Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  Léon reveals his ineptitude, the chink in his armor, when he mentions the pianist: "A cousin of mine who traveled in Switzerland last year told me that one could not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of incredible size across torrents, log cabins suspended over precipices, and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some imposing site." How the sights of Switzerland must move you to prayer, to ecstasy! No wonder a famous musician used to play his piano in front of some magnificent landscape in order to stimulate his imagination. This is superb!

  Shortly we find the whole bible of the bad reader—all a good reader does not do. " 'My wife doesn't care about [gardening],' said Charles; 'although she has been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room reading.'

  " 'Like me,' replied Léon. 'And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?'

  " 'What, indeed?' she said, fixing her large black eyes wide upon him.

  " 'One thinks of nothing,' he continued; 'the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, toys with details, or follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.'

  " 'That is true! that is true!' she said."

  Books are not written for those who are fond of poems that make one weep or those who like noble characters in prose as Léon and Emma think. Only children can be excused for identifying themselves with the characters in a book, or enjoying badly written adventure stories; but this is what Emma and Léon do." 'Has it ever happened to you,' Léon went on, 'to come across some vague idea of your own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?'

  " 'I have experienced it,' she replied.

  " 'That is why,' he said, 'I especially love the poets. I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears.'

  " 'Still in the long-run it is tiring,' continued Emma. 'Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature.'

  " 'Yes, indeed,' observed the clerk, 'works, not touching the heart, miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness.' "

  Nabokov's notes on structural transition in Madame Bovary

  Flaubert set himself the task of giving his book a highly artistic structure. In addition to the counterpoint, one of his tricks was to make his transitions from one subject to another within the chapters as elegant and smooth as possible. In Bleak House the transition from subject to subject moves, on the whole, from chapter to chapter—say from Chancery to the Dedlocks, and so on. But in Madame Bovary there is a continual movement within the chapters. I call this device structural transition. We shall inspect certain examples of it. If the transitions in Bleak House can be compared to steps, with the pattern proceeding en escalier, here in Madame Bovary the pattern is a fluid system of waves.

  The first transition, a fairly simple one, occurs at the very beginning of the book. The story starts with the assumption that the author, aged seven, and a certain Charles Bovary, aged thirteen, were schoolmates in Rouen in 1828. It is in the manner of a subjective account, in the first person we, but of course this is merely a literary device since Flaubert invented Charles from top to toe. This pseudosubjective account runs for about three pages and then changes from the subjective to an objective narrative, a shift from the direct impression of the present to an account in ordinary novelistic narrative of Bovary's past. The transition is governed by the sentence: "It was the curé of his village who had taught him his first Latin." We go back to be informed of his parents, and of his birth, and we then work our way up again through early boyhood and back to the present in school where two paragraphs, in a return to the first person, take him through his third year. After this the narrator is heard no more and we float on to Bovary's college days and medical studies.

  In Yonville just before Léon leaves for Paris, a more complex structural transition takes place from Emma and her mood to Léon and his, and then to his departure. While making this transition Flaubert, as he does several times in the book, takes advantage of the structural meanderings of the transition to review a few of his characters, picking up and rapidly checking, as it were, some of their traits. We start with Emma returning home after her frustrating interview with the priest (seeking to calm the fever that Léon has aroused), annoyed that all is calm in the house while within she is in tumult. Irritably, she pushes away the advances of her young daughter Berthe, who falls and cuts her cheek. Charles hastens to Homais, the druggist, for some sticking plaster which he affixes to Berthe's cheek. He assures Emma that the cut is not serious but she chooses not to come down to dinner and, instead, remains with Berthe until the child falls asleep. After dinner Charles returns the sticking plaster and stays at the pharmacy where Homais and his wife discuss with him the dangers of childhood. Taking Léon aside, Charles asks him to price in Rouen the making of a daguerreotype of himself that in his pathetic smugness he proposes to give to Emma. Homais suspects that Léon is having some love affair in Rouen, and the innkeeper Madame Lefrançois questions the tax collector Binet about him. Léon's talk with Binet helps, perhaps, to crystallize his weariness at loving Emma with no result. His cowardice at changing his place is reviewed, and then he makes up his mind to go to Paris. Flaubert has attained what he wanted, and the flawless transition is established from Emma's mood to Léon's mood and his decision to leave Yonville. Later, we shall find another careful transition when Rodolphe Boulanger is introduced.

  On 15 January 1853, as he was about to begin part two, Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet: "It has taken me five days to write one page.... What troubles me in my book is the insufficiency of the so-called amusing element. There is little action. But I maintain that images are action. It is harder to sustain a book's interest by this means, but if one fails it is the fault of style. I have now lined up five chapters of my second part in which nothing happens. It is a continuous picture of small-town life and of an inactive romance, a romance that is especially difficult to paint because it is simultaneously timid and deep, but alas without any inner wild passion. Léon, my young lover, is of a temperate nature. Already in the first part of the book I had something of this kind: my husband loves his wife somewhat in the same way as my lover does. Both are mediocrities in the same environment, but still they have to be differentiated. If I succeed, it will be a marvelous bit, because it means painting color upon color and without well-defined tones." Everything, says Flaubert, is a matter of style, or more exactly of the particular turn and aspect one gives to things.

  Emma's vague promise of happiness coming from her feelings for Léon innocently leads to Lheureux (ironically a well-chosen name, "the happy one," for the diabolical engine of fate.) Lheureux, the draper and moneylender, arrives with the trappings of happiness. In the same breath he tells Emma confidentially that he lends money; asks after the health of a cafe keeper, Tellier, whom he presumes her husband is treating; and says that he, too, will have to consult the doctor one day about a pain in his back. All these are premonitions, artistically speaking. Flaubert will plan it in such a way that Lheureux will lend money to Emma, as he had lent money to Tellier, and will ruin her as he ruins Tellier before the old fellow dies; moreover, he will take his own ailments to the famous doctor who in a hopeless attempt is called to treat Emma after she takes pois
on. This is the planning of a work of art.

  Desperate with her love for Léon, "Domestic mediocrity drove her to luxurious fancies, connubial tenderness to adulterous desires." Daydreaming of her school days in the convent, "she felt herself soft and quite deserted, like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, inclined to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it." About the scene with the cure Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet in mid-April 1853: "At last l am beginning to see a glimmer of light in that damned dialogue of the parish priest scene.... I want to express the following situation: my little woman in a fit of religious emotion goes to the village church; at its door she finds the parish priest. Although stupid, vulgar, this priest of mine is a good, even an excellent fellow; but his mind dwells entirely on physical things (the troubles of the poor, lack of food or firewood), and he does not perceive moral torments, vague mystic aspirations; he is very chaste and practices all his duties. The episode is to have at most six or seven pages without a single reflection or explanation coming from the author (all in direct dialogue)." We shall note that this episode is composed after the counterpoint method: the curé answering what he thinks Emma is saying, or rather answering imaginary stock questions in a routine conversation with a parishioner, and she voicing a kind of complaining inner note that he does not heed—and all the time the children are fooling in the church and distracting the good priest's attention from the little he has to say to her.

  Emma's apparent virtue frightens off Léon so that when he leaves for Paris the way is clear for a more forward lover. The transition is going to be from Emma's illness following Léon's departure to her meeting with Rodolphe and then the scene of the county fair. The meeting is a first-class illustration of structural transition which took Flaubert many days to compose. His intention is to introduce Rodolphe Boulanger, a local country gentleman, at heart exactly the same kind of cheap vulgarian as his predecessor, but with a dashing, brutal charm about him. The transition goes as follows: Charles had invited his mother to come to Yonville in order to decide what to do about Emma's condition, for she is pining away. The mother comes, decides that Emma reads too many books, evil novels, and undertakes to discontinue Emma's subscription at the lending library when she passes through Rouen on her way home. The mother leaves on a Wednesday, which is the market day at Yonville. Leaning out of the window to watch the Wednesday crowds, Emma sees a gentleman in a green velvet coat (green velvet is what Charles picks for her pall) coming to Bovary's house with a farm boy who wants to be bled. In the study downstairs when the patient faints Charles shouts for Emma to come down. (It should be noted that Charles is consistently instrumental, in a really fateful way, in introducing Emma to her lovers or helping her in continuing to see them.) It is Rodolphe who watches (with the reader) the following lovely scene: "Madame Bovary began taking off his tie. The strings of his shirt had got into a knot, and for a few minutes her light fingers kept running about the young fellow's neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her cambric handkerchief; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and then blew upon them softly. The yokel revived....

  "Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the movement she made in sinking to a squatting position, her dress (it was a summer dress with four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) ballooned out around her on the stone floor of the room; and as Emma, stooping, swayed a little on her haunches as she stretched out her arms, the ballooning stuff of her skirt dimpled with the inflections of her body."

  The county fair episode is instrumental in bringing Rodolphe and Emma together. On 15 July 1853, Flaubert wrote: "Tonight I have made a preliminary sketch of my great scene of the county fair. It will be huge—about thirty manuscript pages. This is what I want to do. While describing that rural show (where all the secondary characters of the book appear, speak, and act) I shall pursue ... between its details and on the front of the stage a continuous dialogue between a lady and a gentleman who is turning his charm on her. Moreover, I have in the middle of the solemn speech of a councilor and at the end something I have quite finished writing, namely a newspaper article by Homais, who gives an account of the festivities in his best philosophic, poetic, and progressive style." The thirty pages of the episode took three months to write. In another letter, of 7 September, Flaubert noted: "How difficult it is.... A tough chapter. I have therein all the characters of my book intermingled in action and in dialogue, and ... a big landscape that envelops them. If I succeed it will be most symphonic." On 12 October: "If ever the values of a symphony have been transferred to literature, it will be in this chapter of my book. It must be a vibrating totality of sounds. One should hear simultaneously the bellowing of the bulls, the murmur of love, and the phrases of the politicians. The sun shines on it, and there are gusts of wind that set big white bonnets astir .... I obtain dramatic movement merely through dialogue interplay and character contrast."

  As if this were a show in young love's honor, Flaubert brings all the characters together in the marketplace for a demonstration of style: this is what the chapter really is about. The couple, Rodolphe (symbol of bogus passion) and Emma (the victim), are linked up with Homais (the bogus guardian of the poison of which she will die), Lheureux (who stands for the financial ruin and shame that will rush her to the jar of arsenic), and there is Charles (connubial comfort).

  In grouping the characters at the beginning of the county fair, Flaubert does something especially significant in regard to the moneylending draper Lheureux and Emma. Some time before, it will be recalled, Lheureux when offering Emma his services—articles of wear and if need be, money—was curiously concerned with the illness of Tellier, the proprietor of the cafe opposite the inn. Now the landlady of the inn tells Homais, not without satisfaction, that the cafe opposite is going to close. It is clear that Lheureux has discovered that the proprietor's health is getting steadily worse and that it is high time to get back from him the swollen sums he has loaned him, and as a result poor Tellier is now bankrupt. "What an appalling disaster!" exclaims Homais, who, says Flaubert ironically, finds expressions suitable to all circumstances. But there is something behind this irony. For just as Homais exclaims "What an appalling disaster!" in his fatuous, exaggerated, pompous way, at the same time the landlady points across the square, saying, "And there goes Lheureux, he is bowing to Madame Bovary, she's taking Monsieur Boulanger's arm." The beauty of this structural line is that Lheureux, who has ruined the cafe owner, is thematically linked here with Emma, who will perish because of Lheureux as much as because of her lovers—and her death really will be an "appalling disaster." The ironic and the pathetic are beautifully intertwined in Flaubert's novel.

  At the county fair the parallel interruption or counterpoint method, is utilized once more. Rodolphe finds three stools, puts them together to form a bench, and he and Emma sit down on the balcony of the town hall to watch the show on the platform, listen to the speakers, and indulge in a flirtatious conversation. Technically, they are not lovers yet. In the first movement of the counterpoint, the councilor speaks, horribly mixing his metaphors and, through sheer verbal automatism, contradicting himself: "Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on the object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment will, I am sure, be shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to the higher administration, to the government, to the monarch, gentlemen, our sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or private prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a hand at once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the incessant perils of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace respected as well as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts."

  In the first stage the conversation of Rodolphe and Emma alternates with chunks of official oratory. " 'I ought,' said Rodolphe, 'to get back a little further.'

  " 'Why?' said Emma. />
  "But at this moment the voice of the councilor rose to an extraordinary pitch. He declaimed—

  " 'This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord shed blood in our public places, when the landed gentry, the business-man, the workingman himself, peacefully going to sleep at night, trembled lest he should be awakened suddenly by the disasters of fire and warning church bells, when the most subversive doctrines audaciously undermined foundations.'

  " 'Well, some one down there might see me,' Rodolphe resumed, 'then I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad reputation—'

  " 'Oh, you are slandering yourself,' said Emma.

  " 'No! It is dreadful, I assure you.'

  " 'But, gentlemen,' continued the councilor, 'if, banishing from my memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there?' "

  Flaubert collects all the possible clichés of journalistic and political speech; but it is very important to note that, if the official speeches are stale "journalese," the romantic conversation between Rodolphe and Emma is stale "romantese." The whole beauty of the thing is that it is not good and evil interrupting each other, but one kind of evil intermingled with another kind of evil. As Flaubert remarked, he paints color on color.

  The second movement starts when Councilor Lieuvain sits down and Monsieur Derozerays speaks. "His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councilor, but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had always contributed to civilization. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism." In contrast to the preceding movement, at the start the conversation between the two and the speech from the platform are rendered descriptively until in the third movement the direct quotation resumes and the snatches of prize-giving exclamations borne on the wind from the platform alternate rapidly without comment or description: "From magnetism little by little Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing Cincinnatus and his plow, Diocletian planting his cabbages, and the Emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the young man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence.