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2. Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude Flaubert and the Art of Self-Subversion Each of the canonic realist novelists—Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola—takes a pessimistic view of human happiness. This position is consonant with the representation of the changing world of the nineteenth century in which the ever-advancing institutions of capitalism and the bourgeoisie as well as the ideological state apparatuses supporting them, not least the effects of urbanization, lead many novelists of the time to paint rather bleak pictures of the world surrounding them. Despite the negative pictures they often paint, Balzac and Zola do believe in progress and progress narratives. For the latter, of course, this progress is often in conflict with his belief in decadence and decline; yet counterbalancing the pessimism of Germinal and La Bête humaine is the optimism of Le Docteur Pascal. As for Stendhal, in spite of the unhappy endings of works such as Le Rouge et le noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, this author does at least believe in a future in which the ‘‘happy few’’ will be present. Alone of the four major realist writers, Flaubert stands out as the one who shows no belief in a progress narrative. His characters fail repeatedly and decline almost from the very beginning of his narratives, and there is no belief, except on the part of some of his hapless protagonists, that things may ever get better. Each of his works is a construct of insufficiencies on the level of plot and in the formation of character; the depicted world, while arguably realistic, often seems a slightly lesser version of the real world. His characters’ foibles are seldom explored with sympathy: there will be no tragedy here, just a kind of dedramatized apathy marking the passage of time toward inevitable mediocrity or decline. From his earliest writing, Flaubert is necessarily at odds with the ideological production of the reality that surrounds him. That is to say, there is a progress narrative implicit in the nineteenth century’s construction of itself and Flaubert’s pessimism or his espousal of failure as an object of study cannot represent reality in its own terms, precisely because constructions of 58 Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude 59 nineteenth-century reality depend for coherence on that concept of progress to proceed. Clearly, not all authors are wide-eyed Pollyannas with naive views of human nature, urbanization, or the loss of tradition. None of the important realist authors in any national tradition eschew the darker side of human nature, and at one point or another many take on the down-side of progress, whether it is Galdós in La de Bringas offering a critique of nascent consumerism (as Flaubert offers in Madame Bovary and Zola in Au bonheur des dames) or Eliot offering a critique of sterile knowledge for its own sake in Middlemarch, just to offer two examples. But, for all that, there is the belief in progress, often scientific or medical in nature in works as different as Middlemarch , Le Docteur Pascal, and Mont-Oriol. Decline and decadence may be there, but progress will trump them, except in Flaubert’s case.1 A glance at Flaubert’s correspondence allows us to think about this author ’s notion of failure. Whereas an author can attest to his or her own progress, feelings, failure, or frustrations about writing—in the sense that Roland Barthes gives writing as an end en soi—the author is certainly no guarantor of the meaning of the fictional text produced. The author is one reader among many: he or she can attest to intention, or perhaps more accurately rhetorically state a misprision of his or her own intention, but that is not the same thing as guaranteeing the meaning of the literary work outside the author’s correspondence. Books have their own fate, as the old expression goes, and they are soon autonomous. Nevertheless, the correspondence is symptomatic of what this fledgling writer is going through as he attempts to produce a work of fiction that will stand on its own. That need for a freestanding objet d’art that does not rely on objective representation or even on the simulacra of verisimilitude always already puts notions of the verisimilar into question in Flaubert’s narratives. From his correspondence, we easily recognize that the author struggles while trying to produce what will become his first masterpiece, Madame Bovary. For example, in a letter to Louise Colet...

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