Too Much Information: Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet

Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet is a Tendenz-Roman without a clear proposition to espouse,¹ or, as Jacques Neefs has said, a comedy of ideas.² Its characters repeatedly endeavor to learn how to perform various actions—from handling grain that has just been harvested to finding items for a geological collection—and repeatedly fail. They are committed to self-improvement and to improvement in all things. Because they frequently consult some of the sources that aim to offer the latest, most up-to-date views, it would be easy to imagine that the novel's chief target is progressive modernity. Yet Bouvard and Pecuchet's failures could equally be seen as problems that are uniquely theirs. Since they fail at everything they try, perhaps, we might think, the problem is not with their sources but with them.

Neither of these views—that we should blame the message, that we should blame the messengers—captures the book's peculiar charm and seriousness. Bouvard et Pechuchet is, from the moment Flaubert plants "several volumes of Roret's Encyclopaedia"³ ("plusieurs volumes de l'Encyclopedie Roret" 33)⁴ and The Magnetist's Manual in Pecuchet's apartment, a novel that assigns starring roles to the encyclopedia, the dictionary, and the how-to book. These are Enlightenment institutions that are not merely storehouses for knowledge but shrines to writing. They collect information, ideas, and objects and arrange them. Moreover, as Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas clearly records, their fame precedes them. And the things that people say about the writing that speaks to them are as catty as the conversations of teenaged girls are reputed to be:

DICTIONARY: Laugh about it—made only for the ignorant.

RHYMING DICTIONARY: To use one? Shameful!

DICTIONNAIRE: En rire—n'est fait que pour les ignorants.

DICTIONNAIRE DE RIMES: S'en servir? Honteux!⁵

ENCYCLOPEDIA (THE): Laugh at it in pity and even thunder against it as a rococo work.

ENCYCLOPEDIE (L'): En rire de pitié, et même tonner contre comme étant un ouvrage rococo.

(Flaubert, Dictionnaire 75)

These entries do not define, if to define means to describe what something is or give synonyms for it. They are not what Saussure termed a synchronic law, a simple descriptive equivalence that would enable us to say that one tablespoon measures the same quantity as three teaspoons do, or to demonstrate with a diagram what a quincunx is (Saussure's example of a synchronic law).⁶ Flaubert instead moves well past such definitions to draw out the prescriptivism that hovers in all but the most descriptive accounts, to present a conduct book and to give instructions for use. One entry takes up yet another modern scriptural form and treats it as a central player in a small drama of daily social life:

NEWSPAPERS: Not be able to do without them—but thunder against them.

JOURNAUX: Ne pouvoir s'en passer—mais tonner contre.

(Flaubert, Dictionnaire 97)

In one edition of the Dictionnaire, the description of what newspapers and journals are is overwhelmed with directions on how they might become props. The entry for newspapers and journals continues:

Play an important part in modern society: e.g., the Figaro, Serious Journals: the Revue des Deux Mondes, L'Economiste, the Journal des Debats. You must leave them lying about on your drawing-room table, taking care to cut the pages beforehand. Marking a few passages in red pencil is also impressive. In the morning, read an article in one of these grave and serious journals; in the evening, in company, bring the conversation round to the subject you have studied in order to shine.

(318)⁷

All these forms—the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the newspaper—employ one rigorous organizational system or another so as to bring some order to knowledge and information. The dictionary and the encyclopedia mobilize the alphabet and allow it to multi-task. The alphabet does not, under their influence, merely serve as a system for representing speech and opening it to transcription. It also saturates knowledge with a filing technique. The museum likewise finds a dual...