FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE. - French writer, b. at Rouen on 12 Dec. 1821, d. at Croisset on 8 May 1880. After a youth devoted to romantic impulses and exotic flights of fancy, which later found expression in a journey to the East (Oct. 1849-May 1851) and in vague literary sketches (Mémoires d'un fou, Novembre) later rejected, F. took refuge in his native city, where he reduced himself to living in seclusion, devoting himself exclusively to the art of writing, which he felt to be a vital necessity for an intimate, though painful, salvation. One can follow the path of this writer, bearing in mind on the one hand his passionate and dreamy soul, which would never cease to abandon itself, even in life, to romantic illusions, and on the other a keen and at times morbid awareness of such provisional states of mind that lead outside reality.
A revealing document of Flaubertian romanticism is the Tentation de st Antoine, reworked no fewer than three times and finally published in 1874. But the conflict alluded to takes shape between 1850 and 1856 in a singular manner, during the composition of the novel Madame Bovary. The victory belongs to the second F., the realist, as emerges from the figure of the heroine whom the author, while curiously identifying her with himself ("madame Bovary, c'est moi"), regards with a disenchanted and pitiless eye. She is a young woman, the wife of a provincial doctor, who tries to escape through adultery from a mediocre life and ends as a suicide. Around the heroine and her two lovers are other characters, among whom one cannot forget the pharmacist Homais, a characteristic figure of a Voltairian and a positivist who believes in scientific progress as in the sole weapon for the renewal of human life. This cruel and banal story, told with much art, earned the author a trial for outrage to public morals that remained famous in French literature. In 1863 Salammbô also appeared: the realist method is applied here to an episode of Carthaginian history, relived through the ancient histories, but it does not depart from its aims, which appear at times undisguised when the analysis of events is replaced by a relish for scenes of violence and blood. F.'s art, which is on the verge of touching rhetoric, returns to being genuine and limpid in the Education sentimentale (1869), a novel with little of the novel about it, as it has recently been defined, if one looks at the rather weak narrative construction, or at the figure of the main character, Frédéric Moreau, dominated by a love that can never be satisfied and drags on through time without a plausible reason; but a novel intimately complete and highly evocative for the poetic warmth it emanates, within the vast panorama of contemporary events summoned to memory by the author's direct experience. After the publication of the last version of the Tentation, it is the Trois contes (Un coeur simple, Hérodias and La légende de st Julien l'Hospitalier), which appeared in 1877, that give the definitive measure of F.'s marvellous and humane art. Once again, to contemporary themes of modest interest he alternates historical or legendary themes, but the taste of the narrative is unique, unmistakable the style brought to a linguistic and representational mastery worthy of the best classical tradition. A very singular aspect of F. is revealed finally in the last work, left unfinished (and published posthumously in 1881): Bouvard et Pécuchet. It is the caricature of two stubborn ignoramuses who methodically engage in works and actions greater than themselves, and, inwardly devoid of love for life and for knowledge, make collections of experiences of life and of science. F.'s realism here makes its most ambitious and cruel attempt, since in the end the image of man is deformed and sterilized beyond remedy, without the narrative drawing any moral impetus from the errors and brutalities represented. Almost by contrast, leafing through the vast Correspondance (9 vols.; published in 1933), one discovers the qualities of F. the man, good, generous, enthusiastic, and so committed to his own work as to humble and exalt himself by turns in the most exhausting philological and historical research. Placed on the Index are, of F.: Madame Bovary and Salammbô (decree of 20 June 1864).
Bibliography14 works
Giacinto Spagnoletti