Au pays des perroquets: Feerie theatrale et narration chez Flaubert (review)

Olds, Marshall C. Au pays des perroquets: Féerie théâtrale et narration chez Flaubert. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, Faux titre n^o 202, 2001. Pp. 266. ISBN 90-420-1514-4

The theater fascinated Flaubert throughout his life. His parents often took him to plays in Rouen and Paris. At home, he directed plays enacted by his childhood friends and himself. In time, he composed original dramas for them. Later, he wrote scenarios for most of his narrative works, and read his drafts out loud not only to test their sound and rhythm, but also to help him imagine the narratives as live per-formances. Between 1862 and 1874, he struggled in vain to establish himself and, later, his deceased friend Louis Bouilhet (1821-1869), as playwrights. His most successful effort, the satirical Candidat, ran for only four performances. Critics, including Flaubert himself, condemned his plays as lifeless and unoriginal. Consid-ering the importance of his novels, Flaubert's abortive career in the theater seems a tragic waste of talent. Jean Canu (1946) was one of the last critics to devote a book to Flaubert's achievements as a dramatist.

With few exceptions, then, until around 1980 critics tended to divide Flaubert's writings into successful novels and unsuccessful plays. Only then did they begin to synthesize their conception of these two genres, by examining the striking theatricality of Flaubert's prose works (most evident, perhaps, in La Tentation de saint Antoine). Marshall Olds goes a step further. Instead of discussing theatricality in the contes and novels, he seeks to understand the aesthetic vision common to the plays and the prose. He first studied the manuscripts of Flaubert's plays, fragments, notes, and sketches, 28 of which are listed chronologically and partially reproduced in his twelve Appendices (176-243). Newly-available documents concerning Flaubert's theatrical collaborations with Louis Bouilhet and Charles d'Osmoy permitted a treatment fuller than before. To confirm and refine the dating, Olds analyzed the kinds of writing paper used by Flaubert. At length he found a key to the author's imagination in the minor, forgotten genre of the féerie, exemplified by the unstaged Château des cœurs.

A conceptual problem crops up immediately. In trying to establish the role of fairy plays in Flaubert's creative process, how can one distinguish between mere mentions of or allusions to the genre (by-products of creative exuberance) and a creatively productive preoccupation? Marshall Olds proposes a convincing, many-stranded weave of criteria: recurrence throughout a career; manifestations embedded within complete works in other genres, as well as in projects; episodic appearances in other works, and in the correspondence and theoretical writings; effects on both the form and content of works in other genres. By the end, we are thoroughly persuaded of the féerie's importance for Flaubert's imagination.

The traditional féerie, rather like A Midsummer Night's Dream,depicted a super-natural world of invisible beings, good (fairies) and bad (gnomes), who could appear at will to humans, and who secretly determined individual human destinies without trying fundamentally to reshape the human social or political order. Unlike classical drama, French fairy plays were organized associatively - metaphorically - rather than causally (metonymically). They consisted in an episodic series of tableaux whose settings could shift freely in time and space, and between the natural and supernatural. On stage, the fairy play of the 1840s and '50s was a pioneering Gesamtkunstwerk, a grand spectacle combining music, dance, costume, elaborate stage sets, and special effects (27).

What interest did Flaubert find in that genre, beyond the appeal of an instant response from a live audience? He wanted to promote language from vehicle to dramatic mover, to create a metaphorically-grounded drama in which didascalies (stage directions) function as causal principles transcending psychological or supernatural effects, and where the figurative use of language can suddenly become literalized in...