Flaubert : Pessimism, Pathology and Salvation through Art

Extracts from :

Victor H. Brombert

Novels of Flaubert A Study of Themes and Techniques

The Monastic Urge

It is only half in jest that Flaubert, in a letter to his friend Turgenev, refers to the ascetic, monklike disposition which alone made it possible to undertake as mad a task as the writing of Bouvard et Pecucfiet. In fact, the monastic image is one of the basic images in Flaubert's works. It applies to some of his most revealing characters (the hermit Saint Antoine, Bouvard and Pecuchet who end up like monks at their copying desks), as well as to his own writer-vocation. Whether this anchoretic tendency is, as Sartre asseverates, the result of a father-fixation is perhaps a point best left for psychoanalysts to debate.

Flaubert himself was rather more concerned with the sacerdotal dignity of the artist, which, he was convinced, only a detachment from the world and the self-inflicted discipline and austerity of work would allow him to attain. In depth, however, the image corresponds to more than a desire to join the ranks in a sublime martyrology of Art. The image of the monk and of the cell (and was not the study in Croisset a kind of cell?) is related to a chronic propensity to exotic and metaphysical reveries: the sense of confinement and the sense of the infinite are with him part of a dialectical scheme.

The word and concept of monk comes up insistently in his correspondence. "I live like a Carthusian friar," he writes to his mistress Louise Colet, who quite naturally showed little understanding for such eremitic tastes. "I have always locked myself up in a severe Ioneliness." He himself was aware of the apparent contradiction between his orgiastic dreams and his almost conventual existence. "Debauches attract me, yet I live like a monk." Elsewhere, he finds that he has the basic temperament of a monk precisely to the extent that he feels contempt for the follies of the human race and the vulgar satisfactions of social Ufe. He views systematic reclusion as a "soufflet donne a la race humaine." This somewhat adolescent attitude finds echoes throughout his life. To Mme Leroyer de Chantepie he proudly explains that he is what is called a "bear" ("Je vis comme un moine"); and to George Sand, many years later, pointing to the small role women played in his daily existence, he explains that he has in him "un fond d'ecclesiastique."

To be sure, Flaubert experienced from childhood on an unquestionable fondness for privacy and solitude. A well-heated room, books and leisure seemed to the young Gustave the most desirable conditions for happiness. He later recalled the feeling of elation ("allegement") he felt whenever he was alone. He even wondered retrospectively at the joy he found in boyhood solitude. With time, he came to understand that his claustrophilia was deeply involved with his need to protect his inner life: self-confinement became the means of salvaging his dreams and his memories. Thus precisely for his most moving remembrances he liked to use metaphors of pious immurement and entombment, and evoked the "royal chamber" he has walled in.

To be sure, there was also a measure of pride, even a bit of a pose, in the advice he gave Louise Colet and himself to lock their doors and climb to the upper level of their ivory towers. Yet the image of the locked door or the closed window cannot be attributed solely to Romantic fashion or cliches. These images, together with the monastic similes and metaphors, convey a double ascetic tendency: contempt for the "world," since the ideal is unattainable here and now ("il faut boucher toutes nos fenetres et allumer des lustres"); but also a positive and almost maniacal devotion to the austere joys of study and work. The adolescent advises his friend Alfred Le Poittevin to "break with the outside world." The thirty-yearold writer confesses: "I love my work with the passionate and perverted love of an ascetic who loves the hairshirt which scratches his belly." At the age of fifty-five, he still proudly notes that his entire existence has been "laborious and austere."

What is involved, however, is far more than an artist's pride and allegiance to his vocation. Solitude, for Flaubert, is the most potent mental aphrodisiac. True debaucheries of the imagination take shape within the confines of his self-imposed claustration. These are the "mental harems" ('liarems dans la tete") he evokes in a letter of 1853.

A characteristic polarity is here to be noted. The monastic tendencies point to an inherent idealism; but they also imply carnal and intemperate velleities. This almost mystic voluptuousness is one of the keys to Flaubert's temperament and to his work. A very revealing passage in Par Ies Champs et -par Ies greves sums up this sensuous asceticism which Flaubert sees as a "superior epicureanism," a "refined gluttony." His characters will repeatedly experience a strange blend of religiosity and voluptuousness. When Hilarion accuses Saint Antoine of a corrupt chastity, of a hypocritical indulgence in solitude, of a vicarious surrender to the most lascivious desires, it is almost as though Flaubert were denouncing a familiar perversity.

This extravagant asceticism must no doubt be related to his fundamental fear of life, and even — as the study of La Tentation de saint Antoine will reveal — to a chronic abhorrence of the flesh which recalls certain forms of Christian pessimism. Referring precisely to his monastic urges, Flaubert explained to Louise Colet (a curious statement indeed to make to one's mistress!) that there comes a moment when one needs to chastise oneself and to "hate one's flesh." Thus it is the view of the old convent wall which provokes Emma Bovary's meditation on the "inadequacy" of life and the instantaneous decay of all things, and which confirms her in an almost metaphysical "degout" of all the pleasures of this world.

Pessimism, Pathology and Salvation through Art

Early in his life, Flaubert looked forward to a literary career almost as to a vocation of gloom. "If ever I take an active part in the world," he writes his friend Ernest Chevalier, "it will be as a thinker and demoralizer. I will only state the truth; but it will be horrible, cruel and naked." At eighteen years, this could be attributed to an adolescent pose. But at twenty-five, similar remarks begin to betray a congenital disposition. "I was strangely born with little faith in happiness," he confides to Maxime Du Camp. "I have had, in my childhood, a total foreboding of life." In fact, one is repeatedly struck by how old Flaubert sounds in his letters, though he is still in his youth or middle years. At times this precocious aging is explicitly stated, almost as a matter of sad pride. "I feel as though I were forty years old, or fifty, or sixty," he writes in 1852, when he has barely turned thirty !

And it is not so much a question of explicit statement as of a prevailing tone. Ideas of death, decomposition and nothingness literally haunt him. The view of a child almost automatically conjures up images of senility and decrepitude. 'The contemplation of a naked woman makes me think of her skeleton." Despair, he writes elsewhere, is his "normal state," a despair which is indubitably provoked by the permanent obsession with physical corruption and death. "Comme Ie neant nous envahit!" Flaubert is painfully aware, almost to a pathological degree, not only of death around him, but of the "necropolis" he carries within himself.

Flaubert's pessimism, comparable in intensity to that of a Pascal, a Leopardi or a Schopenhauer, constitutes in itself a powerful poetic inspiration. In its extreme form, however, it can lead to dreams of self-annihilation. Edmond de Goncourt recalls an intimate conversation during which Flaubert, without any attempt to strike a pose, expressed his total discouragement and his yearning for nonbeing.

(...)

His is, however, not a negative, but a resilient pessimism. Flaubert finds inspiration in his very obsession with decay. He views the artist as an alchemist who creates beauty out of the very impurity of life. An extended metaphor, in one of his letters, develops, with somewhat dubious taste, the image of the latrine as artistic fertilizer. He advises Louise Colet not to neglect the "decompositions fecondantes," and states that the writer is a sewage cleaner ("vidangeur") and a gardener who extracts delectations from putrefaction. Ultimately, the form-giving powers of the artificer were to distill crude reality, transmuting it into ideal essences rising from the creative spirit toward the absolute and the ideal. No passage suggests more clearly Flaubert's notion of an artistic redemption. None brings into sharper focus the relation between his "realism" and his mystical yearnings. The dilemma of Flaubert is to be found largely in this apparent contradiction. The demoralizer who wants to reveal the naked truth also believes that beauty, like a star, "cannot be detached from heaven."

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