Mimesis (84 page)

Emma Bovary, too, the principal personage of the novel, is completely submerged in that false reality, in
la bêtise humaine
, as is the “hero” of Flaubert’s other realistic novel, Frédéric Moreau in the
Éducation sentimentale
. How does Flaubert’s manner of representing such personages fit into the traditional categories “tragic” and “comic”? Certainly Emma’s existence is apprehended to its depths, certainly the
earlier intermediate categories, such as the “sentimental” or the “satiric” or the “didactic,” are inapplicable, and very often the reader is moved by her fate in a way that appears very like tragic pity. But a real tragic heroine she is not. The way in which language here lays bare the silliness, immaturity, and disorder of her life, the very wretchedness of that life, in which she remains immersed (
toute l’amertume de l’existence lui semblait servie sur son assiette
), excludes the idea of true tragedy, and the author and the reader can never feel as at one with her as must be the case with the tragic hero; she is always being tried, judged, and, together with the entire world in which she is caught, condemned. But neither is she comic; surely not; for that, she is understood far too deeply from within her fateful entanglement—though Flaubert never practices any “psychological understanding” but simply lets the state of the facts speak for itself. He has found an attitude toward the reality of contemporary life which is entirely different from earlier attitudes and stylistic levels, including—and especially—Balzac’s and Stendhal’s. It could be called, quite simply, “objective seriousness.” This sounds strange as a designation of the style of a literary work. Objective seriousness, which seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without itself becoming moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved—this is an attitude which one expects from a priest, a teacher, or a psychologist rather than from an artist. But priest, teacher, and psychologist wish to accomplish something direct and practical—which is far from Flaubert’s mind. He wishes, by his attitude—
pas de cris, pas de convulsion, rien que la fixité d’un regard pensif
—to force language to render the truth concerning the subjects of his observation: “style itself and in its own right being an absolute manner of viewing things” (
Corr
. 2, 346). Yet this leads in the end to a didactic purpose: criticism of the contemporary world; and we must not hesitate to say so, much as Flaubert may insist that he is an artist and nothing but an artist. The more one studies Flaubert, the clearer it becomes how much insight into the problematic nature and the hollowness of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture is contained in his realistic works; and many important passages from his letters confirm this. The demonification of everyday social intercourse which is to be found in Balzac is certainly entirely lacking in Flaubert; life no longer surges and foams, it flows viscously and sluggishly. The essence of the happenings of ordinary contemporary life seemed to Flaubert to consist not in tempestuous actions and passions, not in demonic men and forces, but in the prolonged
chronic state whose surface movement is mere empty bustle, while underneath it there is another movement, almost imperceptible but universal and unceasing, so that the political, economic, and social subsoil appears comparatively stable and at the same time intolerably charged with tension. Events seem to him hardly to change; but in the concretion of duration, which Flaubert is able to suggest both in the individual occurrence (as in our example) and in his total picture of the times, there appears something like a concealed threat: the period is charged with its stupid issuelessness as with an explosive.

Through his level of style, a systematic and objective seriousness, from which things themselves speak and, according to their value, classify themselves before the reader as tragic or comic, or in most cases quite unobtrusively as both, Flaubert overcame the romantic vehemence and uncertainty in the treatment of contemporary subjects; there is clearly something of the earlier positivism in his idea of art, although he sometimes speaks very derogatorily of Comte. On the basis of this objectivity, further developments became possible, with which we shall deal in later chapters. However, few of his successors conceived the task of representing contemporary reality with the same clarity and responsibility as he; though among them there were certainly freer, more spontaneous, and more richly endowed minds than his.

The serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation, on the one hand; on the other, the embedding of random persons and events in the general course of contemporary history, the fluid historical background—these, we believe, are the foundations of modern realism, and it is natural that the broad and elastic form of the novel should increasingly impose itself for a rendering comprising so many elements. If our view is correct, throughout the nineteenth century France played the most important part in the rise and development of modern realism. What the situation was in Germany, we discussed at the end of the last chapter. In England, though the development was basically the same as in France, it came about more quietly and more gradually, without the sharp break between 1780 and 1830; it began much earlier and carried on traditional forms and viewpoints much longer, until far into the Victorian period. Fielding’s art (
Tom Jones
appeared in 1749) already shows a far more energetic contemporary realism of life in all its departments than do the French novels of the same period; even
the fluidity of the contemporary historical background is not entirely lacking; but the whole is conceived more moralistically and sheers away from any problematic and existential seriousness; on the other hand, even in Dickens, whose work began to appear in the thirties of the nineteenth century, there is, despite the strong social feeling and suggestive density of his milieux, almost no trace of the fluidity of the political and historical background. Meanwhile Thackeray, who places the events of
Vanity Fair
(1847-48) most concretely in contemporary history (the years before and after Waterloo), on the whole preserves the moralistic, half-satirical, half-sentimental viewpoint very much as it was handed down by the eighteenth century. We must, unfortunately, forego discussing the rise of modern Russian realism (Gogol’s
Dead Souls
appeared in 1842, his short story “The Cloak” as early as 1835) even in the most general way; for our purpose, this is impossible when one cannot read the works in their original language. We shall have to rest content with discussing the influence which it later exercised.

19

GERMINIE LACERTEUX

I
N
1864 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt published their novel
Germinie Lacerteux
, which describes the sexual involvements and the gradual ruin of a maidservant. They wrote the following preface for it:

Il nous faut demander pardon au public de lui donner ce livre, et l’avertir de ce qu’il y trouvera.

Le public aime les romans faux: ce roman est un roman vrai.

Il aime les livres qui font semblant d’aller dans le monde: ce livre vient de la rue.

Il aime les petites œuvres polissonnes, les mémoires de filles, les confessions d’alcôves, les saletés érotiques, le scandale qui se retrousse dans une image aux devantures des libraires: ce qu’il va lire est sévère et pur. Qu’il ne s’attende point à la photographie décolletée du Plaisir: l’étude qui suit est la clinique de l’amour.

Le public aime encore les lectures anodines et consolantes, les aventures qui finissent bien, les imaginations qui ne dérangent ni sa digestion ni sa sérénité: ce livre, avec sa triste et violente distraction, est fait pour contrarier ses habitudes et nuire à son hygiène.

Pourquoi donc l’avons-nous écrit? Est-ce simplement pour choquer le public et scandaliser ses goûts?

Non.

Vivant au xix
^e
siècle, dans un temps de suffrage universel, de démocratie, de libéralisme, nous nous sommes demandé si ce qu’on appelle “les basses classes” n’avait pas droit au Roman; si ce monde sous un monde, le peuple, devait rester sous le coup de l’interdit littéraire et des dédains d’auteurs, qui ont fait jusqu’ici le silence sur l’âme et le cœur qu’il peut avoir. Nous nous sommes demandé s’il y avait encore pour l’écrivain et pour le lecteur, en ces années d’égalité ou nous sommes, des classes indignes, des malheurs trop bas, des drames trop mal embouchés, des catastrophes d’une terreur trop peu noble. Il nous est venu la curiosité de savoir si cette forme conventionelle d’une littérature oubliée et d’une société disparue, la Tragédie, était définitivement morte; si dans un pays sans caste et sans aristocratie légale, les misères des
petits et des pauvres parleraient à l’intérêt, à l’émotion, à la pitié, aussi haut que les misères des grands et des riches; si, en un mot, les larmes qu’on pleure en bas, pourraient faire pleurer comme celles qu’on pleure en haut.

Ces pensées nous avaient fait oser l’humble roman de Sœur Philomène, en 1861; elles nous font publier aujourd’hui Germinie Lacerteux.

Maintenant, que ce livre soit calomnié: peu lui importe. Aujourd’hui que le Roman s’élargit et grandit, qu’il commence à être la grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante de l’étude littéraire et de l’enquête sociale, qu’il devient, par l’analyse et par la recherche psychologique, l’Histoire morale contemporaine; aujourd’hui que le Roman s’est imposé les études et les devoirs de la science, il peut en revendiquer les libertés et les franchises. Et qu’il cherche l’Art et la Vérité; qu’il montre des misères bonnes à ne pas laisser oublier aux heureux de Paris; qu’il fasse voir aux gens du monde ce que les dames de charité ont le courage de voir, ce que les Reines autrefois faisaient toucher de l’œil à leurs enfants dans les hospices: la souffrance humaine, présente et toute vive, qui apprend la charité; que le Roman ait cette religion que le siècle passé appelait de ce large et vaste nom:
Humanité
;—il lui suffit de cette conscience: son droit est là.

(We must ask the public’s pardon for giving it this book, and for warning it of what it will find there.

The public likes false novels: this is a true novel.

It likes books which pretend to move in society: this book comes from the street.

It likes little smutty works, prostitutes’ memoirs, alcove confessions, erotic trash, scandal pulling up its dress in a picture in a bookstore window: what it is about to read is severe and pure. Let it not expect the décolleté photograph of Pleasure: the following study is the clinical examination of love.

The public further likes innocuous and consoling reading, adventures which end happily, imaginings which upset neither its digestion nor its serenity: this book, with its sad and violent distraction, is so made as to go against its habits and be injurious to its hygiene.

Why, then, have we written it? Is it simply to shock the public and scandalize its tastes?

No.

Living in the nineteenth century, in a time of universal suffrage, of democracy, of liberalism, we asked ourselves if what is called “the lower classes” did not have a right to the Novel; if that world beneath a world, the people, must remain under the literary interdict and the disdain of authors who have so far kept silent upon the soul and the heart which it may have. We asked ourselves if, for the writer and the reader, there were still, in these years of equality in which we live, unworthy classes, troubles too base, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too little noble in their terror. We became curious to learn if that conventional form of a forgotten literature and a vanished society, Tragedy, was definitively dead; if in a country without caste and without a legal aristocracy, the troubles of the little and the poor could speak to interest, to emotion, to pity, as loudly as the troubles of the great and the rich; if, in a word, the tears which are wept below could cause weeping, as do those which are wept above.

These thoughts caused us to venture the humble novel of
Sœur Philomène
in 1861; today they make us publish
Germinie Lacerteux
.

Now, let this book be calumniated: it matters little to it. Today when the Novel is broadening and growing, when it is beginning to be the great, serious, impassioned, living form of literary study and social investigation, when, through analysis and psychological research, it is becoming contemporary moral History; today when the Novel has imposed upon itself the studies and the duties of science, it can demand the freedoms and immunities of science. And if it seek Art and Truth; if it disclose troubles which it were well the happy people of Paris should not forget; if it show people of fashion what district visitors have the courage to see, what Queens of old let their children’s eyes rest upon in hospitals; human suffering, present and alive, which teaches charity; if the Novel have that religion to which the past century gave the broad and vast name:
Humanity
;—that consciousness suffices it: its right lies there.)

The violent polemic against the public with which this preface begins we shall take up later. We shall now deal with the program of artistic purpose expressed in the later paragraphs (beginning with the words
Vivant au
XIX
^e
siècle
). It corresponds exactly to what we mean by our term mixing of styles and it is based on political and sociological
considerations. We live, say the Goncourts, in an age of universal suffrage, democracy, and liberalism (it may be noted that they were not by any means unqualifiedly in agreement with these institutions and phenomena). Hence it is not just to exclude from literary treatment the so-called lower classes of the population, as is still being done, and to preserve in literature an aristocraticism of subject matter which is no longer in keeping with our social picture. It should be admitted, they argue, that no form of unhappiness is too low for literary treatment. That the novel is the proper form for such a treatment is taken for granted in the words
avoir droit au roman
. A later sentence—
Il nous est venu la curiosité
…—suggests that the realistic novel has become the successor of classical tragedy. And the last paragraph contains a rhetorically enthusiastic survey of the functions of the new art form in the modern world, a survey which contains a special motif, that of the scientific, attitude. It is a motif which had appeared in Balzac, but here it has become much more vigorous and programmatic. The novel, they insist, has grown in scope and significance. It is the serious, passionate, and living form of literary study and social inquiry (note the words
étude
and especially
enquête
), through its analyses and psychological investigations it will become
l’Histoire morale contemporaine
, it has taken over the methods and duties of science, hence it can also lay claim to the rights and freedoms of science. Here, then, the right to treat any subject, even the lowest, seriously, that is to say, the extreme in mixture of styles, is justified by both politico-social and scientific arguments. The work of the novelist is compared to scientific work, and it seems beyond doubt that here the Goncourts are thinking of the methods of experimental biology. We are here under the influence of the enthusiasm for science which marked the first decades of positivism, when all active intellects—insofar as they were consciously searching for new methods and values in accord with the times—strove to assimilate the experimental techniques of science. Here the Goncourts are in the extreme vanguard; it is, so to speak, their vocation to be in the extreme vanguard. The conclusion of the preface, it is true, introduces a less modern position, a turn toward ethics, charity, and humanitarianism. A number of motifs of very different origin enter into this. The reference to the
heureux de Paris
and the
gens du monde
who ought to think of the misery of their fellow-men belongs to the mid-century socialism of sentiment. The queens of old who cared for the sick and showed them to their children remind us of the Christian Middle Ages. And finally
there is the religion of humanity of the Age of Enlightenment. There is a great deal of eclecticism and not a little arbitrariness in this rhetorical finale.