romantic exchanges between Rodolphe and Emma, observing from above in the town hall, are punctuated (without authorial comment) by the sober announcements of awards for agricultural advancements in such areas as “manure” and “use of oilseed cakes.” Or the humor arises from a juxtaposition of disproportionate elements, as, for instance, in the case of the writings of Homais, who is a journalist as well as an apothecary: sometimes it is the grandiosity of his style that is out of keeping with the banality of his subject (cider); or, as he reports the festivities, it is the glorious colors in which he paints them in his article that have little relation to what we know of them in all their paltriness and insufficiency.
Or it is not in Homais’s writing but in his manner that the disproportion lies—between his pomposity, in a moment of embarrassment with the grieving Charles, and the obviousness of his statement: “Homais thought it appropriate to talk a little horticulture; plants needed humidity.”
Yet complicating our reactions to these moments is, in one instance, during the awards ceremony at the agricultural fair, some modicum of respect for the concerns of the proponents of advances in agriculture, and, in another, as Homais waters Charles’s plants after his tactless question about the funeral, some sympathetic understanding of the pharmacist in his moment of embarrassment. Our emotional responses to the incidents of the novel are never entirely unmixed, which is of course one of the sources of its power.
Because Homais is something of a writer, and a character obviously much enjoyed by Flaubert (who refers to him affectionately in his letters as “my pharmacist” and occasionally likes to use an expression Homais might have used), it is hard not to think that he must represent a comment on the role or the practice of the writer, or one aspect of it. Infact, late in the novel, Flaubert the great reviser insinuates a moment of self-parody that would be comical if it weren’t subsumed by the drama of Emma’s final hours. As Emma lies gravely ill, Homais must send word by messenger to the two doctors who might be able to save her. He goes home and bends to his task, but although speed is of the essence, he is so agitated (and so particular about his prose style) that he requires no less than fifteen drafts to find the right wording.
Twice, at least, we are allowed to experience an event and then to read Homais’s written version of it. Homais’s material (like Flaubert’s) is mundane and subject to lapses into mediocrity—the fireworks at the conclusion of the agricultural fair are damp and they fizzle, a complete failure. But he transforms this material, inflates it, gives it importance and success, by a grandiloquent style that Flaubert, tongue in cheek, describes in a letter as “philosophic, poetic, and progressive”—and by his outright lies. A piece of writing, Flaubert seems to be demonstrating, may always be false: the writer has the power to transform reality as he wishes. Words, particularly in print, have the perfidious power to misrepresent and betray. And eloquence is especially dangerous: the better one can write, the more persuasively one can lie.
Though Homais is the only “professional” writer in the book, other styles of writing appear in the course of it: Emma’s father’s letters, the speeches of the officials, Rodolphe’s farewell note to Emma, Charles’s instructions for the coffining. Flaubert, entering fully, always, into his characters’ points of view, shifts gears convincingly as he moves in and out of these other styles, no less alien to him, perhaps, than the style of narration of the book as a whole. His own natural style, after all, he says in one letter, is that of Saint Anthony: what he wishes he could be writing are “grand turns of phrase, broad, full periods rolling along like rivers, a multiplicity of metaphors, great bursts of style.”
What he is