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Flaubert, Verga, Huysmans, D’Annunzio THE DESCRIPTIVE MODE: FLAUBERT, VERGA, HUYSMANS, D’ANNUNZIO A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN FRENCH AND ITALIAN Amy Lilah Elghoroury December 2010 © 2011 by Amy Lilah Elghoroury. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/yy507wq8379 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannes Gumbrecht, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Franco Moretti, Co-Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Laura Wittman Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii Abstract Looking at novels by Flaubert, Verga, Huysmans, and D’Annunzio, this project charts the increasing role of subjectivity in novelistic descriptions from mid- to late- nineteenth century France and Italy. This extended analysis of literary techniques that express subjectivity reveals that description was increasingly seen as a field of experimentation in which the parameters of an individual’s access to the observable world could be adjusted to the concerns of a particular novel. Earlier approaches to description in the nineteenth century had used the proliferation of individual details as a way of ensuring fidelity to the observable world. An unobtrusive describing voice was considered a mark of the objectivity of a description. Adaptations of this concept to new types of projects – projects in which the distinctive perspective of figures within the world of the novel are key to the novel’s plot – produced different results, however, in the second half of the century: the issue became not only whether or not one could describe sufficiently and in as objective a way as possible, but how a description could adapt to accommodate observational subjectivity while maintaining the referential basis of the descriptive mode. In some cases the use of techniques that imply the presence of a filtering subjectivity leads to what seems like a greater impersonality, as the observing descriptor is redistributed and reabsorbed into the reality of the novel’s characters. In contrast, in others the overabundance of subjectivity techniques and the influence they have on sentence and paragraph structure overwhelms the composition and the novel moves into relativism and even idiolect. This dissertation traces a progression from the former tendency to the latter over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century in France and Italy, thus showing a continuity between iv ‘realist’ tropes of observation integrated in description and the ‘decadent’ style that appropriated those tropes in the interest of individual expression. This project stems from the premise that description is not simply a type of text, easily isolated from other types; rather, passages, sentences, and phrases considered descriptive are operating in a mode that prioritizes the durative qualities of objects in the world of the novel. Descriptions require a pause in novelistic time, and detecting descriptive pause is the first task in analyzing how the descriptive text functions both internally and in relation to the narrative whole. Using durative verb tenses as markers of descriptive pause, descriptive passages were isolated and examined for formal features that were either repeated throughout the novel or received special emphasis. Some features appear to be necessary to all approaches to description – the creation of lists, for example, is a practice common to all four novels – while others are particular to descriptions of specific kinds of objects or novelistic contexts. The advantage of this approach is that it looks at trends in descriptive practice as groups of stylistic choices that enjoyed certain degrees of preference over time, sometimes emerging with greater emphasis or frequency at certain kinds of moments in a novel (moments of observation, moments of introspection, moments of adjustment in a character’s expectations, etc.) and, on a larger scale, at certain times and places in nineteenth century literary history. The configuration of authors and novels presented here is therefore based on stylistic tendencies that overlapped across historical and national divisions and not on periodizations that would isolate these works by other criteria. The use of descriptive technique to infuse a novelistic world with the subjective observational standpoint of an integrated observer is shown to have increased in frequency and importance from the v 1860s to the turn of the century, but this should not imply causal links between the successive moments in literary history represented by these novels. Each novel adapts the possibilities of descriptive language to its immediate aesthetic goals. This dissertation explains descriptive prose from microscopic observations of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs in an effort to decode, from individual choices, the workings of descriptions in themselves and only after that as part of larger narrative wholes. The first chapter looks at descriptions in Flaubert’s Salammbô as examples of integration of an observing entity with the world the novel describes through perspectivist techniques. With the imperfect tense as support for vast descriptive panoramas, Flaubert’s prose disperses the points of view from which descriptions of ancient Carthage and its environs emanate. The result is an encyclopedic project that maintains a high level of documentary detail while accounting for the experience of an observer who shares a perspectival context with the novel’s characters but is simultaneously not identified with any single figure in the novel. The second chapter detects the specific traits of Verga’s use of a choral voice in Mastro-don Gesualdo. By combining the phrase structure of dialect speech with the vocabulary of literary Italian Verga’s project achieves an unusual synthesis of describing voice and described world. The brevity, directness, and expressivity of Verga’s descriptions collapses the pretense of impersonal objectivity; in particular, Verga’s use of idiomatic expressions and emotive punctuation in descriptions infuses his describing voice with the shared emotional, social and linguistic contexts of Gesualdo’s Sicilian village. vi The third chapter looks at Huysmans’s À rebours as an example of a manipulation of descriptive techniques in the service of the perceptions of a single protagonist. In rejecting the social and turning Zola’s precision toward an individual mind Huysmans uses description as a support for interpretive essays on topics that align with the tastes of his protagonist. Huysmans’s descriptive sentences show a tendency toward superfluous transformations of syntax and excessive elaboration of the qualities of perceived objects at the expense of phrasal unity and narrative context. In the fourth chapter I turn to D’Annunzio’s Il fuoco, a novel in which descriptive prose becomes poetic prose. D’Annunzio’s poet-describer projects his vision of a symbolically-charged Venice onto descriptions of the city in a way that integrates the poet’s feeling of power over his own environment with the descriptive form. In its use of extended and complex metaphors, emphatic repetition, and sonorous word patterns D’Annunzio’s descriptive style is a distinct movement away from universal observation of phenomena toward a solipsistic, individualized use of description that ignores the epistemological questions that form the basis of literary practices focused on observable reality. While Flaubert and Verga provide evidence of descriptive technique being used to afford greater objectivity through omnipresence of the describing mind, Huysmans and D’Annunzio prove to be less concerned with the relationship of the individual to the world the novel describes. The result is a refocusing of the interests of descriptive novels from the totality of the lived experience shared by inhabitants of a given world to the interests and perspective of a powerful and alienated individual figure. vii For my parents With special thanks to Sepp, Franco, and Laura And with thanks to all my advisers, official and unofficial, past and present!... viii Table of Contents Abstract: iv Introduction: 1 Chapter one: Flaubert 11 Chapter two: Verga 58 Chapter three: Huysmans 108 Chapter four: D’Annunzio 153 Bibliography: 207 ix Introduction Thinking back on the history of the novel in the nineteenth century, we find it impossible not to think of long and detailed descriptions: those passages in which human environments are described in intimate detail as if the entire structure of a novelistic world rested
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