Flaubert: Transportation, Progression, Progress (review)

The entry 'Progrès' in Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues — 'toujours mal entendu et trop hâtif' — captures in half a dozen words both the author's hatred of the idea of progress and his contempt for the platitudes it spawns. In a perceptive study of this unlikely but rich theme, Kate Rees is careful to insist that the novelist is never less than dismissive of notions of political, technological, or moral progress in the nineteenth century. The grand Enlightenment narrative of gradual perfectibility and the optimistic ideologies of his own era are not for him; nor are the mechanical advances that have come with the age of steam. He shares none of his contemporaries' excitement about train travel, while steamship journeys in his work (across the Atlantic in the first Éducation sentimentale, down the Seine at the beginning of the second) are represented as dreary events that do no more than lead the characters back to their starting point. Even in Salammbô, Rees argues, Flaubert is taking issue by implication with the mechanical inventions of his own age when he describes cumbersome machines of war in language that is itself perversely unwieldy, symbolizing 'a sustained rejection of the promotion of technology and industry' (p. 72). Yet for all that, Rees argues, Flaubert does engage positively with themes of progress and progression throughout his writing career, and embeds them in the halting, spiralling structure of his narratives. While so much of his work is an obvious critique of the ideology of progress, it is crucial to make the distinction between that ideology and the actual practice of progression. In a discussion ranging from the early 'mystère' Smar through to the posthumous Bouvard et Pécuchet, Rees thus shows how Flaubert experiments with different models of 'progress' rather than 'Progress', exploring repetition, circularity, to-ing and fro-ing, and creating plot structures that act as alternatives to a master narrative of linear advancement. This approach is most successfully deployed in a long chapter devoted to Bouvard et Pécuchet, where we are shown that, in spite of Flaubert's emphasis on stasis and circularity, his characters remain intellectually and physically mobile — unable, perhaps, to solve the problems they set out to solve, but discovering unexpected new directions along the way (even in the course of their walks) while also finding the energizing potential of their own contrasting viewpoints. Almost inevitably, in a study that takes stasis as given in these 'beaux romans paralysés' (to cite Malraux's famous phrase), one senses occasional strain in the effort to seek out 'undercurrents of momentum' or 'instances of progression which manage to retain the potential for a progress of sorts' (p. 21). Progress for Emma Bovary is nothing but the dream of flight, while Homais's vision of material and scientific progress is, of course, exposed as worthless. Nonetheless, by seeking to emphasize a positive if complex thematics of progress, this book gives a clear sign that the study of Flaubert's narrative techniques has at last moved beyond Culler's negative and disproportionately influential reading. A final chapter devoted largely to Huysmans serves to put Flaubert into a comparative perspective, confirming that his ambivalent, experimental view of progress is indeed a mere starting point for further progression in the art of literary stasis.