Cullers on Flaubert

I'm sure you know that parody of pedantry in one of Dickens' novels (I can't even remember what book it's in) where a schoolmaster asks his class what a horse is. One of the boys raises his hands and starts talking about the horses on his uncle's farm and the schoolmaster says that, no, that isn't what a horse is. Another boy gives the correct answer, which is something like "an animal with four legs". I'm thinking of this in part in connection with Lecercle''s book on nonsense. The joke works in part because of the contrast between practical, direct knowledge derived from experience, which is denied any value, and the more useless, academic knowledge of which arbitrary traits have been deemed the appropriate ones to relate for a dictionary definition - the details the schoolmaster is looking for are every bit as arbitrary, every bit as divorced from the essence of what a horse is (assuming there is an essence of 'horse', a 'the what is it' of the horse which is fully self-identical and not comparable to anything that is not a horse). I'm kind of assuming the tie to Lecercle's nonsense is clear, though perhaps I wasn't explicit enough talking about the arbitrary nature of linguistic rules and facts of language made apparent. I don't know whether you're familiar with the 'dictionary of received ideas that Flaubert decided to write at some point. He conceived of a dictionary much closer to definitions like the boy gave. Each entry would contain the things that people say on a certain subject, so that the definition, for instance, of Catholicism would be "it has had a positive influence on the arts". The definition of 'palm tree' is "it gives local color" (I assume this entry had a lot of influence on Victor Segalen, who in his 'notes on exoticism is constantly railing against palm trees as a cliche used to give a sense of being an exotic place - pure decorative backdrop that is unconcerned with confronting readers with anything genuinely challenging, strange or outside their experience. Segalen, who became fluent in Chinese, learned the history and art forms of China, wanted nothing less than to use China or Tahiti - which he also visited and wrote about - as colorful backdrops for romance or adventure, and he wanted nothing less than to make the place he was writing about transparent. He used what he knew about China to give himself and his readers a lingering sense of just how little they understood or were capable of understanding the place). More radical than the 'horse' definition, Flaubert's definitions intentionally avoid truly essential identifying traits, so the definition of Basque is "they make the best runners". Some definitions are stupid not because they are not true - the definition for Hugo is "he should have stayed out of politics", and this isn't a great example since it is sort of stupid, but perhaps someone could have a legitimate reason for declaring this, but what makes it stupid is that it is learned by rote and then passed off as an original opinion. Some of the best definitions contain more than one possible response. For the printing press, "one may either say that it is a marvelous discovery, or, if someone else has got his word in first, maintain that it has done more harm than good". Then, of course, there are the over the top entries, like Peru which is a country where everything is made of gold. One of the most important aspects of the book should be that mixed in with all of the obvious nonsense, almost everyone, or possibly everyone, should find some opinions, ideas or statements in there that he himself has voiced at one point or another. This comes from a deep conviction on Flaubert's part that cliche is so solidly built into language and our thought patterns that no one can escape it. I think that in Flaubert there's already the germ of an idea that Guy Debord will elaborate, and which is sort of there in what Deleuze writes on Kafka - and which is definitely in Brecht in a slightly different form, namely that dominant thought patterns or ideology can't successfully be criticized in a language coded by those thought patterns, in language which can recuperate everything it is used to say. The only true criticism comes from distorting the language and making its structures evident. What brings Flaubert closer to nonsense (and Deleuze is sort on his side, though not Debord or Brecht), is the fact that this is not a political statement. There is no real desire to create another or a better language. There is, I think, a certain real frustration with the difficulty of thinking independently, rather than merely repeating, allowing language to think through you (language, or discourses you've taken in, or the conventions and expectations of an art form). How can you communicate if you violate expectations, when language only works through accepted convention. What can be said that would have any meaning for me or for anyone else if I don't use recognized, inherited forms?
This all sounds banal and obvious - and it sounds banal and obvious, because it doesn't sound new, because it is repeating recognizable ideas. I don't really have any patience with people who say or think that it is impossible to say or write anything new - for thousands of years it has seemed to people that everything had already been said, and this is because everything they could think of saying HAD been said, and they personally didn't have the independence of mind to think of something else, to think of what might still be said. There's always something else, something new, a different form that can be found. People periodically come up with things that appear as revelations. If I'm talking about all of this while talking about Flaubert, it isn't necessarily because of Flaubert... it's because the academic books I keep reading come back so often to the same things, and occasionally I do feel a bit trapped by academic discourse. I sometimes get really sick of always coming back to Saussure, to metaphor vs. metonymy, to essence vs. accidence and pre-lapsarian language. Sometimes I do feel like I'm reading and writing in circles, and I'd have more fun just reading or writing a good old-fashion story - or stick with Flaubert's novel and ignore whatever other people might have written about him.
With Flaubert more than just about any other writer, I tend to get annoyed reading what people write about him. You read so many things that could convince you he was the most boring writer ever... later this summer I'll have to read 'the temptations of Saint Anthony' for the first time, and I've read descriptions of the book, almost all of them making it sound unreadable (there's no real story, just temptation after temptation being paraded in front of the saint - most of them abstract things, including various heresies and ideas that don't sound tempting at all. Though the descriptions of the book are painful - and apparently when Flaubert read his first draft to friends before he was published or famous they told him it was awful - but then occasionally someone will excerpt a lengthy passage from it, and the passage is funny and enjoyable to read. There is such a tendency to 'explain' Flaubert - to make it clear what one main idea drove him and shaped his writings, so that once you have the theoretical concept, you don't think you have to actual go and read the practical application of that idea. In Flaubert's case, the desire to write a book about nothing makes it easy to reduce him to a dreary nihilist who did everything possible to torture his readers. But of course, Flaubert is an ironist (the latest book I read on Flaubert contained a discussion of Kierkegaard's 'Concept of Irony', oddly enough), and more importantly, he is a humorist, however dry and understated his humor might be. Humor cannot be reduced. It is not, as Bergson defines it, the mechanical grafted on the living, though this is far from the worst definition it has been given. It s something much more elusive (and I realize that in our discussion of horror in relation to comedy I tried to explain it, and will certainly grope towards explanations again in the future). I think in writing about literature people should never try to explain WHAT an author or a book does - as though there is one thing. You should only ever talk about some of the things a book or author or passage does, and better yet some possibilities for thought or creation that a book or author helps to open up - which may sound semantic, except, when I write academic stuff, I usually don't write about an author or a book, I usually use certain books and authors to help me write about something else. And I think this is the only respectful way to write about books.
I will, though, quickly say one of the things I appreciated in the book on Flaubert I just read (by Jonathan Cullers - and there were a number of good things in it). Near the end he started to dismantle an idea of Flaubert as a nihilist, as an author who sees nothing but stupidity in the world and uses irony to dismantle everything that anyone feels or believes. Though the things that appear sacred to Emma Bovary or Frederic from Sentimental Educations are shown up as sentimental nonsense, Culler does a convincing job showing the existence of a very real sense of the sacred in Flaubert - the sacred and the sentimental being categories set in opposition. He largely uses Salammbo and three tales to do this. He mainly shows the sentimental as being in some way motivated, and the sacred as arbitrary and self-sufficient. I'm not going to try to reproduce his argument, though it is perhaps what was most satisfying in the whole book. It feels like another topic. I will say that I think he missed one of the most clear and moving examples of, maybe the sacred, but certainly the moving and immune to irony... he considered Charles Bovary a figure of fun, as sentimental and as deeply implicated as his wife, but I disagree. Charles, unlike his wife, could not be disillusioned. When he found out all his wife had done, it changed nothing for him, and his mourning was genuine. As the character that opens and closes the book, he maybe pathetic, but he is also beautiful. When he is laughed at by the other children at school you feel for him and sort of love him, and when he suffers for his wife and not for his own humiliation, you feel the same. All the irony in the world can't undermine feeling that isn't based on expectation or on wanting to see oneself in a certain way - love that is, in a sense, unmotivated. It should be noted, and Culler does note this, that the end of sentimental educations is weirdly touching as well, and it is in a sense the fact that the most genuine emotional scenes have been put through a test of the most scathing, uncompromising irony ever, a will to strip away and mock every inflated temporary feeling, every cliche romantic notion, every self-serving, self-aggrandizing or sloppy sentimental notion imaginable - it is because something survives in tact and is still moving that it has as much impact as it does.