Gustave Flaubert: Une manière spéciale de vivre (review)

Pierre-Marc de Biasi accomplishes what at first appears an impossible task: a new biography of Gustave Flaubert. He does so by situating it in the space between lived experience and the finished work, focusing on Flaubert's research notes, outlines, drafts and the Correspondance. Like the fictional biographer in Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, Biasi often brings to light little-known details of his subject's life experience, for instance, the burn scar on the hand with which the writer gripped his pen. Yet unlike Barnes' character or Flaubert's own would-be biographers, Bouvard and Pécuchet, whose efforts are ultimately futile, Biasi achieves far more fruitful results. He may in fact have found the very best way to approach this particular writer's life.

Flaubert's self-professed goal was to erase all evidence of his personality from the literary texts he produced, and he thus in some sense proclaimed the death of the author long before Barthes. Nonetheless, as Biasi demonstrates, the Flaubertian œuvre everywhere bears the trace of the author's lived experience. Biasi's critique génétique, the study in depth of all the documents that surround the writer's literary works, reveals the story of a self-styled homme-plume, a man who ultimately lived to write, especially after the infamous hallucinatory crisis that forced him to withdraw from the world for extended periods and thus allowed him to devote himself to his writing.

Biasi finds the unique, but fitting metaphor of horseback riding for Flaubert's "dada": the act of writing itself. He mounted his pen as he mounted a horse, and used it to move with force, to travel, and to dream. In fact this biographer finds three such motifs in an Arab proverb cited in a letter from Flaubert to Louise Colet: "Le Paradis en ce monde se trouve sur le dos des chevaux, dans le fouillement des livres ou entre les deux seins d'une femme!" (as cited in Biasi 34). Riding, research, and love thus define Flaubert's manière spéciale de vivre.

This biography is not for the uninitiated. Biasi assumes that his reader will have an intimate knowledge of Flaubert's major works and of Flaubert criticism in general. For example, he responds to Sartre's L'Idiot de la famille, with his own version of the Flaubert family dynamic, but seems to assume his readers know Sartre's perspective. A major strength of this biography is Biasi's balanced account of Flaubert's relationships. No individual is characterized merely as a defender, detractor, or disciple. He relies on studies such as Daniel Oster's work on Du Camp or Hermia Oliver's work on Flaubert's relationship with Juliette Hebert, his niece's governess, to support his assessments. He is also able to present the potential for bias in his sources, especially in the correspondence and in biographical accounts written by members of Flaubert's inner circle.

In the same vein, Biasi often leaves biographical questions open-ended, presenting as much evidence as exists, but allowing the reader to draw his or her conclusions. He makes a strong case that despite Maxime Du Camp's account of Flaubert's illness, the writer did not suffer from epilepsy, since Flaubert's use of the term épileptique differs enormously from his own descriptions of the nervous malady that debilitated him for much of his life.

Another gratifying feature of this text is Biasi's use of citations from the Correspondance, notebooks, and published works, as well as from sources written by Flaubert's contemporaries. Because he quotes passages at much greater length than is customary, he is able to preserve the integrity of the thought he wants to underscore. Still, despite Biasi's efforts to remain objective himself, his admiration for the great writer sometimes leads to certain blind spots. While he gives weight to Flaubert's correspondence with his mistress Louise Colet, a corpus he calls...