Flaubert: Une ethique de l'art pur (review)

Séginger, Giséle. Flaubert: Une éthique de l'art purr. Liège: sedes, 2000. Pp. 220. ISBN 2-7181-9165-1

One of the benefits to be derived from reading Flaubert: Une éthique de l'art pur is the pleasure many will experience in being reminded that we live in a period not very different from Flaubert's, "une époque où la 1égitimation de l'art ne va plus de soi" (12). Then as now art addresses a public, both within and without the art world, whose interests are unabashedly materialistic and superficial. Flaubert writes that after the political events of "89 . . . 48 . . . 51 . . . Il n'y a plus rien, qu'une tourbe canaille et imbécile. - Nous sommes tous enfoncés au même niveau dans une médiocrité commune. L'égalité sociale a passé dans l'Esprit" (10; his italics). Flaubert's pro-nouncements against his culture, against the bourgeois reader, and the literature that caters to that class, are used as the backdrop upon which Séginger explains Flaubert's dogged search for a "pure style." Art for Flaubert, according to Séginger, is "une action de résistance." "L'artiste clandestin sera non un résistant par la parole," she writes ". . . mais par un silence actif, qui fait œuvre, loin des discours, se retournant même contre les discours. Il travaille et fait de l'art contre le réel!" (11). The arduous work of writing, like the tedious work of criticism he imposes on his work, allows Flaubert, according to Séginger, not so much a way of producing a more perfect novel (though surely it does that) but of establishing the foundation upon which he can advance the writer's position, social value, and his reputation as a creator (16).

Séginger's study may not offer new ideas concerning Flaubert's aesthetic exigencies regarding the importance of style and the arduous and necessary work that con-stituted writing for him. But she does provide a cogent, though incomplete, narrative based on her reading of Flaubert's correspondence, that follows casually Flaubert's thought processes from the early works to Bouvard et Pécuchet. Along the way she highlights key transitional moments in Flaubert's ideas on writing. Some of his positions and beliefs undergo a shift at certain points in his itinerary as a writer. For example, Séginger points out that in the years 1835-1842 Flaubert believed that his ideas, "pensées," and his personal point of view should be communicated in a style that was not worked but lyrical and natural. In this period, he aspired to simply "dire la vérité," in Séginger's words. In the years between 1845-1849, however, the work and the letters are replete with references to irony as a narrative figure, binary oppositions, the impersonal narrator, and the "affres du style." From that point on, Séginger signals, irony in Flaubert's letters is "indissociable d'une éthique de l'art pur." Moreover, the figure of the artist as "artisan" takes the place of the Romantic writer concerned with self expression (32). In 1849, during the writing of the first Tentation, Flaubert's work and letters reflect another transition, "C'est la première fois qu'il tente ce qui deviendra ensuite l'une des formes majeures de son œuvre; le livre fait de livres . . . en travaillant à partir du déjà dit" (35). At this point, also, "La Corres-pondance montre bien qu'il hésite encore entre l'écriture rapide du poète et 1'écriture artisanale de I'artiste" (37). From 1850 onward, poetry and reality are not mutually exclusive; in Flaubert's work "La poésie tient à une certaine façon de voir et de montrer" (49). And from Madame Bovary to Bouvard et Pécuchet, we are told, "l'écriture se fait de plus en plus critique" (105). "Les affres du style...