Aspects of the Novel

8 Aspects of the Novel Do not speak to me about modern times, with respect to the grandiose. There is not enough there to satisfy the imagina tion of a fe uilletonist of the lowest order. Flaubert, June 7, 1844 It's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments (17g8) Approaching more general aspects of the novel, I shilll enlarge the focus on narrative perspective to include other dimensions of Flaubert's novelistic practice, for his "dual style" affected other standard components of the novel: themes, plot, characterization, and setting or context. While my treatment of these issues may in certain respects be antic ipated given the preceding discussion, it is nonetheless use ful to render more explicit the manner in which Madame Bovary recast the traditional novel. In the analysis of cliche, irony, and stupidity, I intimated that Madame Bovary lends itself to thematic unification up to a point but also provokes a questioning of the very thematic lines or leads it holds out to the reader. The trial centered its readings upon the themes of the family and religion. Asso ciated with them was the theme of the novel itself in influenc ing behavior in "real" life. The prosecution and the defense were in agreement on the ability of fiction to trigger "mi metic" effects in ordinary life, for good or ill. They both assumed that readers would read Madame Bovary as Emma herself read novels, and, in attributing great importance to this theme, they joined literary critics who present Emma's 169 Madame Bovary on Trial own quixotic attempt to live what she reads as the unifying explanation which the novel seems to furnish in accounting for her life. It might, however, be argued that within the novel itself the explanation of Emma's "fate" through the reading of novels has only a limited validity. It is in no sense a total or univocal explanation of her life. That Emma attempts to lead her life as if she were living a novel and that her actual reading of "romantic" novels as a girl helped to shape her conception of life are blatantly apparent postulations of the novel itself. But they are mediated, qualified, and dislocated by other consid erations in a complex of relations that is not entirely coher ent. There is, for example, a tension between Emma's more transcendent aspirations toward an absolute and her earth bound, indeed vulgar, desires: both are in some sense "ro mantic," but they cohabit uneasily. Nor is there any simple coincidence between Emma's romantic excesses and her fi nancial imprudence. Love and money are two forms of impro priety in her life, and they combine to help undermine the status of the bourgeois family. But they do so from different directions that intersect only at certain points (gifts for her lovers or expenditures for the planned escape with Rodolphe). What they share is an extremely transgressive relation to conventional norms of bourgeois respectability, but the mode of transgression is not unitary: there is little romance in Emma's financial problems. A similar relation holds between erotic dreams and conventional religious inclinations in Emma, for they merge in mawkish amalgams that attest to the implausibility of their combination. Indeed Emma, in par adoxical contrast to her idealizing romanticization of secular love, takes too literally the image of a celestial lover and the belief that material practices are the path to true religious faith. In all these senses, Madame Bovary is not simply a "tragedy of dreams" that places responsibility for Emma's "fate" on her reading of romantic novels which create "mimetic" desire in her. One telling defect of this interpretation is that it does not inquire into the way in which it is both invited and critically situated by the novel itself. The fact that Emma's mother-in- Aspects of the Novel law offers the reading of romantic novels as the cause of Emma's "problems" is enough to give one pause and to cast a shadow of doubt upon the explanation. The shadow is lengthened by the additional fact that Charles and Rodolphe are the bearers of the belated Greek message that "fate" deter mined the course of events. Indeed a general problem in offering any given interpretation of a Flaubert novel is to see whether and how that interpretation is already put forth and positioned in the novel itself, for example, which of the char acters one sounds like in offering it. One may then find that the trojan horse in which one takes refuge has a rather un comfortable fit. On a related level of composition, symbols and images also raise problems in providing agencies of unification or coher ent organization that tend to break down or become ques tionable. We have already mentioned Charles's hat-a symbol that manifestly seems to stand for him yet is both too full and too empty for adequate interpretation. The image of the window serves as another remarkable instance of the possibil ities and limits of unified thematic interpretation. Jean Rous set begins his famous discussion of Madame Bovary as the "book about nothing" (in which the art of narrative transition is nonetheless crucial) only to have his analysis veer in the direction of making the novel a book about windows. I This Alice-in-Wonderland metamorphosis from a formalistic read ing of the novel as the realization of pure art to a thematic and image-centered reading may be emblematic of the du ality of the novel itself in exploring the interplay of opposites without being reducible to them. The window in Madame Bo vary does partially lend itself to thematic analysis as an image inducing phenomenological reverie that is more subtle and extensive than Emma's own. The closed window is often re lated to claustration and self-enclosure, while the open win dow is the scene of dreams in the provinces-dreams that provide at least imaginary communication with an outside world. Yet there are instances in the novel that block the comprehensive coverage of this interpretation. For in the use 1. Forme et signification (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1962), 109-33. Included in Paul de Man, ed., Madame Bovary (New York: Norton, 1965), 439-57. Madame Bovary on Trial of the window with its quivering hook as the father's signal to announce Emma's acceptance of the proposal of marriage to the inarticulate Charles, as well as in the "absurdist" gesticu lations of Emma and Binet as perceived by the two old busy bodies, it is the open window that functions as a barrier to communication and a bar to dreams. All this is not to say that thematic organization is beside the point. But the text puts into practice a complex interplay between thematic determinacy and indeterminacy, proffering certain consistent lines of interpretation to the reader while simultaneously indicating their shortcomings or possible dead-ends. Jonathan Culler has written extensively about the uses of uncertainty in Flaubert.2 It is important to recognize that it is a question of uses of uncertainty and not simply a provision of "a theory of the indeterminacy of experience."3 The reader may of course attempt to formulate this theory. The novel furnishes certain elements for it and tests the limits of their validity, thereby raising the question of the tenability of such theories in its world and, by implication, in other possi ble worlds. Here one sees again how Madame Bovary is a novel situated on the threshold between traditional novels and ex perimental texts. The latter will often leave the furnishing of conventional interpretations or expectations up to the reader rather than inscribe them within the text itself. The Sentimental Education and Bouvard and Picuchet move further in this direc tion. But Madame Bovary is positioned between tradition and its often disorienting critique, and for this reason is accessible to large numbers of readers (or misreaders) and even seems to invite misreading or at least reading on only a relatively "naive" level. This active use of "deviations" that are unre markable enough to pass unnoticed, yet insistent enough to disconcert once they are noticed or even subconsciously sensed, may also be observed on the levels of plot and char acterization. When one attempts to provide a linear plot summary of 2. Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca: Cornell Univer sity Press, 1974). 3. The idea that Flaubert provides such a theory is put forth by Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself(Ch icago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 160. Aspects of the Novel Madame Bovary, one invariably begins to echo either the pros ecution or the defense at the trial. Rather than repeat the story of adultery in the provinces, I shall try to indicate how modifications in narrative perspective provide a non linear subplot-one in which the use of language engages the prob lem of sense-making and its limits. And I shall relate this story to the role of temporality in the novel. Chronology in the ordinary sense is not very well defined in Madame Bovary (in contrast to a novel such as The Sentimen tal Education where the implausible length of Rosanette's preg nancy or the gap between 1851 and 1867 are marked by their contrast to the precise dating of other events). For the world represented in Madame Bovary is that of everyday life in the provinces where plusr;a change, plus c'est la meme chose.

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