CONCLUSION
READING TO LIVE
People say that life’s the thing, but I prefer reading.
—Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts
Two and a half centuries after the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, Gustave Flaubert pursued the exploration of the reader as mediator between the perception of fiction and the perception of reality. The reader as traveler, the reader in the ivory tower, the reader as devourer of books, all appear in Flaubert’s works from his very earliest writings. The reader as life’s apprentice lies at the core of all Flaubert’s books.
Flaubert regarded himself as a reader-traveler, and the books he read as a cartography that helped him explore the world of experience. “Read to live!”¹ is his famous advice to his friend, Mademoiselle de Chantepie. His last book, Bouvard and Pécuchet, portrays two bookish fools who believe that by reading everything they will acquire, as travelers of the printed page, full knowledge of the world. But the novel, left unfinished at his death, cannot reach a conclusion: there is no last page either to Bouvard and Pécuchet’s endeavor or to the chronicle of their efforts penned by Flaubert. Unlike Dante’s travels that end in the ineffable, the journey of Flaubert’s two book fools never comes to the final line of the countless books that they could read, and therefore never reaches the Dantesque revelation that cannot be put into words. Their journey is, as it were, the down-to-earth version of Dante’s otherworldly pilgrimage, a heroic attempt to do the seemingly impossible, knowing that it is impossible and that it must fail.
Bernard Naudin, “Bouvard and Pécuchet.”
From Oeuvres complètes illustrées de Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Librairie de France, 1923).
And yet, in spite of such heroic failures, Flaubert believed that books allowed a reader (the wise reader, not the Book Fool) a sane sanctuary for thought. Rejoining Hamlet, Flaubert defined the ivory tower as a refuge against the world’s imbecility, a place where a reader can be at peace with the intelligence of his books even though these be made up of “words, words, words.” In another letter to Mademoiselle de Chantepie, dated Tuesday, 23 January 1866, Flaubert pities her for having to bear the “fanaticism and stupidity” of the province (Mademoiselle de Chantepie was then living in Angers): “When people no longer believe in the Immaculate Conception, they’ll believe in ouija boards. We must find consolation in this and go live in an ivory tower. It’s not fun, I know, but if one follows this method, one is neither a gullible fool nor a charlatan.”² This is Flaubert’s tongue-in-cheek take on Horace’s beatus ille, the classic praise of those who withdraw from the throng of city business to the studious peace of the country. For Flaubert both city and country were contaminated, the former by bourgeois conventionality, the latter by peasant doltishness. The ivory tower was the only refuge for a sane person seeking to escape the world’s stupidity. Bouvard and Pécuchet never truly find their ivory tower.
Bouvard and Pécuchet was Flaubert’s last work; the short story “Bibliomania” was his first, published in 1837, when Flaubert was sixteen years old. It tells of an antiquarian bookseller so passionate about collecting books that he will even commit murder to obtain one. “He loved a book because it was a book,” Flaubert says of him. “He loved its smell, its shape, its title.” To which Flaubert added: “He could barely read.”³ The obsessive bibliomaniac is one of the deadlier incarnations of the bookworm who accumulates books without traveling through them, without reading them in studious seclusion, without making them truly his. He is the hoarder of dead symbols, unwilling or unable to breathe life into the book, since it is the reader’s breath (his incarnate reading, as Saint Augustine argued) that gives the book life.
The same year he published “Bibliomania” Flaubert wrote another story, “Passion and Virtue,” “a philosophical tale” (as he called it) whose plot he had found in the law courts’ gazetteer, concerning the adultery and consequent suicide of a health official’s wife. In this adolescent tale, the heroine is not explicitly a bookworm, and yet the world of romantic fiction is clearly present in her dreams, her conversations, her ideas of what love should and should not be. Years later, the health official’s wife would be reincarnated in a clearer version of the bookworm, the romantically obsessed Emma Bovary.
Flaubert’s three bookish Bs (the bibliomaniac, Bouvard, and Bovary) are all Book Fools with one common ancestor. Writing to his lover, Louise Colet, on 12 June 1852, almost ten months after having begun Madame Bovary, Flaubert confessed to her that all his roots were to be found “in the book I knew by heart before knowing how to read, Don Quixote” (overlaid, he added, with “the agitated foam of the seas of Normandy, the English sickness [epilepsy], and the stinking fog”).⁴ Don Quixote was to provide Flaubert with the uneasy model of a fiction in which “art”—meaning “that which is artificial or stylish”—seemed to Flaubert happily absent.⁵ Because even in apparently “artificial” works such as The Temptation of St. Anthony or Salammbô, absence of artificiality was to Flaubert of the essence. At ten in the morning, on 4 May 1880, in a letter addressed to Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert wrote: “The importance attached to foolishness, and pedantic futility exasperate me! Bafouons le chic!” (“Let us scorn stylishness!”).⁶ These were Flaubert’s last penned words. Four days after writing them he died.
In Madame Bovary, the pretentious pharmacist Homais is attracted to that futility which Flaubert derided. “What seduced him above all was the chic.”⁷ Chic—stylishness, not style. And it is also this chic, this stylishness, that seduces Emma as a reader, a chic that she mistakes for elegance. What Emma finds in her romantic books is a contrast to the tedium, the inaneness, the dreariness of her life with Charles Bovary—no matter how badly the books are written, no matter how artificial the language used. It is the passionate chic adventures that matter to her, because, unlike Don Quixote, who can (when necessary) distinguish between what is real and what is fiction, Emma when reading her books translates their romantic plots straight into the world of her own desires.
Emma’s first books are small, gaudily bound volumes received as school prizes, which she proudly shows Charles during their first meetings. Later come the novels in which she will find enhanced versions of her affair with the viscount: she reads books by Eugène Sue, Balzac, George Sand, “seeking imaginary satisfaction for her private desires. . . . The memory of the viscount would constantly return in her reading. Between him and the imaginary characters she would establish links. But the circle of which he was the centre gradually became larger around him, and the halo he possessed, spreading out from his image, stretched out far away, illuminating other dreams.”⁸
“Imaginary satisfaction for her private desires”: Emma’s readings color her entire world. They are her history, her geography, her spiritual mirror. So caught up is she in the fictional world, she even brings her books to the dinner table, turning the leaves while her husband tries to speak to her, telling her stories from his working day. Emma responds to these attempts with passionate scenes from her novels. Because having transformed herself into an emblematic bookworm, books are now her food, the stuff on which her world is built.
A. S. Byatt, recalling her first encounter with Madame Bovary, noted that what makes it impossible for Emma “to inhabit her house or her marriage is her romantic sense that there is something more, some more intense experience, some wider horizon if she could only find it. Her desires are formed by her reading and her education.”⁹ When reality fails to live up to her fiction, Emma blames her books. “I’ve read everything,” she says, anticipating Mallarmé. In the end, Emma will attempt suicide because life is dreary and books no longer offer consolation. Having served as fodder for her dreams rather than proper nourishment for the soul, books can now neither encourage nor satisfy her. For Emma, both on the page and in the world, there is, in the end, no “wider horizon.” Like the bookworm in the Anglo-Saxon riddle, she has not truly benefited from the books she has devoured.
After Cervantes, the
readers in fiction (that is to say, fictional characters who are both the subject and the object of a novel) become more literally conscious of the gastronomy of reading. From Arabella, in Charlotte Lennox’s slightly silly eighteenth-century romp, The Female Quixote, in which the heroine forces the world around her to mirror the romantic novels that delight her, “supposing romances were real pictures of life,”¹⁰ to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for whom reading is a taunting reminder of the life not lived, fiction makes its exemplary role explicit.
After Anna Karenina’s meeting with Vronsky in Moscow, she returns to St. Petersburg. On the train she picks up a book and a paper-knife to cut the pages, and reads. “Anna read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She wanted too much to live herself. When she read about the heroine of the novel taking care of a sick man, she wanted to walk with inaudible steps around the sick man’s room; when she read about a Member of Parliament making a speech, she wanted to make that speech; when she read about how Lady Mary rode to hounds, teasing her sister-in-law and surprising everyone with her courage, she wanted to do it herself. But there was nothing to do, and so, fingering the smooth knife with her small hands, she forced herself to read.”¹¹
Emma Bovary devours books and imagines that the fictional lives are her own, that she is a heroine of Balzac or Sue. Don Quixote devours books and models his behavior according to certain fictional codes that he deems just and proper, though he knows that he himself is neither Lancelot nor Amadis. Anna Karenina sees in the fiction she reads neither ideal characters nor ideals of conduct, simply imaginary lives that taunt her with the life she herself is not living. Not the fictional life but her own life, not that of a Lady Mary but that of Anna Karenina, not as much an image of the world as an example of action in the world, an example of what it is like to live, while remaining aware that the life read is not her own. And just as Anna Karenina understands what it means to be Lady Mary without believing herself to be Lady Mary, we understand what it means to be Anna Karenina without ourselves being Anna Karenina. Without this understanding, fiction (and society itself) would be impossible. Or as Nicholas de Herberay would say, “Be with the style content / And ask not if what takes place is true.”
“Literary characters are quicksand,” wrote Blakey Vermeule in a fascinating study. “They are telescopes. They mire us down; they give us perspective.” But “what happens,” Vermeule asks, “when people get overly focused on the orienteering devices themselves, on the map rather than the road, on the telescope rather than the distant planet?” As Socrates put it to the hapless rhapsode Ion in Plato’s dialogue, “What does it mean to be more interested in a representation of something than in the thing itself?” Vermeule notes that “Ion, of course, had no answer.”¹²
And yet, perhaps an answer is possible. Perhaps Socrates’s question to Ion (as Plato no doubt knew) is answered in that moment known to every true reader, in which a verse, a line of prose, an idea or a story, suddenly touches us, unexpectedly and profoundly, revealing something dark, half-intuited, unavowed, something that belongs exclusively to that reader to whom it has been secretly destined. That verse, sentence, or story will always interest us more than the material thing itself, because we are creatures of feeble perceptions, like moles in the sun, betrayed by our senses, and even though literary language is an uncertain, unreliable instrument, it is, however, capable, in a few miraculous moments, of helping us see the world.
The protagonists of Don Quixote’s chivalric romances and of Emma Bovary’s novels may be faint shadows of the real thing, but they are nevertheless powerful enough to overwhelm their readers—totally in the case of Emma, ambiguously in the case of Alonso Quijano—and compel them to tilt at windmills and inhabit romantic castles. Or, as in the case of Anna Karenina, to follow Flaubert’s advice and “live.” Even if death comes at the end.
Like Cervantes, Flaubert intuited this essential power of fiction, its extraordinary capacity to recreate and transmit our experience of “the thing itself.” He knew also that we learn the tenets of our behavior not necessarily through material action but rather through stories in which this behavior is played out, with its various possible causes and consequences. On the stage set by the text, we see our own selves perform under a multitude of guises, and we can, and often do, learn something from what we see. Fiction is in this sense exemplary, and if the seeming infinity of plots does not exhaust the possibilities of our dealings with the world, some part of it, a certain episode or character, a particular detail in a story, will perhaps illuminate for us a turning point in our lives. Chesterton noted that “somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are five or six words for which really all the rest will be written”:¹³ it is in those five or six words that readers consciously or unconsciously seek to understand something of their own circumstances.
The meanings lent to the metaphors of the reader—as traveler, as resident of the ivory tower, as devourer of books—never remain the same for long. The bookworm changes its meaning from the gluttonous reader of the Anglo-Saxon riddle to the obedient word eater of Revelation, from the wishful Emma to the wishing Anna. Being a bookworm need not always carry a negative connotation. We are reading creatures, we ingest words, we are made of words, we know that words are our means of being in the world, and it is through words that we identify our reality and by means of words that we are ourselves identified.
NOTES
When the translator of a quotation is not mentioned, the translation is my own.
As I lack university training, my reading habits are less rigorous than those of academics, and often, when giving a source, I do not mention the page on which I found the original quotation. I hope the reader will forgive this fault, due less to carelessness than to an amateur’s enthusiasm.
INTRODUCTION
Epigraph. Friedrich Nietzsche, Posthumous Papers.
1. See Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, IX:3:10, translated with an introduction and notes by H. C. Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 235–36.
2. Cicero, Orator, XXIII:78, translated by Albert Yon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002).
CHAPTER 1. THE READER AS TRAVELER
1. Heures de Rohan à l’usage de Paris, Ms 9471, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
2. See Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, vol. 2, translated by Henrietta Szold (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 261–65.
3. Quoted in Dominique Charpin, Lire et écrire à Babylone (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), pp. 18, 33, and 208.
4. Plotin, Traités 1–6, translated under the direction of Luc Brisson and Jean-François Pradeau, Traité III: 6, 20, p. 157 (Paris: Flammarion, 2002).
5. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Major Works, edited with an introduction and notes by C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977).
6. See A. Gros, L e thème de la route dans la Bible (Brussels: La pensée catholique, 1957).
7. The word “road” appears more than six hundred times in the Old Testament. See Gros, Le thème de la route dans la Bible.
8. See I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, 1924).
9. Habakkuk 2:2. Biblical quotations are taken from the King James Version.
10. Ezekiel 2:9.
11. Revelation 10:9–11.
12. See Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, vol. 3, translated by Paul Radin.
13. Quoted in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, I:9:24, translated by Edwin Hamilton (Piscataway, N.J.: Gifford, Gorgias Press, 1903).
14. Saint Bonaventure, Breviloquium, in The Works of Bonaventure, vol. 2, translated from the Latin by José de Vinck (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1963).
15. Genesis 3:5.
16. See S. de Dietrich, L e dessin de Dieu, itinèraire biblique (Paris: Denachaux et Niestlé, 1948).
17. Saint Augustine, Confessions, I:13, p. 34.
18. Saint Augustine, Confessions, I:13, p. 33.
19. Yehuda Amichai, Début fin début, (Paris: Editions de l’éclat, 2001).
20. See Jean-Pierre Sonnet, Le chant des montées: marcher à Bible ouverte (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2007).
21. See Saint Anthanasius, The Life of St. Antony, translated by R. T. Meyer (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1950), p. 56.
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