Flaubert and "Don Quijote": The Influence of Cervantes on "Madame Bovary." (review)

Often, the history of literary criticism becomes bogged down in clichés and repetitive simplifications: an opinion, an idea, a seductive synthesis is forwarded, and it remains for years, even centuries, as the solid truth. This is what seems to have happened with the relationship between Cervantes and Flaubert, frequently limited to the oft-repeated anecdote of the child fascinated with Don Quijote, a fascination that dates the birth of Flaubert the writer "avec la lecture qu'on luit fait du Quichotte."¹ Beyond this ultimately biographical argument, only those studies dedicated exclusively or primarily to Madame Bovary mention Cervante's influence on Flaubert, pointing out in passing that Don Quijote's and Emma's fervor for reading is to blame for their impossible dreams. And this negligence in turn exposes what turns out to be another disillusion, for us this time, and especially for comparative literature, namely, that of a world literature dreamed by Goethe, Schiller, and the German romantics, one that would join nations and overcome nationalisms. The broadening and deepening of the literary kinship between Cervantes and Flaubert that Fox's book reveals in itself suffices to prove once again how far we still are from that intellectually and spiritually laudable dream, a distance no doubt expanded even more by what Ortega y Gasset aptly labeled "la barbarie de la especialización," or the barbarity of specialization, particularly detrimental, of course, to comparative literature.

Five chapters prepare us for the final one, "Madame Bovary and Don Quijote," that is dedicated explicitly to a comparison between both works. The first five situate the two authors within their respective eras and identify the predominant literary trends and influences of their times. In this respect, Fox's book is another study that reestablishes a welcome balance between biography and literary criticism, often lost in twentieth-century literary studies (and not just in New Criticism or pure explication de texte). Fox traces the evolution of the two writers, relying on both their reading and their earlier works. She notes the positive influence of Erasmian and Italian Renaissance literature on Cervantes (though we miss the mention of Ariosto's Orlando furioso) and that of the classics, both ancient and French, on Flaubert and the rejection of chivalric romances by Cervantes and of melodramatic Romanticism by Flaubert that led in both cases to the brilliant irony of literary parody. She also points to common influences on the Spaniard and the Frenchman (including Erasmus, which she sees evidence of in Memoires d'un fou), as well as the influence exerted by Cervantes that may have reached Flaubert through other authors (Goethe being the most outstanding one). Fox delves into a truly thought-provoking comparative analysis that, as is usual in the always slippery issue of literary influences, may raise eyebrows, but even if her case is not entirely convincing, it is at least sufficiently intriguing as to warrant further exploration. In certain comparisons, however, a neat differentiation between influence and mere intertextuality yields a more plausible solution to textual coincidences. This is the case, for example, with Fox's analysis of Maese Pedro's retablo, or puppet show, in Don Quijote and of the opera Lucia di Lammermoor in Madame Bovary. Interestingly enough, Fox invokes this same opera in making a more solid comparison between chivalric romance (Don Quijote), on the one hand, and romantic literature (Madame Bovary), on the other, in the section dedicated to Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, where once again Fox transcends the passing mention—if that—of so many studies that may casually allude to Sir Walter Scott's novel as the source of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, of which Emma is so fond. Not only does Fox suggest that Scott might be another indirect Cervantes influence on Flaubert but she also persuasively argues that The Bride of Lammermoor was to Madame Bovary what Amadís de Gaula was...