Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out by Barbara Vinken (review)

Flaubert has long been thought to mark a turning point in the modern novel. In this absorbing if sometimes relentless study, first published in German in 2009, Barbara Vinken offers a fresh perspective on Flaubert’s significance. What the author’s work is about, she argues, is ‘saving the Cross from its dominant Christian interpretation’ (p. 16). Flaubert, on this reading, is post-secular, not only in that his work rejects the traditional Christian promise of other-worldly redemption, but also in that it similarly impugns all alternative, secular faith in this-worldly redemption. Paradoxically, this also makes Flaubert something of a pre-secular figure, insofar as what remains as an unspoken subtext — implicit in his diagnosis of ubiquitous corruption — is the truth of a promise that survives only as an erasure. ‘The task of literature’, asserts Vinken, ‘is to make the irredeemable figure of the Cross legible throughout history and to convert it into text so as to keep its memory alive’ (p. 20). This poses numerous questions of reading. How is an erasure to be deciphered and a deleted memory resurrected? And how to avoid the trap of literary-critical false memory syndrome? The book begins by claiming that Flaubert’s narratives are best read not as realist texts but allegorically, with Madame Bovary featuring, for instance, as ‘the allegorical narration of the end of allegory’ (p. 34). In developing her thesis, Vinken offers a sequence of close readings of Quidquid volueris, Madame Bovary, Salammbô, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Trois contes. (Surprisingly, there is barely any mention of La Tentation de saint Antoine or Bouvard et Pécuchet.) Her main strategy is to re-interpret seemingly secondary networks of allusion by recourse to various biblical, classical, literary, and theological intertexts. This is a tried and tested method. The results vary, however, from the astutely observed to the inconclusive. When, for instance, Homais claims Emma’s suicide was caused by her mistaking arsenic for sugar, we are invited to see this less as a Barthesian effet de réel, or as an ironic mention of a valuable preservative, than as an allusion to that spiritual sweetness that is said to come from communion with Christ but which, in Emma’s case, is comprehensively withheld. Similarly, when Félicité in Un cœur simple finds her friend, the Pole, making vinaigrette in her kitchen, this, we are told, is a memory of ‘the sponge soaked in vinegar extended to the crucified Christ’ (p. 286). More convincing is Vinken’s sustained comparison of the Paris of L’Éducation sentimentale with the Babylon of Augustine’s City of God, both of them dominated by ‘fratricide and incest’ (p. 212). It is rarely clear, however, whether Flaubert in Vinken’s view was purposefully reworking these intertextual frames, or whether they belong to unconscious cultural memory, or whether they simply mirror the interpreter’s commitment to gnostic Christian dualism. And it is at times hard to avoid the conclusion that Vinken’s resourceful revisionist readings are in the service of a largely routine interpretation of Flaubertian misanthropy. Readers of Flaubert will nevertheless find much here to admire, and much that will stimulate and provoke.