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  • Flaubert épistémologue: autour du dossier médical de ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’
  • Kate Rees
Flaubert épistémologue: autour du dossier médical de ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’. By Norioki Sugaya. (Faux titre, 346). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 276 pp. Pb £55.00; $83.00.

As part of their investigation into medicine and physiology in Chapter 3 of Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flaubert’s two copyist characters dismantle a medical mannequin, attempt to bleed pigeons only to find that birds with both full and empty stomachs die within the same space of time, and are surprised to discover that drugs prescribed as sedatives can also have an effect as stimulants. In her book Norioki Sugaya examines the 233-page medical dossier compiled by Flaubert in preparation for writing this section, throughout which knowledge is subject to such particular comedy. Sugaya’s aim here is twofold: to ask further questions about Bouvard et Pécuchet itself as a text, probing its relationship with the theme and practice of knowledge, and to relate the findings of the medical dossier to Flaubert’s work as a whole. Incorporating transcriptions of selected notes at the end of each chapter, Sugaya’s clear and methodical book acts as a valuable addition to the work currently being produced on the diverse ‘chantier’ of notes documented by Flaubert in the course of his life, such as his reading notes on Montaigne or on Hegel, discussed in recent years, or the dossiers relating to other sections of Bouvard et Pécuchet. The medical dossier is a particularly interesting one: Flaubert’s family background, of course, meant that he was intimately connected with the medical world; his earlier works show a similar interest in the surgical and the pharmacological, as indicated by the club-foot operation in Madame Bovary, and by the research he undertook into the symptoms of pneumonia in preparation for Un cœur simple. Sugaya sets as a starting point the frequent connections made in the nineteenth century between medicine and literature, such as the questioning of the relationship between the physical and the moral. The medical notes made as Flaubert was preparing to write Bouvard et Pécuchet indicate a desire, suggests Sugaya, not to look up facts and truths relating to medical conditions, but to highlight examples of surgical error, or startling physical traits: he underlines, for instance, the case of a girl with neither vagina nor anus, obliged to excrete via her mouth. In this way the dossier contributes to our understanding of Flaubert’s familiar preoccupation with bêtise and with monstrosities. The notes reveal a particular interest in the process of contradiction, both within and between theories — an interest unsurprising, given the vacillations of Flaubert’s copyist characters throughout the text, who find themselves variously [End Page 540] amused, frustrated, enraged, and despairing when confronted with such contradiction in all their areas of research. Sugaya also considers Flaubert’s interest in the style of the medical resources he studies, finding that Flaubert pinpointed certain examples of pretentious terminology as belonging to the category ‘comique d’idées’. Her conclusion reinforces the view that the documentary approach, favoured by Flaubert in relation to his other works, becomes, in Bouvard et Pécuchet, the very nature of the text: we see, through this insight into the dossier, the way that decontextualized notes on medicine are then strategically cited in the novel in such a way as to become a thorough deconstruction of scientific thought.

Kate Rees
The Queen’s College, Oxford
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