Madame Bovary Read Free Page B

trying to achieve in this book, instead, is a style that is clear and direct, economical and precise, and at the same time rhythmic, sonorous, musical, and “as smooth as marble” on the surface, with varied sentence structures and with imperceptible transitions from scene to scene and from psychological analysis to action.
    Though he did not write poetry himself, Flaubert complains in a letter to Colet, “What a bitch of a thing prose is! It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistencyof verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable , as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
    Yet Proust, in the course of his vehement response, in 1920, to a negative article about Flaubert, commented (admiringly) on what he called Flaubert’s “grammatical singularities,” which, he said, expressed “a new vision”; our way of seeing external reality was radically changed by Flaubert’s “entirely new and personal use” of the past definite, the past indefinite, the present participle, certain pronouns, and certain prepositions. He went on to talk about other singularities: Flaubert’s unprecedented manner of using indirect discourse, his unconventional handling of the word “and”—omitting it where one would expect it and inserting it where one would normally not look for it—his emphatically “flat” use of verbs, and his deliberately heavy placement of adverbs. But it was Flaubert’s innovative use of the imperfect tense that most impressed Proust: “This [use
of the] imperfect, so new in literature,” he said, “completely changes the aspect of things and people.”
    The imparfait , or imperfect, tense in French is the form of the past tense that expresses an ongoing or prevailing condition, or a repeated action. It is most usually conveyed in English by “would” or “used to.” Expressing a continuing state or action, and thereby signaling the continuity of time itself, it perfectly creates the effect Flaubert was seeking—what Nabokov describes as “the sense of repetition, of dreariness in Emma’s life.” Thus, early in her marriage, Charles’s (tiresomely predictable) habits are described using a string of verbs in the imperfect: “He would return home late. … Then he would ask for something to eat. … He would take off his frock coat. … He would tell her one by one all the people he had met … he would eat the remains of the beef hash with onions … then go off to bed, sleep on his back,
and snore.”
    While the imperfect, as agent of “background” description and habitual activity, was traditionally, before Flaubert, subordinated to the simple past tense, used to narrate finite action, with Flaubert, the habitual and the ongoing are foregrounded, and the division between description and action is blurred, as is the division between past and present, creating a sustained immediacy in the story. Even the speeches of the characters are often reported indirectly in the imperfect (as, for instance, in the mayor’s wife’s comment quoted above: “ Madame Bovary was compromising herself ”),allowing Flaubert to slip seamlessly into a character’s point of view without abandoning the detachment of the third-person narration. The narration remains dynamic despite the fact that a large proportion of the book, in Flaubert’s view at least, is exposition or preparation for
action.
    In a letter to Colet of January 15, 1853—sixteen months into the book—Flaubert worries about the amount of “action” so far: “I have now lined up five chapters of my second part in which nothing happens.” An exaggeration, of course—but he felt there was going to be a great quantity of exposition, or prologue, and then very little unfolding action, before the conclusion. This, too, had not been done before—to tell a story with so little action. He believed that those proportions were true to life: “A blow lasts a minute