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4 Science and Confusion: Flaubert’s Temptation We lack science, above all. We flounder like savages in barbary. —Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance (December 12, 1857) My only distraction is to see the Prussian gentlemen pass, from time to time, beneath my windows, and the only thing that keeps me busy is my Saint Anthony, on which I work constantly. This extravagant book keeps me from thinking of the horrors in Paris. —Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance (May 3, 1871) Flaubert speaks often in his letters of a desire to make criticism, literary style, and even politics ‘‘scientific.’’ Yet critics habitually assume that the meaning of Flaubert’s ‘‘science’’ lies elsewhere than in the practices of the natural sciences as he and his contemporaries would have known them. When Raymonde Debray-Genette writes, for example, ‘‘All that Flaubert truly takes from science is the idea of a probable generality,’’ she implicitly subsumes science to an aesthetic category, to a ‘‘documentary verisimilitude’’ that justifies—or, better, authorizes—prior acts of the imagination (‘‘Science,’’ 44).1 Likewise, there has long been a tendency among Flaubert’s readers (especially of Madame Bovary) to see in science a threatening, if often ridiculous , discourse of power inscribed in the young Gustave’s oedipal conflict with his father, the doctor. Here is Jean-Paul Sartre, from L’Idiot de la famille: Science is the demonic gaze that cuts lies ‘‘to pieces’’ and leads the hysteric back to his reality; in short, it is the realizing gaze of the Father and his power to decompose imaginary orders, to pin his younger son down, reduced to his naked impotence. (3:596/5:) Given Flaubert’s lifelong commitment to a practice of writing informed by meticulous erudition, his rhetoric of science must ultimately be brought to bear on our understanding of the processes behind the Flaubertian text.2 86 Flaubert’s Temptation 87 But I would argue that only by postponing this subsumption, only by looking first at the nineteenth-century science behind Flaubert’s rhetoric, can one see how Flaubert’s work is at once tempted by science as an institution of power and drawn to confusion, the very negation of science and its ruses. In the first part of this chapter, I read the motley bustle that is La Tentation de saint Antoine to show how Flaubert wrote the contradictory temptations of science and confusion into the third and final version of that text (completed in 1872, but not published until 1874). And I argue for the inevitability of the temptation of confusion, given the model of science to which Flaubert in his middle years actively subscribed. To make the argument solely in these terms, however, is to risk missing the historical embeddedness of the 1874 Temptation. First drafted in a threeyear period straddling the February Revolution (1846–49), and put into final form around the time of the Franco–Prussian War and Paris Commune (1869–1872), La Tentation de saint Antoine served Flaubert as an aestheticized repository for his historical hopes and, more often, his historical fears. In September 1871, as he rewrote the book’s march of the gods sequence, Flaubert spoke of his lassitude with ‘‘the vile worker, the inept bourgeois, the stupid peasant and the odious ecclesiastic’’ as the reason for his ‘‘losing [him]self,’’ as best he could, in antiquity (Corr., 4:372).3 And yet Flaubert’s version of fourth-century Alexandria echoes contemporary France in multiple ways. Witness the similarity between certain of its passages and passages from the contemporary correspondence in portraying times of transition, decaying values, and incipient boorishness: JUPITER: ‘‘I have no more use for [the souls] of men! . . . For now they live like slaves, oblivious of insults, of ancestors, of vows; and on all sides what triumphs is the mob’s imbecility, the meanness of the individual, the hideousness of every race!’’ (130/)4 As for me, I am nauseated, heartbroken, by the stupidity of my compatriots. The incorrigible barbarism of mankind fills me with blackest gloom. (Corr., 4:211/:) What grieves me most deeply is: 1) the stupid ferocity of men . . . 2) I am convinced we are entering into a hideous world, where those like us will no longer have a reason to live. Everyone will be utilitarian, military, stingy, small, poor and abject. (Corr., 4:257) Whereas the first part of this chapter explores Flaubert’s debt to natural history and his reinscription of contemporary vitalist biology, the second [3.15.46.13] Project MUSE...

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