“Feux D 'Artifice”: Flaubert and the Decadents
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Order Number 8820331 “Feux D’Artifice”: Flaubert and the decadents Nelson, Melinda McKinney, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1988 Copyright ©1988 by Nelson, Melinda McKinney. All rights reserved. UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 FEUX D'ARTIFICE; FLAUBERT AND THE DECADENTS DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Melinda M. Nelson, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1988 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Micheline Besnard • (3^ -- ""__ I--- , ^-Advisor Charles Klopp Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Charles Williams Copyright by 1988 Melinda Nelson ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation could not have been successfully completed without the patient encouragement of the members of my advisory committee, I wish them to know how sincerely I appreciate the generous and insightful guidance— unfailingly offered— that made this task a most pleasant enterprise. Very special thanks are due my advisor and mentor Micheline Besnard, whose exciting teaching inspired this project in the first place, and who during its preparation was that most valuable of allies, an interested and affectionate avocat du diable. I am also indebted to my readers and teachers Charles Williams and Charles Klopp, whose intellectual integrity and meticulous attention to detail enabled me to improve both the style and substance of my work. Finally, I would like to thank Robert Cottrell, many of whose challenging ideas enabled the writing of this paper. ii VITA August 14, 1948 ........... Born - Birmingham, Alabama 1969 .................... B.A., Birmingham-Southern College, Birmingham, Alabama 1970-71 .................. Graduate Teaching Associate, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 1971 .................... M.A., University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 1984-86 .................. Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1987 .................... Lecturer, Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri 1988 .................... Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio PUBLICATIONS Assistant Editor, Papers in Comparative Studies 4 (1985) FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Nineteenth Century French Literature iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................... ii VITA ............................................. iii INTRODUCTION Qu'est-ce que le Bovarysme? .......................... 1 Notes to Introduction.............................. 23 PART I Disjunction and Its Discontents: The Discourses of Flaubert and the Decadents CHAPTER I Formalizing the Latterday Carnivalesque: Bovarysme as Significatory Otherness ................. 26 Notes to Chapter I ................................. 59 CHAPTER II From Referents to Simulacra, From Flaubertian Flux to Decadent Stasis .............. 61 Notes to Chapter II ................................ 88 PART II OF SIRENS, SULTANS, AND PSYCHES: THE THEMES OF FLAUBERT AND THE DECADENTS CHAPTER III Emma and Company: Daunting Agents of the Reduced Carnival ............... 90 Notes to Chapter III............................... 128 CHAPTER IV The Land of the Sphinx: Where the Carnival Is Immobilized ................... 130 Notes to Chapter I V ............................... 159 CHAPTER V The Cerebral Universe: The Carnival Spiritualized, Individualized, and Artificialized............................. 162 Notes to Chapter V ............................... 193 CONCLUSION The Artifice of Reality........................... 195 Notes to Conclusion............................... 217 WORKS CONSULTED .................................. 220 v INTRODUCTION Qu'est-ce que le Bovarysme? Gustave Flaubert's first known essay was an eloge of Corneille, followed by an eloge of constipation (Bolleme 22). His early letters also burgeon with naughty excesses. But even the correspondence of more mature years is often wonderfully burlesque. For example, in a letter to Louis Bouilhet dated December 26, 1852— written, then, during the composition of Madame Bovary— Flaubert assumes a Rabelaisian style and orthography to complain about his ongoing struggles with his pen: Oyez pourtant. Par affinite d'esperits animaulx et secrete coniunction d'humeurs absconses, ie me suys treuve estre ceste septmaine hallebrene de mesme fascherie, a la teste aussy, au dedans, voyre; pour ce que toutes sortes grouillantes de papulles, acmyes, phurunques et carbons (allegories innombrables et metaphores incongrues, ie veux dire) tousiours poussayent emmy mes phrases, contaminant par leur luxuriance intempestive, la nice contexture d'icelles; ou mieux, comme il advint a Lucius Cornelius Sylla, dictateur romain, des poulx et vermine qui issoyent de son derme a si grand foyson que quant et quant qu'il en escharbouylloit, plus en venoyt, et estoyt proprement comme ung pourceau et verrat leperoseux, tousious engendrant corruption de soy-meme, et si en mourut finalement. (Correspondance 3: 72) Equally as Rabelaisian as this missive to Bouilhet from "Flaubertus Bourgeoisphobus" was that excavator of 1 bourgeois values Le Garqon, an invention of Flaubert and his friends for their theatrical representations in the billiard room of the Hotel Dieu, the Flaubert home in Rouen. According to Flaubert's niece Caroline, Le Garcon was a nineteenth-century travelling salesman version of Gargantua (Thibaudet 20), a creature hyperbolizing prevailing wisdom and thereby subjecting it to ridicule. The "affinite d'esperits" between Gargantua and Le Gargon, and so between Rabelais and Flaubert, similarly asserts itself in Flaubert's fiction. For instance, in Madame Bovary a cousin in the process of spitting water through the keyhole of the door to Charles and Emma's nuptial chamber is interrupted by Monsieur Rouault, who explains that the "position grave de son gendre ne permettait pas de telles inconvenances" (61). Later, Emma’s frenzied ride with Leon as the copulating couple crisscrosses Rouen in a "voiture a stores tendues . plus close qu'un tombeau et ballottee comme un navire" (289-90), and whose coachman is so perplexed by his disorienting course that he almost weeps with thirst, fatigue, and despair, is a passage that, according to Dominick LaCapra, approaches puppet theatre (164). Even more blatantly vaudevillian is the party at Rosanette's in L 'Education sentimentale. where oranges and bottle corks are hurled through the air, and dinnerplates are smashed against the heads of the guests; in addition, birds from 3 the aviary alight in disheveled coiffures, while the revelers carouse variously about as a clown, an orangutan, and a sloop. The material bodily humor of scenes such as these makes it clear that no satisfying reading of Flaubert is possible without ample recourse to Rabelais as interlocutor. In his now classic Rabelais and His World Mikhail Bakhtin,1 though he does not directly consider the affinities of Rabelais and Flaubert, nonetheless contends that modern literature— the writings of Flaubert, for example, or the products of the decadent authors who succeeded him— has become the privileged forum for Rabelais's carnivalesgue spirit.2 Bakhtin points out, however, that as the nineteenth century transposed the carnival spirit into a laughter that did not laugh (Rabelais 45), the carnivalizing tendencies of the Renaissance were gradually reduced to the negativism of rhetorical satire. The passages from Madame Bovary and L 1 Education sentimentale mentioned above, for instance, are all poised precariously between burlesque and spleen in the comic limbo of irony. The broad humor engendered by comparable antics in the fiction of Rabelais gives way in Flaubert's narratives to insistent silence, the result of their "more damnable and cuttingly critical tone" (LaCapra 163). Even while he is in the midst of Rosanette's party festivities, Frederic Moreau . frissonna, pris d'une tristesse glaciale, comme s'il avait apergu des mondes entiers de misere et de desespoir, un rechaud de charbon pres d'un lit de sangle, et les cadavres de la Morgue en tablier de cuir, avec le robinet d'eau froide gui coule sur leurs cheveux. (Flaubert, L 1 Education 145) As distinct from their Rabelaisian counterparts, Frederic, Emma Bovary, indeed every Flaubertian figure is checked by an implacable reality that depletes the laughter potential of Flaubert's books, foiling his characters' dreams, and so exposing the overwhelming incongruity between those dreams and that reality. What caused this latterday reduction of Rabelais's gay carnival spirit to sobering irony? In the first place, by the nineteenth century, the Renaissance social institution of the carnival had long since become impoverished, both as an event and a concept. Carnival forms of folk culture were degraded to mere holiday play, as festivities were brought into the home to become part of families' private lives; moreover, governmental encroachment upon festive life had the effect of politicizing it, of turning it into a parade (Bakhtin, Rabelais 33). But in addition to its separation from the important public institution of the carnival itself, the carnival spirit— exclusively a literary genre as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (34)— was further muted by political and social developments during the nineteenth century. By the time of Flaubert's death in 1880, the romantic idealism spawned by the glorious Napoleonic era was long dead, a victim of the unrelenting battery of shocks that the collective French nervous