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Overview
Originally published in 1971.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691647296 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1330 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Flaubert and Joyce
The Rite Of Fiction
By Richard K. Cross
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1971 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06199-3
CHAPTER 1
THE PRIESTHOOD OF ART
TWO VOCATIONS
To readers who know Flaubert and Joyce best for their scrupulous portraits of burgher-life it seems natural to bracket the two writers as "realists." "Flaubert belongs to Rouen as Joyce belongs to Dublin," remarks Philip Spencer. "Essentially drab in spite of its cradle of woodland scenery and emphatically contemporary in spite of its medieval past," he goes on to say, "Rouen was synonymous with commerce and commerce at its most uninviting: a greyness of spirit seemed to droop over the river and seep into the hearts of the inhabitants." One cannot help recalling the brown tints, emblematic of Dublin's moral paralysis, that Joyce deploys in his early stories. Sombre city-scapes are not, however, the final truth of either man's art, for both insisted on the poetry of inward experience as well as fidelity to naturalistic surfaces. Each of them carried within himself the germ of symbolism, which constituted a potent strain even in their early works and developed into the major mode of Joyce's later fiction.
Rouen serves as the locale of several episodes in Madame Bovary, but otherwise Flaubert made no direct artistic use of the city he knew so well. Paradoxically it seems to have determined the attitudes that underlie his oeuvre to an even greater extent than was the case with Joyce's Dublin youth; Flaubert's moral and aesthetic views appear to have changed relatively little after his move to Croisset. His fascination with the grotesque began with his playing in the dissecting rooms of the Hotel-Dieu, and it was there that he honed his powers of observation and analysis. "Son and brother of distinguished physicians," observed SaintBeuve, "M. Gustave Flaubert holds the pen as others do the scalpel." His hatred of bourgeois moeurs, many of which he continued to observe even as he exposed their vacuity in his novels, and his collection of idées reçues have their roots in Rouen as well. At age nine the future author of Bouvard et Pécuchet remarked in a letter to his schoolmate Ernest Chevalier, "And since there's a lady who comes to see papa and always says stupid things, 111 write them too."
In spite of the fact that Joyce spent his adult life wandering from place to place on the Continent, the tie to his native city remains unmistakable. Like Odysseus coming home to his Penelope, Joyce returns to "dear, dirty Dublin" for the settings of all his books. To infer, though, that his imagination failed to enlarge itself during the years of exile would be to misjudge him seriously. Admitting the decisive character of youthful experience, a great many incidents drawn from the author's mature life found their way into the novels and his moral vision deepened enormously. The main reason for transposing these impressions and insights to a Dublin setting lies, I believe, in Joyce's recognition that only in art could he recover his lost fatherland and redeem his pledge to draw Ireland more fully into the civilization of the West. If he was unable to forge a new conscience for his race, he could at least create a fresh image of it in the European mind. The Dubliners provided him also with one indispensable resource that Flaubert's Rouennais lacked, a vivacity of speech and gesture. Stephen Dedalus may have moments when he feels as though he is walking among "heaps of dead language," but his author managed to find verve even in his compatriots' clichés. Joyce's Liffey is not the counterpart of the miasmal Seine that flows through the opening pages of L'Education sentimentale; by the time we see it in Finnegans Wake the murky stream has come to represent the "hitherand-thithering waters" of life.
The battle of Romanticism, still being waged in the provinces during the 1830's, had an impact on Flaubert comparable to that of the Decadence of the nineties on Joyce. Both writers' apprentice fiction reveals minds given to expansive reveries, which offered escape from a materialism whose vulgarity at once appalled and intrigued them. Flaubert spoke of the opposing tendencies of his mind as "deux bonshommes distincts": "one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of phrase and the high points of ideas; and another who digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can, who likes to treat a humble fact as respectfully as a big one, who would like to make you feel almost physically the things he reproduces; this latter person likes to laugh, and enjoys the animal sides of man." He tried unsuccessfully to effect an ironic fusion of the lyrical and the grotesque in the first Education sentimentale (1843-1845), and ten years later he accomplished it in such brilliant episodes of Madame Bovary as the agricultural fair and the rendezvous of Emma and Leon at the Rouen cathedral.
Joyce also struggled to reconcile conflicting impulses in his art. The protagonist of Stephen Hero refers to them as the classical and romantic "tempers." Possessed of "an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper," the romantic "sees no fit abode here for [his] ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures ... lacking the gravity of solid bodies." The classical temper, "ever mindful of limitations," draws strength from its focus upon "these present things" but finds itself forced to cope with "the materialism that must attend it." Especially in Ulysses, Joyce mediates with consummate skill between the world of dreams and ideals on the one hand and that of everyday reality on the other. An extraordinary capacity for integration, for welding dissonant elements into artistic wholes, is in fact the primary attribute of Joyce's and Flaubert's brand of imagination. "Imagination" must be understood here as what Coleridge called the esemplastic power rather than in its popular sense of inventiveness in matters of plot and setting. Both artists reserve their creative energies for audacious technical experiments, and when it comes to form neither man repeats himself.
The two writers' preoccupation with style did not, of course, preclude a concern with the details of their subject matter. They were simply less inclined than most novelists to spend themselves fabricating material that could be more accurately drawn from observation. "The more Art develops," Flaubert believed, "the more scientific it will be" in the rigor of its methods. Their conscientiousness as craftsmen led them to make even the most minute particulars the objects of painstaking research. An example of the French master's scrupulousness in authenticating details may be seen in a letter to Ernest Feydeau in which he requests information pertaining to L'Education sentimentale:
This is what I should like to know — it concerns my book:
My hero Frédéric quite properly wants to have a little more money in his pocket, and he plays the market. ... This takes place in the summer of 1847.
So: from May to the end of August, what were the securities favored by speculators?
My story has three phases:
1. Frédéric goes to a broker with his money and follows the broker's advice. Is that how it's done?
2. He makes a profit. How? How much?
3. He loses everything. How? Why?
It would be very good of you to send me this information — the episode shouldn't take up more than six or seven lines in my book. But explain it all to me clearly and exactly.
One need not look far to find a parallel instance of Joyce's fastidiousness. He frequently wrote to his aunt, Mrs. William Murray, to verify factual points concerning Dublin life. The following query, relating to an incident in the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses, is representative:
"Is it possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of no 7 Eccles street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself down from the lowest part of the railing till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 of the ground and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build. I require this information in detail in order to determine the wording of a paragraph."
The two writers' obsession with literal fidelity to even the smallest facts exceeds the requirements of novelistic verisimilitude. Walton Litz cites Joyce's letter as evidence of his "desperate need for principles of order and authority. Deprived of social and religious order by his self-imposed exile, and acutely aware of the disintegrating forces in modern European society, Joyce turned to the concrete details of place and character as one stable base for his writing." These observations apply almost equally to the internal emigro Flaubert, who sought refuge from his time in unremitting labor and an aesthetic mysticism that anticipates Joyce's priesthood of the imagination: "disgusted, frustrated, corrupted, and brutalized by the outside world ... decent and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live. If society continues on its present path I think we shall see a return of such mystics as have existed in all the dark ages of the world." Given this cast of mind, the attraction of Saints Anthony and Julian and his comparison of "les affres de l'Art" to an ascetic's hair-shirt are not hard to understand.
Finding it impossible to submit to any creed — ? believe that a thinker (and what is an artist if not a triple thinker?) should have neither religion, country, nor even any social convictions"— Flaubert knelt only before the altar of art, that least mendacious of lies. Joyce reaffirms the need for detachment when he has Stephen decide to become a wildgoose and fly by the nets of church, nationality, and language. The Irish novelist sought to transcend not just the parochialism of the Gaelic revival but ultimately even the constraints of a usurper's tongue. In Finnegans Wake he aspires to a pan-European idiom, although, as anyone who has read passages aloud can testify, his fundamental medium remains a Dublin-accented English. His sole commitment was to express himself as fully and as freely as he could and to avoid any form of engagement that might deflect his vision or representation of the truth. Joyce's fear of oppressive institutions and attitudes led to his insistence that the writer isolate himself from any influence that threatened the purity of his vocation: "This radical principle of artistic economy applies specially to a time of crisis," he declared in 1901, and at no point during the forty critical years that ensued did he display the slightest readiness to compromise.
Flaubert, who felt that bourgeois society posed a grave menace to personal and artistic liberty, was even more adamant in asserting that the writer must "climb into his ivory tower" in order to keep faith with his calling. His fierce independence made even the sort of family life that gave Joyce solace an impossibility. "For me, marriage would be an apostasy which it appalls me to think of," he told his mother. "If you are involved in life you see it badly; your sight is affected either by suffering or by enjoyment. The artist, in my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature."
In spite of their early and imperious vocations, neither novelist published any fiction until he was in his mid-thirties. Flaubert, who wrote chiefly for his own satisfaction and that of a few close friends, remained largely indifferent to the prospect of literary fame. His artistic conscience rendered unthinkable the idea of relinquishing control over a book in any measure less perfect than he felt he could make it. "It is very doubtful that the public will ever have occasion to read a single line written by me," he avowed in 1846; "if this happens, it will not be before ten years, at least." Exactly a decade later he yielded to Maxime Du Camp's pleas and allowed the serialization of Madame Bovary in the Revue de Pans.
Flaubert's longanimity calls to mind Stephen Dedalus' claim, mocked by Mulligan, that he is "going to write something in ten years." Joyce places at the end of A Portrait the dates 1904-1914, as if to fulfill this promise, even though work on the book appears to have extended into 1915. Unlike Flaubert, he was anxious to publish and eager for recognition, but a perusal of his letters to various editors reveals an artistic integrity every bit as unbending as the Frenchman's. His refusal to change or delete a relatively small number of passages in Dubliners delayed the book's publication for eight years, and his unwillingness to modify the Portrait in deference to conventional tastes led to its rejection by so many firms that he was very nearly obliged to have it printed privately. Ulysses appeared only through the good offices of Sylvia Beach, whose Paris bookshop was for many years the sole place where copies of "his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" could be obtained, since, like Madame Bovary, it had incurred the disfavor of censors.
Add to the shortsightedness of publishers and critics and harassment by legal authorities such cares as near-blindness, poverty, a schizophrenic daughter, and the painstaking labor of composition and one begins to appreciate the stupefying cost of Joyce's vocation. What is more, the burden was not merely borne but borne with courage, patience, and humor. "I am now advised to go to Aix-les-Bains," he wrote to Harriet Weaver, "but am in Ithaca instead. I write and revise and correct with one or two eyes about twelve hours a day I should say, stopping for intervals of five minutes or so when I can't see anymore. My brain reels after it but that is nothing compared with the reeling of my reader's brain. ... I am doing the worst thing possible but can't help it." In a letter to Ibsen, written when he was just nineteen, Joyce praised the artist's "inward heroism," scarcely knowing the extent to which he himself would become its exemplar.
Flaubert knew equally well that the writer's life was nothing if not sacrificial. While his home at Croisset did not lack material comforts, the solitude his calling imposed on him was often painful, for he loved children and was an uncommonly loyal and generous friend. The task of composition was as agonizing for him as it proved to be for his Irish counterpart, and of the two he seems to have been more prone to selfdoubt and creative fatigue: "At times I have feelings of great despair and emptiness — doubts that taunt me at my moments of naivest satisfaction." But, like Joyce, he could not help himself: "my conscience tells me that I am fulfilling my duty, obeying a decree of fate."
Nothing less could have sustained these novelist's novehsts, one supposes, than this faith that what they were doing was good, that they were in the right.
CHAPTER 2DEAD SELVES
EPIPHANIES IN TROIS CONTES AND DUBLINERS
The reputations of Flaubert and Joyce do not depend upon their contributions to the short story, yet at a crucial point in his career each man distinguished himself in the genre. Un Coeur simple and 'The Dead" are undisputed masterpieces, and La Legende de saint Julien and several of the other Dubliners stories stand near that mark. From the moment of publication Trois Contes enjoyed a critical esteem that Joyce's stories received initially only from the most discriminating readers, among them Ezra Pound, who observed that in Dubliners "English prose catches up with Flaubert."
Any attempt to make rapprochements between the two collections must take into account the place of each work in its author's canon. Critics often regard Flaubert's tales as pendants to his novels, even though they diverge considerably in tone. Madame Bovary and Un Coeur simple share a Norman setting, but the disparity between their heroines' responses to it could hardly be greater. Félicité, the protagonist of the conte, inevitably reminds us of Catherine Leroux, the mute, inglorious farm worker who serves as a foil to Emma in the Cornices agricoles chapter of the novel, and indeed we may think of Un Coeur simple as a counter-statement to Madame Bovary. Of all Flaubert's writings it is the one whose irony is least truculent, the one in which he allows his tendresse fullest expression: "I want to move sensitive souls to pity, to make them cry, being one myself," he wrote to Mme Roger des Genettes. The conte represents an extraordinary triumph of artistic economy, encompassing as it does a whole life within a mere sixty pages. Pound asserted that it embodies "all that anyone knows about writing." Un Coeur simple and, to a lesser extent, its two companion pieces represent also a victory of the artist's ripe maturity over the despair and spiritual exhaustion of his last years, a time when financial worries, the death of his mother and many of his friends, and the composition of Bouvard et Pécuchet oppressed him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Flaubert and Joyce by Richard K. Cross. Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- PREFACE, pg. v
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
- CONTENTS, pg. xi
- CHAPTER I. THE PRIESTHOOD OF ART, pg. 1
- CHAPTER II. DEAD SELVES, pg. 17
- CHAPTER III. LES NOURRITURES CELESTES, pg. 35
- CHAPTER IV. SEA CHANGES, pg. 71
- CHAPTER V. JEUNES FILLES EN FLEURS, pg. 95
- CHAPTER VI. THE NETHERMOST ABYSS, pg. 125
- CHAPTER VII. IMPASSIVE STARS, pg. 153
- CHAPTER VIII. INVISIBLE NOVELISTS, pg. 177
- INDEX, pg. 193