Hours following arriving in Paris one day last century, I hurried to a bookshop in the Latin Quarter called The Pleasure of Reading, and bought a copy of Madame Bovary. After spending the whole night reading it, I realized at dawn what kind of writer I wanted to be, and that, thanks to Flaubert, I began to discover all the secrets of the art of the novel.
No one qualifies as a single “croissant” in terms of its merit over fiction. He is the one who discovered that the storyteller is the most important character created by the writer, who may be the all-knowing narrator, or one of the characters of the novel, and that all of them may be of a diversity and plurality. This is how the modern novel was born with Flaubert who laid the rules that, following years, turned into the endless forms and accumulations that the genius of James Joyce had created to distinguish it once and for all from the classic novel. But the novelist who mastered what Joyce, the Irishman, had most perfected, was not a European, but a far Mississippi American, who gave the art of fiction a flexibility of time and place that enabled it to overcome all transgressions: it was William Faulkner. What amazes Faulkner most was not his remarkable audacity, which allowed him to write novels such as “Burning and Meadow” or “While I Lay in the Presence of Death,” the most difficult of the novels, but rather the tricks he used to deceive journalists when he introduced himself as “a farmer who loves Horses.” He refuses to talk regarding the techniques of the novel because he “doesn’t understand anything of that.” It is to Flaubert, Joyce, and Faulkner that the modern novel is credited with definitively distinguishing it from the classic.
Flaubert’s interest in the novel’s structure is embodied in the letters he wrote every night to his mistress, Louise Colette, during the five years that it took to write “Madame Bovary”, meaning that many years passed before these letters were collected in a book, perhaps the most important books that set the boundaries of the modern novel, as a structure It is integrated with clear features, and differs from all previously written stories and tales bearing the name “novel”. That dissociation from the past was as stark as it was vague, and it explains to us how the narrator may be very knowledgeable and knowledgeable regarding everything regarding all people, or an ordinary character whose perceptions are limited to what ordinary humans know regarding others, with the consequences of this limited perception of slippage towards error. A novel like Madame Bovary can accommodate a narrator who knows everything, and a number of narrators-characters, provided that each respects his limits.
On the level of prose, Flaubert always considered creativity to be dependent on the musical rhythm of the sentence, and that the dissonance of one syllable is enough to destroy the musical perfection of the text to which he was ascribing the works of magic. The five years that it took to write “Madame Bovary” were the most fertile and most creative in terms of the narrative structure, and the truth is that Flaubert was the real maker of the modern novel.
Emma Bovary’s story and the almost daily letters to Louise Colette are the basis for the modern novel, though it took some time to realize this. The veiled narrator is the pinnacle of creativity in Flaubert’s narration: he is the knower of everything in the story he tells, and he is the absent and not the present who knows everything that happens, and does not appear but conceals his existence behind an alleged objectivity that constantly intersects with other characters who are allowed to appear and feel a limited presence, Provided that it does not go beyond what a person must or can know. And the narrator, who knows everything, is the only one who directs the facts, distributing the roles and the successive appearance of the characters according to the gradations of the story. Within this framework, everything is permissible for narration and knowledge, as well as for the eloquent silence imposed by the narrator according to the requirements that he alone determines.
The “new novel” that Flaubert’s genius developed in “Madame Bovary” does not know taboos, but within limits. For example, it allows the creation of a collective character, temporary or transient, similar to that of the school class when the new student, Charles Bovary, enters it at the beginning of the novel, and the teacher introduces it to his colleagues. This class is one character that branch out into many different personalities as students begin to relive their personalities and differentiate themselves from one another. Everything is possible and coherent in this structure laid down by Flaubert, as long as the narrator respects the rules and does not fall into excess, since an accident can lead to the collapse of the tight plot of the novel.
It was not an easy path that Flaubert took until he was able to devote five years of his life to writing Madame Bovary, day and night, seven days a week. He resorted to feigning illness to convince his father, the doctor, who wanted his son to follow his example, that he was unable to continue studying. Much has been said on the tongues of critics and doctors regarding Flaubert’s disease and the seizures that afflicted him and threw him to the ground, and he saw strange lights. I think that the disease was a figment of his imagination so that he might devote all his time to writing quietly, knowing that this does not mean at all that he did not sometimes fall down and see strange lights and vomit. Fortunately, his letters to Louise Colette were preserved thanks to her care, may God bless her memory. Those which Louise Colette wrote to Flaubert were burnt by his vile niece, whom he considered to be too permissive, and thus drew the resentment of Flaubert’s lovers, and certainly mine too.
Was Flaubert aware of the revolution that “Madame Bovary” would spark? I’m not so sure. It is likely that during those five years he spent writing Madame Bovary, he did not expect such a wide influence, nor the revolution that his discovery of the hidden and total narrator would bring to the line between the new novel and the old, that is, the classic. This is not the first time in the history of literature that someone discovers, by chance, a new style of fiction that sparks a revolution in the world of writing (as happened with Borges in his stories).
I always felt admiration and affection for Flaubert, as if he were my uncle or my grandfather. I went many times to Croisette to relive his walks in my mind, shouting in the “Screaming Garden” he frequented to test the rhythm of his sentences, and I carried flowers with me to that cemetery full of crosses and mausoleums, and I visited his father’s hospital, the doctor who had to support him throughout the years he spent writing that novel.
More than two hundred years have passed since Flaubert’s birth, and the style he invented for writing the novel is still fresh and alive. I think it will remain young and renewed for the next two hundred years.
