Writing on the Wall (11 page)

Léon too is addicted to books, as the passage cited shows.
He
prefers poetry. But it is not only the young people in
Madame Bovary
who are glamorized by the printed page. Monsieur Homais is another illustration of the evil effects of reading. He offers Emma the use of his library, which contains, as he says, “the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, the
Echo des Feuilletons.”
These authors have addled his head with ideas. And Monsieur Homais’ ideas are dangerous, literally so; not just in the sense Madame Bovary, Senior, meant. An idea invading Monsieur Homais’ brain is responsible for Charles’ operation on the deformed Hippolyte. Monsieur Homais had read an article on a new method for curing club foot and he was immediately eager that Charles should try it; in his druggist mind there was a typical confusion between humanitarian motives and a Chamber of Commerce zeal. The operation is guaranteed to put Yonville l’Abbaye on the map. He will write it up himself for a Rouen paper. As he tells Charles, “an article in the paper gets around. People talk about it. It ends by snowballing.” This snowballing is precisely what is happening, with horrible consequences yet to come. Thanks to an article in the press, Hippolyte will lose his leg.

The diffusion of ideas in the innocent countryside is the plot of
Madame Bovary.
When the book ran serially, Flaubert’s editors, who were extremely stupid, wanted to cut the club-foot episode: it was unpleasant, they said, and contributed nothing to the story. Flaubert insisted; he regarded it as essential to the book. As it is. This is the point where Monsieur Homais interlocks with Emma and her story; elsewhere he only talks and appears busy. True, Emma gets the arsenic from his “Capernaum”—a ridiculous name for his inner sanctum based on the transubstantiation controversy—but this is not really the druggist’s fault. He is only an accessory. But when it comes to the operation Monsieur Homais is the creative genius; it is his hideous brain child, and Charles is his instrument. Up to the time of the operation, Monsieur Homais could appear as mere comic relief or prosaic contrast. But with the operation the affinity between apparent opposites—the romantic dreamer and the “man of science”—becomes clear. Monsieur Homais is not just Emma’s foil; he is her alter ego.

For the first time, they see eye to eye; they are a team pulling together to persuade Charles to do the operation and for the same reason: a thirst for fame. And both, in their infatuation with a dream, have lost sight of the reality in front of them, which is Charles. He surrenders to the dazzling temptation they hold out to him. What is it, exactly? The temptation to be something other than what he is, a slow, cautious, uncertain practitioner who is terrified to set a simple fracture. Charles has got
nothing
out of books; he cannot even stay awake after dinner to peruse a medical text. He accepts his ignorance innocently as his lot in life and takes precautions to do as little harm as possible; his pathos as a doctor is that he is aware of being a potential hazard to his patients. Yet when Hippolyte’s club foot is offered him, he falls, like Adam, urged on by the woman and the serpent. After the operation, Charles’ limitations are made public, and the touching hope he had, of securing Emma’s love by being different from what he is, is lost to both of them. This is the turning-point of the book. Emma has met resistance in Charles, the resistance of inert reality to her desire to make it over, as she can change the paper in her parlor. In furious disgust she resumes her relations with Rodolphe, and from then on her extravagances have a hysterical aim—revenge on Charles for his inability to be papered over.

Both Emma and Monsieur Homais regard themselves as confined to a sphere too small for their endowments—hers in sensibility, his in sense. Emma takes flight into the country, where the château is, into the town, with its shops and “culture.” Monsieur Homais’ solution is to inflate the village he lives in by his own self-importance and by judicious publicity. It must be remembered that if Emma is a reader, Monsieur Homais is not only a reader but a
writer
—the local correspondent of the
Fanal de Rouen.
That is, they represent the passive and the active side of the same vice. No local event has
happened
for Monsieur Homais till he has cast it into an epic fiction to be sent off to his paper; for Emma, less fertile, nothing happens in Yonville l’Abbaye by definition.

Emma surely felt that she had nothing in common with the grotesque pock-marked druggist in his velvet cap with the gold tassel; he was the antithesis of refinement. But Monsieur Homais was attracted to her and sensed a kindred spirit. He expressed this in his own way: “She’s a woman of great parts who wouldn’t be out of place in a sub-prefecture.” Homais is a textbook case of the Art of Sinking in prose, and this is the comic side of his hobbled ambitions: he would like to be a modern Hippocrates, but he is a druggist—halfway between a cook and a doctor. He is bursting with recipes; he has a recipe for everything. At the same time, he would like to turn his laboratory, which is a kind of kitchen, into a consulting-room; he has been in trouble with the authorities for playing doctor—practicing medicine without a license.

Emma’s voluptuous dreams in coarser form have tickled the druggist’s thoughts. He takes a fatherly interest in Léon, his lodger, seeing the notary’s clerk as a younger self and imagining on his behalf a wild student life in Paris, with actresses, masked balls, champagne, and possibly a love affair with a great lady of the Faubourg St. Germain. He is dreaming à la Emma, but aloud, and he lends his dream, as it were, with a show of philanthropy to Léon. This is double vicariousness. In practice, Monsieur Homais’ dissipations are more thrifty. When he goes to Rouen for an outing, he insists that Léon accompany him to visit a certain Bridoux, an apothecary who has a remarkable dog that goes into convulsions at the sight of a snuffbox. The unwilling clerk is seduced by Monsieur Homais’ excitement into witnessing this performance, which is evidently the pharmacist’s equivalent for a visit to a house of ill fame; and Léon, having yielded like a voyeur to his curiosity, knows he is committing an infidelity to Emma, who is waiting impatiently in “their” hotel room for him. In fact, between Emma and Homais, there has always been a subtle rivalry for Léon, and this betrayal is the first sign that she is losing. Léon is turning into a bourgeois; soon he will give up the flute and poetry, get a promotion, and settle down. As Léon is swallowed by the middle class, Monsieur Homais emerges. By the end of the novel, he has published a book, taken up smoking, like an artist, and bought two Pompadour statuettes for his drawing-room.

Bridoux’s dog is an evil portent for Emma; he has been heard before, offstage, at another critical juncture, when Emma falls ill of brain fever, having received the “fatal” note from Rodolphe in a basket of apricots. Homais, to whom love is unknown, blames the smell of the apricots and is reminded of Bridoux’s dog, another allergic subject. For Yonville l’Abbaye grief and loss only release a spate of anecdotes; similar instances are recalled, to reduce whatever has happened to its lowest common denominator. This occurs on the very first night the Bovarys arrive in Yonville; Emma’s little greyhound has jumped out of the coach coming from Tostes, and Lheureux, the draper, her nemesis-to-be, tries to console her with examples of lost and strayed dogs who found their masters after a lapse of years. Why, he has heard of one that came all the way back from Constantinople to Paris. And another that did fifty leagues as the crow flies and swam four rivers. And his own father had a poodle that jumped up on him one night on the street, after twelve years’ absence. These wondrous animals, almost human, you might say, are a yipping chorus of welcome to Yonville l’Abbaye, where everything has a parallel that befell someone’s cousin, and there is nothing new under the sun.

Emma’s boredom and her recklessness distinguish her from Monsieur Homais, who is a coward and who creates boredom around him without suffering it himself. Yet Emma is tiresome too, at least to her lovers, and she would have been tiresome to Flaubert in real life, as he well knew, because her boredom is a silly copy of his own, and she is never more conventional and tedious than when she is decrying convention. She and Léon agree that membership in a circulating library is a necessity if you have to live in the provinces (he also has a music subscription), and they are both wholly dependent on this typical bourgeois institution. The lending library is a central metaphor of
Madame Bovary
because it is the inexhaustible source of
idées reçues
—borrowed ideas and stock sentiments which circulate tritely among the population.

But for Flaubert all ideas become trite as soon as somebody expresses them. This applies indifferently to good ideas and bad. He makes no distinction. For him, the lending library is an image of civilization itself. Ideas and feelings as well get more and more soiled and grubby, like library books, as they pass from hand to hand. The curé’s greasy thumbprint on Christian doctrine is just as repulsive as Monsieur Homais’ coffee stain on the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The pursuit of originality is as pathetic as Emma’s decorating efforts. Similarly with the quality called sincerity. If it exists, it is inarticulate, pre-verbal, dumb as an ox or as the old peasant woman who is awarded a medal at the agricultural fair for fifty years of meritorious service. The speech of presentation annihilates fifty years of merit—a life—in a flash by turning it into
words.

From his own point of view, this renders Flaubert’s efforts in his study as unavailing as Emma’s quest for a love that will live up to her solitary dreams. Words, like lovers, have the power of lying, and they also, like lovers, have a habit of repeating themselves, since language is finite. Flaubert’s horror of repetition in writing (which has been converted into the dogma that you must never use the same word, above all the same adjective, twice on a page) reflects his horror of repetition in life. Involuntary repetition is banality. What remains doubtful, though, is whether banality is a property of life or a property of language or both. In Emma’s eyes, it is life that is impoverished and reality that is banal, reality being symbolized for her by Charles. But Charles is not banal; Rodolphe and Léon are banal, and it is exactly their banality that attracts her.

Rodolphe is superior to Léon, in that his triteness is a calculation. An accomplished comedian, he is not disturbed, at the agricultural fair, by the drone of the voice awarding money prizes for animal flesh, manure, and flax, while he pours his passionate platitudes into Emma’s fluttered ears. “Tell me, why have we known each other, we two? What chance has willed it?” His view of Emma is the same as the judge’s view of a merino ram. She is flesh, with all its frailties, and he is putting her through her paces, noting her points. Yet Rodolphe is trite beyond his intention. He is wedded to a stock idea of himself as a sensual brute that prevents him from noticing that he actually cares for Emma. His recipes for seduction, like the pomade he uses on his hair, might have been made for him by a pharmacist’s formula, and the fact that they work provides him with a ready-made disillusionment. Since he knows that “eternal love” is a cliché, he is prepared to break with Emma as a matter of course and he drops a manufactured tear on his letter of adieu, annoyed by a vague sensation that he does not recognize as grief. As for Léon, he is too cowardly to let himself see that his fine sentiments are platitudes; he deceives himself in the opposite way from Rodolphe: Rodolphe feels something and convinces himself that it is nothing, while Léon feels nothing and dares not acknowledge it, even in secrecy. His very sensuality is timid and short-lived; his clerkly nature passively takes Emma’s dictation.

Emma does not see the difference. She is disappointed in both her lovers and in “love” itself. Her principal emotions are jealousy and possessiveness, which represent the strong, almost angry movement of her will. In other words, she is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is only remarkable for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling. Emma is trite; what happens to her is trite. Her story does not hold a single surprise for the reader, who can say at every stage, “I felt it coming.” Her end is inevitable, but not as a classic doom, which is perceived as inexorable only when it is complete. It is inevitable because it is ordinary.
Anyone
could have prophesied what would become of Emma—her mother-in-law, for instance. It did not need a Tiresias. If you compare her story with that of Anna Karenina, you are aware of the pathos of Emma’s. Anna is never pathetic; she is tragic, and what happens to her, up to the very end, is always surprising, for real passions and moral strivings are at work, which have the power of “making it new.” In this her story is distinct from an ordinary society scandal of the period. Nor could any ordinary society Cassandra have forecast Anna’s fate. “He will get tired of her and leave her. You wait,” they would have said, of Vronsky. He did not. But Rodolphe could have been counted on to drop Emma, and Léon to grow frightened of her and bored.

Where destiny is no more than average probability, it appears inescapable in a peculiarly depressing way. This is because any element in it can be replaced by a substitute without changing the outcome;
e.g.,
if Rodolphe had not materialized, Emma would have found someone else. But if Anna had not met Vronsky on the train, she might still be married to Karenin. Vronsky is
necessary,
while Rodolphe and Léon are interchangeable parts in a machine that is engaged in mass production of human fates.
Madame Bovary
is often called the first modern novel, and this is true, not because of any technical innovations Flaubert made (his counterpoint, his
style indirect libre)
but because it is the first novel to deal with what is now called mass culture. Emma did not have television, and Félicité did not read comic books in the kitchen, but the phenomenon of seepage from the “media” was already present in every Yonville l’Abbaye, and Flaubert was the first to note it.