In its day the novel was read as a document of the new school of Realism: both anti-romantic (a cold-eyed exposé of the sentimental myths by which its heroine lives) and anti-bourgeois (an attack on the philistinism and censoriousness of a society that allows no breathing space to romantic souls). A contemporary caricature showed the author of the book, Gustave Flaubert, clad in a surgeon’s apron, holding aloft on a scalpel Emma’s bleeding heart. This image of Flaubert as a clinical writer – with all the overtones that the word ‘clinical’ has come to carry – was reinforced by the leading critic of the day, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who reminded his readers that Flaubert came from a medical family (his father was a respected surgeon) and hailed him as a leading light of a new wave in literature, ‘scientific, experimental, adult, powerful, a little harsh’.1
In fact Flaubert’s attitude toward ‘scientific’ realism was highly ambivalent. He certainly believed that the novelist should adopt an objective stance toward his characters, allowing their destiny to follow its logical course, in the same way that the scientist does not intrude himself into his experiments. He also practised and perfected a French prose of ‘clinical’ precision. Yet by temperament and inclination he felt himself to be a Romantic, a hangover from the past in the France of Napoleon III. He had no ties with artists of the realist avant-garde, of whom Gustave Courbet was the most notorious. Indeed, once he had completed Madame Bovary he plunged into Salammbô, a story of passionate love set in ancient Carthage, with lavish battle scenes and lurid descriptions of torture and human sacrifice.
Madame Bovary came out in 1857, when Flaubert was in his mid-thirties. It was his first published novel, and was conceived at a strange crossroads in his life. Haunted by Bruegel’s painting The Temptation of St Anthony, which he had seen during his travels in 1845, he had spent eighteen months in a state of absorption writing the story of the hermit saint in voluptuous prose. But the pair of close friends to whom he read the completed work, 500 pages long, reacted with dismay and persuaded him to abandon it as unpublishable. As a corrective, as a way of disciplining his imagination and stripping his prose of its metaphoric excesses, he undertook, on their advice, to tackle a subject that would permit of no lyrical flights: adultery in a humdrum French provincial town.
What makes Flaubert a novelist’s novelist is his ability to formulate larger issues (for instance, should the erotic adventures and subsequent suicide of a provincial nobody count for as much as the passion and death of Cleopatra?) as problems of composition – in this case, what would be the best language and narrative technique for Emma, a language and technique that should neither diminish her nor inflate her importance, that would allow her to express her case (or allow her case to express itself) without making her into a puppet voicing her author’s opinions?
Flaubert’s intuition was that a novel of the kind he envisaged, focused on the anatomy of a single character, without much overt action, need not lack dramatic interest, that in the right hands psychological analysis could have the same swiftness, clarity, and forward drive as narrative. It was all a matter of style, of giving to prose composition the same close attention that one gave to verse.
While he was working on Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote a series of midnight letters to his then mistress, the writer Louise Colet. These letters became in effect a record of his progress with the novel and an exploration of the challenges it threw up. Some penned in states of exaltation, others in fits of despondency, they have become justly famous, and form an inseparable pendant to the Bovary project.
The irony of his situation, he confesses to Louise, is that he has committed himself heart and soul to an undertaking for which he has no natural talent:
The books I am most eager to write are precisely those for which I am least endowed. Bovary, in this respect, will have been an unprecedented tour de force … its subject, characters, effects, etc. – are all alien to me … I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.2
Despite the frustrations he describes in his letters – principally the frustration of working on a miniature canvas – Flaubert never slackens or compromises. Isolated in his country retreat with only his mother and his young niece for company, he plunges deeper and deeper into the imagined life of his Emma. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ he said or is claimed to have said years later. What did he mean – or rather, since it is undocumented, what does this gnomic utterance mean, an utterance that has acquired legendary status? Perhaps no more than that he had put his all into bringing Emma off, that in the white heat of creation the individual self of the artist is consumed and absorbed into his creative self. But Charles Baudelaire, who of all Flaubert’s contemporaries saw most clearly how radically he had redrawn the map of fiction, seized on this point: that in order to write Emma, Flaubert must have inhabited her so thoroughly that in some sense he must have become her, become a woman; but also, correspondingly, that in his hands Emma had become somewhat ‘bizarre and androgynous’, a being of female form driven by an essentially masculine mode of desiring, imperious, dominating, and intent on physical satisfaction.3
In this respect it is instructive to compare Emma with the other great adulteress of nineteenth-century fiction, Anna Karenina. In one of the most sobering scenes of Tolstoy’s novel, the curtain opens on Anna and Vronsky just after they have first had intercourse. Far from being happy, Anna is devoured with guilt and in despair because she can think of no one from whom to ask pardon. As for Vronsky, gazing on Anna’s body he feels like a murderer contemplating the corpse of his victim.
Emma feels no such burden of guilt. Her lovemaking with Rodolphe in the woods outside Yonville has opened up to her a whole a new world of sensation, which Flaubert captures in vivid synaesthetic metaphors:
Silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to come forth from the trees. She felt her heartbeat return, and her blood coursing through her flesh like a river of milk. Then, far away … she heard a vague, prolonged cry, a voice which lingered; and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. (p. 116)
That evening, gazing in a mirror, she sees herself mysteriously transfigured. ‘I have a lover!’ she whispers joyously. It is as if a legion of adulterous women, sister heroines in the romances she has been consuming, raise their voices around her in enchanting song. (p. 117)
It would be false to say Emma lacks any moral sense; but to her morality means maintaining standards of propriety and obeying the teachings of religion; and, ever since her childhood, religion has been bound up with and indeed corrupted by the more spectacular, sensuous aspects of Catholic ritual. Her yearnings, volatile and inchoate, have the power to lead her indifferently on the path of vice or the path of virtue; while the kind of spiritual guidance she needs is beyond the capacities of the Yonville parish priest.
As his affair with Emma progresses, Rodolphe treats the doctor’s young wife more and more casually. Emma learns a lesson from the experience, and by the time she commences her second affair, with Léon, she has acquired a new steeliness. Now it is the young man who is the novice, the erotic plaything, the one to be used and depraved.
He never questioned her ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he was becoming her mistress rather than she his. She had tender words and kisses that thrilled his soul. Where could she have learned this corruption so deep and well masked as to be almost unseizable? (p. 201)
The ferocity of Emma’s passion grows to frighten her lover, but he lacks the courage to break off the affair.
Both Rodolphe and Léon, in their different ways, sense that Emma is engaging not with them as they are but with stereotypes she is projecting onto them from her romantic reading. It is only her husband whom Emma sees as he is, unillusioned, and for being nothing but what he is she despises him. Sainte-Beuve reproves Emma for failing to grasp that if one cannot tolerate some degree of ennui, life will be unbearable. But if there is one feature that sets Emma apart from the other wiv
es of Yonville, it is her inability, her outright refusal to tolerate ennui in the form of a husband who bores her and a child for whom she has no tenderness.
The subtitle of Madame Bovary is Moeurs de province: the way people live in the provinces. Petty adulteries have always been part of that way of life. The project on which Flaubert’s writer friends persuaded him to embark was to anatomize the life of a petty provincial adulteress. But under the writer’s pen that adulteress turned into something greater as, in effect, she took over her author, became him.
The letters to Louise Colet record that process. In December 1853, immediately after composing the scene in which Emma and Rodolphe make love for the first time in the forest, Flaubert writes to Louise in a state of rapture:
Today … man and woman, lover and beloved, I rode in the forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was the horses too, the leaves, the wind, the words my people spoke, even the red sun that made them half-shut their love-drowned eyes.4
At times of such intensity, writing is no longer a matter of finding the words to represent a given, pre-existing world. On the contrary, writing brings a world into being. ‘Everything one invents is true … My poor Bovary, without a doubt, is suffering and weeping at this very instant in twenty villages in France.’5
This radical idealism, which Flaubert elsewhere calls ‘aesthetic mysticism’, is in his eyes the very contrary of materialism. Unlike the realist novelist, he does not hold up a mirror to the misery of real life as a first step toward combating the material causes of misery. ‘Nothing will extirpate suffering, nothing will eliminate it,’ he writes to Louise. ‘Our purpose [as writers] is not to dry it up, but to create outlets for it.’6
In her quest for ever more intense erotic sensation, in her love of beautiful clothes and fabrics, Emma is an aesthete too, if of a superficial kind. What had been conceived at the beginning as a mocking case-study of provincial manners has grown in Flaubert’s hands into a concentrated project in bringing to the fore the heroic strain in Emma’s petty adventures. Despite the resemblance between the arcs of their lives, Emma is no sister to Anna Karenina. On the contrary, she is a distant granddaughter of Alonso Quixano, the hero of Cervantes’ epic of provincial life. There may be no end to the sufferings of Emma’s sisters in villages all across France, but at least, reading the story of her adventures, they can dream of themselves as famous heroines too.
For Baudelaire was right: whatever reservations we might have about Emma, she has ‘real greatness’. There is an element of the heroic in the tenacity with which she asserts her right to desire in the face of the pious disapproval of society; an element of the heroic too in her choice of death over humiliation.
Madame Bovary came out in instalments in a review run by friends of Flaubert’s. Alerted by irate readers, Napoleon III’s censors instituted proceedings against the publishers and the author on the grounds that the novel was an outrage against public morals and religion. But the censors had underestimated their opponent. Through family connections Flaubert marshalled influential supporters. A prominent trial lawyer was engaged; the public’s curiosity was aroused; interest in Flaubert’s work spread. In the end the prosecution lost its case. However, the judges did not allow the occasion to pass without expressing their distaste for the book and reprimanding the author for choosing to depict vice without comment.
In the same year Baudelaire was prosecuted for breaching public morals in Les Fleurs du mal. He was found guilty and fined.
The judges misunderstood Flaubert. The real target of his scorn in Madame Bovary was not public morals or religion but bêtise, stupidity, the unquestioning, complacent endorsement of bien-pensant opinion, exemplified by all the main characters, not excluding Emma herself, but represented best by Monsieur Homais, the town pharmacist, who in due course will be welcomed into the Légion d’Honneur.
Flaubert treats stupidity as a kind of spiritual malaise; but the intensity of his scorn for it can also justly be seen as a reaction to the stagnation of political life in the France of his day, where, after the failure of the revolution of 1848 and the seizure of power by Napoleon III, the feeling had spread widely among the younger generation that there was no role for them in the life of the nation. His most concentrated attack on stupidity is his Dictionary of Received Ideas, not published during his lifetime. The Dictionary embodies the deadpan humour of direct quotation that is the basis of his last novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet; but the approach is also characteristic of Madame Bovary, where characters continually reveal themselves in the fatuous commonplaces they express. It was fundamental to Flaubert’s practice as an artist that, as long as an event can be presented with accurate observation and in the right words, it will speak for itself. ‘An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.’7
10. Irène Némirovsky, Jewish Writer
The reputation of Irène Némirovsky, in the English-speaking world as in her adopted France, rests on Suite Française, an unfinished multipart novel that appeared in print only in 2004, some sixty years after its author’s death. During her lifetime Némirovsky was best known for an early work, the novel David Golder (1929). Astutely promoted by its publisher and swiftly adapted for stage and screen, David Golder was a runaway commercial success.
Némirovsky never struck it quite as rich in the rest of her short career (she died at the age of thirty-nine, a victim of the Final Solution). She wrote a great deal, her books sold well, but in an age when experimental modernism held the high ground her work was too conventional in form to gain serious critical attention. After the war she slid into obscurity. When in 1978 Germaine Brée published her authoritative survey of French literature of the half-century 1920–70, Némirovsky did not figure among her top 173 writers (nor, however, did Colette). Even feminist critics ignored her.
All of that changed when Suite Française – the manuscript of which had by amazing good luck survived the war – was published. Against all precedent, Némirovsky was awarded the Prix Renaudot posthumously. Suite Française became both a critical success and a bestseller. Hastily her publishers began reprinting her oeuvre, most of which is now also available in English translation from the hand of Sandra Smith.
With its large cast of characters and wide social range, Suite Française was more ambitious than anything Némirovsky had earlier attempted. In it she takes a hard look at France during the blitzkrieg and the subsequent occupation. She saw herself as following in the line of Chekhov, who had addressed the ‘mediocrity’ of his own times ‘without anger and without disgust, but with the pity it deserved’. In preparation for her task she reread War and Peace, studying Tolstoy’s method of rendering history indirectly, through the eyes of his characters.1
Of the four or five novels of the planned Suite, only the first two were actually written. At the centre of the second is a young woman, Lucile Angellier, whose husband is a prisoner of war and who has to share her home with a Wehrmacht officer billeted on her. The officer, Lieutenant Valk, falls deeply and respectfully in love with her, and she is tempted to respond. Can she and he, nominal enemies, not transcend their political and national differences and, in the name of love, make a separate peace; or must she, in the name of patriotism, deny herself to him?
Today it may seem puzzling that a writer confronting the crisis for the French conscience precipitated by defeat and occupation should have framed that crisis in such romantic terms. For the war in which France was involved was not just a matter of political differences spilling over onto the battlefield: it was also a war of conquest and extermination whose goal it was to wipe certain despised peoples from the face of the earth and enslave others.
Genocide is of course not the enterprise Valk signed up for. Lucile has even less of an inkling of Hitler’s larger plan. But that is hardly the point. Had Némirovsky appreciated how monstrous the new war was, how different in essence it was from the Franco-German hostilities of 1870 and 1914, she would
surely, one thinks, have given herself a different plot to work with, one that would pivot on the question not of whether a separate peace was attainable between individuals but rather – for instance – of whether honourable German soldiers should not disobey the orders of their political masters, or of whether French civilians like Lucile should not be prepared to risk everything to save the Jews amongst them.
(Interestingly, Lucile does risk her life to save a fugitive, but that fugitive is not a Jew – there is no significant Jewish presence in Suite Française. As for Valk, Némirovsky’s design was for him to die fighting for the Reich on the Eastern Front.)
Unlike War and Peace, which, as Némirovsky reminds herself in her diary, was written half a century after the event, Suite Française is written from ‘on the burning lava’.2 It was planned to cover the occupation from its beginning to its hypothetical end. The first two parts take us until mid-1941. What would happen next – in the novel as in the real world – Némirovsky could not of course foresee: in her diary she called it ‘God’s secret’.3 In relation to herself, God’s secret was that, in July 1942, she would be picked up at her home by the French police and delivered to the German authorities for deportation. Weeks later she would be dead of typhus in Auschwitz. In all, some 75,000 Jews would be shipped from France to the death camps, a third of them full French citizens.
Why did the Némirovskys (Irène, her husband Michel Epstein, and their two daughters) not flee France while there was time? Refugees from tsarist Russia, Michel and Irène were, technically speaking, stateless persons residing in France, and therefore unusually vulnerable. Yet even when, in the mid-1930s, popular opinion began to harden against foreigners, and the anti-Semites on the French right, emboldened by events in Germany, began to beat their drums, the two did nothing to regularize their status. Only in 1938 did they exert themselves to obtain papers of naturalization (which, for whatever reason, were not issued), and go through the motions of renouncing the Judaic faith in favour of the Catholic.