Table Of ContentFlaubert
The Uses of Uncertainty
JONATHAN CULLER
Critical Studies in the Humanities
Victor E. Taylor, Series Editor
The Davies Group, Publishers
Aurora, Colorado USA
Critical Studies in the Humanities
Victor E. Taylor, Series Editor
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Sander L. Gilman, Nietzschean Parody: An Introduction to Reading Ni-
etzsche
Sharyn Clough, Ed., Siblings Under the Skin: Feminism, Social Justice
and Analytic Philosophy
Dominick LaCapra, Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher
Gregg Lambert, Report to the Academy (re: the new conflict of the fac-
ulties)
Michael Strysick, Ed., The Politics of Community
Dennis Weiss, Ed., Interpreting Man
Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty
Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque
Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text
Gregg Lambert, Return of the Baroque
© 1974 Elek Books Ltd.
Copyright © 1985 by Cornell University.
Copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Culler.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Culler, Jonathan D.
Flaubert : the uses of uncertainty / Jonathan Culler.
p. cm. -- (Critical studies in the humanities)
Originally published: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1974.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 1-888570-40-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-888570-40-3 (alk. paper)
1. Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Uncertainty in
literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ2249.C8 2006
843’.8--dc22
2006006524
Printed in the United States of America
Published 2006. The Davies Group Publishers, Aurora CO 80044-0140
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Contents
Chronology v ii
Introduction i x
1. The Rites of Youth 1
A. Precocious Boredom 1
B. Narrative Strategies 1 2
C. ‘Beyond’ Romanticism 51
2. The Perfect Crime: The Novel 5 9
A. Opportunities 5 9
B. Description and Meaning 76
C. The Elusive Narrator 99
D. Weak Vessels 116
E. Thematic Indeterminacy 129
3. Values 153
A. Stupidity 153
B. Irony 183
C. The Sentimental and the Sacred 208
Conclusion 2 31
Afterword 235
Notes 241
Bibliography 253
Index 255
Acknowledgments
My debt to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre will be apparent to anyone
who reads L’Idiot de la famille or my notes, but what I owe to the work of
Roland Barthes, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Geoffrey Hartman, Fredric
Jameson, and Paul de Man will be less obvious. To them I should like to
express my gratitude and to apologize for any violence their ideas may
suffer in these pages.
I am also greatly indebted to Professor Graham Hough for his com-
ments on the manuscript and to Professor Alison Fairlie for her sugges-
tions, criticisms, and disagreements. They have helped to make it a much
better book than it would otherwise have been.
Jonathan Culler
Selwyn College, Cambridge May, 1973
Note to the 1984 Edition
For this edition, I have corrected typographical errors and added
an Afterword that explains aspects of The Uses of Uncertainty which
I would approach differently today. The earlier Afterword has been re-
christened Conclusion, despite Flaubert’s warnings on this subject.
Jonathan Culler Ithaca, New York September, 1984
Chronology
1821. Birth at Rouen of Gustave Flaubert, son of Achille-Cléophas, Chief
Surgeon of l’Hôtel Dieu.
1835. First of his extant juvenilia: ‘Voyage en enfer’.
1836. ‘Un parfum à sentir’, ‘Rage et impuissance’.
1837. ‘La dernière heure’, ‘Rêve d’enfer’, ‘Quidquid volueris’.
1838. ‘Agonies’, ‘La danse des morts’, ‘Rabelais’, ‘Mémoires d’un fou’.
1839. ‘Smarh’.
1842. Goes to Paris to study law. Completes Novembre.
1843. Begins the first Education sentimentale. Fails his exams.
1844. Epileptic or apoplectic seizure (‘crise de Pont l’Evêque’).
1845. Completes the first Education sentimentale.
1848. Begins La Tentation de Saint Antoine.
1849. Reads La Tentation de Saint Antoine to Bouilhet and Du Camp, who
advise him to burn it. Leaves with Du Camp for an 18 month trip to
the Middle East, Greece, and Italy.
1851. Begins Madame Bovary.
1856. Madame Bovary published in the Revue de Paris. Revises Saint
Antoine and publishes fragments.
1857. Trial of Madame Bovary. Acquitted of offences to religion and mora-
lity. Begins Salammbô.
1858. Trip to Tunis and Carthage for Salammbô.
1862. Salammbô published. Public but not critical success. Beginning of life
as a society figure.
1864. Begins the second Education sentimentale.
1866. Apogee of social success. Named Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
1869. L’Education sentimentale published.
1872. Third version of Saint Antoine completed.
1874. Failure of his play, Le Candidat. Saint Antoine published. Begins
Bouvard et Pécuchet.
1877. Trois contes published. Returns to Bouvard et pecuchet.
1880. Sudden death at Croisset. Bouvard et Pécuchet unfinished.
Introduction
Poor Flaubert has been turned inside out for the lesson, but it has
been given to him to constitute practically-on the demonstrator’s
table with an attentive circle round-an extraordinary, a magnifi-
cent ‘case’.
Henry James
The reader who encounters Flaubert’s works for the first time is likely to
feel rather like Emma Bovary when, a few days after her marriage, she
begins to suspect that she has been deceived and wonders what exactly
in her brief experience is supposed to correspond to those grand words,
‘bliss’, ‘passion’, ‘ecstasy’, that she has oft heard repeated. For like love,
Flaubert has such an exalted literary reputation that disillusion almost
inevitably follows hard upon one’s first experience. The cynic might even
paraphrase La Rochefoucauld’s dictum on love and say that no one would
think of admiring Flaubert if he had not read about him in books.
Fortunately, one does encounter cases of spontaneous admiration, but
for most readers Flaubert’s reputation is something of a puzzle. Why
should Henry James, who spent time detailing the flaws of his novels and
who was offended by Flaubert’s social manner, have resisted the temp-
tations of condescension and overcome personal animosity to call him
‘the novelist’s novelist’ and ‘for many of our tribe at large the novelist’?l
Or why should Ezra Pound, lover of Provençal lyrics and Japanese hai-
ku, have extended Flaubert’s empire to verse as well as prose: not only
does Un Coeur simple embody ‘all that anyone knows about writing’,
but Mauberly, the artist who ‘strove to resuscitate the dead art of poetry’,
took Flaubert as his ideal: ‘His true Penelope was Flaubert.’2 That may
be set clown as metaphor, but even within the realm of the novel it is
not obvious, to anyone comparing Flaubert with his own ‘great novelist’,
whether he be Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, why Percy
Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty
Lubbock, writing of The Crqft of Fiction, should call Madame Bovary,
that tale of provincial adultery, ‘the novel of all novels that the criticism
of fiction cannot overlook’.
How are we to explain this prodigious reputation? One clue might be
found in the reasons for Pound’s praise:
His true Penelope was Flaubert.
He fished by obstinate isles.
Flaubert the craftsman, the perfectionist, who found creation such an
obstinate process and set such standards for himself that writing became
sacramental penance: this is certainly the picture he gives in his letters.
Flaubert, like his contemporary Marx, developed a labour theory of val-
ue but applied it to literature. Henceforth a text must cost its author a
great deal of agony. The sprezzatura of the aristocrat who dashed off a
sonnet in a spare moment had already been displaced as an ideal; now
one could no longer play the inspired Romantic bard swiftly transcribing
a moment’s illumination. And of course to be as enormously productive
as a Balzac, planning to turn out a novel a month, would be to give up any
artistic pretensions whatsoever. Even so, one must stress that Flaubert’s
posture was not that of the classical craftsman who knew how to con-
struct a verse or a period and whose mastery of an art made his task one
of finite progress towards definable ends. For Flaubert the artistic process
was interminable and the work, by definition, imperfect; but the writer
could not, for that, accept his limitations with a philosophic shrug with-
out renouncing his artistic titles. Indeed, Flaubert seems very much at the
source of a conception of the artist that is still with us. No doubt, part of
its attraction and reason for its persistence is the stress that falls on desire
rather than accomplishment. The struggling author can interpret the con-
junction of a compulsion to write and an inability to compose as proof of
his vocation. It is precisely at the moment when one finds it impossible to
write anything that one enters the artistic condition.
The Romantic artist was often in agony and may have felt it the
necessary accompaniment of his condition, but it belonged to his emo-
Introduction i
tional life and attempt to live in the world rather than to the process
of composition. ‘Quels délices! quels tourments!’ or ‘I fall upon the
thorns of life, I bleed!’ locate agony in an experience of the world and
require of the reader an empathetic understanding of possible causes.
The ultimate inexpressibility of such states of feeling does not trouble
the poem, for that is its implicit subject. An agony that was clearly
defined by the poem would not require the reader to explore his own
experience for possible analogues and would thus be less effectively
profound. The function of inexpressibility is to refer the reader to the
world and to make him seek out sources of agony as a condition of un-
derstanding the poem.
Flaubert transferred this Romantic agony to the creative act itself and
thereby called into question the notion that made literature a communi-
cation between author and reader and made the work a set of sentences
referring to a shared experience they did not express. The agony becomes
a property of the act of writing and does not figure in a communicative
process. Inexpressibility, therefore, once a property of feelings, mark of
profundity, and possible source of pride, now becomes part of a creative
linguistic act and a source only of agony — the agony of the unending
search for le mot juste.
This agony has been an extremely important feature of modern litera-
ture, and to pay homage to Flaubert is one way of expressing solidarity
with the writer in his battle with language and obsessive exploration of
its possibilities. There have consequently been those who not only held
Flaubert in reverence but also, like Gide, would willingly have traded the
novels — stories of mediocre quests — for the correspondence, which
records this nobler and more poignant struggle. However, I think one can
say that without the novels the letters would be a grotesquely comic docu-
ment: Flaubert’s desperate reflections on art are impressive only because
his novels are, finally, worthy of respect. Otherwise, the letters would
be the contortions of a sadly exaggerated passion. To explain Flaubert’s
reputation by the ideal he proposed and the example he set would be to
devalue the novels themselves and to nourish a myth of the artist’s tragic
condition that flourishes quite well enough already.
