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MLN 115.4 (2000) 761-782



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"Hérodias," or the Self-Annihilation of the Absolute Work

Victor Provenzano


In act IV, scene II of Othello, Desdemona says to the Moor:

I understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.

(Shakespeare 1140)

This Blackmurian example of gesture in language (Blackmur 4) oddly also seems to describe the response of literary criticism to Flaubert's "Hérodias," for critics have understood the fury of Saint John's oracle--an annihilation moving from Isaiah to the Apocalypse, from the Old to the New Testament 1 --yet not the words; they have understood the role of this fury in the transition to the transfigured world of the Messiah, yet they have insisted, as Flaubert in his letters (Extraits 275), on the excessive number of ellipses in the explicative background of this work (Robertson 111), on its obscurity or unreadability--"le conte est obscur, parce qu'il doit traiter de l'obscurité" (Debray-Genette 201) 2 --going as far as to see it as an [End Page 761] example of "cubist writing" (Neefs), 3 and thus a prefiguration of Stein's Tender Buttons.

Literary critics have, with their assumptions about narrative form and meaning (even in its most sinuous guises), somehow failed to understand the words of "Hérodias," since the peculiar understanding they would need to see underneath its lapidary surfaces would not fall within the realm of philology, hermeneutics, genetic criticism or narratology; would not be a matter of understanding, but rather of seeing what is most apparent, here and now, on the immediate landscape of the page (Richard 7) 4 without looking for its origin. This peculiar reading of "Hérodias" would be a matter, not of understanding, but of "standing under" the Richardian landscape along with the figure of Saint John, who is under the ground at the absolute center 5 of the tale, and who, from that center, with his voice alone, undermines the represented landscape--along with the landscape of the page, the work, even Literature itself.

That the demi-divine voice of Saint John undermines the landscape in the tale, as well as the landscape of the page, is a seemingly immoderate claim to make, similar, in a sense, to the sort of arcane allegory of writing that one would expect to find in Blanchot's "Song of the Sirens" (Blanchot 105-113). Be assured that it is not an immoderate claim. In "Hérodias" we are presented with a brief work of fiction that is an artfully reduced model of Flaubert's "idea of spatial form" (Frank 5-64), 6 a work in which the landscape represented as the site of the action (a helical, cone-shaped peak capped by a walled city) coincides perfectly with the landscape of the work's thirty-four pages, from beginning to end; thus, the site of "Hérodias" (the "cone-shaped peak" of Macherus) is named in the opening line (TC 109), while it is not until the penultimate sentence that anyone ventures from this site: the three Essenes, like a trio of divine clowns, [End Page 762] set out from the summit of the peak with the head of Saint John--passing it to one another from hand to hand (TC 142).

Saint John, the nabi 7 at the center of the representational landscape, in an astonishingly subtle manner, also coincides with this landscape: the helical, cone-shaped peak, the walled city of Macherus and their surroundings. About Saint John's presence in "Hérodias," Flaubert wrote in his brouillons: "Mêler la figure de Iaokanann aux détails du paysage" (Debray-Genette 200). 8 Flaubert could not have been more understated in his depiction of how and to what degree he would eventually combine the "figure" of Saint John not merely with the paysage, for Flaubert is no mere landscape artist, but with Nature or the cosmos of Spinoza: Deus sive Natura. 9

Before "the voice [rises]" at the midpoint of the 34 page tale (TC 125: "la voix s'éleva")--on the "fold" between the...

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