Why on earth, one might well ask. Under ordinary circumstances – with other books present and vying for my interest – I wouldn’t; the first chapter seemed enough: it was uninspired; the reflections on the significance of the parrot seemed to me dull regurgitations. I couldn’t see how they were any interest; in any way worth thinking, let alone printing. The whole thing seemed to me a forced book (‘publish or perish’): written because the author had a need to publish something; not because he actually had anything to say.
But I was in the sticks, away from books, in a beautiful garden at the foot of a mountain, and this solitary book just sort of slipped into my hand. The first chapter was lousy, but it was a book, and it was about Flaubert; and so I persisted.
Which perhaps I shouldn’t have, since as a result of all this reading I have lost all my former sympathy for Flaubert.
While I was never fond of his Education, or Madame, or Simple Heart (however well written, they are books about people in whom I could not stir in myself the least interest), I have liked his Salammbo a great deal; and was delighted to learn of Flaubert’s attitudes to France and – Egypt. He had hated France, thought it utterly disgusting and stupid; and he delighted in Egypt – in part for its exoticism; but in the main for it not being France; just the opposite of French professors and of Polish poster artists.
People, I suppose, fall in two categories: those who like the familiar and those who rebel against it. Neither is a rational attitude (contra Flaubert, I am sure France is not worse than Egypt); but I can’t help feeling sympathy for the latter: it seems to me more individualistic and independent-minded, more pregnant with possibilities, more – interesting. After all, nothing interesting ever arises out of complacency. I was made in my mother’s womb to be this second sort; and so was Flaubert, it seemed. I liked him for it.
I even liked his ambition to be like a bear: a bear is a solitary animal, hates all around him, and bites off (and eats) the hand that attempts to feed him. I imagined him ripping to shreds French professors and Polish poster designers. I imagined him as a noble bear, of the sort Barnes describes in the sole line of magical poetry to be encountered in the whole book:
[Polar bears] travel great distanced carried along on floating pack ice. One winter in the last century twelve great white bears got as far south as Iceland by this method; imagine them riding down on their melting thrones to make a terrifying, godlike landfall.
But then part III of the chapter entitled 'Chronology', which consists entirely of quotations of Flaubert, has changed that view. Flaubert was not really a bear; he was a boor; and there is a substantial difference: bears may be ruthless but they are not striving to be rude. Rudeness is the weapon not of the powerful (bears), but of the weak (magpies, monkeys); and it is only employed by them when they know that they can deploy it with impunity.
Perhaps the overwhelming impression of offensive vulgarity arising from the selection of quotations is more due to Barnes than Flaubert; perhaps Barnes has selected, and thereby amplified, for us the choicest of Flaubert’s vulgarisms; what makes Barnes revel in them, I neither know nor care (it is unlikely I will read another word by him); but the truth is these vulgarisms have emanated from Flaubert’s mouth or pen. And I dislike him for it.
Zobenigo’s attitude to humanity is no less radical than Flaubert’s: I too have the sensation that I am drowning in stupidity; and I too seek solitude and avoid company as a result. But I think – or at least hope – that I express these foul attitudes in ways which are not vulgar. The views are disagreeable; what need is there to dress them in disagreeable language?
Perhaps it was Flaubert’s rebelliousness which led him to his incessant vulgarisms; in his day vulgarity was not part of the general public discourse; perhaps he therefore felt iconoclastic every time he pronounced words like ‘shit’ or ‘syphilis’ (I imagine he pronounced them slowly and clearly, rolling them with relish in his mouth). It is perhaps also a sign of rebellion on my part that, in an age of vulgar public discourse, I assiduously strive not to be vulgar. But there is more to it than that: I can’t help feeling that I am offended by vulgarity per se, not only per rebellion; and I suspect that there is less to Flaubert’s vulgar discourse than meets the eye.
Take his rebellion: yes, he did strive to learn Arabic while in Egypt; and yes, he did adopt Arabic dress when at home; but all his declared preference for things Egyptian aside, he did return, after a relatively short stay in Cairo, to the dull and boring and stupid Rouen, which he never ceased to curse roundly, to live his entire life there and die. His avowed orientalism was therefore just like Said says – skin deep: with the one exception of his wonderful Salammbo, in which he did try to escape to another, better world, his books were all about the stupid, boring and dull Frenchmen of Normandy and Paris, minutely analyzed in their small, shallow, empty lives. One can’t help feeling, upon reflection, that Flaubert was either perverse – a man enjoying treading in the disgusting feces which he denounces roundly all the while; or else the whole thing was a pretense. And perhaps it was. Why disbelieve him when he says that Madame Bovary, c’est moi? If Flaubert had really hated Norman stupidity, why would he have spent seven years writing about it? And then another seven? And then another?
George Sand, who knew him well, disbelieved his bearish pretense. To her he seemed as ‘gentle as a lamb’; and the two of them ‘chattered as magpies’. A magpie: there is a better simile for Flaubert than ‘bear’: bears, because they do not speak, are worth listening to when they at last do; magpies on the other hand – well, it’s all stuff and nonsense, even when they claim to be bears.
*
Two quotations from Flaubert worth mentioning (after they have been purged of their unfortunate vulgarity):
1872:
‘Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for all things great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature.’
This seems at first to be as true now as it was then. Perhaps others have felt (and maybe even written) the same in 1772 and 1672 and 1572. I suppose the conclusion is that things of the spirit have always counted for little.
On the other hand, it seems worth asking: what did Flaubert consider a thing of the spirit? Madame Bovary?
And
1857:
“Books (…) are made like pyramids. There is some long pondered plan, and then some great blocks of stone are placed one upon the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! Jackals piss on it, and the bourgeois clamber to the top of it”.
A reflection rarely heard by those who write. What is the purpose of a book? One wishes Barnes had asked himself that before he set out on Flaubert’s Parrot.
No comments:
Post a Comment