Flaubert Postsecular by Barbara Vinken (review)

“Flaubert’s relation to religion,” Barbara Vinken writes, “has been largely overlooked” (91). Can that really be true? Religion is all over the pages of Salammbô, La Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier, and Hérodias. Emma Bovary has her spiritual exaltations, sublime and abject as she suffers the Calvary of her disappointing adulteries; Félicité attains spiritual transcendence at the end of Un coeur simple, and who would dare invoke her parrot in order to mock the earnestness of her devotion?

It is well known that Flaubert used religion as a touchstone in his writing. Vinken’s claim seems, therefore, a little voulu. It remains true, however, that the religious element in Flaubert is difficult to handle, and it is tempting to deem his mises en scène of religious devotion merely ironic parodies. For Vinken, speaking of religion, “[w]hen it conspicuously comes to the fore, as it does in Three Tales, it is considered playfully ironic” (91). Perhaps this is true for some readers of Flaubert, though I am not sure whether even a cursory reader would ever deem Flaubert’s irony “playful.” In any case, if one considers Félicité’s veneration of her parrot, no true Flaubertiste would simply dismiss that ending as merely ironic—those pages, written with so much care, display no mean-mindedness or sophisticated disdain for her simple pieties.

Vinken exaggerates a little, to my mind. But these claims serve as preambles to a very strong recuperation of the religious dimension in Flaubert’s writing. In Flaubert Postsecular, he becomes something like a Christ, repeating His same message of love and redemption. This portrayal of Flaubert goes far beyond the rather standard representations of him as a writer martyred by Bêtise, or as a monkish figure, withdrawing from the world and fulminating against the mores of his time, a fire and brimstone vox clamantis in deserto. For Vinken, Flaubert was indeed a martyr figure, crucified on his own cross, but to portray him like this is not a matter of indulging in metaphorical hyperbole—a way of characterizing Flaubert as a hardbitten, self-punishingly fastidious prose stylist. On the contrary, we must seek the true meaning of Flaubert’s martyrdom in the meaning of Christ’s self-sacrifice. And that meaning is assuredly the meaning of love: “Flaubert’s oeuvre erects a monument to a message of love that remains the touchstone for human behavior by exceeding what is humanly possible” (91).

This is a startling claim to make of Flaubert. Imagine a Cross raised above the Golgotha of the modern age, and an agonized Flaubert nailed to it, testifying through his suffering to the limitless prodigality of a love that only God can bestow on us mortals. Imagine Flaubert, marooned in the apparently secular 19^th century, rewriting the Bible, engaged in a sort of intertextual agon with the Good Book, hoping to find readers who would finally appreciate his theological revision of human history. “For Flaubert as well, all earthly history is articulated through the events of salvation history: through Pentecost and Babel, through the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Eucharist and the fulfilling words of love of the living Spirit that transforms the text into the holy bread of redemption. The text that is the touchstone for Flaubert’s literary writing is the Bible” (3). So if earthly history simply follows the plot of the Bible, episode by episode, small wonder that Flaubert, inscribed in history as we all are, opted to rewrite that Story of stories—it’s really the only Story we ever had.

This is hardly a vapid exercise in proposing the religion of art as a replacement for true religion, as if art for art’s sake could elicit the same ethical force as love for love’s sake. Aestheticism, moreover, cannot promise what religion promises—redemption, salvation, the afterlife. Alas, the promises of art are empty by contrast with religion’s fulsome promise of love and redemption. “Aesthetics is therefore not a compensation and secularization of a...