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COMEDY, NATURE, AND DEATH:
THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION IN
FLAUBERT'S “RABELAIS, " ”SMARH, " AND
”LES FUNERAILLES DU DOCTEUR MATHURIN”

presented by

Robert 0. Steele

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COMEDY, NATURE, AND DEATH:

THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION IN
FLAUBERT’S "RABELAIS," "SMARH," AND
"LES FUNERAILLES DU DOCTEUR MATHURIN"

BY

Robert Otto Steele

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Romance and Classical Languages

1993

ABSTRACT
COMEDY, NATURE, AND DEATH:
THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION IN

FLAUBERT’S "RABELAIS," "SMARH," AND
"LES FUNERAILLES DU DOCTEUR MATHURIN"

BY

Robert Otto Steele

The fertile chaos present in these neglected texts
from Flaubert’s juvenilia provides tools for dismantling the
prevailing view of Flaubert as an impassive, ironic stylist.
In "Rabelais," Flaubert proposes for himself the role of a
comic destroyer of masks; as the satirist of all the beliefs
of his time; as, in short, a new Rabelais for the nineteenth
century. The voice of Yuk in "Smarh" represents Flaubert's
first attempt to realize this project. But in "Smarh,"
Rabelaisian profusion is continually undercut by Byronic
anguish as the two voices struggle for control of the
meaning of poetic images. The imminent collapse of language
under the pressure of this repeated mutual reinvestment of
the word is repeatedly delayed by the irruption of the
desire for a transparent language devoid of cliché and
completely adequate to its object.

"Les Funérailles du docteur Mathurin" parodically
performs inherited discourse in an ambivalent carnivalesque
travesty. In this chaotic, fragmented text, Flaubert
joyfully dismembers Rabelais and Byron as well as the
transparent language imagined in "Smarh," here slandered as

merely borrowed from the Neoclassics. The image of a

penetrating gaze that dismembers is itself a cliché,
appropriated from medicine, Romantic novels, and/or
Flaubert’s experience of his father. The repeated collapse
of the project of universal dismemberment leads to a crisis
in the relationship between Nature and Culture, as the
text's realization that all language is cliché explodes in a
Sadeian flood of pure destruction. And yet, in a final
fragment, a sudden calm space opens up in a vision of joyful
emptiness, as Nature, Culture, and self seamlessly fuse in a
beautiful, meaningless flow.

The new view of comedy and cliché in Flaubert
derived from reading these texts leads to a re-examination
of "Novembre," Madame Bovarv, L'Education sentimentale, and
"La légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier" as stages in the
realization of the boundless flow already visible in "Les
Funérailles." In "Saint Julien," Flaubert’s comic
restructuring of a béte legend allows him his own voice as
he transforms his source into a complex parable of the

embrace of the béte beyond repugnance.

Copyright by
ROBERT OTTO STEELE

1993

This dissertation is dedicated to Steven R. Hemker, my
lover, without whose enthusiasm, encouragement, and computer

skills it would never have been completed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Numerous friends and teachers at Michigan State
University have provided help and support to me over the
years, but no-one has been more indispensible to the
completion of this project than Dr. Laurence Porter, whose
insights and suggestions have always been useful and
provocative, and whose tireless encouragement and generosity
were always appreciated. Thanks are due also to Dr. Eugene
Gray, Dr. Malcolm Compitello, Dr. Michael Koppish, and Dr.
Sheila Teahan, who read and commented on the manuscript, as
well as to Jane Ucman, Danielle Ranes, and Joyce Schroeder,
who patiently took numerous phone calls, ran errands above
and beyond the call of duty, and, most of all, provided a
sympathetic ear and welcome friendship. All of my teachers
at Michigan State University deserve my gratitude, but
especially Prof. Frieda Brown, who hates to be called doctor
and whom I will always consider a friend; Dr. Herbert
Josephs, the first to inspire me to study French, although
he probably doesn’t know it; Dr. Marlies Kronegger, whose
startling questions caused me to wonder about the
philosophical basis of all reading; and Dr. Ann Harrison,
whose extreme clarity kept my speculations from wandering

too far. Thanks also to Dr. Anne Caillaud Jones and

vi

Christopher Jones, my nearly Rabelaisian dinner companions,
whose laughter kept me sane.

I would also like to extend my gratitude to my
colleagues and students at Wilkes University who encouraged
me to complete this project, especially Dr. Robert Heaman,
Dr. Victoria Jaén, Dr. Jane Elmes—Crahall, Dr. Harold Cox,
and Steve Day. Without the tirelessness and efficiency of
the Wilkes interlibrary loan librarian, Mary Watkins, I
would have been travelling out of town for books even more
often than I did. Thanks also to Dr. Lynda Goldstein, for
providing intellectual sustenance in the wilderness, and,

once again, to Steven Hemker, who has weathered it all.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Writing Close to Reading:
Dialogic Criticism

A New Rabelais
"Smarh"

Bricolage and Penetrating Vision: Voices
in "Les Funérailles du docteur Mathurin"

Nature and Culture: The Death of Mathurin
Nature, Language, and Silence

The Oeuvre

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

viii

15

58

110

152

191

207

228

233

264

INTRODUCTION: WRITING CLOSE TO READING:

DIALOGIC CRITICISM

As Lawrence R. Schehr has pointed out in a recent
article in Nineteenth Century French Studies,1 Flaubert’s
oeuvre is usually constructed as consisting of Madame
Bovary, L’Education sentimentale, Bouvard et Pécuchet, and
"Un coeur simple," plus the correspondence. Since Bouvard
et Pécuchet is often seen as anomalous, Flaubert is
typically construed as a stylist, a writer of restrained,
ironic pathos, an anguished but amused chronicler of petty
tragedies. The construction of an author’s oeuvre, like the
construction of a canon, is ideological: the claim that
certain works are standard is typically accompanied by a
justification of this claim, so that, indirectly, certain
values are upheld.2 Thus when "Novembre" is agreed to be
the "best" of the juvenilia, it is usually linked to a
series of the other "best" works, and certain values are
mentioned: delicate observation, controlled voice,
understatement, style. For example, according to Nadeau,
"[Flaubert] montre un tel souci des lieux et du temps, du
cadre, de la nuance et du détail, des mille impressions du
coeur."3 Nadeau makes it clear that he wants Flaubert's

work to be seen as pessimistic and that he believes his

2
placing of "Novembre" at a pivotal position will achieve
this: "Flaubert, nous aurons l’occasion de voir, vit en vue
de se fabriquer des souvenirs, et plus ces souvenirs sont
frustrateurs et déchirants, plus ils excitent en lui une
ironie a la fois amére et nostalgique qui alimente et
justifie son pessimisme, nourrit son oeuvre" (38). He is
also explicit about how he intends to use the juvenilia as a
way of orienting his readings of the mature works: "Les
chefs d’oeuvre [sont] tous en germe dans ces premiers
récits: La Tentation dans ‘Smarh’, Madame Bovary dans
‘Passion et Vertu,’ L'Education sentimentale dans ‘Mémoires
d’un Fou,’ et Bouvard et Pécuchet dans ‘Une Lecon d'Histoire
Naturelle Genre Commis’" (40). Note that we are to see
L’Education as basically an extended memoir, and Bouvard et
Pécuchet as a character study; neither is to be seen as a
massive orchestration of prior texts, and in fact this
aspect of Flaubert’s work is to be de-emphasized. Thus
major works like Salammbo are left out of the list
altogether, and La Tentation is treated as a romantic,
pessimistic outpouring.

It would not be fair to attack only traditional
critics: this kind of thinking is so typical of the way one
reads Flaubert that even Flaubert himself was led to
suppress La Tentation for a quarter century; and indeed,
according to certain statements preserved in the
correspondence, he considered "Novembre" pivotal in his

oeuvre.4 And even the Lacanian Shoshana Felman focuses on

3
"Novembre" and its "precursor" "Mémoires d’un fou" in the
section of La Folie et la chose littéraire devoted to
Flaubert.5 This is perhaps because she is not very
interested in the question of oeuvre construction and merely
accepts the oeuvre wholesale from the past. Note, for
instance: "C’est bien vers l’aphonie de l’oeuvre
flaubertienne ultérieure [Felman refers the reader to a
passage by G. Genette] que va ‘Novembre,’ par son passage du
‘je’ au ‘il’ [...]" (210). Felman here supports her
assertion of the pivotal nature of "Novembre" by an appeal
to an authoritarian precursor on the essential nature of the
oeuvre. In other words, since an analysis of the whole
oeuvre is outside her scope, she positions her text in
relation to the usual construction of the oeuvre: a
selection of works interpreted as a unit by a critic
considered to be an authority. In doing so, she begs a
number of questions: why must the texts that bear the
signature "Flaubert" be constructed as a narrative series,
correlated or not to a narrative of the life of the
(presumably) historical person that bears that name? Why
must any text in this series be read in relation to the
others? Why must one’s own reading be positioned within an
authoritative interpretation, even if this interpretation
has an impact only on oeuvre construction (if, indeed, it is
possible to construct the oeuvre without a broader hidden
agenda)? Why do critics always act as if they believe that

a text can be understood only with reference to an authority

4
or a progression, a specific external text hierarchically
superior to the critic or to the text at hand, or to an
external narrative that puts texts in order?

The convention that literary criticism must
construct a hierarchy of texts seems not yet to have
disappeared. Programmatic statements of an inevitable
future, like the manifestoes of Jean Ricardou and Alain
Robbe—Grillet,6 which claim superiority for certain texts
based on their insertion into a master narrative of artistic
progress toward certain values, seem to have become less and
less common; in the meantime, rightists like Allan Bloom and
Dinesh D’Souza7 have reasserted the view of a static
hierarchy based on eternal values. Frankly, it seems little
different to me whether value is seen as transcendent and
unchangeable or dependent on a known direction of history;
authority and telos are both rhetorical demands for
submission that do not acknowledge personal responsibility
for the creation of value. Perhaps the focus of the debate
could be shifted: away from a static evaluation of texts as
monuments, away from an emphasis on innovative form as
progress, to the open restructuring of the past as a way of
creating the future. This approach would envision criticism
not as the explication of a text seen as authoritative, but
as an active and subjective response, as an acknowledged
attempt to move history in the direction of the critic’s
desire: "The past is not prologue, nor should it be: it is

something to improve on, as quickly as humanly possible."8

5

The theories of Mikhail Bakhtin provide a possible
way of recentering the debate about the construction of
textual hierarchies by his focus on the act of
interpretation as an answer to the text, not a translation
9: it. As Bakhtin points out in "The Problem of Speech
Genres" and in "The Problem of the Text,"9 a text is not
merely a form, because language is not merely a code:
"language" is an artificial, synchronic construct of
linguistics based on the real phenomenon of the
communication of attitudes, ideas, and values, a phenomenon
which is diachronic. Although form (langue) can in fact
meaningfully be analyzed, such an analysis dismembers,
truncates: the text as utterance (parole) is a rejoinder in
a great debate: it answers other utterances and anticipates
response. "The speaking subject [. . .] manifests his own
individuality in his style, his world view, in all aspects
of the design of his work" (Genres, 75). He chooses a
generic form, and specific words, because his utterance is
related to other utterances that have preceded it: it is a
response. But it re-evaluates terms, reverses their
positions, orchestrates points of view, and thus can locate
itself within a new position in the debate. "We [. . .]
take [words] from other utterances, and mainly from others
that are kindred to ours in genre, that is, in theme,
composition, and style [. . .] Hence the possibility of
typical expressions that seem to adhere to words [. . .] In

our example, ‘Any joy is now bitterness to me,’ the

6
expressive tone of the word ‘joy’ as determined by the
context is, of course, not typical of this word. Speech
genres in general submit rather well to re-accentuation
[. . .]" (Genres, 87). Thus one can create an original
position for oneself within the debate through the
manipulation of received materials: through collision,
recontextualization, reversal, and other operations. A
major way this is done is through irony, which "has
penetrated all languages in modern times (especially
French)" (Genres, 132).

As for the reader, Bakhtin points out that
understanding is dialogic, that reading in fact rewrites the
text in a way that itself anticipates response. For
Bakhtin, the best reading is one that neither abdicates the
self to reproduce the point of view of the author (in fact,
following the logic of Bakhtin’s position, this is
impossible) nor imposes a structure on the text, ignoring
its individuality, what Bakhtin calls its "unrepeatability"
(134). In the telegraphic style of "The Problem of the
Text," he scrutinizes the problem of understanding: "To
understand a given text as the author himself understood it.
But our understanding can and should be better. Powerful
and profound creativity is largely unconscious and polysemic
[. . .] Understanding supplements the text" (Genres, 141-
142). Understanding can proceed only from a strong point of
view: "Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its

own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing.

7
In order to understand, it is immensely important for the
person who understands to be located outside the object of
his or her creative understanding [. . .]" (Genres, 7,
emphasis in original). This involves an active rewriting of
the work: "Understanding is impossible without evaluation
[. . .] The person who understands approaches the work from
his own already formed world view, from his own viewpoint,
from his own position" (Genres, 142). However, if the
interaction with the work is to be truly productive, one
must be willing also to be rewritten by the text: "These
positions [. . .] do not always stay the same. They are
influenced by the artwork, which always introduces something
new. Only when the position is dogmatically inert is there
nothing new revealed in the work (the dogmatist gains
nothing; he cannot be enriched) [. . .] In the act of
understanding, a struggle occurs that results in mutual
change and enrichment" (Genres, 142). Each age can see
things in a great work that could not be seen either by the
author or by her contemporaries; reading enriches the
meaning of a text. Yet each age, by its rereading of great
texts, finds itself changed in the process: through its
reading of the past it makes its future.

Bakhtin sketches a sort of reading steeped in values
but does not evaluate the text from a superior position, as
if the text were a mere object; instead, it responds to the
text from a position that is clearly stated and exterior to

the text, and allows itself to be changed by the reading.

8

In short, Bakhtin projects a sort of reading that enters
into contact with the position of the text within the great
historical dialogue, and represents not an interpretation or
an evaluation, but a rejoinder.10

But a rejoinder to whom? To the author who stands
behind the text, undoubtedly. Interpreters of Flaubert are
continuously confronted with the "impersonality" of his
texts, and in the absence of explicit authorial statements,
they either praise the beauty of the form, or search
elsewhere in the oeuvre for evidence of Flaubert’s position:
sometimes they do both, quoting extensively from the
correspondence to support their emphasis on form. But a
number of questions arise. First, why is the correspondence
canonical? Or in other words, why are statements made
privately and not intended for publication taken as keys for
the interpretation of the public works? Surely the public
works are more thoroughly thought out and definitive than
remarks made to friends. Is it because as literary critics
we default on exactly that task that confronts us: the
understanding of literary texts? Because statements made in
the normal way, with explicit referents in the real world,
explicitly stated positions and goals, are easier to
understand than works that subvert normal reference and
purpose? But perhaps the statement represented by the text
of, say, Madame Bovary is not the same as statements made in
letters to Louise Colet -- not only in its form, but also in

its content. The interpretation of a literary work cannot

9

follow the same method as the interpretation of a personal
letter. And why should we believe that one is more "honest"
in private than in public? The mask the author creates for
himself in a literary work is different from the mask he
creates for each of his friends. But the mask created for
posterity, the mask that establishes one’s position in the
great dialogue, could be seen, conceivably, as more "honest"
than that created for friends, from whom one wants very
specific and limited things in the here-and—now. Perhaps,
for instance, the claims for the purity of art Flaubert
borrowed from Gautier to fling at Louise Colet were part of
his strategy for keeping her at a distance from his private
life at Croisset. Undoubtedly the various masks overlap.
But as literary critics confronted by a text, we need to be
able to respond to the author's position as stated in that
text; and for Flaubert, because of his complete renovation
of the generic conventions of the novel, this task demands
an entirely new type of reading.11

Bakhtin’s notion of criticism as a rejoinder can
provide insight into the sort of reading that is appropriate
for Flaubert’s texts. As Bakhtin reminds us, the author of
the literary work is not the same as the real-life author.
The former creates himself in the work; an attempt to
explain the text from the biography of the real-life author
destroys it as literature: "A work’s author is present only
in the whole of the work, not in one separate aspect of the

whole, and least of all in a content that is severed from

10
the whole" (Genres, 160). The primary author, whom Bakhtin
describes by borrowing theological terms of which the
historical Flaubert would have approved,12 is "natura non
creata guae creat"; any image of the author present in the
work, any self-description, is "natura creata guae non
creat." The hero, likewise, is "natura creata guae non
great" (Genres, 148). Thus any statement the author makes
about himself has the same status as a statement he makes
about anybody else. He is present here only as elsewhere:
"The author cannot be separated from the images and
characters [. . .] He is revealed in all [his] best
pictures" (Genres, 116, 161). No explicit statement made by
the author reveals him as well as his whole artistic
utterance: "the primary author clothes himself in silence.
But this silence can assume various forms of expression,
various forms of laughter (irony), allegory, and so forth"
(Genres, 149). Thus the author is re—produced by our
reading of the work in which he has produced himself: "To
see and comprehend the author of a work means to see and
comprehend another, alien consciousness and its world, that
is, another subject (‘Du’)" (Genres, 111). The author and
his text are not to be explained from a superior position;
rather, the meaning of the utterance is to be understood,
that is, answered. This can occur only within a
comprehension of the literary text itself, not from the
point of view of an unchangeable system, not as proof of a

preconceived structure, and not from external texts seen as

11
explanatory, least of all from the author's self-portrait
painted elsewhere. What is important is to learn to respond
to the author’s position as revealed at each moment of the
reading, without recourse to other, easier texts, and
without sacrificing one’s own point of view. In short, one
must confront the text as igh to gu, as an equal, without
accepting as authoritative the text at hand, nor any other
text, nor indeed oneself.

The sort of reading I am advocating is one that
starts from a strong point of view, involving but not
limited to beliefs, principles, and values, and which then
responds to moments in the text where these beliefs are
challenged. Such a reading would enrich the text as it
would transform the reader.13 But further: I advocate a
sort of writing-about-reading that stays as close as
possible to this reading process, starting out with a
statement of position, following a text through moments of
transformation and crisis, then concluding with a modified
statement.“ The original position for such a writing will
have normally already been modified by a prior reading of
the text, but the process of writing will undoubtedly again
modify the position. The original position will have been
enriched as well by other reading as well as life
experience: it ultimately need not be justified by reference
to authoritative texts, but ought rather to be adjusted by
the experience of responding to the text at hand. During

the course of the reading or writing memories of other texts

12
will occur; these might as well be duly noted and explained
so that the reader of my text can pursue the idea further,
if he or she so desires. Some of these other texts may in
fact be other works by the same author, some even written in
the first person. But never should it be assumed that one
text can explain another, nor that the author as constructed
in one text is more authentic than the author as constructed
in any other. I cannot promise that my version of another
writer is objectively valid; I can merely transform each
text according to my position; it is up to my reader to
decide whether I have enriched it.

My position at this moment of writing is the
following: Flaubert is not a tragic, but a comic writer.15
This position is strategic in my general project to advocate
the comic view of life rather than the tragic, a project I
seem to share with Bakhtin. Admittedly, my statement
represents a reversal that is perhaps not judicious, as
Flaubert is perhaps sometimes tragic; strategically,
however, I believe it is sound. It was Derrida who first
alerted me to the strategic value of hierarchical reversal
as an intervention in the discourse of power: "J’insiste
beaucoup et sans cesse sur la nécessité de cette phase de
renversement qu’on a peut-étre trop vite cherché a
discréditer." Normally in Western discourse opposite terms
exist in a hierarchical relationship to each other, and a
questioning of the terms must proceed through a questioning

of the hierarchy: "[D]ans une opposition philosophique

l3
classique, nous n’avons pas affaire a la coexistence
pacifique d’un vis—a-vis, mais a une hiérarchie violente.
Un des deux termes commande l’autre (axiologiquement,
logiquement, etc.), occupe la hauteur. Déconstruire
l’opposition, C’est d'abord, a un moment donné, renverser la
hiérarchie." This process is necessary strategically in
order to intervene in the power relation: "Négliger cette
phase de renversement, c’est oublier la structure
conflictuelle et subordonnante de l’opposition. C'est donc
passer trop vite, sans garder aucune prise sur l’opposition
antérieure, a une neutralisation qui, pratiguement,
laisserait 1e champ antérieur en l’état, se priverait de
tout moyen d’y intervenir effectivement. On sait quels ont
toujours été les effets pratigues (en particulier
politigues) des passages sautant immédiatement au—dela des
oppositions, et des protestations dans la simple forme du
nilni."16 Ultimately, the close link between the concepts
of tragedy and comedy will allow me to argue that Flaubert
transcends the opposition; for the moment I have accepted
the distinction between the two in order to transfer
Flaubert from one category to the other while reversing the
relative valuation of the two.

This text will attempt a strategic intervention in
the discourse about Flaubert through the advocacy of three
texts from 1838-1839 as fundamental juvenilia; it will
assert that they are pivotal in an understanding of

Flaubert's oeuvre because they are the site of a struggle

14

that will become dominant in Flaubert’s mature style: a
struggle between Rabelaisian excess, Byronic agony, and
Neoclassic restraint. I will proceed from a close reading
of "Rabelais," where Flaubert's comic project is given its
first theoretical development; through an examination of key
passages of "Smarh," where Rabelaisian and Byronic voices
struggle over the interpretation of the relationship between
Man and Nature; to a detailed analysis of "Les Funérailles
du docteur Mathurin," in whose fertile chaos lie the seeds
of Flaubert’s mature project.17

In short, I wish to unhinge certain assumptions and
drive certain wedges into the oeuvre as it has been
constructed, which will (I hope) lead to a view of Flaubert
not as a tragic realist, but rather as a comic reworker of
prior texts, a playful revealer of and reveller in
emptiness, an inventor, manipulator, and destroyer of masks,
in short, as a renovator of the carnivalesque tradition,
and, pap; Bakhtin (who preferred Dostoevsky), the most
innovative and important representative of that tradition in

the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER 1: A NEW RABELAIS

Most Flaubert critics have ignored "Les Funérailles
du docteur Mathurin," a short story written in 1839 when
Flaubert was eighteen. Yet this story is clearly the most
complete application of the principles enumerated in his
essay "Rabelais," and Rabelais was one of the few writers
Flaubert consistently praised throughout his life.1 For
example: "Les gens que je lis habituellement, mes livres de
chevet, ce sont Montaigne, Rabelais, Régnier, La Bruyére, et
Le Sage" (a Louis de Cormenin, 7 juin [1844]; gppp. 1:210);
"Je téche de fermer l’oeil aprés avoir lu un chapitre du
sacro-saint, immense et extra-beau Rabelais" (a Ernest
Feydeau, [25 décembre 1867]; gppp. III:716); "Donne de ma
part une pensée de respect et d’adoration devant la maison
[de Rabelais]" (5 Caroline, [8 juillet 1876]; Conard
vii:317); "[de Rabelais] découlent les lettres francaises"
(a Guy de Maupassant, 19 février 1880; Conard viii:398).

Not only have "Les Funérailles" and "Rabelais" been
largely ignored; the connection between Flaubert and
Rabelais has been explored rarely. Bruneau,2 however, sees
Rabelais as a major source of the figure of the Gargon,3 the
root and archetype of Flaubert’s comedy: "Le ‘Garcon'

aurait donc a la fois pour origine les romans de Rabelais et

15

16
1e type bien connu a l'époque romantique du

4 He considers Rabelais the source of the

commis-voyageur."
bourgeois, bon-vivant aspect of the Gargon (Debuts, 153), as
well as of his exaggerated, parodic eloquence (Débuts, 152):
one can put in his mouth "tous les clichés habituels"; but
as a "farceur méchant" given to sadistic "jouissance... dans
le malheur des autres," he also represents "une critique
violente de la société bourgeoise" (Débuts, 158). Thus the
language of the Garpon is both an exaggerated example of the
ridiculous, and an attack on the ridiculous. Bruneau
ponders the following formulation of the Goncourts, which he
finds "loin d’étre clair" (Débuts, 152): "11 [1e Garcon]
représentait la blague du matérialisme et du romantisme, la
caricature de la philosophie d'HolbachJ"s Bruneau, who
notes that the terms materialism and romanticism are
contradictory,6 explains the sentence as meaning that "le
‘Garcon,’ matérialiste et ridicule, se moque du romantisme"
(Débuts, 153). In Bruneau’s reading of this phrase, then,
the Gargon is a mockery of the mockery of Romanticism, a
satire of materialism. It is not insignificant that he
connects this figure to Homais, and to Arnoux (Débuts, 160):
he is attaching himself to the traditional reading of these
figures as wholly objects of satire. In the face of the
complex vertigo of Flaubert's relationship to the
characters, values and languages that he depicts, most
critics feel moved to choose sides, but this is a fatal

temptation. For suppose that the Goncourts' formulation is

17
pp; contradictory, that what the Garpon represents is in
fact la blague of contradictory opinions linked in a
sociologically representative pypp, the ridiculousness of
both the materialists and the romantics, in short a
caricature of philosophy, of language itself as an object of
and vehicle for belief.

Bruneau’s dilemma confronts anyone who attempts to
specify Flaubert’s position regarding one of his characters:
for Flaubert, belief, or more specifically, the language of
belief, is itself the object of his satire. The result of
this is that when one finalizes one's position regarding
something represented in one of Flaubert’s texts, one finds
oneself mocked by the text. At the same time it is never
certain that the satire of belief precludes the author’s
identification with his object: after all, Flaubert played
the Gargon, and became Madame Bovary.7

When Bruneau quotes Flaubert as saying that "Mon
Rabelais est tout bourré de notes et commentaires
philosophiques, philologiques, bachiques, bandatiques, etc."
(a Chevalier, [28 octobre 1838]; gppp. 1:30-31), he
considers these commentaries "peut-étre la source d"Ivre et
Mort’, certainement des ‘Funérailles du docteur Mathurin,’"
and concludes that "le conte bachique n'est donc pour
Flaubert qu’une variété du conte philosophique, un moyen
pour lui d’exprimer ses idées sur la vie et sur la société"
(Débuts, 184). Bruneau reduces statements made in

Flaubert’s texts to the mere expression of opinions, rather

18
than viewing them as the display of language in the mode of
laughter. He sees Flaubert's writings as serious commentary
on a comic text; the process of generating the text can thus
be described as one in which "1e conte bachique [...] se
[fait] philosophique" (Débuts, 184), in which a drunken text
learns to think about itself, rather than as thought
learning to become drunken, or as irreducibly ambiguous
drunken thought. Bruneau’s project is inscribed within the
general Western project of finding a meaning for every
creative outburst, a purpose for every enjoyment.
Flaubert’s creation is outside of, if not contradictory to,
that project.

The connection between Flaubert and Rabelais is most
thoroughly explored in H. Patry’s 1904 article "Rabelais et
Flaubert." Patry here makes the essential point that most
other critics have missed: Flaubert not only commented on
Rabelais, he emulated him. Thus it is significant that he
was reading Rabelais not only during the late 1830’s, when
"Rabelais" and "Les Funérailles" were written, but also that
he reread him during the periods when he was writing Madame
Bovapy, Salammbo, and L’Bducation sentimentale. Patry
unearths several obvious emulations of the Rabelaisian style
in the correspondence, notably this one from 1837:

Le pere Langlois et Orlowski ont diné hier a la
maison et ils ont passablement bu, maqué, blagué.
Achille, moi et Biset sommes invités pour dimanche a
aller ribotter [pip], fumer et entendre de la
musique chez Orlowski [...] On mange des saucisses,

des boudins, des oeufs durs, de la cochonnaille et
il n'est permis d’en sortir que saouls et aprés

l9

avoir vomi 5 on 6 fois.

J'ai une nouvelle agréable a t'apprendre.
Je puis t’en garantir l'authenticité, elle vient du
sieur Ducoudray, pion de M. Mainot et éléve en
médecine. Il porte un chapeau, une redingote et une
chemise. Il m’a donc dit ce matin a l’amphithéétre
que... que... eh bien, que le censeur des études M.
Cabrié qui [a] une chemise sale, des bas sales, une
ame sale et qui enfin est un salo[p]... il m’a dit
bref qu’il avait été surpris dans un bordel
bordelant et qu’il allait étre traduit devant 1e
Conseil Académique [...] Voila qui me réjouit, me
récrée, me délecte, me fait du bien a la poitrine,
au ventre, au coeur, aux entrailles, aux viscéres,
au diaphragme, etc. Quand je pense a la mine du
censeur surpris sur le fait je me récrie, je ris, je
bois, je chante ah ah ah ah ah ah et je fais
entendre le rire du Garcon, je tape sur la table, je
m’arrache les cheveux, je me roule par terre, voila
qui est bon. Ah! Ah! voila qui est Blag[u]e, cul,
merde. Adieu, car je suis fou [de] cette nouvelle
(a Ernest Chevalier, [24 mars 1837]; Corr. I:22-23).

What is specifically Rabelaisian here are the lists of food,
of body parts, of synonyms for pleasure; as well as the
conflation of drinking and conversation ("bu, maqué,
blagué"). Likewise it seems significant that the laughter
of the Garcon is mixed with signs ambiguously of excessive
pleasure and of distress ("je m’arrache les cheveux") and
that "blague" appears very close to "fou."8 This nexus of
oral and anal enjoyment, of things pouring into and spewing
from the mouth, of laughter that is both painful and
pleasurable, of swallowing that results in vertigo and
vomiting, of painful enjoyment that is akin to folly, of
playful defilement that degrades also the defiler, carries
in germ the principal dynamics of Flaubert's later works:
the gpeuloir, the nauseated rejection of what one has

assiduously collected, the sadistic mockery of what one

20

wears as a mask; but most of all the fact that all of this
takes place in the mode of pleasurable verbal display, of
play and enjoyment.9

We know what attracted Flaubert to Rabelais in the
late 1830’s because there has been preserved an essay he
wrote, probably in 1838 or 1839, probably as a class
assignment. Critics who write about "Rabelais"m usually
dismiss it as "sans grande originalité" (Débuts, 265). If
it is taken seriously, it is in the context of the letter of
13 September, 1838 to Ernest Chevalier (QQEI. 1:27-28) which
links Byron and Rabelais: "Vraiment je n’estime
profondément que deux hommes: Rabelais et Byron les deux
seuls qui aient écrit dans l'intention de nuire au genre
humain et de lui rire a la face" (28). "Rabelais" is
interpreted by Coleman11 and, following him, Shanks,12 as
Byronic, as a source for "Smarh." Coleman’s article dates
from 1925, when "studies of Flaubert tend[ed] to regard as
his most spontaneous production, not Madame Bovarv or
L’Education sentimentale, in which are embodied the
realist’s tables of the law, but Salammbé and the three
versions of the Tentation" (205). This construction of the
oeuvre was inscribed within the overarching structure of
"pessimistic determinism" which "constituted the foundation
of Flaubert’s philosophy" (207). Coleman quotes from the
essay Flaubert’s description of Rabelais’s laughter:
"Rabelais est un Luther dans son genre. Sa sphere, c'est le

rire. Mais il le pousse si fort, qu’avec ce rire il démolit

21

tout autant de choses que la colere du bonhomme de
Wittenberg [...] ce rire—la est terrible. C’est la statue
du grotesque" ("Rabelais," 1:180); somehow he transforms its
revolutionary joy into "pessimism" and "brutal irony" (213).
For Coleman, Flaubert’s laughter is different from Byronism
in that it welds to a "savage and inhuman pessimism" a
"brutal sneer, a coarse contempt for human relations, a sort
of delight in rolling them in the mire" (215). Shanks,
using again "Smarh" as his example of Flaubert’s
Rabelaisianism, calls this last "a new type of grotesque
expressive of his disillusion," and claims that Flaubert
"transmogrifies the sane humour of Rabelais in order to
create another spirit that denies, an obscene Mephistopheles
[. . .] the monster born of the rape of Flaubert's illusions
by reality" (87); according to Maynial, this is because
Flaubert has confused Rabelais with Byron: "Flaubert’s
bracketing of Rabelais and Byron shows his misinterpretation
of the former: to this repressed and adolescent Romanticist
even the healthy laughter of Pantagruel rings bitter" (86).

Yet in the essay Flaubert explicitly separates
Rabelais from Byron: "ce n'est ni la pointe acérée [...] de
Voltaire, ni la colére naive [...] de Jean-Jacques, ni les
sanglots étouffés de Byron, ni la douleur réfléchie de
Goethe, c’est le rire vrai, fort, brutal, le rire qui brise
et qui casse,-- ce rire-la qui, avec Luther et 93, a abattu
le moyen age" ("Rabelais," 1:183). What Flaubert admires in

Rabelais is his strength, his truth,13 and the fact that his

22
laughter is revolutionary. In fact, as Patry has pointed
out, Flaubert admired Rabelais for his "force," and also,
surprisingly enough, for his "impersonnalité" (37): "Les
épithétes qui reviennent le plus souvent quand il veut
caractériser l’oeuvre de Rabelais, ce sont celles
d"exagéré,’ de ‘monstrueux,’ de ‘puissant,’ d"immense,'
d"énorme,' de ‘pyramidal'" (37-38); yet Flaubert also finds
in Rabelais the absence of the artist from his work:
"L’artiste doit s’arranger de facon a faire croire a la

postérité qu'il n’a pas vécu [...] Je ne peux rien me

figurer sur la personne [...] de Rabelais" (a Louise Colet,
[27 mars 1852]; Corr. II:62). Rabelais acts as a force of
Nature:

Ce qui me semble, a moi, le plus haut dans l’Art (et
le plus difficile), ce n’est ni de faire rire, ni de
faire pleurer, ni de vous mettre en rut ou en
fureur, mais d’agir a la facon de la nature,
C’est-a-dire de faire réver. Aussi, les trés belles
oeuvres ont ce caractére. Elles sont sereines
d'aspect et incompréhensibles. Quant au procédé,
elles sont immobiles comme des falaises, houleuses
comme l’Océan, pleines de frondaisons, de verdures
et de murmures comme des bois, tristes comme le
désert, bleues comme le ciel [...] Rabelais [...]
m’appara[it] impitoyable. Cela est sans fond,
infini, multiple. Par de petites ouvertures, on
apercoit des précipices; il y a du noir en bas, du
vertige. Et cependant quelque chose de
singuliérement doux plane sur l'ensemble! C'est
l'éclat de la lumiére, le sourire du soleil, et
c’est calme! c’est calme! et c’est fort (a Louise
Colet, [26 aofit 1853]; Corr. II:417, emphasis in
original).

 

Thus a powerful comedy transcends laughter, tears, and
sexuality: it leads one to contemplation. In the midst of

Rabelais’s excess is serenity, calm. The variety of its

23
procedures masks an infinite depth that is vertiginous
emptiness, but also light, the smile of the sun. It
embraces opposites, as does Romanticism, but its ultimate
nihilism is indistinguishable from the harmony, calm and
reason of Classicism. What must be retained from this
letter is Flaubert’s view of superior art as transcending
all contradictions, and that this ultimate reconciliation of
emotions, moods and schools is modeled on Nature. For
Flaubert, excess can be wedded to clarity, variety to
immobility, power to calm. And all of this can take place
within a laughter that is pitiless.

Given the importance of Rabelais for Flaubert, then,
it seems wise to analyze in depth the image of the master
produced by the youthful essay, whether or not the insights
are original, whether or not the style is admirable. What
is needed is an understanding of the view of Rabelais that
the essay produces, and thus its view of comedy. What I
will attempt to show, through a reading of the essay and of
its companion piece "Les Funérailles du docteur Mathurin,"
is that the comic impulse, the "triumph of spring over
winter" (Frye, 183), is fundamental to an understanding of
Flaubert’s relation to Nature and language. As will be
seen, moving these works from a marginal to a central
position in Flaubert's pppype can illuminate the comic
aspects of Flaubert's mature works. What "Smarh"
dramatizes, then, is the last gasp of Byronism; "Les

Funérailles" represents the first attempt at a reworking of

24
Byronism in the new Rabelaisian mode.

"Rabelais" begins with a claim that its
interpretation of Rabelais is original, a corrective to the
general misreading: "Jamais nom ne fut plus genéralement
cité que celui de Rabelais, et jamais peut-étre avec plus
d’injustice et d'ignorance" ("Rabelais," 1:180). Yet two
alternative interpretations are given. Which one is
incorrect? Are both unjust, ignorant? "Ainsi, aux uns, il
apparait comme un moine ivre et cynique, espirit désordonné
et fantastique, aussi obscene qu’ingénieux, dangereux par
l’idée, révoltant par l’expression." If this interpretation
is to be rejected, what of its implicit connection of
cynicism with revolt and insult? Although a quick reading
of this passage might lead one to reject this first
interpretation of Rabelais as representing an opinion
condemned by the text, the fact is that such a reading is
undercut elsewhere, where Rabelaisian laughter is connected
with Luther and the execution of the King in 1793
("Rabelais," 1:183). But what then of the second
interpretation of Rabelais? "Pour les autres, C’est toute
une philosophie pratique, douce, modérée, sceptique il est
vrai, mais qui conduit aprés tout a bien vivre et a étre
honnéte homme" ("Rabelais," 1:180). Contrasted in this
juxtaposition of two interpretations of Rabelais are
disorder, revolt, drunkenness, danger and genius, versus
practicality, mildness, moderation and correct living; in

short, cynicism ("une moine [...] cynique") versus

25
skepticism ("une philosophie [...] sceptique"), which in

this context apparently mean, respectively, destructive

nihilism ("désordonné [...] dangereux [...] révoltant") and
calm, rational domesticity ("pratique [...] modérée [...]
bien vivre [...] honnéte homme"). One sees here the two

sides of the Gargon described by Bruneau: the bourgeois
lover of comfort and the anti-bourgeois épateur. Perhaps
both readings are misreadings because of their
reductiveness. For although the text seems momentarily to
ally itself with the first reading ("son prodigieux génie a
jeté a la face du monde sa satire mordante," emphasis
added), it soon signals its position as regards
interpretation itself, when it invokes "sa satire mordante
et universelle" and says that "chaque siécle a tourné sous
tous les sens, interpreté de mille facons cette longue
énigme." Rabelais's texts satirize everything: they are
thus an enigma, a puzzle inviting an interpretation;
Flaubert’s text envisions this interpretive process as a
turning in all directions, a twisting, a deformation: but
also, through polysemy, a curdling as of milk, a spoiling;
as a placing of the text under meanings, as a subordination
to an imposed sense.14

Rabelais’s texts are satires: they invite one to
discover their intent, the position from which they attack,
the serious purpose that underlies their laughter; but they
are universal satires: any interpretation of them that

limits them, and thus distorts them, is an attempt to tame

26
their laughter by subordinating them to a unique meaning.
What precedes any distorting reception of them is the moment
of their origin as escape: "sa satire mordante et
universelle, gui s’échappe si franchement par le rire
colossal de ses géants" (emphasis added). The irrepressible
and colossal force of their birth trivializes any purpose
interpretation can afterward foist on them. They escape
interpretation thanks to their vulgar and seemingly
insignificant joy ("cette longue énigme si triviale, si
grossiére, si joyeuse") which masks profound depths that
represent truth ("cette longue énigme [...] au fond
peut-étre si profonde et si vraie"). The injustice and
ignorance that the essay promises to correct are those of
interpretation itself, through a view of Rabelais's comedy
that sees it as a spontaneous, creative force, unbounded by
any particular meaning, that is powerful and true precisely
because of its joy in what seriousness considers low.

The following paragraphs of Flaubert's text outline
the history of Rabelais’s influence throughout the ages:
"Son oeuvre [...] a [...] une telle importance qu’elle se
lie a chaque age et en explique la pensée." One thinks of
this phrase from the correspondence: "Je lis toujours
Rabelais et j’y ai adjoint Montaigne [...] c’est selon [moi]
un point d'ofi est parti la littérature et l'espirit
francais" (5 Ernest Chevalier, 13 septembre 1838; gppp.
I:28). The sentiment was apparently lifted from

Chateaubriand, although Flaubert may not have known this at

27
the time: "Rabelais ‘d’ofi découlent les lettres francaises’
suivant Chateaubriand" (a Guy de Maupassant, 19 [16] février
1880; Conard viii:398). When Rabelais's works were written,
they were revolutionary: "c'est une révolte ouverte [...]
Elle a toute l’importance de l'actualité, elle est dans le
sens du mouvement, elle le dirige." There is a sense,
apparently, that is not imposed by a deforming
interpretation: a sense that is a direction of history that
the text, through following, leads. Rabelais’s laughter
demolishes as many things as the anger of Luther, because of
its strength ("il pousse [son rire] si fort, qu'[...] il

démolit tout autant de choses que la colére du bonhomme de

Wittenberg"), but also because of the precision of its
style: "11 1e manie si bien, il 1e cisele tellement [...]
que ce rire-la est devenu terrible." Carefully worked style

hones laughter into a weapon, and creates a work that is
"éternelle comme le monde." This last notion resonates in a
number of directions: Flaubert’s later view of artistic
creativity as like God’s creation of the world; the eternal
nature of laughter and its connection with the power of
Nature. Here the formulation is abrupt, unmotivated by the
preceding sentences ("Ce rire-la est devenu terrible. C'est
la statue du grotesque. Elle est éternelle comme le
monde"). "Rabelais," like many of Flaubert’s early texts,
sometimes becomes a disorderly network of linked assertions,
a sketching-in of connections that in some cases Flaubert

would later explore more thoroughly. Moments of incoherence

28
in these early texts signal points of creative productivity,
points therefore worthy of scrutiny and expansion. What is
problematized at this point in the text is the relationship
between meaning and history. Subsequent ages have
subordinated Rabelais to their own pppg (meaning, direction,
project); but Rabelais is the expression of a specific
historical gppp (direction, project, meaning). The force of
Rabelais’s originality here makes his creation eternal: this
durability is what allows all subsequent deformations, as
well as its subsequent development along a historical
trajectory. The following paragraphs of "Rabelais" sketch a
series of deformations, transformations, and continuations
in various ages. Yet a question remains unanswered: how is
one to distinguish between valid continuations and invalid
continuations? between true expressions of a tendency's
eternal nature and the degradations of time? between the
uniqueness of an artist’s spontaneous, timeless creation and
its historical position? The problem indicated but not
thoroughly explored here of the relationship between art and
history would obsess Flaubert throughout his life.

The text asserts that Rabelais’s historical
revolutionary force finds a valid continuation in the
seventeenth century in the works of Moliére and La Fontaine:
these two are "insouciants des philosophies, des sectes, des
religions." Although they have reduced the laughter of
Rabelais to "un demi—sourire," they are like him in that the

serious analytic portion of their project is motivated by

29

enjoyment: "un demi-sourire de bonhomie et d’analyse" and
by their directness and freedom: "[ils sont] francs,
libres." Rabelais, Moliére and La Fontaine are, in fact,

"les plus vraiment francais que nous ayons," because their
first allegiance is not to a school or system of belief, but
to the representation of the human. "Ils l’ont retournée
[la religion de l’homme] et analysée, disséquée": one
thinks of Flaubert’s dissection of the heart of Madame
Bovary.15 This cutting is a function of the precision of
their language: "ce dialogue si habilement coupé." This
chiseled and cutting language is in fact better than
systems: the laughter of Moliére, for example, is "plus
philosophe [...] que tous les philosophes depuis qu’il y en
a." Analysis devoted to truth and motivated by laughter is
superior to belief.

La Bruyére liked Rabelais, but this is atypical for

the century of Boileau, Racine, and Maintenon, because of

its "gofit [...] réserve [...] pureté" and prudishness: "ce
siécle prude [...] si bien représenté dans l’anguleux et
plat jardin de Versailles." The century feared Rabelais
because of his connection to the Revolution: "[Le

dix-septiéme siécle] se trouvait entre deux choses terribles
pour lui [...] Les démolisseurs des croyances avant, les
démolisseurs de tétes aprés." The century is lost in
admiring self-contemplation, "guindé, dans l’adoration de
soi-méme," too serious, too bienséant to appreciate "cette

littérature débraillée, bruyante, nue." There is an

3O

implicit contrast between analysis and truth on the one hand
and absorbed self-admiration on the other: of the gaze that
travels outward into the universally human and discovers the
truth, and the gaze that is turned toward its own reflection
and is pleased, hence mistaken. Perhaps truth is negative,
destructive not only of illusion but of the admiration of
the human? The force underlying the Rabelaisian tendency in
French literature seems in fact to be destructive:
Rabelais’s laughter demolishes; Moliere’s half-smile
analyzes through dissection. Both laughters imply a corpse;
this corpse is perhaps that from which the narcissistic
spectacle of the seventeenth century is intended to divert
(the text echoes Pascal: "deux abimes au milieu desquels
[1e dix-septiéme siécle] se tenait guindé dans l’adoration
de lui-meme," emphasis added). The spirit of Rabelais is
medical in the sense of dispelling the illusions that veil
the corpses its act of revelation dismembers.16

The eighteenth century did not like Rabelais. They
misread his vertigo ("ce tourbillon"), which the essay
interprets as an irrepressible font of invention ("cette
verve de saillies, cet entrain, ce tourbillon, cette veine
poétique palpitante d’inventions, d’aventures, de voyages,
d’extravagances," "Rabelais," 1:181). For the eighteenth
century, this vertigo was merely drunken vomiting:
"Voltaire [...] appelle son livre: ‘Un amas des plus
grossiéres ordures qu’un moine ivre puisse vomir.'" The

century’s contempt for Rabelais reveals the secret beneath

31
its illusion: "Le petit gofit musqué, réglé et froid du
siecle avait horreur de ce qu'il nommait le dévergondage
d'esprit. Il aimait mieux celui des moeurs." The century’s
attempt at fixing Rabelais’s meaning ("Voltaire [...]
n’excuse Rabelais que parce qu'il s’est moqué de l’Eglise")
merely reveals its pettiness and hypocrisy. Misreading
Rabelais does not cripple him: his texts are so constructed
that fixing their meanings or showering them with contempt
makes one the object of their satire. This is because of
the text's vital force that explodes hypocritical
refinement, the fact that its sppp is historical, but larger

than any school or program that tries to harness or confine

it.

In fact, its uniqueness derives from its rejection
of even the restraint required for clear communication: "Ou
lui trouvons-nous un rival? [...] est—ce Pétrone, Apulée,

avec leur art prémédité, mesuré, leurs contours purs

[...] ?" Classical art, with its clarity and carefully
considered effects, is for Flaubert inferior to the formless
vitality of Rabelais. Yet the text has already praised
Rabelais's chiseling and manipulation of his laughter, as
well as Moliére’s skillfully cut dialogue. Perhaps at this
point Flaubert is merely reproducing standard Romantic
clichés about classical style, clichés his thought escapes
when engaging Rabelais directly. In any event, the struggle
between Rabelaisian profusion and polished restraint would

continue to trouble him, as would the difficulty of keeping

32
his voice pure of Romantic cliché.

Flaubert rejects the idea that Rabelais had
precursors, although he admits a connection to medieval
comedy: "la partie matériellement comique de Rabelais
apparti[ent] a l’élément grotesque du moyen age, nous ne lui
trouvons de prédécesseur dans aucun document littéraire."
What, precisely, is the distinction between material links
and literary predecessors? Why is the mere act of
inscribing within literature what already existed outside of
it proof of originality? In fact, this part of the text is
not particularly well developed, nor is the following:
leaping suddenly to "les temps modernes," it merely states
that Béroald de Verville "en est si loin" that there is no
comparison. One would have hoped that the text’s evaluation
of Sterne as a modern emulator of Rabelais ("Sterne a voulu
le réproduire") might have given insight as to how such an
emulation might proceed, but the text merely attacks his
"affectation" and "sensibilité raffinée," attaching him
somewhat speciously to the eighteenth century. In fact, as
we shall see, the text is unsure of exactly how Rabelais is
to be emulated, although it does speculate on the question.

But first, it explores the idea that Rabelais is
"unique parce qu’il est a lui seul l’expression d'un siécle,
d’une époque." Geniuses "disent leur mot, le mot de leur
temps," and thereby "créent des littératures ou [...] en
ferment de vieilles." Thus Homer is the singer of the

springtime of a world, Virgil of its end. The former

33

"chante la vie guerriére, la jeunesse vaillante et
belliqueuse du monde, la verte saison ou les arbres
poussent." He is associated with struggle, youth, and
Nature, rather like Rabelais. Virgil, whose "civilisation
est déja vieille" is full of "larmes [...] nuances [...]
sentiment [...] délicatesse" -- not at all like Rabelais.
Dante, however, is both "sombre et rayonnant"; as "le poéte
chrétien," the poet of death and hell, he contains both
"mélancholie et [...] espérance": are we to see this as the
poetry of an age in transition between decadence and a new
life, if only in its own metaphysical imagination?

Next comes an analysis of the historical conditions
that produce Byronism:

dans les sociétés vieillies, quand la satiété est

venue a tous, que le doute a gagné tous les coeurs

et que toutes les belles choses révées, toutes les

illusions, toutes les utopies sont tombées feuille a

feuille, arrachées par la réalité, la science, le

raisonnement, l'analyse, que fait le poéte?
The text attributes the disillusion of Byronism to the
Enlightenment and to science, and it reviles them for it.
Yet it has just argued that Rabelais, hero of the text, is
in fact the very embodiment of the attack on faith. It is
not clear at this point in the text either that Byronism is
the only valid response to the modern age, or that it is the
model the text proposes emulating. In fact, although the
text here seems to indicate otherwise ("de nos jours, c’est

Byron"), it is not clear that the age being described is in

fact 1839, date of the text, rather than the period just

34
before: indeed the end of the text seems ambiguously to
indicate that 1839 is a period of transition propelled
forward by the ambivalent blessing of science. Readings
that argue that the text as a whole upholds Byronism must be
selective, and they must ignore the entire context that
leads up to this passage.

In fact, the late 1830s were a period when the
influence of Byron was on the wane, according to Edmond
Estéve,“ for whom "le fond du byronisme peut se définir
d’un mot: C'est l’individualisme, hautain, irréductible,
absolu. Etendre son moi au dela de toutes lois [...] c’est
l'instinct de l’homme" (4). By the early 1830s this
tendency had led to a politics of extremes:

sous 1e régime du juste milieu orléaniste, [certains
des Jeune-France] sont légitimistes, [...] les
autres, la plupart, républicains [...] Mais ils ont
tous un sentiment commun: c’est la haine du
bourgeois [...] De la [...], les excentricités
d’opinion et de langage [...] Le bourgeois est ami
de l’ordre: on lui parle de revolution sociale. Le
bourgeois estime [...] les professions honorables:
on lui déclare qu’il n'y a que trois états possibles

dans une civilisation avancée comme la n6tre:
voleur, journaliste ou mouchard, et qu’on aurait

\

aimé a étre voleur (220).
This led quite naturally to the proclamation of a belief in
"l’anarchie morale et littéraire" (229), if not quite
political anarchy.
Part of the reaction against this tendency was the
call of the more moderate opponents of Louis-Philippe like
Lamartine for a reformist poetry that would lead humanity to

strive for political utopia, a poetry not lyric, epic, or

35
dramatic, but a poetry "philosophique, religieuse,
politique, sociale [...] C'est elle qui plane sur la
société et la juge, et qui, montrant a l'homme la vulgarité
de son oeuvre, l’appelle sans cesse en avant, en lui
montrant du doigt des utopies, des républiques imaginaires,
des cités de Dieu, et lui souffle au coeur le courage de les
atteindre."18 The political theory of "Rabelais" seems
calculated to escape from the excessive despair engendered
by the frenetic Byronism of the 1830s19 without giving up
its revolutionary energy and without sinking into piously
reformist platitudes. Flaubert's solution is Rabelais,

which Estéve says was already an option for the young

Romantic of the 1830s: "Il y a [...] 1e Jeune-France
rabelaisian [...] Le Jeune-France byronien se grise ‘d’une
maniére tout a fait byronien’" (Estéve, 221-222; the quote

is from Gautier).20 Drunkenness, of course, is not
necessarily revolutionary, or even Rabelaisian: the danger
is that drunkenness can easily be read as Byronic unless it
is purged of all despair.

According to Flaubert, the poet's response to a

disillusioned age is Byronic isolation and nihilism: "Il se
recueille en lui-méme [...] il chante [...] tous les néants
de la pensée" ("Rabelais," 1:181). Yet in his isolation, he

reflects his age, reproducing within himself all of the
discourses that surround him in a dying world: "toutes les
douleurs qui l’entourent, tous les sanglots [...], toutes

les malédictions": all these voices "résonnent dans son ame"

36
and "sortent par la voix du génie" to give an eternal place
in history to the misfortunes of an epoch. The poet’s
resonant power comes from the immense void of his soul:
"vaste, sonore, immense." Surprisingly, although this void
had previously been seen as historical (the two "abimes" of
the Renaissance and the Revolution), here it is seen as
God-given ("son ame que Dieu a faite vaste"). This moment
in the text is a monument to Byronic Romanticism; but it
will soon prove to be a funeral monument ("pour ciseler la
mémoire de ses infortunes"): the final passage of the text
will speculate on how to fill its resonant void.

It must be emphasized that the representation of
surrounding voices is not the monopoly of Byronism: "Les
grands écrivains [...] recoivent l’espirit [...] de chaque
individualité, y mélent ce que leur est personnel, original:
ils l’amalgament, ils l’arrangent, puis ils le rendent
transformé dans l’art." In this way "le vrai poétique est
plus vrai que le vrai historique." The text will soon
speculate on the voices that the Rabelaisian text
articulates: notably the resistance of the people, through
humor, to the church and to the aristocracy. "Le roi [Louis
XI] avait abattu la féodalité, le moine [Luther] allait
abattre la papauté, c'est—a-dire tout le moyen age, le

guerrier et le prétre. Mais 1e peuple lassé de l’un et de

l’autre n'en voulait plus." This political desire is based
on observation: "[Le peuple] s'était apergu que l’homme

d’armes 1e mangeait, que le prétre l’exploitait et le

37

trompait de son cété" (emphasis added). Popular humor, at
this moment of transition, sought a new form:

Longtemps il s’était contenté d'inscrire ses

railleries sur la pierre des cathédrales, de faire

des chansons contre le seigneur, de lacher, comme

dans le Roman de la Rose, quelque mot mordant sur le

pouvoir ou la noblesse. Mais il fallait quelque

chose de plus: une révolte, une réforme... c’était

un besoin général de sortir des entraves, d’entrer

dans une autre voie. Besoin de la science, méme

besoin dans la poésie, dans la philosophie

("Rabelais, " 1:181) .

Thus Rabelais, living in the midst of a society

"toute chancelante sur ses bases [...] devant tant de choses
démolies et tant de ruines," gave birth to an "immense
sarcasme" directed at the Middle Ages. The text has said
that Rabelais was the originator of that literature that can
legitimately be called French ("Rabelais est le pére de
cette littérature [... la] plus vraiment francais[e] que
nous ayons," "Rabelais," 1:180). It has said that great
geniuses give rise to, or close, literatures. Rabelais
seemingly does not represent the pristine moment of Homeric
creation; since he is an originator, his literature cannot
be exactly the same as that of Byronic despair. Is it that
Rabelais’s epoch is different in kind from Byron’s, as it is
from Homer’s? Or is it merely that his response to the
decadence of his world is different from Byron’s? Perhaps
both: the poet’s representation of the voices that surround
him depends partly on what those voices are, partly on what

he adds that is personal, original to him, like the God-

given vastness of Byron’s soul. But the text describes the

38
object of Rabelais’s sarcasm as: "ce Eéééé hideux du moyen
age, qui palpitait encore au seiziéme siécle, et dont 1e
seiziéme siécle avait horreur lui—meme" ("Rabelais," 1:181).
Rabelais lived at a moment when the past survived only as
despised relics; Byron just after the illusions had fallen,
one by one. Has Flaubert outlived the historical moment of
Byronism to reach a moment when a renewed Rabelaisianism is
needed?

This is precisely the question that the last section
of the essay addresses. Most commentators have skipped the
intervening section, where Flaubert summarizes and comments
on each of Rabelais's five books in turn. In fact, this
section was omitted when the essay was originally published
in 1886,21 but it is important for several reasons. First:
in the light of the last section, where Flaubert calls for a
new Rabelais for the nineteenth century, it is important to
see which aspects of Rabelais Flaubert emphasized. Second:
in this passage, direct quotations from Rabelais gradually
seep into Flaubert’s style, contaminating it: this is
particularly interesting in light of the emulation of
Rabelais to be discussed at the end of this chapter. Third:
the analytic passages scattered throughout the summary help
to explain what Flaubert was doing in "Les Funérailles."

"Qu’est-ce donc que Rabelais?" The aspects of
Rabelais that Flaubert emphasizes in his plot summaries are
unsurprising: food, drink, sex, and philosophy; profusion

and vigor. As for philosophy, it is significant for the

39

connection between "Rabelais" and "Les Funérailles du
docteur Mathurin" that Flaubert emphasizes medical writers
("Pline, Athénée, Dioscoride, Galien, Aristote, Elien; il
apprend la géométrie, la musique, la médecine," "Rabelais,"
1:181-182). But what is "le plus beau" in Rabelais is not
its "inventions [this is a bit surprising, given Flaubert’s
admiration of Rabelais as an originator], ni ce style [...]
a la phrase si bien ciselée en relief [again surprising,
since this also had been emphasized earlier], c’est le
dialogue, le comique des caractéres, les longues causeries
philosophiques" ("Rabelais," 1:182). In fact, it is such a
"longue causerie philosophique" which is the central focus
of "Les Funérailles."22

The text describes the contrast between the first
two books as that between joyous force and malicious
sarcasm: "Dans le roman de Gargantua [...] c'est surtout la
force et la vigueur qui prédominent: ce sont de joyeux
buveurs aux propos libertins, a la saillie franche, avec
moins de malice sceptique et de satire mordante que dans
Pantagruel," 150). Perhaps it is this malice that
distinguishes "Smarh" from the more joyous "Funérailles."
The monologues of Dr. Mathurin, however, are internally
dialogic, which is to say that they display a number of
discourses in a shifting, kaleidoscopic mode that allows
them to interpenetrate freely; and further, they do this in
a way that weds Byronic skepticism to Rabelaisian drunken

joy. "Les Funérailles" represents the initiation of a

4O
post-Byronic Rabelaisianism, a Rabelaisianism that has
absorbed the Byronic influence.

In the paragraphs that retell the five books of
Rabelais, Flaubert gives examples of Rabelaisian
exaggeration, both in quotations and in his own voice:
extended lists, huge numbers, juxtapositions of exaggerated
joy and agony (as in the letter emulating Rabelais quoted
above). The text spends a rather large amount of space
(twenty-one lines of the 134 in the summary, including
sixteen lines of direct quotation, by far the longest
quotation in the text) on the reaction of Gargantua to the
birth of his son that happens at the moment of the death of
his wife. Gargantua is torn between a despair for the death
of the old that is arguably Byronic ("‘Ha faulse mort! tant
tu me es malivole, tant tu me es outrageuse de me tollir

celle a laquelle immortalité appartenait de droit’"); like

Flaubert’s Byron, he imitates what he mourns: "pleurait
comme une vache." But the cow becomes a calf when
Gargantua's thoughts turn to his son: "mais tout souldain

riait comme ung veau quand Pantagruel lui venait en
mémoyre." Gargantua celebrates the birth of the new in a
way that would be imitated by Mathurin:

"Oh! mon petit-fils, disait-il, mon couillon, mon
péton, que tu es joly [...] Ho! ho! ho! que je suis
ayse, buvons, ho! laissons toute mélancholye,
apporte du meilleur, rince les verres, boutte la
nappe, chasse les chiens, souffle ce feu, allume la
chandelle, ferme cette porte, taille ces soupes,
envoie ces pauvres, baille-leur ce qu'ils demandent
[...] que je me mette en pourpoint pour mieux
festoyer les comméres [...] Ma femme est morte, je

41

ne la ressusciterai pas par mes pleurs, il faut
[sic] mieux pleurer moins et boire davantage."

Thus Byronic elegy is to be replaced by drunken joyousness,
for the death of the old is the birth of the new; and the
moment of the transition is signalled within language itself
through a comic metaphor (vache/veau) that subordinates both
mourning and laughter to a comic world in which mourning
itself is a mask that can be exchanged freely for joy.
Change can be mourned, or celebrated.

The next paragraphs recount the adventures of
Pantagruel and Panurge, emphasizing their sexual adventures
and Panurge's search for the truth about marriage, a search
that leads him unsatisfied from poets to prophets, from
prophets to philosophers, and reaches its conclusion at the
Dive Bouteille. Only two passages are directly quoted:
another extended list, comically describing Panurge, and a
sentence about Pantagruel’s rebellion against authority that
is unconnected to anything in the sentence before or after,
although it is emphasized by its position at the beginning
of a paragraph: "‘Et toujours machinait quelque chose
contre les sergents et contre le guet.’" Flaubert displays
this quasi-political revolt as if sure that it is
significant, but unsure about what to do with it. The
stylistic profusion evident in the other quotation
("‘[Panurge] estait malfaisant, pipeur, buveur, batteur de
pavé, ribleur s'il en estait a Paris'") and in the passage

quoted above is, however, freely absorbed into Flaubert’s

42
own style as he gives lists of events, actions, characters,
places. He pauses for several lines to describe Panurge’s
fear during a storm at sea ("il a peur, il se recommande a
Dieu et a tous les saints, il pleure, sanglote, gémit, fait
des voeux"). This fear, transformed through a grotesque
list to a comic mask, is denied by Panurge once the storm is
over: "Aprés l’ouragan Panurge fait le bon compagnon et
soutient qu'il n’a pas eu peur, il se raille de Dieu et se
moque de l’Océan." This could be seen as an alternative
description of the poet's behavior in a time of transition:
rather than putting aside sorrow for drunken joy, one
pretends not to have been afraid and turns to mockery. Yet
this reaction, too, is transformed through comic language
into a parody of itself: seen by the comic eye, Byronic
mockery itself becomes a comic mask. Flaubert’s
descriptions are also invaded by the Rabelaisian tendency to
include seemingly irrelevant details about bodily needs:
"Il se munit de force provisions de bouche et part." This
constant turning from high themes to low ones is
characteristic of Mathurin’s monologues.

As a final summary of the Rabelaisian corpus,
Flaubert describes Rabelais’s laughter: "C'est un éternal
rire immense, confus, un rire de géant, qui assourdit les
oreilles et donne le vertige." It confuses and stupefies,
it makes the world seem to turn upside down because it
attacks all social classes: "moines, soldats, capitaines,

évéques, empereurs, papes, nobles et manants, prétres et

43
laiques," who are "flagell[és] et stigmatis[és]" and who
emerge from beneath his pen "tous mutilés et tous saignants"
("Rabelais," 1:182-183). This idea of the artist as a
revolutionary who stands outside all social classes, who
brutally mocks both rulers and ruled, is particularly
Flaubertian; as Estéve has argued, it is also Byronic. But
the superiority of the déclassé is apparently undercut
almost immediately by the fervor of the engagé, when the
text bewails the "longues douleurs du peuple" ("Rabelais,"
1:183). The distinction between the peuple and the manants
is specifically bourgeois, separating the legitimate "haines
contre le seigneur et contre le prétre" from the stupidity
of the manual laborer. The impulse toward a general satire
of all social classes that the text will soon make explicit
is here implicitly undercut by approval of a particular
revolutionary position. Yet, as will be seen in "Docteur
Mathurin," rejection of a particular revolution can easily
become a reactionary rejection of revolution in general.

The essay imagines at this point the effect Rabelais
must have had on his contemporary reader. The material and
spiritual conditions were archaic, survivals from a dead
age: "depuis longtemps les croyances et les servitudes
pesaient également; mais la vieille société vivait encore
avec ses tyrannies pour le corps, ses entraves pour la
pensée"; it is the material aspect of both these dominations
that is emphasized: "le seigneur était encore dans son

donjon, le prétre dans sa riche et grasse abbaye." A book

44
appears, which will give the people the last bit of
intellectual freedom necessary to overthrow their oppressors
("et pour que la raillerie soit plus forte, [écrit par] un
moinei") The book is "sans suite, sans formes, a la pensée
vague, peut-étre sans plan prémédité, sans idée fixe." A
formless book, without logically linked episodes, without
definite message or point of view: it is difficult not to
think of L'Education sentimentale. But not any formless
book would have had the desired effect: it was necessary
that the book be full of "railleries mordantes et cruelles,
contre le seigneur malgré son armée, contre le prétre malgré
sa sainteté, contre le pape malgré ses bulles," full of
outrageous and courageous humor that attacks everything
previously respected, "la vieille cathédrale gothique [...]
philosophie, science, magie, gloire, renommée, pouvoir,
idées, croyances," even "l'humanité" which is "dépouillée de
ses robes de parade et de ses galons mensongers," thus
naked, ugly, replusive; Panurge "lui jette a la téte ses
brocs de vin et se met a rire."

This courageous humor that takes everything as its
target is interspersed with delicate analyses of the human
heart: "les apercus les plus fins sur la nature de l’homme,
les nuances les plus délicates du coeur, les analyses les
plus vraies." Rabelais's laughter is here explicitly
contrasted to "la pointe acérée et aguisée de Voltaire, avec
son rire percant, sa bile recuite, sa morsure envenimée,"

that is, vicious and petty spite: remember that according to

45

the text Voltaire misread Rabelais, liking him only for the
fact that one of his targets was the Church, and
misunderstanding the universal nature of his laughter.
Neither is Rabelais’s laughter "la colére naive et
déclamatoire de Jean-Jacques, ni les sanglots étouffés de
Byron, ni la douleur réfléchie de Goethe." Romantic
complaint is rejected for something stronger, more
effective. For Rabelais’s laughter is "vrai, fort, brutal,
le rire qui brise et qui casse, -- ce rire—la qui, avec
Luther et 93, a abattu 1e moyen age." The confused,
formless, total satire of Rabelais, with its courageous
mockery of everything, is revolutionary both for the
intellectual freedom of the spirit and for the material
freedom of the body.

Because of the random formlessness of this book
"sans suite," a careful reading ("une attention suivie")
makes it impossible to interpret each word of Rabelais:
"ceux qui ont prétendu donner de Rabelais des clefs, voire
des allégories a chaque mot, et traduire chaque lazzi, n'ont
point, selon moi, compris le livre. La satire est générale,
universelle, et non point personnelle ni locale." Thus a
close reading that takes note of the text’s mockery of
everything without making too much of any of its individual
targets is capable of comprehending the nature of its
universal satire, a satire that is by nature vague and not
subordinated to any specific purpose. Compared to Falstaff

and Sancho Panza, who also flung mud on the middle ages from

46

which they emerged, the figure of Gargantua is "plus vague,
moins précise. Les formes en sont plus amples, plus
lachées, plus grandioses." To perceive these vague, large,
grandiose forms requires "une longue étude [...] il faut le
connaitre [Rabelais] tout en entier pour l’apprécier, des
analyses et des extraits le mutilent et le gatent." A
series of moments of careful, precise reading creates a
series of fragments that do not add up in the normal way to
a particular point of view, a particular parti pris. The
gradual frustration of the reader’s desire to make sense of
Rabelais creates the impression of a world in which
everything is ridiculous, the butt of joyous mockery. This
purposeless world of unlimited enjoyment can be perceived
only by a deep gaze that can penetrate beneath its "forme
triviale" to see "tout ce qu’il y a de séve, de vigueur,
d’imagination, de génie" hidden like "tant de diamants
ensevelis." The careful chiseling of a rigorous style that
seems to operate on trivial subjects, that seems to have no
definite point of view, is the only means of revealing the
powerful depths of the universal comic vision; for the
reader to share in this vision, he must carefully savor each
detail as he drinks large draughts.23

To summarize, then: great writers express the spirit
of their time by representing the various voices and
tendencies that surround them, allowing all these voices to
interact in the vastness of their imagination and giving

them a new meaning that derives from the writers’ own

47
personalities. Rabelais focused the dissatisfactions of the
people with the state and the church of his time, which were
mere anachronous vestiges: through a general courageous
satire he destroyed these vestiges. Byron gives voice to
the pain of a dying world. What must a writer of the late
18305 do?

This question, present implicitly from the first few
pages of the essay, is introduced near the end as an after-
thought: "une derniére reflexion qui termine." Rabelais
penetrated (a sondé) only the world of his time, denounced
its "abus [...] ridicules [...] crimes," and perhaps "a
[...] entrevu [...] un monde politique meilleur, une société
toute autre." He saw his world as a farce, and treated it
as a farce. But the abuses and ridiculousness of the 18305
are not exactly the same as those of the sixteenth century,
although the world perhaps is still a farce.

By 1838, "tout est changé. La réforme est venue.
Indépendance de la pensée. La Révolution est venue.
Indépendance matérielle." The twin targets of nobleman and
priest no longer have power. The world finds itself in the
midst of a "tourbillon" of "mille questions [...] sciences,
arts, philosophies, théories." In this cacophonous babble
of discourses, one is unsure how to evaluate the historical
moment: "ofi étes—vous? Est-ce le crépuscule? est-ce
l’aurore?" What is the appropriate response of the poet to
his times: elegiac lament, or drunken creation? The beliefs

of the past are dead: "Vous n’avez plus de christianisme."

48
What one has instead are the material rewards of science,
the modern inheritor of the revolution in free critical
thought that Rabelais pioneered: "des chemins de fer, des
fabriques, des chimistes, des mathématiciens. Oui, le corps
est mieux, la chair souffre moins." The universal
skepticism of Rabelais, so liberating in its time, has
destroyed the soul: "la chair souffre moins, mais le coeur
saigne toujours. L’ame, la sentez-vous se déchirer [...]?"
The text becomes elegiac, as it bemoans the way the soul
"s’abime dans le scepticisme universel, dans cet ennui
morne," as it bemoans the fact that all official discourse
has become idiotic: "la politique bégaye, [...] les poetes
[...] jettent [leur pensée] a demi écrite sur une feuille
éphémére." Stupid politics and journalism: yet are these
not the debased results of the free thought that Rabelais
championed? The current dilemma takes the form of a
homicidal fury that explodes in the homes of the poor as of
the rich, "dans chaque grenier, ou dans chaque palais"; this
fury is caused by poverty ("misere") and by the same
"orgueil" and "satiété" that characterized the eighteenth
century.

Thus progress, although it has cured material woes,
has caused a "gouffre béant" within the human soul; and the
sciences, powerless to fill the abyss (in fact it can be
argued that its skepticism caused it), "ne valent pas un
brin d’herbe" ("Rabelais," 1:184). "Vienne donc maintenant

un homme comme Rabelais!" But what will he attack? What

49
form will his laughter take? (And a harder question: how
exactly is his laughter to fill a void he himself has
created? The text doesn’t answer this question, and it will
take Flaubert some time even to pose it). First, the new
Rabelais must divest himself of anything personal or local:
his satire must be general. "Qu'il puisse se dépouiller de
toute colére, de toute haine, de toute douleur!" In any
event, he must not be Byronic, in part because 1838 is a

time after the death of all belief, when only the vestiges

 

of dead beliefs remain; in part, as has been argued above,
because 1838 is a time already striving to move beyond
Byronism. "De quoi rira-t-il?" Not at kings, "il n’y en a
plus." Note that this is itself a veiled attack on
Louis-Philippe, apparently not a real king, according to the

text. How ignoble to be dismissed as no longer worthy even

of satire! Not at the Jesuits, "c’est déja vieux." Mocking
the Church is unoriginal. Not at God: "quoiqu’on n’y croie
pas, cela fait peur." Note the subtle grammatical slur: "y"

treats God as a thing, as does, more ambiguously, "cela"
("cela" also refers to the implicit "rire a Dieu"). Note
also the complexity of the attack: what is officially being
mocked is not God, but those who don’t believe yet still
fear, and the new Rabelais is ambiguously assimilated to
that group: he will not laugh because that causes (his or
their?) fear. Already Flaubert has discovered the mockery
of a point of view which he ambiguously attributes to a

character (here, the new Rabelais), but also perhaps to his

50
listeners, or to the author himself, in a shifting game of
identification and alienation that produces both vertigo and
delight at the edge of the precipice of complete
undecidability.

For the object of the new Rabelais’s satire will be
the void itself, the void his ancestor created, the void his
laughter is intended to fill. "Le monde matériel est pour
le mieux [...] mais l’autre? -- Il aurait beau jeu." The
new Rabelais will take the hollow language of lost belief as
his object, the language of politics and journalism; perhaps
also Byronism itself. For in this period of transition ("Le
monde matériel est pour le mieux, ou du moins il est sur la
voie"), the poet must put aside Byronic lament ("cacher ses
larmes"), even though it may be his deepest impulse (in
which case his work cannot totally avoid identifying with
what it mocks), and "se mettre a rire." This new laughter
will produce "le livre [...] le plus terrible et le plus
sublime qu’on ait fait."

Flaubert’s version of Rabelais is in many ways
similar to Bakhtin’s, as presented in his Rabelais and His
flpplg.“ Both talk about the representation of powerful
popular sentiment in Rabelais’s art, and about its
historical impact; both talk about the joyousness of
Rabelais’s text, of its escape from all official seriousness
and restraint. But there are some important differences.

Flaubert says that Rabelais gives a meaning to the

historical direction of his time: according to him,

51
Rabelais’s laughter focuses popular anger against
institutions that are already nearly dead, thus sweeping
them away. His laughter is therefore predominantly
destructive: Flaubert merely notes in passing that Rabelais
has "entrevu peut-étre un monde politique meilleur, une
société toute autre" ("Rabelais," 1:183); he never discusses
passages of utopian thinking, like the description of the
abbey of Théléme; and the ultimate results of the
Rabelaisian current proceeding from the Renaissance, namely,
free thought and material progress, are seen as the roots of
the malaise of the modern world. Likewise, Rabelais's
laughter is seen as the innovation of a heroic genius,
although the argument supporting this position is far from
cogent: Flaubert says that Rabelais has no rival in the
comic production of the Middle Ages, although "toute la
partie matériellement comique de Rabelais appartien[t] a
l’élément grotesque du moyen age" ("Rabelais," 1:181).
Perhaps he is merely saying that the nature of Rabelais’s
genius raises him above any of his predecessors; or merely

that Rabelais was the first to transpose the medieval comic

impulse into literature: "nous ne lui trouvons de
prédecesseur dans aucun document littéraire" ("Rabelais,"
1:181, emphasis added). Flaubert’s argument preserves the

Romantic commonplaces of the heroic creative genius, as well
as the standard distinction between high and low literature.
Although its explicit analysis of Rabelaisian humor is

superficial and imprecise, indiscriminately calling it

52

satirical, grotesque, cynical, skeptical, and sarcastic, its
description of the five books points out exaggeration,
profuse lists, display of parodic encyclopedic knowledge,
juxtaposition of the high and the low, and of birth and
death, as characteristic traits. Its explicit analysis is
perhaps willfully imprecise, since it is intent on
emphasizing that Rabelais did not write with a single
specific target in mind, that he did not choose sides within
what was essentially an empty debate among dead forms, but
rather that he satirized all possible positions within the
dead culture of the past in order to sweep them away.
Flaubert sees Rabelais as predominantly destructive.

Bakhtin’s view is substantially different, in that
it emphasizes Rabelais’s connection to the popular humor of
the past, and views Rabelais’s laughter as utopian.
According to Bakhtin, Rabelaisian humor is directly linked
to carnival, when for a limited time the people experienced
a "liberation from the prevailing truth and from the
established order; [carnival] marked the suspension of all
hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions"
(Rabelais, 10). In the town square, privileged space of
carnival, all sorts of people mixed freely and familiarly:
any special roles that existed were costumes, masks, assumed
for the closed time of carnival, to be put on and taken off
at will: even the king was merely acclaimed by popular
consent, to be deposed when carnival was over. The

"uncrowning" (Rabelais, 305) or debasement of the high was

53
accompanied by an ironic crowning of the low, of a "roi pour
rire" (Rabelais, 81). Thus all established truths are
transformed by carnival into something adopted and rejected
at will; all social signs are manipulated in the mode of
play. Carnival laughter is general: "It is not an
individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event [. . .]
It is the laughter of all [. . .] directed at all and
everyone" (Rabelais, 11). It is not purely destructive:
"it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking,
deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives"
(Rabelais, 11—12). Thus carnival laughter represents a
moment in which all dies and is reborn; like the Roman

5 it was a moment of feasting and abundance,

Saturnalia,2
when the people, like Janus: "looked into the future and
laughed, attending the funeral of the past and present"
(Rabelais, 81), unlike official medieval culture that looked
only to the past to sanction the existing order.

In carnival, praise is intimately bound up with
abuse, so that everything is both mocked and celebrated.
Thus there is a conjunction of death and birth, of eating
and vomiting, of all processes of change and renewal. The
reversal of all hierarchies brings ultimately all
pretentious seriousness into contact with the lower bodily
element, where it is degraded in order that it be born anew.
The predominance of descriptions of physical bodily

functions in Rabelais has as its ultimate meaning the

display of the body as the undoer and source of all

54

significance; it has as its origin the carnival view of the

body in process:
It is not a closed, completed unit; it is
unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own
limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the
body that are open to the outside world, that is,
the parts through which the world enters the body or
emerges from it, or through which the body itself
goes out to meet the world. This means that the
emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or
on various ramifications or offshoots: the open
mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus,
the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its
essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its
own limits only in copulation, pregnancy,
childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking,
or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever
creating body (Rabelais, 26).

Rabelais’s laughter, then, represents a death that
is also a new birth, "for death is life’s rejuvenation"
(Rabelais, 405). Rabelais’s negation does not result in
nothingness but in the "carnivalesque upside down [. . .]
The object that has been destroyed remains in the world [as]
the ‘other side’ of the new object that has taken its place"
(Rabelais, 410). It is not pure negation, but a
"description of the world’s metamorphoses, its remodeling,
its transfer from the old to the new, from the past to the
future" (Rabelais, 412). As such it is the enemy of all
that is fixed, static, of all official seriousness. Thus
its general ambivalent laughter attacks everything that
resists change, yet preserves it as the ancestor of the new.
Carnivalesque laughter continually serves up corpses,

simultaneously praised and mocked.

According to Bakhtin, this joyful ambivalence that

55
creates as it destroys is specifically what was lost in the
Romantic revival of the Renaissance grotesque: "laughter
was cut down to cold humor, irony, sarcasm [. . .] Its
positive regenerating power was reduced to a minimum"
(Rabelais, 38). Thus the world of the Romantic grotesque is
the world of terror. "On the other hand, the medieval and
Renaissance folk culture was familiar with the element of
terror only as represented by comic monsters, who were
defeated by laughter. Terror was turned into something gay
and comic" (Rabelais, 39). Madness, which in Rabelais is a
renewal of vision that rejects commonplace, official reason,
becomes the tragic sign of individual isolation. Likewise
the mask, in carnival associated with "change and
reincarnation [. . .] gay relativity and [. . .] negation of
uniformity" (Rabelais, 39) becomes in the Romantic period
the keeper of a secret, a deceiver: "a terrible vacuum; a
nothingness lurks behind it" (Rabelais, 40). The Romantic
grotesque invents the theme of the marionette as "the victim
of alien inhuman force, which rules over men" (Rabelais,
40); it transforms the devil from the "gay ambivalent figure
expressing the unofficial point of view, the material bodily
stratum" (Rabelais, 41) of the fabliaux into a figure that
is "terrifying, melancholy, and tragic, [whose] infernal
laughter [is] somber and sarcastic" (Rabelais, 41). And
finally, the Romantic grotesque occurs mostly at night,
whereas the folk grotesque "is a festival of spring, of

sunrise, of morning" (Rabelais, 41). Thus the Romantic

56

grotesque eliminates the positive, joyous aspects of
Renaissance laughter, and retains only the references to
death, not to rebirth. It is purely destructive, purely
negative, purely melancholy. Its separation from popular
sources leads to isolation and solitude.26

In the late 1830’s, Flaubert was writing imbued with
Romantic values, but he had just read Rabelais. Thus he
wavers between a view of the artist as Byronic, expressing
the agony of a dying world, and a new view that he was
unsure how to express.27 He made a number of statements
that conformed to the Romantic grotesque; but the text of
"Rabelais" indicates a dim awareness of the connections of
Rabelais to sub-literary sources, and of Rabelais’s
positive, joyful side. The text is aware of the possibility
of a laughter occurring at a moment of transition that
clears away the past as it delights in the new; and it is
aware too that any positive historical tendency can become
fixed into rigid, empty forms. The text’s vision of the new
Rabelais as the renewal of an original force that serves to
destroy that force’s decrepit heir reflects a similar
phenomenon of the Renaissance: the return to Latin antiquity
in order to find justification for championing vernacular
contemporaneity against a fixed and artificial medieval
Latin officialdom (Bakhtin imagines that "Rabelais could
have compared this triple linguistic process to the farce
jouée a trois personnages," Rabelais, 467). But Flaubert’s

formulation of laughter as revealing ugly nakedness, of

57
stripping away the dead forms that mask a void, is Romantic,
and can do nothing to fill that void. The development of
his comedy will long languish in a view of laughter as
strictly destructive, of the past as merely empty, rather
than as the fertile soil for the new. This will be played
out as anguished isolation, rejection of popular vulgarity,
glorification of the poet as an isolated genius: clichéd
poses he adopts like one of his own characters, as if
carried along by the force of his own language despite
himself. But the way out of the dilemma is already glimpsed
in "Rabelais," and implicitly played out in "Les Funérailles
du docteur Mathurin." Bakhtin spelled it out in Rabelais
and His World: "The relative nature of all that exists is
always gay; it is the joy of change, even if Romantic gaiety
and joy are reduced to their minimum" (Rabelais, 48).
Flaubert’s emphasis on instability and change, on the
relativity of all that people would prefer to consider
stable, bears within it the seed of joy, even though that
seed often remains hidden and undeveloped. And despite all
his Romantic agonizing in the correspondence, Flaubert’s
literary practice will gradually grope toward a type of

comedy worthy of a new Rabelais.

CHAPTER 2: "SMARH"

The new insights provided by the encounter with
Rabelais enter Flaubert’s oeuvre in two ways: as a fully
differentiated voice (that of Yuk) in "Smarh," and as the
frame and foundation of "Les Funérailles." There is a
reason that "Smarh" is the longer, more fully developed of
the two and "Les Funérailles" shorter, more fragmented, and
less definitive: "Smarh" is closer to its Romantic sources,
and to earlier juvenilia like "Réves d’enfer," "Ivre et
mort," and "Agonies"; "Les Funérailles" represents a new
direction, that of an emulation of Rabelais.

The basic structure of "Smarh" is that of a dialogue
between Satan and Smarh, a saintly hermit. As a
counterpoint to this serious, agonized conversation there is
introduced the figure of Yuk, who laughs heartily as Satan
destroys Smarh’s faith through means that echo a number of
Romantic sources, among them works by Goethe, Byron and
Edgard Quinet; the influence of Byron is considered by most
commentators to be fundamental.1 Smarh is dazzled by the
infinite emptiness of space, and the infinite emptiness
within his heart; he is forced to confront the hostility of
nature, the vanity of civilization, the superfluity of the

Church, the emptiness of lust, gluttony, pride; at last,

58

59
about to find love, he is destroyed. During all of this
Yuk’s voice repeatedly intervenes, mocking Smarh and
inventing fictions to dazzle and dishearten him. The voice
of Yuk is fundamentally Rabelaisian in that it destroys high
seriousness in the mode of a profane celebration of
carnality;2 yet inasmuch as Yuk is the servant of Satan,
presented here as the sardonic isolated destroyer of the
early Romantic or Byronic traditionq3‘Yuk’s Rabelaisianism
is implicitly subordinated to Satan’s Byronism. More
importantly, the world of "Smarh" is more or less that
described in "Rabelais" as that of Byron ("les hommes
étaient faibles et méchants, le monde [...] suait de
fatigue, il allait se mourir," "Smarh," 1:187), so that Yuk
is presented as a figure in a Byronic landscape, and his
discourse rarely escapes the limitations forced on it by the
disillusion and discouragement inherent in that world that
Satan has all but destroyed: "pas une vertu que je [Satan]
n’aie sapée par le doute, pas une croyance que je n’aie
terrassée par le rire, pas une idée qui ne soit un axiome,
pas un fruit qui ne soit amer." Thus the laughter that
clears away belief, which "Rabelais" identified as positive,
if problematic, is here purely evil. None of the ambiguous
valuation of this laughter is present: in fact, the laughter
that survives is reduced to the sardonic laughter of the
Romantic grotesque: "On riait, mais ce rire avait de
l’angoisse." In short, the potential fertile duality of

Yuk’s laughter, inherited from Rabelais and carnival, is

60
limited in a particularly Romantic way, and does not freely
interact with the Romantic tradition.

On the other hand, "Docteur Mathurin" parodies,
dissects, in short dominates Romantic discourse, in a
context that is itself dialogized: it is variously
neo-classic, realist, and grotesque; drunken and sober;
comic and lyric. "Les Funérailles" represents a fertile
chaos that is an experimental transplanting of Rabelais’s
carnival freedom into the world of mid-nineteenth-century
discourse. Its attempted subordination of Romanticism is a
reversal of the hierarchy of "Smarh," and thus the first
step toward a new balance between the old dominant and its
suppressed other half. "Les Funérailles" is therefore the
most important of the juvenilia for an understanding of the
mature works.

Yet a close reading of selected passages of "Smarh"
can reveal that although Yuk's discourse is everywhere
infested and dominated by the discourse of Byronism, it
reveals processes that point to a new, Rabelaisian rereading
of Byron; which is to say that it contains in germ the
processes that will become dominant in "Les Funérailles."
In fact, and this is of the highest significance for the
understanding of Flaubert’s oeuvre, it is Yuk’s laughter,
and not Satan’s, that triumphs at the end of the work.

From its first appearance, it is evident that Yuk’s
discourse is Rabelaisian: it reproduces many of the

structures familiar from our previous discussion of

61

Bakhtin’s theories of carnival, as well as from Flaubert’s
Rabelaisian emulations in "Rabelais" and the correspondence.
It rapidly juxtaposes high, religious images and low, common
ones ("[je fais] le gros de la besogne, comme d’allumer les
cierges, d’appréter le diner, de confesser, de preparer les
hosties, de nettoyer, de gratter, d’écurer," "Smarh,"
1:188); it creates grotesque strings of synonyms ("Il est
maintenant occupé a réfléchir, a causer, a disserter, a
savantiser avec ce saint homme"). Yuk’s first humorous
speech is an attack on the Church that turns to lust:

Yuk: [...] ce saint homme que vous voyez 1a, en

habit de docteur [...] La Femme: [...] Est-ce un

nonce du pape? ou quelque théologien de Gréce?

Yuk: C’est l’un et l’autre; il est fort lié avec la

papauté et les moines, auxquels il a conseillé

d’excellents tours pour se divertir. Pour la

théologie, il la connait. Vous connaissez votre

ménage, et, comme vous, il y jette de l’eau trouble

et y fait pousser des cornes. La Femme: Que
voulez-vous dire la? Yuk: Que vous étes bien

\

gentille, ravissante, avec une gorgette a faire
pamer toute une classe d’écoliers.

Yuk’s comic conversation with the woman parallels
the serious conversation between Smarh and Satan. Thus
Satan reveals to Smarh "un monde nouveau" ("Smarh," 1:189),
that of erotic desire, that unmasks the superficiality of
Smarh’s pious advice; for example, his advice to husbands to
love children that aren't even theirs. In the meantime, Yuk
is reminding the woman that her apparently happy marriage is
to "[un homme] un peu benét [...] et la nuit de vos noces
vous ffites méme obligée de lui apprendre certaines choses

que les femmes ordinairement savent trop bien [...] depuis

62
l’age de neuf ans" ("Smarh," 1:188). He breeds
dissatisfaction in her heart through the vision of a "beau,
grand joli cavalier, aux sourcils noirs et aux dents
blanches" ("Smarh," 1:189); he separates her from the Church
by flattering her pride ("Si la vertu existe, chaque
créature doit pouvoir d’elle-méme la discerner et la mettre
en pratique"); he uses erotic descriptions of nature
("lorsque le soir vient [...] et que les rayons du soleil
meurent sur les dalles, que les fleurs d’oranger laissent
passer leurs parfums, que les roses se referment, que tout
s’endort, que la lune se léve dans ses nuages blancs") and
more blatantly erotic images ("aux bains vous avez apercu
[...] des hommes nus, et vous révez de tout cela [...] Vous
avez un bataillon de cuisses charnues dans la téte"; "cette
bouche dit: [...] ‘nos deux corps nus sur un tapis [...] je
prendrai tes hanches [...] j’embrasserai tes seins,’"
"Smarh," 1:189-190) to seduce her into adultery. This
entire scenario brings to mind Madame Bovapy, as do specific
details like the "beau jeune hommme qui vous baisait la
main" ("Smarh," 1:189). Here, eroticism is foregrounded, so
that even standard Romantic images are invoked within an
explicit atmosphere of sexual excitation. Feverish
eroticism is brought into contact with the lower bodily
element, thus deflated, carnivalized, and implicitly
renewed; but here as elsewhere, Rabelaisian elements are
deployed within a humorous destruction of belief that is

ultimately agonized, tragic. The Romantic framework igself

63
needs to be subordinated to ambiguous carnival laughter in
order to move beyond the echoing emptiness of abandoned
belief.

This direction is sketched in "Smarh." At the end
of the dialogue between Yuk and the woman, she rhapsodizes
in a Romantic, exaggerated way that the context teaches us
to see as ridiculous, because it is a self—induced frenzy
that excuses illicit desire:

Qu’il vienne donc, qu’il vienne! j’aurai pour lui

des baisers de feu et des voluptés sans nombre.

J’étais bien folle, en effet, de vieillir sans

amour. A moi, maintenant, les délices des nuits les

plus ardentes; que je m’abreuve de toutes mes

passions, que je me rassasie de tous mes désirs! De

longues nuits et de longs jours passés dans les

baisers! ah! toute ma vie passée a un soupir, tout

ce que je révais a moi! oh! comme je vais étre

heureuse! Je tremble cependant, et je sens que

c’est la mon bonheur ("Smarh," 1:190).
Yuk gives us an analysis of the particular form of her
pleasure: "Quel plaisir, n’est-ce pas? de se créer ainsi,
par la pensée, toutes les jouissances désirées, et de se
dire: ‘Si je l’avais la [...]!’" The woman is too
distracted to listen to Yuk’s analysis, but it ought to give
us pause. Here, Yuk has found a way to represent empty
belief within a comic world view: as a willful acceptance of
what one wants to believe, because of pride and lust; as a
sort of self-hypnosis that the poet induces in the listener
as she reveals the deeper impulses that make her want to be
dominated.

Satan’s disillusioning of Smarh proceeds according

to the same dynamic: desires are awakened through dazzling

64
images, then the images are either reversed (the calm sea is
shaken by a storm) or revealed as empty (the church
crumbles). It is likely that the process would not work if
the impulses were not awakened rather than created: the
woman must already have lust within her, or she could not be
moved to adultery.4 Yet the motivation of an artist that
awakens desire only to disappoint it must be questioned: is
it merely a matter of striking a last blow against belief
that is already empty, as "Rabelais" seems to indicate, or a
more deeply sadistic motivation? Even if the ultimate
purpose of the creation of dazzling empty images is the
revelation of the bad faith of the reader who desires to be
dazzled by empty images, an unearthing of the reader’s
hidden corruptions and lies, one could claim, as Bakhtin
might, that this is salutary, a comic unmasking, a clearing
away of pretention, a revivification. But in "Smarh," all
of this unmasking is subordinated to the works of Satan, and
the end is death.

One constant of the story is a continual reinvoking
of Nature as good, desirable. Thus Smarh, terrified at the
immensity of space, of the emptiness that was before all
things and that will follow them, of the infinite solitude
of freedom and of human knowledge ("Satan: [...] la science,
c’est le doute," "Smarh," 1:195), maintains the beauty of
Nature and man’s fitness for it against Satan’s temptations
to despair: "La mer, des prairies de hautes falaises; temps

calme; le soleil se couche sous les flots. Smarh: Me voila

65

enfin sur la terre! l’homme naturellement s’y sent bien, il
y est né. Satan: Pourquoi la maudit—il toujours?"
("Smarh," 1:196). Smarh does not answer but merely repeats:
"Moi, je suis fait pour y vivre; comme cette nature est
belle! Satan: Et comme tu la comprends bien, n’est-ce
pas?" Smarh must recognize this last as at least a valid
point: his fear of the nothingness of science was the last
straw that made him want to return to Earth. So he
responds: "Tu as beau m’entourer de tes subterfuges et de
tes sophismes, je ne suis plus ici dans les régions du ciel,
ou tous les mondes errants m’effrayaient; non, j’étais fait
pour celui-Ci, c’est sur lui qu’il faut vivre. Satan: Et
mourir aussi, n’est-ce pas? il y a longtemps que tu y
respires, que tu y souffres [...] explique-moi donc le
mystére d’un de ces grains de sable [...] ou celui d’une
goutte d’eau de l’Océan?" Smarh responds with a lyrical
description of the world’s beauty:

Mais regarde toi-méme comme la mer est douce et

comme les rayons du soleil lui donnent des teintes

roses sous ces ondes vertes! Sens-tu le parfum de
la vague qui mouille le sable, comme les flots sont

longs et forts [...]? vois donc cette bande d’écume
qui festonne le rivage avec des coquilles et des
herbes [...] quelle beauté! Nieras-tu que mon ame

ne s’ouvre pas a un pareil spectacle, quand
j’entends cette mer qui roule et meurt a mes pieds,
quand je vois cette immensité que j’embrasse de
l’oeil? (emphasis added).

 

Smarh has here opened up the possibility of the
undoing of his position: he has introduced death, a metaphor
borne of his Romantic rhapsodizing about sunsets and

immensity; the notion was earlier invoked by Satan, but

66
Smarh ignored it. As for immensity, it has already been
linked in the preceding conversation to the impossibility of
knowledge, also invoked by Satan. Smarh claims against
Satan that phis immensity is visible, that it can be
dominated by the eye. Satan responds by invoking the
limitations of the human senses: "Aussi loin que ton oeil
peut voir, oui; tu vois l’infini, jusqu’a l’endroit 00 ton
espirit s’arréte." Smarh reiterates the beauty of Nature:
"Mais non, tout cela est trop beau pour n'étre pas fait pour
l’homme, pour son bonheur, pour sa joie." This slippage
from "beau," to "pour l’homme," to "pour son bonheur," to
"pour sa joie" is rather illogical, subjectively true as it
may be; no amount of repetition of beauties can cover up the
fact, for example, that a calm sea can turn dangerously
violent. Nonetheless Smarh goes on with a lyrical
descriptive passage: "Vois donc aussi ces hautes falaises
blanches sur lesquelles plane la mouette aux cris sauvages,
aux ailes noires; vois plus loin ce paturage touffu avec ses
herbes tassées et ses fleurs ouvertes."

This last description of Nature is relatively free
of metaphors: it merely names objects, notes a color
contrast, registers height, and describes in simple terms
the pasture with its massed plants and open flowers. It is
the mere presence of things that is here invoked; and it is
likely that these are things Flaubert himself saw more than
once on the Normandy coast. The last word is sober, simple,

not at all flowery; but it ought to give pause, because it

67
is redundant: a flower not open is a bud. In fact this last
word is present as a sign of the receptivity of the world to
Man; it is subtly metaphoric, ideological, as is in fact the
cliché of the solitary seagull.S But none of this undoes
the impact of this passage’s calm, unrhetorical presentation
of the sober fact.

The recurrence of this aspiration to an unagonized
portrayal of Nature’s visible presence in a language wholly
adequate to its object is a constant not only in this story
but throughout Flaubert’s oeuvre, as is the repeated
undercutting of this portrayal by cliché, metaphor, and
rhetorical purpose: in short, by the impossibility of
subtracting description from its engagement within
discourse.‘ ‘Here, the calm portrayal contrasts sharply with
Satan’s highly rhetorical description: "Et regarde aussi
comme tu es petit [...] Oui, tu es plus faible que ces
cailloux que la mer roule en criant, comme si elle avait des
chaines dans le ventre [...] Et toi donc? N’y a-t-il pas un
pied aussi qui t’écrase sous son talon invisible? Ecrase
donc un grain de sable, homme fort!" Of course, Smarh is
not as confident as his calm description would indicate: he
can ignore Satan’s points momentarily, but he is far too
easily pushed into a defensive position. Satan invokes
again the limitations of Man's power, and Smarh immediately
counters with his power to escape the sea’s fury. Then he
reverts to the mere repetition of his former position,

clothed as theology: "Tout cela, te dis-je, m’a été donné

68

par Dieu," after which he confidently reasserts Man’s
technological power, to which Satan opposes the fact of
decay and death. Satan then moves on to the claim that
"l’échelle de forces et d’intelligences successives"
("Smarh," 1:197) that Smarh invokes is really a chain of
superior destructive power and of suffering: "Smarh:
Est—ce que je ne suis pas supérieur au cheval, et le cheval
a la fourmi, et la fourmi au caillou? Satan: Oui, parce
que tu es sur le cheval et que tu l’accables, et que le
cheval écrase la fourmi, et que la fourmi creuse la terre."
Satan then launches into a Byronic wail in the face of
infinite emptiness:

Tu es plus grand par tes malheurs que tout ce qui

t’entoure, grandeur digne d’envie! [...] quand la

terre gémit sous tes coups, quand les vagues

murmurent en battant la proue de tes navires, [...]

tout cela souffre moins que toi seul [...] sans rien

qui te déchire la peau [...] mais seulement les yeux

levés vers le ciel, l’abime, et demandant pourquoi

cela? pourquoi ceci? [...] C’est [...] que la mer

s’étend devant toi, ouvre sa surface, mais elle

t’engloutit, c’est que ton intelligence te sert,

mais te trahit et te fait souffrir; c’est que

l’infini est ouvert devant toi, mais sans bornes et

sans fin, et qu’il te perd.
To this Smarh can only say "C’est vrai," and a Byronic storm
erupts. Satan forces Smarh to admit that "la creation est
méchante" ("Smarh," 1:198); it is one step from this to
"Smarh: L’Océan est ce qu’il y a de plus grand. Satan:
Oui, c’est ce qu’il y a de plus vide." The beauty of the
empty presence of Nature has been invoked by Smarh as a sign

of Man’s fitness for it; the emptiness itself is invoked by

Satan as a sign of his unfitness. As the unmetaphoric

 

69
presence of Nature repeatedly asserts itself in "Smarh," it
will gradually be seen that it is the temptation to poetic
language that gives Satan the foothold by which he can fill
emptiness with the meaning "despair." Flaubert’s search for
an unproblematic adequation of self, Nature, and language
was to be lifelong; because of its tendency to exaggerated
emotion expressed in grandiose metaphors, Romantic discourse
could not provide that adequation: we shall soon see what
alternatives Flaubert explored.

Disillusioned by Nature, Smarh wonders if "Le
bonheur n’est donc qu’un mensonge?" ("Smarh," 1:199). No,
says Satan, it can be found in the passions that occupy the
heart. Smarh, as a saint, knows nothing about the world;
but Yuk constructs fictions for him from which he can learn
about it. Of course we have already seen what Yuk’s
fictions do: they manipulate the reader into admitting
hidden passions, or perhaps they create those passions, or
perhaps both. In any event, the ambiguous exposure/creation
of these passions is sadistic: it turns the reader into an
object of satire. And it does this through the manipulation
of clichés, sometimes clichés about Nature fused with images
of lust.

Despite the constant investment7 in "Smarh" of
images of Nature with resonances of lust and destruction,
Nature continually rises anew, usually in a mode of
remembrance; pure, as a sober physical presence, without

metaphors, conveyed in a language adequate to its object.

70
Yet every time this purity is undone. This constantly
cycling dynamic produces a work whose form is repetitious,
unresolved. One can hypothesize that unmetaphoric
description is a third voice, beyond Rabelais and Byron,
beyond carnival and agony; but a voice that seems
unachievable, at least within the dynamics of the voices
that Flaubert attempts to articulate in "Smarh." We will
come back to this point in our discussion of "Les
Funérailles."

Before we move on to the analysis of Yuk’s voice and
how it operates, let us examine the textual processes by
which Nature is reduced to a small number of images invested
with isolation and despair as Byronism gradually subverts
its calm, healing presence in the text. An earlier
appearance of Nature occurred immediately after Satan had
awakened Smarh’s awareness of lust: Smarh gazes at the
beauties of the night, but he finds their appearance
altered:

Autrefois l’air des nuits me faisait du bien, je me
plaisais a cette molle langueur des sens qu’il
procure, je me plongeais dans l'harmonie dont elle
se compose, j’écoutais avec ravissement le bruit des
feuilles des arbres que le vent agitait, l’eau qui
coulait dans les vallées, j’aimais la mousse des
bois que les rayons de la lune argentait; ma téte se

levait avec amour [his passion was already dimly
present before his awareness of it] vers ce ciel si

bleu, avec ses étoiles aux mille clartés [...] Mais
pourtant, cette nuit, est aussi belle que toutes les
autres [...] Pourquoi mon ame ne s’ouvre-t-elle

plus an parfum de toutes ces choses? je suis pris de
pitié pour tout cela, j’ai pour elles une envie
jalouse [...] Oh! qui viendra me retirer de cette
angoisse [...]! ("Smarh," 1:191).

71
The passions destroy the harmony between the self and
Nature: but one wonders if Smarh’s description would be
quite so lyrical, quite so beautiful, if his lust had not
already been awakened. Actually, many of the details of
this speech were already present in a short description of
Nature that Smarh makes before he meets Satan, and these
details are already suffused with a somewhat abstract
"amour": "j’aime a voir la riviére serpenter au bas de la
vallée, a voir l’oiseau étendre ses ailes et le soleil se
coucher lentement avec ses teintes roses. Cette nuit sera
belle, les étoiles sont de diamant, la lune resplendit sur
l’azur; j’admire cela avec amour" ("Smarh," 1:187). The
bird, the river in the valley: these are images that
constantly recur in the Nature descriptions in "Smarh." The
emphasis on sunset and night are already Byronic, as is the
eroticization of death (the sunset is "rose"). The images
Smarh uses to describe Nature are already invested with the
passions that Satan awakens. Thus his new awareness of
passion takes the form of a new awareness of the investments
already present in the language he deploys.

After his awakening, the trouble of his senses is
directly reflected, in good Byronic fashion, in Nature
itself: the leaves are agitated, water flows in a valley,
soft dark moss is vivified by the penetrating rays of the
moon. Nostalgia for a past fusion is marked by signs that
anticipate fusion: Smarh has presented the image of fusion

in language already invested with desire; it is possible

 

 

72
that fusion is always in the future, never actually in the
past, but always the result of progress, not return. This
possibility could be visible only in a discourse that
emphasized joyous motion toward fusion, rather than an
original loss.
In "Smarh," the cycle from assertion of fusion with

Nature, to awareness of rupture, to assertion of fusion
seems endless. In any event, Yuk’s fiction, which is
intended (or so says Satan) to teach Smarh about the world,
begins again in Nature, in the past, with a Savage whose
surroundings seem perfectly adequate to him. Yuk marks the
Savage’s description of Nature at the beginning of the
fiction with fragments of Smarh’s own descriptions:

Oh! que j’aime la mousse des bois, le bruissement

des feuilles, le battement d’ailes d’oiseau, le

galop de ma cavale [this fragment comes from a

speech of Satan, to be cited shortly}. les rayons du

soleil, et ton regard, 6 Haita! et tes cheveux noirs

qui tombent jusqu’a ta croupe [another horse image:

woman and horse fuse already, as they will soon more

thoroughly under the sign of the pun cheveux/

chevaux], et ton dos blanc, et ton cou qui se penche

et se replie quand mes lévres y impriment de longs

baisers, je t’aime plein mon coeur ("Smarh," 1:200,

emphasis added to mark elements from previous
descriptions).

 

Yuk has invested with lust elements of Smarh’s nostalgic
remembrance of his harmony with Nature, as well as his pure,
calm description of a seagull flying over a cliff ("ces
hautes falaises sur lesquelles plane la mouette [...] aux
ailes noires," "Smarh," 1:196): even the stark beauty of the
bird’s dark wings contrasting with the white cliffs here

clothes the desirable body of the woman ("cheveux noirs

73
[...] dos blanc," "Smarh," 1:200). This is the same sort of
ploy Yuk used earlier with the woman, as he awakened desires

already dimly present in her consciousness, linked to images

she had observed ("vous avez vu un beau jeune homme [...]
souvent les soldats passent sous vos fenétres [...] aux
bains vous avez apercu [...] des hommes nus," "Smarh,"
1:189). Here we can see more clearly his skill, since we

have at our disposal the texts he is using. But as soon as
he elicits Smarh’s positive reaction to his tale through the
manipulation of images dear to him, Yuk turns to images
Satan has used against him, investing them also with sexual
desire. "Quand ma bonne [Haita?-no-] béte court et saute"
("Smarh," 1:200). From the woman one reverts to the beast,
and the shift is masked by the fusion of woman and beast in
the sexually charged image of freed hair, already once
invoked ("tes cheveux noirs qui tombent [...] je laisse
aller ses crins") and by invoking images Smarh already dimly
associates with lust: "ses crins qui bruissent, j’écoute 1e
yppp qui siffle et parle, j’écoute le bruit des branches
[...]" (emphasis added). Quickly Yuk disorients Smarh by
invoking images Satan has used against his belief in the

adequation of Nature to Man: images of domination and

destruction: "j’écoute le bruit des branches que son pied
casse" (cf.: "tu es sur le cheval et [...] tu l’accables;
[...] le cheval écrase la fourmi," "Smarh," 1:197). The

transition from harmony to disharmony with Nature is as

abrupt as the passage from woman to horse, from lust to

74

beauty. The lyric description of force ("une échelle de
forces et d’intelligences successives," "Smarh," 1:197) and
vigor that follows is dimly undercut by the image of "la
poussiére" that flies up about "ses flancs" ("Smarh,"
1:200): dust and flanks, death and sexuality: a typical ploy
texts use to dazzle and dominate their readers, here
resonating with Satan’s imagery of stones and crushed sand
that stand as signs of the limit of Man’s force, of his
disharmony with Nature, and with the resonant network of
woman and horse, freedom, flying, birds, moss, and branches
that represents a fusion of the human and the world of
nature. The text’s lyric beauty turns, through force and
its associated resonances of domination and death, to an
image of killing: "la fléche [...] a frappé le léopard ou
le lion, qui se débat sur le sable et répand son sang sur la
poussiére [clearly linking this word to the nuances
postulated above]." The following sentence fuses sex and
death through a rapid alternation of discourses, so that the
desire for fusion is inextricably linked to the desire to
dominate and destroy: "J’aime a l’embrasser corps a corps,
a l’étouffer, a sentir ses os craquer dans mes mains, et
j’enléve sa belle peau, son corps fume et cette vapeur de
sang me rend fier."8

Yuk’s fiction reveals in no uncertain terms the
connections between the doctrine of the adequation of Man
and Nature and the underpinnings of lust and violence that

are evident in the language used to talk about it. All of

75
this carnivalesque play of unmaskings and fusions, of
shifting identities and puns, opens up the question of Man
and Nature far more thoroughly than the dialogue between
Smarh and Satan -- at least for the attentive9 reader. The
casual reader who, like Smarh, lets the images fly by
rapidly, without slowing them down and dissecting them, is
dazzled, manipulated, moved: to despair. The casual
reader’s assumptions are shattered; the attentive reader
glimpses the abyss of language. Perhaps despair is not the
only reaction to that abyss.

We need not analyze every detail of Yuk’s fiction of
the Savage: the slippage of Haita’s discourse from an erotic
description of her husband’s body to an erotic description
of Nature, now less exciting than the new perfume with which
the sight of his body has flooded her;10 the eroticism of
the juxtaposition in the Savage’s discourse of newly
gathered fruit and the "lait tiré de la mamelle de [sa]
vache blanche." Suffice it to say that a dense web is woven
that tangles Nature up with sexuality and violence, and that
the Savage, like so many other characters in this story, is
finally sundered from Nature, dissatisfied with it, and
tormented by vague desires: "Une main invisible me fait
aller en avant comme le sable du désert emporté par les
vents" ("Smarh," 1:201). He is pushed on, toward the city,
which he knows is death: "en voyant les feuilles jaunies de
l’automne rouler dans l’air, j’ai souhaité d’étre feuille

comme elles, pour courir dans l’espace," as Smarh has done.

76
He leaves everything: his wife, his children, his horse, his
native land. Satan promises him a number of things that
sound Rabelaisian (for Satan is now a character in Yuk’s
fiction, therefore at least partially subordinated to a
Rabelaisian discourse): "ivresse [...] des joies, des
voluptés [...] des femmes nues [...] des nouveaux mets, des
nouveaux vins [...]"; but these are undercut by a number of
markers of vanity, of the seven deadly sins: "une ivresse
folle! [...] des joies, des voluptés, des raffinements de
plaisir [...] des femmes nues [...] le bruit des armées
[...] le sang [...] tu étais libre et tu seras roi [...] des
nouveaux mets, des nouveaux vins, des frénésies inconnues
[...] la volupté, la puissance, l’ambition [...] un palais
d’or." Pleasure is linked with power; civilization with
decadence; drunkenness with frenzy. Somehow Satan has
managed again to subordinate Rabelais to Byron, to reassert
the Romantic grotesque. And soon, "Le Génie du Sauvage"
puts Rabelais’s values definitively into a framework that
cannot see them except as vain deceptions: "Mieux vaut la
hutte de roseaux que leur palais de porphyre, ta liberté que
leur pouvoir, ton innocence que leurs voluptés, car ils
mentent, car leur bonheur est un rire, leur ivresse une
grimace d’idiot, leur grandeur est orgueil et leur bonheur
est mensonge" ("Smarh," 1:202). Thus when the Savage enters
the city, the drunk are indistinguishable from the dead:
both seem to sleep.

The city is described as the site of a diabolical

77

orgy, operating under the sign of sin, doomed to death: "le
roi et ses empires, ses voluptés, ses crimes, tout cela dans
son linceul, tout cela poussiére et néant" ("Smarh," 1:203).
Yuk laughs for a long time; "Satan dit que cela l’ennuyait
et qu’il en avait vu assez." He dismisses Yuk’s fiction as
a hodge-podge of genres, both high and low: "De l’érotique,
du burlesque, du pastoral, du sentimental, de l’élégiaque!"
Genre-mixing will be one of Flaubert’s major strengths:
Satan denounces this mixture as "une littérature au lait
pour un poitrinaire," as sickly, weak. Yuk defends his
style as appropriate for his audience: "Que voulez-vous que
nous montrions au novice?" And he sketches out a number of
choices that have a rather bourgeois flavor: "des fiancés,
des mariés ou des morts? un mensonge ou un serment?", to
which Satan responds: "Oui. Yuk: Ensemble, n’est—ce pas?"
But lest we think that we are going to escape the subordina-
tion of Rabelais’s laughter to Byronism in a light-hearted
juggling of opposites, Yuk marks everything, even the
clearing-away of belief as pretense, with the sign of
despair: "car serment et mensonge sont synonymes, ainsi que
mariage et cocus, ainsi que fiancés et morts."

Yuk’s new fiction (a "Petite Comédie Bourgeoise") is
a retelling of the story of the woman he spoke with at the

beginning of the text, as well as an anticipation of Madame

Bovapy. A woman is married to a man who does not understand
her: "elle aimait la poésie, les réves, les pensées

capricieuses, brumeuses et vagabondes, et son mari commence

78
par lui dire que Lamartine est incomprehensible, que les
réveurs sont des fous, qu’il n’y a de vrai que l’argent et
la géométrie" ("Smarh," 1:204). Yuk works up the audience’s
sympathy for the woman’s plight through the Romantic
metaphor of a crown of flowers the woman has in her heart
that is crushed "feuille a feuille" (note the connection to
Smarh’s personal imagery of open flowers and rustling
leaves) by "le gros rire brute de l’homme qui triomphe, de
la raison écrasant la poésie." The text manipulates us into
a Romantic rejection of the laughter that dispels illusion.
Yet the purpose of the text is to dispel Smarh’s illusions
through mockery, and it does this by first playing to them
as it evokes his empathy for the woman as a sort of martyr:
after the birth of their child, her husband finds her ugly;
he returns to prostitutes; she lives a life of sacrifice, he
a life of pleasure; they live together as strangers; they
die; and the last scene is "toute remplie par un rire de
Yuk" ("Smarh," 1:205). But after Smarh thoroughly
identifies with the woman, Yuk adds that when the husband
died he was a cuckold: "Comment diable [...] avec une
petite femme si vertueuse?" says the narrator ironically.
The sudden reversal renders the text’s values ambiguous: a
fictional laughter (the husband’s) was marked negatively
through its opposition to a value we were led to accept (the
wife’s Romantic transcendence of the material world through
poetry and dreams); yet this laughter is very similar to one

(the narrator’s) that destroys the value we have accepted

79

(the wife’s Romantic transcendence of the material world,
which to the naive reader might seem naturally to include
the transcendence of physical desire). The mutual
undercutting of values produces a void in which illusions
are dispelled, but we are not sure how to react. The shock
of the ending leaves us with two possibilities: either the
woman was not truly contemptuous of the mundane world, or
Romanticism is not as pure as we believed. It seems clear
that Yuk intends the fiction as a means of awakening Smarh’s
awareness of lust; but the elaborate seduction of Smarh’s
sympathies that ends in their betrayal is cruel, intended to
produce despair.11

The text moves on to a scene in which Satan tempts a
poor man to murder Yuk, whom he takes for a rich bourgeois.
The theme of political revolution as a revolt against divine
order is a Romantic cliché, stretching back to Milton by way
of Byron: "it was Byron who brought to perfection the rebel
type" (Praz, 61).12 The theme was repeatedly used by the
Right: "Cain le révolté [...] créait [... l’école] de
l’insurrection morale, [...] de la rébellion a outrance et
du romantisme."13 Le Maistre finds "un caractére
satanique"“ in the Revolution of 1789 ; it is, he says,
"une insurrection contre Dieu,"15 inspired by "la haine du
christianisme" and "la haine [...] contre son saint Auteur"
(305), since: "11 était [...] inévitable que le philosophe
du siécle ne tardét pas de hair les institutions sociales

dont il ne lui était pas possible de séparer 1e principe

80
religieux" (306). According to Antoine Adam, the connection
between political revolution and rebellion against the
divine order was made also by Romantics and by
revolutionaries themselves:
"La Révolte était un des grands themes de la
littérature romantique [...] elle s’inspire d’abord
d’un refus d’adhérer a l’ordre social [...] Dressés
contre l’ordre politique, contre la morale commune,
contre les conditions mémes de la vie humaine, ils
devaient, du méme coup, se tourner contre Dieu et
l’insulter. Satan devenait le symbole de leur
révolte.16
The theme was most notably developed by Baudelaire in the
section "La Révolte" of Les Fleurs du mal, published in
1857,17 and the prose poem "Assommons les pauvres!" from Lg
Spleen de Paris, published in 1869.18 At this point in
"Smarh," the cliché is activated to produce a space of
political ambiguity analogous to the space of moral

ambiguity that preceded it.

The poor man claims he has never thought of

murdering a rich bourgeois: "O mon Dieu! voila des pensées
que je n’avais jamais eues." Yet he has already said: "je

hais les riches": Satan is awakening desires dimly present,
as Smarh awoke the woman’s lust at the beginning of the
text. The man’s tale of woe is constructed of exaggerations
and Rabelaisian lists ("Personne ne m’a aimé, ni homme, ni
femme, ni chien"), and it moves Yuk to laughter. Yet the
text does not succeed in subordinating Byronic agony to
Rabelaisian revelry, for the poor man is unwilling to allow

the carnivalization of his discourse: "Ne ris pas, par

81
Dieu!" Satan treacherously reads Yuk’s laughter as superior
mockery: "Tue-1e, c’est un homme méchant. Pourquoi, quand
tu lui contais tes maux, s’est-il mis a rire? C’est un
riche au coeur dur." Yuk collaborates with Satan’s
interpretation of his laughter by disguising his fertile
profusion as material wealth: "Yuk se découvre et laisse
voir un magnifique costume; une bourse garnie de diamants
[...]"

Yuk’s laughter at the plight of the poor can trigger
revolution. Yet, this time at least, the rebellion is
futile; after Yuk’s death, he is reborn: "il n’y aurait
plus de monde, ni de création, du jour ou je cesserais de
vivre [...] il n’y aurait plus ni gouvernement, ni religion,
ni vertu, ni morale, ni lois" ("Smarh," 1:206). Yuk’s
statement can be taken two ways, depending on whether he is
speaking in character (the bourgeois in the person of the
Gargon19 comically taking himself as the source of all
order) or in his own voice (all order springs from fertile
disorder). Because of the instability of Yuk's identity, it
is likely that pppp readings are intended. Yuk’s statement
that "je me fache a cette horrible idée d’anarchie sociale"
is immediately undercut when Satan causes the poor man to
escape in order that "il brfile sa prison, viole six
religieuses et massacre une trentaine de personnes avant de
rendre l’éme," and Yuk, stepping gratefully out of the
constraint imposed on him by his role, "se frotte les mains,

s’étend au soleil, crache au nez du magistrat, et pisse sur

82
l’église."
Thus the Byronic cliché of revolution as demonic is
liberated in Rabelaisian joy. But the means to this end is

the ambivalent rejection of all possible political

positions: the poor man is satirized as béte: "[il] sourit
bétement" ("Smarh," 1:205), yet feared as a wild beast:
"[il] avait un froid rire de béte affamée." Sympathy for

the poor man’s plight is béte, as Yuk’s laughter asserts;

 

but mockery of his plight is bourgeois, as Satan claims.
Revolution is a valid response to oppression, yet merely
motivated by sexual jealousy and Romantic illusion: "Le
Pauvre: Personne ne m'a aimé [...] Yuk: C’est ca,
compére, les jeunes filles aiment les beaux cavaliers riches
et les pourpoints de velours. Le Pauvre: Ne me parlez pas
des riches, encore une fois, —— je les hais!" Revolution is
futile, because destruction necessarily ends in the creation
of form; yet this is so merely because Satan wants to let
destruction proliferate. The text accepts as valid neither
the poor’s passive acceptance of their plight nor their
active rebellion against it; nor does it accept any possible
response from the rich, neither philanthropy, nor reaction,
nor the belief in their own eternal nature. Unless Smarh
can forget his own position in relation to the problem of
poverty and wealth, he must be moved to despair.

Likewise the collapse of the church is envisioned
not as a joyful liberation; it is heavily moralized as due

to the vanity of Man's works in the face of a hostile

83
Nature: "tu vas retomber sur la terre, ou l’herbe te
couvrira pour toujours" ("Smarh," 1:207). Yet this
pessimism is figured in a language that subordinates Man’s
creation to metaphors representing clear, precise
descriptions of Nature: "Les colonnes fréles vont se casser
comme un roseau sous le poids de leur cathédrale, qui
s’abaissera tout a l’heure comme un flot de la mer qui s’est
monté bien haut, et qui tombe ensuite sur la surface unie et
vide." Here, for a moment, civilization is seen as natural,
as following the same process as all Nature. It is true
that destruction is emphasized, not creation. But the text
has already discovered a truth that Flaubert will seem
endlessly to forget: the conflict of Nature and Culture is
illusory; thus language, although a human artifact marked by
its history and hence infested with clichés, is perfectly
adequate to Nature, because it is already Nature. Here the
insight is, as usual, subordinated to the general rhetoric
of Byronic despair: it ends in the void, and is followed by
"un immense rire [...] celui de Yuk" ("Smarh," 1:208).

The text, after this triumph of destruction and
laughter, again gives rise to the image of Nature, which
springs up first as an image of Smarh’s unbroken spirit:

"ne suis-je déja assez ployé comme un roseau?" against the
destructive and tempting force of Satan’s knowledge:
"Satan: [...] je veux [...] que les tempétes et les vanités
soufflent dans ton existence comme le vent dans la voile,

t’entrainent vers quelque chose d’immense, d’inconnu, et que

84
moi seul je sais. Smarh: [...] Tu veux donc que l’orage
aille toujours jusqu’a ce qu’il m’ait brisé tout a fait?"
This wind which creates the void is opposed to Smarh’s
despairing hope that the present age is in fact an age of
transition: "Dis-moi donc si l’horizon ne s’éclairera pas
et si le soleil dormira toujours dans les ténébres?" It is
in fact this hope that Satan wishes to destroy: "Il n’y a
de bonheur que pour ceux qui espérent [...]" Thus he gives
Smarh the possibility of realizing all his hopes that he
might experience their emptiness: "forme un réve, creuse
une idée, désire quelque chose, et ton réve aussitét va
devenir une réalité [...] je te ferai descendre jusqu’au
fond du gouffre de ta pensée, j’accomplirai ton désir."
Thus he plans to stop once and for all the perpetual rebirth
of Smarh’s hopes, like the endless cycle of sunset and dawn
caused by the earth’s rotation, and help them reach once and
for all a certainty that is motionless: "je veux que tu
n’aies plus de doute, et que ta pensée s’arréte et ne
tournoie plus sur elle-meme comme la terre dans sa course
ivre et chancelante." Smarh finds his heart empty, battered
by Satan’s temptations ("mon coeur est sec comme un roc
brfilé du soleil et battu de la tempéte," "Smarh," 1:209),
like the heart of the woman in Smarh’s fiction ("ces fleurs
flétries de croyance et d’amour, d’illusions perdues,"
"Smarh," 1:209). Yet he feels within him the voice of life,
which Satan has called "poison" ("Smarh," 1:208), but which

he imagines as "une voix d’enfant dans la nuit, cherchant sa

85
mere" ("Smarh," 1:209), and as a desire for the erotic
relationship to Nature his knowledge of lust has caused him
to lose: "si quelque pppée du ciel, toute humide et toute
fumeuse de parfums, venait baigner mon coeur et l’endormir!

Si le vent frais des nuits d’été pouvait ranimer mes yeux

usés et fatigués de veilles et de fatigues!" (emphasis
added). Compare this speech to the one after the awakening
of the awareness of lust: "Autrefois je dormais [...]

Autrefois l’air des nuits me faisait du bien [...] Pourquoi
mon ame ne s'ouvre-t-elle plus au parfum de toutes ces
choses?" ("Smarh," 1:190-191, emphasis added). But as we
have already seen, this perfume and this wind are already
associated with lust; and the cycle of sleep and awakening
is here figured forth in language that resonates with its
own undoing: is this secret voice that always reawakens hope
Nature, or the "rosée" that Satan said he had poured from
his heart at the very beginning of the text: "Mon orgueil
me dévora le coeur, mais le sang de ce coeur ulcéré je l’ai
versé sur la terre, et cette pppép de malédiction a porté
des fruits" ("Smarh," 1:187, emphasis added). Satan’s
Byronic discourse has swallowed up transition, reversal,
rebirth, and Nature itself, calling all these powerful
carnivalesque Rabelaisian forces "poison" ("Smarh," 1:208).
But these forces are not entirely subordinated: the
description of Smarh’s subsequent wallowing in the seven
deadly sins must itself arise as an image of Nature calm and

beautiful; and Smarh’s ultimate disgust and disillusion with

86
life is again reversed by hope, youth, Nature. Satan's
discourse, which seeks to give a monolithic, despairing
reading to the endless cycling of Nature, is constantly
undone by the reassertion of the cycle of Nature as hope, as
a new beginning. Byronic despair is continually overturned
by Rabelaisian ambivalence. But since the frame is Byronic,
it continually overturns Rabelaisian ambivalence by giving
it a monolithic, despairing reading. Within this discourse,
there is seemingly no possible issue.

The description of Nature that precedes Smarh’s
final plunge into the passions of life represents a fight
between despair and calmness, between a reading of Nature as
evidence for Byronism and Nature described in a sober
language adequate to its object: "ils arrivérent au bord
d’un beau fleuve. Qp entendait [note the shifting point of
view: "on" may or may not be the same as "ils": observation
is becoming neutral, uninvested with anything personal] le
bruit de l’eau dans les bambous, dont les tétes ployaient
sous 1e souffle du vent" ("Smarh," 1:210, emphasis added).
The calmness here is subtly eroticized by echoes of Smarh’s
speech after his awakening to lust ("l’eau [...] coulait
dans les vallées," "Smarh," 1:191); it is more directly
undercut by reminiscences of Satan’s investment of Nature
with despair: the bamboos bend under a gentle breeze
reminiscent of the "tempétes" of vanity which were to break
Smarh like a "roseau" ("Smarh," 1:208). Likewise the calm

image of the moon reflected in the water is agitated by the

87
wind-blown clouds which obscure it: "la lune [...] se
réflétait sur [les ondes]; [...] les nuages l’entouraient et
roulaient emportés en se déployant" and by the never-still
surface of the water: "les eaux du fleuve aussi s’en
allaient" ("Smarh," 1:210).

But the potentially turbulent description of the
rolling clouds and waves is smoothed out by the imposition
of an adverb: "les eaux du fleuve aussi s’en allaient
lentement, entre les prairies toutes pleines de silence, de
fleurs." Silence has been associated by Satan with the void
of meaninglessness; it is here reinvested by its association
with fullness, and with flowers, which have alredy been used
as images of desire in Smarh’s discourse.

Calmness itself soon becomes Byronic: "Les flots
étaient si calmes qu’on efit pris le courant pour quelque
serpent monstrueux qui s’allongeait lentement sur les herbes
pour aller mordre au loin l’Océan." One is tempted by this
last metaphor, if not before, to read the river as not
merely an image, but as a metaphor itself: but of what? Of
the wellsprings of life, the dew that has revitalized
Smarh’s veins? Of the meaningless flow of life toward
violence and death ("mordre [...] l’Océan"), the dew of
malediction that flows from Satan’s heart? The text
suggests a nexus of possible investments of the image;
clouded and rolling as it is, it soon opens up to produce
another reading: of the possibility of a discourse

reflecting its object in the flow of its language with

88
minimal distortion, despite the rapid reversibility of
metaphorization, visible in swirling oxymorons that
alternate black and white like letters on a page:
"Cependant on voyait glisser dessus les ombres scintillantes
des étoiles et les masses noires des nuages" (emphasis
added). To the danger of metaphoric illusion ("on efit
pris") the text attempts to offer the hope of a language
based on observation ("cependant on voyait"); what can be
observed is the interaction of language and nature, of
nature mirrored in a flow. Meaninglessness is reread as the
possibility of a language devoid of metaphor ("cygnes
[signes] disparaissaient"); devoid also of dualities ("les
deux ailes [...] des cygnes disparaissaient"); and devoid of
the ego of the Romantic writer ("ils," which had become
"on," disappears behind an impersonal third-person
description).20 The bird is ambiguously read as death: the
white swans disappear: but not into blackness, into the
green of rushes ("les deux ailes blanches des cygnes
disparaissaient dans les joncs verts") which according to
whether they are read as Smarh or as Satan would read them,
figure eternal springing up after the storm has passed, or
the soul broken by disillusion. Thus the language of the
text breaks open under the collision of the multiple
reinvestment21 of images by both Smarh’s and Satan’s points
of view to leave the vision (only partly resolved, only
dimly visible under layers of battling meanings) of a

language calmly and purely reflective.

89
But this clarity is again reinvested as lust and
destruction: "La nuit était [...] lippide, toute vaporeuse

de parfpms, toute humide de la rosée des fleurs; elle était

 

prppsparente [...] comme si un grand feu d’étoiles l’efit

éclairée par derriére [this last is a reflection of the
fiery earthquake that swallows up a church and spews forth
skeletons and corpses on the previous page]. C’était un

horizon large at grang, qui baisait au loin le ciel d’un

baiser d’amour et de volupté" (emphasis added).

 

Yet despite all of these warnings, the soul of Smarh
soaks up Nature and fuses with it:

Smarh se sentit revivre; je ne sais quelle
perception, jusque-la inconnue, de la nature entra
dans son éme [...] comme une jouissance intime et
transparente, au dedans de laquelle il voyait se
mouvoir confusément des pensées riantes, des images
tendres, vagues, indécises. Il resta longtemps
plongé dans la béatitude de l’extase et se laissant
enivrer par tout cela, laissant son ame humer par
tous ses pores l’harmonie et les délices de ce ciel
diaphane, si large et si pure; de cette campagne,
avec ses herbes courbées par la brise embaumant,
avec les fleurs [... dont] 1e parfum [...] s’envole;
de cette onde de lait murmurante [...] dans les
roseaux, avec ces cygnes.

The fusion has re-created his soul as female ("Son ame se
déployait et nageait a l’aise, elle étendait ses ailes et
planait au milieu de cette création, tout ivre de parfums,
toute dormeuse et nonchalante, comme une sultane sur des
lits de rose," emphasis added); such a re-creation suggests
the reconciliation of all opposites. And soon images of
women pour forth from his imagination: "De vagues formes de

femmes nues, blanches [...] on voyait leur dos blanc, tout

9O
couvert de cheveux noirs [...] elles étaient vives,
folatres, errantes, douteuses come une suite d’images dans
un songe d’amour." Despite the lush profusion that owes
something to Rabelais, the scene ends in Byronic
disillusion: the women run in and out of the river; Smarh’s
responsive soul reflects their image in a "vague géante"
which rises within him, a hope the text labels as
"illusions," which "éclairaient son coeur" with images of
"un avenir plein de délices"; the image leads him only to a
continual striving devoid of success: "il voulait courir
aprés, mais il [l’avenir] lui échappait toujours et il
courait toujours." The women themselves become a
"guirlande," like the crown of roses in the heart of the
woman in Yuk’s fiction; his burst of life force becomes a
"démon en lui, qui le poussait en avant." The temptation
degenerates into a vicious circle: "sa pensée malade
courait dans un cercle de fer et se brisait la téte en
voulant le franchir." But this cycle has already found an
issue at the moment of its inception; and the image of
failure and death continually gives rebirth to the image of
calm Nature.

For after Smarh has passed through desire, and
fulfillment of desire, through war, power, glory, and death,
when he has reached the ultimate stage of disgust and
disillusion, "au milieu de ses larmes silencieuses, [...]
il s’éleva cependant comme un dernier soupir, un dernier

baiser, quelque chose d’immense, d’amoureux, d’impalpable.

91
Il se ranima" ("Smarh," 1:214). He yearns for "ce qu’il
n’avait jamais vu, désira ce qui n’existait pas"; perfumes
and distant sounds seem to reawaken him; "il reprit a la
vie, et son coeur se rouvrit a l’espérance comme les fleurs
au soleil." The dynamic of the text is so well set that the
narrative voice is suddenly invaded by Satan’s: "Quelle
journée devait l’attendre? Quel ouragan allait la casser
sur sa tige? Pauvre fleur! pauvre ame!" This invasion of
Byronism makes the last phrases ring ironic. Since we have
learned in this text that all joy will end in despair, the
next line, also, is subsumed by sardonic mockery entirely
out of proportion to the discreet reservation expressed in
"encore": "C’était un enfant, tout jeune, tout rose encore,
l’ame impregnée d’amour, de réveries, d’extases." The power
of the Byronic world view is so great by this point in the
text that all gentle, hopeful sentiments ring false. Yet if
Byron had definitively triumphed, why would the image of a
calm and peaceful Nature recur at all? And why in a passage
so long, fluid and beautiful, so devoid of anguish (except
inasmuch as we assume that the calm and peacefulness are
temporary)?

As always in this text, Nature is envisioned in
memory, in the imperfect tense. The relationship between
the child to Nature is not economic ("il n’allait ni vers
les champs ou son pere labourait, ni sur le rivage ou la
barque de ses fréres ainés était attachée": it is

contemplative ("il aimait a contempler"). What follows is

92
some fifty lines of description, of (nearly) non-metaphoric
fragments of language wholly adequate to their object, where
the pleasure of remembered contemplations is concretized in
language pleasurable to read. In this passage, the same
sentence can include references to harvests and snow: the
images are linked freely, as if in memory, with no
discernible rhetorical purpose behind their choice. A
number of images appear that have already been invested by
the discourse between Satan and Smarh: "les nues fugitives
[...] le vent mugir [...] l’aigle [...] la vague [...] les
mouettes [...] les feuilles qui tremblent au vent [...]
tempétes" ("Smarh," 1:214-215).

But although the nexus of invested images returns,
they do so connected with a number of images that have not
been invested; and contemplation does not take place at
night, in the midst of vague erotic desires. Fleeting
clouds give rise to leaves blowing in the wind, and to the
sea; but the rustling sound that has so often been
emphasized has disappeared and the leaves are displaced by
fruitful fields: "il aimait a contempler les nues
fugitives, les moissons qui se ploient et s’ondulent aux
vents comme une mer" ("Smarh," 1:214). Birds and flowers
are associated with uninvested images: rain, hedges,
insects, and sun. Thus observable reality (or observed
reality preserved in memory) dissipates the fascination of
the images that have been multiply invested.

Unlike the Savage, who sadistically penetrated and

93
wrestled with Nature, the contemplative Child is passive: he
is wounded by Nature ("Le soleil brfilait sa peau blanche,
les rochers déchiraient ses pieds"); but this wounding is
compensated by pleasurable perception ("lui qui écoutait
[...] qui regardait"). The danger of Byronism itself is
still present: what is listened to are dying waves, and what
is watched is a setting sun; and the child watches "dans un
[...] rocher, comme l'aigle dans son aire." But the Byronic
frame and content are undercut by soberly observed images of
Nature: "l’ombre des rochers [...] s’allongeait et
diminuait sur le rivage." Contemplation, already made
timeless by imperfects of repetition, is stretched out in
time to become nearly mystical: how is it possible to watch
"la méme vague pendant longtemps"? What state of mind is
induced by gazing "immobile" at something seemingly so
commonplace and meaningless as a "brin d’herbe"?

Escape from the economic tyranny of farming and
fishing allows the Child to enter a world of pure pleasure,
without purpose, so that from his vantage-point he can
contemplate scattering sand, despite the fact that it has
previously been invested as an image of the ultimate vanity
of human endeavors, in a mode of aesthetic enjoyment that is
also one of sensual physical grasping: "Souvent il prenait
du sable plein les mains, il ouvrait les doigts, et il
prenait plaisir a voir les rayons de sable partir de
différents c6tés et disparaitre en tourbillonnant, en

s’élevant." Likewise sunset can be contemplated as

94
beautiful despite its Byronic connotations: it forms "un
immense réseau lumineux."

As previously invested images are purged of
investment through contemplation, the contemplator dissolves
into Nature to become analogous to a natural object: "il
vécut comme les fleurs elles-memes, vivant au soleil et
regardant le ciel": these are "ses plus belles années"
("Smarh," 1:215). To figure the "vaste harmonie" of Nature
that "résonn[e] dans son ame," the text has recourse to a
Rabelaisian list, as if the soul were drinking in Nature’s
profusion in great draughts:

Tout ce qui chantait, volait, palpitait, rayonnait,

les oiseaux dans les bois, les feuilles qui

tremblent au vent, les fleuves qui coulent dans les

prairies émaillées, rochers arides, tempétes,

orages, vagues écumeuses, sable embaumant, feuilles

d’automne qui tombent, neiges sur les tombeaux,

rayons de soleil, clairs de lune, tous les chants,

toutes les voix, tous les parfums, toutes ces choses

qui forment la vaste harmonie qu’on nomme nature,

poésie, Dieu, résonnaient dans son ame.
The majority of fragments in this list are directly borrowed
from the commonplace imagery of Romantic poetry; many were
directly invested by the preceding discourse between Smarh
and Satan. But here each is cut away from the discourse of
despair or nostalgia that surrounds it; no fragment is
allowed to generate discourse, so that any implicit
resonances, whether merely metonymous ("vagues [...] sable")
or potentially metaphoric ("feuilles d’automne qui tombent,

neiges sur les tombeaux") are directly undercut by seemingly

random juxtaposition ("sable [...] feuilles"; "neiges [...]

95

soleil"), so that any partial fusions are deferred to a
general harmonization that is in fact pantheist ("nature,
poésie, Dieu"). The ultimate goal of this detailed
observation that subtracts itself from previous discourse is
fusion with Nature, or with God; or with language, or at
least with that special form of language called poetry.

In fact, it is the relationship to language itself
that remains problematic. It was necessary that a
Rabelaisian depiction of carefully observed Nature be
preceded by a ruthless purging of Romantic investments of
Nature; yet the result of this must be poetry, not common
language. How is one to imagine a language able to describe
things soberly, without investment, that is yet higher than
common speech? The resonant soul of the Child is like
Byron’s in "Rabelais": it is therefore unsurprising that the
Child will leave Nature because of a troubled soul: "il y
avait dans son ame bien d’autres tempétes que celles de
l’Océan, bien d’autres nuages que ceux du ciel." This
dissatisfaction causes the Child, like the Savage in Yuk’s
fiction, to leave Nature and enter the city. The Savage’s
force was taken from him by images of gold and power ("des
palais d’or dont j’étais 1e maitre," "Smarh," 1:200), but
also by the same vague desires ("j’ai souhaité des bonheurs
inconnus, des ivresses qui ne sont pas," "Smarh," 1:200) as
the Child ("il avait voulu un horizon plus vaste," "Smarh,"
1:215). For the Savage, dreams of material glory lead him

from an active to a passive, contemplative view of Nature:

96
"j’errais comme de coutume, mais [...] je ne tendais pas la
corde de mon arc; je m’assis au milieu des bois et
j’entendais vaguement la pluie tomber sur le feuillage [...]
les feuilles blanches du peuplier tremblaient au clair de
lune. Alors, j’eus peur, je me suis mis a trembler comme si
j’allais mourir" ("Smarh," 1:200).

But whereas in Yuk’s discourse poetry is taken as a
sign of weakness that denotes that one is prey to the
temptation to fall from a state of original fusion with
Nature, here poetry is a term for the fusion that can take
place once all the clichés blocking immediate vision have
been removed. The problem is that the notion of "poetry" is
already so heavily invested that it falls back into the
Byronic mode, one of despair, separation, alienation. Thus
soon after the Child’s interior visions separate him from
Nature, the same images of Nature invested with
dissatisfaction and desire recur:

il voyait, dans les belles nuits d’été, les bouquets
de roses et les jasmins secouer aux souffles des
vents leurs tétes fleuries, que la brise agitait les
feuilles verts et qu’elle remuait, dans ses plis
invisibles, des échos lointains d’amour et des
parfums de fleur, que la lune brillait toute pure et
toute sereine, avec ses lumieres qui montent et
brillent et coulent silencieusement la-haut, avec
les nuages qui s’étendent comme des montagnes

mouvantes ou les vagues géantes d’un autre Océan
(emphasis added).

 

Natural details become metaphors for one another ("les
nuages [...] comme des montagnes [...] ou les vagues"),
direct fusions between material details are effected by

emotional terms ("la brise [...] feuilles [...] amour [...]

97

parfum des fleurs"). Poetry, only a page before an
equivalent term for Nature, becomes engulfed in the Romantic
myth of the original creator ("il y avait en lui des sources
intarissables"); soon, the myth of the Byronic resonant soul
emerges full-blown:

Oh! poéte! se sentir plus grand que les autres,

avoir une ame si vaste qu’on y fait tout entrer,

tout tourner, tout parler, comme la créature dans la

main de Dieu; exprimer toute l’échelle immense et

continue qui va depuis le brin d’herbe jusqu’a

l’éternité, depuis le grain de sable jusqu’au coeur

de l’homme; avoir tout ce qu’il y a de plus beau, de

plus doux, de plus suave, les plus larges amours,

les plus longs baisers, les longues réveries la

nuit, les triomphes, les bravos, l’or, le monde,

l’immortalité! N’est-ce pas pour lui, la mousse des

bois fleuris, le battement d’ailes de la colombe, 1e

sable embaumant de la rive, la brise toute parfumée

des mers du Sud, tous les concerts de l'ame, toutes

les voix de la nature, les paroles de Dieu, a lui,

le poéte? ("Smarh," 1:215-216).
The separation of poetry from common language leads to the
myth of superiority, so that Nature and God become, not
equivalent terms for poetry, but the personal property of
the poet.

All previous themes for poetry have been exhausted,
revealed as empty: love, glory, death: "Et cependant...
tout n’a pas été dit!" ("Smarh," 1:216). The search for
originality in the face of the emptying-out of all poetic
images, in the absence of all belief, leads the poet to
despair: "Dieu? autrefois j’y croyais" (note the insult
that treats God as a thing; this same insult appeared in

"Rabelais"); this section ends with the image of the poet’s

soul trapped in his body like an eagle in a cage: "tu n’as

98
plus qu’a mettre ta téte sous ton aile et a mourir [...]
bient6t tu ne seras plus qu’un cadavre encore tiéde qu’on
appelle désespoir" ("Smarh," 1:217).
Poetry, invested with superiority, despair, and the
desperate search for originality, separates the poet from

his original fusion with Nature. Thus, the notion of matter

emerges, as a sort of physical reality devoid of poetry, but

full of force: "la matiere resplendissait dans sa force
[...] elle siégeait sur des tr6nes [...] Aussi le poete
sortit, chassé, méprisé, honni." Yet Nature, devoid of

Poetry, becomes less than matter, it becomes mere dust:
"tout s’écroula," and its emptiness produces "un grand
rire." The possibility that Rabelaisian style coupled with
careful representation of uninvested Nature could lead out
of Byronism has been undercut by the residual desire for
Poetry: Byronism has slipped in by the back door, separating
Poetry from Nature, and from God, creating emptiness and
despair, and allowing Rabelaisianism space only in the
Romantic grotesque. If language were not elevated into a
Poetry separated from common speech, if one were not
diverted from observation and representation by the fear of
the already-said, a new joyous vision, the voice of the new
Rabelais, could be produced.

The text of "Smarh" attempts to integrate the
Rabelaisian influence in a number of ways; it is much better
at describing a Rabelaisian style than in producing one. We

have already examined the attempted fusion of Rabelaisian

99
style and precise observation in the Child’s narrative; we
will further examine fully the description of Yuk’s
discourse ("Smarh," 1:202) as contrasted to his answer to
Satan’s question "‘On te demande ce que c’est que la vie’"
("Smarh," 1:199).

The descriptions of Nature in the Child’s narrative
that purge Romantic images of their investment and invoke
uninvested natural details are sober: the baldly presented
fragments of observable reality are not interpreted, and the
only emotion is that of calm aesthetic enjoyment. The
achievement of these descriptions is the achievement that
was attributed by Flaubert in the correspondence to
Rabelais. One could call their fusion of Rabelaisianism and
precise observation that of a drunken style deployed
soberly, or of a fusion of drunken form and sober content.
Let us hasten to specify that by "sober" is not meant
"depressed" or "purposive," but merely calm. And let us
remember that the descent into Byronism was triggered in
this passage by the desire to maintain the category of
Poetry as a special form of exclusive language, a form not
necessarily adequate to precise observation; and that the
descent took the form of the display of all the clichés with
which the discourse of Poetry was associated in the late
1830s.

On the other hand, the description of Yuk's
discourse that accompanies the Savage’s entrance into the

city is itself Rabelaisian and depicts a form of speech that

100

is fluid, interpenetrating and fertile:

Quand Yuk ouvrait la bouche, c’étaient des

calomnies, des mensonges, des poésies, des chimeres,

des religions, des parodies qui sortaient,

partaient, s’allongeaient, s’amalgamaient,

s’enchevétraient, se frisaient, ruisselaient,

finissant toujours par entrer dans quelque oreille,

par se planter sur quelque terrain, par germer dans

quelque cerveau, par batir quelque chose, par en

détruire une autre, enfouir ou déterrer, élever ou

abattre ("Smarh," 1:202).
Religion and poetry are assimilated to lies, calumnies and
chimeras; the reduction of grandiose verbal productions to
low, playful ones is more or less Rabelaisian, as is the
image of discourse proliferating and interpenetrating, and
the dual process of building and destroying, burying and
reviving. However, even in this paragraph negative tones
are dominant: calumnies and chimeras could have been called
insults and fantasies; rather they have been assimilated to
lies, so that their enslaving effect on their audience,
rather than any joyful liberating effect, is emphasized. In
the preceding paragraph, Yuk’s skill at producing
adulteresses is reiterated: "bientét on voyait les
murailles se disjoindre et de volumineuses cornes s’étendre
[...] pendant qu’une femme tournait le dos a un homme et
donnait son devant a un autre."

Yuk’s face is a comic mask, which mocks everything:

"sa figure était une grimace, grimace devant l’église,
grimace devant le palais, grimace devant le cabaret, devant

le bouge, devant le pauvre, devant le roi." This lack of

respect for social categories is Rabelaisian; but the

101
destructive effect of Yuk’s actions ("il faisait rouler une
couronne, une croyance, une ame candide, une vertu, une
conviction") is not tempered by any sort of identification
or creativity: his grimaces are resolutely in front of,
separate from their objects, and these objects are
indiscriminately destroyed, even when the language
describing them is unambiguously positive ("ame candide,
vertu"). The joyful Rabelaisian ambivalence is visible, but
in the process of being distorted into the Romantic
grotesque. Thus Yuk’s laughter is described as "un rire de
damné"; but from this Byronic appelation it soon escapes and
it associates itself with its historical force and vigor:
"mais un rire long, homérique, inextinguible, un rire
indestructible comme le temps, un rire cruel comme la mort,
un rire large comme l’infini, long comme l’éternité, car
c’était l’éternité elle-méme." Note, however, that death is
specifically named, and that life is mentioned only in the
mode of its escape from death ("inextinguible,
indestructible").

The escape of Rabelaisianism from Byronism does not
quite yet reach the level of affirmation or resurrection,
although that possibility had been glimpsed a moment before;
and in the next sentence, although framed by night and storm
("dans ce rire-la flottaient, par une nuit obscure sur un
océan sans bornes, soulevés par une tempéte éternelle"), a
Rabelaisian list flows forth in a flood of oppositions and

amalgamations: "empires, peuples, mondes, ames et corps,

102
squelettes et cadavres vivants [death and life momentarily
fuse], ossements et chair, mensonge et vérité, grandeur et
crapule, boue et or; tout était la, oscillant dans la vague
mobile et éternelle de l’infini." However, unlike the
Rabelaisian list in the tale of the Child, here every detail
is completely invested, invoked only as a marker in a play
of oppositions, as a member of a list which is rhetorically
determined to signify "tout" ("empires, peuples, mondes") or
"tous les deux" ("ames et corps"; "boue et or"). No member
of the list is described in sufficient uninvested detail to
produce any sort of disinterested aesthetic contemplation of
remembered or imagined images: its use of physical details
is relentlessly metaphoric; in fact, the rhetorical
structure moves very easily from concrete terms to abstract
ones ("ossements et chair, mensonge et vérité"), since the
concrete details are mere allegorical markers for
abstractions.

Yuk’s discourse is potentially fertile in the
abstract: it is described as building as well as destroying,
of resurrecting as well as burying; and embraced in his
laughter are truth and greatness as well as lies and filth.
But warring against this is a force that can be identified
as Byronic, a force associated with unambivalent damnation,
destruction, grimaces and lies.22 Thus among the physical
details thrown up in the Rabelaisian list quoted above are a
disproportionate number of dismembered corpses, and the

result for Smarh is the illusion that revelation is

103
equivalent to suffering: "Il sembla alors a Smarh que le
monde était dépouillé de son écorce et restait saignant et
palpitant, sans vétement et sans peau" (emphasis added).
The text can imagine an act of revelation that reveals
light, but only in a mode that emphasizes darkness and calls
light illusion: "Son oeil plongea plus loin dans les
ténébres, il crut un moment y voir les astres, les ténébres
étaient encore 15" (emphasis added). Two mutually
undercutting points of view are visible in that sembla and

that crut: sembla reminds the reader that the claim that

 

clear vision produces corpses is just that: a claim, a
belief, itself subject to penetration by vision; gppp
counters that all vision is illusion and occurs surrounded
by darkness. Darkness, here, has the last word; and only
dimly, in passing, in the midst of cruelty and
dismemberment, is it glimpsed that this very ambivalence of
vision is inherently joyful. At the beginning of the text,
Satan claimed the production of chimeras as a way to
alienate Man from an original state in the earth was "faite
pour la félicité de l’homme" ("Smarh," 1:187); the original
adequation of Man for the earth is what the sober
description in the Child’s narrative seeks to reclaim. If
Rabelaisian proliferation could be clearly separated from
Romantic posturing, if the chimera of language could be seen
as joyful, fertile, productive rather than as anguished,
void, destructive, there would perhaps be seen a way out of

Byronism.

104

Yuk’s answer to the question of "ce que c’est que la
vie" ("Smarh," 1:199) begins with a double invocation to
interchangeable opposites: "ah! par Dieu ou par le Diable":
one hopes one is in the realm of joyful carnivalesque
reversibility and ambivalence. Truth in Yuk’s discourse is
associated with laughter: "La vie? [...] c’est fort drole,
fort amusant, fort réjouissant, fort vrai"; in Satan’s
discourse it was associated with man’s anguished emptiness.
Indeed, the association here of laughter with truth is
subordinated to the truth of Romantic despair: "La farce
est bonne, mais la comédie est longue"; this despair is
clothed in a carnivalized Rabelaisian form in which
opposites collide:23 "La vie, c’est un linceul taché de
vin, c’est une orgie ou chacun se sofile, chante et a des
nausées; c’est un verre brisé, c’est un tonneau de vin acre,
et celui qui le remue trop avant y trouve souvent bien de la
lie et de la boue." Drink here is not unambiguous joy: it
is joy that ends in nausea; carnival imagery is given a
particular pessimistic twist that is typical of the Romantic
grotesque. Thus Rabelaisian food metaphors clothe despair:
"l’existence te paraitra une mauvaise ratatouille d’auberge
[even before its appearance the metaphor is marked
negatively], qu’on jette a chacun et que chacun repousse."
Free mixing of all in public space without respect to class
is here not the carnival feast in the public square, where
all fuse into a joyous mass, but a negatively valued

deviation from the supreme value of the unique individual,

105
so that all are nauseated with a sickness the text has just
called "le mal de mer," and which must in this context be
associated with the devil’s use of the sea to signify the
vanity of human endeavor.
At this point in the discourse, however, food

imagery begins to proliferate,24

although associated with
continual marks of despair so that the Byronic maintains the
upper hand: "car les femmes te paraitront de maigres
mauviettes, les hommes de singuliers moineaux, le trone une
gelée bien tremblante, le pouvoir une créme peu faite, et
les voluptés de tristes entremets." Note that the feast has
been reduced to meager, unsubstantial foods, and pleasure
itself merely a morsel between courses, previously marked
with sadness. Only the next line escapes briefly from the
overwhelming Byronic imagery, and that only because of its
ambivalent re—evaluation of religious values: "Un digne
cuisinier, c’est vous, mon maitre [Satan], qui nous servez
ce qu’il y a de plus beau sous le ciel; vous, qui donnez les
jolies pécheresses, laissant aux anges du ciel les dévotes
jaunies." In this reversal, sinners are seen as more
sexually desirable than religious women, so that religious
values are reinterpreted according to the needs of the body.
The description of the "festin de la mort" that follows is
more death than feast; all the agitation of life is reduced
to a grotesque enumeration (again, a Rabelaisian device
without Rabelaisian content):

A nous, dont la nappe est faite avec les linceuls

106

des rois, qui nous asseyons au large festin de la
mort sur les trdnes et les pyramides, qui buvons le
meilleur sang des batailles, qui rongeons les plus
hautes tétes de rois et qui, bien repus des empires,
des dynasties, des peuples, des passions, des larges
crimes, revenons chaque jour regarder le monde se
mouvoir, les marionnettes gesticuler aux fils que
nous tenons dans la main, qui voyons passer, en
riant, les siécles amoncelés, et l’histoire avec ses
haillons fougueux et sa figure triste, et le temps,
vieux faucheur glouton, aux talons de fer et a la
dent éternelle, tout cela, pour nous, tourne, remue,
marche, s’agite et meurt; nous voyons la farce
commencer, les chandelles brfiler et s’éteindre, et
tout rentrer dans le repos et dans le vide, dans
lequel nous courons comme des perdus, riant, nous

mordant, hurlant, pleurant [...] le Dieu du
grotesque est un bon interpréte pour expliquer le
monde.

Perhaps, indeed, the grotesque is a good interpreter of the
world. The comic reversibility of values mentioned above
does momentarily provide a fresh vision. If only reversible
values ("par Dieu, ou par le Diable") were maintained
throughout! But in this passage, as in nearly all of
"Smarh," the Rabelaisian comic is thoroughly subordinated to
Romantic despair. This, in fact, seems to have occurred to
Flaubert: in a passage appended in the name of another

narrator, the text ridicules itself for having taken itself

seriously: "tu te regardais comme un petit Goethe"
("Smarh," 1:218). Yet the voice that ridicules is itself
suffused with despair: "tu iras ainsi enthousiasmé de ce

que tu réves, dégofité de ce que tu as fait. Tout est ainsi,
il ne faut pas s'en plaindre." In fact, it is possible to
hear in this moralizing postscript a reflection of the final
narrator of Goethe’s Werther, so that the form itself only

reiterates Romantic clichés.

107

But the climax of the story itself is complex and
ambiguous enough to indicate that the triumph of Byronism is
inconclusive. A woman appears to Smarh, a woman Flaubert
called in the correspondence "la Verité" ("Se présente une
femme... une femme il l’aime [...] cette femme, C’est la
Vérité" 5 Ernest Chevalier, [18 mars 1839]; 993;. I:40),
although here she is called only "un ange": she invites
Smarh to "aime-moi, je suis si belle" ("Smarh," 1:217). For
a moment, Smarh feels a rebirth of hope: "voila la
poussiére qui monte au ciel, voila les ruines qui se lévent
et se placent [...] il y avait en un immense espoir dans la
création." Satan, Smarh, and Yuk each claim the woman, and
a dispute ensues. In the end, what Smarh wins is
"l’éternité [... i1] tournoya dans le néant, il y roule
encore" ("Smarh," 1:218). Yuk reveals himself as the most
powerful: it is he who casts Smarh into eternity, which is
to say, nothingness; Satan responds only through passive,
although perhaps ironic, sorrow: "Satan versa une larme."
Yuk "se mit a rire et [...] étreignit [la femme] dans un
baiser si fort, si terrible, qu’elle étouffa dans les bras
du monstre éternel." If in fact this woman is intended to
be Truth, as the correspondence claims, it is difficult to
see how laughter has killed her. In fact, the final
situation bears some resemblance to the conversation between
Yuk and Death that precedes the narrative of the Child. Yuk
claims a superiority over Death, because of his power to

embrace both creation and destruction, birth and death, the

108

vast and the small, the high and the low:

quand je parle, c’est le monde qui dit quelque

chose, c’est le créateur qui crée [...]; je suis le

passé, le present, le futur, le monde et l’éternité,

cette vie et l’autre, le corps et l’éme; tu peux

abattre des pyramides [...] mais tu ne m’arracheras

pas la moindre parcelle de quelque chose. Je me

moque de [...] toute la poussiére qui t’entoure

[...] tout ce magnifique cortége [...] les ruines,

le passé, l’histoire, tous ces grains de sable qui

forment ton tréne, le monde qui est la roue sur qui

tu tournes dans le temps, tout cela [...] depuis les

océans les plus larges jusqu’aux larmes d’un chien,

l’Atlas jusqu’a un tas de fumier, depuis un tronc

jusqu’a un brin d’herbe [...] tout ce qui vit et

meurt, tout ce qui est commencé pour finir, tout

cela me fait pitié, tu entends? tout cela me fait

rire ("Smarh," 1:213).
Death begs to know the nature of this power greater than
she; Yuk responds that he is "le vrai [...] l’éternel [...]
le bouffon, le grotesque, le laid [...]; je suis ce qui
est, ce qui a été, ce qui sera; je suis toute l’éternité, a
moi seul." The two are necessary to each other; in fact
they are spouses: "plus d’une fois je t’ai baisée au visage
et j’ai mordu tes os, nous avons eu de bonnes nuits,
enveloppés tous deux dans ton linceul troué." This fusion
of truth, creation and death, of history and eternity, was
also evoked when the Child become poet searched for a theme:
"Si je parlais de la mort plutét? C’est du néant, cela,
c’est du vrai" ("Smarh," 1:216). The significance of the
final passage is thus ambiguous: beautiful truth inspires
life and becomes death; eternity is equivalent to
nothingness. Laughter precipitates the move from the

positive to the negative pole, and thus reveals itself as

powerful in an act of destruction. But the act of reversal

109
reveals the more powerful fact of reversibility, of
ambivalence: this is what has been revealed by the
presentation of unmotivated observable truths, by the
representation of ambivalent fact through description. The
very ambiguity of the ending escapes the imposition of the
hegemony of Byronism. The possibility of a joyously
ambivalent celebration of death and life that escapes
one-sided despair: this possibility is what will be explored

in "Les Funérailles."

CHAPTER 3: BRICOLAGE AND PENETRATING VISION:

VOICES IN "LES FUNERAILLES DU DOCTEUR MATHURIN"

As I have argued above, "Les Funérailles du docteur
Mathurin" is the most clearly Rabelaisian of Flaubert’s
juvenilia. In it the Byronic force of mordant despair is
dominated by a fertile profusion of "mensonges [...]
chiméres [...] religions [... et] parodies qui [...]
s’enchevétr[ent]" ("Smarh," 1:202). The plot, such as it
is, is quickly summarized: a doctor has retreated from the
world to the peace of the countryside. Feeling that he is
about to die, he calls his few friends to his bedside; they
spend the night drinking while the doctor pronounces satiric
philosophical and political discourses. He dies calmly and
at peace, and the friends parade the corpse through the town
pouring wine into its gaping gullet at each tavern before
burying it under a broken barrel near a river.

"Docteur Mathurin" is a bricolage, by which I mean a
text pieced together from various debris of previous
discourses in various states of decay: an image here of
unknown provenance, a line or two there trailing shreds of
cultural meaning, words resonating with history, even a few
areas clear, transparent, and calm, almost pristine. Dick

Hebdige discusses bricolage in the context of the subculture

110

111
of youthful revolt: "[Youth-culture bricoleurs]
appropriated [. . .] commodities by placing them in a
symbolic ensemble which served to erase or subvert their

original straight meanings."1

This view of appropriation
and juxtaposition as "intentional communication" (102)
derives from cultural theorists like Claude Levi-Strauss,
who in La Pensée sauvage argues that the mind in its pre-
scientific or natural state solves problems through
bricolage, which is to say that it "engag[e] une sorte de
dialogue" with whatever materials are on hand "pour
répertorier [...] les réponses possibles que l’ensemble peut
offrir au probleme qu’il lui pose [...] pour comprendre ce
que chacun d’eux pourrait ‘signifier,’ contribuant ainsi a
définir un ensemble 3 réaliser, mais qui ne différera
finalement de l’ensemble instrumental que par la disposition

2 The possible solutions are limited

interne des parties."
by the fact that "elles possédent déja un sens" being "une
collection de résidus d’ouvrages humains" (19). On the
other hand, the scientist tries to escape from the
constraints imposed by his culture: "le savant [...]
dialogue [...] avec un certain état du rapport entre la
nature et la culture, définissable par la période de
l’histoire dans laquelle il vit, la civilisation qui est la
sienne, les moyens matériels dont il dispose" (29). He
"cherche toujours a s’ouvrir un passage et a se situer pp

dela (30, emphasis in original). The artist operates rather

like a bricgleur and rather like a scientist: she is in

112
dialogue with her materials and with the world, both
"faisant des événements (changer le monde) au moyen de
structures" and "faisant [...] des structures au moyen
d’événements" (33). For Levi-Strauss, a work of art is in
essence a reduced model of something in the world, which we
contemplate in order to see the parts and the whole and to
see how the model was pieced together. Art is "la
découverte d’[une] structure" (38). The work of art, then,
is partially limited by the available materials and
partially limited by the model it imitates: certain artists
might be more like bricoleurs, focusing on manipulation of
their materials; others more like scientists, focusing on
accurate representations of their models.

But Levi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage as the
permutation of given elements within a single set is too
limited to describe art in a context of competing
traditions, movements, or cultures, as is the situation for
most art produced after the eighteenth century. Cultural
theorists like John Clarke have therefore expanded the
concept: "When the bricoleur re-locates the significant
object in a different position within [the] discourse
[. . .] or when that object is placed within a different
total ensemble, a new discourse is constituted, a different
message conveyed."3 The transference of elements across
boundaries produces new meaning through all sorts of
unforeseen juxtapositions, forbidden contacts, and

degradations.“ This is approximately what Bakhtin calls the

113
carnivalesque: "All distance [. . .] is suspended, and a
special carnival category goes into effect: free and
familiar contact [. . .] Discourse [is . . .] freed from
the authority of all hierarchical positions [. . .]
Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the
sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great
with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid." This
"profanation" is linked with the "reproductive power of the
earth and the body" (Dostoevsky, 123, emphasis in original).
After the eighteenth century, values are not so clearly
situated along a vertical axis: each artistic movement, for
example, promulgates its own values, by which it holds
itself to be superior to all other movements. The notion of
bricolage must thus be complicated in yet another way: in
bricolage, the transfer of elements from one system to
another implies the re-interpretation and re-evaluation of
the entire original system according to the meanings and
values of the new system. Sometimes in bricolage, codes
judge one another.

Although there is a connection between my analysis
of the interaction of inherited voices in Flaubert’s texts
and the notion of intertextuality, there is little
similarity between my view of an open, dynamic relationship
between elements renewed through bricolage and Michael
Riffaterre’s theories outlined in his Fictional Truth.
Riffaterre’s view that "the intertext [. . .] acts as the

unconscious of fiction and that readers recover or discover

114
that intertext because the narrative itself contains clues
leading back to it"5 envisions the intertext as something
closed and potentially knowable with certainty; for
Riffaterre, the intertext as genre "regulates and directs
comparisons" (95).

However, according to Bakhtin, the novel is
precisely that genre that subverts regulation, in which
there is "no language center at all."6 For Bakhtin, the
novel is characterized by "heteroglossia," by "the
ridiculing [of] all ‘languages’ [. . .] where all
‘languages’ [are] masks and where no language [can] claim to
be an authentic, incontestable face" (Bakhtin, "Discourse,"
273). Thus in the novel, "a multiplicity of ‘language’ and
verbal-ideological belief systems [. . .] are unmasked and
destroyed as something false, greedy, limited, narrowly
rationalistic, inadequate to reality" (Bakhtin, "Discourse,"
311-312). The novel, far from being limited by its
intertext, is a response, and it invites a response.

Closely related to Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogue
between the novel and its pre-texts is the notion of
intertextuality developed by Julia Kristeva in Le Texte du
ppmapp7 According to Kristeva, it is characteristic of the
novel that "les textes les plus connus sont confrontés, mis

en dialogue l’un avec l’autre et souvent méme neutralisés"

 

(Kristeva, Texte, 147). For Kristeva, this confrontation of
texts is political: "La culture vocalique [...] est

étroitement liée a l’organisation politique et aux habitudes

115

sociales de la cité. Elle paplp la pluralité non plus
soumise [a la] Vérité" (Kristeva, Texte, 153, emphasis in
original). Kristeva’s view of intertextuality is historical
and social, but also open-ended and transformational. For
her, meaning is not controlled by the intertext; the
individual writer juggles the intertext to produce new
meaning: "[les] énoncés [...] obtiennent, ajouté a leur
sens original, un sens supplémentaire [...] le roman [...]
ne peut étre lu que comme une polyphonie" (Kristeva, Texte,
176, emphasis in original). Ultimately, the manipulation of
the intertext may trigger a crisis in meaning in which the
process of signification itself is brought into question:

En s’appropriant les discours présupposés et

légiférants et par le seul acte de cette

appropriation (negation, transformation, etc.), [les

textes modernes] s’arrogent d’abord le droit de pp

poser. Mais, en méme temps [...], ces textes

dévoilent que le présupposé est une convention de

discours [...] ce type d’appropriation [...] laisse

planer le doute sur la possibilité méme d’un pppé.8
The confrontation of texts in the novel causes the
destruction of the reader’s naive belief in the stability of
meaning; but this destruction is also a clearing-away that
allows an act of creation: "le texte touche a la
possibilité meme du symbolique; mais s’il la met en
question, s’il la menace, ce n’est que pour la renouveler"
(Kristeva, Révolution, 340). Freeing the reader from the
power of social meaning (from "l’usage normatif du langage

et donc la position du sujet," Kristeva, Revolution, 340)

has the same beneficial liberating effect as does the

116

process of transference in psychoanalysis: "le sujet
presuppose l’autre (l’analyste) ‘en savoir,’ et [...] il
cherche a s’approprier ce lieu présupposé, avant d’éprouver
la vérité: que l"autre’ suppose savoir ou légifier n’est
qu’une structure de langage et donc [...] vide" (Kristeva,
Revolution, 339). For Kristeva, intertextuality is a
political struggle within a text that culminates in a
revolutionary, utopian moment that is ambiguously both
destructive and creative; it is not surprising that she
lists Bakhtin in the bibliography of Le Texte du roman.9

Since intertextuality has taken on so many radically
different meanings (Genette, attempting in Palimpsestes a
typology of intertextuality and related notions, suggests
that "il serait temps qu’un Commissaire de la République des
Lettres nous imposét une terminologie cohérente"”), I have
chosen to avoid it in my reading of "Les Funérailles," using
instead a variety of words (bricolage, dialogue,
carnivalization) that suggest the heterogeneity of my
approach, and thus the experimental nature of my reading of
the text. Rather than forcing Flaubert’s texts to conform
to a theory formed prior to my reading, I have allowed my
theoretical assumptions to be restructured continually by
the process of reading.

Following Bakhtin and Kristeva, I shall read "Les
Funérailles" as the site of a struggle between various
systems. We have already seen such a struggle taking place

in "Smarh," where various dramatized voices fought over the

117
meanings to be invested in images, and ultimately over the
value of life itself. But the struggle for dominance
between two systems need not be dramatized as a struggle
between clearly separated voices, nor need the outcome be
the annihilation of one code. According to Bakhtin,
"dialogic relations are [. . .] possible between language
styles, social dialects, and so forth, insofar as they are
perceived as semantic positions, as language world views of
a sort" (Dostoevsky, 184). Codes can interact through
various fusions and contaminations: through parody, for
example, or imitation, thereby becoming "double-voiced"
(Dostoevsky, 192). In fact, innovative thought may require
such double-voicedness: "When there is no adequate form for
the unmediated expression of the author’s thoughts, he must
resort to refracting them in someone else’s discourse"
(Dostoevsky, 192). On the other hand, the voices in the
text might react only implicitly to each other, through
"reservations, concessions" (Dostoevsky, 196), or other
anticipations or invitations of response.

Bakhtin sees systems as always belonging to
somebody: embedded in one’s experience and projects,
representing a position in what he sometimes calls the
"great dialogue" (Dostoevsky, 165). For him, the great
achievement of Dostoevsky as a novelist was the
representation of a plurality of voices which cannot be
given a "finalizing definition" (Dostoevsky, 163): "the

ultimate position of the author [. . .] does not permit any

118
single point of view to be absolutized [. . .] The author
[. . .] leaves the dialogue open and puts no finalizing
period at the end [. . .] The carnival sense of the world
[. . .] is, in fact, hostile to any sort of conclusive
conclusion (Dostoevsky, 165, emphasis in original). The
deepest meaning of the unfinalizability of the work of art
is that "nothinqficonclusive has yet taken place in the
ypglg, the ultimate word of the world has not vet been
spoken, the world is Open and free, evepything is in the
future and will always be in the future" (Dostoevsky, 166,
emphasis in original).11
For Bakhtin, then, Dostoevsky represents the best

example of what he calls the "polyphonic novel" (Dosgoevsky,
5 ff.); Bakhtin claims that Flaubert, on the other hand, is
not polyphonic:

A novel such as Bouvard et Pécuchet, for example,

unites material of the most heterogeneous content,

but this heterogeneity does not function in the

structure of the novel itself and cannot so function

in any well-defined way -- because it is

subordinated to the unity of a personal style and

tone permeating it through and through, the unity of
a single world and a single consciousness

(Dostoevsky, 15).
The claim that spyle destroys polyphony is correct only if
the style indeed irons out all individual differences in
voices; but Flaubert’s mature style is born of a struggle
between diverse voices: its apparent calm reflects only a
precarious and shifting equilibrium of various points of
view; indeed sometimes, of a multiplicity of various

identifiable sources. Even in juvenilia like "Smarh," as

119
has been shown above, these various points of view interact
dialogically at the level of style itself, which is to say,
on the level of the word as image.12
Voices merge and interact in complex ways in

"Docteur Mathurin," and the voices are more numerous than in
"Smarh." The pre-texts have diversified as well: there are
references, for instance, to nymphs and to Horace: "Oh!
jadis les nymphes [...]" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:221); "la
bibliothéque commune se composait d’Horace, de Rabelais"
("Docteur Mathurin," 1:222). Neoclassicism as it was
filtered through the official culture of the public schools
was certainly familiar to Flaubert;13 he apparently admired
Horace.14 And, indeed, Sartre, in L’Idiot de la famille,
cites Neoclassicism (especially the rationalism of the
eighteenth-century Encyclopedists) as the main influence
other than Romanticism on the writers of Flaubert’s
generation. Sartre sees the Encyclopedists as the origin of
the negative analytical strain in writers like Flaubert,
Baudelaire, and Mallarmé; he sees the Romantics as the
origin both of their sense of the organic unity of the world
and of their belief in failure as the proof of success.
Unable to choose between these two influences:

les post-romantiques [...] juger[ont] Boileau par

Hugo et Hugo par Boileau sans autre résultat qu’une

vacillante incertitude qui donne a l’oeuvre future
la mission d’étre romantique par négation des

classiques et classique par reprise et enveloppement
du romantisme et de ses oeuvres au nom des régles et

du gofit (emphasis in original).15

But the voices of "Docteur Mathurin" are too complex to be

120

reduced to two historical tendencies. For instance, Nature
imagery in "Docteur Mathurin" is sometimes associated with
nymphs (Classical? Neoclassical?), sometimes with
drunkenness (Rabelais? Anacreon?), sometimes with
pantheistic fusion (Rousseau? Chateaubriand?), sometimes
with emptiness and silence (?). The number of points of
view, the number of centers of evaluating consciousness,
does not neatly line up with the number of apparent
"sources": it is as if in absorbing cultural influences, the
text has already begun permuting and combining them.
Indeed, any text, even one composed with open books and a
scholarly apparatus, must combine its influences into a
structure of interacting voices that are permuted and
combined, sometimes in fresh and startling ways. Every text
must create its own prehistory. In any event, Sartre’s
account, by de-emphasizing eighteenth-century writers who
were not Encyclopedists, and ignoring the fact that some
Encyclopedists such as Rousseau were Pre-Romantic, is
"clearly incomplete, one-sided, and misleading," according
even to Hazel Barnes, who herself minimizes Rousseau’s
historical importance.16

Indeed, one need not depend on a generalized
literary history that groups writers together in great
historical blocs, as if the objective external situation
could determine what happens in the text. If one wishes to
seek sources for Flaubert’s literary project, one may

examine any of the several lists of writers he admired and

121

wished to emulate that can be found in the juvenilia and the
correspondence. For example, in "Smarh," the narrator
dreams of writing:

la plus belle page qu’ou ait faite, mais je vous

avertis d’avance qu’elle sera superbe, monstrueuse,

épouvantablement impudique [...]; ce sera une page

qui passera en prodigalité la poésie de M. Delille,

en intérét les tragédies de M. Delavigne, en

exubérance le style de J. Janin, et en fioritures

celles de P. de Kock; une page, enfin, qui [...]
mettrait les murs en chaleur eux-mémes [...] et

\

forcerait hommes et femmes a s’accoupler dans la rue
("Smarh," 211).

But in what sense are these authors "influences"?
Although Flaubert owned at his death a seven-volume set of
works by Delavigne, for instance,17 he never seems to have
had a very good opinion of him, calling him at one point "un
Louis-Philippe en littérature" (5 Louise Colet, [29 mai

1852]; Corr. II:96); at another, saying of himself that he

 

was "la derniére ganache romantique [...] qui a insulté
personnellement Casimir Delavigne (action d’éclat!)" (a M.
Léon Hennique, [2-3 février 1880]; Conard viii:375). Yet

his contempt for Delavigne did not keep him from parodically
quoting Delavigne’s poetry in a letter to George Sand: "Si
votre rhume s’obstinait (voir l’Epitre de Casimir Delavigne
a Lamartine) et que votre brulante haleine/ Par secousse en
sifflant s’exhalat avec peine soyez [sans] crainte, on
pourrait humecter vos poumons irrités/ Des sirops onctueux
par Chalard inventés" (a George Sand, [24 aofit 1866]; gppp.
III:521, emphasis in original).

As for Delille, Flaubert feared becoming like him

122
and used him as an insult when he disapproved of something a
friend had written, and yet on at least one occasion quoted
his style mockingly: "Ou suis-je? ou vais-je? Comme
dirait un poéte tragique de l’école de Delille" (5 Louise
Colet, [14-15 aofit 1846]; Qppg. I:301); critiquing a poem of
Louise Colet’s: "C’est du Delille et du pire!" (a Louise

Colet, [11 mars 1853]; Corr. II:2644); while writing

 

Salammbo: "Quel chien de sujet! je passe alternativement de
l’emphase la plus extravagante a la platitude la plus
académique. Cela sent tour a tour le Pétrus Borel et le
Jacques Delille" (a Ernest Feydeau, [fin novembre 1857];
gpgp. II:782). Thus Flaubert’s own voice may be invaded by
the voice of a writer he detests, as if he were possessed by
a demon he must struggle to exorcise.

While writing Madame Bovarv, Flaubert was constantly
afraid of becoming Paul de Kock: "J’ai peur de tomber dans

le Paul de Kock ou de faire du Balzac chateaubrianisé" (a

Louise Colet, [17 octobre 1853]; Corr. II:453); "ce que

 

j’écris présentement risque d’étre du Paul de Kock si je n’y
mets une forme profondément littéraire" (5 Louise Colet, [13
septembre 1852]; Cppp. II:156). He likewise fears after the
publication of Louise Colet’s Lpi, a roman a clef which
included Flaubert as one of its characters, that he will be
taken as Paul de Kock: "pp a sur moi une opinion toute
faite [...] que je n’ai aucune espéce de sentiment, que je
suis un farceur, un coureur de filles (une sorte de Paul de

Kock romantique), quelque chose entre le bohéme et le

123

pédant" (a Amélie Bosquet, [novembre 1859]; Corr. III:60,

 

emphasis in original). Yet Paul de Kock can move him:
having read Paul de Kock with his niece, he was "plongé dans
une atroce mélancolie" (a Mme Roger des Genettes, [18 aofit
1872]; Conard vi:403). The voice of a despised writer may
not only possess Flaubert, it may also threaten to cover him
up in the eyes of the public, or even (horror!) to seduce
him into a pépp response.

As for Janin, Flaubert in 1839 was outraged that
Janin attacked the Marquis de Sade: "J’ai lu sur [le
Marquis] un article biographique de J. Janin qui m’a révolté
sur le compte de Janin bien entendu, car il déclamait pour
la morale, pour la philanthropie, pour les vierges
dépucelées" (a Ernest Chevalier, 15 juillet 1839; 992;.
I:48). Yet it is uncertain whether or not he liked Janin’s
other efforts, such as L’ane mort et la femme guillotinée,
which is every bit as bloody and melodramatic as it sounds,
and which is so exaggerated that Janin in his preface calls
it "une parodie sérieuse, une parodie malgré moi."18
Consider Flaubert’s description of Hot-Corn, an American
temperance work, with its elusively ironic reference to
Janin’s grand moments: "Sais-tu quelle est l’idée du livre?
l’établissement sur une plus grande échelle des sociétés de
tempérence, l’extirpation de l’ivrognerie, le bannissement
du gin, 1e tout en style lyrique a la Jules Janin dans ses
grands moments, et avec des anecdotes! [...] J’en étais

malade de dégofit" (5 Louis Bouilhet, [17 aofit 1854]; Corr.

124
II:568). In any event, Flaubert eventually became Janin’s
friend,19 although he considered him pépez he consoles
Bouilhet for having been criticized by "un tel monsieur,
dont les aneries rempliraient un volume" (5 Louis Bouilhet,
[21 septembre 1856]; gppg. II:633). Nonetheless he tells de
Maupassant that Janin should be included in any history of
criticism (5 Guy de Maupassant, [octobre 1876]; Conard
vii:355).

Flaubert’s relationship to his "sources" is not
simply one of imitation: he is tempted by them, he steers
clear of them, he admires them, he is ashamed of them, he
wallows in their bad taste, he insults them, he calls them
pépg, he befriends them. If he had written a page combining
these four authors (and there may be one somewhere in a
draft of Salammbé) his imitation would undoubtedly have been
full of parodies, calumnies, false compliments,
exaggerations, mock-serious declamations, and broad attempts
to épater les bourgeois. He probably would have
orchestrated the interaction of a number of voices that he
found both horrifying and fascinating, as if the Gargon were
"refracting his thoughts" in a carnivalesque bricolage.

Thus, when the narrator of the Pygmi§;p_flgppapipp
senpimentale of 1845 lists Jules’s models during his
literary apprenticeship, there is no reason to believe that
every emulation is to be taken seriously -- by Jules, by the
narrator, or by Flaubert:

Aussi passait-il d’une école a une autre, d’un

125

sonnet a un dithyrambe, du dessin sec de
Montesquieu, [...] au trait saillant et ferme de
Voltaire, [...] de la plénitude de Jean-Jacques aux
undulations de Chateaubriand, des cris de l’école
moderne aux dignes alllures de Louis XIV, des
naivetés libertines de Brantéme aux apretés
théologiques de d’Aubigné, du demi—sourire de
Montaigne au rire éclatant de Rabelais.

Il efit souhaité reproduire quelque chose de
la séve de la Renaissance, avec le parfum antique
que l’on trouve au fond de son gout nouveau, dans la
prose limpide et sonore du XVII°siecle, y joindre la
netteté analytique du XVIIIe, sa profondeur
psychologique et sa méthode, sans se priver
cependant des acquisitions de l’art moderne et tout
en conservant, bien entendu, la poésie de son
époque, qu’il sentait d’une autre maniére et qu’il
élargissait suivant ses besoins [...] Comment [...]
enfermer sous la méme forme, toutes ces differences
essentielles [...]? (Education sentimentale version
de 1845, 1:354-355).

 

The fact that these emulations are multifarious, that they
pull and stretch in opposite directions, that they are
perhaps contradictory, is no reason to dismiss them as
impossible in principle, as does Sartre:

Dans ce texte, Gustave se borne a nous offrir un
pot-pourri de ses préférences: Homére, Rabelais,
Moliére, Voltaire et Rousseau, Byron; il aimerait
que son écriture ffit un plat complexe qui réunit
tous ces éléments [...] C’est que le style figs
autres 1e tourmente, quel qu’il soit: fasciné,
envieux, il porte en lui la tentation hystérique
d’imiter chacun des écrivains qu’il admire; ce qui
le sauve, c’est leur nombre et la difference de
leurs projets. Alors il réve de les condenser tous
et que sa phrase soit un cocktail. Mais comment
relever Moliére d’un zest de Byron? (Sartre,
II:1973, emphasis in original).

I will argue that this kind of mixture is precisely what
Flaubert is trying to do in "Docteur Mathurin," as well as
in the mature works. This is not to say that Moliére plus
Byron equals Flaubert; although a case could be made that

Flaubert can be precisely defined as the addition of

126
Romantic agony to a comedy of types. As I have stated
above, I believe that Flaubert’s mature project is more
clearly described as a Rabelaisian universal satire played
out in the mode of a carnivalesque bricolage.

Thus my task in reading "Docteur Mathurin" will be
to identify the voices in the text and their apparent
provenance, which will often be multiple and indeterminate.
For the voices in the text represent the tendencies
struggling within the author as he writes; it is not
necessary that each of these be associated with an
identifiable source, as in the writing of Salammbd,
L’Education sentimentale, or Bouvard et Pécuchet.20 It is
more likely that various voices from Flaubert’s readings,
which "résonnent dans son ame" ("Rabelais," 1:181), enter
here in essence, as a set of elements implying codes, and
that Flaubert playfully juggles their permutations as he
mockingly or seriously tries out their values.

There are two principal voices in "Docteur
Mathurin": that of the narrator and that of Mathurin
himself.21 Free indirect style and carnivalesque parody
create in both voices an indeterminate decentered space of
playful interaction that, like Mathurin’s tomb, "rappel[le]
des joies, et montr[e] un vide" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:227).

The title, "Les Funérailles du docteur Mathurin,"
begins the text with a celebration of death that is the
commemoration of a life, a solemn fixing of a dead

consciousness under a tombstone so that it can be free

127
firmly in memory. Here, however, the funeral is a farce and
a mockery: memory is dismembered and ridiculed so that in
the unblocked flow of joyful language itself a fertile
chaotic nothingness can be revealed.

The funeral is of a doctor named Mathurin. The
historical Robert Maturin22 was an English writer of Gothic
romances, whose Melmoth the Wanderer was published in 1820
and appeared in French the following year, becoming quite
popular in French Romantic circles;23 Balzac wrote a
continuation, "Melmoth réconcilié," which appeared in
1835.24 Baudelaire analyzed at some length the laughter of
Melmoth in "De l’essence du rire" of 1855:

[Les héros de] l’école romantique [...] sont presque

tous des petits-fils légitimes ou illégitimes du
célébre voyageur Melmoth, la grande création

satanique du révérend Maturin [...] il rit, se
comparant sans cesse aux chenilles humaines, lui si
fort, si intelligent [...] Et ce rire est

l’explosion perpetuelle de sa colére et de sa
souffrance [...] Sa nature [...] est infiniment
grande relativement a l’homme, infiniment vile et
basse relativement au Vrai et au Juste absolus [...]
C’est pourquoi ce rire glace et tord les entrailles

[...] 3
This is Byronic sardonic laughter; Balzac says that the
laughter of Melmoth "tordait les entrailles et [...]
travaillait la cervelle comme si quelque chirurgien le
trépanait avec un fer brfilant" (289). Laughter; surgery.
In Maturin’s novel Melmoth, having seen a young girl and her
lover struck dead by lightning, "burst into a laugh so loud,
wild, and protracted, that the peasants, starting with as

much horror at the sound as at that of the storm, hurried

128
away, bearing the corse [sic] with them."26 Laughter;
storms; horror; corpses; (class) superiority. Deaths abound
in Melmoth the Wanderer: a descendent of Melmoth dies
drinking (12); an old monk dies laughing: "There is
something very horrible in the laugh of a dying man.
Hovering on the verge of both worlds, he seems to give the
lie to both, and proclaim the enjoyments of one, and the
hopes of another, alike an imposture" (87). Laughter;
drinking; death; despair; emptiness.

Melmoth’s superiority to the human is revealed in
"Melmoth réconcilié" through his ability to read thoughts:
he has "un regard de feu qui vomissait des courants
éléctriques, especes de pointes métalliques par lesquelles
Castanier se sentait pénétré, traversé de part en part, et
cloué" (288). When the character Castanier receives for
himself the powers of Melmoth, "sa penseé embrassa le monde,
i1 en vit les choses comme s’il efit été placé a une hauteur
prodigieuse [... I1] avait 1e pouvoir de lire dans les
émes" (295): penetrating vision which sees the world as if
from a great height.

In Melmoth the Wanderer, the curse that Melmoth lays
on his victims is that they will remember his eyes
(Mathurin’s narrator quotes Southey: "‘only the eyes had
life, -- they gleamed with demon light’"[13]); "‘the glance
of these eyes shall be reflected from every object, animate
or inanimate, till you behold them again’" (34). Mario Praz

traces the origin of Melmoth, who has "something of Goethe’s

129

Mephistopheles, something of the Byronic hero, something of
the Wandering Jew, something of the vampire" (118),
ultimately to Milton’s Satan (53-57); a more immediate
ancestor is Radcliffe’s monk Schedoni in The Italian: "his
eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate, at a
single glance, into the hearts of men, and to read their
most secret thoughts."27

Now the purpose of all of this is not to trace the
specific origin of the figure of Dr. Mathurin in Flaubert’s
tale;28 nor is it to discover the true meaning of his
laughter; nor to understand the true significance of Dr.
Mathurin’s penetrating eye ("quand il [...] vous regardait
[...] en souriant, vous sentiez qu’une sonde magnétique
entrait dans votre ame" ["Docteur Mathurin," 1:2211). There
is no evidence in the correspondence that Flaubert read
Melmoth, or "Melmoth," or that he was even familiar with
them; "De l’essence du rire," for example, was not written
until sixteen years after "Docteur Mathurin." However, the
Romantic nexus of laughter/superiority/penetrating gaze/
death/nothingness gig exist in the culture that surrounded
the text; which is not to say that this nexus determined the
portions of the text that reflect it, and certainly not that
the meaning of those portions can be determined by reference
to this nexus. What is really important is the way in which
the text absorbs and transforms the clichés which precede
it.29

Flaubert’s correspondence refers to a penetrating

130
gaze: his. "Je disséque sans cesse, cela m’amuse et quand
enfin j’ai découvert la corruption dans quelque chose qu’on
croit pur, et la gangréne aux beaux endroits, je léve la
téte et je ris" (a Ernest Chevalier, 26 décembre 1838; Qppg.
I:35). For Flaubert, this penetrating gaze is similar,
perhaps, to what he will call "ce coup d’oeil medical de la
vie, cette vue du vrai enfin, qui est le seul moyen
d’arriver a de grands effets d’émotion" (a Louise Colet, [24

avril 1852]; Corr. II:78); it is associated with "l’art

 

[...] scientifique," "un style qui vous entrerait dans
l’idée comme un coup de stylet," "la griffe de lion," and
literature which "vous prend aux entrailles" (same letter;
76, 79, 78, 77-78). Already by 1837 he had noted that "la
plus belle femme n’est guére belle sur la table d’un
amphitheatre, avec les boyaux sur le nez, une jambe écorchée
et une moitié de cigare éteinte qui repose sur son pied," (5
Ernest Chevalier, 24 [juin] 1837; gppp. I:24): he will later
write to Louise Colet: "Je n’ai jamais vu un enfant sans
penser qu’il deviendrait vieillard ni un berceau sans penser
a une tombe. La contemplation d’une belle femme nue me fait
réver a son squelette" (5 Louise Colet, [6 ou 7 aofit 1864];

Corr. I:275). Flaubert had ample opportunities to see

 

dissected corpses in his father’s hospital;30 these images
are undoubtedly based on early memories.

This leads us to a curious notion: that Dr. Mathurin
is a representation of Flaubert as much as is the narrator.

In a sense, it is not surprising that all voices in a text

131
have something of the author in them: the multiplication of
voices represents the fragmentation of the author through
"refract[ion] in somebody else’s discourse," in part because
there is "no adequate form for [their] unmediated
expression" (Bakhtin, Dostoevsky, 192). Critics, however,
have repeatedly asserted that characters with a penetrating
gaze in Flaubert’s work, like Dr. Lariviére in Madame
Bovary, whose "regard, plus tranchant que ses bistouris,
vous descendait droit dans l’ame et désarticulait tout
mensonge a travers les allégations et les pudeurs" (Madame
Bovapy, 1:682), merely represent Flaubert’s father: "Sous
les traits du Dr. Lariviere, Flaubert a portraituré son
pere" (Dumesnil, 139); "le docteur Lariviére, figure de son
pére";31 "the great Dr. Lariviére, modeled on Dr.
Flaubert."32 Mason goes so far as to assert that "le beau
portrait du Dr. Lariviére de Madame Bovapy dont l’original
fut 1e pére de Flaubert est trés reconnaissable dans celui
du Dr. Mathurin" (Mason, 41). None of these authors
adduces any basis for his or her claim; the ultimate source
is probably the "Souvenirs intimes" of Caroline Commanville,

Flaubert’s niece, that were published as a preface to the

Conard edition of the correspondence: "Mon grand-pére, dont
les traits ont été esquissés dans Madame Bovary, sous ceux

du docteur Lariviére appelé en consultation au lit d’Emma
mourante [...]"33 But Caroline was born after Dr.
Flaubert’s death (Bart, Flaubert, 133); she had no direct

experience of her grandfather. Thus when Sartre goes so far

 

132

as to assert that "pour Gustave, [son pere] est demeuré le
‘démon’ dont le regard chirurgical perce les mensonges les
plus secrets" (Sartre, 2:1829), he is on shaky ground: he

seems to be using details of literary texts to explain the
life of the author who produced them in a sort of circular
logic the truth of whose claims can never be tested. Even
if Flaubert told Caroline that Dr. Lariviere was based on

his father, it is a great leap to assume that Dr. Flaubert
was the sole source of the image of penetrating vision in

Flaubert’s work.

What is certain is that the scientific/surgical/
medical gaze is present in various Flaubertian texts: his
correspondence, his novels, his oeuvrespde jeunesse; but
also his life, his memory, his readings, maybe even his
experience of his father. But the operation of this image
in any of these texts is not necessarily the same as its
operation in any other; it makes no difference whatsoever
whether or not the "origin" of the image is Flaubert’s
personal experience or his immersion in cultural history.
Indeed, how is it possible to distinguish clearly between
the two? Voices in Flaubert’s texts are amalgams of other
texts articulated in the text which is himself.

"Se sentant [...]": the text begins centered on the
experience of itself, and in process. But what is itself?
"[...] vieux [...]": already outmoded, feeling in itself
only the weight of history: "[...] Mathurin [...]"

destroyer, doctor, penetrator "[...] voulut [...]" with the

133

resolute force of his will, decided "[...] mourir, pensant
[...]" to die while thinking, death as the result of thought
in process "[...] bien [...]" (an evaluation, an
intensifier): the result of thinking correctly, of thinking
indeed "[...] que la grappe trop mfire n’a plus de saveur": a
metaphor based on drinking, for the thought of Mathurin is
drunken speech. "[...] trop mfire n’a plus [...]": a life,
like wine, like a discourse, can outlast its best moments
and no longer produce "saveur," pleasure in the mouth of the
wine-taster who takes it in, swirls it around, and spits it
out. Discourse, life, wine: all live according to this
model: a rise in perfection, an epitome, a consciously
chosen death. What is it like for a discourse to live that
chosen death in drunkenness? "Mais pourquoi, et comment
cela?" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:220).

The text, being caused by the weight of history,
turns first back against itself, and in the parody of a
normal fiction, gives us a description of Mathurin: his
appearance, his character, his motivation. Mathurin’s
physical appearance displays signs of old age: "cheveux
blancs [...] dos vofité [...] nez rouge [...]" (and, in this
last case, of drunkenness) which are parodically read as
beauty: "en somme, c’était une belle téte de vieillard."
Signs here can be read according to the narrator’s whim.
Mathurin’s "pur et limpide" eye is merely noted: its
significance as penetrator will be detailed in a few

paragraphs. His teeth "blanches et fines, sous de petites

134
lévres minces et bien ciselées" are rather arbitrarily read
by the narrator as representing "une vigueur gastronomique,"
which he claims is "rare a cet age ["70 ans, environ,"
states the narrator who, unlike Mathurin, is apparently not
able to penetrate souls, and so must content himself with
appearances]"; at this age, according to the narrator, it is
more usual to "dire des priéres et a avoir peur qu’a bien
vivre." Living well, eating and seeing: limpid eyes, fine
teeth, delicate lips: clarity and delicacy allied with
devouring and destroying: already the narrator’s version of
Mathurin is no longer only Romantic or even Rabelaisian:
something almost classical has entered in.

"Le vrai motif de sa résolution" is the subject of
the next paragraph, but the narrator here gives several:
first, that "il était malade"; second that "tat ou tard i1
fallait sortir de la-bas." Certainly the second is true
whether or not one is sick; which is the cause, then,
illness or the fact of eventual death? Is the move from
sickness as an accident of history to the generalized truth
of eventual death parodic, or serious? We could perhaps
answer this question if we knew the position(s) from which
the statements were made. But from what point of view is
the world "la-bas"? From the point of view of the narrator,
looking down on Mathurin? Of Mathurin, already rising above
the world? Or merely from the cynical perspective that
Earth is already hell? Although Bruneau admits the tale’s

"remar able unité" (Débuts, 187), the elusive reasoning of
qu

135
this text and its already developed free indirect style
produce an undecidability that Culler calls meta-irony:
"one’s sense of an elaborate artifact whose meaning cannot
be pinned down,"34 which is rather like what Barthes praises
as Flaubert’s "ironie frappée d’incertitude" because it
"n’arréte pas le jeu des codes" which "opére un malaise
salutaire de l’écriture."35 The logical slippage here
rapidly multiplies the text’s duplicity: for what had only a
moment before been will ("voulut") becomes mere preference
in the face of the inevitable ("il aima mieux"): his choices
are to "prévenir la mort," to anticipate death, or, by a
happy misreading, to prevent it; or to "se sentir arraché
par elle": to feel in his own being a tearing away by death.
The meaning of preventing the wound of alienation by
embracing the shifting ambiguities of dead language will
become clearer by the end of the tale; for now, Mathurin is
fixed by the already—completed fact of his own experience:
"Ayant connu sa position": will has become clear-eyed but
passive acceptance. The result is a flurry of negatives;
since history has already happened, the only possibility
left is to reject everything. Mathurin does not feel "ni
étonné ni effrayé [...]"; he does not express his feelings:
"il ne pleura pas, il ne cria pas"; he does not make verbal
gestures: "il ne fit ni humbles priéres ni exclamations
ampoulés." The text quickly strips Mathurin of attributes:
"il ne se montra ni stoicien, ni catholique, ni psychologue,

C’est-a-dire qu'il n’eut ni orgueil, ni crédulité, ni bétise

136
[...]" It is possible to map each member of the first list
into all three members of the second list ("ni stoicien,
[...] c’est-a-dire qu’il n’eut ni orgueil, ni crédulité, ni
bétise," etc.); but even a more limited reading, that links
the lists in parallel, reveals some odd incoherencies: "ni
stoicien [...] ni orgueil." Self-control is mere pride;
Mathurin has neither. Yet although pride is a Catholic sin,
he is "ni [...] catholique," which means he has no
"crédulité." This, however, does not imply that he is an
unreserved partisan of the Enlightenment; for although the
text will later talk about his vision that can penetrate
souls, here he is "ni psychologue, c’est-a-dire qu’il n’eut
[...] ni bétise": science is linked with stupidity. Not all
of these negations can be taken with complete seriousness:
it is as if the text, carried along by its own momentum,
were mocking both itself and the reader, while, at the same
time, sometimes speaking the truth: the fact that Mathurin
is skeptical, for instance. The playful meta-ironic
discrepancies of the list keep the reader off-balance so
that she is not sure whether apy of it is to be taken

seriously: whether Mathurin, who, in a sense, ;_ a
psychologist, since he reads souls, is therefore really
"béte"; whether psychologists are stupid merely because of a
certain prideful credulity regarding their own "insights";
whether the list is meant to imply that Mathurin is

rejecting all philosophies, religions, and sciences; or

whether "ni stoicien," for example, is to be taken as

137
seriously implying its opposite: that Mathurin is an
Epicurean.36 All this ambiguity is compounded by the
statement that Mathurin merely abjures the appearance of any
of these things: "il ne se montra [...]"

The result of this complex denial is that Mathurin,
at the moment of his death, is "grand," even heroic: "son
héroisme surpassa" a long list of heroes of the ancient and
modern worlds, connected with at least one pépe bourgeois
irrelevance: "M. de Talleyrand mourant dans sa robe de
chambre verte," and ending with a thief, traitor, spy, and
would-be assassin of Louis-Philippe, who is presented as the
most heroic of all (except Mathurin): "son héroisme

.7

surpassa [...] méme celui de Fieschi,3 qui disait des
pointes encore qu’on lui coupa le cou." Pronouncing clever,
humorous sayings in the face of death is the most heroic act
of all; this will be Mathurin’s response. That a form like
the pointe, which reached its highest development in the
Neoclassical restraint of La Rochefoucauld, could be upheld
as supreme in a list Rabelaisian in its profusion is a
tension that will be present throughout the text.

Next, all convictions and devotions are parodically
assimilated to stage costumes after they have been debased
by epithets that level them: "tous ceux, enfin, qui
moururent pour une conviction gpelcongpe, par un dévouement
gpel gp’il soit, et ceux qui se farderent a la derniére

heure encore pour étre plus beaux, se drapant dans leur

linceau comme un manteau de theatre" (emphasis added).

138
Flaubert will expand this carnivalesque image of belief as
costume in L’Education sentimentale of 1869: it is strange
that already in 1839 he envisions the structure that will
prove the downfall of the Romantic revolution of 1848. The
list ends with a series of short phrases consisting of a
noun and an epithet; some of these epithets are frankly
negative: "républicains stupides [...] héroes de bagne"; in
context the positive epithets are also contaminated:
"capitaines sublimes," as are even the neutral ones: "rois
détrénés," so that all adjectives, and by extension all
language, are potentially as suspect as makeup or theatrical
costumes. But are Fieschi’s pointes other than theatrical
poses? And for that matter, what of Mathurin’s drunken
speech? Does consciously choosing bétise innoculate one
from being infected by it? When Flaubert plays the Gargon,
is he "pépp" and therefore not pépp? The text now states,
perhaps to answer the charge that Mathurin’s choice of death
is a pose, that he did not die "ni par conviction, ni par
orgueil, ni pour jouer un rale, ni par religion, ni par
patriotisme," not because of anything to do with a text or a
performance, but "d’une pleurisie [...] et d’une
indigestion": of natural causes.

This version of the situation, that Mathurin’s death
is caused, rather than willed, casts him as passive: in
order to avoid the charge of posing, he submits. In its
avoidance of bétise, the text has teetered on the brink of

rejecting all culture; but all texts are a part of culture.

139

Is it possible for words to be woven into a text without the
weight of history, without striking poses, without cliché?

The text, as if afraid to assert anything in the
uncertain space it has opened up, spends more time running
through a list of negations, pausing only to reduce things
to the level of food and drink, §_la Rabelais: "il savait
manger [...] il fut enterré dans un baril." Yet swamped in
this sea of negation is one thing that must give us pause:
not that the narrator caps a list of ridiculous last words
with Christ’s ("‘Mon pére, pourquoi m’avez-vous
délaissé?’"); this sort of move is to be expected. What is
surprising about this list is Cato’s "‘Vertu, tu n’es qu’un
nom.’" But the text is aware of the emptiness of language.
What about this is pépe? Such thoughts can make one afraid
to speak.38

Gradually, in the development of the narrator’s
text, a voice has come into being which is "pleine de
railleries mordantes et cruelles," in short a "satire [...]
générale, universelle" ("Rabelais," 1:183), which is to say,
a Rabelaisian voice. In this text the Rabelaisian voice
claims the right to judge Romanticism, as it has already
judged the official culture of philosophy, religion, history
and politics. Romantic suicide is condemned in a
Rabelaisian list, first of all because it is such a cliché
that it has engendered a number of types, which gap be
listed ("Un poete romantique aurait [...] un autre se serait

[...]"), but also because it "gate [...] le palais," and

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because poison is "une détestable liqueur qui [...] fait
vomir," which is to say, a "bétise." This Rabelaisian view
of Romantic posturing gives the insight that republican
virtue is similar to it: the list of Romantic suicides ends:
"un républicain aurait tenté d’assassiner le roi, l’aurait
manqué, et se serait fait couper la téte" ("Docteur
Mathurin," 1:220-221). All of this clearing away allows
space for an affirmation, albeit disguised as a negation:
"la philosophie lui défendait de se faire souffrir"
("Docteur Mathurin," 1:221). But perhaps this is not an
affirmation: perhaps it does not mean that philosophy
teaches pleasure, but merely the avoidance of suffering. If
so, this is not a Rabelaisian thought, although Rabelais has
cleared a space for it. Yet despite the fact that the text
emphasizes the thought by placing it at the end of a
paragraph, it quickly (for now) moves away from it.

So far, the text’s re-evaluation of socially
accepted values has been primarily negative, Rabelaisian,
ground-clearing. But the nineteenth-century Rabelais must
also "entre[voir] un monde [...] meilleur" ("Rabelais,"
1:183). The text now tentatively moves toward affirmation
as it discusses Mathurin’s status as a doctor. But first
(yet another delay!) the narrator describes all the other
chapters that he will eventually write about the doctor’s
life, which other than "voyages," seems to have consisted
entirely of texts: "tous les livres qu’il a faits [...]"

which, the narrator says, "j’analyserai." This serious,

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analytic activity is brought down to earth by focusing on
its materiality: "un volume de notes sur ses commentaires
et une appendice de papier blanc et de points d’exclamation
a ses ouvrages de science"; for apparently science is not
valued negatively at this point in the text, although
psychology was a moment before. But Rabelaisian wordplay
suddenly Carnivalizes it: "C’était un savant des plus
savants en toutes les sciences possibles." This last word
echoes the refrain of Candide, perhaps bringing Rabelais a
little closer to Voltaire. Against "orgueil," "modestie" is
now presented as a positive value: "Sa modestie surpassait
encore toutes ses connaissances, on ne croyait méme pas
qu’il sfit lire; i1 faisait des fautes de francais, il est
vrai, mais il savait l’hébreu et bien d’autres choses." Is
Mathurin’s incompetence to read merely apparent, and if so
is it consciously feigned? Are his errors in French
bépises, or consciously chosen to conceal his power? Is
conscious modesty a pompous costume? In any event, his real
knowledge is not of texts, which he treats cavalierly: "Il
connaissait la vie surtout."

The next portion of the text explores the notion of
the devilish, penetrating gaze, merging it with scientific
observation and (surprisingly) Pastoral, as the narrator
attempts to construct a bricolage of Romantic, Neoclassic,
and medical elements in a tumult of Rabelaisian lists. In
order to do this, mistakes are made, which is to say that

elements inappropriate to a particular discourse are wedded

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to it. The disorderly violence this produces is in direct
opposition to the goal of its quest, which, as we shall see,
is calm. Unsurprisingly enough, the unstable calm this
struggle produces will not last even until the end of
Mathurin’s death-speech.

"I1 connaissait la vie surtout, il savait a fond le
coeur des hommes": personal experience moves into abstract
knowledge that is the penetration of secret spaces; no
longer does the text reject psychology. It is impossible to
escape "son oeil pénétrant et sagace." Who is it that wants

to escape penetration? the reader? the narrator? Already

violent sexual fantasies are arising. "Quand il [...] vous
regardait de cété en souriant [...]" Indirectly and with
(mocking?) humor he looked at... you, which is probably

"on," but might be the reader. Is the text’s aim the
dissection of the reader? "[V]ous sentiez qu’une sonde
magnétique entrait dans votre ame et en fouillait tous les
recoins."

The text now makes an Oriental reference that is
perhaps Romantic, although numerous Enlightenment writers
also used Oriental references. "Cette lunette des contes
arabes" by means of which "l’oeil percait les murailles" is
a textual remnant of a movement across cultural barriers
which itself has circulated between artistic movements,
penetrating space and time and now piercing and revealing
the secrets of bodies as well as souls. Mathurin’s eye peep

s an exotic tool (is this not costuming?) "vous dépouillait

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de vos vétements": the rape of the reader (and/or of the
cultural "on") is proceeding apace, as s/he becomes the
object of satire: "vous dépouillait [...] de vos grimaces,
de tout le fard de vertu qu’on met sur ses rides [...]" The
Rabelaisian list continues, now openly attacking the
connection between persons and their attributes that was
implicitly problematized earlier: "il arrachait aux hommes
leur présomption, aux femmes leur pudeur [first clothes were
ripped off, now even shame!], aux héros leur grandeur, au
poete son enflure, aux mains sales leurs gants blancs." The
doctor’s gaze, after having seen a man make a gesture, take
two steps, say "deux mots," can make him "nu, déshabillé, et
grelottant au vent." Nudity is here clearly named for the
first time; and the clear boundary between genders is
blurred: a map here is stripped, for you: "il vous le
rendait nu."”

Although the victim of the visual rape was at first
"vous," then women, then men, "vous" is now clearly enlisted
on the side of the penetrating viewer: "Avez-vous
quelquefois, dans un spectacle": the image of the theater is
once again brought forward, but here it will be the
spectators who are dissected, not the actors; and here,
after a brief confusion, gender identity will straighten
itself out: the victims will be women.

The first move in the dissection is the reduction of
objects to a single polysemic word: "éclats." Time is de-

individualized ("quelquefois"), and the individuals in the

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audience are turned into an undifferentiated mass ("le
public") that is reduced to the organic ("palpitant"), then
to one gender ("femmes") who are synecdochically reduced to
fragments of bodies ("mains"). The initial vision
("spectateur") is broken up into fragments ("mille feux"),
then expanded into numerous, tiny events on the surface of
an undifferentiated mass ("mains [qui battent ...] sourires
[...] diamants qui brillent [...] vétements blancs"), so
that abstractions can also be listed as mere flickers on the
bright surface ("richesses [...] joies"), then summarized in
a word that means bursts of sound and/or light, but also
shattered fragments ("éclats"). This Byronic use of
Rabelaisian lists leads to a transvaluation of joy as

horror, read first as an imagined reversal of brilliant

light: "vous étes-vous figuré [m.] toute cette lumiére
changée [f.] en ombre." The polysemic "éclat" then
generates this series: "lumiere" becomes "ombre," "bruit"

becomes "silence," and "vie" becomes not mpg; but "néant,"
as if life and existence were alike mere palpitating
flickers on a dark background. The missing term reasserts
itself ("étre") in an erotic image of bound breasts that is
briefly sexually ambiguous, but which straightens itself out

as soon as persons are fragmented ("étres décolletés [m.],

aux poitrines haletantes [f.]"), then resolves itself in a
starkly erotic light/dark contrast ("cheveux noirs [...] sur
des peaux blanches"). This image occurred in "Smarh" in

Yuk’s tale of the savage: it was the means which allowed the

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passage from woman to horse to the erotic embrace with the
Savage’s dying prey. Here it is living human women
themselves who are destroyed in imagination: they are
reduced to skeletons, whose future is death ("des squelettes
qui seront longtemps sous la terre"); in a cliché from
Renaissance drama, actors and spectators are collapsed into
a circulating reciprocity which sub specie aeternitatis is
motionless: "ils [... se sont] réunis [...] dans un
spectacle [...] pour s'admirer [...] pour voir une comédie
[...] qu’ils jouent eux-mémes, dont ils sont les acteurs
éternels et immobiles." The spectator imaginatively
reconstitutes joy as horror, but in a comedy in which light
is darkness, life is death, spectators are actors, motion is
immobility and, sometimes, men are briefly women. In the
light of this dark vision, language becomes silence: "une
comédie qui n’a pas de nom."“

This Byronic black comedy has not yet discovered the
values that will create a new Rabelais. In the context of
the playfulness and indeterminacy that has preceded this
macabre scene, it is not certain that one should take it
entirely seriously; although it may be meant to demoralize a
certain sort of reader, another sort of reader might laugh.
In any event, the fact that the scene is posed as a question
that invites a reader to own or disown it ("Avez-vous
[...]?") indicates that it is not to be taken as the text’s
final word. But by its power, length, and repetition of

images and themes from "Smarh," it rather insistently

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reminds the reader that Byronism is a part of the text’s
dismembering vision, and that the new Rabelais cannot merely
discard it.

Mathurin’s vision is not quite exactly the same as

this sardonic Byronism: "Mathurin faisait a pen pres de
méme" (emphasis added). Rather, Mathurin’s vision is

medical: it penetrates the clothing to the skin, the
epidermis to the flesh, and the bone to the marrow, seeing
even the skeleton not as a momento mori, but merely as a
tissue within which there is another. Nonetheless, this
dissection is called exhuming, as Mathurin uncovers death in
the midst of life: "il exhumait [...] lambeaux sanglants,
pourriture du coeur." Mathurin’s medical vision is here
reconstituted as moral, because of the culturally inscribed
"coeur," so that the opposition "sain"/"gangrene" ("sur des
corps sains, vous découvrait une horrible gangrene") is also
redolent of moralizing, though as a metaphor it is empty,
which is to say that the text is not specific about how the
opposition "sain"/"gangrene" is to be read, about how it is
to be filled with a specific content. Certain meanings can
be supplied in context ("orgueil," for example, might be
seen as a "gangréne"); but the theme of health represents a
project, an optic for exploration, rather than a pre-
determined end. Likewise, the metaphor "sain" promises a
healthy core once disease has been pitilessly cut away, but
does not specify in advance what that core will be.

This medical vision, in fact, is associated with

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happiness, and with greatness: "Cette perspicacité, qui a
fait les grandes politiques, les grands moralistes, les
grands poétes, n’avait servi qu’a le rendre heureux"; it
also puts Mathurin in the context of heroes of both the
Neoclassics and the Romantics: "Richelieu, Moliere et
Shakespeare," who, unlike him, "ne [...] furent pas
[heureux]." The goal, then, is to modify unmitigated
Byronic negativity with an image of health and happiness.
The text now details the values that are to be added to
flesh out this vision; they are decidedly not Romantic.

He lives in a world of the senses in which he is
passive: "Il avait vécu, poussé mollement par ses sens
[...] sans effort," in a world without extremes ("sans
malheur ni bonheur [...] sans passion et sans vertu"). A
metaphor of drinking is used that is surprisingly
Neoclassical in its elevation of pppps to a supreme virtue:
"Son coeur était une cuve pleine, il l’avait vite fermée,
laissant encore de la place pour du vide, pour la paix."
Thus the image of a diseased heart here finds its opposite
in the image of a heart that has space for emptiness.
"Emptiness as health" is a rereading of a Byronic negative
metaphor according to a medical metaphor assimilated to
Neoclassicism. Language is made empty (hence healthy) here
not by stripping adjectives from nouns, conflating opposites
or refusing to name, but by peeling away from the human
being all social relationships, hence leaving only the

biological: "il n’était donc ni poéte mi prétre, il ne

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s’était pas marié, il avait le bonheur d’étre batard, ses
amis étaient en petit nombre [...] il n’avait ni maitresses
[...] ni chien." What he has left is (the very Rabelaisian)
food and drink connected with health: "sa cave était bien
garnie [...] il avait une excellente santé et un palais
extrémement délicat." These values of the lower bodily
element subvert negative lists by insinuating themselves
unexpectedly: "ni poete ni prétre [...] pas marié [...]
bonheur [...] batard [...] peu d’amis [...] cave bien
garnie" (emphasis added), but they do this delicately,
gradually, without insistence; the calmness of this
discourse is in evident contrast to the frenzy at the
theater or the rapid parallels of most of the earlier lists
("il arrachait aux hommes leur presumption, aux femmes leur
pudeur, aux héros leur grandeur, etc."). In fact, in
retrospect, the reader may perhaps be led to wonder whether
what was being rejected so violently in the theater was not
life itself but the emptiness of vain social pleasures; a
bit later the text will confirm that Mathurin lives "dans un
oubli complet du monde [...] avec son organisation
multiple." Perhaps the excessive Romantic despair of the
passage is meant to be rejected along with the vanity of the
applauding spectators.

It will be instructive to pause at this point and
compare the struggles so far in this text to the similar
struggles in "Smarh." The Rabelaisian and Byronic voices in

"Smarh" are clearly differentiated (those of Yuk and Satan

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respectively), although as I have shown the voice of Yuk is
sometimes invaded by Byronic elements. These voices
struggle for dominance with Smarh, by, among other things,
reading Nature as hostile to Man against Smarh’s belief in
Nature’s fitness for Man; this process includes reinvestment
of specific images in which Smarh has invested personal
meanings. Here, since the voices are not clearly
distinguished, various strands are allowed to interpenetrate
and develop themselves freely on a variety of levels, so
that experimental modifications and nuances can arise which
bring elements of a number of different discourses into new
relationships. For example, the operation of stripping away
can be performed linguistically (nouns stripped of
adjectives) or in an image (skeletons stripped of flesh);
the resulting lack of differentiation may occur on the level
of culture (distinctions between men and women stripped away
so that genders mingle) or on the level of the discourse of
fiction ("vous" moved between "on" and the reader,
associated first with the stripped object, then with the
stripping subject); the meaning of stripping can be read
variously as scientific, medical, Romantic, Rabelaisian, or
Neoclassical (stripping as exploration, as diagnostic, as
anguished, as joyous, as resulting in calm); and
negotiations of meaning may be performed on the level of
words (the connotations of "vide") or on the level of entire
discourses (political action is like Romantic suicide;

medicine is erotic). In short, because no voices are given

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clearly independent existence, there is greater freedom to
explore possible interactions.

The discourse of Yuk, with its freely
interpenetrating forms and genres, is close to that of the
narrator of "Docteur Mathurin." However, Yuk’s discourse
invents fictions that demoralize by finding images with
particular meanings for particular listeners, thus
developing desires that are already present, in order to
cause social disorder (motivating the woman to commit
adultery, for example). Here, multiple strategies are
employed for clearing away social meanings because of the
multiplicity of discourses that were active in nineteenth—
century France; any given reader may or may not identify
with any of the targets of destruction. In this text,
demoralizing is merely a possible effect of the principal
aim: health; which is to say, fitness to Nature. Comedy is
used as a beneficial antidote to a Culture too distant from
Nature. This presents its own set of problems.

In "Smarh," Nature was unconsciously eroticized by
Smarh, a fact that was used against him by both Yuk and
Satan. Smarh’s belief in the fitness of Man to Nature,
challenged by Satan through reinvestment of images dear to
him, ultimately sought realization in a language free of
investment, a language transparent and wholly adequate to
its object. Here, this clear language is re-envisioned as a
marriage of Romantic and/or Rabelaisian negativity coupled

to Neoclassical and/or scientific restraint; in short, of a

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wedding of "vide," "paix," and "santé." Whether language

can in fact embody these values remains to be seen.

CHAPTER 4: NATURE AND CULTURE: THE DEATH OF MATHURIN

"Mais je dois vous parler de sa mort" ("Docteur
Mathurin," 1:221). At the end of a paragraph devoted to a
description of Mathurin’s life that in fact consists mostly
of negations, the narrator reminds the reader of the
announced subject of his tale. And so Mathurin calls his
two disciples (here, as previously, his social ties are
limited) and gives them two additional reasons for choosing
death: that he is tired of being sick and of having been
"tout un jour a la diéte," another reference to his
appetite. Yet despite the author’s promises, he engages in
another apparent delay, speaking rather of the surrounding
countryside; this is in fact not a delay at all, since a
major purpose of this text is to discover a way of speaking
about Nature. What is first given is a list of details that
sketch a landscape, a list without obtrusive grammatical
parallels between phrases which parody and undercut one
another, but rather a list of moments of beauty which map
out space and awaken the senses. Places near and distant
are named, in words both common and mellifluous ("tonnelle
[...] échalas [...] haie [...] bois"); the senses of sight
("blanc") smell ("embaume") and sound ("chante [...] rire")

are invoked; the images are calm, peaceful, and beautiful.

152

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Individual human beings are not portrayed: all that is
depicted is their collective actions in Nature ("on commence
a courber la vigne") and their traces ("les foins sont
enlevés"). Their voices, like the other things portrayed,
have become mere objects of sensory contemplation without
specific content ("on entend des rires d’enfants dans les
bois"). Other than the children, whose presence is merely
inferred from the sounds of voices, people are referred to
only as "on," so that the observer ("on entend") is fused
with the worker in the field ("on commence").

This is not to say that the goal of transparent
language has been reached merely because Rabelaisian
playfulness and Romantic anguish have been stripped away.
From the very beginning of the description ("C’était la
saison dorée ofi les blés sont mfirs") the scene is labeled as
a recognizable time of the year, which is to say, something
constantly recurring and already seen; and the very epithet
used to identify the season ("dorée") is reminiscent of the
Golden Age, perhaps even of the golden mean or of the true
riches of simple pleasures. Nor is the rest of the
paragraph free from clichés like "vigne" or "rossignol," or
of bétises ("les raisins pendent [unsurprisingly enough] en
grappes"). All of these details could have been observed in
a real French countryside, and their presence here simply
named in a disorderly jumble tends to strip them of
investment, partly because the text refrains from expanding

on their presence in commonplace ways (there is nothing here

154

on the order of: "the nightingale, sweet singer in the dark
of night, beloved of star-crossed lovers and poets...").
But still, why mention a nightingale at all? Why not
another bird without such a wealth of association? Or to
put it another way, is it possible to say "nightingale" even
when a nightingale is really present without uttering a
cliché? Is it really possible ever to say anything without
evoking the weight of history?1

Words related to wine occur three times ("vigne
[...] raisin [...] grappes"). This clichéd image, which
will become the dominant motif of the work, is here invested
with peace, calm, and plenty; this investment will nuance
the later appearance of the image in the contexts of
Rabelaisian excess and Romantic frenzy. The presence of
this motif in this paragraph is integral to the economy of
the work; but it is still a motif, and in fact it has
already been used as a symbol of life (in the first line)
and of experience ("son coeur était une cuve"). The
tendency in this work toward a language that is transparent,
free of cliché, is opposed by another tendency toward the
enrichment of images through their investment with
associations in more and more discourses, thus producing
instruments that can undercut the presuppositions of
discourses by increasing the points of view from which they
are seen. "Rossignol" is, perhaps, already such an
instrument, being already invested in a number of discourses

(Neoclassical, Romantic, Oriental, etc.). Here, however,

155

the presence of these clichés undercuts the pretension
toward transparency. Can any work of art ever produce an
image that is not contaminated by significance? Is it ever
possible to say anything without producing new clichés? Is
transparent language ever possible?2

The opening of the next paragraph is so artificial
that it must be a conscious self-parody ("Oh! jadis les
nymphes [...]"). The iterative imperfect of this sentence
("les nymphes venaient danser [...] la fontaine murmurait
[...] les colombes allaient voler"), despite its claims,
does not refer to a past: springs, presumably, still murmur
and doves still fly; and nymphs never danced. The sentence
refers to a past discourse, where symbols of peace
("colombes") coexisted with sources whose onomatopoeic
voices ("la fontaine murmurait un roucoulement," emphasis
added) echoed them, mingling sound and touch ("un
roucoulement frais"), and fusing as if in love ("un
roucoulement frais et amoureux") origins, images, language,
and senses into a whole whose mutual adequacy sprang from a
mutual origin. In fact, remnants of that former time
present only in texts can still be seen in daily reality’s
recurrent beginnings: "Le matin encore, quand le soleil se
léve, l’horizon est toujours [...] bleu" and in faint
breathings that still smell of erotic investments and the
most eternally recurring of all poetic clichés ("un frais
parfum, humide des baisers de la nuit et de la rosée des

fleurs"). Is it ever possible to see Nature without the

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interference of past texts? Can a frank acknowledgement of
the clichéd nature of vision save one from the embarrassment
of being derivative?

Mathurin is now sleeping before an open window, and
the narrator describes the scene from that perspective. The
narrator claims no ability to penetrate Mathurin’s
consciousness: his dreams are "sans doute comme sa vie,
calmes et purs" (emphasis added). But the narrator’s eye
can penetrate Nature: it moves outward, past "La fenétre
[...] la jalousie [...] la muraille [...] la basse-cour" to
"les grands noyers"; this penetrating vision, content with
the surfaces of things and their names, avoids (it seems to
me) all allegorical meanings, all agonies, all historical
references, except for one, that, again, of wine ("la
treille"):

La fenétre ouverte lassait entrer a travers la

jalousie des rayons de soleil, la treille, grimpant

le long de la muraille grise, nouait ses fruits mfirs

aux branches mélées de la clématite; le coq chantait

dans la basse-cour, les faneurs reposaient a

l’ombre, sous les grands noyers aux troncs tapissés

de mousses.
The effect is that of a cliché surrounded by a frame of
uninvested details, so that it becomes nearly uninvested
itself. Thus, when the observed scene provokes memory, it
is not the cultural memory of mythology: dancing nymphs give
way to the homely memory of the "méridienne" as motion is
replaced by sleep, the "guirlandes [des] fleurs de prés" of

the nymphs becoming "un rond de gazon ofi ils allaient

souvent faire la méridienne, et dont la verdure touffue

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n’était seulement tachée que d’iris et de coquelicots,"
secret stains ("pourriture du coeur") parodically invoked to
be recuperated as beauty. And there, in Nature, they
(repeatedly) "buvaient," while the "cigale" sang, insects
buzzed in the sun, and leaves moved in the hot wind of
summer nights. In this Pastoral description, birds have
been replaced by insects; lest one think that this was to
reduce cliché, note that the insect chosen is a reputedly
lazy one from a famous fable.

In all of these Pastoral descriptions, images that
repeatedly appeared in nature descriptions in "Smarh" have
surreptitiously reappeared: birds, flowing water, rustling
leaves. When these occurred in Smarh’s first lyrical
description of communion with Nature, he was not aware of
their erotic content; the erotic content has been clearly
named here ("baisers de la nuit"). This Pastoral idyll,
then, is a sort of recuperation of Smarh’s vision before his
demoralization by Satan and Yuk. However, this vision is
not pristine, being heavily influenced if not directly
inspired by the Neoclassical tradition of lyrical nature
description. And although Mathurin’s life has been called
calm and pure, Rabelaisian themes have not convincingly been
integrated with Pastoral ones: images of drinking have
merely been invoked, as metonymic fragments of landscape
("vigne," "raisin," "treille"), or as habitual actions in a
list that does not add up to a coherent scene ("buvaient

[...] dans les rayons de soleil [...] sous le souffle chaud

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des nuits d’été": yhpp did this occur?). Could a
Rabelaisian orgy by Mathurin and his disciples look idyllic?

"Tout était paix, calme et joie tranquille." This
remains to be demonstrated. Rather than describing
Mathurin’s life, the text contrasts the Pastoral images of
Mathurin’s surroundings to life in society. There are
complex lists relating to economic activities ("les hommes
travaillaient [...] machines," "Docteur Mathurin," 1:221-
222) but especially political ones ("lois [...] soldats
[...] intrigants [...] revolutions," "Docteur Mathurin,"
1:221-222) reduced to violence done to the body ("sang,"
"Docteur Mathurin," 1:222). Mathurin’s separation from
politics is acknowledged as a willful disregard ("dans un
oubli complet du monde, dans un égoisme divin, ils vivaient,
inactifs, inutiles, heureux," "Docteur Mathurin," 1:221).
They lived, in short, like aristocrats, or children of the
bourgeoisie who neglect their responsibility: "Parlez de
devoir, de morale, de dévouement [...]" The fact that they
may live idly because there are peasants at work in the
fields and agents of the state to keep the peasants from
rebelling is not touched on here; the farmworkers have been
picturesquely reduced to elements of landscape. The fact is
that the text is willing to accept certain social ties while
making a great show of rejecting others; this is typical of
Flaubert’s ambiguous relationship to Culture in the face of
Nature.

But let us examine more closely the form of the

159
present rejection: it is not the wholesale renunciation of
the previous lists. For one thing, it is presented as a
reply to two distinct readers. The first is imagined as the
voice of social responsibility: "Accusez-les d’égoisme," a
charge which has already been mockingly answered by the
earlier phrase "égoisme divin": the text has already
accepted an insult that can be leveled at its characters,
and revels in it. The second reader is the voice of
political rebellion: "O hommes, vous qui [...] faites les
révolutions [...]" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:222). The
motivation of revolutionaries is reduced to the earlier
stigmatized pride: "pour faire regarder vos petits fronts";
their frenzied lives are compared to Mathurin’s, which has
still not been dramatized: "je vous demande [...] si tout
cela vaut une vie calme." But all the possible discourses
of imagined indignant readers are reduced to noise:

"Accusez [...] parlez [...] dites encore une fois [...]

rabachez [...] chantez" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:221-222), as
insults ("égoisme," "Docteur Mathurin," 1:221) become
fragmentary clichés ("devoir... morale... dévouement"), then

unoriginal discourses ("dites encore une fois ce qu’on doit
au pays") and finally meaningless systems ("chantez toujours
cette magnifique trouvaille du plan de l’univers"). The
"organisation multiple" of society is here linked to
language itself, and all ideals and even world-views reduced
to empty linguistic performance; all are, ultimately, mere

melodious sounds ("chantez"); all disruptions of this

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meaningless harmony are "bruit" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:222).
The best thing to do is to retreat into silence ("eux, ils
buvaient, ils dormaient," "Docteur Mathurin," 1:221), which
is true wisdom: "vous n’empécherez pas qu’il y ait des gens
sages et des égoistes, qui ont plus de bon sens avec leur
ignoble vice que vous autres avec vos sublimes vertus"
("Docteur Mathurin," 1:221-222). A revolution is not only
noisy,3 but unnecessary: one can find wisdom without even
moving outside of one’s own bourgeois class, since wisdom is
the same as "bon sens" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:221-222).
Although the "virtue" of the defenders of order is rejected
because of its exaggerated pretension ("sublimes vertus,"
"Docteur Mathurin," 1:222), the "virtue" of the

Revolutionaries is rejected through its position as the

culmination of a series that does not support it: "bruit
[...] chars de triomphe [...] fers [...] machines [...]
charlatanisme [...] vertus." The defenders of order are

ridiculous because they exaggerate their virtue; the
Revolutionaries are not really virtuous at all. It is clear
which side the narrator favors; after all, order supports
peace and calm better than Revolution does. Thus becomes
clear the essentially reactionary nature of the text’s
rejection of politics in the name of peaceful domestic
comfort: "ofi l’on ne casse rien que des bouteilles, ofi il
n’y a d’autre fumée que celle d’une pipe, d’autre dégofit que
celui d’avoir trop mange." But who is "on"? Who is it that

will break, but only bottles; will feel rage, but will

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instead smoke pipes; will feel disgust, but claim only to
have eaten too much? Are Mathurin and his disciples really
Romantic revolutionaries only playing at loving order? or
really lovers of order keeping their revolutionary
tendencies within safe bounds?

This uneasy shifting between identification with
Revolutionary vandalism and orderly calm leads the text in
the next paragraph to reject both alternatives in a clichéd
image that calls up the central site of dispute in "Smarh,"
the sea: "le gouvernail de l’Etat était disputé entre des
pirates et des ineptes, et [...] il se brisait dans la
tempéte." The defenders of order are here rejected not only
because they love order, but because they are incompetent;
disorder is attributed not to the revolutionaries, but to a
natural disaster both are trying to contain. "Are there no
storms where Mathurin lives?" the reader of "Smarh" can hear
Satan asking. The text brackets the problem for a moment,
though it will return to it, and turns instead to a series
of paradoxes: "on assassinait et [...] on vivait [...] on
faisait des livres sur la vertu et [...] l’Etat ne vivait
que de vices splendides [...] on donnait des prix de morale
et [...] il n’y avait de beau que les grands crimes."
Official virtue undercut by secret vice that in fact
sustains it: the idea is reminiscent of Sade,‘*who will soon
be mentioned by name; the notion of the beauty of crime
perhaps originated with him, but had become by 1839 a

Romantic cliché. Sade’s idea of the inherent

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destructiveness of Nature will in fact close Mathurin’s
speech; but although the idea is implied here, the text
contents itself with cutting off Mathurin’s life from the
ambivalence of Nature as it has cut it off from Culture: the
problem of Nature’s destructiveness is irrelevant to
Mathurin’s life: "le soleil pour eux faisait toujours mfirir
leurs raisins [there are never clouds?], les arbres avaient
tout autant de feuilles vertes [there is no winter?]" This
"Nature" is not real; peace, for Mathurin, depends not just
on separation of Culture, but on separation from Nature.
Memories of Smarh’s original image of Nature arise here, as
if asserting themselves despite the text’s denial: leaves,
"la mousse des bois," water. The water is tamed: it has a
cultural (and implicitly erotic) function: "ils [...]
faisaient rafraichir leur vin dans l’eau des lacs." But
taming Nature with Culture has again led to a cliché, that
of Lamartin’s lag, whose very existence functions as a
reminiscence of the poet. Thus Nature, fit for man, at
least within Culture, is trapped in a calm space that denies
both Nature and Culture. The multiply blocked and
controlled sea will burst forth in a torrent at the end of
Mathurin’s speech.

The narrator claims that Mathurin lives in isolation
of (almost) all forms of social discourse, which it calls
"bruit": "une parole rapportée des villes aurait troublé le
calme de leurs coeurs." Specifically mentioned as excluded

are "ni livres, ni journaux, ni lettres [...] pas un bout de

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politique, pas un fragment de controverse, de philosophie ou
d’histoire," which are called "hochets," and ironically,
"hochets sérieux." Actually, Mathurin’s speech is full of
political and historical references, and it is deeply
philosophical: is discourse possible without response to the
currents of one’s time? The only texts allowed are Horace,
Rabelais, and cookbooks ("toutes les éditions de Brillat-
Savarin"): these, then, are the desired origin of this text;
Byron has been excluded. The text defies the reader to add
to the allowed topics of discussion:

la nature et le vin, que fallait-i1 de plus?

Indiquez-moi donc quelque chose qui surpasse la

beauté d’une belle campagne illuminée soleil et la

volupté d’une amphore pleine d’un vin limpide et

pétillant? et d’abord, quelle qu’elle soit, la

réponse que vous allez faire les aurait fait rire de

pitié, je vous en préviens.
All positions other than the allowed ones are ridiculed in
advance; but the narrative will be no more able to exclude
Romanticism from Mathurin’s text than it has from its own.

Mathurin now awakens, and his discourse begins: he

asks for wine and glasses, and proposes another delay from
his death: "Je suis malade, il n’y a plus de reméde [...]
mais avant j’ai soif, et trés soif..." And this thirst is
not metaphysical, although it is blasphemous (Byronic?
Rabelaisian?): "Je n’ai aucune soif des secours de la
religion ni aucune faim d’hostie." Thus lofty religious
thoughts, which one might expect on the occasion of one’s

death, are brought into contact with the lower bodily

element, as if to clear away their pretensions. Mathurin

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proposes drinking as a sort of secular funeral, as a wake

 

that he would prefer attending: "buvons donc pour nous dire
adieu." Wine here displays signs of the erotic fusion with
Nature: "le vin ruissela a flots" (emphasis added); it also
displays a sign of Rabelaisian excess: "le vin ruissela a

flots pendant vingp heures" (emphasis added). At first
everything unfolds in Neoclassical calm, although the
narrator indicates that this will not last: "D’abord ce fut
une ivresse calme et logique" (emphasis added). For despite
the narrator’s rejection of history, he compares Mathurin’s
bathing his heart in wine to Seneca’s suicidal bath in his
own blood, carnivalized as a blasphemous comparison of the
soul to a wine-skin: "son ame s’en alla droit au Seigneur,
comme une outre pleine de bonheur et de liqueur." And in
the midst of this joyfully chaotic noise of multiple
cultural references, the narrator allows blasphemous
transgression to open up a space of blissful silence: "un
bain d’excellent vin [qui] baigna son coeur dans une
béatitude gpi n’a pas de nom," (emphasis added). Peace is
not the opposite of chaos: one inexorably entails the other.
The narrator now draws a parallel between philosophy
and drinking (despite his earlier assertion that philosophy
is banned from Mathurin’s dwelling): "Quand 1e soleil se
fut baissé, ils avaient déja bu, a trois, quinze bouteilles
de beaune [...] et fait tout un cours de théodicée et de
métaphysique." This image of Rabelaisian excess claims the

goal of representing drunken thought, and all of Mathurin’s

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pronouncements must be taken in that spirit; which is to say
that this speech flowing like wine must be read as a chaotic
outpouring and not as a serious disquisition. The reader
must pay attention to the apparently random transitions and
contradictions; it is in the drunken slippage from thought
to thought that the comic significance of the discourse is
revealed.

But first, there is another delay. Mathurin looks
at the night, and the narrator again embarks on a landscape
description. Although a number of elements of the scene
come directly from Pastoral ("Les troupeaux descendaient, et
les clochettes des vaches sonnaient dans les clairiéres"),
the rhythm of this sentence, through studied avoidance of
parallelisms which would draw attention to it as an
artificial construct, presents the illusion of a transparent
language. But the scene is framed by Mathurin’s
consciousness of his own impending death: "Il vit l’astre
s’abaisser pour toujours." Thus the images of animals going
home to sleep, of flowers closing, of the setting sun, must
be read as so many metaphors for death. The scene, in
short, has a message: death is peaceful and natural like
sleep. Likewise, the absence of synesthesia, of ambiguous
pronouns, and of a vision that penetrates Nature,5
represents Mathurin’s passivity and his distance from this
scene, as if he were already distant from life. After a
semicolon, the scene itself becomes active, and a wave of

images that were erotic signs of Man’s fitness for Nature in

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"Smarh" penetrate into the room to touch Mathurin’s body:
"la ppise des nuits s’éleva, et les feuilles des vignes, a
son souffle, battirent sur leur treillage, elle pénétra
jusqu’a eux et rafraichit leurs joues enflammées" (emphasis
added). Here, like the lakes that cool the bottles of
Mathurin and his disciples, Nature is invoked as a calming
influence, as something peacefully erotic that can cool
Rabelaisian drunkenness. But already Mathurin is pulling
back from Nature as he reads meanings into it. And in any
event, breezes often make fires burn hotter.

When Mathurin begins again to speak, his discourse
displays what will be the final image of the work: a
disappearance, and a flow: "adieu! demain, je ne verrai
plus ce soleil, dont les rayons éclaireront mon tombeau,
puis ses ruines, et sans jamais venir a moi. Les ondes
couleront toujours [...]" The rays of the sun (reason) will
not reach the primal chaos where he will be buried; even
memorials to him will gradually dissipate as time moves on
like a river, one of the images in Smarh’s initial vision of
Nature. In a parody of reason, death is mentioned in the
same breath with life ("j’ai vécu, pourquoi ne pas mourir"):
the image is Rabelaisian, carnivalesque. The destructive
power of time is here envisioned as the image of all things
flowing, so that life is envisioned not as an "organisation
multiple" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:221) disputed between order
and disorder and ending in a shipwreck, but as a flow which

can be peaceful: "La vie est un fleuve, la mienne a coulé

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entre des prairies pleines de fleurs, sous un ciel pur, loin
des tempétes et des nuages, je suis a l’embouchure, je me
jette dans l’Océan, dans l’infini." The result of this view
of structure as flow in time, however, is the image of the
sea as telos. Flow, distant from order and unreason
(tempétes and nuages) leads nonetheless to the image of
Nature as hostile to Man, here reread as the unimportance of
the human: "Est-ce que l’homme est quelque chose de plus
qu’un simple grain de sel de l'Océan," which is expanded to
something subtly Rabelaisian and political: "ou qu’une
bulle de mousse sur le tonneau de l’Electeur?" The proposed
solution for overcoming the telos of destruction at the end
of flow is unconsciousness, which in this text will come to
mean drunkenness: "tout a l’heure, mélé au tout immense et
sans bornes, je n’aurai plus la conscience de mon néant."
Although the notion of flow has the potential of overcoming
the problem of structures breaking down to chaos, the text’s
fear that flow implies nothingness keeps it from seeing that
chaotic breakdown is not inevitable. Thus Mathurin’s
discourse, which, as we will see, will imperfectly attempt
to become pure flow, will end in a Byronic breakdown.

Mathurin’s speech pulls back almost immediately from
the image of fusion that it touched: rejecting the rustling
breeze and its erotic charge ("Adieu donc, vents du soir,
qui soufflez [...] sur les feuilles palpitantes"), because
of time, because of death ("quand les ténebres viennent").

Light-heartedness and calmness in the face of death is

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pushed into the past: "Naguere [...] je passais, riant,
pres des cimetieres [...] je jetais un oeil calme [...]
c’était pour moi un autre monde." Already rigid structures

are breaking the image of flow: life versus death breaks
flow into a contrast, so that bits of life are mingled, but
kept separate from, bits of death. This rigidification of
structures into opposites breaks down the fusion that was
occurring in previous nature descriptions, thus generating
the Other of Pastoral as a macabre landscape: rustling
leaves are present here, but they are those of the "orties
qui croitront sur [...] ma tombe" and of "cyprés [qui]
murmuraient les soupirs des morts"; a bird is present, but
it is a "hibou."6 Even in the midst of this reversal of
Pastoral, a few phrases preserve the memory of the possible
unity of life and death: nettles growing on tombs; trees
giving voice to the dead. But Mathurin is about to die, and

his emotional rejection of death already threatens to become

Byronic: "mes doigts tremblants touchent aux portes de cet
autre monde [...] j’en remue le marteau d’un bras de
colére."

Drunkenness will be the means to keep Byronism at
bay; Mathurin will accept death, provided that he is
unconscious: "Que la mort vienne [...]! elle me prendra
tout endormi [...] sous l’herbe douce du printemps ou sous
la neige des hivers, qu’importe! et mon dernier sourire sera
pour elle, je lui donnerai des baisers pleins de vin, un

coeur plein de vie et qui [...] ne bat plus." The flow of

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wine will be one with the ceaseless flow of the seasons
become indistinguishable, as spring and summer, love,
happiness, and death fuse into one: "Les morts [...] il
s’interrompit pour boire et continua: -- La vie [...]" And
the link between death and life is not only drink, but his,
and the text’s, good-natured self-mockery: "A cette belle
phrase graduée, il s’interrompit pour boire et continua: --
La vie est un festin."

And now the text’s central experiment begins: can
thought, becoming drunken, which is to say Rabelaisian but
also Horatian, find a way out of Byronic despair? Mathurin
first rereads Rabelaisian orgy from a point of view which is
more or less that which saw calm flow as the highest value:
at the feast of life, "les sages" ("Docteur Mathurin,"
1:223) are contrasted to those who gorge themselves, those
who are violent, those who "étourdis des lumieres, du bruit
[...] génés par la cohue" begin to cry. "Les sages," then,
have moderate appetites, are peaceful, are not frightened by
the noise; they "écartent les convives avides, les valets
impudents qui les tiraillent," shunning those who are too
eager, and those of the lower classes who, presumably, have
some reason for bothering them, such as neglected duty; and
they eat "longuement" and "lentement," then die. But is
long, slow, methodic feasting in the midst of an orgy
equivalent to flow? Earlier the text has insisted that
total separation from disorder is necessary for Mathurin’s

happiness; placing Mathurin in the midst of chaos is not

170
enough: the text must find a way to incorporate disorder,
yet remain calm.

The narrator attempts a possible solution: he
describes Mathurin’s voice as a flow, in fact as the flow of
water from a Neoclassic fountain: "Comme l’eau limpide que
la nymphe de marbre laisse tomber murmurante de sa conque
d’albatre, il continua ainsi longtemps de parler."
Mathurin’s voice is described as both serious and sensual
("grave et voluptueuse"), and mingling opposites ("pleine de
cette mélancholie gaie"); that is, as Neoclassical in its
form and as Rabelaisian/carnivalesque in its content; and
his speech is said to be the outpouring of his soul, "comme
l’eau limpide." Thus a circular structure encloses
Mathurin’s voice, which is his soul, creating an oasis of
calm where Horace may enclose Rabelais, where sadness and
joy might coexist. The narrator, in any event, can describe
Mathurin’s speech like this, as he has been able to describe
Nature as peaceful.

The narrator now describes the night as
Neoclassically "pure" and with "pas un bruit"; images from
Smarh’s first vision of Nature also appear: the night is
"bleue" with "étoiles"; there is a "vent"; thus the night is
not only pure, but "amoureuse." The calm space that has
opened up in the middle of Mathurin’s speech makes room for
a description of the beauty of the room lit by candlelight.
Yet something troubles the peace of the night: Mathurin’s

voice, here described as a "bruit." Mathurin's voice can be

171

envisioned as a limpid flow, or as a noise; as fused with
Nature, or troubling it. The text wavers between the two.

The narrator now describes drunkenness in erotic
terms, with parodic Neoclassical imagery. "Vienne donc
cette molle langueur des sens [...]"; Mathurin, rocked
gently as if in a boat on the waves of his drunken senses,
is treated, according to the narrator’s subjunctive desire,
to the erotic imagery of actual nymphs, rising out of his
"draps rougis," stained with blood or wine. This appearance
of erotic desire in the midst of a death scene is
carnivalesque; and this joyful mockery that conflates life
and death, creation and destruction gives rise to the desire
for Nature to become even more beautiful: "que le ciel se
fasse plus étoilé [...] que des clartés d’azur viennent
éclairer les joies de cette agonie, fassent le vent plus
frais, plus embaumant." Ultimately, death becomes, in
desire, an orgasm:7 Wpendant qu’il boit les dernieres
gouttes de la vie; que ses yeux fermés tressaillent comme
sous le plus tendre embrassement"; happiness fuses with
death, peace, and nothingness as the deathbed becomes a
cradle, rocked gently on the flow of eternity: "que tout
soit, pour cet homme, bonheur jusqu’a la mort, paix jusqu’au
néant; que l’éternité ne soit qu’un lit pour le bercer dans
les siecles!"

On one level, despite its comic force, this
invocation of sex and death is very serious, as Rabelaisian

sentiments and carnivalesque fusions meet in a space of

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peace modeled on the Neoclassical. These parodic fusions
with history can be as fertile as Mathurin’s deathbed
couplings with imaginary nymphs. But the wind is making
Mathurin’s teeth chatter; the window is closed, and the orgy
begins again: "le vin tombe par terre, ils jurent, ils
ricanent; cela va devenir horrible, ils vont se mordre."

The threatened violence was a (rather sophomoric) trick the

narrator was playing on the reader: "Ne craignez rien, ils
mordent une poularde grasse." And Mathurin’s speech begins
again: "Mathurin parle politique."

"La démocratie est une bonne chose pour les gens
pauvres et de mauvaise compagnie [...]" Mathurin is
apparently against democracy, although for the excellent
reason that the poor are no fun at parties. It is uncertain
what is the object of satire here: the poor? democracy?
elitism? the reader? Mathurin? Is it reactionary to like
such humor? Is it pépg to ask that question? Although
humor can increase the meta-irony of the text, if it is not
all-inclusive (and can it ever be?), it can seem to state
implicitly that which it does not mock: "on parviendra
peut—étre un jour, hélas! a ce que tous les hommes puissent
boire de la piquette. De ce jour-la, on ne boira plus de
constance." Mathurin imagines the goal of democracy to be
universal drinking; if drinking good wine ceases to be
reserved for the elite, the motivation for drinking well
will be lost. Although Mathurin may be poking fun at the

elite as well as at the poor, he seems to identify with the

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elite. This parodic identification with the forces of
bourgeois reaction whose motivations are vulgar signals that
we are in the realm of the Garcon.8 We should expect, then,
a rapid shifting of opinion among a variety of cliches; and
since we are apparently also in the realm of Rabelais, we
should expect constant undercutting of highflown rhetoric by
references to food and drink. Thus a speech that apparently
was going to attack (parodically? seriously?) the nobles:
"Si les nobles, dont la tyrannie" is subverted by a
distracting reminiscence: "(ils avaient de si bons
cuisiniers!)" which causes Mathurin to lose his place:
"j’en étais donc a la Revolution... Pauvres moines! ils
cultivaient si bien la vigne!" Mathurin’s reactionary
tendencies are apparently inspired by the fact that the
Revolution ruined a lot of good food and drink; and on
principle! Robespierre had the most annoying habit of
culinary and sexual restraint: "Oh! 1e dréle de corps, qui
mangeait de la vache chez un menuisier, et qui est resté pur
au pouvoir [...]" His bad reputation was "bien méritée!"
If he had "ruiné l’Etat, entretenu des maitresses sur les
fonds publics, bu du vin au lieu de répandre du sang, ce
serait un homme justement, dignement vertueux..." Mathurin
feels a common bond with all who enjoy life, even if they
are politically corrupt, and even if their enjoyments
involve things he has decided against for his own reasons:
keeping mistresses, for example. Mathurin can even feel

some sympathy with republicans: Fourier, after all, wrote

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"un bien beau morceau sur l’art culinaire"; and it is always
possible that Washington was a great man, and that Montyon
was "quelque chose de surhumain, de divin, presque de
sur-stupide." Thus Mathurin’s language flies off into the
realm of the ridiculous, apparently parodying its own
apparent intent.

The problem of deciding the worth of a republican is
at root a question of language: "il s’agirait de définir la
vertu avant d’en décerner les prix." But applying clear
language to the task of describing the human soul is
difficult, if not impossible: anybody who could define
virtue "aurait mérité un prix," according to Mathurin. But
first, one must give "une bonne classification," having
previously established it "avec des caractéres tranchés,
nettement exprimés, positifs": clarity in language demands
previous clarity, and so on in a never-ending series; and
clear language is only imperfectly applied to the murkiness
of the human heart: "il lui aurait fallu determiner jusqu'a
quel point l’orgueil entre dans la grandeur, la niaiserie
dans la bienfaisance, marquer la limite précise de l’intérét
et de la vanité." And abstract moral words, like "moralité,
liberté, devoir," are often "incompréhensibles," and when
used together in the same discourse, apt to lead to
paradoxes: "il aurait fallu [...] montrer [...] comme les
hommes sont libres tout en ayant des devoirs, comme ils
peuvent avoir des devoirs puisqu’ils sont libres." The

desire to write a clear moral discourse is undercut by the

175
intractability of language; nonetheless, one might try to
cover up the inherent poverty of such an attempt through
form ("on aurait pu enfermer ca dans une période savante"),
or through the use of historical examples ("il aurait fallu
citer des exemples [...] on soutiendrait [...] que [...]
César [...] Rabelais, Byron, Napoléon et le marquis de Sade
étaient des imbéciles, et que [...] Montyon, l’homme au
manteau bleu [...] étaient des grands hommes, des grands
génies, des Dieux, des étres... Mathurin se mit a rire").
Now it would seem that Mathurin must seriously admire at
least Rabelais; Byron and Napoleon were heroes of the young
Flaubert. As we have seen, even in praising Montyon
Mathurin has been unable to refrain from calling him "sur-
stupide," and it is difficult to believe that he could
consider Caesar other than great, or a nameless nonentity
like "l’homme au manteau bleu" other than mediocre. This
satire is universal in that it attacks language per se; but
when it comes to history or politics, Mathurin is picking
sides. Specifically, what he seems to be attacking is a
discourse which bases itself on Revolution but tries to
maintain stability, that is, a discourse that seeks to cover
up a scandalous disjunction of liberty and duty through
clear distinctions, learned periods, and lengthy historical
discussions.9 Mathurin’s penetrating eye has cut to the
cancer on the soul of this discourse; but he has done so
claiming that clear distinctions are an illusion, because

language is not an instrument capable of understanding human

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motivation. Implicitly, he has undercut his own project.

In the midst of this dismembering of language a name
has come up that was earlier implicit: the Marquis de Sade,
whose name has floated over the comic reversals of vice and
virtue and the erotic dissections. Here, the subtitles of
Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu and Juliette, ou les
prosperités du vice are ironically reversed: "il aurait
fallu [...] s’étendre longuement [...] sur la vertu
récompensée et le vice puni." It is uncertain whether
Flaubert knew Sade in 1839 other than by reputation.10 If
he knew Sade, he might have known Sade’s apology for
universal destruction as natural: "[La nature] ne vit, elle
ne s’entretient, elle ne se perpétue qu’a force de
destructions."ll In any event, Sade as the extreme of Byron
will haunt Mathurin’s speech; universal satire will become a
vision of universal destruction.

Now, in the shadow of Sade and his heirs Melmoth and
Byron, Mathurin’s smile is called "diabolique," yet he is
said to laugh "en éternuant." Laughter that is diabolical
and bored is certainly not what the reader was promised:
"Comme l’eau limpide [...] il continua [...] longtemps de
parler." Yet Mathurin’s speech is indeed water-like in its
flow of endless sentences, swirling around topics and
spreading in all directions, its surface flash masking murky
depths. And it is also Rabelaisian, in its deflating of
pious pretension through contact with the lower bodily

element ("Vive la philanthropie! -- un verre de frappé!").

 

177
But the text is moving in a political direction very unlike
that of "Rabelais," where Flaubert praised Rabelais’s
rebellion against "la vieille société [du moyen age ...]
avec ses tyrannies [...]; le seigneur était encore dans son
donjon, le prétre dans sa riche et grasse abbaye [...]" It
was Rabelais’s laughter which "avec Luther et 93, a abattu
le moyen age." However, the text of "Rabelais" blames the
Revolution for having fostered the material progress that
has contributed to the spiritual poverty of the nineteenth
century: "je ris a mon aise a vos misérables sciences"
("Rabelais," 1:183). Flaubert in "Docteur Mathurin" has
seemed to seek a rapprochement with the scientific spirit of
calm observation; Mathurin himself is a sort of scientist.
Neither Mathurin, nor the narrator, nor Flaubert seem to be
against the rationalism of eighteenth-century thought, but
rather against their desire to elevate the lower classes.
This is the worst sort of reaction, and, as will be seen, it
is this Byronic elitism which contributes to the crumbling
of the project of universal satire at the end of Mathurin’s
speech.

Mathurin now turns to a parodic view of history as
providential ("tout est pour le mieux," "Docteur Mathurin,"
1:223) that could have been inspired by Voltaire. Even the
most horrible massacres of history have resulted in some
good, according to Mathurin; in fact, as he first notes,
history is at root a continuous orgy of sex and violence:

"l’histoire est un science morale par dessus tout, a peu

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pres comme la vue d’une maison de filles et celle d’un
échafaud plein de sang". The slaughtered Hebrews produced
psalms, which "nous admirons comme poésie lyrique"; the
death of Christ produced "an bout de seize siécles, le sujet
d’un beau tableau." The arrogance of the bourgeoisie which
leads it to believe that the most deeply felt monuments of
another culture’s religious experience find their true
destiny by being admired as decoration is surpassed only by
its belief in the perfection of its own civilization: "les
chrétiens, qu’on égorgeait, ne se doutaient pas qu’ils
fondaient une poésie aussi, une société pure et sans tache."
The list of great moments in French civilization ("les
croisades, la Réforme, 93, la philosophie, la philanthropie
qui nourrit les hommes avec des pommes de terre et les
vaches avec des betteraves") is ridiculous not because all
of the items on the list are ridiculous, but because earth-
shaking historical events are claimed as mere precursors to
modern agriculture: greatness is used to elevate the
ordinary, which is to say, the current state of affairs, so
that greatness need never be contemplated or understood.
Likewise, the heterogeneous list that proves material
progress: "la poudre a canon, la guillotine, les bateaux a
vapeur et les tartes a la creme" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:223-
224) is ridiculous because the description that ties them
together ("des inventions utiles," "Docteur Mathurin,"
1:224) applies to each in a different way and raises more

questions than it answers. First, why is "usefulness" an

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important criterion of value? Second, how can instruments
of death like the guillotine be "useful"? What values
presuppose the "usefulness" of gunpowder, or cream pies?
Lumping together all inventions as "useful" begs the
question of their actual purpose and value, and the bétise
that assimilates them to something that is not an invention
at all, but a discovery, "le tonnerre," raises a larger
question: in what way is it any more valid to limit the
significance of a human artifact to a single, undisputed
meaning than it is to include raw, natural forces within the
same limiting concept? To put it another way, since Culture
can never definitively explain itself, can Nature ever be
meaningfully assimilated into Culture’s arbitrary
constructs? Rumbling on the horizon is a dimly-perceived
image of the storm that made Smarh doubt Providence; what
comes into view is an image of scientific dismemberment that
calls into question the purpose of the human body itself:
"ne pouvant plus marcher, on vous conduit a l’hépital, ofi
vous mourez [...], et votre cadavre sert encore aprés vous a
faire dire des bétises sur chaque fibre de votre corps et a
nourrir de jeunes chiens qu’on éléve pour des experiences."
Bourgeois science, which seeks to make everything useful,
loses sight of the difference between guillotines and cream
pies, between execution and pleasure; having forgotten that
the pleasures of the body are ends in themselves (a mistake
that Mathurin is in no danger of making!), science has

become its own end, using the body for the continued

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accumulation of its own knowledge,” and when no more can be
squeezed out of it, reducing it to mere meat to feed
laboratory animals.

The discourse of usefulness that ignores any
questioning of value or purpose is linked to the discourse
of Providence: it is not necessary to understand it, merely
to have "la ferme conviction" that there is one, and also to
believe in "le sens commun des nations." Providence,
usefulness, progress: the notions are linked to the notion
of the immutability of things and their inexorable order;
this is more a form of language than an inherent property of
things themselves. Thus any content can be placed in their
form; for example, that of food and wine: "Le bordeaux se
chauffe toujours... l’ordre des comestibles est des plus
substantiels aux plus légers, celui des boissons des plus
tempérées aux plus fumeuses et aux plus parfumées..." The
purpose of these discourses is coercion: if one desires the
good (and the good is objective, no one may question it),
one must act in a certain way: "si vous voulez qu’une
alouette soit bonne, coupez par le milieu." This coercion
takes the form of forcing verbal habits, patterns of thought
("vous l’avouerez [...] Ayez la ferme conviction [...]").
Language is not just empty; rather than an instrument of
meaning, it is more about obfuscation and control.

But Mathurin does believe in Providence and
progress, in his manner; which is to say, he believes in

Providence and progress in food and drink: "Je crois que le

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soleil fait mfirir le raisin, et qu’un gigot de chevreuil
mariné est une bonne chose..." Belief for him, then, is
based on pleasure. The parodic comparison between the two
"sciences éternelles: la philosophie et la gastronomie"
implicitly degrades the abstract science, which in its long
phrase of vaguely defined terms comes to seem mere noise:
"Il s’agit de savoir si l’éme va se réunir a l’essence
universelle ou si elle reste a part comme individu, et 00
elle va," especially when one of its most undefined terms
("00": what exactly is the meaning of place when one is
discussing immaterial objects?) is taken literally: "ou
elle va, dans quel pays..." The pause after this phrase
(the ellipsis is in the original) leads one to (silent,
empty) reverie... but the phrase does not continue in
abstract speculation, it falls into the concrete: "dans
quel pays... et comment on peut conserver longtemps du
bourgogne." One of these "eternal sciences" is eternally
undecidable, which is to say, very apt for the endless
production of language; the other is eternally pleasurable,
which is to say, very apt for the endless production of
interest, and incidentally, wine. Here, "assis sur le bord
de la tombe" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:223), Mathurin thinks of
life, and of the beyond; and he opts for life. For he
believes in progress, at least when it comes to pleasure:
"Je crois qu’il y a encore une meilleure maniére d’arranger
le homard" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:224); as for people,

"l’education ne perfectionne guére que les chiens quant au

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c6té moral." Mathurin’s use of verbs of belief with
inappropriate nouns taken from the realm of food and drink
parodies belief as empty language and substitutes for it the
more vibrant pursuit of pleasure: "J’ai cru longtemps a
l’eau de Seltz [...] je suis convaincu maintenant de
l’absinthe." Happiness comes not from finding the correct
ideals, but from an attitude toward life that is based on
light-hearted enjoyment and a healthy skepticism:
"l’absinthe [...] est comme la vie: ceux qui ne savent pas
la prendre font la grimace." Thus in response to great
unanswerable questions like: "l’immortalité de l’ame [...]
la recompense et le chétiment," Mathurin answers only "Un
verre de vin! [...] Quelle saveur!" As for the largest,
most abstract question, "Le plan de l’univers, qu’en pensez-
vous?", Mathurin answers that its answer is unknowable: "Et
toi, que penses-tu de l’étoile de Sirius?" Not only are
these larger questions unanswerable, so are more modest
ones, like the meaning of history: "l’histoire méme est un
mensonge réel." What exactly this paradoxical formulation
might mean puzzles one of Mathurin’s disciples; Mathurin
informs him: "Cela veut dire que les faits mentent, qu'ils
sont et qu’ils ne sont plus, que les hommes vivent et
meurent, que l’étre et le néant sont deux faussetés qui n’en
font qu’une, qui est le pegieppe!" (emphasis in original).
This image of ultimate reconciliation beyond all oppositions
is reminiscent of Eastern thought, although whether Flaubert

at this early date had read any Eastern philosophical works

183

or merely absorbed some of their ideas through Romantic
sources is uncertain. In any event, this statement
represents a culmination of the dissection of language that
has developed in the text so far: language has been seen as
based on arbitrary associations between words with no
necessary relation to reality, as essentially empty, as
coercive; now language is seen to be based on stable
oppositions between categories undercut by the instability
of objects in time. Which is to say that structure is seen
as arbitrary because it takes no cognizance of the
diachronic; or that categorical pronouncements are
impossible in the face of death. The solution is the fusion
of opposites, of passing beyond stable structural
oppositions to the model of reality as flee,” which is to
say, as continuity without stable form. It is the denial of
flow that invents the image of destruction as the necessary
counterpart of the fiction of stable form; facts lie because
they come and go. Language is at its best when it is
structured only by conformity to the unstable flow of
reality.

Mathurin’s discourse is a parody of normal speech.
Its blatant discontinuities and moral ambivalence, its self-
contradictions and pretenses, its misuse of words and
inappropriate tone, reveal the actual workings of language,
whose incoherencies are usually covered up by patterns whose
familiarity lulls the mind to sleep. But lest these

insights be taken too seriously, as the final word in the

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text’s dialogue, they are quickly relativized: "—- Je ne
comprends pas, maitre. -- Et moi, encore moins [...] --
Cela est bien profond, -- dit Jacques aux trois quarts ivre,
-- et il y a sous ce dernier mot une grande finesse." Is
the reminiscence of Pascalian language ("finesse") the
reason for the mixture of Pascal and Descartes which
follows?

-- N’y a-t-il pas, entre moi et vous deux, entre un

homme et un grain de sable, entre aujourd’hui et

hier, [...] des espaces que la pensée ne peut

mesurer [...]? [...] Ne crois-tu pas quelquefois

que tu n’es plus [...]? [...] T’es-tu pris a douter

de la nature, de la sensation elle-meme? [...]

Palpe-toi bien pour voir si tu existes [...] il y a

la un infini que tu ne sonderas pas.
The image of Man’s helplessness in nature, linked with that
of the ocean: "tu roules dans un gouffre comme l’Ocean," is
here read as an image of the unconsciousness of sleep: "Te
sens—tu dormir?" Thus Mathurin’s discourse, through its
revelation of language as falsifying, has set off a
reinvestment of the destructive power of the ocean that
undercuts the notion of the beauty of uninvested perception.
In "Smarh"’s tale of the child, "Souvent [l’enfant] prenait
du sable plein les mains, il ouvrait les doigts, et il
prenait plasir a voir les rayons de sable partir de
différents c6tés et disparaitre en tourbillonant, en
s’élevant" ("Smarh," 1:214). Sand, which was invested as an
image of the beauty of meaningless flow which is a sign of

the perfect adequation of the human and the natural, here is

reinvested as a sign of the failure of understanding because

185
of matter’s stubborn resistance to the penetration of
vision: "Prends un grain de sable, il y a la un abime a
creuser pendant des siécles." The failure of language
resolves itself as the image of blindness in the face of
chaos, so that fusion with matter is seen as impossible.
The discourse seems blind to the fact that it has only
revealed that fusion with Nature is impossible if the medium
for fusion must be a transparent language; if the opacity of
language is not seen as a barrier, fusion is not impossible.
It is possible to imagine silence producing calm; Mathurin
has lost touch with the voice in the text that imagines
limpid flow.

Mathurin’s discourse makes an attempt to right
itself by remembering its drunken audience, by reimagining
blindness in Rabelaisian terms: "Cela veut dire que l’homme
voit aussi clair en lui et autour de lui que si tu étais
tombé ivre mort au fond d’une barrique de vin plus grande
que l’Atlantique" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:224). But
Rabelaisian joy has been lost; the images of oceans and
alienated blindness thrust the discourse into a Byronic
frenzy. The loss of faith in stable form causes a rupture
in the flow of language; it is as if Mathurin and his
followers, who "ne cass[ent] rien que des bouteilles"
("Docteur Mathurin," 1:222), have bottled up their Romantic
rebellion for too long, and it now spills forth in a torrent
vast as the ocean, as Mathurin’s penetrating vision is

divested of all the calm that so many words have laboriously

186
built up: "ce que l’oeil peut saisir, c’est un horrible
fracas d’une agonie éternelle. Regardez un peu la cataracte
qui tombe [...]" The calm beauty that existed in the
pastoral passages above is undercut by the "truth" of its
opposite: "Soutenir ensuite qu’il y a quelque chose de beau
dans la création [...] Quelle philosophie!" Thus "la
beauté des fleurs" is as ridiculous as "louanges"; the
passage ends in a Rabelaisian list that envisions Nature as
universal destruction: "Regardez un peu la cataracte qui
tombe de la montagne, comme son onde bouillonnante entraine
avec elle les débris de la prairie, le feuillage encore vert
de la forét cassé par les vents, la boue des ruisseaux, le
sang répandu, les chars qui allaient; cela est beau et
superbe." The unexplained leap from Nature to history
("sang [...] chars") is completed by a vision of time as an
endless series of deaths: the further one penetrates, the
more ruins one finds, and in each epoch "d’autres calamités,
d’autres désastres, des ruines fumantes, du sang figé sur la
terre, des ossements broyés sous les pas." This "agonie" is
"sans nom," beyond language. But its emptiness is not
viewed as peaceful; as Mathurin says, "quelle beauté! quelle
horreur! quel abime!"“

This extreme Byronism, which, as I have argued, is
nearly Sadeian, is far from the calm that was promised; what
is perhaps the most surprising thing about this cataclysm in
Mathurin’s speech is that the narrator tells us that

Mathurin at this point is "calme," that "aucun sentiment

 

187
humain ne scintille de sa prunelle." It is difficult to
imagine that this is possible, especially since Mathurin is
also said to be "essoufflé." The narrator seems oblivious
to the fact that Mathurin’s discourse has been anything but
calm despite the text’s claims to the contrary; or perhaps
he is oblivious to the fact that the reader can see through
him.

But soon the narrator acknowledges a change: "Tout
s’agite maintenant [...] Au calme heureux des premieres
libations succédent la fiévre et ses chauds battements,"
(emphasis added). It is as if he were trying to recuperate
his failure in discovering a discourse that is a universal
satire, yet calm, by denying that failure and taking
responsibility for the change; as if he were saying: "No, I
know he seems frenzied, but trust me, he’s calm. All right,
now he’s frenzied." From this point in the text until the
death of Mathurin, the text is an unrelievedly satanic orgy.

The text gives an alternative description of
Mathurin’s discourse, now called the discourse of all three
men:

Si vous les aviez vus ainsi épuiser tout, tarir tout
[no longer do they discover disease; they create
stains], exprimer les saveurs des plus pures
voluptés [? Mathurin was celibate], les parfums de
la vertu et l’enivrement de toutes les chimeres du
coeur, et la politique, et la morale, la religion,
tout passa devant eux et fut salué d’un rire
grotesque et d’une grimace qui leur fit peur
("Docteur Mathurin," 1:225).

The discourse has fallen from the carnivalesque joy imagined

by Flaubert in "Rabelais" to the minor Romantic genre of the

 

188
grotesque; and the joyful ambivalence of
creation/destruction exemplified by Rabelais has here split
in two: frenzied characters are being contemplated by their
scandalized selves. It is as if the narrator has suddenly
allowed figures based on the Romantic revolutionaries in
Mathurin’s political satires to displace the figure of
Mathurin himself.

The narrator’s defensiveness seems to indicate that
he is aware he has failed in his promised depiction of
Mathurin. He directly attacks the reader: "Et pourqoui
pas? si cela vous scandalise, n’allez pas plus loin, je
rapporte les faits." He has projected the reader as the
scandalized bourgeois; presumably he has now taken on the
role of the Romantic rebel, but in the mode of an objective
reporter. He pretends that his failure to invent a calm
laughter is the fault of his characters, as if he stood
apart from them, merely reporting their behavior; but his
characters are within him, and their failure is his. There
is indeed something within the dynamic of the voices that he
has created that causes them to veer off into Romantic
cliché. But there is something within his voice, too, that
leads to the production of cliché, although he denies it.
When the punch that suddenly appears sets fire to the room,
lending a fiery decor to the diabolic scene, the narrator
defensively claims that this is not a cliché, or at least
not as much of a cliché as it could have been: "Il n’y eut

pas de sang avec le punch, comme il arrive dans les romans

189
de dernier ordre";ls and for the first time clearly, fear of
the cliché is revealed as intimately related to disdain for
the people: "dans les romans de dernier ordre et dans les
cabarets ou l’on ne vend que de mauvais vin, et ou le bon
peuple va s’enivrer avec de l’eau—de-vie de cidre." And
having lost sight of his project, the narrator is no longer
able to invent a motivation for joy: "ils rient sans savoir
pourquoi, 1e vin les fait rire."

Mathurin now calls for more drink in a speech that
links it to diabolic flame: "faites brfiler, que cela flambe
et que cela soit chaud, bouillant... casse la bouteille,
buvons a méme!" Yet in the midst of this "fureur de démons
ivres" calm returns, firmly embodied in Nature, and in sharp
contrast to the scene in Mathurin’s bedroom:

une heure sonna, le temps était beau, la lune

brillait au ciel entre le brouillard, la colline

verte, argentée par ses clartés, était calme et

dormeuse, tout dormait. Ils se remirent a boire et

ce fut pis encore; c’était de la frénésie, c’était

une fureur de démons ivres.
Fusion with calm Nature has been completely abjured; despite
his isolation from Culture, Mathurin has completely fused
with it, which is to say, with the cliché.

The final orgy is depicted in a rush of fragmented
bodies, bottles, and wine: "leurs doigts [...] les jambes
[...] la téte [...] le cou [...] les yeux [...] la bouche";
"le goulet [...] le vin." And Mathurin "boit encore" and

willfully, "entre dans le cynisme, il y marchera de toute sa

force, il s’y plonge et il y meurt." Shut off from Nature,

190
Mathurin has escaped from passivity. Yet at the same time,
he has also lost his voice and his vision: "il remue les
lévres machinalement [...] sans articuler aucune parole
[...] il ne distingue rien." Yet he has enough strength to
throw a carafe of wine at the priest when he enters (exactly
why a priest enters is unexplained: Mathurin has said that
he does not want the last rites), staining the priest’s
white surplice and frightening the altar boy. Stains and
outrage are all that Mathurin is still capable of; he utters
"un hurlement de béte fauve; il tord son corps comme un
serpent"; his voice, which the narrator has promised would
flow like pure water, has become sheer wild stupidity,
writhing like a demon. Yet, incredibly, the narrator
assures the reader that Mathurin dies "doucement, heureux."
Pastoral has been reduced to a mere label, a mere figure of
speech, meaningless sounds cynically deployed to cover up
the scandalous collapse of the project of finding a comic
alternative to Byronism. The text will now move through a
carnivalesque catharsis to a new kind of peace, the peace of

the dissolution into meaningless flow.

CHAPTER 5: NATURE, LANGUAGE, AND SILENCE

Despite its promises, the text has found itself
incapable of realizing its desire for a joyful universal
satire. In the first part of the text, the narrator has
moved between scenes of rape and dismemberment and scenes of
pastoral calm, seeking a link through the image of wine and
through Mathurin’s penetrating gaze. Penetration
convincingly elaborated itself as dissection, psychology,
and dispassionate observation; in so doing, it attacked the
prestige of artistic, political, religious, and
philosophical discourses, and, by implication, that of
language itself. The fragmenting gaze opened up a clear
space for calm observation of the Other of language, which
is to say, of Nature. But the rejection of language
conventions led to a double bind. Nature descriptions found
themselves incapable of escaping cliché, and the text itself
seemed unable to function without giving meaning to what it
was describing. The rejection of Culture in Mathurin’s
speech led to a smug superiority to lower social classes, so
that the discourse, despite its claims to universal
rejection, in fact reproduced the politics of the class to
which Mathurin (and Flaubert) belonged. The desire to

expand on the motif of emptiness led into concepts rehashed

191

192

from seventeenth—century philosophers and Romantics, as the
weight of history rushed in to fill the gap. Nature has
been transformed from a place fit for Man into a destructive
chaos, seemingly against the text’s aspirations. Why?

Talking about bricolage, Claude Levi-Strauss points
out that "les éléments que collectionne et utilise le
bricoleur sont ‘précontraints’ [...] la décision [to permute
the set of elements in a particular way] dépend de la
possibilité de permuter un autre élément dans la fonction
vacante, si bien que chaque choix entrainera une
reorganisation complete de la structure, qui ne sera jamais
telle que celle vaguement révée, ni que telle autre, qui
aurait pu lui étre préférée" (29). Thus religion constantly
recurs as an element in Mathurin’s rejections, as a part of
Culture when he is rejecting Culture, as something to be
defiled when he is being diabolical; and yet something dimly
desired when he is pressing up against the limits of the
absolute: Mathurin and his disciples "cherchent la vérité au
fond du verre [...] les yeux au ciel, le goulot dans la
bouche" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:225). Heaven seems secondary
to what is most important in this text (Nature, language);
heaven must be present because it is a part of the
structures that are being manipulated. Likewise emptiness
breeds images of diabolical chaos not because there is a
necessary link between them, but because emptiness is an
element of a discourse Flaubert breathes, that of

Romanticism, in which emptiness is diabolical. But

 

193
emptiness is also associated with other values, in other
discourses: with the impersonality of the objective eye of
science, for example. The whirlwind of contradictions these
competing claims entail blows the solution beyond the edge
of the page... for the moment.

Thus the attempt to capture Nature in the nets of
Culture has resolved itself as the attempt to capture
Nothingness in the nets of Language. The result is
speechlessness and blindness. The impossibility of
resolving the contradiction lies in the very way the problem
has been posed.

Culture is a set of structures inherited from the
past; the creation of a text necessarily involves the
reordering of whatever has been inherited. By positing that
there is an Other distinct from Culture, or an object
distinct from the text, language locks itself in an
impossible struggle to be what it is not: meaningless,
without history, a transparent medium. On the other hand,
by positing that it is something that is not a part of the
natural world, Culture proposes for itself an endless task,
that of finding the precise juncture where Nature stops: at
the edge of the city? at the threshold of the house? where
the mind leaves off and the body begins? just this side of
the libido? at the border of rational consciousness? The
imaginary duality of Nature and Culture proposes a problem
that can be solved only by the rejection of the duality:

there is nothing that is not Nature; or conversely, there is

194

nothing that is not Culture. Any line drawn anywhere
threatens to revive the whole dilemma in all of its
manifestations.1

Despite the narrator’s claims that Mathurin is
separate from the noise of the city and its controversies,
it is evident that he is embedded in Culture: he
philosophizes, he has written books, he (evidently) has read
them. Mathurin carries the city in his mind. And he is
evidently interwoven with the economic order of which the
city is a part: his life of idleness is supported by
servants and peasants, and the calm he enjoys could not
exist were revolutionaries not controlled by the state’s
police. Mathurin rejects the social system that allows his
existence, as he rejects the discourses that allow him to
speak. But Culture is human nature: human beings speak
naturally, and naturally they speak clichés. Thus the
rejection of Culture is the rejection of Nature. In order
for the orgy to proceed uninterrupted, Mathurin must close
the window to block the wind. But the rejection of Nature
this implies leads to an orgy drunk with Romantic clichés,

and Mathurin becomes béte, which is to say that Nature

 

reasserts itself, but as Culture.

An insight of Mathurin’s might provide a way out of
this circular dilemma. He knows he will die, so he yille
it. By choosing the mortality of the body, Mathurin erases
the illusory line between will and matter, life and death.

Were the text able to choose as a singular, original act the

195

fact that it is always already riddled with other discourse,
with the discourse of the Other; were it willing to enter
the discourse that surrounds it and to leave itself open to
all influences without repugnance; were it able to let all
the voices of its time "résonne[r] dans son ame [...] vaste"
("Rabelais," 1:181); it would perhaps find that it had lost
its anguish without losing its own voice.

Perhaps Mathurin’s discourse fails precisely because
it is invented by a character in a fiction, with a given
personality, from a given background. Mathurin is a doctor;
hence he is bourgeois. He has left his practice to move to
the country, where he lives a life of idleness. Thus he is
apparently no longer interested in serving humanity; hence
he is likely to reject philanthropy. His existence depends
on the maintenance of the social order; hence he is likely
to support order and reject Revolution. If the new Rabelais
wants to write a universal satire, he may not be able to do
so as a lyrical outpouring from a fictional character.

On the other hand, the narrator’s discourse, because
of its greater anonymity, its freedom from personality,
class, and personal history, is potentially more able to
open itself up to a multiplicity of influences. In fact,
not only has the narrator’s discourse explored cultural
tendencies as unlike each other as diabolical Romanticism
and pastoral Neoclassicism, it has explored the dissolution
of the distinctions between genders and between leisured

observers and working-class objects of observation. And

196
unsurprisingly, the narrator has been able to give the
reader insights into the failure of Mathurin’s discourse
that read against Mathurin’s own self-interpretation: for
instance, the insight that Mathurin’s drunkenness can be
seen as a failed quest for God.

And so the narrator survives Mathurin. Once
Mathurin is dead, and silent, the narrator can find a use
for his body; not to interpret every fiber of his being
(although others will try), but perhaps to feed young dogs.
For the narrator has not found what he was seeking: a way to
represent death that is unanguished; or, to put it another
way, a way to fuse emptiness with beauty. And so he starts
a new tale:

The disciples take Mathurin’s corpse "dans ses draps
rouges" out of his home and into what Bakhtin calls the
"free and familiar contact" (Dostoevsky, 160) of the
carnival square, which is life ("La vie est un festin,"
"Docteur Mathurin," 1:222): "C’était [...] un jour de féte,
une belle soirée" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:225), and "tout le
monde" has gathered in the streets. The corpse is paraded
down the highway to town, barely being missed by the traffic
("il fallut se garer [...] des charrettes, des voitures, des
chevaux"). The image of a silent corpse in the midst of a
busy street, surrounded by a noisy crowd of mixed social
classes ("la cohue de canailles et d’honnétes gens qui
formaient le convoi de Mathurin") is that of a momento mori,

the skeleton brought into the feast to reveal the feast’s

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vanity. But this corpse reveals vanity by being presented
as a brute fact without explanation: it elicits a number of
discourses from speakers which are incorrect interpretations
of its presence. Which is not to say that no correct
interpretation can be given; in fact, the reader’s
privileged information about Mathurin’s death is what makes
the spectator’s questions and speculations so ridiculous.

This is what death is: an unassimilable absurdity
that interrupts the well-oiled structures of which we make
our lives; it is "that which always exceeds the
interpretations which it provokes."2 The performance
presented to the town by Mathurin’s disciples, which was
scripted by Mathurin himself ("il meurt [...] aprés leur
avoir fait connaitre ses suprémes volontés et ses caprices
par dela le tombeau. Ils obéirent"), presents the
spectators with an unreadable object;3 in their readings of
it, they reveal themselves: "les uns étaient scandalisés,
rouges de colére, furieux; il y en avait aussi qui riaient."

Suddenly the crowd stops, although "on ne sut
pourquoi," as if during a religious procession when "le
prétre stationne a un reposoir"; in fact "ils venaient
d’entrer dans un cabaret." The text moves the reader
through the wondering of the crowd ("on ne sut [...]") to a
proposed explanation ("comme vous la voyez dans les
processions lorsque 1e prétre [...]") that seems to
communicate directly to the reader over the heads of the

crowd; although it is uncertain whether this is to be taken

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as a humorously blasphemous analogy made by the narrator or
as a ridiculous speculation made by someone in the crowd and
reported by the narrator. The reader’s curiosity is piqued
and led astray before it is satisfied ("comme vous la voyez
dans les processions [...] ils venaient d’entrer dans un
cabaret"); the text plays with the reader as the disciples
do with the crowd. A question is posed: "Est-ce que le
mort, par hasard, venait de ressusciter [...]?" which could
have originated with the crowd, with the narrator, or in the
mind of the fictional reader.

This carnival confusion of speaker, point-of-view,
meaning and intention is a strategy Flaubert will develop as
the style indirect libre. Here, it functions as an
ambivalent elevation of Mathurin’s funeral procession to the
parody of a religious service. Yet parody of ritual may
have its ritual aspect; according to Bakhtin, in "ritual
laughter" the most sacred things are "put to shame in order
to force them to renew themselves." "Everything has its
parody, that is, its laughing aspect, for everything is
reborn and renewed through death." This mocking was a part
of Roman funerals, and of festivals relating to "crises in
the life of the sun" (Dostoevsky, 126-127, emphasis in
original): Mathurin’s speech takes place from dusk to dawn,
as does the funeral parade through the town. Thus the
parading of the corpse through the "bouchons, cabarets,
cafés" ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:125) is in a sense what

Bakhtin calls a "decrowning" ritual (Dostoevsky, 127): death

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itself is degraded, purged of its meaning so that it can
find a new meaning.

The ceremony at each stop in the procession is a
parody of communion and baptism, but also of the drinking
party that preceded it: "les philosophes buvaient un petit
verre, et un troisiéme fut répandu sur la téte de Mathurin."
The whole scene is like a ritual passage through the
cacophony of hell on the road to the peace of silence. The
presence of the corpse causes the breakdown of social
exchange ("les voitures ne peuvent plus circuler") and of
the distinction between people and pepee ("on marche sur les
pattes des chiens... et sur les cors des citoyens").
Eventually the disciples begin pouring wine into Mathurin’s
mouth, to which the corpse reacts like an automaton: "On
les voit ouvrir ses lévres et passer du liquide dans sa
bouche, la machoire se referme, les dents tombent les unes
sur les autres et claquent a vide, le gosier avale, et ils
continuent," ("Docteur Mathurin," 1:226). Mathurin has
become matter.4

The corpse now gives rise to a series of questions
that try to place it within a normalizing narrative: if only
the cause of death is known, the fact is less disturbing
(one is reminded of the earlier endless circulation of the
text’s discourse on the reasons for Mathurin’s death:
variously, it was willed; it was caused by disease; it was
chosen; he submitted to it; he was tired of living; he was

on a diet). "Avait-il été écrasé? s’était—il suicidé?

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était-ce un martyr du gouvernement? la victime d’un
assassinat? s’était-il noyé? asphyxié? était-i1 mort d’amour
ou d’indigestion?" This last was one of the "true" reasons
given by the narrator, as if the "truth" itself were merely
another in a series of idle, ignorant speculations.

The text now enters into a series of satires of
specific pypee: in a Sadeian reversal of virtue and vice,
"Un homme tendre ouvrit de suite une souscription, et garda
l’argent." Next, "un moraliste fit une dissertation sur les
funérailles," and his dissertation is supremely beee: it
argues that human beings ought to be buried because moles
are: "il parla au nom de la morale outragée." The blind
ridiculousness of his outrage is matched by the blind bétes
of his example. The crowd is titillated at first by the
fact that he "commencait par des injures"; finally only a
deaf man listens to him. The trickery and foolishness of
public leaders and the shallowness of public response is
matched by those cowardly champions of the people, the
republicans: manufacturing evidence that furthers his
agenda, "un républicain proposa d’ameuter le peuple contre
le roi, parce que le pain était trop cher et que cet homme
venait de mourir de faim; il le proposa si bas que personne
ne l’entendit." The barriers between people and animals are
again broken down: "ameuter."

The disciples now enter a café of "amateurs," and
refusing to answer any questions ("d’ou viennent-ils?

qu’est-ce donc? pourquoi? -- point de réponse"), they lay

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the corpse out on a gaming table ("on le coucha sur une
table de marbre, avec des dominos"), thus linking it with
chance, the operation of fate: "Alors c’est un pari." In a
sense, the corpse is a game of "justice, fate, and chance,"5
a sort of Rorschach blot that judges each character as it
reveals his or her deepest meaning. Thus it is not
surprising that speculations leap from betting to religions:
"ce sont des prétres." But what the corpse reveals about
learned discourse is that it is arbitrary and ignorant as
popular discourse, as it strives to fill in the meaning of
the corpse with particulars for which it has no evidence:
"ce sont des prétres indiens, et c’est comme cela qu’ils
enterrent leurs gens." The unassimilable becomes the
oriental Other, a site of learned but ignorant invention and
controversy: "-- Vous vous trompez, ce sont des Turcs!
-- Mais ils boivent du vin. -- Quel est donc ce rite-la?"
The text suggests a reading of the funeral procession as
religious (wine poured like baptismal water, silent
solemnity), but it is a religious ritual that is profoundly
empty; and that is its deepest significance. The lack of
respect for death evidenced by bringing the corpse into

contact with low characters and situations elicits howls of

protest, even from unbelievers: "Quelle profanation! quelle
horreur! dit un athée." But the spectators’ own lives
undercut their claims for lofty judgement: "Un valet de

bourreau trouva que c’était dégofitant et un voleur soutint

que c’était immoral." Mathurin’s corpse not only brings the

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lofty to the level of the béte, but the wicked to the level

 

of judges: the comic breakdown of social categories caused
by its presence results in a chaos that is political,
intellectual, and moral.

For the presence of the corpse interrupts the normal
flow of traffic, of discourse ("un cordonnier interrompit sa
dissertation sur l’éducation"), and of consumption
("beaucoup furent furieux, car les garcons tardaient a
apporter leurs plateaux"). It also sets off flurries of
discourse, all empty because generated by nothing; from
single words ("un poéte élégiaque [...] osa hasarder le mot
‘ignoble’") to torrents:

Vingt journaux s’en emparerent, et chacun fit 15-
dessus quinze articles a huit colonnes avec des
supplements, on en placarda sur les murs, ils les
applaudissaient, ils les critiquaient, faisaient la
critique de leur critique et des louanges de leur
louange; on en revint a l'évangile, a la morale et a
la religion, sans avoir lu le premier, pratiqué la
seconde ni cru a la derniére; ce fut pour eux une
bonne fortune, car ils avaient eu le courage de
dire, a douze, des sottises a deux, et un d’eux,
méme, alla jusqu’a donner un soufflet a un mort.
Quel dithyrambe sur la littérature, sur la
corruption des romans, sur la décadence du gofit,
l’immoralité des pauvres poétes qui ont du succés!
Quel bonheur pour tout le monde, qu’une aventure
pareille, puisqu’on en tira tant de belles choses,
et, de plus, un vaudeville et un mélodrame, un conte
moral et un roman fantastique!

This discourse is clearly being satirized ("sottises"), in
part because of its commercialism ("fortune") and hypocrisy
("sans avoir [...] pratiqué"), but also because of its
ridiculous expansion ("a douze, des sottises a deux"). This

Rabelaisian flood of endless self-generated language bears

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resemblance to the discourse of Yuk ("des calomnies, des
mensonges, des poésies, des chiméres, des religions, des
parodies," "Smarh," 1:202); and indeed to the fertile
chaotic profusion of Mathurin. The text is in the process
of rejecting such profusion, finding that a universal satire
is better embodied in a discourse whose sources are multiple
and anonymous, and silent about its own positions and
desires, a discourse that offers itself as a mute fact, as a
corpse in the midst of the festival. Which is not to say
that mute presence is ever possible for language: earlier
experiments in "Docteur Mathurin" with language devoid of
significance suggest that it is impossible. The text has
paraded the corpse through the hell of bétise to purge it of
significance: even the most courageous reader, the text
hopes, is now afraid to interpret it, for fear of uttering a
bétise. The text now moves the meaningless corpse out of
the "multiple organization" of the city in search of a
language that can present reality naked.

The solution chosen is that of flow: not the flow of
public opinion or of enraged satire, but the flow of human
motion through the flow of Nature itself. The text
describes the dawn, a new beginning after the chaos of the
city. The description mingles pale light ("blancheurs [...]
pale [...] gris"), coolness ("fraicheur du matin") and sweet
odors ("parfum des foins"), as the disciples enter a path
flowing like a river ("un sentier serpentant comme l’eau").

This image of a serpent implicitly pacifies Mathurin’s

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agony: he too writhed like a serpent, but in agony; the
gentle curves of the path, the trace of a gentle human
interaction with Nature, replace his writhings. The river
like a serpent reflects "Smarh"’s nature descriptions, as do
the images of moss, trembling leaves, and birds. But here,
the specific details are mere synecdoches of the landscape,
with little or no cultural resonance: "bouleaux [...]
tremble [...] peupliers [...]" The gold of the first nature
description of "Docteur Mathurin" has been replaced by
silver, a metal associated with the moon ("la lune devint
pale") and feminine reflectiveness, rather than the
penetrating aggressiveness associated with the gold of the
sun; but also, merely the real color of real aspens in the
pale sunlight of dawn: "le tremble agitait son feuillage
d’argent." Significance and artistic order are here muted,
as if arising naturally and unobtrusively from the scene
observed.

The noise of human activity ("un vague bruit de
chariot dans les chemins creux [...] les pas [...] sur les
herbes foulées") is mingled with Nature and reduced to
sounds, sensory fragments only dimly endowed with a past or

a purpose or with any other human meaning; even the words

used to name them speak of absence: "vague [...] creux
[...] pas." The central image of the text is integrated
with the river’s flow: "des iles [...] leurs bords tapissés

de vignobles descendant jusqu’au rivage, que les flots

venaient baiser avec cette lenteur harmonieuse des ondes qui

205
coulent." The language of this passage, with its long, slow
phrases, which trail out in lengthened harmonious vowels,
reflects the calm flow of Nature: at least for the space of
a sentence, a language has been found which puts Rabelaisian
profusion within Neoclassic calm; a flow has been discovered
which is beautiful, but meaningless. The achievement has
taken place within nature description; the text now attempts
to integrate human activity within its form.

The disciples now stop where Mathurin will be
buried: "entre la forét et le courant, dans la prairie,"
equidistant from dark terror and endless flow, on level
ground, "non loin de la treille [Rabelais] qui jaunissait
[death] an soleil [Horace] et de l’onde [flow] qui murmurait
[meaningless sound] sur le sable caillouteux [dissolution;
matter] de la rive [at the edge of flow]." Now the final
act of Mathurin’s funeral takes place, accompanied by the
harmonious flowing together of the human and the natural.
Fishermen pass, floating with the current of the river;
their collective voice is harmonious but free of specific
meaning ("ils chantaient, et leur voix allait, portée 1e
long de l’eau"); it is integrated with the flowing waters,
which carry it, as it echoes along the banks ("et l’écho en
frappait les coteaux voisins"). The disciples also sing a
"hymne," for this ceremony ie religious, although not in any
traditional way; they sing not to a deity, but to all the
mingled values of the preceding discourse: "au vin, a la

nature, an bonheur, a la mort." Their voices also flow with

206
Nature: "Le vent emportait leurs paroles," and their bodies
are passively integrated with that of their friend and with
the trees (or the grapevine): "les feuilles venaient tomber
sur le cadavre de Mathurin ou sur les cheveux de ses amis."
The grave is not deep and there appears to be no coffin;
Mathurin’s body will flow out gradually and merge with the
elements.6 The only monument placed on his grave is that of
"quelques planches d'une barrique cassée," fragments of past
joy, which can never be reconstructed into a whole, but will
themselves gradually enter the flow of Nature, a process
they have already begun, given their fragmentation and
random emplacement: "quelques planches [...] qui se
trouvaient la, par hasard."

And the disciples drink again, breaking wine bottles
on the grave, so that the flow of drunkenness and
destruction merges with the earth and unites them with
Mathurin’s corpse: "Le vin tomba en bouillons rouges sur la
terre, la terre le but vite et alla porter jusqu’a Mathurin
le souvenir des derniéres saveurs de son existence et
réchauffer sa téte couchée sous la terre" ("Docteur
Mathurin," 1:227). These broken bottles are Mathurin’s
final monument: remembrances of happiness, and, as the
text’s last word has it, signifying emptiness: "elles

rappelaient des joies, et montraient un vide."

CHAPTER 6: THE OEUVRE

"Les Funérailles du docteur Mathurin" has not solved
all of the problems it has posed, but its successes have
been substantial: it has recast the goal of "Rabelais" in a
way that will be endlessly reworked in Flaubert’s mature
works. The new Rabelais must emulate Rabelais’s universal
satire without falling into the trap of Byronic depression;
the mark of Rabelais’s greatness, as Flaubert will say in
1853, is "calme" (5 Louise Colet, [26 aofit 1853]; gepp.
II:417). Pursuing Rabelais’s skepticism leads to the
danger, so well documented here, of merely repeating Byronic
clichés and veering off into frenzy. An antidote for
Romantic agony is sought in emulation of the Neoclassic
tradition; Flaubert will continue to struggle with this
solution throughout his life. For example, in a letter to
Louise Colet of 1852, Flaubert says that the talent for
universal creation of great writers like Rabelais,
Cervantes, Shakespeare and Hugo is often expressed in very
bad style: "Ils n’ont pas besoin de faire du style [...]

ils sont forts en dépit de toutes les fautes, et a cause

d’elles." Having internalized their vision (including the
"fantaisie [...] monstrueuse" of Rabelais), "il faut s’en
séparer pour toujours" and learn "l’art de la forme [...]

207

208
chez les seconds (Horace, La Bruyére, etc.)" (a Louise
Colet, [25 septembre 1852]; gepp. II:164). In the same
letter, Flaubert praises Gautier over Musset for having
"raclé des cordes plus neuves (moins byroniennes)" (gepg.
II:163). Thus form as a way of controlling excess lyricism,
which was a preoccupation during the writing of Madame
Bovary, is posed explicitly in 1852 as it was worked out
implicitly in 1839: Rabelais, purged of Byron, controlled by
Horace and the Neoclassics.

The emulation of Horace has led to pastoral nature
descriptions whose calm space has been used as a contrast to
Rabelaisian excess, but not really fused with them; their
more obvious ornaments (such as nymphs) are as ripe for
satire as are the specific characteristics of any other
discourse, so that sometimes Horace, in Flaubert’s text, has
been dominated by Rabelais. And although Mathurin’s
discourse has been called calm and limpid, its dissection of
pretension has ended up being anything but calm.

As I have argued above, the problems in Mathurin’s
discourse are political: fusion with Nature in isolation
from Culture is impossible; the discovery of a language free
of the weight of history is impossible; separation from
politics is impossible, since the mandarin-like existence
led by Mathurin (or by Flaubert at Croisset) can exist only
through the continuation of existing political dominations.
Fusion with Nature in language implies fusion with language,

and language is always rife with allusions both personal and

209
cultural; cultural meanings are always cliches. Flaubert
has sketched out an image of fusion that overcomes contempt
for the lower classes, although his text has not
convincingly done so. His carnivalesque representation of
people trying to make sense of Mathurin’s corpse has
implicitly leveled animals ("chiens"), commoners
("canaille"), and the upper classes ("citoyens"); it has
shown that the discourses of the people and of the learned

are different, but equally béte; and it has shown that the

 

most heartfelt lyricism of Mathurin’s disciples is no more
or less beautiful than any other human sound when viewed as
meaningless melody ("Des pécheurs [...] chantaient [...]
Eux aussi [les disciples] se mirent a chanter," "Docteur
Mathurin," 1:226). Yet his very use of terms like
"canaille" and his contempt for republicans undercuts any
possible fusion with popular discourse.

The text’s comic fusion with its sources, as it
alternatively emulates and mocks, admires and attacks them,
has already been tentatively extended as a comic fusion with
its characters, as the text experimented with the style
indirect libre when reporting the questions asked about
Mathurin’s corpse; likewise, fusions of narrator, character,
and reader, operated through "vous" and "on," have created
ambiguous spaces of mingling and reversal, notably, of
gender confusion in erotic images of Mathurin’s penetrating
gaze and the fusion of the leisured viewer and the working-

class observed in pastoral description.

210

The desire for fusion with Nature has opened up the
problem of spirituality, although Flaubert seems very
ambivalent about this. In "Rabelais," religion was part of
the old world that had needed to be swept away, yet that
sweeping away had resulted in spiritual poverty. In
"Smarh," the monk and Satan were both defeated by the
laughter of Yuk, although Smarh talked of "cette vaste
harmonie qu’on nomme nature, poésie, Dieu" ("Smarh," 1:215).
In "Docteur Mathurin," religion (or at least Catholicism)
seems of interest mainly as the source of images of comic
degradation; yet, as I have shown, drunkenness is at least
once linked to spiritual longing, and although
interpretations of the meaning of Mathurin’s funeral
procession according to particular religions are satirized
in the text, nonetheless the procession ie rather like a
religious procession: it degrades something before its
sanctification by means of a ritual that involves a song
explicitly called a hymn. For Flaubert, spiritual longing,
expressed as dissolution into nature, will continue to be an
obsession.

Flaubert’s desire for fusion with Nature seems,
according to Bart,1 to have passed through three phases:
before 1845, tenderness toward Nature, tinged with
pantheism; from roughly 1845 to 1870, embarrassment over his
feelings of tenderness and the claim that he prefers art;2
after 1870 until his death in 1880, an acknowledgement of

tenderness, sometimes becoming almost openly erotic. We

211

have seen numerous examples of the tender, erotic regard for
Nature in "Smarh" and "Docteur Mathurin," although even in
1839 this tenderness is already unstable. As Flaubert
becomes more and more embarrassed about his love of Nature,
he occasionally still refers to it, but only in a self-
deprecating manner, such as this, written from Paris in
1862: "Croirais-tu que je m’ennuie de la campagne et que
j’ai envie de voir de la verdure et des fleurs? J’en rougis
de honte. Voila la premiere fois de ma vie que ce sentiment
épicier surgit dans mon ame" (a sa niece Caroline, [6 mai
1862]; geyp. III:214). Note the association of the feeling
of longing for Nature with a despised social class: the
problem with expressing tenderness for Nature is that one
runs the risk of becoming pepe. It was during the 1870’s
that Flaubert noted with astonishment that he had been moved
by Nature: "Tu n’imagines pas comme je deviens ‘amant de la
nature.’ Je regarde le ciel, les arbres et la verdure avec
un plaisir que je n’ai jamais eu. Je voudrais étre vache
pour manger de l’herbe" (a sa niece Caroline, 31 décembre
1876; Conard vii:383-384), and by a Christmas eve ceremony:
"J’ai été cette nuit a la messe, a Sainte Barbe, chez les
bonnes religieuses, ou j’ai conduit Noémie et Mme Chevalier.
Voila! N’est-ce pas d’un beau romantisme? Et je m’y suis
plu beaucoup, pour dire le vrai!..." (a sa niece Caroline,
[25 décembre 1876]; Conard vii:380).

Flaubert’s ambivalence with respect to both Nature

and.religion which, as we have seen, was present already in

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1839, and, as the above passages show, continued in an
attenuated form even in the 1870’s ("je voudrais étre
vache"), ("N’est-ce pas d’un beau romantisme?") reflected in
a comedy which alternatively identifies with and mocks its
sources, characters, objects, and even the writer himself.
Bart’s construction of Flaubert’s life into discrete phases
is not exactly accurate; Flaubert’s relationship to Nature
is better expressed as the shifting relationships between a
number of voices in conflict, in which various voices have
the upper hand in various texts, whether these texts be
literary works, letters, or Flaubert’s own self—image.
Throughout his life, Flaubert’s longed-for fusion with the
Other of language continues to circle around an
embarrassment with bétise.

Flaubert’s quest for a transparent language, then,
is a part of a larger comic dynamic that operates through
reversals, travesties, decrownings, and fluid indeterminacy.
What keeps Flaubert’s comedy from "liberating one from fear"
is his fear of allowing his texts to be seen clearly as a
"great common performance," as the space where the "free and
familiar contact" of all social classes brings about "joy at
change" (Dostoevsky, 160). It is not until the writing of
"La Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier" that Flaubert
felt free to openly fuse with a popular source, thus
overcoming his hatred for the pepe. A brief examination of
some of the most important scenes and themes from some of

the works usually considered to be important parts of

213
Flaubert’s oeuvre can show how, in the light of insights
gained from my reading of "Rabelais," "Smarh," and "Docteur
Mathurin," they can meaningfully be reread as comic.
For most of "Novembre," a single character speaks.
Although this character ardently desires fusion with both
Nature and women, he is by nature passive: "au milieu de

tout je restais sans mouvement [...] aussi inerte qu’une

statue entourée d’un essaim de mouches [...] qui courent sur
son marbre," ("Novembre," 1:254), and he feels superior to
the raging chaos of the world: "En vain [...] l’orage casse

les arbres, les torrents roulent avec les sanglots [...]
j’ai vécu dans une aire élevée [...] Il me vint bien vite
un dégout pour les choses d’ici-bas," ("Novembre," 1:252).
But because of his passivity he is acted on by Nature ("le
soleil [...] dorait mes doigts," "Novembre," 1:253; "L’odeur
des vagues montait jusqu’a moi," "Novembre," 1:256), and
penetrated by the eyes of women ("Comme leurs regards [des
femmes] nous pénétrent," "Novembre," 1:251).

Unsurprisingly, his passivity leads him to be swept away by
torrents of Romantic cliché ("Réver l’amour, c’est tout
réver," "Novembre," 1:257; "Alors la mort m’apparut belle,"
"Novembre," 1:255) of whose banality he is unaware: when he
imagines that all children contemplate suicide (not just all
children reading too many Romantic poets), he universalizes
and eroticizes the thought: "l’homme [...] aime la mort
d’un amour dévorant" ("Novembre," 1:255). He believes that

"C’est une des plus belles choses des amants que les cheveux

214
donnés et échangés," yet is aware that this is far from
original: "Que de belles mains, depuis qu’il y a des nuits,
ont passé a travers les balcons et donné des tresses noires"
("Novembre," 1:263). Ultimately the torrents of Romantic
cliché are literalized: "Emportez—moi, tempétes du Nouveau
Monde, qui déracinez les chénes séculaires et tourmentez les
lacs 00 les serpents se jouent dans les flots!" ("Novembre,"
1:272); the manuscript is finished by another voice who
concludes that the first text stops because its narrator
"n’aura plus rien trouvé a dire," and tells us that the
first narrator died torn between desire for Nature and love
of the city.

In "Novembre," the first narrator seeks authenticity
and cannot find it: his "superiority," which is a cliché,
leads to his drowning in banality. This is profoundly
comic,3 as is the entire event that makes up the core of his
text: the philosophizing in the bedroom of the prostitute,
who is strangely able to speak the same Romantic clichés he
is: "Souvent j’ai eu envie de me tuer" ("Novembre," 1:264).
Born innocent in the country, she was rather precociously
(at ten years old, it seems) erotically aroused by the naked
Christ hanging on a crucifix: "A l’église, je regardais
l’Homme nu étalé sur la croix [...] de sensuels
frémissements me couraient sur la peau" ("Novembre," 1:265).
The woman in "Smarh" was sexually experienced by the age of

nine ("Smarh," 1:188). The prostitute’s favorite readings

are Paul et Virginie, but also les Crimes des Reines

215

("Novembre," 1:265). The narrator is like her: "Tu as donc
souffert quelque chose de semblable?... est-ce que tu es
comme moi?" ("Novembre," 1:269). Ehrhart Linsen points out

that Marie is not only like the narrator: in a sense, she ie
the narrator: "Le narrateur [...] n’a pas aimé Marie,
l’autre, mais seulement son propre moi incarné en elle."‘
Michal Peled Ginsburg notes a similar fusion between the
principal narrator and the second narrator who completes the
tale, as, for example, in the following passage:
Il [the first narrator] pensait sérieusement qu’il y
moins de mal a tuer un homme qu’a faire un enfant: au
premier vous étez la vie [...] mais envers le second,
disait-i1, n’étes-vous pas responsable de toutes les
larmes qu’il versera depuis son berceau jusqu’a sa
tombe? sans vous, il ne serait pas né, et i1 nait,
pourquoi cela? pour votre amusement, non pour le sien a
coup sfir; pour porter votre nom, le nom d’un sot, je
parie? autant vaudrait l’écrire sur un mur ("Novembre,"
1:273, emphasis added).
Who is "je"? For that matter, who is "vous"? The second
narrator? The reader? As Ginsburg points out, "it is
symptomatic that the fusion between narrator and character
occurs in a discussion of birth and murder, creation and
destruction [. . .]"S I would add: and of cliché; for the
multiple travesties and inversions of "Novembre," as
elsewhere in Flaubert’s oeuvre, participate in the
carnivalesque, but also in the fear of banality. Thus the
fertile chaos that on the one hand leaps joyfully forth
toward a "plurality without limit, without end,"6 on the

other hand pulls back in an embarrassed awareness that the

dissolution of boundaries implies loss of distinction.

 

216

Yet for much of the "Novembre," Flaubert limits
himself to a single, coherent voice, that of the first
narrator, who is open only to Romantic ideas and modes of
perception and is thus unable to see either his own
limitations or the absurdity of his encounter. Indeed,
Flaubert has here attempted a comedy so subtle that it is
easy to miss. This is probably why critics have so often
spoken of "Novembre" as a work characterized by careful,
nuanced description and the nostalgic expression of the
author’s own memories. In the absence of a clear
understanding of the relationship between observation,
cliche, and parody in certain of Flaubert’s other juvenilia,
it is all too easy to react merely to the surface of
"Novembre," and to take its claims to authenticity at face
value. This is, of course, a valid reading of "Novembre" in
isolation, or in the context of Flaubert’s oeuvre as it is
usually constructed; I have tried to increase the number of
texts that are taken as canonical in Flaubert’s oeuvre
specifically to make such readings impossible.

All of Flaubert’s works published during his
lifetime show elements that are clearly Rabelaisian, usually
in a dynamic relation to Byronic agony, unually half-hidden
under a veneer of Neoclassic calm, usually engaged in a
struggle for a transparent language free of bétise. In
Madame Bovary, perhaps the most canonical of all of
Flaubert’s works, Emma is unaware of the clichés that rule

her life as much as was the principal narrator of

 

217
"Novembre"; but the carnivalesque interplay of the
extravagant and the banal, the (dead) cultural and the
(living) carnal is here much more visible to the reader,
perhaps because of the text’s openness to a multiplicity of
influences and voices. The greatest achievement of the
novel is the generalization of the style indirect libre: the
complex fusion of the narrator with Emma allows a
simultaneous degradation and elevation of her
consciousness;7 the reader aches for her and laughs at her
at the same time. The Rabelaisian profusion in the
descriptions of Charles’s hat and of the Norman wedding
feast sets the scene for the carnivalesque mixture of comedy
and tragedy in the depiction of Emma, or the carnivalesque
intercutting of discourses in scenes like that of the
comices agricoles, which assimilates prize farm animals to
faithful servants and political hot air to love-smitten
sighs, thus allowing the reader clear awareness of Emma’s
bétise, but also disgust at her victimization. The calm
space of Nature is set as a background to Emma’s textual
excesses, but it is never completely free of her Romantic
imaginings. After the first time she has sex with Rudolphe,
she contemplates the forest: "quelque chose de doux
semblait sortir des arbres..." She drinks in the peaceful
beauty of the scene, but not in detail; and what she gpee
see is immediately transformed by imagination: the sunlight
coming through the trees produces "des taches lumineuses" on

the leaves and on the ground; Emma imagines that they look

218

as if "des colibris, en volant, eussent éparpillé leurs
plumes" (Madame Bovarv, 1:629). In the reverie set off by
the effect of low-angle lighting, Emma hears a Romantic cry
in the distance. That is all, no other perception, no other
openness. Perhaps it is significant that, just before the
seduction, "les feuilles ne remuaient pas" (Madame Bovarv,
1:628): for Emma, Nature does not speak, only language does;
her eye does not penetrate, she is blind. When her Romantic
suicide becomes, to her chagrin, a painful medical ordeal,
she commits sacrilege, a fact the narrator lets us see,
although she is probably unaware of it: "Collant ses lévres
sur le corps de l’Homme-Dieu, elle y déposa de toute sa
force expirante le plus grand baiser d’amour qu’elle efit
jamais donné"; and she dies laughing "d’un rire atroce,
frénétique, désespéré" (Madame Bovary, 1:684). Emma can be
blind, because the narrator can let us see her.

After Emma’s death, Homais and Bournisien continue

the battle of texts that has preoccupied them throughout the

book: "-- Lisez Voltaire! disait l’un, lisez d’Holbach,
lisez l’Encyclopédie! -- Lisez les Lettres de quelques

 

juifs portugais! disait l’autre; lisez la Raison du

Qhristianisme, par Nicolas, ancien magistrat!" (Madame
Bovary, 1:686). Scientific rationalism, the last degraded

heir of the Rabelaisian spirit which has "abattu 1e moyen
age" ("Rabelais," 1:183), is here locked in battle with the
spiritual poverty which masks itself as reason. "Le monde

materiel est pour le mieux [...] Mais l’autre? -- [Le

219
nouveau Rabelais] aurait beau jeu" ("Rabelais," 1:184).
From this point on, Flaubert would construct his
texts as just such a battle of empty language; indeed, at
one point during the composition of Madame Bovapy, he had
already dreamed of writing "un livre sur rien" (3 Louise

Colet, [16 janvier 1852]; Corr. II:31). Turning his back on

 

Nature, Flaubert now plunges into Culture, carefully
constructing complex texts like Salammbo, L’Education
sentimentale, La Tentation de saint Antoine, or Bouvard et
Pécuchet, into which his own voice does not directly enter,
but which maximize cliché in a vertiginous erasure of
sources, what Herschberg-Pierrot calls a "derision de la
citation" (61). The work of maximizing cliché maximizes
bétise, as in the scene at Fontainebleau in L’Edpcation
sentimentale: "tout ce coin de la forét a quelque chose
d’étouffé [...] on pense aux ermites, compagnons des grands
cerfs portant une croix de feu entre leurs cornes, et qui
recevait avec de paternels sourires les bons rois de France,
agenouillés devant leur grotte" (L’Egueetipn sentimeneele,
2:126); "Quelques-uns [des arbes ...] avaient des airs de
patriarches et d’empereurs, ou [...] formaient [...] des
arcs de triomphe, d’autres [...] semblaient des colonnes
pres de tomber" (L;E§eeepipp_eeppimepeele, 2:126). Nature
can only be seen as culture, and ultimately, as politics;
Nature is incapable of opening up a calm space outside of
the noise of the city. The awareness of the imposeipility

of describing Nature in transparent language has been

220
undercut by the the description of the Seine in the first
pages of the book, with its objects and anonymous people
melting together on the steamship floating along the river

that flows past the banks which "filérent comme deux rubans"

 

(L’Educationyeentimentale, 2:8). The seamless circulation
of natural and cultural images ("riviere [...] gréves [...]
trains [...] vagues [...] bateau [...] homme [...] brumes
[...]," L'Education sentimentale, 2:9) is made more fluid by
the repeated imperfects: "arrivaient [...] génaient [...]
répondaient [...] se heurtait [...] montaient [...]"
(L’Education sentimentale, 2:8). In fact, the whole project

of the book is the revelation of history itself as an empty
flow: "C’était le peuple. Il se précipita dans l’escalier,
en secouant a flots vertigineux des tétes nues, des casques,
des bonnets rouges, des baionettes et des épaules [...]
comme un fleuve [...] avec un long mugissement, sous une
impulsion irresistible" (L’Education sentimentale, 2:113).
This image of fragmented body parts and objects floating on
a river whose voice does not communicate, but makes noise
like an animal, is carnivalesque; but the text’s contempt
for the people ("1e peuple [...] brisa, lacera les glaces et
les rideaux [...] Puisqu’on était victorieux, ne fallait-i1
pas s'amuser! La canaille s’affubla ironiquement de
dentelles et de cachemires," L’Education sentimentale,
2:113, emphasis added) keeps the potential joyful relativity
of this scene of decrowning and degradation from realizing

itself. Since the text’s generalization of style indirect

 

 

221
libre makes the attribution of any opinion uncertain, the
question arises of who has contempt for the people.

Frédéric, who is viewing the scene? Hussonet, who satirizes

the text itself by saying " -- Quel mythe! [...] Voila 1e
peuple souverain!" when they see "sur le tréne [...] un
proletaire a barbe noir [...] l’air hilaire et stupide

[...]"? Who thinks the people are stupid? Would Rabelais
disapprove of their antics?

The undecidability of these questions is a function
of the fluidity of the text. The fact that Flaubert
appropriated these hackneyed images and insults from sources
which included popular histories and newspaper accounts8
only displaces the question: did Flaubert feel more contempt
for his popular sources, or for the people itself? The
fusions in this text between author and character,
consciousness and the thing observed, history and fiction
reveal a profoundly comic vision of time itself as a series
of fragmented texts. But running through it like the cry of
Byron is an agony over the bétise of those texts.

It is only in "La Légende de saint Julien
l’Hospitalier," perhaps, where fusion most unambiguously and
joyously takes place. The text is an ironic retelling of a
medieval legend,9 in which Rabelaisian excesses of slaughter
undercut the pious tale; Biasi calls it:

une vie de saint qui n’est que massacres et bains de
sang, abattis insensés de bétes innocentes,
exterminations guerriéres, et qui suit pas a pas la

biographie d’un héros pervers depuis la plus tendre
enfance, dont la plus éclatante action sera

222

finalement d’assassiner au couteau son pére et sa

mere; la rédemption n’intervenant, comme on le sait,

qu'a l’occasion d'une étreinte plus que douteuse ou

le futur Saint doit s’étaler sur la purulente nudité

d’un Lépreux qui lui demande pour cela de se

déshabiller, et qui peut alors, in extremis --

miracle --, prendre les traits rassurants du Sauveur

(Biasi, 78).
Biasi points out that Flaubert wrote the text during a
period of his life when his contempt for the party of order
("La politique devient de plus en plus abrutissante.
Généralement on est exaspéré par l’Ordre moral," a Emile
Zola, 5 octobre [1877]; Conard viii:83; "Quoique sceptique
en cette matiére, je trouve que c’est trop fort! L’Ordre
moral [...] arrive a des degrés fantastiques d’ineptie [...]
Je tacherai de vomir mon venin dans mon livre. Cet espoir
me soulage," a Edmond de Goncourt, [9 octobre 1877]; Conard
viii:84-85) led him to an even greater contempt for the
political role of the Church: "Je suis de plus en plus
dégofité de ce qu’on appelle la religion [...] Quel néant!
et quel aplomb!" (a Mme des Genettes, [mi-février 1879];
Conard viii:203), which was resulting in the repression of
thought: "Au Havre, on a interdit une conference sur la
géologie! Et a Dieppe une autre sur Rabelais! Ce sont la
des crimes" (5 Mme des Genettes, [18 septembre 1877]; Conard
viii:76); "Tant qu’on ne s’inclinera pas devant les
Mandarins, tant que l’Académie des Sciences ne sera pas le
remplacant du Pape, la politique tout entiére, et la société

jusque dans ses racines, ne sera qu'un ramassis de blagues

écoeurantes" (a George Sand, 8 septembre [1871]; Conard

223
vi:281, emphasis in original). In short, "Les mots religion
on catholicisme d’une part, progrés, fraternité, démocratie
de l’autre, ne répondent plus aux exigences spirituelles du
moment" (a George Sand, [décembre 1875, apres le 20]; Conard
vii:282). Flaubert sees the reaction of the Church against
Science as the revival of a voice long since dead, of "tout
un moyen age sombre et terrible [...] avec ses tyrannies
pour les corps, ses entraves pour la pensée [...]"
("Rabelais," 1:183), in short, as a reaction against the
spirit of Rabelais; what better way to fight the repression
than to write a secretly Rabelaisian comic tale that would
nonetheless be accepted even by the Church as pious: "les
Trois contes de ‘ce bon M. Flaubert’ sont recommandés sur la
catalogue d’une librairie catholique, comme pouvant circuler
‘dans les Familles’" (a Mme Brainne, aofit 1877; Conard
siv:24). Like "Smarh," "La mere en permettra la lecture a
sa fille" ("Smarh," 1:186). The joke is played more or less
according to the textual dynamic of "Docteur Mathurin":
Rabelaisian excess, tinged here with Romantic medievalism
("ma petite historiette [religioso-pohétique (sic) et
moyenageusement rococo]," a Mme Brainne, 5 janvier 1876;
Conard siii:234) is controlled by a calm Neoclassic style:
during the composition of "Saint Julien," Flaubert was
reading Voltaire; and also Sade (Biasi, 77). It is as if
the images that poured out of the forest of Fontainebleau
were organized into a text whose calm order only disguised

the fertile disorder of its conception.

224

The text, then, is played out as a complex
relationship to the Romanticism of Flaubert’s youth, so that
the bétise of his sources is undercut by a subtle rewriting
that exaggerates violence under a calm veneer. Yet by
choosing to rewrite a sublimely pepe legend in which a saint
is a murderer, Flaubert, like a secret Gareon, fuses with
what he is mocking. Julien’s destructiveness links him to
the Byronic/Sadeian universal destroyer, the embodiment of
the universal destructiveness associated in "Docteur
Mathurin" with Nature, but also with Mathurin’s iconoclastic
discourse: Nature and Culture here circulate in a
destructive chaos in which they become interchangeable. Yet
Julien becomes passive in relation to Nature like the first
narrator of "Novembre": in the scene just before he murders
his parents, seemingly supernatural animals that cannot be
killed look at Julien with the penetrating eye of Mathurin:
"Une ironie percait dans leurs allures sournoises. Tout en
l’observant au coin de leurs prunelles, ils semblaient
méditer un plan de vengeance" ("Saint Julien," 2:184).
Julien, penetrated by Nature, has become impotent, stripped
of his exaggerated murderous talents; a cliché motivated by

hatred for bétes, he has been ironically penetrated by the

 

pepee’ desire for vengeance. The text has become aware of
what was already dimly present in "Docteur Mathurin": the
rejection of bétise is the elaboration of a Romantic cliché;
destruction of bétise backfires.

Bart10 has argued convincingly that the ultimate

225
source for the image of the animals looking at Julien is a
dream from Flaubert’s youth, in which monkeys surrounded
him: "Je ne sais jamais si c’est moi qui regarde 1e singe
ou le singe qui me regarde [...] Ils me regardaient tous."
One tried to touch him; he shot at it and wounded it; his
mother scolded him: "‘Pourquoi le blesses-tu, ton ami,
qu’est-ce qu’il t’a fait? ne vois-tu pas qu’il t’aime?
Comme il te ressemble!’ Et le singe me regardait. Cela m’a
déchire l’ame et je me suis réveillé... me sentant de la
méme nature que les animaux et fraternisant avec eux d’une
communion toute panthéistique et tendre" ("Voyage en Italie
et en Suisse," 2:460). Bart argues that the embrace with
the leper at the end of "Saint Julien" should be read as "a
tender, fraternal, pantheistic communion with creation"
(Bart, "Julien," 341), an embrace of the sexual beast of
which one is the brother; I would argue that one should not
lose sight of the comic nature of this communion: Flaubert
was well aware in the 1870’s that although he really loved
Nature, his love of Nature was really a cliché. His fusion

with cliché is played out as the fusion with a béte source;

(D)

for his own latent Romanticism makes him, too, b te. And

 

yet, and yet... the comic fusion with a source need not
entail the destruction of the self. As Biasi has shown,
Flaubert’s rewriting of Langlois’s description of the
stained-glass window in the Rouen cathedral completely
reverses a fundamental image: the devil in the window has

become Flaubert’s leper/Christ who no longer goes to bed

226

with Julien’s wife, but with Julien himself. The scene
reverses good and evil and confuses gender in a quasi—sexual
embrace in which Julien must overcome his repugnance for the
Other, and which echoes the Savage’s muderous embrace of his
prey in "Smarh": "-- Déshabille-toi, pour que j’aie la
chaleur de ton corps! [...] i1 sentait contre sa cuisse la
peau du Lépreux, plus froide qu’un serpent et rude comme une
lime [...] Julien s’étala dessus completement, bouche
contre bouche, poitrine contre poitrine [...] et Julien
monta vers les espaces bleus, face a face avec Notre
Seigneur Jésus, qui l’emportait dans le ciel" ("Saint
Julien," 2:187). Flaubert has operated a comic
restructuring of a saint’s life; his bricolage of its
elements has allowed him his own voice. A tale about
hospitality has become a complex parable of the embrace of
the béte beyond repugnance. It is the textual exemplum of a
fusion with Culture that is also a fusion with Nature, a
transformation of destruction into the endless creation of
new forms:

le pouvoir de détruire n’est pas accordé a l’homme,

il a tout au plus celui de varier des formes, mais

il n’a pas celui de les anéantir ; or toute forme

est égale aux yeux de la nature, rien ne se perd

dans le creuset immense ou ses variations

s’exécutent, toutes les portions de matiére qui s’y

jettent se renouvellent incessamment sous d’autres

formes et quelles que soient nos actions en ce

genre, aucune ne l’offense directement, aucune ne

saurait l’outrager; nos destructions raniment son

pouvoir, elles entretiennent son énergie mais aucune

ne l’atténue.11

The text ends with a stained-glass window: "Et voila

227
l’histoire de saint Julien l’Hospitalier, telle a peu pres
qu’on la trouve, sur un vitrail d’église, dans mon pays"
("Saint Julien," 2:187). The window has been broken, as
surely as the wine-bottles on Mathurin’s grave or the
windows in the crumbling cathedral in "Smarh." Yet
Flaubert, finally, has owned it ("mon pays"): it shows not

only a void, but a void which has been filled.

CONCLUSION

My "strategic intervention in the discourse about
Flaubert" (above, 13) has moved far beyond its original
project of reversing the unstable hierarchy of comedy and
tragedy in Flaubert’s texts, arriving at the vision of a
fusion beyond opposition that is much more than "une
neutralisation [...] au-dela des oppositions [...] dans la
simple forme du pi/pi" (Derrida, 57, emphasis in original).
My desire to write "as close[ly] as possible to the reading
process" (above, 16) has led me to identify a number of
voices I had not foreseen, and to see meanings that extend
far beyond the simple reversal I had intended. I had
envisioned bringing to the surface two voices, those of
Byron and of Rabelais. But as I wrote, the text’s plurality
spread out nearly uncontrollably, with numerous echoes
suggesting themselves in texts previous to, contemporary
with, and subsequent to the texts I was reading.

Roland Barthes in SA; has shown how a similar sort
of reading can produce a plural in a text that tries to
present itself as unified:

Interpreter un texte, ce n’est pas lui donner un
sens (plus ou moins fondé, plus ou moins libre),
c’est au contraire apprécier de quel pluriel il est

fait [...] Dans ce texte idéal, les réseaux sont
multiples et jouent entre eux [...] ce texte est une

228

229
galaxie de signifiants, non une structure de
signifies; il n’a pas de commencement; il est

reversible; on y accede par plusieurs entrées dont
aucune ne peut étre a coup sfir déclarée principale;

\

les codes qu’il mobilise se profilent a perte de
vue, ils sont indécidables (le sens n’y est jamais
soumis a un principe de décision, sinon par coup de
dés)" (SZZ, 11-12, emphasis in original).
Interpretation can produce revolution in a text that tries
to produce the illusion of stability; conversely, according
to Bakhtin, interpretation can produce the illusion of unity
and closure in a text that is open-ended and multiple:
Monologization [attempts] to squeeze the artist’s
[. . .] plurality of consciousness into the
systematically monologic framework of a single
worldview [. . . Critics] surgically remov[e]
ideological theses, which they either arrang[e] in a
dynamic dialectical series or juxtapos[e] to one
another as absolute and irreducible antinomies. The
interaction of several [voices is] replaced by an
interrelationship of ideas, thoughts, and attitudes
gravitating toward a single consciousness
(Dostoevskv, 9).

Despite the fact that Flaubert’s texts are "a
polyphony of battling and internally divided voices,"1
numerous critics have been content to monologize them.
Already in 1908, E. W. Fischer claimed that "Les
Funérailles, like the other juvenilia, merely "donne encore
une fois la preuve d’un profond scepticisme"2; Shanks read
the broken bottles on Mathurin’s grave as symbolizing "the
ruins he had acclaimed" (3); more recently, Antoine Naaman
has asserted that "[les Funérailles] préch[e] la sérénité
devant la mort, ce long sommeil."3 As I have shown,

Mathurin preached skepticism, as well as destruction, as

well as peace; although fragments could be picked out of the

230
text to support Fischer’s, Shanks’s, Naaman’s, or any number
of other theses, I have been content to let the voices
audible in Flaubert's texts multiply, even if their fertile
profusion pushed into ground unforeseen in my original
project.

My complete reading of the text of "Rabelais" has
shown that the Rabelaisian voice in Flaubert’s works was
struggling as early as 1838 to become distinct from
Romantic, Byronic voices: there are Byronic statements in
"Rabelais," but there are also Rabelaisian emulations, and
ultimately a call for a new voice that can surpass Byron to
become a Rabelais for the nineteenth century. A careful
reading of "Smarh" has shown the struggle between Byronic
and Rabelaisian voices which take place on the level of
language, as each tries to invest images with its own
meaning. My reading of "Les Funérailles" has shown the
dynamic relationship in this text between a variety of
Romantic, Neoclassical, and Rabelaisian voices in conflict
as the implied author, narrator, and main character
parodically perform inherited discourses in an ambivalent
carnivalesque travesty.

Since my reading has been an intervention in an
existing discourse with existing rules, I have to my dismay
found myself required to participate too often in practices
I deplore: extensive quotations from the correspondence, as
if it contained the "truth" about Flaubert; texts

dismembered to supply quotations; authorities cited as if

231
their status were different from that of any other text.
Perhaps this aspect of my method has failed because there
was a contradiction within my project: interventions must
operate according to the conventions of the system they are
disrupting; the conventions of the present system do not
normally allow one to read texts whole and polyphonically,
without hierarchies or authorities.

Yet maybe a complex and contradictory method was
completely appropriate. By putting a text as multiple as
"Les Funérailles" at the center of my reading of Flaubert,
then letting the text suggest as many routes as possible
into the surrounding discourse and following these routes no
matter how much they meandered, I have perhaps increased the
number of voices audible in Flaubert's other texts, even
texts as allegedly "autobiographical" (i.e. expressive,
truthful, transparent) as "Novembre." Rather than
revealing, as I had hoped, as simple a thing as the "comic"
in Flaubert, I have found an abyss within his texts whose
chaotic complexity cannot be summarized in a brief formula.
Yet perhaps this is appropriate for an author who had so
much respect for complexity that he felt contempt for the
desire to conclude.

Nonetheless, I shall "pay homage to the generic
expectation of closure" (Clark and Holquist, 348) by
appropriating Bakhtin’s closing lines from the last article
he ever wrote, appropriated by Clark and Holquist to end

their book on Bakhtin; let this parodic multiplication of

232
closures stand as a comic monument to the uncontrollable
expansion of new meaning in which death and life merge into
the ever fertile silence of the next blank page:

There is neither a first word nor a last word. The
contexts of dialogue are without limit. They extend
into the deepest past and the most distant future.
Even meanings born in dialogues of the remotest past
will never be finally grasped once and for all, for
they will always be renewed in later dialogue. At
any present moment of the dialogue there are great
masses of forgotten meanings, but these will be
recalled again at a given moment in the dialogue's
later course when it will be given new life. For
nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will
someday have its homecoming festival.‘

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: WRITING CLOSE TO READING:
DIALOGIC CRITICISM

1 "The easiest thing to do would be to make believe
that half of Flaubert did not exist" (Lawrence R. Schehr,
"Salammbo as the Novel of Alterity," Nineteenth-Centupy
French Studies 17.3-4 [1988-9]: 352).

2 Ginsburg has made a similar point: "The
traditional studies of Flaubert’s work are basically of two
kinds: one deals with the entire oeuvre in order to show
Flaubert’s growth as a writer; the other kind aims to show
the thematic unity of the corpus as a whole [. . . Critics
who produce the former kind of studies] always shape their
concept of development according to a certain aesthetic
criterion [. . . Those who produce the latter see] the
unity of the oeuvre in terms of a set of ideas that receive
a more complete and satisfactory expression from one work to
the next" (Michal Peled Ginsburg, Flaubert Writing: A Study
in Narrative Strategies [Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1986], 3-4. Further references to this work will be
in the form Ginsburg, Flaubert Writing, page.

3 Maurice Nadeau, Gustave Flaubert Ecrivain (Paris:
Denoél, 1969), 39.

4 I do not believe, however, that author’s
statements are authoritative as regards interpretations of
works: I shall treat this question later in this chapter.

5 Shoshana Felman, "Gustave Flaubert: folie et
cliché," in her La Folie et la chose littéraire (Paris:
Seuil, 1976), 157-216.

6 Answering questions after his presentation, "Le
Nouveau roman existe-t-il?" at the Colloque de Cerisy in
1971, Jean Ricardou admitted that: "Vous avez raison de
souligner que le roman moderne n’est guére un bloc
monolithique. Il y a lieu de marquer des clivages. C’est
ainsi, pour fixer les idées, que je proposerai un rapide
schéma":

233

234

 

 

 

 

Age classique Age romantique Age moderne
Rhétorique Expression Production
Representation

 

 

 

(Jean Ricardou, "Le Nouveau roman existe-t-il?" in Nouveau
roman: Hier. aujourd’hui, ed. Jean Ricardou and Francoise

Rossum-Guyon, 2 vols. [Paris: 10/18, 1972], 22). Alain
Robbe-Grillet made similar claims about the history of the
novel: "C'est donc tout le langage littéraire qui devrait

changer, qui déja change [...] l’adjectif optique [...]
montre probablement le chemin difficile d’un nouveau art
romanesque" (Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Une voie pour le roman
futur [1956]," in his Pour un nouveau roman [Paris: Minuit,
1963], 23). The temptation to construct a meta-narrative
haunts even the theoreticians of the postmodern, sometimes
at the very moment that they are critiquing the notion: "On
tient pour ‘postmoderne’ l’incrédulité a l’égard des
métarécits. Celle-ci est sans doute un effet du progrés des
sciences" (Jean-Francois Lyotard, La Condition pestmoderne:
Rapport sur le savoir [Paris: Minuit, 1979], 7.

7 "Men [sic] may live more truly and fully in
reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time,
because they are participating in essential being [. . .]
Objective beauty [is] still there [. . .] Human nature
[. . .] remains the same [. . .1" (Allan Bloom, The Closing
of the American Mind [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987],
380); "[In deconstruction and other forms of contemporary
literary criticism,] the notion of enduring ethical
standards has been rendered antiquated [. . .] Yet what is
the goal of liberal education if not the pursuit of truth?
If education cannot teach us to separate truth from
falsehood, beauty from vulgarity, and right from wrong, then
what can it teach us worth knowing?" (Dinesh D’Souza,

Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus
[New York: Macmillan, 1991], 179).

8 Douglas Davis, "Artpolitics: Thoughts Against the
Prevailing Fantasies," in his Artculture: Essays on the
Pestmodern (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 24.

9 These essays may be found in M[ikhail] M. Bakhtin,
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, tr. Vern W. Moelle
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). Further
references to these essays and others printed in the same
volume are noted in the text as Genres. It may seem here as
elsewhere that I am using Bakhtin as an authority, thus
undercutting my project. Let me say in my defense that
quotations from authorities are expected in the present

235

genre; that my ideas were sharpened and focused by my
reading of Bakhtin and Flaubert rather than generated by
them; and that my construction of Bakhtin may have given his
texts a meaning they were never intended to possess. My
experience of reading Bakhtin is that of having hidden
corners of my mind illuminated and given form; it is very
likely that this is a projection of my mind’s process in
illuminating and giving form to obscure corners of Bakhtin’s
texts.

” I acknowledge that I am constructing a Bakhtin
that is not quite the same as Clark and Holquist’s (in
Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984]) or Todorov’s
(in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: le principe dialogigpe
[Paris: Seuil, 1981]). This is partly because I privilege
the late texts collected in Speech Genres (see note 5) and
the chapter on Menippean satire added to the second edition
of Bakhtin’s Problems pf Dospoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and tr.
Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984; further references to this work will be in the form
Dostoevsky, page). Perhaps because these texts were written
after Bakhtin’s rehabilitation, they are more direct and
baldfaced in their opposition to normal critical
preconceptions, and thus I find them more penetrating and
provocative. In any event, my ideas about comedy and about
strong reading and values have developed in contact with
these late texts, and I find it difficult to give them form
without having recourse to Bakhtin’s name. Following his
lead, I have tried to construct a reading that is a
rejoinder, productive of further rereadings of his texts and
others.

” Rainer Warning ("Irony and the ‘Order of
Discourse’ in Flaubert," tr. Michael Morton, New Liperagy
Histopy 13.2 [1981—2]: 235-286) argues that Flaubert created
a new ironic readership that has taken almost a century to
develop; Pierre Bourdieu ("Flaubert’s Point of View," tr.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Critical Ingpipy 14.3
[1987-8]: 539-562) prefers to see Flaubert as the creator of
a position neither Romantic nor Realist that created a new
sociological form of the art world. The task still
confronting literary criticism is to find the reading
methods appropriate for Flaubert’s joyful nihilism, to find
other than a tragic way to read Flaubert’s irony.

” Cf.: "L’auteur, dans son oeuvre, doit étre comme
Dieu dans son univers, présent partout, et visible nulle
part" (Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau,
[3] vols. [4 vols. planned]. [Paris: Gallimard, 1973-
(1991)], 2:204). All references to Flaubert’s
correspondence before 1869 are to this edition; they will be
noted in the form Corr. Vol.:page. References to the

 

236

correspondence after 1868 are to the Conard edition (Gustave
Flaubert, Correspondance: nouvelle édition augmentée.

[Paris: Conard, 1926-19541); they will be noted in the form
Conard vol.:page. In references to volumes of the Conard
Supplement an "s" will be inserted before the volume number,
for example: Conard siii:23.

Using the correspondence at all would seem to stand
in contradiction to the project of liberating the moment of
reading from the control of hierarchically structured
external texts; in my defense, let it be said that I have
always tried to use references to the correspondence either
to argue against hierarchy or to complicate the structure of
the intertext of Flaubert’s work and hence to destabilize
meaning. The present text is an attempt to disrupt the
system that assigns meaning to Flaubert; an unfortunate, if
inevitable, byproduct of that attempt is the continual
reactivation of the modes and systems of meaning—production
that I am trying to surpass. By using the structures of the
present against themselves, one may perhaps cause a local
collapse that makes way for the future.

” My position here is similar to that of Ross
Chambers: "Discourse always has the potential, realized by
reading, to mean other than what it says (it is always open
to interpretation); but also, the act of reading that
produces discourse, in this sense, as ironic, has the power
similarly to produce, within the socially constructed
identity of the reader, an equivalent emergence of otherness
that shifts the nature of readerly desire" (Ross Chambers,
Room for Maneuver [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991],
235, emphasis in original).

“ Given my background in the sciences, the
similarity to the scientific method (hypothesis,
observation, conclusion) is undoubtedly not fortuitous. It
would be possible to link this sort of reading to the
Enlightenment project of direct observation without textual
authority, perhaps via Foucault on Kant, but such a task
lies outside the scope of the present work.

” By "comic" I mean "the victory of summer over
winter [. . . of] our own desires [over] the stumbling and
blinded follies of the world of experience [. . . through]
visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from
‘reality,’ but as the genuine form of the world" (Northrop
Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957], 183-184); by "tragic" I mean the
sense that "merely to exist is to disturb the balance of
nature," that "every birth provokes the return of an
avenging death [. . .] when the wheel of fortune begins its
inevitable cyclical movement downward" (Frye, 213). Life
and death exist together; comedy celebrates the triumph of
rebirth, tragedy the inevitability of death. As will be

237

seen, in Flaubert’s juvenilia the forces of comedy and
tragedy interact in the form of a struggle for dominance
bewteen Rabelais and Byron. I will argue that in Flaubert’s
juvenilia, spring triumphs by revealing as empty the tragic
opposition of the human and the natural; the triumph
operates through what Frye calls "intellectual satire," a
type of irony which "break[s] up the lumber of stereotypes,
fossilized beliefs [. . .] and all other things that impede
the movement [. . .] of society" (233). In Flaubert, comedy
wields irony against tragedy.

Both the comic and the tragic world views are ways
of envisioning death. Tragedy celebrates the death of the
individual as a way of reasserting the "immutable" order of
the world; comedy celebrates death as the scene of rebirth
and the relativization of all possible orders. I call
"tragic," then, the prevalent view of Flaubert’s destruction
of certainty as a loss, rather than as the opening up of a
space for the creation of new forms.

The view that Flaubert is comic is a minority
position, although other critics have advocated it: see, for
example, Girdler B. Fitch’s "The Comic Sense of Flaubert in
the Light of Bergson’s Le Rire," dating from 1940 (PMLA 55
[1940]: 511-530), and Suzanne Hélein-Kloss’s more recent
articles "Le Discours textuel du rire dans Salammbd de
Flaubert" (Symposium 39.3 [1985-6], 177-194) and "Discours
ironique et ironie romantique dans Salammbd de Gustave
Flaubert" (Symposium 40.1 [1986-7]: 16-40). Edouard Maynial
finds elements in even the most agonized of Flaubert’s
juvenilia (such as "Smarh," "Agonies," and "Les Mémoires
d’un fou") that parody Romanticism (see Edouard Maynial, Le
Jeunesse de Flaubert [Paris: Mercure de France, 1913], 299-
303). The majority of critics, like Nadeau (cited above on
page 2) emphasize the blocking of desire by the "blinded
follies of the world" (Frye, 183). I cite, almost at
random: "Petitesses, miséres, prétentions, bétise, routine,
monotonie et ennui" (Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, "Madame
Bovapy par M. Gustave Flaubert," in his Causeriee dp lpndi,
16 vols. [Paris: Garnier, n.d.], 13:348); "le pessimiste qui
fut l’auteur de Madame Bovarv" (Louis Bertrand, Gustave
Flaubert [Paris: Mercure de France, 1912], i);
"L’impossibilité de l’amour comme l’échec de la revolution
de 1848 [...] l’écroulement des réves, des ambitions" (Jean-
Pierre Duquette, Flaubert ou l’architecture du vide: Une
lecture de l’Education sentimentale [Montréal: Presses de
l’Université de Montréal, 1972], 127, 176). I don’t wish to
prolong the echoes of the chorus of critics who bewail the
loss of what Flaubert liberates us from; I prefer to
celebrate the liberation.

 

 

“ Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972),
56-57, emphasis in original.

” The examination of a work as non-canonical as "Les

238

Funérailles du docteur Mathurin" perhaps needs some
justification. As Shoshana Felman states in regard to her
examination of "Les Mémoires d’un fou," "N’est-il pas temps
de tacher de lire [...] ces débauches d’ébauches ou
l’écriture, en marge de l’oeuvre publique, se débat,
s’organise comme travail [...] ofi l’oeuvre se fait éclater?"
(170, emphasis in original). "Les Funérailles" is
fragmentary, tentative; yet it is precisely here, in a
"chaos [...] hors normes," perhaps deliberately "l’anti-
texte d’un systéme canonique" (Claude Duchet, "L’Ecriture de
jeunesse dans le texte flaubertien," Nineteenth Centupy
French Studies 12.3 [1983-4]: 301; Duchet is here talking
about Flaubert’s juvenilia in general), that one can see "ce
qui s’est tu, ce qui s’est tué chez Flaubert pour que les
grands oeuvres se fassent" (Leyla Perrone-Moisés, "L’autre
Flaubert: ‘Quidquid volueris’: l’éducation scripturale,"
Poétigpe 53 [1983]: 110). What Perrone-Moisés finds buried
in "Quidquid volueris" is Romanticism; but what is buried in
"Les Funérailles" is not only Romanticismn and not only, as
I will argue, Rabelais and Neoclassicism, but also that very
fertile chaos of free-floating fragments that will be buried
under the massive and well-wrought silence of Flaubert’s
mature style. In "Les Funérailles," the fragments are
exposed, revealing patterns of conflict that can still be
dimly discerned beneath the surfaces of more canonical
works.

CHAPTER 1: A NEW RABELAIS

1 I am indebted for the following references to H.
Patry’s article "Rabelais et Flaubert" (Revue des études
rabelaisiennes 2[1904]: 27-39), which as far as I have been
able to discern is the only thorough treatment of the
subject.

2 Also René Dumesnil: see his Gustave Flaubert,
l’homme et l’oeuvre, 3e éd. (Paris: Desclée et Brouwer,
1947), 90: "Le Gargon est une abstraction rabelaisienne,"
emphasis in original.

3 The Gareon was a humorous character invented by
Flaubert and his friends in the 1830’s, and played by them
sporadically throughout Flaubert’s life. The Gareon was the
embodiment of bourgeois bétise, but also the rowdy, vulgar
disrupter of bourgeois propriety. Flaubert’s ambiguous
identification with and rejection of the Gareon is typical
of his relationship to his characters, as is the ambiguous
valuation of the Gareon’s pompous stupidity and gleeful
destructiveness.

‘ Jean Bruneau, Les Débute littéraires de Guetave
Flapbert: 1831-1845 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), 151.

239
Henceforth abbreviated Débuts.

5 Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Journal, ed. Robert
Ricatte (Monaco: Editions de l’Imprimerie Nationale, 1956),
3:247-8. Quoted in Débuts, 152.

6 But are they? Both are foundations of bourgeois
consciousness.

7 I am referring to the famous "Madame Bovary, C’est
moi -- D’apres moi," reported by René Descharmes in his

Flaubert: sa vie, son caractére, ses idées avant 1857

(Paris: Ferroud, 1909), 103.

 

8 Perhaps the love-folly of "Memoires d’un fou" and
its heirs is to be seen as a comic display of tragic signs.

9 But also, of course, of fear; as Ernest Seilliere
reminds us: "Le ‘Garcon’, ce fut pour nos collégiens
rouennais une systématisation des tendances bourgeoises
fonciéres qui parlaient en eux la voix de leur hérédité et
de leur education premiere [...] Le Garcon, ce fut cet
ensemble d’idées traditionnelles et bourgeoises, personnifié
par les amis de Gustave et concu par eux tantét comme
purement odieux et grotesque, tantdt comme menacant peut-
étre, comme prét a les ressaisir a la dérobée" (Ernest
Seilliére, Le Romantisme des réalistes [Paris: Plon, 1914],
116-117).

” Gustave Flaubert, "Rabelais," in his Oeuvres
Completes, ed. Bernard Masson, 2 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1964),
1:180-184. Unless noted otherwise, all further references
to Flaubert’s works will be from this edition; they will be
noted in the form Title, volume:page. In close readings,
page numbers will be noted only when the page changes.

” Algernon Coleman, "Some Sources of Flaubert’s
Smarh," Modern Language Notes 40 (1925): 205-215).

” Lewis Piaget Shanks, Flaubert’s Youth: 1821-1845
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1927).

” The connection of truth to violence is what will
lead to the long frustration of Flaubert’s Rabelaisian
tendencies; only when Flaubert learns to stop demanding a
language transparent enough to represent reality without
distortion will he be able to reveal his own voice. As I
will argue, Flaubert’s greatest achievement as an artist was
his ability to slip into the clichéd voices of others in
parodic insincerity.

“ And perhaps an awakening of the senses: the
sadistic eroticism of the process of interpretation will be

240

signalled later, in the discussion of "Smarh."

” "Ici commence une analyse profonde, delicate,
serrée; une dissection cruelle s’entame et ne cessera plus.
Nous entrons dans le coeur de Madame Bovary" (Sainte-Beuve,
13:352). Compare the contemporary caricature by Lemot,
"Flaubert disséquant Madame Bovary," in which Flaubert holds
aloft some internal organ or other on what appears to be a
straight razor. The caricature, which appeared originally
in la Parodie in 1869, has been reproduced, among other
places, in René Dumesnil’s Flaubert: l’homme et l’oeuvre, Be
éd., after p. 224. Flaubert’s view of himself as a
dissector will be discussed later.

“ I will discuss the meaning of corpses for Flaubert
when I talk about "Les Funérailles"; I think my remarks here
are supported by the text, although I have certainly been
influenced by Michel Foucault's discussion of the medical
gaze in La Naissance de la clinigpe: "L’oeil [...] a le
pouvoir de faire venir au jour une vérité qu’il ne recoit
que dans la mesure 00 i1 lui a donné le jour [...] le
solide, l’obscur, la densité des choses closes sur elles-
mémes ont des pouvoirs de vérité qu’ils n’empruntent pas a
la lumiére, mais a la lenteur du regard qui les parcourt,
les contourne et peu a peu les pénetre" (Michel Foucault, Le
Naissance de la clinigpe [Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1963], ix-x). This quasi-sexual ("faiblement
érotisé," x) encounter between a passive body and the
physician’s penetrating gaze is: "[l]’ouverture, premiere
dans l’histoire occidentale, de l’individu concret au
langage de la rationalité" (xi). Flaubert’s quasi-sexual
embrace of his characters takes the form of an
interpenetration of their gaze and his; but whereas medicine
claims to be able to make the truth of the body speak,
Flaubert problematizes the process of the penetrating gaze,
ultimately leaving ambiguous the exact location and nature
of the "truth" about his characters and their world. The
development of Flaubert’s literary process follows the
pattern that Foucault describes for the historical
development of clinical observation: "1. L’alternance des
moments parlés et des moments pereus dans une observation
(112, emphasis in original)." This alternation between
expression and observation, at first followed rigorously in
"Smarh," will gradually interpenetrate in the mature works
as the relation between speech and external reality is
increasingly problematized; as Foucault puts it, the next

stage is: "2. L'effort pour définir une forme statuaire de

correlation entre le regard et le langage (113, emphasis in
original). The ideal is one of a perfect adequation of

language and the thing described, what Foucault calls: "3.
L’idéal d’une description exhaustive [...] Au dessus de
tous ces efforts de la pensée clinique pour définir ses
méthodes et ses normes scientifiques, plane le grand mythe

241

d’un pur Regard qui serait pur Langage: oeil qui parlerait"
(114-115, emphasis in original). As will be seen, this
quest, for Flaubert as much as for the medical profession,
will be lived out as the dismembering of human bodies; but
Flaubert, far from believing naively in the perfect
adequation of language and the observed object, will explore
the ambiguities inherent in that project, ambiguities caused
by the opaque nature of language as well as by the flowing
indeterminacies of matter and experience themselves.

” Edmond Estéve, Bvron et le romantisme francaise,
2e éd. (Paris: Boivin, n.d.); see especially chapter 5: "Le
Déclin (1835-1850)" (247-295).

” Alphonse de Lamartine, "Destinées de la poésie,"
in his Oeuvres choisies, ed. Maurice Levaillant (Paris:
Hatier, 1925), 557-558.

” See Esteve, 270-271.

” See Théophile Gautier, Les Jeunes-France
(Bruxelles: Briard, 1886), xvi.

“ According to the Conard edition: see Gustave
Flaubert, "Rabelais," in his Oeuvres completes, 22 vols.
(Paris: Conard, 1910), 17 (Oeuvres de jeunesse inédites, 2):
149.

” And of "Smarh": I will later analyze at length the
difference between their techniques for orchestrating
various philosophical voices.

” The notion of a carefully worked style, mentioned
earlier in the essay, has been omitted at this point in
order to emphasize Rabelais’s triviality and grossness. Yet
it is this notion of style that will prove to be Flaubert’s
way out of Byronism. "Smarh," which includes Rabelaisian
content in a form and style that is almost never
Rabelaisian, fails as a producer of new work in a way that
"Les Funérailles," which invents a form of writing I have
earlier called drunken thought, does not. This drunken
phough; is a part of the most fertile experiment attempted
in the text, that of seamless flow. Later, Flaubert’s broad
satire will become seamless on the level of style as it
incorporates multifarious sources into a fluid mass of
unattributable points of view.

“ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rebelais and His World, tr.
Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968). Henceforth
abbreviated Rabelais.

” In his discussion of comedy as spring, Northrop
Frye invokes Saturnalia in a way reminiscent of Bakhtin’s

242

theory of carnival as utopia: "the hero’s society is a
Saturnalia, a reversal of social standards which recalls a
golden age" (Frye, 171).

” Although Bakhtin is certainly right that the
Romantic grotesque reduced the fertile, creative aspect of
carnival, he is not right in asserting that this aspect was
completely eliminated by the Romantics: "laughter was cut
down to [. . .] irony" (Rabelais, 38) certainly; but in the
view of Friedrich Schlegel, who is usually credited with
inventing what is now called Romantic irony, the
destructiveness of irony is "a vital step for [. . .]
subsequent re-creation" (Lilian R. Furst, Fictione of
Romantic Irony [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984],
28). The ambivalent creativeness/destructiveness of
Romantic irony is signalled also by Lloyd Bishop: "By
playfully de—creating the forms and myths he has just
created and then re-creating ever new forms and myths, [the
Romantic ironist] is involved in a process of exer-expanding
consciousness" (Lloyd Bishop, Romantic Irony in French
Literature from Diderot to Beckett [Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 1989], 9); he or she is thus a creative
participant in a universe viewed as "infinite, as a dynamic
and creative process of change, becoming, and organic

growth" (Bishop, 15). Ultimately, Romantic irony is
utopian, according to Furst: "the ‘open ideology’, nurtured
by the rising young generation of Romantics, tolerated --
indeed welcomed -- disorder, flux, mystery, and

fragmentariness as the elements of that creative chaos from
which a better new world could be shaped" (Furst, 37).
Bishop rightly points out that Bakhtin’s view of the novel

is very similar to Schlegel’s: "just as it was for
Schlegel, the novel, for Bakhtin, is not a fully developed,
finished, or completed genre [. . .] With its infectious

spirit of renovation the novel’s novelization of the other
genres over which it has become dominant makes them freer
and more flexible in form as they become permeated with
laughter, irony, humor, and self-parody" (Bishop, 206).
Granted, French Romantics tended to hold a negative,
destructive view of this chaos: "French authors of the
Romantic period [. . .] used romantic irony in large measure
for its negative charge" (Bishop, 9); nonetheless, "French
romantic irony [. . .] is a rejection of the tragic mode"
(Bishop, 10). Flaubert, in "Smarh" and "Les Funérailles,"
reinterprets Romanticism’s fertile chaos through the lens of
Rabelais, hence resurrecting the joyful, creative forces
buried in it; yet the destructive side of Romanticism’s
ambivalent attitude toward chaos continually reasserts
itself, threatening to swallow up what has been wrenched
from it. It is not necessary to accept, with Bakhtin and so
many others, Romanticism’s view of this constant struggle
against dissolution as agony; one can insist on seeing it as
a continuously joyful creation. "Il faut imaginer Sisyphe

243

heureux" (Albert Camus, Le Mvthe de Sisyphe, in his Essais,
ed. Roger Quillot and Louis Faucon [Paris: Gallimard, 1965],
198).

” Eric Gans argues that Flaubert’s juvenilia even

before 1838 can be characterized as "the emptying out of
[. . .] Romantic forms" (Eric Gans, The Discoverv of
Illusion: Flaubert’s Early Works. 1835-1837 [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1971], v), as "a process of
negation whereby the Romantic world view, at first accepted
unquestioningly, is eventually discredited and repudiated"
(3). The Romantic rejection of all roles in society entails
also that of the Romantic poet, who "begins to appear not
superior, but actually inferior, to the youthful writer" (9,
emphasis in original).

Gans does not discuss Rabelais at any length, but then
he is writing about only those works composed between 1835
and 1837. Although the epigraph of "Un secret de Philippe
le Prudent" is from Rabelais, Shanks claims that the first
of Flaubert’s works to be importantly influenced by Rabelais

is "Ivre et Mort" of 1838 (see Shanks, 53-56). Indeed, the
epigraph from Rabelais is so cynical it could have come from
a Byronic imitation: "Si on cognoissoit tout ce qui se
passe chez les roys, l’on verrait de bien sales choses et
moult couardises" ("Un secret de Philippe le Prudent,"
1:70); and despite Shanks’s claims, the drunken orgy in
"Ivre et Mort" is unrelievedly frenzied and Byronic: "On

dirait que Satan les pousse [...] aprés la passion, la
frénésie, une frénésie cruelle, effrayante d’atrocité et de
cynisme [...] C’est une orgie [...] sombre, sans cris, sans
femmes, sans clartés" ("Ivre et Mort," 1:178). As I have
said above, it is my opinion that "Les Funérailles," also
from 1838, is the first of Flaubert’s juvenilia to come
fully to grips with Rabelais’s joyful laughter.

CHAPTER 2: "SMARH"

1 Bruneau analyzes the various sources and
influences and concludes that "L’influence de Byron [...]
est fondamentale [...], aussi bien du point de vue
philosophique que du point de vue technique [...] Le Faust
de Goethe semble avoir joué un role moins important"
(Debuts, 205). This seems to me entirely accurate.

 

2 Shanks states categorically that "Yuk is the
Garcon" (87).

3 Mario Praz, in The Romantic Agony, tr. Angus
Davidson (Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Co., 1956)
argues that the Byronic persona was modeled on the mixture
of rebellion and despair that characterizes Milton’s Satan,
as well as on the cruelty of Sade’s heroes. Both elements

244

in turn combine in the figure of Satan as found in French
Romanticism, and in fact influence the whole development of
that movement. Praz’s contention that Flaubert reworked the
Byronic/Sadeian tradition and transformed it will be of
further interest in the next chapter; in "Smarh" the figure
of Satan seems wholly conventional, with only that of Yuk
bearing seeds of transformation.

4 Shanks thinks that "Yuk corrupts [the woman] by
defining [. . .] her half-conscious desires" (79). Indeed,
in Catholic theology, temptation operates "only in
conjunction with [one’s] nature," when an "external stimulus
meets with an internal resonance." This resonance is
ultimately traceable to original sin, but it is given a
particular shape due to each person’s nature (R. H.
Springer, "Temptation," New Catholic Encyclopedia, 18 vols.
[New York: McGraw Hill, 1967], 13:1002). Yet it remains to
be seen whether temptation is always injurious, or whether
it can lead us to break out of outmoded forms and become
more truly ourselves. As Gide says in Prétextes, "les
influences agissent par ressemblance. On les a comparés a
des sortes de miroirs qui nous montreraient, non point ce
que nous sommes déja effectivement, mais ce que nous sommes
d’une facon latante." They reveal to us "une partie de
[nous] inconnue a [nous]-méme[s]" (André Gide, Prétextes,
suivi de Nouveaux prétextes [Paris: Mercure de France,
1963], 12). Whether this awakening is considered to be good
or bad depends on one’s view of the forms of the present; I
view such upheavals as salutary renewals.

5 Most fully developed in Coleridge’s "The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner," in which the murder of an albatross by
the Mariner leads to a season of penance and an ultimate
redemption. The albatross is variously interpreted as an
image of the poet, misunderstood by a hostile world (see
Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge [New York: Macmillan, 1968],
58; Bate attributes this reading to David Perkins) or as the
representative of a pantheistic Nature: "The Mariner
violates the bond of communion between man and the natural
world, a bond restored, or partly restored, when the Mariner
is able to bless the water-snakes" (Bate, 58). There is a
possible relationship to "Saint Julien," especially since
Coleridge’s preface of 1800 identifies the crime as killing
the bird "cruelly and in contempt of the laws of
hospitality" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poetical
Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. [Oxford:
Clarendon, 1912], 1:186). Bate traces the figure of the
Mariner to Romantic heroes like Byron and Faust, "who by
violating laws acquire a depth of experience that others
lack" (57). The image of a Nature, free, unrestrained, and
unattainable, that represents a projection of the ideal Self
that can only be owned through the violation of a taboo, is
an image of Flaubert’s problematic relationship to language:

245

he seeks a language wholly adequate to its object (hence
"natural" or transparent), yet free of cliché (hence hie,
owned, original) as of bétiee (hence not breaking the rules
of logic, syntax, semantics, etc.). To recognize the ideal
Self in the Other is a problem for any writer (indeed, any
user of language), since language is always inherited; that
the solution is fusion with the Other at the risk of the
loss of the independent self was apparently not clearly seen
by Flaubert until the period of the writing of the Trois
Contes, although it is dimly visible already in the
processes at work in "Smarh."

5 Ginsburg has had a similar insight: "[Flaubert]
trusts in the capacity of language to express his
subjectivity and therefore posits an adequacy between the
subject and his language" (Michal Peled Ginsburg,
"Representational Strategies and the Early Works of
Flaubert," Modern Language Notes 98.5 [1983]: 1253; further
references to this work are in the form Ginsburg,
"Representational Strategies," page). This "trust" is not
unproblematic, however; Ginsburg has more recently described
Flaubert’s textual practice as an overcoming of resistance
to the representation of the self, an overcoming expressed
as the gradually dawning awareness that "the self does not
exist prior to its (re)presentation in language" (Ginsburg,
Flaubert Writing, 7). To this I would add: neither does the
world. Raymonde Debray-Genette, analyzing Flaubert’s
descriptions in Par les champs et par les greves, notes that
"le ‘je’ descripteur [...] ne doit jamais s’exclure de son
énonciation"; not, however, because of any inherent
impossibility, but "pour perpétuer 1e bonheur." For her,
the result of this willed presence of the self in language
is a fusion of subject and object: "Le sujet s’absorbe dans
l’objet, sans jamais se résorber, puisqu’il est tout entier
passé dans l’écriture" (Raymonde Debray-Genette, "L’Empire
de la description," Revue d’histoire litteraire de la France
81.4-5 [1981]: 584). Implicit in Debray-Genette’s analysis
is the view of language, self, and object as originally
separate. As I will show in my reading of Les Fpnérailles,
the overcoming of the separation between the subject and the
object in language is not a matter of will, but of the
realization that language, world, and self are always
already coextensive, however many versions can be given of
their mutual separation and containment. This is the
greatly more complicated awareness that Flaubert’s texts
repeatedly approach, flee from, and nonetheless always
already embody.

7 By "investment" I mean the creation of resonances
in a particular word or image. These resonances may be
emotional, evaluative, or metaphoric. After a discourse has
set up these resonances, they are dimly felt every time an
image or word is reinvoked. In a conversation, the meaning

246

of these invested images or words is disputed; the battle
may involve all sorts of assertions, concessions or
capitulations. The invested words or images may be invoked
to elicit solidarity or alienation, or to manipulate. I
have been inspired in a general way by Bakhtin’s account of
Dostoevsky’s dialogism in Problems of Dostoevekv’s Poetics,
especially ch. 5, "Discourse in Dostoevsky" (181-269); but I
invented the term and its content gradually evolved during
the writing of this essay.

9 Cf. Saint Julien’s embrace with the leper.
9 Or imaginative.

” This, it seems to me, is an answer to Smarh’s
description of Nature after his awareness of lust was
awakened: Smarh claimed no longer to smell Nature’s perfume.
Yuk suggests the new perfume of lust, the answer he also
gave for the woman’s dissatisfaction with her husband at the
beginning of the text.

” Madame Bovary comes much closer to the ideal of a
laughter that liberates: we are aware from the beginning of
the eroticism underlying Emma’s Romanticism, so that we read
her as foolish rather than as inexplicable. Thus we come to
understand the power of Romanticism, and its danger, in a
detailed, nuanced way that dispels the power of the illusion
without manipulating us into despair; rather, it empowers us
to resist manipulative illusions.

” Flaubert was aware of the cliché linking Byron to
revolution as early as 1835: "Byron ne trouvait rien de
beau comme la liberté [... Il voulait] relever le char de
la Liberté de la fange ou l’avaient enfoncé les tyrans"
("Portrait de Lord Byron," 1:49).

” Louis Goudall in Le Figaro (24 février 1856),
quoted in Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, ed. Claude
Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1:1081.

“ Joseph de Maistre, Considératipns sur la France,
in his Oeuvres completes, 14 vols. (Lyon: Vitte et
Perrussel, 1884-1886), 1:55.

” Joseph de Maistre, Essai sur le principe

générateur des constitutions politigpes, in his Oeuvres
completes, 1:303, emphasis in original.

” Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, ed. Antoine
Adam (Paris: Garnier, 1961), 418.

” "Puissé-je user du glaive et périr par le glaive!/
Saint-Pierre a renié Jésus... il a bien fait!" (Charles

247

Baudelaire, "Le Reniement de saint Pierre," in his Oeuvres
completes, 1:123); "Race de Cain, tes entrailles/ Hurlent le
faim comme un vieux chien [...] / Race de Cain, au ciel
monte,/ Et sur la terre jette Dieu!" (Charles Baudelaire,
"Abel et Cain," in his Oeuvres completes, 1:123); "Toi qui,
pour consoler l’homme fréle qui souffre,/ Nous appris a
méler le salpétre et le soufre,/ O Satan, prends pitié de ma
longue misére!" (Charles Baudelaire, "Les Litanies de
Satan," in his Oeuvres completes, 1:125). This section was
specifically mentioned in the obscenity trial against
Baudelaire as offending "la morale religieuse"
("Requisitoire d’Ernest Pinard," reprinted in Charles
Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, 1:1207); Antoine Adam sees it
as proposing a "révolte contre l’ordre social sous la forme
d’une protestation contre Dieu et sa loi" (notes to Charles
Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, 422).

” In this poem, the poet is inspired by "une voix
que je reconnus bien [...] celle d’un bon Ange, ou d’un bon
Démon" to beat a decrepit beggar, thus teaching him that
"‘celui-la seul est légal d’un autre, qui le prouve, et
celui-la seul est digne de la liberté, qui sait la
conquérir,’" a theory the poet sees verified when the beggar
revolts against his treatment and beats him in return "dru
comme plétre" (Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, I:358-359).

By leaving the inspiration for Revolution ambiguously either
divine or diabolical, although unambiguously beneficial, and
by making the results both liberating for the beggar and
painful for his bourgeois tempter, Baudelaire carnivalizes
the Romantic cliché; in the episode of the beggar in
"Smarh," what is left ambiguous is the appropriate reaction
toward the plight of the poor and, ultimately, toward the
moral value of Revolution itself.

” Seilliére argues that conservative political
opinions expressed even in Flaubert’s correspondence are in
fact performed in the voice of the Gareon (Seilliére, 105-
107). It is the ambiguous attraction/repulsion for
bourgeois opinions, which Seilliére sees as integral to the
performance of the Gareon, that makes it difficult to
pinpoint Flaubert’s attitude toward class politics. This
ambiguity will trouble my analysis of Mathurin’s discourse
in Les Funérailles: the anti-bourgeois attitude that entails
rejection of the cliché of bourgeois order also entails the
rejection of the cliché of philanthropy and hence of
sympathy for the people (further blocked by the people’s
association with bétise). As I will show, it is precisely
this rejection of sympathy as béte that will long keep
Flaubert from consummating a vision of the fusion of Nature
and Culture that is already present in "Les Funérailles."

 

“ It is perhaps significant that the disappearance
of the ego is manifested in the image of disappearing birds:

248

earlier images of birds seem to resonate with an ambivalent
location of the ideal Self in the Other, perhaps because of
an investment inherited from Coleridge: see note 5 of this
chapter.

“ I am using the term "multiple reinvestment" to
refer to the reinvestment of an image by two or more points
of view, so that the image is no longer monovalent, which is
to say that it can no longer be judged monologically. The
result of this process is the internal dialogicization of
the image. Bakhtin calls this double-voicedness
(Dostoevsky, 185-204).

” Max Milner cites the very passage I am analyzing
here as proof that Yuk’s laughter is cynical and sarcastic;
his failure to see the fertile, creative aspects of this
laughter is significant for our understanding of the
recurrent negative evaluation of Flaubert’s comedy. Milner,
in his two-volume study on the Devil in French literature

(Max Milner, Le Diable dans la littérature franeaise de
Cazotte a Baudelaire |1772-1861|, 2 vols. [Paris: Corti,

1960]), interprets the figure of Yuk as deriving from
earlier versions of Satan: "Dédoublé en deux personnages,
Satan lui-méme et Yuk, [...] 1e Tentateur présente des

ressemblances évidentes avec Mephistopheles" (2:219); he
specifically mentions "le dénigrement, le cynisme, [...] le
rire sarcastique" (2:223) of Yuk as deriving from this
figure. Blinded by the sources he recognizes, he fails to
see the Rabelaisian elements that also lie behind Yuk, and
indeed, behind the sardonic laughter of Romantic irony
itself. Breaking up the description of Yuk’s laughter as I
have can reveal bursts of joy escaping from despair; Milner
quotes the description whole (see 2:223), apparently not
noticing details like "inextinguible" or "indestructible"
("Smarh," 1:202). In any event, Milner quite paradoxically
adduces the connection of Yuk to the Gargon as evidence of
Flaubert’s belief in "le malheur fondamental [de]
l’existence" (2:224). Using pieces of texts as examples to
prove one’s thesis promotes (selective) blindness;
fragmenting the pieces and reading them end to end can
provide a new version of the whole.

” And contains in germ a number of key elements of
"Les Funérailles."

“ As Richard says, "On mange beaucoup dans les
romans de Flaubert" (Jean-Pierre Richard, Littérature et
sensation [Paris: Seuil, 1954], 119). Richard links
Flaubert’s appetite for images, food, texts ("Percevoir,
penser [...] c’est donc d’une certaine facon dévorer," 122)
to his love of Rabelais: "Corps énorme, cousin de ces héros
rabélaisiens qu’il aimait tant, Flaubert est devant les
choses comme un géant attablé" (120); Richard interprets

249

this as a desire for fusion with the world ("L’objet se
tient la, devant nous [...] pour le rendre nétre il faudra
le faire entrer en nous, nous pénétrer en lui," 122), an
idea to which I will return in my discussion of the final
passage of "Les Funérailles."

CHAPTER 3: BRICOLAGE AND PENETRATING VISION:
VOICES IN "LES FUNERAILLES DU DOCTEUR MATHURIN"

1 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style
(London: Methuen, 1979), 104.

9 Claude Levi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris:
Plon, 1962), 28.

9 John Clarke, "Style," in Resistance through
Rituals, ed. Stuart Hall and Terry Jefferson (London:
Hutchinson, 1976), 177.

9 See Hebdige (102-112) for examples in youth
culture.

9 Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 91.

9 Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in his
The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 273.
Further references to this article will be in the form
Bakhtin, "Discourse," page.

7 Julia Kristeva, Le Texte du romen (The Hague:
Mouton, 1970), 139-176. Further references to this work
will be in the form Kristeva, Texte, page. According to
Gérard Genette, Kristeva invented the concept of
intertextuality (see Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes [Paris:
Seuil, 1982], 8).

 

9 Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétigpe
(Paris: Seuil, 1974), 340, emphasis in original. Further

references to this work will be in the form Kristeva,
Révolution, page.

9 Kristeva, Texte, 197. Both Dostoevsky and
Rabelais are listed, in Russian.

” Genette, 7, n. 2. In the English edition of Le
Révolution du langage poétigpe, Kristeva herself (or her
translator, Margaret Waller) proposes replacing the term:
"Intertextuality denotes [the] transposition of one (or
several) sign system(s) into another, but since this term
has often been understood in the banal sense of ‘study of

250

sources,’ we prefer the term transposition because it
specifies that the passage from one signifying system to
another demands a new articulation" (Julia Kristeva,
Revolution in Poetic Language, tr. Margaret Waller [New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 59-60, emphasis in
original).

” Compare Flaubert’s statement that "La bétise

consiste a vouloir conclure" (5 Louis Bouilhet, 4 septembre
1850; Corr. I:680).

” And at the level of the word as sound, but that is
beyond the scope of this paper.

” Bruneau says Horace was on the reading list for
the seconde, for Flaubert 1837-1838 (Corr. I:865, n. 5).

“ Or so he said in a letter of 1839 to Ernest
Chevalier: "Vivent les poétes [...] il y a plus de vérité
dans une scene de Shakespeare, dans une ode d’Horace ou
d'Hugo, que dans tout Michelet, tout Montesquieu, tout
Robertson" (a Ernest Chevalier, [31 mai 1839]; Corr. I:45).

” Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave
Flaubert de 1821 a 1857, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1971-
1972), 3:63.

“ She nonetheless foresees "rich rewards for future
scholars brave enough to use [Sartre’s literary-historical
method in the first part of the third volume of L’Idiot]."
Her defense of Sartre hinges on her assertion that "one may
feel (I do myself) that whatever the reality behind the
fact, this is the way in which the literary tradition
appealed to Flaubert. There is at no period of Flaubert’s
life any evidence that he was interested in the socialistic
ideas of Rousseau" (Hazel E. Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 267). Arguing
from feelings and lack of evidence does not give firm ground
to an opinion.

” See Gustave Flaubert, Carnets de travail, ed.
Pierre-Marc de Biasi (Paris: Balland, 1988), 953. Biasi
reproduces a list of books in Flaubert’s personal library at
Croisset made shortly after his death.

” Jules Janin, L’Ane mort et la femme guillepinee

(Paris: Flammarion, 1973), 33.

” See, for example, the letter to Louis Bouilhet of
[20 mars 1860] (Corr. III:82).

 

” See, for example, the edition of the Carnets de
travail mentioned above in n. 10, and Ann

251

Hershberg-Pierrot’s analysis of a scene from L’Edpcation
sentimentale ("Le Travail des stéréotypes dans les
brouillons de la ‘prise des Tuileries’: L’Education
sentimentale, III, 1," in Histoire et langage dans
l’Education sentimentale, ed. Maurice Agulhon [Paris:
Société d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1981], 43-61), which show
how Flaubert painfully documented himself, then laboriously
constructed an anonymous amalgam of his sources.

“ A few other voices are quoted in passing by the
narrator, but these are either historical figures ("Grégoire
VII [...] Jesus-Christ," "Docteur Mathurin," 1:220) or
characters who speak only once and have no existence beyond
their words and a brief epithet ("une historien [...] un
athée [...]," or merely "on," "Docteur Mathurin," 1:226);
for this reason, I don’t consider them substantially
different from the half-formed voices and echoes that flow
through the narrator’s text. The voices of Mathurin’s
disciples are obvious exceptions, but they speak very few
words and are, in fact, nearly indistinguishable: both are
given names only after Mathurin’s death, from which point
they are silent except for a song whose words are not
reported. Other than the narrator, Mathurin is the only
figure who has a fully-developed voice.

” The French translation of Melmoth misspelled the
author’s name as "Mathurin": see Milner, 1:291, n. 12.
Milner posits the influence of Melmoth on Flaubert’s "Réve
d’enfer" of 1837 (2:216-217); he does not analyze "Les
Funérailles."

” See Nilo Idman, Charles Robert Mapurin, His Life

and Works (Helsingfors: Helsingfors Centraltryckeri, 1923),
267.

“ Honoré de Balzac, "Melmoth réconcilié," in his Le
Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, 4 vols. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1970), 9:267-310.

3 Charles Baudelaire, "De l’essence du rire," in his
Oeuvres completes, 2:531.

“ Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 23.

“ Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, or the Confessional of
the Black Penitents (London: Oxford University Press, 1968),
35.

“ Although Shanks (93) is sure that Melmoth is the
source of Dr. Mathurin.

” "L’origine des sources d’un écrivain tel que

252

Flaubert est certes d’un grand intérét mais d’un intérét
moindre cependant que l’usage qu’il fit de ces sources" (G.
M. Mason, Les Ecrits de jeunesse de Flaubert [Paris: Nizet,
1961), 113.

” See, for example, the letter to Louise Colet of [7
juillet 1853]; Corr. II:376.

 

” Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert. 1821-1880: sa
vie, ses romans, son stvle (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 118.

” Benjamin Bart, Flaubert (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse
University Press, 1967), 307. Further references to this
biography will be listed as Bart, Flaubert, page.

” Caroline Commanville, "Souvenirs intimes," Conard
1:xiv.

“ Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 204.

5 Roland Barthes, 812 (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 146.

“ Bruneau, reading Mathurin’s reverence for Nature
and his last wishes, talks about his "épicurisme" (Debuts,
186).

” "Fieschi (Guiseppe), conspirateur corse [...]
trahit a deux reprises Murat, roi de Naples [...] condamné
[...] pour vol et escroquerie, il s’évada et vint a Paris,
00 i1 fut agent secret de la police, puis s’avisa [...] de
faire éclater une ‘machine infernale’ [pour assassiner]
Louis-Philippe [...] 11 y eut de nombreuses victimes." He
was beheaded; he had been pushed into the act by republican
friends, but was not himself a republican (Grand Larousse
encyclopédigpe, 10 vols. [Paris: Larousse, 1961], 4: n.

pag.).

” Writing to Louise Colet about his Dictionnaire des
idées reeues, Flaubert hopes that "une fois qu’on l’aurait
lu on n’osat plus parler, de peur de dire naturellement une
des phrases qui s’y trouvent" (a Louise Colet, [16 décembre
1852]; Corr. II:208-209).

 

” Homoeroticism is only briefly touched in this
text; but "vous" could indeed be Alfred Le Poittevin,
official destinataire of the text: "Prends [ces pages] donc
comme venant de deux choses qui sont a toi: et l’espirit qui
les a concues, et la main qui les a écrites" ("Docteur
Mathurin," 1:220). I have decided not to delve into this
aspect of the text because Le Poittevin’s relationship to
Flaubert will remain obscure as long as their correspondence
remains as censored as it is even in Bruneau’s edition ("The

253

tone of these letters [of Le Poittevin to Flaubert] and the
matters discussed are such that very little of them can ever
be published" [Bart, Flaubert, 752, n. 17]; "Fallait-il
[publier] les lettres d’Alfred Le Poittevin a Flaubert? Il
ne me l’a pas semblé, car ces lettres apportent bien peu a
la connaissance de Flaubert, sauf en ce qui concerne ses
‘écarts de conduite’ a Paris, avant les premieres attaques
de la maladie nerveuse" [Jean Bruneau, Preface, Corr.
I:xx]). But this is specifically why they are of interest.

“ Dennis Porter notes the frequent occurrence of
sadistic dismemberment connected with the male gaze in
Flaubert; he links this with irony: "To see and to know all
there is to know about a woman is to see the ‘reality’ of
mutilation and future decay beneath the lure of the flesh.
The ironist’s ‘N’est-ce que ca?’ masks the satisfaction of
the sadistic as well as the scopic drives" (Dennis Porter,
"The Perverse Traveler: Flaubert’s Vovaqe en Orient,"
L’Esprit Créateur 29.1 [1989]: 33). Porter notes that this
often gives rise to images that "captur[e] the oppositions
of youth and age, female and male, aggression and passivity,
sex and death in a single complex image" (35). However, he
completely misses the joyful, creative aspects of such
images, calling them instead those of a mere "demoraliser"
(35). In his case this appears to be related to his reading
of "the categories of voyeurism and exhibitionism, sadism
and masochism" as well as "homosexuality" and "fetishism" as
"pathological structure[s] of the adult human being that
[result] from the unsatisfactory overcoming of the Oedipus
complex under the threat of castration [in which]
preliminary acts are preferred to the normal [sic] sex act"
(25-26). This is, of course, an oversimplification of
Freudian theory typical of American psychoanalysis; Freud
himself often blamed such tendentious pronouncements on
American puritanism in his letters to his more moralistic
disciples (see Henry Abelove, "Freud, Male Homosexuality,
and the Americans," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader,
ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M.
Halperin [New York: Routledge, 1993], 381-393). Naomi Schor
is guilty of a similar oversimplification when she calls for
a divorce between the undecideability of irony and the
"exclusively male perversion that is fetishism" (Naomi
Schor, "Fetishism and its Ironies," Nineteenth Centugy
French Studies 17.1 [1988]: 96, emphasis added). Irony is
indeed related to the ambivalent acceptance/denial of
dismemberment; but fetishistic fantasies of an
absent/present phallus are not an exclusively male
obsession. As Sue-Ellen Case argues about lesbian butch-
femme sexuality, "the butch proudly displays the possession
of the penis [. . .] to a woman [the femme] who is playing
the role of compensatory castration" through fetishistic
womanly masquerade. Thus two women are displaying fetishes
to each other: "This raises the question of ‘penis, penis,

254

who’s got the penis,’ because there is no referent in sight;
rather the fictions of penis and castration become ironized
and ‘camped up’" (Sue-Ellen Case, "Toward a Butch-Femme
Aesthetic," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry
Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin [New
York: Routledge, 1993], 300). Fetishism is potentially
everywhere because the phallus is nowhere, which is to say
that as a fetish it can belong to anyone. Like drag,
butch-femme "put[s] into question the categories of ‘female'
and ‘male,’ whether they are considered essential or
constructed, biological or cultural"; it is "a way of
describing a space of possibility" (Marjorie Garber, Vesped
Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety [New York:
Routledge, 1992], 10-11). Ironic dismembemberment is
feedom, a place with no boundaries, the carnivalesque space
of endless possibilities, precisely because it puts into
question the authority of the father, whether this is seen
as seriousness, or the weight of history, or the reign of
mutually exclusive dualisms. Previous to the Oedipus
conflict are always already the endless possibilities of the
polymorphous perverse. The ironic generalization of
dismemberment leads to the eruption of a free and
indeterminate space previous to all constructions which I
will later call flow.

CHAPTER 4: NATURE AND CULTURE: THE DEATH OF MATHURIN

1 Perrone-Moisés points out that already in
"Quidquid volueris" Flaubert shows an awareness of the
problem of clichés adhering to descriptive elements. For
instance, near the beginning of the tale, when the narrator
describes: "la lune, a travers les grands ormes, que leurs
branches entr’écartées laissaient apparaitre limpide et
calme," he (or another narrator) complains: "Encore la
lune!"; however, he then ironically justifies the appearance
of the cliché: "mais elle doit nécessairement jouer un grand
r61e, c’est le sine gpa non de tout oeuvre lugubre [...]
mais enfin, ce jour-la, i1 y avait une lune. Pourquoi me
l’éter, ma pauvre lune? 0 ma lune, je t’aime! tu reluis
bien sur le toit escarpé du chateau, tu fais du lac une
large bande d’argent [...]" Having (perhaps purposefully)
gone too far in his lyric effusion, he breaks it off: "Ceci
est bien vieux! mais coupons 15 et revenons a nos moutons,
comme dit Panurge" ("Quidquid volueris," 1:103). The
incapacity of the narrator to avoid cliché in descriptions
shows, according to Perrone-Moisés, that "le cliché, la
bétise ne sont pas les autres de la littérature, mais
intégrent sa matiére méme [...] L’écriture se nourrit des
zones mortes de l’individualité et des débris de la
‘littérature,’ cette superbe momie" (Perrone-Moisés, 121-
122). I would add that the struggle between various voices
in this passage and the reference to Rabelais earn it a

255

place as a precursor to "Les Funérailles": its comic play
with dead literature is a celebration of the creative act,
not a failure.

2 Marie Diamond apparently thinks it is quite
possible: she claims that Jules’s "rejection of the romantic
deformation of reality" in La Premiere Education
sentimentale leads him also to reject the belief "that
language is inadequate to portray reality"; she sees the
episode of the dog as the trigger for Jules’s renewed
insight into the unity of the human and the natural (Marie
Diamond, Flaubert: The Problem of Aesthetic Discontinuity
[Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1975], 88-89). I
agree with her that there is a link, at least in Flaubert,
between the belief in the unity of Man and Nature and the
dream of a transparent language, but I do not believe that
"distortion" is ever avoidable, nor that the inadequacy of
language to "portray" language is problematic. The dynamic
relationship between language, bétise, Nature and Culture is
complex and multidimensional; its ultimate resolution is the
realization that language, whether or not it is transparent,
is a natural part of being human.

9 This is a typical Romantic pose: "Qu’est-ce
qu’une revolution? [...] cela casse beaucoup de carreaux"
(Théophile Gautier, Les Jeune-France, xiv).

4 Flaubert makes a great show of admiring Sade in
the correspondence, although it is unclear whether and when
he actually read him. Flaubert mentions Sade in a letter to
Ernest Chevalier (15 juillet 1839; Corr. I:48) which was
discussed above in connection with Flaubert’s opinion of
Jules Janin. In that letter, Flaubert asks Chevalier for a
copy of a work by Sade. Yet Flaubert had already used an
epigraph from Sade for "Smarh": "La mere en permettra la
lecture a sa fille" ("Smarh," 1:186; see Bruneau, Débuts,
38, n. 118); the words of the epigraph also appear in
slightly altered form ("la mere ne permettra pas...") in a
letter to Ernest Chevalier ([18 mars 1836]; Corr. I:40).

9 The scene is not structured along an axis that
moves from inside to out, as in the earlier pastoral
description when Mathurin was sleeping.

5 Philippe Aries traces the image of the cemetery as
a place of contact with Nature back to the English
preromantics like Thomas Gray, through French nineteenth-
century poets like Delille (whom, it will be remembered,
Flaubert intended to imitate, according to "Smarh"). The
cemetery in this tradition is "un lieu de sérénité et
d’apaisement" associated with the theme "de l’aurea
mediocritas [...] pour exalter les valeurs d’une destinée
obscure, d’un égal éloignement des grandes actions et des

256

crimes" (Philippe Aries, L’homme devant la mort, 2 vols.
[Paris: Seuil, 1977], 2:233-234). Here, the peacefulness of
the cemetery is quietly invaded by terror through subtle
reversals of images of Nature invested as calm in Pastoral,
thus prefiguring the subversion of the Neoclassic golden
mean by Byronism that will occur later in the text.

7 The image is a Renaissance one: "les danses
macabres [...] créées au XVTe siécle sont a la fois
violentes et érotiques [...] la mort [...] est animée d’un
désir de jouissance, elle est a la fois mort et volupté"
(Aries, 2:79). I would specify, following Bakhtin, that
such an image is carnivalesque.

9 In fact, the only possible mention of "Docteur
Mathurin" in the correspondence is the following: "J’ai
écrit il y a une quinzaine de jours un conte bachique assez
cocasse, que j’ai donné 5 Alfred"; this may be the same work
Flaubert is referring to when he says later in the same
letter that "le Garcon, cette belle création si curieuse a
observer sous 1e point de vue de la philosophie de
l’histoire, a subi une addition superbe c’est la maison de
campagne du Garcon..." (5 Ernest Chevalier, [13 septembre
1839]; Corr. 1:51-52). I have already noted the possibility
that all reactionary statements made by Flaubert can be
taken as parodic pronouncements in the name of the Gareon;
if this remark in the correspondence indeed refers to "Les
Funérailles," Mathurin’s reactionary politics need not be
taken seriously. However in "Les Funérailles," as I have
already said, the desire for stability implicit in the
emulation of Horace implies anti—revolutionary sentiments,
and the rejection of Byronic agony leads to the rejection of
Byronic rebellion. Reaction is implied by the logic of the
bricolage; that this solution is taken seriously by at least
one voice in the text although it is far from satisfactory
may be the reason Byronism keeps resurfacing.

9 Flaubert would later attack democracy because of
its pretense at having reached a conclusion: "La démocratie
n’est pas plus [le] dernier mot [de l’humanité], que
l’esclavage ne l’a été, que la féodalité ne l’a été, que la
monarchie ne l’a été [...] Le meilleur, pour moi, c’est

celui qui agonise, parce qu’il va faire place a un autre" (a
Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 mai [1857]; Corr. II:719).

” See note 2 of this chapter.

” Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, La Nouvelle
Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu suivie de l’Histoire
de Juliette. sa soeur. ou les prospérités du vice, in his
Oeuvres completes, ed. Gilbert Lely, 16 vols. (Paris: Cercle
du Livre Précieux, 1966), 6:208.

 

257

” Foucault discusses medicine as a political
formation that uses the observation of the body as one of
the means of the State’s control of the individual:
"l’espace médical L .] coincid[e] avec l’ espace social
[. ..] On commence a concevoir une présence généralisée des
médecins dont les regards croisés forment réseau et exercent
en tout point de l’ espace, en tout moment du temps, une
surveillance constante [...] liée a chaque existence
individuelle, mais aussi a la vie collective de la nation
(Foucault, 30-31); "la santé remplace le salut" (Foucault,
201). Awareness of medicine as the arm of the state has
most recently emerged within AIDS activism: "the social
role categories which defined how to be an expert, [. . .]
or a person living with HIV/AIDS [. . .] tended to silence
people speaking out of character. These silencing effects
are grounded in the political commitments which cordon off
the knowledge of science into an unbreachable,

unquestionable domain [. . .] However, activists gained
medical competence [. . .] This incursion into the
protected domain of science resulted in [. . .] the rise of

research subjects able to speak about their conditions
rather than simply serving as agar plates" (Cindy Patton,
Inventing AIDS [New York: Routledge, 1990], 51). The
usurpation of the right to speak about disease in AIDS
activism is paralleled in Flaubert’s practice in "Les
Funérailles," where what is usurped is the medical gaze
itself. However, in AIDS activism, the enemy is AIDS, and
only secondarily the political formation that sustains the
discourse about AIDS; in Mathurin’s discourse, the enemy is
discourse itself: quite paradoxically, the weapons of
medicine (reason, dissection) that reduce the body to silent
matter are used in Mathurin’s speech against medicine
itself, dismembering it and reducing it to bétise. Yet in
Mathurin’s final wishes (to be discussed in the next
chapter), the results of the medical gaze (silence, matter)
are reclaimed as desirable goals for the body. The imagined
reversals of the structures of power in "Les Funérailles"
are more complex than anything that could be realized in
practical politics; one could call their ludic
irresponsability "meta-politics."

” Jean-Pierre Richard develops the notion of the
fluidity of Flaubert’s texts in his Littérature et
sensation, but his notion is significantly different from
mine. My most important disagreement with Richard is that
he sees the loss of self in flow as negative ("Eaux
délicieuses, eaux dangereuses: tout bain présente un risque
de noyade," 140); he links fluidity with weakness: "la
faiblesse, la mollesse de l’étre flaubertien" (148).
Aouicha Hilliard pushes Richard’s reading to the point of
exaggeration when she interprets the theme of fluidity in
"Smarh, " La Tentation, and L’ Education sentimentale as
evidence of Flaubert’s pathology, which she calls masochism

258

(Aouicha E. Hilliard, "Le Rythme de ‘Smarh’: deux modes
contrastés du voeu de désintégration chez Gustave Flaubert,"
Romanic Review 77.1 [1986]: 58, n. 4) and schizophrenia
(59ff). Richard sees "[la] volonté," "la Force" (emphasis
in original), and domination ("le pouvoir qui dominera
l’ame") as the sources of Flaubert’s greatest achievement,
which is "la Vérité" (219); I think Flaubert’s greatest
achievement is his ability to slip into the flow of Culture
in order to subvert the very notion of authenticity.

“ Vaheed Ramazani, in "Historical Cliché: Irony and
the Sublime in L’Education sentimentale" (PMLA 108.1 [1993]:
121-132), argues that the cliché in Flaubert tends to the
sublime, which, following Kant, he defines as having two
parts: "an initial affect -- anxiety, terror, or melancholy
-- gives rise to compensatory energies such as exultation or
rapture" (122). Awe at the power of the stupid collectivity
"can approach sublimity through the motif of
meaninglessness. In other words [. . .1, the omnipresent
specter of senseless violence and, more profoundly, of death
ratifies the absurdity of history" (124). In the
Fontainebleau episode, the "sublime representations of ‘la
nature éternelle’ might well belong to a hackneyed Romantic
topos" (127). My difference with Ramazani is that I see the
tendency toward the sublime to be the tendency of the
(clichéd) Byronic voice in Flaubert, whose triumph (when it
occurs) is the failure of the project to be the new
Rabelais. At the end of "Rabelais," Flaubert argued that
"si 1e poéte pouvait cacher ses larmes et se mettre a rire,"
despite the fact that he will have stripped himself ("se
dépouiller") "de toute colére, de toute haine, de toute
douleur," his book "sera le plus terrible et le plus sublime
qu’on ait fait" ("Rabelais," 1:184). Perhaps "sublime" in
this case just means excellent; but for the sake of
argument, I will concede that "terrible" and "sublime" are
to be taken, as Ramazani says, "straight" ("a straight
reading of the sublime is [. . .] not only possible but
necessary," 130); if this is the case, it is likely that
Flaubert’s destruction of cliché is intended to terrify the
reader as would a force of Nature. But as I am trying to
show in my reading of "Docteur Mathurin," this tendency
toward destruction is countered by other, more orderly
forces which tend toward an alternative view of change as
not cataclysm, but flow; and in any event, at least in
"Rabelais" and "Docteur Mathurin," destruction is the
limit/subversion of an impulse that is in its inception
joyous. Ramazani’s reading is faulty because it totalizes
one voice in Flaubert at the expense of all others.

” The Romantic cliché of death as the culmination of
an orgy is parodied in "Le 801 de punch," by Gautier:
"Faisons une orgie! [...] Rien n’est plus a la mode que
l’orgie. Chaque roman qui parait a son orgie [...] une

259

orgie folle, échevelée, hurlante, comme la Peau de M. de
Balzac, comme dans le Barnave de M. Janin, comme dans Le
Divorce du bibliophile Jacob [...] comme dans la Danse
Macabre du méme! [...] vous étes les aristocrates de
l’orgie, et nous vous guillotinerons a la fin, entre la
poire et le fromage" (Théophile Gautier, "Un Bol de punch,"
in his Les Jeune-France, 190-193); "Un bol de punch fut
déposés sur la table [...] Des reflets verdétres et faux
couraient sur ces figures déja palies, hébétées par
l’ivresse, et leur donnaient un air morbide et cadavereux.
Vous les eussiez pris pour des noyés a la Morgue" (Théophile
Gautier, "Un Bol de punch," 212).

CHAPTER 5: NATURE, LANGUAGE, AND SILENCE

1 This concept was inspired in a general way by Alan
W. Watts’s NatureLyMan. and Woman (New York: Vintage, 1970):
"Nature is not necessarily arranged in accordance with the
system of mutually exclusive alternatives which characterize

our language and logic" (6); "It is impossible to consider
man apart from nature" (4); "Man is one with nature in a
seamless unity" (S); "The knower is what he knows" (20).

2 Which is what Culler says of the dog in Le
Premiere Education sentimentale (Culler, 65). The dog,
also, is repeatedly interpreted, but escapes all
interpretation. Culler says that the dog does not
necessarily represent death, a statement with which I agree;
but death fulfills the same role in life as does the dog in
La Premiere Education sentimentale.

9 According to Eugenio Donato, "The corpse [. . .]
will always remain in a relationship of absolute Otherness
to [any representational system . . .] the corpse

destabilizes all the oppositions necessary to maintain the
economy of the dialectical operation [between life and
death]"; he claims that the corpse has a "subversive role in
relation to any operation that aims at recapturing the lost
object in a belated rememoration" (Eugenio Donato, IDQ
Script of Decadence [New York: Oxford University Press,
1993], 199-200). The corpse causes death to escape any
meaning we give it.

9 This was the desire of Saint Antoine: "Je
voudrais... étre la matiére!" (La Tentation de saint
Antoine, version definitive, 1:571).

9 Huizinga, J[ohan]. Homo Ludens: A Studv of the
Plav-element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 81.
"Zeus holds the divine decrees of fate and justice in the
same balance" (81).

260

9 According to Philippe Aries, the image of death as
a "dissolution commune dans le travail perpetuel de la
nature [...] dans un flux perpetuel" (Aries, 2:155) was a
cliché of British and North American Romanticism, although
it was common in France only during the late Enlightenment.
In France it was associated with the "mythe Rousseauiste de
la ville corrompue opposée a la campagne proche de la
nature," where there was "une tradition de famialiarité avec
la mort" (Aries, 2:120). On the other hand, Romanticism in
France tended toward "grands deuils [...] dramatiques mises
en scene [...] une sorte d’apothéose baroque, qu’aucun
auteur baroque n’aurait inventé" (Aries, 2:120-121).

At the extreme limit of the Enlightenment idea of
death as dissolution into the flow of Nature stands the will
of the Marquis de Sade, who asked that his corpse be carried
on a wood merchant’s cart "au bois de ma terre [...] ou je
veux qu’il soit place sans aucune cérémonie, dans le premier
taillis fourré qui se trouve a droite." The tomb was to be
dug by a farmer; the wood merchant was to watch until the
corpse was covered over, accompanied by any of Sade’s
friends or family who wished to participate "dans cette
cérémonie [...] sans aucune espece d’appareil." The tomb
was to be sown with acorns, so that "les traces de ma tombe
disparaissent de dessus la terre, comme je me flatte que ma
mémoire s’effacera de l’esprit des hommes" (see Gilbert
Lely, Sade: Etudes sur sa vie et sur son oeuvre [Paris:
Gallimard, 1967], 350-352).

Fusion with Nature’s endless creation of new forms
that is also a destruction of the old, marked only by a
gradual disappearance into silence: Sade’s will is similar
in many ways to Mathurin’s last wishes. It is of course
nearly impossible that Sade’s will could have been a
"source" for Mathurin. Perhaps Flaubert knew a distant
cousin of the will: similar ideas were not uncommon in
literature produced around 1800 (Aries, 2:62), and reduced
forms of the notion appeared in later French Romantic
literature: "un héros fait pousser d’excellents petits
pois" (Gautier, Les Jeune-France, xiv). In any event, Sade
seems to be everywhere secretly present as a dimly desired
ancestor in this work; the extreme development of his
perversion of Enlightenment ideas of Nature have perhaps
arisen spontaneously in "Les Funérailles" as the child of
the interaction of the voices of Sade’s heir (Byron) and his
ancestor (Rabelais) with the distant source (Horace) of his
contemporary adversaries (the Neoclassics). In any event,
Flaubert’s complex bricolage has unveiled a problematic far
richer and more suggestive than anything in Sade’s labored
polemic.

261
CHAPTER 6: THE OEUVRE

1 Benjamin Bart, "Psyche into Myth: Humanity and
Animality in Flaubert’s ‘Saint Julien’" (Kentuckv Review
Quarterly 20.3 [1973]: 317-342), see especially pp. 336-338.

2 Terdiman explains the withdrawal of Flaubert from
the desire for fusion in another way in his analysis of
Flaubert’s attempted penetration of the cultural Other
during his trip to the Orient in 1849-51. Flaubert found
that the Orient, like Marie in "Novembre" or Nature itself,
had already been penetrated and appropriated, so that all
that could be found there was the already-said, like the
European graffiti carved into Egyptian monuments or the
clichés he found himself writing: "since the Orient which
Flaubert could visit was already objectively penetrated, his
account of it opens itself to the ineluctable discourse of
Europe" (Richard Terdiman, Discourse Counter-Discour e: The
Theopy and Practice of Sympolic Resistance in Nineteenth-
Centurv France [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1985], 243). Terdiman sees this trip as the decisive moment
when Flaubert withdrew from the quest for Romantic otherness
to begin in earnest his subversive work on language itself.
I am not convinced that Flaubert’s life can be periodized so
neatly. In any event the relationship in Flaubert between
Nature and Culture, penetration and withdrawal, the exotic
and the banal needs to be more thoroughly explored in the
context to Flaubert’s pansexual frolics in Egypt: see Joseph
A. Boone, "Mappings of Male Desire in Durrell’s Alexandria
Quartet," in Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in
Literature and Culture, ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum,
and Michael Moon (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989),
especially 80-83.

9 Shoshana Felman argues that Flaubert’s project in
"Novembre" is a deconstruction of the cliché: "travaillant
dans le cliché [...] l’écriture se determine, et
s’appréhende, non plus comme une precipitation aveugle vers
la signification, un rapport naif at précritique au
signifié, mais comme une relation complexe, critique, au
signifiant" (198). According to Felman, Flaubert’s insight
is that "le seul réel indiscutable [...] c’est la puissance
toute linguistique de l’illusion réferentielle [...] commune

[...] au réalisme et au romantisme: l’un croit a la
representation de la société, et l’autre a celle de la
subjectivité" (212). It would seem, then, that despite

Felman’s insight that "toute pratique linguistique
répétitive véhicule une puissance d’hypnose, qui induit
l’individu a des comportements sociaux et mentaux
stéréotypés dans lequel il abdique sa subjectivité (164;
Felman is analyzing "Un coeur simple"), she believes that
such abdication is impossible to avoid. The terrifying
vision she evokes, of mankind trapped in a linguistic order

262

that forever alienates it from itself and from the natural
world, is indeed present in Flaubert; but there is also
present a playful delight in parody, a comic mocking of
tragic masks, a drunken delight in the multifarious
complexity of inherited culture. To be fair, Felman admits
that her project of attacking the readability of the
literary text ("la chose littéraire [...] est précisément Le
specificité méme de sa résistance a notre lecture") is a
means of opening up the space for an "interpretation a
venir" (350, emphasis in original). But her description of
Flaubert’s texts could have included the joy of new birth
that is everywhere also present in Flaubert’s joyfully
ambivalent destruction.

Victor Brombert has also emphasized the role of
cliché in "Novembre", asserting, for example, that
"l’inventaire des themes se joue ironiquement de conventions
fatiguées" (Victor Brombert, "Usure et rupture chez
Flaubert: L’exemple de "Novembre," in Essais sur Flaubert en
l’honneur du professeur Don Demoresp, ed. Charles Carlut
[Paris: Nizet, 1979], but like Felman he fails to see the
humor that underlies the posturing.

‘ Erhart Linsen, "Le narcissisme dans les oeuvres de
jeunesse de Gustave Flaubert," Romantistische Zeitschrift
fur Literaturgeschichte 12.3-4 (1988): 384.7

9 Ginsburg, "Representational Strategies," 1258.

9 Ginsburg, Flaubert Writing, 184.

7 Flaubert in 1854 defined "le sens comique" as "le
dédain et la comprehension mélées" (3 Louise Colet, [2 mars
1854]; Corr. II:529).

9 Herschberg-Pierrot lists as the primary sources of
the episode "notations personnelles [...] notes de Du Camp,
souvenirs de témoins, récits des mémorialistes [...]
journaux de 1848, et le ‘on dit’ de 1848, dont les
stéréotypes marquent l’insertion" (Herschberg-Pierrot, 45).

9 Flaubert’s medieval and Romantic sources for the
tale are exhaustively explored in Benjamin Bart and Francis
Cook, The Legendapy Sources of Flaubert’s "Saint Julien"
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); further
references to this work are in the form Bart, "Julien,"
page. Biasi convincingly demonstrates that the major source
is E. H. Langlois’s Essai histori e et descri tif sur la
peinture sur verre, etc. (Rouen: Edouard, 1832): see Pierre-
Marc de Biasi, "Le Palimpseste hagiographique:
l’appropriation ludique des sources édifantes dans la
rédaction de ‘La Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier’"
(Revue des Lettres Modernes 777-781 [1986]: 69-124).

Further references to this article are in the form Biasi,

263

page.
” See note 1 of this chapter.

” Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, Les Infortunes
de la vertu (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 86.

CONCLUSION

1 Bakhtin, Dostoevskv, 250. Bakhtin is talking
about Dostoevsky; I think I have shown that the words can
also meaningfully be applied to Flaubert.

2 E. W. Fischer, Etudes sur Flaubert inédit, tr.
Benjamin Ortler, Caroline Franklin-Grout, and Francois
d’Aiguy (Leipzig: Julius Zeitler, 1908), 3.

9 Antoine Youssef Naaman, Les Débuts de Gustave
Flaubert et sa technique de la description (Paris: Nizet,
1962), 133.

f M[ixail] M. Baxtin, "K metodologii gumanitarnyx
nauk," Estetika slovesnoqo tvorcetva (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1979), 373, quoted in translation in Clark and Holquist,
348-350.

B IBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY FLAUBERT

Flaubert, Gustave. Carnets de travail. Ed. Pierre-Marc de
Biasi. Paris: Balland, 1988.

-------- . Correspondance. Ed. Jean Bruneau. [3] vols. (4
vols. planned). Paris: Gallimard, 1973-[1991].

-------- . Correspondance: nouvelle édition augmentée. 13
vols. Paris: Conard, 1926-1954.

-------- . L’Education sentimentale. In his Oeuvres
completes. Ed. Bernard Masson. 2 vols. Paris: Seuil,
1964. 2: 7-161.

-------- . L’Education sentimentale. version de 1845.
Oeuvres completes. Ed. Masson. 1: 277-371.

-------- . "Les Funérailles du docteur Mathurin." Oeuvres
completes. Ed. Masson. 1: 220-227.

-------- . "Ivre et mort." Oeuvres completes. Ed. Masson.
1: 175-180.

-------- . "La Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier."
Oeuvres completes. Ed. Masson. 2: 178-187.

-------- . Madame Bovary. Oeuvree completes. Ed. Masson.
1: 573-694.

-------- . "Novembre." Oeuvres completes. Ed. Masson. 1:
247-276.

-------- . "Portrait de Lord Byron." Oeuvres completes.
Ed. Masson. 1: 49.

-------- . "Quidquid volueris." Oeuvres completes. 2: 102-

-------- . "Rabelais." In his Oeuvres completes. Paris:
Conard, 1910. 22 vols. 17 (Oeuvres de jeunesse
inédites, 2). 144-156.

264

265

-------- . "Rabelais." Oeuvres completes. Ed. Masson. 1:
180-184.

-------- . "Un secret de Philippe le Prudent." Oeuvres
completes. Ed. Masson. 1: 70-73.

-------- . "Smarh." Oeuvres completes. Ed. Masson. 1:
186-218.

-------- . La Tentation de saint Antoine, version
definitive. Oeuvres completes. Ed. Masson. 1: 522-

571.

-------- . "Voyage en Italie et en Suisse." Oeuvres
completes. Ed. Masson. 2: 457-472.

WORKS ABOUT FLAUBERT

Barnes, Hazel. Sartre and Flaubert. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981.

Bart, Benjamin. Flauberp. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse
University Press, 1967.

-------- . "Psyche into Myth: Humanity and Animality in

Flaubert’s ‘Saint Julien.’" Kenppcky Romance Querterly
20.3 (1973): 317-342.

Bart, Benjamin, and Francis Cook. The Legendary Sources of
Flaubert’s "Saint Julien." Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1977.

Bertrand, Louis. Gustave Flaubert. Paris: Mercure de
France, 1912.

Biasi, Pierre-Marc de. "Le Palimpseste hagiographique:
l’appropriation ludique des sources édifiantes dans la
rédaction de ‘La Légende de saint Julien
l’Hospitalier.’" Revue des Lettres Modernes 777-781
(1986): 69-124.

Bourdieu, Pierre. "Flaubert’s Point of View." Tr.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Critical Ingpiry 14.3
(1987-8): 539-562.

Brombert, Victor. "Usure et rupture chez Flaubert:
L’exemple de "Novembre." In Essais sur Flaubert en

l’honneur du professeur Don Demorest. Ed. Charles
Carlut. Paris: Nizet, 1979. 145-154.

Bruneau, Jean. Les Débuts littéraires de Gustave Flaubert:
1831-1845. Paris: Armand Colin, 1962.

266

-------- . Preface. Correspondance. By Gustave Flaubert.

[3] vols. (4 vols. planned). Paris: Gallimard, 1973-
[1991].
Coleman, Algernon. "Some Sources of Flaubert’s ‘Smarh.’"

Modern Language Notes 40 (1925): 205-215.

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