Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page A

opinion. Under the Second Empire, things change. The (often female) protagonists see their actions blocked, distorted, or weakened; exterior, and sometimes interior, forces overcome even their desire to act. Determinism according to race (that is, genealogy), milieu, and moment—to borrow the concepts of the philosopher Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893)—limits the characters’ freedom. The esthetics of the “slice of life” tend to diminish the importance of plot, descriptions, and inventories compete with narration, as do tableaux with adventures. (Let’s not forget that the word “Realism” was first applied to painters, most notably Gustave Courbet [1819-1877].) Finally, under the triumphant influence of Positivism, which helped social sciences come into their own, Naturalism (a term coined by Zola for its scientific connotations) substitutes documentation for observation, experimentation for invention, demonstration for representation, and objectivity, invisibility, and even infallibility for authorial interventions. Stendhal compared the realistic novel to a mirror carried along the way, reflecting mud as well as flowers; Zola uses the image of a glass pane, so transparent that the reality is reproduced as such, as if without any mediation.
    Like Romanticism at its beginning, Realism created a scandal, not so much because its intellectual enterprise rested on an illusion, but because of its alleged preference for the ugly, the vulgar, the lowly, and the vicious. Courbet’s painting LEnterrement a Ornans (Funeral at Ornans) shocked the public and in 1855 his canvas The Artist’s Studio was rejected for display at the Exposition Universelle (International Exposition). In 1857 Charles Baudelaire, the author of the collection of poems Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), and Flaubert, who had published the novel Madame Bovary, were put on trial for immorality. What the prosecutor found objectionable in Madame Bovary was not the depiction of adultery per se, a traditional topic in fiction, but the absence of condemnation by a “positive” character or by the author.
    With Madame Bovary, Flaubert, whose precocious works in the 1830s and 1840s were heavily Romantic, was hailed as a champion of Realism. Yet he never felt at ease in either camp.
    There are in me, literarily speaking, two distinct sorts of fellows: one who is fond of mouthing off, of lyricism, of vast eagle soars, of all the resonance of a sentence and the pinnacles of an idea; and another one who digs and scours the truth as much as he can, who likes to highlight the little authentic fact with as much conviction as the big one, who would have you feel almost physically the things he reproduces (January 1852, Correspondance, vol. 2, p. 30 [unless indicated otherwise, excerpts from the correspondence are translated by the author]; see “For Further Reading”).
    Similarly, he wrote in a letter from October 1856: “People think that I love reality, while I abhor it ... But I hate just as much false idealism, which makes fools of us all in the present times” (Correspondance, vol. 2, p. 643). Although he could empathize with his characters, declare that “Madame Bovary is myself,” and actually feel the symptoms of poisoning when describing her death by arsenic, he stuck to the positivistic credo: “It is one of my principles, that one must not write oneself. The artist must be in his work like God in his creation, invisible and omnipotent. Let him be sensed everywhere, but not seen” (March 1857, Correspondance, vol. 2, p. 691). And later: “I even think that a novelist hasn’t the right to express his opinion on anything whatsoever. Has God ever expressed his opinion?” (December 1866; The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, translated by Francis Steegmuller, p. 94). In LEducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education), Charles Deslauriers aspires to be like Balzac’s seductive opportunist Rastignac and greatly admires the league of superior men