Madame Bovary
The whole time I was reading Madame Bovary, the thought that kept running in the back of my head was why it had taken me so long to read this book. When I came out in college, the faculty advisor for our gay student group was the school’s French professor, who was doing translations and such of Gustave Flaubert. He would encourage me to read Flaubert, and I would tell him I’d look into it, and nothing more would come of it. There is definite regret that I didn’t take advantage of that point in the right direction early on, not to mention having the resource of somoene intimately knowledgable on Flaubert available to me at the time. Oh well, it didn’t happen, and now I’ve read it, so let’s move on…
Mdme. Bovary is one of those timeless books that read impeccably without requiring much in the way of translation or accounting for the fact that it was first released in 1856. Despite the fact that it is a novel, the piece has a beautiful poetry about it. Beautiful imagery combines to illuminate the hollow hearts of the characters.
The novel is basic enough on its surface, as it follows the meeting of Charles and Emma Bovary through to their marriage and (spoiler alert) graves. The whole novel seemed to be about restlessness, in some way. How Emma kept trying to find happiness in the arms of other men, rather than her distant husband. It was rather nice to have a novel where nearly none of the character are all that endearing.
Ultimately, the language of the novel was far more interesting to me than the story. It was interesting to see how Flaubert could make me such a conflicted reader so often, wanting to rush ahead for the sake of the action, but dragging my heels to admire the beautiful interplay of his words. Not to mention, how you are pulled along as a reader with characters that are not all that empathetic.
This book would have been finished a bit earlier had I not been in one of my writerly broodfests a while back, with all of the ‘woe is me’ nonsense regarding the glacial pace of my own work, which becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy. It is unclear whether reading something as masterful as Flaubert during such a period would serve to inspire or make one question why they would even be attempting such a well-worn path. In any event, my mood, writing, and reading all picked up recently, so Bovary was written in two major clips, with the bookmark resting at the end of Part One for longer than it should have.
The story basically shows Emma who, discontented with her husband, falls in love with another man. Despite it being an emotional affair, it never crosses the physical line, and when he leaves her, she is devastated. In her depression, they move to a new village where she begins a physical affair with a wealthy landowner. There is never any doubt that he doesn’t love her or share in her romantic fantasy of their relationship, and he eventually dumps her, which sinks her into another depression.
Finally, she meets the first guy again and begins having a long-distance affair with him under the guise of her traveling to that town once a week to have piano lessons. All this time, she starts piling up enormous debts unbeknownst to her husband. When her debts and adultery become known to people around them she (spoiler alert) commits suicide. Her husband, who despite not being her romantic ideal, remains loyal and true to her to the end, and he dies shortly thereafter.
As per usual, Nabokov geeks out over Bovary, constructing a timeline based on when Flaubert was writing the piece, and arcing back to compute that Charles Bovary was probably born in 1815, in order to place him on a historic timeline with French Kings of the time and such. This seems to be his first inclination with everything he reads, as the book always shows his markings on the first page of the first chapter, and it is always loaded with dates. The need for this exactitude continues to elude me. Maybe someday I’ll wonder why I ever took it so lightly, but we aren’t there yet.
Nabokov says it is important to understand that the characters are all basically philistines, and not mere bourgeois. For example, Emma is shown to be a voracious reader, but Flaubert points out subtly that she is a bad reader, by listing out the evergreen cliches around which she is most attracted, as well as that she uses fiction to put herself into the place of the female protagonist, which Nabokov detests of all readers. He writes:
"Books are not written for those who are fond of poems that make one weep or those whoe like nobel characters in prose as Leon and Emma think. Only children can be excused for identifying themselves with the characters in a book, or enjoying badly written adventure stories; but this is what Emma and Leon do."
In the first instance I recall (although my memory is often for shit), Nabokov questions whether Bovary is meant to be a realistic or naturalistic novel, listing out some of the flaws that would be present were it to have actually happened, but concluding with some nice words about books in general:
"In point of fact, all fiction is fiction. All art is deception. Flaubert’s world, as all worlds of major writers, is a world of fancy with its own logic, its own conventions, its own coincidences. The curious impossibilities I have listed do not clash with the pattern of the book — and indeed are only discovered by dull college professors or bright students."
As he is the former, and I’ve never been the latter, none of these "impossibilities" even tripped my radar. To give you some idea, one of his quibbles is that Emma had not been horse riding for several years is able to get on a horse and gallop away with perfect poise and never feels any stiffness in her joints afterwards.
The most important thing I hope to take away from Bovary as a writer is his counterpoint method that he uses to fuse two parallel dialogues together. Here is a passage where an entire table of people
are all sitting around chatting, but we see how Emma and Leon (her first affair, although it hasn’t happened yet in this scene) steer the conversation from the topic at large to a more personal sub-conversation:
Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza;then, turning to his neighbour-- "Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably inour 'Hirondelle.'" "That is true," replied Emma; "but moving about always amuses me. I likechange of place." "It is so tedious," sighed the clerk, "to be always riveted to the sameplaces." "If you were like me," said Charles, "constantly obliged to be in thesaddle"-- "But," Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, "nothing, itseems to me, is more pleasant--when one can," he added.
The conversation between Emma and Leon always stays on-topic with the others, and is carried out fully in front of them, but it is clear that they are bonding on a deep level during the course of it. there is another scene at a county fair where Emma and her second lover, Rodolphe, set their flirtation against the backdrop of farming awards being handed out in a ceremony one level below them in the town square:
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it. "For good farming generally!" cried the president. "Just now, for example, when I went to your house." "To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix." "Did I know I should accompany you?" "Seventy francs." "A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you--I remained." "Manures!" "And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!" "To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!" "For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete acharm." "To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin." "And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you." "For a merino ram!" "But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow." "To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame." "Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall Inot?" "Porcine race; prizes--equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg,sixty francs!" Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quiveringlike a captive dove that wants to fly away; but, whether she was tryingto take it away or whether she was answering his pressure; she made amovement with her fingers. He exclaimed-- "Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understandthat I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!"
If I am able to take anything away from the book, that would be a key stylistic element that really made those scenes come off the page (although I do not know if they have any similar effect out of context).
It was used most effectively when the characters stare at each other silently, after saying words that just hang in the air about the path upon which they are heading, and instead of them interjecting over the farming awards, the awards just drone on, adding dramatic tension that seemed heightened moreso than using text alone to convey the same scene. Not to mention, the comic potential which Flaubert even used, interjecting "Manures!" into the midst of watching a relationship bloom.
As for Flaubert’s style, Nabokov calls his judicious use of the word and preceded by a semicolon, which usually follows a list of actions or items, but the semicolon gives the reader a perfect pause, and the and flows the reader directly into a culminating image that resonates much deeper as a result. I know I do go out of my way to end certain paragraphs with certain words, because of the increased resonance (something I did get out of all that journalism and press release writing), so just another thing to try and work into the toolkit.
There is also an entire horse theme that, when pointed out, was clearly there all along, but I personally didn’t piece it together on my own. When Charles first meets Emma, he is on a horse that shies violently, which foreshadows his fate with her, etc., etc., and many other horse-involved things happen throughout.
The best part of reading about the horse theme is Nabokov’s delight in certain sexual overtones to the imagery, where he adds "Freud, that medieval quack, might have made a lot of this scene." and then later on, adds again "Old Freud chuckles in the dark."
Which calls to mind why I like Nabokov so much in the first place, the joy and love he brings to what he does, even when he is, at the same time, being sort of dry and academic.
It seems that perhaps the next move isn’t reading the next Nabokov MFA book (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is up next), but maybe something that Nabokov penned himself. It has been too long since I’ve read one of his works.
