The modern novel
The life of Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was born in 1821 in Rouen. His father was a surgeon at the city’s hospital, and he spent his childhood in a rather morbid atmosphere.
Early on he was fascinated by literature and writing, but was bored in school, and even more bored by the prospect of “going to law school” and becoming a lawyer. In 1844, however, a serious nervous breakdown took its toll on the young Flaubert and prevented him from continuing his studies: his family decided to let him write and to give him the means to do so. Two years later, his father and sister died, in quick succession. At the age of 25, he finds himself in an empty house, alone with a mother overwhelmed by grief. Taken along by his friend Du Camp, he made a long journey to the East from November 1849 to May 1851.
On his return to France, he settled permanently in the family property at Croisset and devoted himself to his work, alternating sojourns in Paris and long periods of solitude in Normandy. Thereafter his entire life revolved around writing. “I am a man-pen”, he said. “I feel through the pen, because of the pen, in relation to the pen, and much more with the pen”. From then on, his life would merge with the history of his work. And his correspondence, so lively, so spontaneous, tells of the construction of this work, almost from day to day. Flaubert died in 1880.
“Do you know how many pages I wrote this week? One — and I wouldn’t even say it’s any good! It needed to be a quick, light passage, but I was in a heavy, expansive frame of mind. What agony! Writing must be an atrociously delicious thing, for us to keep at it like this — torturing ourselves and not wishing it were any different. There’s a mystery to that which I simply don’t understand.”
To Louise Colet, 29 January 1854
Flaubert and his time
He hated his epoch. Flaubert was born during the Bourbon Restoration, the period when the monarchy returned after the Napoleonic interlude. Despite two revolutions (1830 and 1848), he saw his century above all as one of moral order and industrial development. In Sentimental Education, he offered an analysis of the history of his generation—its hopes and its failures—that was remarkably profound and far ahead of its time.
The nineteenth century was an age of great certainties: people believed in science, in progress, in technology, in virtue and morality, in civilization and colonization. Throughout his life, Flaubert strove to dismantle these certainties, showing that they were founded on illusions, lies, and received ideas. But he went even further: might the very criticisms we level at our own era not be ideas shaped by the time itself, which we mindlessly parrot? Curiously, he wrote the following entry in his Dictionary of Received Ideas:*
Epoch (our own): Rail against it. — Complain that it is not poetic. — Call it an era of transition, of decadence.
We remain always somewhat entangled in our own time, even when we believe we are judging it. That is Flaubert’s lesson.
“I’m a bear and I want to stay a bear — in my den, in my lair, in my own hide, in my old bearskin — quiet and far away from the bourgeois and their ladies.”
To Caroline Flaubert, 20 December 1843
His place in the history of literature
Lyrical in his works inspired by the Orient, precise and meticulous in his depictions of provincial and Parisian life, and seeing style as “an absolute way of perceiving things,” Flaubert has been claimed by movements as diverse as nineteenth-century realism and the nouveau roman of the 1960s. Through the renewal he brought to the novel as a genre, and through his conception of literature and the role of the writer, he stands above all as the first truly modern novelist.
For Flaubert, literature was a serious matter. A writer was not merely an entertainer. Through his desire, his labor, and his exacting standards, he believed one could create a work that was self-sufficient in its artistic beauty and yet penetrated profoundly into reality. Nothing, then, could be more legitimate than placing writing at the center of one’s life — indeed, of life itself. This is what Flaubert did from a very early stage, and what many writers after him would also do, perhaps more readily thanks to his example.
“Away from my desk, I’m useless. Ink is my natural element. A beautiful liquid, that dark substance — but dangerous! You drown in it, it pulls you in!”
To Louise Colet, 14 August 1853
Why Flaubert is an extraordinary writer
No writer has thought, meditated and matured his work more than he did. Writing each book implied at least five years of hard work and 5,000 pages of drafts. This attention to the conception of the whole and to the smallest detail makes each of his works a literary object where each syllable is weighed, where nothing is left to chance: “may I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second”, he wrote to one of his friends who was pressing him to publish.
Deeply shaped by Romantic imagination and by his experience of the East, Flaubert alternated his “subjects” between contemporary France and an Orient conceived as its complete opposite. In reality, his true ambition was to attain perfection of form and style. Before him, no one had pursued this aim with such intensity and persistence.
« Je crois que me voilà renfourché sur mon dada. Fera-t-il encore des faux pas à me casser le nez ? A-t-il les reins plus solides ? Est-ce pour longtemps ? Dieu le veuille ! Mais il me semble que je suis remis. J’ai fait cette semaine trois pages et qui, à défaut d’autre mérite, ont au moins de la rapidité. Il faut que ça marche, que ça coure, que ça fulgure, ou que j’en crève ; et je n’en crèverai pas. »
À Louise Colet, 25 février 1854
New perspectives on language and literature
This extraordinary rigor in both writing and conception led him to produce works that were innovative in their narrative principles (relativity of points of view, narrator’s impersonality, refusal to conclude) and that opened up new perspectives on language. Contrary to the Romantics, Flaubert believed that the expression of a singular self was anything but straightforward, since it is so difficult to break free from the clichés and preconceived notions carried by language. As a result, his characters sometimes seem to flounder in words. But that is precisely what makes them appear so deeply human.
“I think I’m back in the saddle with my old nag. Will it still stumble and smash my face? Is its back any stronger? Will it last? God willing! I feel I’m recovering. This week I wrote three pages which, if nothing else, have at least some speed. It needs to move, it needs to run, it needs to blaze — or it’ll kill me; and it won’t.”
To Louise Colet, 25 February 1854
Main works
Novels and stories
1857
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is one of the masterpieces of world literature. Why is that? Because, in the mid-19th century, it anticipates the whole of modernity: the decline of the countryside in relation to the city, the feeling of marginality, frustration with reality, and even consumer society. And all of this expressed in a haute couture style, with multiple innovations in narrative technique.
1862
Salammbo
In this novel, after extensive research—and after spending long hours smoking his pipe on the sofa—Flaubert conjures ancient Carthage: battles, lions, warlords, a woman devoted to worship… After the Norman greyness of his previous novel (Madame Bovary), he needed to refresh his soul in a more colourful world.
1869
Sentimental Education
In Sentimental Education, Flaubert wanted to portray the story of his generation while remaining true to his principle: never to conclude, never to say whether it is good or bad. It is up to the reader to interpret the text.
1877
Three Tales
The following passage is drawn from the first of the Tales, “A Simple Soul.” It portrays the life of Félicité, a servant wholly devoted to the family she serves, acting without calculation and untouched by self-reflection. Yet beneath its surface simplicity lies a text of remarkable depth, conceived with meticulous precision. It stands as one of the finest achievements in French prose.
Letters
1830-1880
Letters
Borges said once that this was Flaubert’s most important work. Here are some letters (in french only)