aestheticism versus the novel: the example of "salammbô"

Aestheticism versus the Novel: The Example of "Salammbô"Author(s): Dennis PorterSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1971), pp. 101-106Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345145 .

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Aestheticism versus the Novel: The Example of Salammb6

DENNIS PORTER

From Baudelaire down through Maupassant, Turgeniev, Henry James, and into the twentieth century, Flaubert has been hailed as the first great modern master of his craft, the novelist's novelist par excellence, whose influence on the subsequent evolution of the genre has been as great as that of Baudelaire himself on poetry, and for similar reasons. Both writers brought to fiction and lyric poetry respec- tively a self-conscious artistry which gave rise to a richness of verbal texture and a symbolic order that especially in the novel amounted to a kind of previously untried-for, formal perfection. And to the extent that he was working in a genre which till then had largely resisted attempts to discipline it in accordance with aesthetic norms derived from other literature and the arts in general, Flaubert's originality is, in fact, the greater.

As it developed from the mid-seventeenth century on in England and France, the central tradition of the novel looked outward at the world. With rare excep- tions, in seeking above all to represent imitatively human behavior it largely neglected the claims of art in favor of life. Thus even Flaubert's immediate prede- cessors, Stendhal and Balzac, focused on the character of contemporary French life in a spirit of critical curiosity, without preoccupying themselves unduly with the formal means by which they were representing it. Stendhal's proclaimed method-to take a mirror for a walk along a highway-even implies a willful absence of method. It was left to Flaubert, therefore, to elaborate an art of the novel such that Alan Tate, for instance, could affirm it was through Flaubert that the novel finally caught up with poetry.1

Given Flaubert's richly deserved reputation, therefore, it appears strangely paradoxical to recall that of the half-a-dozen major works after the oeuvres de jeunesse, only Madame Bovary and the Trois Contes impress as symbolically ordered, finely proportioned aesthetic wholes. Salammb6, L'Education Sentimen- tale, and Bouvard et Pecuchet, if not loose and baggy monsters, clearly do not strike us as notable achievements of the designing spirit, even if we acknowledge an appropriateness of form to content. Whatever qualities those works may have, they are certainly less than the ideally made artifacts we may have expected from Flaubert.

The case of Salammb6 particularly suggests, in fact, that not only was the gap between the goal Flaubert set his art and his execution never fully bridged, but also that, in his hands at least, all was not pure gain in the new aesthetic of the

1 "Techniques of Fiction," Collected Essays (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1959), p. 136.



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novel. If Stendhal and Balzac could not have written a Madame Bovary, they would also most certainly not have written a Salammbo either. In other words, the art that gave rise to the former was also in some sense responsible for the latter-for a work, that is, which has something of the character of a monstre sacre, recognized as sui generis and admired, if at all, for its sustained exoticism and hieratic solemnity and for the singleminded passion that drove its author to complete it. To those less sympathetic to Flaubert's aims, Salammbo's monu- mentality is wholly lifeless and monumentally boring. But nobody is likely to deny that Salammbo stands very much to one side of the main tradition of West- ern prose fiction. In what follows, however, I should like to go further and argue that, more than merely eccentric, Salammbo6 is a fictional dead-end, that it probably comes closer than any other novel of similar seriousness to the ideal end nineteenth-century aestheticism conceived for fiction and that its failure derives from an inherent incompatibility between aestheticism and the novel.

To begin with, there is little doubt that Flaubert saw in the history of Carthage matter far richer and more readily transmuted into the beauty of art than the narrow, sordid life of Emma Bovary. Writing to the Goncourts while he was at work on Salammbo, he affirmed, "This time the banner of the Doctrine will be borne boldly, I assure you. For it does not prove anything, it does not say anything, it is neither historical, nor satirical, nor humorous. On the other hand, it could be stupid."2 The doctrine referred to is, of course, l'art pour l'art and perhaps no work more than Salammbo parades some of its more frightening impli- cations. As the quotation indicates, the novel makes no attempt to increase our understanding of the world, performs no service in the present and, far more than seeking to illuminate the past, it uses history to an aesthetic end. It is a sumptuously ornate, blood-soaked artifact created heretically for its own sake, a feast for the imagination that is at the same time a flamboyant non serviam addressed to the world. Its raison d'etre is its own peculiar beauty and the potent pleasure that beauty is supposed to afford.

The ideal of beauty to which Flaubert's novel as a whole aspires, in fact, is concretized in the personage of Salammbo herself. Half-priestess, half-courtesan, she is the narcissistic antithesis of natural woman. Her oiled and jewel-studded body is itself an elaborately stylized work of art and, therefore, comparable to the city of Carthage itself as Flaubert represents it. Like the art he most admires, Carthage is a world of metals and minerals, geometric forms and hard contours that reflect light from a thousand polished surfaces. With its gold and silver, brass and bronze, marble and ebony, the doomed North African city is the em- bodiment of a kind of formalism that arrogantly sets itself against the pullulating confusion of African nature. Its hard-edged perfection is the antithesis of organic softness. And Flaubert's novel as a whole strives for a comparable perfection that is similarly contemptuous of the creation as given.

The result is a work that comes closer than any other to the fiction Flaubert

2 Correspondance, IV (Paris: Conard, 1926-33), 379. French passages translated by Dennis Porter and Robert Scholes.

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DENNISPORTER AESTHETICISM IN SALAMMBO 103

dreamed of as a livre sur rien. What he seems to have had in mind is a kind of romnan pur that would make no statements about the world in referential terms-it would not represent, interpret, or offer moral commentary on human life outside itself at all-but would exist merely as artifact, as the object, that is, of our aesthetic contemplation, whose heightened expressivity would be achieved simply through the cunning ordering of its parts. It is to language thus raised above itself through being stripped of its quotidian functions that Flaubert re- sponded with a thrilled intensity: "I remember how my heart beat, the violent sensation of pleasure I felt as I contemplated a wall of the Acropolis, a wall com- pletely bare (the one which is on the left as you go up to the Propylaea). Now I wonder if a book, independently of what it says, might not produce the same effect. In the precision of its structures, the rareness of its elements, the smooth- ness of its surface, the harmony of the ensemble, might it not have an intrinsic virtue, a sort of divine power, something as eternal as a principle? (I speak as a Platonist.)"3

Involved here is a kind of aesthetic mysticism.4 And if as Flaubert apparently understood, such a book on nothing was impossible, the ideal nevertheless re- mains as a hidden yet pervasively active principle of composition in his fiction. Hence Salammbo, which comes nearer than any other work to the realization of his goal. But yet it falls far short. Weighed down with a mass of erudite data that is worked up into page upon page of descriptive tours de force, the work is far from possessing that "precision of its structures" and that "harmony of the ensemble" of which he speaks. Instead there is a fundamental tension in the work-and in all the works of Flaubert's maturity-between the centripetal tendencies of the matter, the mass of antiquarian facts so characteristic of an age that had seen an unprecedented explosion in the quantity of such information, and the encompassing form, that which was to precipitate from multifarious facts the order of art.

If the form of Salammbo like that of L'Education Sentimentale and Bouvard et Pecuchet may be said to break down under the weight of the matter it was intended to articulate, then, it is apparently because there is an inherent contradiction between the realistic representation of the fullness of life and the demand- ing sense of plastic form of an artist such as Flaubert.5 By the time of Bouvard et Pecuchet in any case, not only the tenuous story lines of Salammbo and L'Educa- tion Sentimentale have disappeared but also the attempt in those works to round off the fiction by harking back to its beginning in the denouement. Thus the

3 Correspondance, VII, 294.

4 "Sans l'amour de la forme, j'eusse ete peut-etre un grand mystique." Correspondance, III, 79.

5 That Flaubert himself was fully alert to his dilemma is clear from comments he made explaining the relative lack of success of L'Education Sentimentale:

"Why did that book not have the success I expected? Robin has perhaps understood the reason. It is too true to life and from an esthetic point of view what is lacking is the falsity lent by perspective. From having worked out the plan with such, the plan has disappeared. Every work of art must have a point, a peak, form a pyramid or the light must strike the ball at a single point. Yet you find nothing like that in life. But Art is not Nature! Never mind, I believe nobody has shown such probity before." Correspond- ance, VIII, 309.



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tragi-comic tale of Flaubert's copy-clerks advances through the accumulation of a long series of repetitious incidents to the point where what is reported is hugged so closely by the manner in which it is reported that it reads like a parody of realism. No event is pointed up as more significant than any other, for no sig- nificance resides in such a world. It is not surprising, therefore, that Flaubert dreamed of writing a book on nothing, for such a book would have permitted him to indulge his taste for the firm and lucid contours of plastic form without having to take account of the amorphous and recalcitrant matter of the world.

Paradoxically one is forced to conclude that Flaubert, one of the greatest masters in the genre, was, in fact, temperamentally and philosophically unhappy as a novelist. First, because of all literary genres the novel is the one which is most resistant to formal design. And second, because whether it focused on the representation of historical and contemporary social reality or whether it explored the complexities of the psyche and concerned itself with problems of moral conduct, the genre as it came down to him had as the center of its concern men living in a social world. Flaubert cared less and less for such a subject and the traditional skills of novelist as storyteller, moralist, psychologist, or social critic that went with it. As far as he was concerned, such human-centered art took man far too seriously and, insofar as it ignored the creation of beauty that was the true end of art, was from his neo-platonist point of view hardly art at all.

Thus Flaubert frequently describes himself as bored by the elaboration of plot and the narration of incident. He is without that fascination with men that leads to the creation of "character" and only really interested in one aspect of human psychology, namely, the complex subterfuges men more or less unconsciously employ in order to avoid facing the truth about themselves and their world. Further, he is too profound a skeptic to believe that fiction should serve God or humanity in any way. Thus his foremost ambition was hardly to be a novelist at all in the traditional sense, but a "prosateur." And what he means by the term is made clear in a letter quoted approvingly by Maupassant. Comparing verse and prose Flaubert writes:

In prose you must have a profound feeling for rhythm, fleeting rhythm, without rules and without definiteness; you must have innate qualities and also a power of reasoning, an artistic sense infinitely more subtle, more acute, so as to alter at any instant the movement, the color, the sound of the style, according to what you want to say. When you know how to manage that fluid thing, French prose, when you know the exact value of words, and when you know how to modify that value by the places you assign them, when you know how to focus the interest of a whole page upon a single line, to make one idea stand out among a hundred others, solely by the choice and position of the terms in which it is expressed; when you know how to strike with a word, a single word placed in a certain way, as you might strike with a weapon, when you know how to arouse a soul, to fill it with joy or fear, with enthusiasm, shame or rage, merely by slipping an adjective before the reader's eye, then you are truly an artist, the greatest of artists, a true prosateur.6 6 Lettres de Gustave Flaubert a Georges Sand precedees d'une Etude de Guy de Maupassant (Paris: Cham-

pion, 1884), p. lxvii.

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DENNIS PORTER[AESTHETICISM IN SALAMMB8

"The greatest of artists," it should be noted, is not a "novelist" but a "prosateur" and the distinction is obviously important. Unlike the former, it is clear that the latter is seen pre-eminently as an artist concerned above all with problems of internal harmony and euphony, rhythm and sonority at the level of the sentence and the paragraph. In common with his contemporaries Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire in poetry, in fact, Flaubert contrives a new art of the novel that starts with the determination to find particular combinations of words in order to promote particular aesthetic effects. Everything that goes into the fiction is cal- culated less in terms of its truthfulness to life than in terms of its internal expressive function and its impact in its context on the reader. The prose no longer merely exists in order to report a story drawn from life; on the contrary, the logical con- clusion of Flaubert's contention that the greatest artist is a "prosateur" is to turn the story with its human meaning into a mere scaffolding by means of which a whole range of aesthetic effects will be rendered in the prose.

The example provided by Salammbo of what can occur when a writer becomes so deeply absorbed with the plastic perfection of his style is, in any case, an in- structive one. In the first place, it is clear that except as a manifesto of aestheticism Salammbo is without meaning. The tale it tells, in other words, is incidental to its message, which involves the celebration, in a world ringed with void, of the triumph of art over life, the artificial over the natural and the beautiful over the good. Beyond that, apart from the pleasure or shock it arouses, it has nothing "to say." In the second place, although Flaubert's prose at the level of the sentence and paragraph and even certain tableaux shows an intense formal preoccupation, the work as a whole gives the impression of having resisted that architectonic order which he strived for-so much of Salammbo seems merely gratuitous, the result both of a desire to paint gorgeous word pictures for their own sake and of a determination to effect a "shocking" contrast between a maximum of gore and unsurpassed oriental splendor. As a consequence, in Salammbo as in so much of Flaubert's fiction there is a fundamental and unresolved tension not only between form and matter, beauty and truth-that is truer of Madame Bovary and L'Education Sentimentale than of Salammbo-but also between the beauty of the parts and the harmony of the whole. And it is those tensions which give rise to the paradox already noted, namely, that Flaubert, the first great partisan of expressive form in fiction, stands accused of swamping his reader with a mass of formless data.

"II faut faire, a travers le Beau, vivant et vrai quand meme,"7 Flaubert noted, thereby recognizing, in effect, that his works did embody a contradiction. For although he once more affirms here that his primary goal is beauty-such is the force of "quand meme"-he nevertheless acknowledges it as his task to represent life accurately. But on the testimony of his oeuvre itself, such a synthesis was impossible in the novel-in nineteenth-century Europe at least. The aesthete's determination to "faire beau" was incompatible with the realist's impulse to "faire vivant et vrai." Thus, not only did Flaubert find it impossible to exclude "life" from his fiction-in fact, if not in theory-by his own high standards he also failed to dominate that "life" formally through his art.

7 Notes de Voyage, II (Paris: Conard, 1910), 347.

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Finally, Salammbo may be said to illustrate that that neo-platonism, which provided the more or less consciously acknowledged philosophic rationale of nineteenth-century aestheticism, is probably the philosophy least compatible with the representation of reality, which in one form or another has been the traditional province of the novelist. The philosophic idealist as novelist has only two choices open to him. On the one hand, like Plato himself whom Nietzsche referred to as "the whole-hearted 'transcendental,' the great defamer of life,"8 he can represent life in the world in order to denigrate it. On the other, he can seek to transcend it by elaborating works of the imagination that are as far as possible purged of the ordinary stuff of life and approximate, through their formal perfection, to that suprasensible heaven of ideas of which he dreams. Flau- bert chose the course of mocking denigration in Madame Bovary, L'Education Sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pecuchet. And Salammbo, insofar as it is the em- bodiment of a Parnassian ideal of beauty, can be seen at least partially as an attempt to write a novel of the second type.

In Salanmmbo the ideal world of art may be said to look harshly down on the real but its Parnassian grandiloquence when sustained over several hundred pages proves strangely hollow. It possesses the magnificent insubstantiality of "grand opera" and stands as a monument to the failure to purge the novel of almost everything that traditionally constituted it for the sake of formal beauty. As Baudelaire, without having Salammbo in mind, foresaw so well, the cultivation of pure form to which the aesthetic idealist is ultimately driven can give rise to the strangest of still-born monsters: "The immoderate cult of form leads to monstrous and unknown disorders. Absorbed by a ferocious passion for the beautiful, the quaint, the pretty, the picturesque (for there are degrees) the notions of the just and the true disappear. The frenetic passion for art is a cancer which devours everything else; and, just as the complete absence of the just and the true in art equals the absence of art, the whole man vanishes; the excessive specialization of one faculty ends in annihilation."9

If the example of Salammbo is at all conclusive, it proves precisely that-the Parnassian desire to approximate the art of fiction to that of sculpture is illusory. The book on nothing, it seems, is a chimera. In the novel at least, form pursued as an end in itself, independently of that which it might express, turns out to contain nothing in a sense Flaubert could hardly have wished for.

8 Genealogy of Morals in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), p. 199.

9 Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Pleiade, Gallimard, 1951), pp. 972-73.

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aestheticism versus the novel: the example of "salammbô"

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