, Molière, and so on. All this is doubtless a game, and you must allow me the indulgence of charting it. It is also, though, a rather disquieting game, symptomatic of what amounts to a rather unusual inclination: these playful fantasies – elaborated with such erudition – reveal that in his readings and so many of his otherwise casual observations Flaubert was very much aware – perhaps obsessed? – with the appearance of this particular member, the foot, and its social envelope, footwear.

Another letter to Louise, written a few days before, provides an interesting corroboration. Having arrived at Trouville for a holiday, Flaubert went to the beach to ‘watch the ladies swimming’. His letter (14 August 1853) expresses his astonishment at seeing how ugly the women look in the shapeless sacks in which they hide their bodies and the bathing caps into which they stuff their hair; but the most distressing is the most visible: namely, their feet. ‘Et les pieds! Rouges, maigres, avec des oignons, des durillons, déformés par la bottine, longs comme des navettes ou larges comme des battoirs.’¹⁰ It is, I suspect, significant that the name of Restif de la Bretonne – the father of foot-fetishism whose voluminous autobiographical oeuvre is organized around this delicate feminine extremity and the footwear in which it is encased – is scribbled in the margins of Flaubert’s manuscripts of Madame Bovary preserved in the Municipal Library of Rouen, and from whose work Flaubert took the picaresque melody that the Blind Man sings.

Throughout Madame Bovary, in fact, this special member exudes a special significance, emerging as one of the most important aspects of the erotic life of the male characters.¹¹ I have mentioned the spell that Emma’s shoes casts over Justin. At another point the narrator mentions that Léon, wearied by Emma, tries to be liberated from her, but that ‘au craquement de ses bottines, il se sentait lâche, comme les ivrognes à la vue des liquers fortes.’ Maître Guillaumin, the notary sought to help clear Emma’s debts, is sexually excited when his knee brushes against ‘sa bottine, dont las semelle se recourbait tout en fumant contre le poêle.’¹² While Emma leaves, sickened by his display, the notary remains motionless, struck like an idiot, ‘les yeux fixés sur ses belles pantoufles en tapisserie’ that have been ‘un présent de l’amour.’¹³ The first time Léon sees Emma, who has just come to Yonville, she is standing in front of the fireplace tucking up her skirts so as to warm ‘son pied chaussé d’une bottine noire.’¹⁴ And on the day of the horseback ride together, that ends with their making love, Rodolphe notes admiringly ‘entre ce drap noir et la bottine noire, la délicatesse de son bas blanc, qui lui semblait quelque chose de sa nudité.¹⁵ And later, at the height of her affair, Emma is described as characterized by that ‘quelque chose de subtil qui vous pénétrait se dégageait même des draperies de sa robe et de la cambrure de son pied.’¹⁶ In the early manuscript drafts of Madame Bovary even Charles was a connoisseur. In one passage, later discarded, the officier de santé, contemplating Emma’s foot as she is dying, is suddenly overwhelmed by erotic memories, and sees himself again on his wedding day, undoing the laces of Emma’s white shoes as ‘il frémissait dans les éblouissements de la possession prochaine.’¹⁷ And indeed, the first emotion that Charles displays is organized around this curious fetish, provoked by the wooden shoes that Père Rouault’s daughter is wearing. The narrator is nothing if not explicit: ‘il aimait les petits sabots de mademoiselle Emma sur les dalles lavées de la cuisine; ses talons hauts la grandissaient un peu, et, quand elle marchait devant lui, les semelles de bois, se relevant vite, claquaient avec un bruit sec contre le cuir de la bottine.’¹⁸ The obsession is expressed on a number of different levels: sometimes on the sensual, and other times on the religious, as when the Abbé Bournisien puts the holy oils on ‘la plante des pieds, si rapides autrefois quand elle courait a l’assouvissance de ses désirs, et qui maintenant ne marcheraient plus.’¹⁹ What I cherish most, amid this gallery of multiple references, is the description of Emma’s ‘mignarde chaussure’ (‘dainty shoe’) – a little pink embroidered satin slipper – that dangles from the instep of her foot as she hops into her lover’s lap in that crammed, small room in the Hôtel de Boulogne.

But I go on too long, and, in dissociating the indissociable, feel I’m falsifying the book. What is important is not one object, but many, each of which is informed with multiple significances, often sexual, throughout the development of the narrative.

While still under the immediate sway of Madame Bovary, I proceeded to read, one after the other like episodes in a serial, all the other books by Flaubert in the yellow paper Garnier editions. Each moved me, to varying degrees, and reinforced my addiction. I remember a number of Olympian discussions I had, in that summer of ’59, with friends who laughed when I heatedly asserted that ‘Salammbô is a masterpiece too’. Everyone agrees today that the book is dated and no one can help yawning uneasily on reading of the young woman committing the sacrilege of touching the veil of Tanit in a story crowded with operatic histrionics and a kind of technicolour ‘antiquity’ reminiscent of Cecil B. De Mille. I cannot deny that much of the novel proceeds from the worst sort of romanticism, centring on the hollow, commonplace story of the love of Mâtho and the daughter of Hamilcar. But another side of this work has lost none of its power and vigour: its epic dimension, the crowd scenes, the social comprehensiveness that no other novelist except Tolstoi has brought off as well as Flaubert. (In Madame Bovary there is the agricultural fair at which the entire town of Yonville is present, and almost every character who appeared in the earlier parts of the book.) The banquets; the fetes; the battles; the ceremonies; the unforgettable, hallucinatory sacrifice of the children to Moloch exhibit a dynamism, a plasticity, an elegance rarely seen in literature.

I have enjoyed everything Flaubert has written, but nothing has impressed me as profoundly as Madame Bovary with the exception of L’ Éducation sentimentale, which, for years, I considered the greatest of Flaubert’s novels because it was his most ambitious: what in Madame Bovary is a woman and a town is, in L’ Éducation sentimentale, a generation and a society. The scope is greater, the historical perspective broader, the representations more richly diversified. And yet, despite its comprehensive variety, L’ Éducation sentimentale proffers no figure comparable to Madame Bovary. Neither the timid Frédéric Moreau nor the elusive, maternal Madame Arnoux, nor the bankers, artists, industrialists, courtesans, journalists, workers, aristocrats can endure comparison with Emma, for none of them constitutes a human type in the Cervantean or Shakespearian sense that Flaubert defined so well: ‘Ce qui distingue les grands génies, c’est la généralisation et las creation. Ils résument en un type des personnalités éparses et apportent à la conscience du genre humain des personnages nouveaux.’²⁰ Like Don Quixote or, arguably, even Hamlet, Emma expresses, through the particularities of her tormented personality, an enduring, charmed relationship with the inflexible circumstances of her environment: the capacity to fabricate illusions and the mad determination to make them real. Salammbô, Saint Antoine, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Saint Julien l’Hospitalier also harbour extraordinary illusions and cultivate formidable wills bent on realizing their chimerical fantasies; but these fantasies ultimately originate with God or Science: Emma’s utopia, by contrast, is rigorously human. On the morning of 22 May 1853, Flaubert wrote to Louise: ‘Une âme se mesure à la dimension de son désir, comme l’on juge d’avance des cathédrales à la hauteur de leurs clochers.’²¹ His greatest glory may have been to have created, in the vulgar, fickle, fictional figure of Emma Bovary, the best demonstration of this truth, one of the bell-towers that dominate the vast flat plain of human existence.

In 1962 I began to read Flaubert’s Correspondance. I remember the exact date: I had just earned some money from a novel, and my first purchase was, in a bookstore in Tours, the thirteen volumes published by Conard. Apart from the interest in following step by step Flaubert’s difficult life, retracing the gestation of his works, discovering at first hand his readings, his hatreds, his frustrations, entering his circle of intimates – Maxime, Bouilhet, Louise, George Sand, Caroline – Flaubert’s correspondence provided the best possible friend for a budding literary writer. Those who know these letters – characterized by a gloomy, unrelieved pessimism and dominated by bitter curses against humanity in which its representatives appear, with very few exceptions (most of them writers), to be a grotesquely vulgar lot – will find my description curious, for I see these letters as unequivocally stimulating. While chronicling the rage and fatigue accumulated during the preceding ten or twelve hours of work, these letters also demonstrate the humanity of Flaubert’s genius.²² His talent emerges through a slow, slowly realized series of small conquests, during which we witness the aloneness of the writer as he confronts the limitations of his imagination and, through patience, persistence, and self-scrutiny, transcends them. It is, in the end, nothing less than inspiring to watch over the shoulder of this vociferous, provincial old bachelor who succeeds, after so much labour, in creating something that endures. When undergoing my greatest difficulties writing, I have often turned to Flaubert’s letters, skipping about, elevated in every respect except for when I have occasion to notice the ridiculous and unfortunate cuts that his niece Caroline insisted be made in the Correspondance.

The end of 1960. A heated argument with a Bolivian friend who, disgusted, parted with the last words, ‘You won’t give an inch when it comes to Cuba or Flaubert.’ Twenty years later, recalling that afternoon, I am infinitely more tolerant of criticism directed at the Cuban Revolution. On the other hand, I am as intransigent as ever in my defence of Flaubert. My devotion has led me through not only all of Flaubert’s work, but most of the critical or parasitical literature that it has occasioned, and, not surprisingly I suppose, Flaubert has emerged as the standard by which I often measure other authors – or, if not the standard, an inflexible influence. I am certain, for instance, that my loathing of Barbey d’Aurevilly derives from his attacks on Flaubert, and that, for the same reasons, I have little interest in Valéry or Claudel (who dismissed the consummately beautiful opening of Salammbô as the dullest prose in the history of French literature), and that my complete revision of Henry James, whose novels had always tried my patience, originated with the discovery of his superb and forthright essay on Flaubert. Likewise, Baudelaire’s article on Madame Bovary was the writing that confirmed my belief that imaginative authors ultimately offer far more illuminating perceptions about literature than either critics or literary journalists (a belief that was reconfirmed on coming across Pound’s ABC of Reading in which he argues that, unlike the poet, who requires a long list of authors as preparation for his practice, the prose writer may simply begin with the author of Bouvard et Pécuchet).

Flaubert has sustained, of course, a curious relationship with writers. The critics of his day were alarmingly short-sighted. Even Madame Bovary, a popular success (due in large part to the trial), was mercilessly attacked by the Paris literary columnists (although Sainte-Beuve and a handful of others were perceptive enough to see its merits). Flaubert’s other books, however, were universally misunderstood and regularly savaged (a dubious record was achieved by Barbey d’Aurevilly who declared La Tentation de Saint Antoine to be as indigestible as the second part of Faust). The following generation, on the other hand, claimed Flaubert as their patriarch, and though he refused to assume the lofty seat that Zola and the naturalists set aside for him Flaubert was certainly considered a master. But after this period, French littérateurs scorned Flaubert – Claudel no exception – and until the 1950s I have the sense that he was recalled only to be dismissed. (The existentialists, convinced that literature was a form for potential action not unlike a military weapon, were intolerant of Flaubert’s fanatic concern for form, his haughty isolationism, his art-for-art’s sake aesthetic, and his disdain for politics; Sartre’s remarks about Flaubert in Situations II were the most brutally acerbic: it was, incidentally, an essay that I read and reread with fervour until the disquieting experience of coming across the hermit of Croisset for myself.)

During the 1960s, the French appraisal changed radically; scorn and neglect suddenly gave way to rescue, praise, and worship. The French became addicts at the same time I did, and half-pleased and half-jealous, I saw the passion for Flaubert spread in those convulsive years of Gaullism, the Algerian war, the OAS and, for me, between writing and preparing radio broadcasts (I was earning my living working for the ORTF), a schedule that kept me on the go from morning to night. I remember clearly the satisfaction – as though a member of my family or a personal friend had been the one thus honoured – with which I read François-Régis Bastide’s preface to the new edition of La Première éducation sentimentale, published by Seuil, an early version of the novel that up to that time had been known only to university students and professors. I would not have hesitated a moment to post the last words of Bastide’s preface on the door of my house: ‘We already realized it, but now we realize it once and for all: the true Patrón is Flaubert.’

The engagés were of course succeeded by that heterogeneous group of novelists referred to by the general title of practitioners of the ‘nouveau roman’. Although each failed to engage my interest or support, with the exception of Samuel Beckett (included in the group as he was published by the same house), I was nevertheless always well-disposed toward all of them for their aggressive proclamation of the importance of Flaubert’s influence on the modern novel. The first to provide the theoretical link was not a novelist, however, but the scholar Geneviève Bollème, who in 1964 published an essay, ‘La Leçon de Flaubert’, and pointed out the aspects already present in Flaubert’s fiction which were currently being cultivated in contemporary writing: the concern for the aesthetic, the obsession with the descriptive, the autonomy of the text – in other words, Flaubertian ‘formalism’. Her essay demonstrated a bold hypothesis: that in all of Flaubert, particularly Madame Bovary, what matters is the description, the foregrounding, that deliberately destroys the narrative. The bridge between Flaubert and the New Novelists was – albeit a little too cleverly – constructed. Subsequently, in interviews, articles, and lectures, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Simon recognized Flaubert as the precursor of modernity. But it was Nathalie Sarraute, in a brilliant and tendentious article entitled ‘Flaubert le précurseur’ published in the review Preuves (February, 1965) who crowned him officially as master of the nouveau roman. As I read it in a bistro in Saint-Germain, I was thunderstruck. I was pleased by the authority Flaubert had suddenly assumed (‘At this moment, the master of us all is Flaubert. As to this name the consensus is unanimous: it is that of the precursor of today’s novel’), but stunned by the reason occasioning it; I thought, literally, that I was dreaming. Taking a paragraph out of context from a letter to Louise (‘Ce qui me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, c’est un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache extérieure, qui se tiendrait de lui-même par la force interne de son style, comme la terre sans être soutenue se tient en l’air, un livre qui n’aurait presque pas de sujet ou du moins où le sujet serait presque invisible, si cela se peut’), Nathalie Sarraute, allowing one intention among many to obscure the ultimate reality of the work created, arrives at the following extraordinary programme for Flaubert: ‘Books about nothing, almost without a subject, free of characters, plot, and all the old props, reduced to the sort of pure movement that make them akin to abstract art.²³ It would be difficult to distort Flaubert any more drastically; Borges’ phrase, that every author creates his precursors, has never been truer: Sarraute, admittedly exercising every reader’s privilege, has discovered in Flaubert only what she has put there herself.

Her Flaubert quote is from a letter written during the labours of Madame Bovary, letters which demonstrate the care with which he worked out every detail – scenes, background, characters, peripeteias – and the meticulous obsessiveness with which he mapped out his narrative strategy: that is, his plot. A number of passages from the Correspondance come to mind demonstrating the importance of the subject (what he called ‘the ideas’), evident, for instance, from his opinion of Lamartine’s Graziella. The desire to write a ‘book of nothing’, liberated from referentiality, derives surely from an enthusiasm for literary style and, secondly, from a belief in the autonomy of fiction: everything in a novel, its truth and its falsehood, is determined by its form; what a novel ‘houses’ is derived from its authority as a linguistic construct not from its fidelity to the world it ostensibly represents. But, while internally coherent, fiction nevertheless partakes of the outside world if only because it relies upon the shared language from it: the same language and the same referents that the reader brings to the text. Moreover, the letter Nathalie Sarraute cites actually argues in favour of the integrity of narrative – a concern entirely different from what she expresses. If she had continued reading she would have come across another letter taking up precisely the same idea (books about nothing):

Je voudrais faire des livres où il n’y eût qu’à écrire des phrases (si l’on peut dire cela), comme pour vivre il n’y a qu’à respirer de l’air. Ce qui m’embête, ce sont les malices de plan, les combinaisons d’effets, tous les calculs du dessous \\et qui sont de l’Art pourtant, car l’effet du style en dépend, et exclusivement.²⁴

For Flaubert the achievements of the imagination did exist dominantly on the level of language – in aspects of style. The world of ‘facts’ clearly occasioned less enthusiasm – the ‘tricks of plotting’, the ‘combination of effects’, the ‘basic calculations’ participate in the organization of a subject within a temporal system – but the concern for facts, this artistic ordering, was not less important. On the contrary, he states that ‘the effectiveness of style’ depends on these concerns, and adds, categorically: and on them exclusively.

An author of course can never know the full significance – or significances – of his work, and it is possible that Flaubert, aspiring to write novels that were simply words, books without the weight of narrative, contributed to our conception of modern fiction by way of inventions that have as much, or perhaps even more to do with technique – the ‘montage’ for instance – than with language. But it is clear, I hope, that the case is far more complex than it has been made out to be in recent years. Flaubert, a born storyteller, developed a specific conception of the value and function of fictional narration, and considered that the effectiveness of prose depended ‘exclusively’ on it. The pleasure that this quotation provided when I first came across it was surpassed – for a devoted admirer of Amadis de Gaule and Tirant le Blanc – when I discovered that Flaubert also had once written:

Tu sais que c’est un de mes vieux rêves que d’écrire un roman de chevalerie. Je crois cela faisable, même après l’ Arioste, en introduisant un élément de terreur et de poésie large qui lui manque. Mais qu’est-ce que je n’ai pas envie d’écrire? Quelle est la luxure de plume qui ne m’excite!’²⁵

Not all distortions of Flaubert have come from the formalist contingent, I should add in passing. At about the same as Sarraute’s article – what I’ll call rightist deviationism – I read in Recherches Soviétiques in 1956 the translation of an essay by A. F. Ivachtchenko, a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, who offered a leftist deviationist interpretation: Flaubert, he argued, was the father of critical realism!

I am not, however, an overly enthusiastic admirer of L’ Idiot de la famille. After the two months needed to read it, the essay leaves a sense only of incompleteness, a tremendous task dwarfed by its even larger ambition: to account completely for the social and ideological context out of which Flaubert’s novels emerged, and to do so through an interdisciplinary investigation incorporating Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the precepts of existentialism. The study, obviously, is not simply ‘about’ Flaubert, but, rather, ‘about’ as much of man generally as it is humanly possible to express. It is, without a doubt, an extraordinarily uneven book, inconsistent in its methodology, uneven in its results, and disproportionate in its treatment of the very objects it sets out to investigate. With the exception of a number of passages (such as the brilliant analysis of the social and ideological origins of Flaubert’s family or the examination of the social classes during the Second Empire), the greatest part of L’ Idiot de la famille is taken up by a rigorous (and orthodox) psychoanalysis expressed through a regular patter of existentialist jargon. The Freudian approach does lead, however, to a number of exciting discoveries, as in the explanation of the ‘Pont-l’ Evêque crisis’, the endlessly debated question about the precise nature of Flaubert’s illness – epilepsy? hysteria? – to which Sartre contributes a solid, imaginative, even if complex theory of neurosis. There are of course a number of sections the brilliance of which is obscured slightly by the massive text into which they have been sunk: the discussion entitled ‘Névrose et programmation chez Flaubert: le Second Empire’, for instance, a critically groundbreaking discussion in the otherwise unfocused third volume; or the last section, developing a comparison between Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle, or the intriguing analysis of the relations between Flaubert and the Second Empire.

The book, however, ends with tremendous abruptness, as though exhaustion had overtaken its author and he could not find the strength to reach a goal so distant. In the end, it is disheartening to realize that the only texts Sartre managed to analyze in detail have been those from Flaubert’s childhood and adolescence, and that the effort expended in scrutinizing these relatively insignificant works ended up destroying the critic. All these thousands of pages, that is, constitute an error in planning, which, failing even to study the first novel Flaubert published, amount to what in Sartre’s original scheme would have been merely preliminary considerations, a prologue before the task proper. Unlike the character in Camus’ La peste who could never write a novel because he could never decide how to phrase the first sentence of it, Sartre has written with such fury and has dealt in such detail with so many adventitious subjects that he loses sight of the book he set out to write. The result is a monstrous progeny, a monumental child, and a brilliant failure: falling far short of its aim by aiming too high, ailes de géant qui empêchent de marcher.

The similarities between Sartre’s last book and Flaubert’s are too obvious to neglect. Have there ever been two such equally admirable failures – caused by such equally idealistic reasons – as L’ Idiot de la famille and Bouvard et Pécuchet? Both are impossible undertakings, enterprises destined to miscarry because, aimed at the unattainable, both were, even in conception, more than any one mind could achieve. To represent in a novel the totality of the human condition was as unrealistic, even if inspiring, a dream as aspiring to capture in an essay the totality of a life, explaining the individual by reconstructing all the sources – social, familial, historical, psychological, biological, linguistic – contributing to what we understand him to be. In each case, the author has dared to unravel a tangled skein that has a beginning but no end. But in each case we recognize the victory, the grandeur emanating from the inevitable failure. For to have persisted in an adventure so reckless and so irrational – to have succumbed to Lucifer’s crime – is to have redefined our conception of language and literary representation and to have projected entirely new standards to which our fiction and our criticism must aspire.

¹ ‘The beloved of every novel, the heroine of every play, the vague she of every volume of verse.’