Bouvard and Pécuchet, by Gustave Flaubert
Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2020 2:33 am
Bouvard and Pécuchet: A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life
by Gustave Flaubert
1881
CONTENTS
• Chapter I. KINDRED SOULS
• Chapter II. EXPERIMENTS IN AGRICULTURE
• Chapter III. AMATEUR CHEMISTS
• Chapter IV. RESEARCHES IN ARCHÆOLOGY
• Chapter V. ROMANCE AND THE DRAMA
• Chapter VI. REVOLT OF THE PEOPLE
• Chapter VII. "UNLUCKY IN LOVE"
• Chapter VIII. NEW DIVERSIONS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
o "NO, MY LITTLE ANGEL! DON'T BE AFRAID!"
o MUTUALLY BECOMING AFFLICTED, THEY LOOKED AT THEIR TONGUES
o HE WAS ABOUT TO CLASP HER IN HIS ARMS
by Gustave Flaubert
1881
Gustave Flaubert died in 1880 without having finished Bouvard et Pécuchet, his comic encyclopedic novel on the degeneration of knowledge and the inanity of human effort. Nevertheless the essential outlines of his vision are clear, and are clearly supported by the ample detail of his novel. The two clerks are members of the bourgeoisie who, because one of them is the unexpected beneficiary of a handsome will, retire from the city to spend their lives on a country estate doing what they please ("nous ferons tout ce que nous plaira!"). As Flaubert portrays their experience, doing as they please involves Bouvard and Pecuchet in a practical and theoretical jaunt through agriculture, history, chemistry, education, archaeology, literature, always with less than successful results; they move through fields of learning like travelers in time and knowledge, experiencing the disappointments, disasters, and letdowns of uninspired amateurs. What they move through, in fact, is the whole disillusioning experience of the nineteenth century, whereby -- in Charles Moraze's phrase -- "les bourgeois conquerants" [Google translate: "The bourgeois conquerors"] turn out to be the bumbling victims of their own leveling incompetence and mediocrity. Every enthusiasm resolves itself into a boring cliche, and every discipline or type of knowledge changes from hope and power into disorder, ruin, and sorrow.
Among Flaubert's sketches for the conclusion of this panorama of despair are two items of special interest to us here. The two men debate the future of mankind. Pécuchet sees "the future of Humanity through a glass darkly," whereas Bouvard sees it "brightly!"
Modern man is progressing, Europe will be regenerated by Asia. The historical law that civilization moves from Orient to Occident...the two forms of humanity will at last be soldered together.1
This obvious echo of Quinet represents the start of still another of the cycles of enthusiasm and disillusionment through which the two men will pass. Flaubert's notes indicate that like all his others, this anticipated project of Bouvard's is rudely interrupted by reality -- this time by the sudden appearance of gendarmes who accuse him of debauchery. A few lines later, however, the second item of interest turns up. The two men simultaneously confess to each other that their secret desire is once again to become copyists. They have a double desk made for them, they buy books, pencils, erasers, and -- as Flaubert concludes the sketch -- "ils s'y mettent" [Google translate: "They get started."]: they turn to. From trying to live through and apply knowledge more or less directly, Bouvard and Pecuchet are reduced finally to transcribing it uncritically from one text to another.
Although Bouvard's vision of Europe regenerated by Asia is not fully spelled out, it (and what it comes to on the copyist's desk) can be glossed in several important ways. Like many of the two men's other visions, this one is global and it is reconstructive; it represents what Flaubert felt to be the nineteenth-century predilection for the rebuilding of the world according to an imaginative vision, sometimes accompanied by a special scientific technique. Among the visions Flaubert has in mind are the utopias of Saint Simon and Fourier, the scientific regenerations of mankind envisioned by Comte, and all the technical or secular religions promoted by ideologues, positivists, eclectics, occultists, traditionalists, and idealists such as Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Michelet, Cousin, Proudhon, Cournot, Cabet, Janet, and Lamennais.2 Throughout the novel Bouvard and Pecuchet espouse the various causes of such figures; then, having ruined them, they move on looking for newer ones, but with no better results.
The roots of such revisionist ambitions as these are Romantic in a very specific way. We must remember the extent to which a major part of the spiritual and intellectual project of the late eighteenth century was a reconstituted theology -- natural supernaturalism, as M. H. Abrams has called it; this type of thought is carried forward by the typical nineteenth-century attitudes Flaubert satirizes in Bouvard et Pécuchet. The notion of regeneration therefore harks back to a conspicuous Romantic tendency, after the rationalism and decorum of the Enlightenment ...[to revert] to the stark drama and suprarational mysteries of the Christian story and doctrines and to the violent conflicts and abrupt reversals of the Christian inner life, turning on the extremes of destruction and creation, hell and heaven, exile and reunion, death and rebirth, dejection and joy, paradise lost and paradise regained.... But since they lived, inescapably, after the Enlightenment, Romantic writers revived these ancient matters with a difference: they undertook to save the overview of human history and destiny, the existential paradigms, and the cardinal values of their religious heritage, by reconstituting them in a way that would make them intellectually acceptable, as well as emotionally pertinent, for the time being.3
What Bouvard has in mind -- the regeneration of Europe by Asia -- was a very influential Romantic idea. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example, urged upon their countrymen, and upon Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture. And from this defeat would arise a new, revitalized Europe: the Biblical imagery of death, rebirth, and redemption is evident in this prescription. Moreover, the Romantic Orientalist project was not merely a specific instance of a general tendency; it was a powerful shaper of the tendency itself, as Raymond Schwab has so convincingly argued in La Renaissance orientale. But what mattered was not Asia so much as Asia's use to modern Europe. Thus anyone who, like Schlegel or Franz Bopp, mastered an Oriental language was a spiritual hero, a knight-errant bringing back to Europe a sense of the holy mission it had now lost. It is precisely this sense that the later secular religions portrayed by Flaubert carry on in the nineteenth century. No less than Schlegel, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand, Auguste Comte -- like Bouvard -- was the adherent and proponent of a secular post-Enlightenment myth whose outlines are unmistakably Christian.
In regularly allowing Bouvard and Pecuchet to go through revisionist notions from start to comically debased finish, Flaubert drew attention to the human flaw common to all projects. He saw perfectly well that underneath the idée reçue "Europe-regenerated-by-Asia" lurked a very insidious hubris. Neither "Europe" nor "Asia" was anything without the visionaries' technique for turning vast geographical domains into treatable, and manageable, entities. At bottom, therefore, Europe and Asia were our Europe and our Asia, our will and representation, as Schopenhauer had said. Historical laws were in reality historians' laws, just as "the two forms of humanity" drew attention less to actuality than to a European capacity for lending man-made distinctions an air of inevitability. As for the other half of the phrase -- "will at last be soldered together" -- there Flaubert mocked the blithe indifference of science to actuality, a science which anatomized and melted human entities as if they were so much inert matter. But it was not just any science he mocked: it was enthusiastic, even messianic European science, whose victories included failed revolutions, wars, oppression, and an unteachable appetite for putting grand, bookish ideas quixotically to work immediately. What such science or knowledge never reckoned with was its own deeply ingrained and unselfconscious bad innocence and the resistance to it of reality. When Bouvard plays the scientist he naively assumes that science merely is, that reality is as the scientist says it is, that it does not matter whether the scientist is a fool or a visionary; he (or anyone who thinks like him) cannot see that the Orient may not wish to regenerate Europe, or that Europe was not about to fuse itself democratically with yellow or brown Asians. In short, such a scientist does not recognize in his science the egoistic will to power that feeds his endeavors and corrupts his ambitions.
Flaubert, of course, sees to it that his poor fools are made to rub their noses in these difficulties. Bouvard and Pecuchet have learned that it is better not to traffic in ideas and in reality together. The novel's conclusion is a picture of the two of them now perfectly content to copy their favorite ideas faithfully from book onto paper. Knowledge no longer requires application to reality; knowledge is what gets passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another. Ideas are propagated and disseminated anonymously, they are repeated without attribution; they have literally become idées reçues: what matters is that they are there, to be repeated, echoed, and re-echoed uncritically.
In a highly compressed form this brief episode, taken out of Flaubert's notes for Bouvard et Pécuchet, frames the specifically modern structures of Orientalism, which after all is one discipline among the secular (and quasi-religious) faiths of nineteenth-century European thought. We have already characterized the general scope of thought about the Orient that was handed on through the medieval and Renaissance periods, for which Islam was the essential Orient. During the eighteenth century, however, there were a number of new, interlocking elements that hinted at the coming evangelical phase, whose outlines Flaubert was later to re-create.
-- Orientalism, by Edward W. Said
CONTENTS
• Chapter I. KINDRED SOULS
• Chapter II. EXPERIMENTS IN AGRICULTURE
• Chapter III. AMATEUR CHEMISTS
• Chapter IV. RESEARCHES IN ARCHÆOLOGY
• Chapter V. ROMANCE AND THE DRAMA
• Chapter VI. REVOLT OF THE PEOPLE
• Chapter VII. "UNLUCKY IN LOVE"
• Chapter VIII. NEW DIVERSIONS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
o "NO, MY LITTLE ANGEL! DON'T BE AFRAID!"
o MUTUALLY BECOMING AFFLICTED, THEY LOOKED AT THEIR TONGUES
o HE WAS ABOUT TO CLASP HER IN HIS ARMS