Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On Madame Bovary and Salammbô by Michael Fried (review)

In this fascinating new book, poet and art historian Fried offers two long essays on Madame Bovary and Salammbô, respectively. In the first, he investigates why the prose of Madame Bovary is “shot through” (2) with the very phonemic effects (what he calls “phonemic play” [99]) that Flaubert claimed to want to eliminate through the famous épreuve du gueuloir. At the heart of this essay is Fried’s meticulous analysis of passages from the novel, many of which are heavy in certain sounds, such as p, t, hard c, and especially v, which, curiously, occurs fairly infrequently in standard French (51). Though Fried is certainly not the first (see Ricardou, Starobinski, Duchet, for example) to comb through passages of Madame Bovary in search of alliterations, assonances and repetitions, what sets his work apart is his keen interest in the question of intention or consciousness, which others have left largely untouched. To that end, he juxtaposes a little-known philosophical treatise by Félix Ravaisson titled De l’habitude (1848)—the same text he showcased in a previous book, Courbet’s Realism—to the structure of intention versus automatism, or will versus nature, that is at play in Madame Bovary (5). Even if there is no evidence that Flaubert was familiar with Ravaisson’s text, Fried urges us to take it “as an anticipatory gloss on or interpretation of those aspects of Flaubert’s prose […] that I have been placing front and center” (70), ultimately making a solid case for the theory that Flaubert’s and Courbet’s common relation to Ravaisson’s concept of habit “provides a hitherto unimagined link between the respective achievements of the foremost French novelist and painter of their generation” (5).

In his coda to the first essay, Fried unveils an intriguing series of elements common to Emma Bovary’s funeral scene and Courbet’s Burial at Ornans—a cortège, two choir-boys, women in black mantles, candles, an open grave, an aspergillum and a country setting, among others (103)—arguing, somewhat less convincingly, that Flaubert’s awareness of Courbet’s “supreme display of pictorial strength may have prompted a special effort of writing […] when it came time to bury Emma Bovary” (105), and that Flaubert even saw Emma’s funeral as an opportunity “at once to subsume and to go beyond” the Burial (104).

According to Fried, a very “different stylistic regime is in force” (6) in Salammbô, inasmuch as every aspect of the text that Flaubert could control is “exclusively the product of conscious intention, of the faculty of will,” resulting in a novel “devoid of the effects of habit and automatism that are continually at work in Madame Bovary” (117). By setting Salammbô in a place and a time completely removed from our own, Flaubert forces us to grapple with “the sheer willfulness of the writing, its insistence from first to last upon determining its own terms of intelligibility, without regard for the reader’s prior knowledge or habitual assumptions” (122). Other narrative strategies suggest a desire on Flaubert’s part to cause readers “discomfort” (132) or to keep them at a distance: a blurring of the boundary between narration and description, main characters lacking in psychological traits that would make them “even passably ‘real’” (123), a “hyperbolic mode of description” and concomitant impression of monotony and immobility (134), not to mention a seemingly relentless outpouring of violence-, cruelty-, and horror-laden scenes which serve to “subject the reader to [Flaubert’s] will even to the extent of shocking or disgusting or otherwise disconcerting him or her with his words” (140). As in the case of the previous essay, the closing movement connects Flaubert’s project to that of a painter—this time, Manet—likening Flaubert’s insistence on the “voulu” in Salammbô to the “valorization of willing and forcing […] in the pictorial discourse around Manet and his generation in the early 1860s” (146).

Fried’s knowledge of the two...