Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

by Jean Améry

  His stylistic principle is the metaphor, inasmuch as he restores to language its basic character, which is metaphorical and onomatopoeic. His stance before the figures his imagination gives rise to is (unsustained, because unsustainable) “objectivity” and an incomparably suggestive irony; hence, the paradigmatic posture of the landed bourgeois; and it should be said here, parenthetically, that an abyss separates this approach from the charitable humor with which Thomas Mann will later illuminate the great theater of the world. Flaubert’s irony is hard, maybe even wicked, in any case profoundly unfair. Let us take a look at one of the most important figures from Madame Bovary, the apothecary Homais, and then proceed from his example. In him, bourgeois enlightenment, the heritage of our civilization, the indispensable fundament of every socialist utopia, finds itself cast into monstrous ridicule. Homais is, if we take up his discourses and analyze them word for word, a clever man, who truly does tower intellectually over his fellow citizens in Yonville-l’Abbaye. All that he says has rhyme and reason. There is no doubt he is the man of progress in his village, and that he strides before us as a vain bounder and fawner is, fundamentally, beside the point. In his artist’s arrogance, his estrangement from reality, Gustave Flaubert has not seen, has not wanted to see, that Homaises of all sorts were the bearers of bourgeois progress, the forerunners of those who sided with the Radical Party during the Third Republic, the historical progenitors of those who rightly stood with Zola and Clemenceau on the side of Captain Dreyfus. The unrestrained wickedness of Flaubert’s irony becomes clear to us in that diabolic way he has of making the apothecary utter illuminating and irrefutable truths so that in them, through them, the entirety of the bourgeois enlightenment, including the ethics it represents and the scientific view of the world, are reduced to grotesque prattle. What is happening here? Undoubtedly this: the reality of Gustave Flaubert, of this specific I, this “bundle of perceptions,” [20] stands opposed to historical reality. The man marked by destiny is settling accounts: with himself, for he was an atheist like Homais; with his father, a freethinker so notorious that, during the Restoration under Charles X, the secret police maintained a dossier on him; with friends who, as children of their time, were Voltaireans of some sort, one and all. The immoralist—in the Gidean sense!—Gustave Flaubert discarded the moralists, and history along with them, because history, if it is to be anything more than an accumulation of data, must give “meaning to the meaningless.” [21] Flaubert, pioneer of a new novel, was at the same time a forefather of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century anti-Enlightenment, not as one who became “bourgeois” through economic determinism, but instead as one who chose to be such in existential freedom. Was he aware of this? Did he at least have a vague sense of it? The first question must be answered with a categorical and legitimate No: his psychological state, his understanding of his ego, excluded the possibility of a logically structured self-awareness. As to the second, one may venture a cautious Yes. In his thirties, Flaubert, who wrote away his nights, working on Madame Bovary, was not a “family idiot,” but rather a raté, a failure, a man of échec. A person like this labors with a guilty conscience, weighed down by resentments. His father rose at six in the morning and waged war, scalpel in hand, against death, on behalf of the sick, from dawn till dusk. He was good for something, even if he lost more battles than he won, as the laws of his era dictated when surgery was still in its infancy. The same is true of Flaubert’s brother, Achille the Second, a pale, faded likeness of the redoubtable Achille-Cléophas, whom high and low held in equal regard. Still, he manages his affairs, more or less, with patients and colleagues alike. But Docteur Flaubert’s younger son is a timid sort, who doesn’t even dare allow his beloved to come to Croisset—Mama might take it the wrong way. A citizen without civic pride, a sorry affair! In this world, whoever cannot vindicate himself as a “useful member of society” (understood in the true sense of the term, and without any sarcasm) whether at a sickbed, in an office, at a law practice, or in a factory, must strike back with hatred. Resistance may be vindicated on social-historical grounds; then one becomes a rebel. Or one may repress it, in the confines of private existence, making oneself a master and servant of art. Beyond this predicament, which social psychology may illuminate, stands the gift—given by whom?—and talent, and genius.

  But this goes without saying: Gustave Flaubert’s artistic endowments are not to be deduced from his reality. To the contrary. It is the former that becomes the center of gravity for the latter. It is as if, in the person of Flaubert, the hate borne of disgust with himself and his world is absorbed into his “grace,” making the realist—and paradoxically, we will see that he was one, in spite of everything!—lose sight of reality. His embrace of ironic distance precludes attainment of the sought-after “objectivity” and its transformation into poetry. Even if the hermit of Croisset did slave away in pursuit of precision, his uncharitable effort was wasted. At work on his description of the agricultural exhibition, where Emma and her lover Rodolphe will hold hands, surreptitiously, for the first time, he reads countless pertinent reports and catalogues, just as later, during the conception of Salammbô, he will digest a massive store of historical documentation; and when he decides to set down the story of the two imbeciles, Bouvard and Pécuchet, he will embark upon a practically encyclopedic course of study. This gives rise to nothing one may describe as a reflection of any real state of affairs. As his talent leads his own reality to emerge, he constantly runs the risk of losing what one may, via arguments rooted in epistemology and logic, refer to as “the real,” to wit: the commonsense equilibrium established by everyday language, the limits of which mark the limits of the everyday world. His salvation is that he never completely abandoned the web of commonsense language, and this is also the salvation of realist prose.

  He himself knows nothing about day-to-day events, about what happens from hour to hour; between them and him stands his genius as an insurmountable wall, and with it his desperate will to create a universe of words, for him and him alone, that will replace the world of things. Since the contemptible everyday truth of trifling and stupid people has no value, he makes no effort to see them in their individuality or pay attention to their social affiliations. This has occasionally been denied, and much been made of how his heart throbbed for the disinherited, too. Did he not write Un coeur simple, the moving tale of a servant who gives herself to others, and has nothing left at the end but a moth-eaten stuffed parrot? Did he not, in Madame Bovary, in the scene at the agricultural exhibition, permit the wizened farmwife, Catherine Nicaise-Élisabeth Leroux, to receive a silver medal worth twenty-five francs from the Councilor for her “fifty-four years of service on the same farm,” which she said right then she would give to the priest, so he would say masses for her?—Moving, perhaps. Understanding: zéro. The old woman Félicité from Un coeur simple, Catherine Leroux from Bovary, are staffage, heartwarming, vaporous lights like those in Rembrandt that shine on an ingeniously constructed stage. The haut bourgeois Flaubert knew the little people no better than that aristocrat in Proust who meets a farmer and says affably, when the man devoutly removes his hat: “Je suis ton prince!” [22] The people outside his patrician class, save for a narrow circle of intellectuals, existed for him not as world, but as surroundings; he experienced them the way one observes the fauna in a landscape, as dainty, odious, even repugnant and worthy of extermination; and the question should remain open as to how well he knew the members of his own class, and what sympathy he may have felt for them.

  Shut off from the world, irascible and filled with hatred (the probable consequence of a miserable state of self-hatred), Flaubert, the bourgeois, had little access to the authentic bourgeois subject, who stands before him in the image of poor Charles, the dutiful citizen and simple doctor—not a man of renown like Flaubert père, but a helper and a good Samaritan all the same, a caring family father, a man who pays his debts down to the last sou. In essence, he awaits nothing more than that the author do him jus
tice, after all the injustice that has befallen him. Charles, too, is a bearer of values, bourgeois and social ones, no less deserving of mention than the proletarian and communal values of the old maid, which flicker tenderly as the stage lights fall on them in passing. But no, there is nothing! Charles Bovary, country doctor, is the uncouth weakling his wife takes him for; and the morsel of compassion the author patronizingly offers him now and then is a pittance.

  “Emma . . .”

  She and she alone kindles the genius of this man without reality, this poet on the lam. She is, it was already hinted, his Napoleonic triumph—as well as his categorical defeat: sun of Austerlitz and Waterloo, morne plaine! [23] In Emma Bovary, in the perfect transformation into her that Flaubert carries out, is concentrated everything thus far said about his reality: his withdrawal, [24] his auctorial commitment, his dedication to words.—It has been said that in Emma Bovary, Flaubert liquidated his early enchantment with romanticism, which we can still see in the writings of his adolescence. The word “Bovarysme” became an idée fixe: it characterizes those who, like the pitiful morons Bouvard and Pécuchet, dare to overstep a boundary fatalité has set before them and inevitably wander off into regions they find—they find!—impassible. The lachrymose amatory platitudes Emma showers on her lovers have been interpreted as the author’s repudiation of that French romanticism that he clung to until the very end, at least in the person of Victor Hugo. But what the scholarship has forgotten here is that one decisive moment in the novel when the author reproaches the hardboiled womanizer and woman-hater Rodolphe, the past master of erotic gamesmanship, for failing to grasp how a multitude of feelings may express themselves in a single gesture. Flaubert acts here as an interpreter for his Emma’s sentiments: his metaphorical art, intensive to the point of kitsch, speaks for Emma—but only for her.

  Mais oui, Madame Bovary, c’est bien lui, Gustave Flaubert. [25] Her excesses are his, her passionate mysticism an analogue to his mystical subservience to the author’s craft. Her pathos, which the author’s irony barely alludes to, is the pathetic irreality of the visionary from the hermitage in Croisset. He said as much, moreover, if not with direct reference to his own self, which he never wished to turn out into the world. In a letter to Louise Colet, he states he is in the midst of composing something no one has yet ventured: he will mock the palaver of the two central lovers, Emma and her second suitor Léon. But just afterward, illuminating both the conception of the work as a whole and his own emotional constitution, which is nothing less than ironic in regards to Emma: “Irony takes nothing away from pathos; to the contrary, it augments it!”

  There is little more simpleminded than the famous contemporary caricature of Flaubert as a surgeon triumphantly skewering Emma’s blood-soaked heart on a knife. As though he were his own father here and not the patient wailing in pain! If one wished to separate the author’s reality from Emma’s, one could take the view of the capable lawyer Maître Sénard, at the trial in which the novel was alleged to be an offense against public morals, when he eloquently persuaded the imperial court that Madame Bovary was a moral book. Did Emma not pay for straying from the path, as bourgeois morality demands? Did she not even find God again in her death throes?

  Now then, let it be said: Madame Bovary is not a moral novel, neither as concerns the narrow conventional morals of the epoch, nor in a higher, Kantian social sense.

  The immoralism of the artistic sphere in general and of Flaubert in particular is obvious. This unparalleled hymn to carnality, which puts all modern eroticism to shame, not only hurtles past every milestone of nineteenth-century prudery, but all social obligations too, with the same indifferent snap of the fingers; not only Flaubert the erotic artist, but also Flaubert the bourgeois-antibourgeois, negates the bourgeois subject (in this case, poor Charles Bovary, country doctor) with an impatient wave of the hand, and with him, any social engagement with subjectivity. What remains then is fatalité, the mysterious fate behind which Flaubert the naysayer, Flaubert the runaway, hides. I’m good for nothing? I’m a dodgy scribbler? I’m not a useful member of society?—Eh bien, tant pis! C’est la faute de la fatalité.

  In an interview about his Flaubert, Jean-Paul Sartre confesses to not knowing whether the man actually existed as he has interpreted him; perhaps it is all a fable—Quod licet Iovi [26] . . . good. Still, we too will dare to spin our own yarn about the author here. The transformation he allowed himself, his conversion into Emma, for which ironic distancing is perhaps merely an alibi, may well be the expression of passive homosexual inclinations. The boy’s sultry letters to friends leave the road open for such bold hypotheses. His infatuation with Emma, whose beauty the author never tires of extolling, may be interpreted as Flaubert’s wish to imbue his body, his flesh, with sensual beauty of the very sort he enjoyed as a boy! It is in her bondage to Rodolphe that Emma reaches her highest erotic-aesthetic efflorescence. Never is she more beautiful than in those days of unrestrained and arduous passion, Flaubert tells us. The unbridledness, the boldness and beauty of this woman behind whom Flaubert hides become a still more vivid image in her second affair, when she meets regularly with the young notary’s clerk Léon in Rouen. At the same time, her beauty brings out something dreadful and morbid in her. Léon notices it in the act of lovemaking, when he sees her comely face contorted in passion: the dark word lugubre appears, and with it, like a phantom, comes death: crypt air wafts from the workroom of a man who never really wanted to live, who abandoned the world early to penetrate the sinister domain of words, where objects no longer have value, because objective reality, being a social affair, refers to something subordinate, bourgeois. Art, love, death—voilà, we have Thomas Mann’s Late Romantic French forerunner, though Mann, unlike Flaubert, found his way into the social and political realities Bovary’s master wanted nothing to do with. That is why there is no room in him for Charles, the bourgeois subject, nor for Homais, the homo politicus. The country doctor will be turned into a risible puppet; the political enlightener a grotesque caricature. Those who proclaim and uphold the “brotherhood of man” are, for Flaubert, its family idiots.

  In a curious way, society will have its revenge. His niece, Mme. Commanville, whom he loved as much as Charles loved his little daughter Berthe, becomes his ersatz social fabric and does to him what his Emma does to poor Charles: she runs him into the ground with her constant demands for money, and pushes him aside, without love or respect. It is pure coincidence, for at the time when he was busy with Madame Bovary, he still had no sense of a future that would leave him to sicken and die as a man bereft—relatively, very relatively, it goes without saying!—of means. Still, the parallel is rather moving. Fatalité. In thrall to it, he produces a piece of writing that tells more about him than his correspondence (for he never reveals himself, not to his friends, much less to his beloved)—more even than the most insightful descriptions of his life and work. Madame Bovary even contains—a coincidence, certainly, but eerily oracular all the same—his own future. The catastrophe that crashes down on Charles and Emma Bovary, because Emma wished it, provoked it, will strike him, too, in a form conditioned by bourgeois moderation, for when the landed bourgeois loses his estate, he loses a considerable part of what he is. Knowing this, but suppressing it because it threatened him, he introduces, in his flight from bourgeois reality, the merchant Lheureux, who praises the bourgeoisie to high heaven with his repulsively sanctimonious words.

  We have said here that, in eluding himself, he lost the commonsense equilibrium of everyday reality and its reflection in everyday speech, if only partly; we have affirmed that, in the arrogance of his dedication to art, he abjured engagement with the bourgeois subject, whom he could have understood as well through Charles as through the apothecary Homais—and yet that he was, in Madame Bovary, in contradiction to his own aesthetic theory, the greatest realist writer of the nineteenth century. Nothing shall be taken back. It merely remains to say in what his realism consists. What we mean here is not the work’s
autonomous reality as a linguistic structure: that is there regardless, whether in Zola or Mallarmé, in Goethe or Hölderlin, in Robbe-Grillet or Simenon. The possibilities and limitations of such a theme would take us too far from Flaubert. What is proposed here is rather an intersubjectively graspable and subjectively experienced reality no less valid for Bovary’s master than for the person who consciously seeks it out. Willingly or not, Gustave Flaubert has distilled this reality into the twin avatars of money and flesh. The inextricable réalité-fatalité of Emma Bovary (as well as of Flaubert) bears the names: money and carnality. Despite the excessive, even overbearing insistence of decades of Bovary scholarship, from which it takes great effort to break free, Emma is not the victim of her bad-to-mediocre readings, or the occasionally slightly better ones (Walter Scott, for example). The destiny she carries out is one that her beautiful body, burning with sensuality, prescribed for her. Why not come out and say it: She chooses the destiny her love and her beauty demand? The “other” that confronts her is money, or if I may, the law of capitalism, exemplified, like a dreadful statue, in the figure of Lheureux. But this law, no less real than the law of her flesh, is one she does not choose, but simply suffers under, like her creator Flaubert.

  His whole life long, Flaubert never had to worry over money, it was simply there, by his father’s grace, according to the conditions of his will. In the same way, Emma needn’t pay attention to grubby trifles, Charles will bring home ducats for her to transform into things to serve her beauty and her carnal pleasures. Luxe et luxure, silk, lace, bijoux, cushions. Or, in the author’s life: voracity and bibulousness, suits of the finest fabric, cut by the best tailors; space, freedom of movement, and calm, which too must be paid for with the good money earned by bourgeois sweat. For Emma Bovary, everything ends in repossession and bourgeois ignominy; for poverty is disgrace, and only because it is so does an uplifting proverb exist to affirm the contrary. Emma dies of the shame prepared for her by the law as embodied in the brute, Lheureux. After his own unfaithful beloved, Mme. Commanville, his sister’s child, has brought him to ruin, Gustave Flaubert will weather the economic storm, but with shame and carping, a “ruined man” who needed only to lose his estate in order to become an utter and complete failure, such as he had taken himself to be from the first. Not a “family idiot.” Something worse. The poor offspring of a well-to-do and thus highly regarded house. One reduced to writing petitions so the bankruptcy of his shifty nephew-by-marriage will not make life impossible for him.