Linguistic Realism in Flaubert's "Bouvard et Pcuchet" Author(s): Charles Bernheimer Reviewed work(s): Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol.

7, No. 2 (Winter, 1974), pp. 143-158 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345094 . Accessed: 29/04/2012 15:27
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in Realism Flaubert's Linguistic Bouvard et Pecuchet

CHARLES BERNHEIMER Realism, Ortega writes, is the exemplum crucis of esthetics.' This is true quite simply because realism derives its claim to truth from something which is outside the realm of art: nature, the real, the given. The task of the literary realist consists in making his reader forget that he is reading a book, that his experience is being mediated through a symbolic system of signification. Cervantes discovered the most effective formula to accomplish this task: the hero will himself be a reader of books and a believer in their truth, their transparency; his actions will constitute an attempt to interpret the world in their terms and his failure to do so will authenticate the "reality" which defeats him as somehow non-bookish, material, unmediated. Thus the reality unmasks the purely metaphorical status of earlier literary language in order to mask the metaphorical status of the language he himself is using. The hero of realism typically believes in the continuity between literature and reality, but his own reality is established by the novelist's revelation of the gap, the essential difference, between a self-reflexive system of signs and the concrete presence of things. Of all Flaubert's novels Madame Bovary most closely represents this prototype. Emma's belief in the realizability of fiction, her faith that her experience can correspond to literary models, is ultimately the cause of her suicide. For the dimension of fiction is the imaginary, the absent, and the Quixotic attempt to materialize this absence is bound to be defeated in confrontation with the inert mass of the phenomenal world. But in Flaubert's novel this emphasis on the incompatibility of the written and the real, developed mimetically on the level of plot, is counteracted by the striking similarity in the stylistic treatment accorded both elements of the dialectic. Emma's romantic dreams and the hum-drum events of everyday life which shatter them are created in the same meticulously constructed prose with its famous ternary rhythms, harmonious sound effects, pervasive use of style indirect libre and progressive et. As Proust puts it: "In Flaubert's style . . . all parts of reality are converted into a single substance, with vast surfaces which shimmer monotonously. . . . Everything that was different has been converted and absorbed."2 Flaubert's homogeneous style is actually calculated to destroy the contrast between the imagined and the real which his language creates through its referential transparency. He felt that literary language, instead of pretending to be full of
1 Jose Ortega y Gasset,
2

Meditations

on Quixote (Paris:

(New York: Norton, Gallimard,

1961), p. 136. from the French are

Marcel Proust, my own.

Contre Sainte-Beuve

1954), p. 207. All translations

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matter external to itself, should exploit its own material qualities of rhythm and sound in order to neutralize meaning and affirm its autonomous existence. Style should act as an image of its own abstraction, of that process by which the signified disappears into the mystical harmony of literary prose. Thus Flaubert's aim was to write a book as free from material content as possible, "a book about nothing, a book without any external support, which would hold itself together by the inner strength of its style, . . . a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible."3 Such a book would elaborate its discourse on the assumption that all language is symbolic and no particular usage of words can be "prior" to or more "true" than any other. The invisible subject of the book Flaubert wants to write is the activity of writing itself, an activity which constantly posits meanings only to dissolve them, which ceaselessly invites interpretation only to subvert its supposed finality. In Madame Bovary this subject is hidden on the level of style. In Bouvard et Pecuchet, Flaubert's last work, written between 1872 and 1880 and left unfinished, it emerges on the level of theme. Flaubert himself termed Bouvard et Pecuchet a "philosophical" novel,4 and it is so in the most modern, post-Wittgensteinian sense of that term: it constitutes an investigation into the nature and status of language in respect to reality and to truth. The question of the clerks' relative intelligence or stupidity, which has so vexed psychologizing critics over the decades, remains obscure because Bouvard and Pecuchet are merely the instruments through which Flaubert illustrates the epistemological insufficiency of metaphor, not characters with analyzable symptoms. Their movement from discipline to discipline is not motivated psychologically so much as it reflects the movement of language itself in its symbolic and discontinuous relation with reality. The novel progresses by a series of confrontations and substitutions. In the early chapters dealing with the natural sciences the confrontations occur between nature and culture. On the one hand, the clerks live so entirely within books that they expect reality to exhibit meaning in the same way language does. On the other hand, the natural environment repeatedly rejects the clerks' attempts to impose a subjective interpretive formula on its neutral phenomena. Each of the episodes in these chapters begins with the clerk's acquisition of a new technical vocabulary and set of working rules, neither of which connects in any way to their previous experience. For example, after the disastrous fire which wipes out their entire hay harvest, Pecuchet suggests that they turn to arboriculture since fruit commands a very high price on the market. However, instead of buying plants which will be hardy and yield plentifully, they purchase a selection of
3 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. II (Paris: Conard, 1926), p. 345. Future references to the Correspond-

ance are to this nine-volume edition (1926-1933). 4 cf. Correspondance, vol. VIII, p. 381. Flaubert was fully aware that his "novel" was unlike anything that had been attempted previously. Shortly before his death he told Auguste Sabatier: "What I have done may not have a name in any language; but since I cannot avoid its being taken for a novel, I would like it to be seen as a philosophical novel. It is my testament, the summary of my experiences and my judgment on man and the works of man" (Journal de Geneve, April 3, 1881).

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fabulous-sounding names: ". . . they searched in their books for a nomenclature of plants to buy;-and having chosen names which to them seemed wonderful, they wrote to a market-gardener at Falaise who eagerly undertook to send them three hundred saplings for which he had found no market" (307; 55).5 The market-gardener is free to send the clerks anything he pleases since they have no way of establishing the connection between the exotic names they requested and the saplings they receive. Romanticists of the word, Bouvard and Pecuchet are innocent in reality. Their next step is to construct elaborate wood and wire frames in the form of candelabras, vases or pyramids, all this in order to determine in advance the shape of the trees. "Thus," comments Flaubert, "on arriving at their house, one seemed to be seeing the pieces of some unknown machine or the skeleton of a firework display" (307; 56). Having begun with words rather than natural objects, Bouvard and Pecuchet continue by imposing man-made geometric patterns on those of nature. But in this case, as in every other such attempt the clerks make, nature revolts against their efforts to make it conform to written rules, or, more precisely, to their interpretation of those written rules: "Bouvard tried to train the apricot trees. They rebelled. He forced their stems down to the level of the soil; none grew up again. The cherry trees, on which he had cut notches, produced gum" (307; 56). Nevertheless, the aspiring arboriculturists continue in their endeavor exchanging with relish such technical terms as "cambium,. . . paling,. . . pruning, . . . thinning" (308; 56). Periodically, Pecuchet takes out his manual and studies it while assuming the pose of the gardener on the frontispiece. Thus, as they work, Bouvard and Pecuchet talk like books and imitate book illustrations. Their ambition is to translate books into action. As the episode draws to a close, nature takes a final revenge against that action: a violent rain storm knocks down their props and trellises and destroys their meagre harvest. Significantly, Flaubert's description of the disaster draws our attention to the fantastic names of the ruined fruit. These names explode surrealistically with autonomous associations which tend to divorce them from any reference to botanical reality: "What a scene when they made their inspection! Cherries and plums covered the grass among the melting hailstones. The passe-colmars were lost, as well as the besi-des-veterans and the triomphes-de-Jordoigne. Of the apples there remained little more than a few bons-papas-and twelve tetons-de-Venus, the entire crop of peaches, rolled in the puddles beside the uprooted box-hedge" (309; 58). So the arboriculture episode ends with the survival of a vocabulary and the death of the objects it supposedly designates and explains. The confrontation between nature and culture has revealed the radical gap between the symbolic order of language and the dispersed phenomena of the real world. The clerks want reality to conform exactly to what is written about it but, over and over again, they find that it eludes all anterior categorizations. For the lan6 The first page number refers to the critical edition of Bouvard et Pecuchet by Alberto Cento (Napoli and Paris,

1964) on which my translation is based. This meticulous scholarly edition includes all Flaubert's scenarios and brings about 300 corrections to previous editions of the text. The second page number refers to the Earp and Stonier translation published by New Directions (1954).

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guage-user who wishes to describe the phenomenal world finds it necessary to generalize about it. In this process a neutral, descriptive language which would, hypothetically, double reality is replaced by a subjective, interpretive one which condenses reality into categories. This condensation corresponds to the creation of meaning. The subject generates meaning as a way of uniting separate phenomena, as a means of filling in the interstices between individual objects. He gives order to reality by naming things in large symbolic categories, such as chair, cat, tree, cloud, thereby collapsing the spatial and temporal distance and the physical difference existing between particular chairs, cats, trees or clouds. As Nietzsche puts it, "every concept [Begriff] originates through our equating what is unequal."6 Thus the attempt to "make sense" out of reality is indeed a creative endeavor, that is, one which arbitrarily imposes meaning where there is none and invents significant patterns and relationships where there are only isolated phenomena.7 Once words are substituted for things the subject believes that he can create symbolic structures which connect, explain and thereby domesticate alien phenomena. Language becomes the instrument of the mind's domination over the world of matter, a kind of imperialist force which recognizes no difference between a sign and the thing it signifies. For Bouvard and Pecuchet, however, this difference constantly reasserts itself, with disastrous results for their practical and scientific endeavors. But unlike Emma Bovary, who associates her innermost being with one particular set of romantic books, and kills herself when she is unable to translate them into her life, the clerks have no absolute commitment to any of the interpretive languages they adopt. Each time they are confronted by the intractable neutrality of nature they retreat into a new collection of books and a new vocabulary. The rhythm of substitutions accelerates later in the novel when the clerks take on speculative disciplines such as esthetics, philosophy and religion. Here culture confronts culture. The dialectic of difference is now contained entirely within the field of language, and there it dissolves into what Rene Girard calls "the ridiculous apotheosis of the Identical and the Interchangeable."8The opposed ideas and theories adopted successively by Bouvard and Pecuchet successively invalidate each other. After oscillating a while between antitheses, the clerks generally agree that there can be no truth where authorities maintain such contradictory views. Having studied the major philosophers, for example, they conclude that "for God, the proofs of Descartes, Kant and Leibnitz are not the same and mutually destroy each other" (484; 248) and they end by dismissing both idealism and materialism as dealing with the ideas of things rather than with the things themselves. "I've had enough
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sinne," in Nachgelassene "Ueber Wahrheit und Liige im aussermoralischen Schriften 1870-1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973), p. 374. All translations from this text are my own. A reasonably accurate English version is readily available in The Philosophy of Nietzsche, ed. Geoffrey Clive (New York: New American Library, 1965), pp. 503-515. study of mnemonics, during which they transform parodies this process by which meaning is created. Desire and the Novel (Baltimore: their environment into a collage of arbitrary

7 The clerks' symbols,

8 Ren6 Girard, Deceit,

Johns Hopkins

Press, 1966), p. 152.

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of it," declares Bouvard, echoing Flaubert's own opinion on the subject; "the famous cogito bores me. One takes ideas of things for the things themselves. One explains what one barely understands by means of words one doesn't understand at all! Substance, space, energy, matter and soul, so many abstractions, imaginings" (489; 255). Philosophic concepts are perhaps more easily dismissed as a bundle of abstract imaginings than are the principles of arboriculture, but in Flaubert's novel all such interpretive discourse ultimately reveals itself to be equally empty because equally meaningful. Since meaning is generated within a closed symbolic system which is radically other than the world it seeks to signify, all meanings are essentially irrelevant and misleading. This is the profound sense in which, as Lionel Trilling has noted, Bouvard et Pecuchet "rejects culture."9 It is a radical work of realism because it demonstrates, on an encyclopedic scale, the necessity to dismiss language as epistemologically invalid. The symbolic, Flaubert insists, exists nowhere in reality. Thus writing, to be true to its inherently unreal nature, must proceed in the consciousness of its duplicity. And this is exactly what Flaubert's novel does. The book is structured not according to an organic unfolding but in the discontinuous form of an unalphabetized encyclopedia. As Taine pointed out to Turgenev, the ease with which the clerks substitute one field of knowledge for the next is "invraisemblable" in terms of an intelligible psychology. "In reality," he declared, "maniacs of that kind (I've known some) get bogged down in a single field and remain there as collectors."'0 Although on a few occasions the clerks investigate a new discipline because they hope it will help them in some practical endeavor, as when they tackle chemistry in order to gain the necessary knowledge to can and distill successfully, they inevitably forget about their own motivation (though even this forgetting is not explicitly stated) and never once return to their earlier occupations. In the intervals between their bookish metamorphoses the clerks have no inner substance to provide a meaningful continuity to their lives. Like cartoon characters they have no memory of what has happened to them in the past. The one time they do think back to their earlier activities, it is only to conclude that "they were separated from them by an abyss" (494; 259). These ruptures in the continuity of the clerks' being cannot be explained by reference to their supposed stupidity, though many critics have done so. Rather these gaps point to the fact that "being" in this self-aware fiction reflects the structure of language more than it does the life of nature. From the moment of their introduction the clerks are deliberately presented as the products of specifically linguistic activity. The carefully devised grammatical parallelism of the sentences describing their appearance and actions makes us aware that the verbal medium is actively creating a reality which has more to do with its own ability to balance phrases and syntactic structures than it does with the way things occur in the
9 Lionel Trilling,
'0

"Flaubert's

Last Testament"

in The Opposing

Self (New York: Viking

Press, 1959), p. 195. introduction to

From an undated letter of Taine's his edition of Bouvard et Pecuchet

to Turgenev quoted by Rene Dumesnil in the book-length (Paris: Societe Les Belles Lettres, 1945), p. xc.

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real world. (cf. "L'un ... l'autre." "Le plus grand... le plus petit" [271; 17]; and later: "L'aspect aimable de Bouvard charma de suite Pecuchet" followed by a fiveline description of Bouvard, then "L'air serieux de Pecuchet frappa Bouvard" followed by a five-line description of Pecuchet [272; 18]). In fact, much of the comic effect of the opening scene results from the contrast between the rigid symmetries of the style-that is, between language mirroring itself-and the richness of detail and responsiveness to complexity one expects of language which purports to mirror reality. This comic pattern, based on the priority of verbal self-reflexiveness over mimetic representation, controls the formal structure of the book as a whole. Just as the accelerated rhythms and logically balanced syntax in the novel's first pages draw attention to the way the structures of language structure the world, so the repeated substitutions by Bouvard and Pecuchet of one system of interpretation for another creates the humorous, if sometimes monotonous, effect of lives governed by the structure of metaphor itself. Roman Jakobson, in his famous essay in Fundamentals of Language, stresses that metaphor depends upon what he calls "a process of selection between alternatives [which] implies the possibility of substituting one for the other, equivalent to the former in one respect and different from it in another."'1 Now it is just such substitutions which Bouvard and Pecuchet repeatedly perform. One set of books replaces the next, each equivalent to the former in that it is the verbal product of individual subjectivities and distinct from it in that the subjectivities differ as does the object of study. However, the mnemonic potential of this series of substitutions, a potential which Saussure sees as essential to the associative structure of metaphor,'2 is never realized by the clerks. For each successive set of books loses its validity in their eyes either because of its failure to describe reality accurately or by virtue of its internal contradictions. Thus the very structure of Flaubert's novel embodies an attack on the supposed truth-content of metaphor. Instead of accumulating knowledge as they move from one subject of study to another and learning from the metaphorical connections to be drawn between them, the clerks de-structure each consecutive discipline by revealing the emptiness underlying all the symbolic formulations of language. Their activity perfectly illustrates the following observation made by Nietzsche in a short but essential essay, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," written in 1873, the very year in which Flaubert was working out the final plan for Bouvard et Pecuchet: What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced,
'URoman Jakobson, "Two Types of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" in Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), p. 60.
12

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 123. Saussure defines metaphoric structure as "an associative relation [which] unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series."

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transposed,and embellishedpoetically and rhetorically,and which after long use seem firm, canonical,and obligatoryto a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphorswhich have become worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their picturesand now matteronly as metal,no longer as coins.13
Science, the clerks find, is lacking an objective methodology because its mode of enquiry is always contaminated by the poetic and rhetorical distortions inherent in verbal expression. As Nietzsche says in the same essay, "[while] originally language works at the building of concepts, in later times it is science . . . [which] works incessantly at that great columbarium of concepts, the cemetery of perception."14 Flaubert intended to refer to this faulty, moribund quality of the scientific edifice in the sub-title he had in mind for his philosophical novel: "Du default de methode dans les sciences."'15 The clerks have no inner being because, in Flaubert's view, metaphor has none. Since the structure of metaphor is discontinuous, so is their existence; since it is timeless, so, in essence, are their lives. And since metaphor generates itself quite independently of any limiting reality, so the chapters in Flaubert's anti-Bildungsroman could theoretically be expanded indefinitely, or at least until the clerks had drained all available libraries of their holdings. Flaubert's decision to limit himself to ten chapters and to a certain selection of topics is purely arbitrary in terms of the book's open-ended structure, a structure which is more mythic than novelistic. The order of the chapters and even the sequence of episodes within chapters could easily be changed without appreciably altering the sense of the narrative. This narrative traces the consequences of the clerks' obsession with meaning, with what Nietzsche calls "right perception, that is, the adequate expression of an object in the subject." However, as Nietzsche points out, such perception "is a nonentity [Unding] full of contradictions: for between two utterly different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no accuracy, no expression, but at the utmost an aesthetic relation, . . . a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into an entirely foreign language. For which purpose, however, there is needed at any rate a freely composing and freely inventing intermediate sphere and intermediate force."'6 The clerks' concern is to test the validity of the numerous foreign languages which lay claim to "right perception." Hence books, "stammering translations," are always at the origin of their desires and expectations. This means that their desires are always mediated by the arbitrary judgments of others which in turn have been mediated through "freely inventing" linguistic activity. Each time the clerks read a new book they project the values created by its specialized vocabulary onto the external world and then collect the objects made significant through this "suggestive transference." A marvelously premonitory example of this subjective conferral of value is the time when,
ls Nietzsche, pp. 374-375. 14 Ibid., p. 380. 16 Correspondance, vol. VII, p. 336. la Nietzsche, p. 378.

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for the clerks, "tout devint phallus" (377; 131). Having read that in olden days towers, pyramids, candles, even trees had a phallic significance, they collect swingbars of carriages, legs of armchairs, cellar bolts, chemists' pestles, etc., and exhibit these supposedly suggestive objects in one corner of their house-museum; all this, of course, to the amazement and disbelief of their bourgeois visitors. Their grotesquely comic assortment of incongruous artifacts has no inherent functional coherence. The juxtaposition of these disparate objects within a limited space is entirely due to the fetishistic significance the clerks' current system of interpretation has conferred upon them. To anyone not sharing this language the objects are simply meaningless debris. Once the "aesthetic relation," the metaphoric link, between subject and object is dissolved, the object returns to its neutral, purely phenomenal existence. This dissolution occurs so frequently in the clerk's experience that by the end of the book their home has become a kind of burial ground for deceased values. They can barely move around among the quantities of insignificant objects which threaten to take over the house. For instance, the statue of St. Peter, which the clerks had once cherished as the most beautiful piece in their archeological collection, becomes, during their discussions of metaphysics, simply an ugly encumbrance. One evening, "in the middle of a dispute on the Monad" (486; 251), Bouvard stubs his foot against St. Peter's big toe and, in irritation, decides to throw the monstrosity out. Next morning they find it broken in fragments in the former manure ditch, itself once Bouvard's pride and joy when he was caught up in "the frenzy for manure" (301; 50). Later, when the clerks happen to go up into the attic of the town hall, we are made to realize that the entire course of history consists in similar conferrals and removals of meaning. There they find, next to a firepump and a few banners, a number of dusty plaster busts: "the great Napoleon without a diadem, Louis XVIII in a dress coat with epaulets, Charles X recognizable by his hanging lip, Louis-Philippe, eyebrows arched and hair in pyramid style" (574; 334). The changes in political regimes are as arbitrary as the clerks' switches from one area of study to the next. In both cases all that is left of the previous order after the substitution has been made are isolated fragments, heterogeneous objects and discontinuous ideas. These dispersed phenomena are "real" because they exist independently of any particular intentional consciousness. They form a kind of collage-marvelously parodied by that surrealistic collection of outlandish decorative props assembled by the clerks in their garden-in which all elements, detached from their meaningful role in the organic continuity of life, have exactly the same ontological status as facts, as equal and equivalent phenomena. The task of Flaubert's style throughout the novel is to render this essential nondifference by separating and isolating each statement of fact as a distinct linguistic entity. To this end Flaubert attempts as much as possible to give each sentence a different formal structure from the next. He is constantly shifting from direct to indirect to free indirect speech; dialogue switches into narration then back to dialogue in quick succession; verb tenses change rapidly as do the subjects of

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sentences. The reader is often made to question not only the original source of particular statements but also the very identity of the speaking subject. He is never allowed to relax in the easy flow of a continuous narration which reassuringly unites ideas and things within a single controlling perspective. For, in Flaubert's view, such a perspective would necessarily entail the distortion which always accompanies subjective interpretation. By detaching each fact from any interpretive framework he restores it to what he considers to be its ontologically pure status. Stylistic differentiation is in the service of ontological equivalence. This stylistic technique could be illustrated by a close analysis of almost any page in Bouvard et Pecuchet. Here is a passage which concerns the mini-revolution of the workers at Chavignolles following the 1848 uprising in Paris: "Citoyens!" dit Gorju, "il nous faut de l'ouvrage!" Le Maire tremblait; la voix lui manqua. Marescot repondit a sa place que le Conseil aviserait immediatement;-et les compagnons etant sortis, on discuta plusieurs idees. La premiere fut de tirer du caillou. Pour utiliser les cailloux, Girbal proposa un chemin d'Angelville a Tournebu. Celui de Bayeux rendait absolument le meme service. On pouvait curer la mare? ce n'etait pas un travail suffisant! ou bein creuser une seconde mare! mais a' quelle place? (423) "Citizens," said Gorju, "we must have work!" The mayor trembled; his voice failed him. Marescot answered in his place that the council would consider the matter immediately;-and once the comrades had left, they discussed several plans. The first was to dig gravel. In order to make use of the gravel, Girbal proposed a road from Angleville to Tournebu. The Bayeux road served exactly that purpose. They could clear out the pond? that was not a big enough job! or perhaps dig a second pond! but at what location? (181-182) Of course, one notices immediately the absolute lack of commentary and the resultant absence of any centralized perspective which would give the reader a means of evaluating the various proposals put forward. Each sentence inaugurates a new paragraph; no causal or temporal links are established from paragraph to paragraph. The passage reads as might a reporter's notes before they are worked into a story by the editor. Yet all Flaubert's stylistic skill has been employed to create just this disjunctive, paratactic effect. Almost every sentence has a different narrative form: the first is in direct discourse, the second in third person narration, the third half in indirect discourse half in narration, the fourth and fifth are in narration, the sixth is in free indirect discourse and the seventh is in free indirect discourse divided into four different unidentified voices. Each of these shifts in

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perspective entails a change in verb tense: the direct discourse is in the present tense, the narration in the passe simple (with one use of the imperfect) and the free indirect discourse is in the imperfect tense. Now it is evident that all the paragraphs in the novel are not made up of single sentences, but even within longer paragraphs the sentences are rarely linked in a manner which reflects the tentative, qualifying, exploratory movement of an active intelligence at work. Rather, the longer paragraphs most often consist of lists, enumerations, summary statements in juxtaposition. Usually such paragraphs present either the clerks' conclusions about a particular area of their reading or the multiple contradictions they have discovered within the discipline examined. In either case the effect of the syntax is to reduce every element in the list to a single level of importance, or rather, of indifference. For example, in the following paragraph we are given some of the clerk's findings in aesthetic theory: And there exist several kinds of beauty: a beauty in the sciences, geometry is beautiful, a beauty in manners, it cannot be denied that the death of Socrates was beautiful; a beauty in the animal kingdom: the beauty of the dog consists in his sense of smell. A pig could not be beautiful, on account of his filthy habits; nor a snake, because it awakes in us ideas of baseness. (410; 166) These surprising definitions, without being identified as to original source, are listed in Flaubert's paragraph as absolutely equivalent facts, each introduced by the phrase "a beauty in." Geometry, Socrates' death and a dog's sense of smell are brought together as equal elements in a surreal collage which, in spite of the stated opposition in sense, tends also to include the pig and the snake. For the disjunctive quality of the syntax causes the reader to place each image on a level with the next independently of its supposedly illustrative meaning. The simple naming of the pig and of the snake links them with the dog previously named. This metonymic juxtaposition tends to cancel out the metaphoric difference claimed in reference to the idea of beauty. The levelling effect brought about by the style of this paragraph is also achieved within countless individual sentences throughout Bouvard et Pecuchet. Usually these sentences are made up of verbal or prepositional phrases of similar grammatical structure which are simply strung together. Or they may be constituted primarily by a list of nouns. The following is an example which uses both devices. The clerks are in a panic as a result of all their medical reading: Mutually depressing each other, they looked at their tongues, felt their pulse, changed mineral water, purged themselves; and were suspicious of cold, heat, wind, rain, flies, and above all, draughts. (339; 90) A sentence such as this draws our attention to the fact that the clerks' characters are at least as much a product of the syntax used to describe their actions as they are of the actions described. The psychological motivation involved here, fear of

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sickness, is of the most rudimentary sort and has no rational cause. Yet the clerks, reminding us once again of cartoon characters, break out into manic, compulsive activity. No discrimination is made as to the relative importance of their actions nor is any logical connection established between their activities. We feel that the order of the four verb phrases Flaubert uses in the first half of the sentence could easily be changed, or the series expanded, without appreciably affecting the sense. For the controlling effect of the sentence appears to be derived as much from the rhythm of the phrases as it is from their signified content. After the semi-colon this rhythm is accelerated as we are given a list of the clerk's fears culminating, ironically, with draughts. Thus their physical and their psychic lives meet in a syntax of enumeration and symmetrical juxtaposition. Their actions and their ideas are cut up into equivalent and often interchangeable verbal fragments arbitrarily arrested in a huge collage. In short, Flaubert's paratactic style creates a similar effect on the level of the sentence, the paragraph and the series of paragraphs. His extensive use of style indirect libre further contributes to this reductive, equalizing effect (equivalent, in psychological terms, to "the withdrawal of affect"). For free indirect style, while it preserves various emotive elements such as questions, exclamations, adverbial expressions of subjective feeling, colloquial terms, etc., which are necessarily sacrificed in indirect reporting, requires no governing verb on which it is syntactically dependent. Thus sentences in free indirect speech maintain the intonation and essential vocabulary of the original speaker but to a certain degree detach themselves from him and become autonomous units floating indistinctly between narrator and character. This is how Flaubert recounts the clerks' conversation on the subject of death:

After all, it [death] does not exist. We departin the dew, in the breeze,in the stars. We becomesomething of the sap of trees, of the sparkleof jewels, of the plumageof birds. We give back to Nature what she has lent us, and the Nothingness which is before us holds nothing more equal than the Nothingness which lies behind. (494; 260)
Here the use of free indirect discourse enables Flaubert to divorce the clerk's opinions from their source and to abolish the dynamic give-and-take of conversational form. The dialogue of Bouvard and Pecuchet becomes the voice of everyone and of no one, a simple listing of cliches, presented in Flaubert's own favorite ternary rhythms and paratactic syntax. Each of the three sentences following the short opening proposition begins ritualistically with the same anonymous subject, "We." There is no reasoned connection between sentences. In fact, the third sentence is both syntactically and semantically a repetition of the second, except that the three nouns of the second are changed into noun phrases in the third. The final sentence incorporates this mirroring effect into its rhythmic and semantic structure: the "Neant" before us is described as reflecting the "Neant" behind. Thus we find that in this passage, as in the others we have examined, paratactic syntax

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serves to isolate every sentence from the next, to detach each statement from any connective and explanatory perspective, and to emphasize rhythmic effects at the expense of semantic determination. Each syntactic unit seems to exist as a distinct verbal phenomenon independent of any identifiable source. At first glance it might seem that Flaubert's text abounds in exact references to origin. After all, we are almost always given the names of the authors the clerks read. But as soon as we attempt to specify the precise source of a particular statement we find ourselves plunged into what seems to be an infinitely regressive series of subjective distortions. For instance, the geology episode begins by Dumouchel's sending the clerks two books, Bertrand's Lettres and Cuvier's Discours sur les revolutions du globe. Now these books are entirely different in quality and importance: Cuvier's scientific treatise sets forth the principles of his revolutionary method for determining the age of a particular terrain by examining the fossils it contains; Bertrand's book is an eclectic popularization of various geological theories which abounds in anecdotes about eccentric cases at the expense of any coherent overview. Bouvard and Pecuchet, knowing absolutely nothing about geology to begin with, read these two works and, as Flaubert puts it, "picture to themselves the following":

In the first place,a huge sheet of water,whence emergedlichen-stained promand not a living being, not a cry. It was a silent, motionless and ontories, naked world. Next long plants swayed in a mist which resembledthe vapourof a Turkishbath. A completelyred sun overheatedthe dampatmosphere.Then volcanoes burst forth, igneous rocks sprang from the mountains;and the running paste composed of porphyry and basalt congealed. Third tableau: in shallow seas, islands of madreporeshave risen; a group of palms, here and to there, dominatesthem. Thereare shells comparable chariot-wheels,tortoises three yards and lizards sixty feet long. Among the reeds, amphibiansstretch theirostrichnecks with crocodilejaws. Wingedserpentsfly above.... (345; 97)
The reader of this passage has no way of knowing which of the details mentioned derive from the reliable Cuvier and which from the unreliable Bertrand. The two works are fused into a single source of information from which, we are told, Bouvard and Pecuchet come away with a series of discontinuous impressions about the origins of life on earth. These impressions are, of course, entirely subjective: we have no means of judging whether the clerks have been struck by some peripheral observation in Cuvier or Bertrand or by one of their basic theoretical premises. Furthermore, we wonder just whose language we are hearing. When Flaubert writes "It was a silent, motionless and naked world" is he reproducing the language of Bertrand or of Cuvier? Is he articulating an impression in the words Bouvard and Pecuchet would themselves have used to describe this evolutionary stage? Is he condensing that impression into his own language? Or is he perhaps giving us his personal response to his reading of these authors? Not only are the original texts confused in their fusion but the exact source of the respond-

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ing subjectivity is unclear. The reader is confronted by a text which purports to be the response of two fictional characters to two anterior texts, but, as he reads, the precise outlines of both texts and response are effaced and he is left afloat inside a collage of surreal or hallucinatory images of undefined origin. If he checks the source books in order to reestablish the distinctions between the given texts and the subjective response to them, the reader finds yet further confusion. For, as Rene Descharmes discovered, the section beginning "third tableau" is not even founded on a discursive text but on an engraved illustration in Bertrand.'7 And it is on the basis of a distortion in the scale of that engraving that Flaubert refers to "shells comparable to chariot-wheels," for the ammonites are made to seem huge in the plate. Thus in this case the absurdity noted in Flaubert's text is due to the ineptitude of an illustrator, and the clerks, like Flaubert before them, are responding directly to this visual stimulus. The reader, however, will examine the engraving in vain for those tortoises and lizards which, according to the novelistic description, he would expect to find there. Yet those monstrous creatures are not Flaubert's invention for they are referred to in Bertrand's text, although the largest lizard he mentions is only forty-five feet long whereas Flaubert's has a length of sixty feet. Thus at the origin of this Flaubertian tableau are both a visual text and a verbal one. Flaubert's own text, making no distinction between them, accurately renders the impression created by the illustration's distorted scale but falsifies the data given discursively in the source, in that source which, we remember, is itself not clearly identified. Consequently, there is no systematic way of sorting out the interpretive distortions inherent in the works read by Bouvard and Pecuchet from the limitations intrinsic to their interpreting subjectivity. In fact, the question of the actual geological truth of the clerks' impressions is completely obscured by the more immediate question of their fidelity to their printed sources, both verbal and visual, and by the problem of accurately identifying those sources. Mimetic fidelity is not tested against the reality of the outside world but against the reality of the books written about that world. Language is verified by previous language; interpretation bases its necessary incertitude upon anterior interpretations. In Bouvard et Pecuchet Flaubert recognizes language as an autonomous symbolic system which traces a field without origin. His writing ceaselessly contests its own capacity to be interpreted, to be deciphered into final signification. It abandons the reassuring dialectic between the imaginary and the real characteristic of earlier realistic fiction and initiates a new linguistic realism which refuses to mask the purely metaphoric status of all verbal gestures. From this point of view the most realistic work is no longer the one which best succeeds in making the reader forget that he is reading words instead of participating in life but rather the one which never pretends to re-present anything which was not entirely verbal to begin with and therefore scrupulously restricts itself to the transcription of the already-said. And the more readily this already-said can be exchanged as intelli17

cf. Rene Descharmes, Autour de "Bouvard et Pecuchet" (Paris: Librairie de France, 1921), pp. 161-162.

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gible communication, the more "real" it is. The closer elements of language approach cliches and received ideas, or, to use Nietzsche's terms, the more "congealed" and "coagulated" metaphors become,'8 the more impervious they are to interpretation and the more closely they resemble "coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins." Words thus effaced approximate the perfect neutrality of meaningless phenomena. Since from the time of Aristotle mimesis was supposed to imitate "general nature," the task of a strictly linguistic mimesis will be to reproduce "general speech." Such was, undoubtedly, the inspiration behind the second volume of Bouvard et Pecuchet, which Flaubert did not live to complete.19This volume was to be made up almost entirely of found language, of pre-existent texts. In this ultra-modern work of anti-literature, narrative action would have been reduced to a bare minimum. The clerks were to begin copying at random anything which happened to fall in their way, including the labels on tobacco boxes, old newspapers, misplaced letters, miscellaneous printed matter bought by weight at a local paper factory (in which Flaubert intended at one point to include an enumeration of the consumption of Les Halles!) and, along with all this, their own notes on the books they had previously read. Thus the specialized vocabularies which "earlier" the clerks had felt to be the repositories of knowledge they now consider as given language with no privileged status whatsoever. The category of fact has ceased to be a problematic designation because they have given up searching for a single set of rules according to which to judge the truth of propositions. Now they accept all vocabularies as mere "stammering translations," all equally metaphoric and hence uniformly incapable of moral or scientific discrimination. Any proposition is true for them by the very fact that it has been written down, that it exists as part of the objective world. No longer are the clerks concerned either with making word coincide with object or interpretation with interpretation. The conflict dissolves as soon as they decide to treat language simply as given in the real world rather than as the means to induce chaotic phenomena to signify. Hence their joy as they return to copying. Having abandoned their search for a vocabulary which will explain reality, Bouvard and Pecuchet can now treat words as objects in themselves. Their indiscriminate copying constitutes Flaubert's demonstration of the logical consequences of literary realism, the reductio ad verbum of such claims as Balzac's "All is true." For, strictly speaking, the realist may invent nothing: he must submit himself to IsNietzsche speaks of the "Hart- und Starr- Werden" of an originally fluid world of metaphors. This solidification, he claims, is due to the fact that "man forgets himself as a subject and, what is more, as an artistically creating subject [in order to] live with some repose, safety and consequence. "If," Nietzsche adds, "he were able to get out of the prison walls of this faith, if only for a moment, his 'self-consciousness' would instantly be destroyed" (p. 377). It is something akin to this annihilation of self-consciousness which Flaubert planned to illustrate in the second volume of Bouvard et Pecuchet.
19 Various versions of Flaubert's sketchy scenario for this volume can be found in Cento's edition on pp. 14,

73-74, 115-116 and 124-125. Genevieve Bolleme has published an edition entitled Le Second Volume de "Bouvard et Pecuchet" (Paris: Denoel, 1966) which brings together many of the ingredients Flaubert intended to reproduce in the second volume. But since the materials are selected and classified according to Ms. Bolleme's own preferences, the reader has no way of knowing what or even how much she is leaving out.

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the given, he must repeatthe already-said. may speak only with the voices of He others. Rigorously defined, realistic representationis a re-presentation, repetia tion, a copy. The only initiative allowed the author within the terms of such a definitionis
the freedom to choose and juxtapose ready-made texts. In effect, Bouvard and

Pecuchet soon feel "the need to make a classification"(124), and the passages they were to recopy,classify and cataloguewouldhave been the very ones Flaubert had selected over the decades as representativeof meaningless discourse masqueradingas truth. These classificationsof found texts, of the language of the Other at its most basic level, would have formed the vast bulk of the second volume. Accordingto the scenarios,the clerks' great collage of stupiditieswould have included specimensof all styles (agricultural, medical,theological,classical, romantic,periphrases),tablesof antitheticalparallelssuch as "crimesof peoplesof kings-benefits of religion, crimes of religion" (124), a universal history composed entirely of beautiful things (including assassination and the seven deadly sins), a list of contradictory judgmentsabout famous men, the Album of the Marquise,poeticalpieces supposedlyfound in the papersof the clerkMarescot, and probably many other such tables and lists. Somewherealong the way the clerks would have assembleda Cataloguedes idees chics and made the Dictionnaire des idees reques.20

Therewouldhave been little roomin such a workfor the carefulandharmonious arrangementof meticulously chosen words, the technique of the "mot juste" which heretoforehad constitutedFlaubert's style. That technique,though it strove to cut language off from the world of signifiedmeaning,was still constrainedby the demandsof temporalnarrationand was, as Proust noted, recognizablythe product of an individual subject. In the second volume of Bouvardet Pecuchet, languagewas to be entirelyemancipated apartfrom a very few pages of narration,
from its subjective origin, divorced from its paternity, and thereby emptied of in-

tentional significance.Style here has become largely a matterof spatial arrangement on a printedpage. It no longer forms languageto its own specifications but only juxtaposes ready-madeverbal fragments found in the popular culture. It operatesin the intersticesbetweendiscontinuous phenomena,constructing thereby a kind of immensepop-artcollage not unlike the paintingsand mixed-mediaconScience structionsof Roy Lichtenstein,Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. failed them in their desire to interpretthe world, the clerks have become having in sense. As is the procedurein bricolage(or "mythical "bricoleurs" Levi-Strauss' as Levi-Straussalternativelycalls this "scienceof the concrete"),Bouthought"
20 Flaubert probably completed the Dictionnaire around 1846 and, as is well known, raided it repeatedly in

ensuing years as a source of certified cliches for insertion into the dialogue of Emma, of Rodolphe, of Frederic and, of course, of Bouvard and of Pecuchet. The description Flaubert gave, in a letter of 1852 to Louise Colet, of the preface he planned for the Dictionnaire contains the seminal idea for what was to become the unfinished second volume of Bouvard et Pecuchet. This preface, he declared, would be an entire book, of encyclopedic scope, in which he would attack everything by glorifying all that is generally approved of. "In the whole course of the book," he added, "there should not be one word of my invention," the contents being composed entirely "of quotations, of proofs (which would prove the contrary) and of frightening texts" (Correspondance, vol. III, pp. 66-67).

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vard and Pecuchet "build up structured sets... by using the remains and debris of events: . . . fossilized evidence of the history of an individual or a society."21The structures they create are the signs of a semantic absence, of the nothingness both before us and behind, an absence which has become one of the most stimulating myths in contemporary art and thought. As the conclusion to the second volume, Flaubert planned to have the two "bonshommes" find, among the old papers they had bought from the factory, the rough draft of a letter from the local doctor to the district Prefect. In this confidential report the doctor explains to the concerned Prefect that Bouvard and Pecuchet are not dangerous madmen but inoffensive imbeciles. Flaubert writes of this letter: "By summarizing all that they have done, all their actions and thoughts, it must constitute for the reader the critique of the novel" (125). In other words, this letter was intended to undermine the validity of the clerks' judgments and enterprises once and for all. Now it would finally be made clear to the reader that the clerks' intelligence was entirely inadequate to perform the encyclopedie critique undertaken in the first volume or to judge the merit of the quotations assembled in the second. Yet Flaubert did not plan to leave his already demoralized readers, assuming he had any left at this point, with this self-sabotaging conclusion. "It is my secret goal," Flaubert told a correspondent, "to bewilder the reader so entirely that he will go crazy."22The clerks wonder what to do with the letter and decide as follows: What shall we do with it?-No reflections! let's copy it! The page must fill up, the monument must be completed-equality of everything, of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the insignificant and the characteristic. Only phenomena are true. ("II n'y a de vrai que les phenomenes.") End with the view of the two "bonshommes" hunched over their desk and copying. (125) Thus the apparently damning criticism of the clerks was to be neutralized as it found its place as an absolutely equal verbal phenomenon within the growing mass of the clerks' copied facts. Transcription abolishes signification; linguistic realism destroys the possibility of spiritual discrimination. The doctor's letter is absorbed into a meaningless murmur of texts without contexts, an absorption which, by extension, also threatens the present text. For nothing written is immune against the Flaubertian reduction of meaning to verbal matter, not even Bouvard et Pecuchet, though it is a book made out of that very nothing.
2 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 21-22. 22Correspondance, vol. VIII, p. 175.