Flaubert: éthique et esthétique (review)

Who killed Emma Bovary? In a probing essay in this eclectic edited collection on Flaubert and ethics, Françoise Gaillard follows the current critical vogue whereby the questioning of literary texts is pursued in the manner of a detective novel (as in Pierre Bayard’s 1998 essay Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? (Paris: Éditions de Minuit)). Taking issue with Philippe Doumenc’s attempt in Contre-enquête sur la mort d’Emma Bovary (Arles: Actes sud, 2007) to ask who is responsible for Emma’s death, Gaillard questions instead why it is that Flaubert kills off Emma. She challenges such popular misconceptions that Emma dies because she is an idealist, or because she cannot distinguish the gulf between reality and dreams, and argues that Emma’s death occurs because her way of reading, rather than the material she reads, threatens the ethical conception of Art that Flaubert envisaged. Emma demands as much from form as from content, focusing on the kind of ‘moments parfaits’ privileged by Annie in Sartre’s La Nausée, and expects payback from her consumption of art and literature. Gaillard pinpoints the gap between Emma’s attitude to Art and Flaubert’s: where Emma buys into kitsch and threatens literature with banality, Flaubert turns the banal into literature. Gaillard’s essay exemplifies the questions associated with Flaubert and his ethical conception of aesthetics. Anne Herschberg-Pierrot, in her editorial ‘Avant-propos’, makes a case for viewing Flaubert not so much as the remote ivory-tower aesthete for whom the ‘livre sur rien’ represents a desire for empty formalism, but instead a writer for whom questions of morality are intrinsic. His search for truth can be equated with a search for justice founded on relationships between sound, rhythm, and sense. The collected essays are often comparative, drawing parallels between Flaubert and Ruskin, Flaubert and Sade, and Flaubert and Baudelaire, all centred on different ethical questions. Agnès Bouvier investigates the ethics of translation in Salammbô, examining the choices Flaubert made when attempting to capture the language of his Carthaginian milieu, and noting close linguistic connections between Flaubert’s text and Samuel Cahen’s translation of the Bible from Hebrew sources. Loïc Windels discusses melancholy in Flaubert and Baudelaire, noting perceptive points of contrast, such as that Baudelaire’s modernity can be seen as an excess of Romanticism, whereas Flaubert becomes modern through a rejection of Romantic sentiment. Jacques Rancière finds morality in writing that emphasizes the minute — droplets and dust — and draws connections between such images across characters and works, equating the force of the sentence with the forces of life; he amplifies his discussion by linking Flaubert with the work of John Ruskin and Walt Whitman. In this disparate collection, the wider question of Flaubert’s relationship to ethics, which merits further discussion, tends to become lost, and much of the focus remains on Madame Bovary. The essays in themselves, however, offer an engaging series of questions about Flaubert’s works and their possible points of connection.