flaubert: papers presented at the university of wisconsin-madison symposium commermorating the...

FLAUBERT AND THE DIFFICULTY OF READINGAuthor(s): Dennis PorterSource: Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3, FLAUBERT: PAPERS PRESENTEDAT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON SYMPOSIUM COMMERMORATING THECENTENNIAL OF THE DEATH OF FLAUBERT, OCTOER, 1980 (Spring—1984), pp. 366-378Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23536545 .

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FLAUBERT AND THE DIFFICULTY OF READING

Dennis Porter

From the nineteenth-fifties on, practitioners and theorists of the nou

veau roman have tended to agree that the modern self-reflexive novel in

the French tradition at least has its beginnings in the work of Flaubert.

Writers like Natalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes have

claimed to find in Flaubert's practice an awareness of the problematic

character of writing that effectively changed the grammatical category of

the verb "to write" from that of transitive to intransitive.1 From such a

contemporary point of view, Flaubert's legendary struggles with the writ

ten word are seen as not simply motivated by a platonic pursuit of the mot

juste in the narration of anecdote but also by the perception that language

is a material substance as well as a medium; words are before they mean.

Flaubert's discovery of the difficulty of writing, therefore, signalled an end

of that happy transparency which characterized the so-called "roman

balzacien."

Such a view also implies something that has perhaps received less

scrutiny, namely the notion that with Flaubert the difficulty of writing

gives rise to a concomitant difficulty of reading. There is a tendency in

current narrative theory to regard the history of the European novel from

the late sixteenth century as a history of increasing reading difficulty. That

does not mean, of course, that works from Don Quijote to La Princesse de

Clèves and Jacques le Fataliste or to Clarissa Harlowe and Tristram

Shandtj are in any sense facile documents that when compared with Bleak

House and the Education Sentimentale, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

and Ulysses, docilely yield up their apparent meaning on a first encounter.

Nor does it mean that the level of reading difficulty has increased incre

mentally and progressively from decade to decade or even from century to

century. It does mean that some time in the nineteenth century the novel

came to exhibit a new form of self-awareness for reasons that are different

from those which had formerly caused Sterne and Diderot to probe the

naturalizing conventions of the genre. And insofar as such self-awareness

366



Difficulty of Reading 367

led to complicating the reading process, Flaubert's role has once again to

be considered crucial.

Without entering into an elaborate comparative study of the Flauber

tian novel with that of his predecessors in the genre, I would like in the

present paper to explore some of the justifications for such a perception of

Flaubert's work, particularly as it relates to the reader's task. What specifi

cally are those features in Flaubert's novels that raise significantly the level

of reading difficulty? But first a word about the reading process, as it has

come to be understood in contemporary criticism.

Current reader theory acknowledges the fact that because of the linear

nature of narrative, reading is a working through that takes account of the

order and distribution of elements within a text for the purpose of con

structing hypotheses concerning its eventual meaning. Reading is a dy

namic activity of progressive "semantic integration" that involves the line

by-line processing of the verbal material which makes up the "text

continuum." The crucial character of the order of presentation of elements

in a text-continuum is the subject of a recent article by Menakhem Perry2

and he defines there the two types of motivation or justifications for a given

order. On the one hand, there are "model-oriented motivations." They

depend on "a model which the text imitates and the reader must identify."

On the other hand, there are "rhetorical or reader-oriented motivations."

They imply that "the text is grasped as a message which is supposed to be

experienced. The sequence is justified through its effect on a reader."

"Rhetorical motivations" involve a channeling of the reading activity "so as

to induce the reader to opt for the realization of certain potentialities . . .

of the material rather than others. . . . "3

In brief, reading a novel demands of a reader that he establish the sense

of a text on the basis of models familiar to him from life and literature as

well as on the basis of the rhetorical strategies an author employs to

prepare a particular experience. Moreover, the reader will continually

reassess the appropriateness of his models and reevaluate his reading

experience in the light of the fresh evidence furnished by each page

turned. Whereas writing a novel is a matter of spacing and placing, of

preparing a reader, leading him on, making him wait, disappointing or

rewarding him, the first reading of a novel involves submitting oneself to a

guided verbal tour whose destination is unknown. One is called upon to

concretize the various elements of the text-continuum by labeling se

quences and bridging gaps in the expectation of producing an integrated

whole at the end.

As far as Flaubert is concerned, if the reading of his novels poses



368 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

problems that do not exist to the same extent in the works of his predeces

sors, this is because both the kind of models operative in his works and his

text as message to be communicated embody impediments to the process

of working through. More frequently than before, what Wolfgang Iser has

called "consistency-building"4 is complicated by the insertion of apparent

ly alien material into a given text-continuum. As far as models from life and

literature are concerned, a major source of difficulty lies in various and

broader functions assigned to the novel by Flaubert. As for the text as

message, reading problems here devolve on realist technique in general,

including particularly the function of object descriptions and the strategy

of the elusive, if not wholly absent author, on the writer's aesthetic parti

pris, and on the apparently unmediated representation of consciousness.

In what follows, I shall consider the effect of each of these factors on the

reader's task. I am not, of course, claiming to be exhaustive with reference

to all those elements in a Flaubert novel that raise the level of reading

difficulty. I would also note that such difficulty varies appreciably from

work to work and that it is not necessarily exclusive to Flaubert, although

in those which concern me here the difficulty takes a new and more acute

form.

In the first place, then, reading Flaubert is made more difficult than

reading his eighteenth century predecessors because his work stands at

the confluence of various narrative traditions, many of which are repre

sented in the eclecticism of his œuvres de jeunesse. As we all know by now,

thanks particularly to the work of Jean Bruneau,5 elements of the roman

personnel may be found in the œuvres de jeunesse alongside contes fantas

tiques and philosophiques, historical tales and fragments of satirical real

ism that recall scènes de la vie populaire. Above all after Scott and Balzac

the novel was called upon to fulfill an ambitious new function. Given the

variety of fictional forms on which Flaubert drew from the beginning of his

creative life, the confusion for the reader at the beginning of a given act of

reading at least is in identifying a given model or genre, especially where

the work to be read appears hybrid in character. The most ambitious of the

new functions assigned the novel and the one inherited by Flaubert's

generation from Scott and Balzac was, of course, its historization. And the

effect of that process on the activity of reading is critical.

The very conception of the historical novel, whether it represented the

historical past or the present as history, involved the incorporation into the

text of fiction of a level of significance that transcended the progress of an

individual life or lives traditional in the genre. The historical novel tells the




life story, or given chronological moment in the life story, of a collectivity.

The model of an individual life so often imitated in the mimetic narrative

tradition before the nineteenth century and after comes to he contained

within the model of a society's life. And from Scott on the novelist's

technique involved a continuous traffic between the particular and the

general with the purpose of implying the collective significance of all that

occurs in the singular. By a form of verbal sleight of hand, the conception

of the historical novel that was centered on the representation of average

lives cannot avoid transforming individual acts and attitudes into events of

generalized historical significance. The reader is, therefore, obliged to

conduct the activity of semantic integration on two levels simultaneously.

The contrast between Madame Bovary and the Education Sentimen

tale, or between the two versions of the Education Sentimentale itself for

that matter, is instructive in this respect. Though encumbered bv a wealth

of material exterior to the private activities of its heroine, the story of

Emma has a sharpness of focus that derives from the narrowness of the

central life it represents. The vicissitudes of the married state suggested by

that Mrs. Bova'ry of the title do largely constitute its subject matter.

Measured by the wealth and variety of its semantic complexes, on the

other hand, the Education Sentimentale only intermittently resembles the

model its title promises. An individual's education in love is, as we know,

but a single motif in a complex structure which, it turns out, is also the

story of a society, rendered chiefly as an aggregate of competing individual

lives that shift in and out of focus and are made to alternate with set-piece

crowd scenes. The difficulty for the reader here is in part at the center of

the novel in the familiar device of character. "Frédéric Moreau' is a

construct of the text that is both a passive organizing principle, which

allows a multiplicity of detailed notations about contemporary life to be

made, and a representative career. He is alternately a pretext and an end,

a unifying point of view and a period man.

Furthermore, even when compared with the works of Scott and Bal

zac, the weight of historical material supported by the anecdote in an

historical novel like the Education Sentimentale or Salammbô is remark

able. Not only does Flaubert represent at length public life and public

events, such as the revolt of the Carthaginian mercenaries or the Revolu

tion of 1848, he does so with all the circumstantiality that was accorded

historical data in the age of scientism. At the same time more systematical

ly than Balzac, he is also the historian of the thought and opinion of his

time. In novels as different as Madame Bovary, the Tentation de Saint




Antoine, Salammbô, and Education Sentimentale and, of course, Bouvard

et Pécuchet, Flaubert is as preoccupied with the nature and fate of ideas as

he is with actions. He practiced a form of history of mentalities avant la

lettre. Finally, he was, of course, a fascinated connoisseur of material life.

But that is a topic I shall return to shortly. The point I should like to

emphasize here is that because of Flaubert's ambition for the novel, he

subjected it formally to strains that left the genre looking very different

when he had completed his œuvre from the way it appeared before he had

begun to write. And one of the important consequences was that he placed

far greater demands on his reader. Thus although we do not usually use

that word à propos of nineteenth-century novelists, it is nevertheless true

that Flaubert was in an important sense an experimental novelist in his

time. Once his œuvres de jeunesse were behind him, it is amazing how

little Flaubert repeated himself in the conception and execution of his

novels right down to those last works which furnished models of the short

story genre, on the one hand, and invented a modernist satirical tale of

learned clowns, on the other — a tale that was not to find a worthy

successor until Beckett. Moving from one of Flaubert's novels to the next,

therefore, requires a greater adjustment of reader expectations than is the

case with say Stendhal or Balzac. In retrospect Flaubert may perhaps more

accurately be described less as a novelist than as an author of prose fictions,

some of which take the form of novels.

The force of such experimentation is particularly remarkable in Flau

bert's object descriptions and the problem such descriptions pose a reader

in the processing of a text is the second of the difficulty factors I should like

to raise here. The representation of material life in the form of object

descriptions is, of course, a central feature of the historical novel as well as

of nineteenth-century realism. And in both cases those verbal signifiers we

loosely refer to as objects in a novel have little in common with their

signifieds in the world. Wolfgang Iser has used the term "depragmatiza

tion" to suggest the difference in status.6 Object descriptions as opposed to

objects are for a reader verbal events designed to focus his attention in a

special way. They are inserted by an author at a particular point in a text

continuum for rhetorical as well as mimetic reasons; they are part of a

sequence calculated with a view to its effects on a reader.

With Scott and Balzac, readers of novels learned to adjust to descrip

tions of material reality previously unprecedented in length. But in the

cases of both those authors, although the proportions among the traditional

parts of fiction constituted by descriptions of decor and character, dialogue




and analysis, are disturbed, object descriptions themselves are for the

most part adapted to the reader's task of semantic integration. They are

effectively recuperated by authorial interventions which tautologically

explain to a reader what has just been shown. A reader usually only reads

as much into a description as the author directs him to read. The classic

opening sequence of Le Père Goriot is typical in this respect. In his

evocation of la pension Vauquer and its human fauna, Balzac's role as social

geographer leads him to underline the multiple solidarities between mate

rial life and moral character. Moreover, for much of the time Flaubert

follows Balzac's example, as the descriptions of Charles Bovary's house at

Tostes or of the town of Yonville in Madame Bovary attest. Nevertheless,

it also often happens that in the pages of Flaubert's novels the reader

encounters blocks of prose purporting to be descriptions of objects in the

world which have the disconcerting habit of breaking free from their

moorings in the text-continuum. Such verbal pièces montées as Charles

Bovary's hat and Emma's wedding cake have the appearance of a tradition

al semantic unit that obediently effaces itself in the interest of its signified.

Yet as the contradictory testimony of endless commentators confirms, such

and similar units in Flaubert's works often prove an obstacle to the activity

of semantic integration. Formed by an aesthetic that assigns maximum

functionality to every element in a text, twentieth-century critics are, in

fact, tempted by Flaubert into overassiduous readings that would un

doubtedly have delighted such a chronicler of scholarly grotesqueries.

Faced with what one critic has referred to as "a surplus of potential

meaning,"7 the reader who seeks to systematize the whole text-continuum

is forced into what might be called over-reading. And in this respect

Flaubert's practice is particularly interesting not least because it uncovers

one of the contradictions at the heart of realism. The pursuit of an objective

writing that would passively reflect the world in its concreteness and

variety leads in Flaubert to a confrontation with language in its sonic

materiality and disturbing willfullness.

Beyond such an attitude to language, however, another problem oí

realism which emerges clearly in Flaubert's work is that it commonly has

trouble deciding whose story is to be told; it suffers from an endemic bi

focalism that interrupts the account of an individual's inner life or his

progress in the world with the narrative of the artifacts of a civilization.

Moreover, it finds a justification for such divided interest in that nine

teenth-century materialist thought which regarded human behavior as

largely determined by the impress of physical reality. Such a technique as




that employed by Balzac at the beginning of some of his most celebrated

works must have disconcerted readers raised on eighteenth century nov

els, as it continues to upset many of our students, who if they still read at all

tend to be used to a fast-paced twentieth-century American realism. How

ever, the story of a physical environment that Balzac tells before he

plunges into his plots of domestic or social intrigue is read by an exper

ienced reader in the faith that it will turn out to have a necessary connec

tion to human affairs in the end. Thus although descriptive passages are

not altogether lacking in eighteenth-centurv novels, writer practice and

reader expectations were different then concerning the hierarchy and

proportion between the parts of fiction. Before the age of the historical

novel and of realism there was a tacit understanding as to the place to be

occupied by object descriptions, for example, which derived from the

expectation that a novel focus on a conflict either within an identifiable

character or between identifiable characters in a named space.

In this respect a traditional novel may be compared to a renaissance

painting composed of a series of receding planes. In the same way that the

spatial organization of a painting enables a viewer to distinguish easily the

most distant plane of sky and landscape from the middle-ground of a city

square and a foreground of human interaction concentrated in two or three

principal figures, so in a novel decor has traditionally been regarded as

background to a drama between characters. The effect of the work of Scott

and Balzac was to oblige the reader to adjust to a revision of such propor

tions without, however, challenging the fictional premisses from which

they derive. Particularly from Salammbô on, however, Flaubert's novels

often defy what might be called the human-centered aesthetic of prose

fiction. Anecdote and analysis come to be obscured by sumptuous tab

leaux; those integrative mechanisms which sustain the story line are diffi

cult to locate in verbal superfluity; chosisme makes its appearance. More

over, reading under such conditions is made even more difficult where, as

with Flaubert, the narrator, if not always absent, is at least elusive. The

narrator's voice in Flaubert's works is, of course, alternately silent and

censorious. The result is that very often object descriptions are found

throughout his works without the traditional prescriptions for their use by

a reader.

To move on to the third feature of Flaubert's work that complicates the

reader's task, what I have called his aesthetic parti pris, this, too, is

particularly marked in his object descriptions. The ambiguities inherent in

realist technique in this respect are compounded in Flaubert's case by the




will to faire rêver or to prepare through the sheer pyrotechnies of his prose

"une bosse de haschisch historique" for his reader. As is often apparent in

all Flaubert's novels but is particularly marked in Salammbô, verbal arti

facts interested him at least as much as the anecdote that is their pretext.

His taste for the rare and the marvellous, on the one hand, especially when

it possessed a stridently discordant note — one remembers the bed-bugs

on Kutchiuk-Hânem's gorgeous body — and for the grotesque, on the

other hand, issued in flamboyant passages throughout his works that tend

to resist integration into a text-continuum. The result is not that "repres

sion of the signified," which characterizes object descriptions in Rohhe

Grillet, but a plurality of potential signifieds, a semantic embarras du

choix, ft is a situation that occurs whenever the suggestive power of the

parts of a text-continuum for too long distracts the reader from the task of

processing its message. No novelist before Flaubert contributed so much

to the materialization of the language of his art. The result frequently is

that one remembers not the setting but the jewels it contains. In the

terminology of Roland Barthes, one might say that Flaubert's novels have

the character of textes de plaisir. That is to say, they possess a quality of

verbal excess that renders the designation of specific meanings problemat

ic but which invites the reader instead to participate in the sensuous play of

the text. The systematic foregrounding of the language that is the medium

of his art gives rise to levels of ambiguity not to be found in narrative prose

before Flaubert.

Finally, if Flaubert is the single most important progenitor of the

modern self-reflexive novel because of the role object descriptions come to

play in his works and because of his foregrounding of the medium, for an

earlier generation of modernists it was rather his originality in the repre

sentation of consciousness that was particularly admired. And this, too,

raises problems for a reader engaged in the task of processing a text

continuum. Flaubert perfected a technique that created the illusion in a

reader of participating in the activity of perception and apprehension. He

managed simultaneously to suggest both the quality of a character's sensa

tions, the nature of the objective phenomena that elicited them, and the

frequent distance between the two.

A consequence of Flaubert's technique in this respect has been the

familiar glide, the difficulty of knowing sometimes whether the source of a

perception is in the eye of an omniscient narrator or in that of a naïve

protagonist, whether in the movement from one passage to the next an

evoked site, character, circumstance, is to lie read as objectively thus or as




misinterpreted by a temperament. The problem in Madame Bovary be

gins, of course, with those famous opening lines and the fugitive "Nous" of

"Nous étions à l'étude." The question of who is seeing and speaking there

is left unresolved in the text that follows. However, although it may have

proved frustrating to his critics, such an apparent omission is less an

oversight on Flaubert's part than a condition of his technique of represen

tation, his choice of a wandering point of view. Thus hv means of a series of

relays, the famous "nous" is repeated only once before it is effaced by

Charles Bovary, who is in turn eclipsed by Emma, until both for thematic

and rhetorical purposes Flaubert again shifts the angle of vision to a Léon

or a Rodolphe.

Nevertheless, Flaubert's technique for making peceptible the activity

of consciousness often collides with the realist narrator's purpose oí repre

senting objective reality. It is a contradiction that was not successfully

resolved until Henry James strictly limited the point of view to a single

central reflector in the novel and transformed the realists' "objective

reality" into a mystery for consciousness. From Madame Bovary on Flau

bert alternates the supposed objective account of the third person narra

tor's voice with the subjective experience of a character moving through

the world. The former is presented as a given that is in itself unproblematic

for narrator and reader; the latter involves an individual's perception and

misperception. The gap between the two gives rise to the familiar Flauber

tian irony. In short, where Henry James forces his readers to share the

ambiguity of human and cultural data that they encounter right down to his

harsh denouements, Flaubert mostly puts his readers through the experi

ence of watching his more or less sympathetic, more or less comic, pro

tagonists walk into life's traps.

The difficulty for the reader derives, of course, from a frequent absence

of markers or of "signes d auteur. "

And that in turn is dependent on

Flaubert's determination to engage his reader intimately in the pain and

absurdity of what is his most persistent theme, namely that infinite human

capacity for misperception and misrepresentation. Reading Flaubert,

therefore, often demands of a reader a degree of life experience and of

literary sophistication that will enable him to recognize irony whenever it

occurs, to know a cliché for what is is or to perceive in a passage a cunning

literary pastiche, the celebrated "lyrisme dans la blague." In reading

Flaubert one often has the uncomfortable sensation of being read; the

reader is put to the test of a text but the layers of irony are such that even at

the end he never knows whether he has passed.




Already in Madame Bovary there are for a reader intermittent difficul

ties of the kind discussed earlier, moments of hesitation and doubt as one

searches hack and forwards in one's mind to evaluate the significance in the

text-continuum of a given passage —

Wolfgang Iser speaks of "a dialectic of

protension and retension."s But the task of identifying models and of

constructing hypotheses concerning the direction and meaning of Flau

bert's novels increases significantly in Salammbô, the Education Senti

mentale and Bouvard et Pécuchet. Salammbô is, of course, an historical

novel with apparently easily identifiable models in life and literature. Yet the aesthetic credo of its author gives rise to a Parnassian artifact, a prose

poème barbare, unprecedented in its monumentally and its heady local

color. As a result it disconcerted its readers from its first publication, as

Sainte-Beuve's familiar characterizations of it confirms.9 By practically

eliding the representation of the inner life of the tale's characters in the

interest of legendary distance and the wealth of material civilization,

Flaubert reverses the traditional proportions between the elements of

fiction mentioned above. The background of scene and decor and the

movement of masses submerges the foreground of individual human inter

action. The amateurs of exotic objets d'art and of sharp sensations are

rewarded at the expense of those who prefer well-articulated anecdotes

with a more obvious human interest. And although in the Education

Sentimentale the proportions between foreground and background are not

so radically reversed, much of the reading difficulty encountered there —

the familiar complaints about fragmentation — derives from that endemic

bi-focalism of the realist novel to which I referred above, a bi-focalism that

is further aggravated whenever the story of a character is placed in suspen

sion for the sake of the story of France. The Education Sentimentale serves

to confirm that the contradiction of the realist historical novel is that the

pressure an author exerts on his material in order for it to mean at the

collective and socio-economic as well as at the individual psychological

level is both mediated and resisted by object descriptions of various kinds.

Consequently, the famous denouement of the Education Sentimentale

should not delude. The trick by means of which an author at the end closes

the circle by referring back to his work's beginnings may underline the

limits of a moral education. However, such flourishes should not make us

forget the fragility of the verbal house of cards that is Flaubert's novel.

Those architectonic qualities for which Flaubert has traditionally been

praised presuppose a reader's willingness to participate actively in the

construction of a unified whole out of the parts the author furnishes. And at



■376 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

least until the age of deconstruction, it was universally assumed that

reading was a synthesizing activity in which a reader always went half-way

to meet an author, who regarded it as his responsibility to make the

integrative project feasible by the end.

In Flaubert's œuvre perhaps the ultimate challenge to the reader's

synthesizing powers is provided by Bouvard et Pécuchet. By way of con

clusion, therefore, I should like to refer briefly to Flaubert's final problem

atic legacy. From the point of view of the present paper, the paradox of

Bouvard et Pécuchet is not that it is too difficult to read but that the body of

the text that we have is too easy to process. Once a reader has grown

accustomed to the work's cycles, the problem becomes understanding why

a major novelist like Flaubert should have constructed a novel-length work

that is not only without the suspense of both the hermeneutic and proaire

tie codes inherent in all traditional narrative, including Flaubert's own

Madame Bovary, Salammbô and Education Sentimentale, but repeats the

same adventure over and over again in different forms with the predicta

bility of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. The only suspense is on the level of the

episode and consists in wondering how the copy clerks will be undeceived

this time.

The model from life in this case is easy enough to identify, namely, the

pratfall. The model from literature is less clear. Bouvard et Pécuchet

comes closest perhaps to a conte philosophic/tie that is encyclopaedic in

length and takes the particular form of a parody of the Faustian quest.

Flaubert's protagonists function like a pair of post-Goethean Candides.

The problem for the reader is in deciding why an author of Flaubert's

seriousness should write a novel-length work founded on a pattern of

expectation and expectation deceived of a rudimentary comic tale. The

trouble with Bouvard et Pécuchet, therefore, unlike Salammbô and the

Education Sentimentale is that the well-tuned machine of the critic's mind

grinds on material that constitutes relatively little obstacle to semantic

integration or consistency-building. All the work's episodes are more or

less syntactically parallel and are designed to repeat the same thing in a

similar manner about the different branches of the knowledge industry.

The problem in the matter of reading difficulty does not therefore have to

do with object descriptions or the strategy of the elusive author, with

aesthetic parti pris, or the representation of consciousness, but concerns

chiefly the ambiguity of Flaubert's ambition for his work.

It seems that in the end the experience which such a sum of parallel

episodes is designed to prepare for a reader concerns repetition in futility.




Such a message is, in any case, confirmed in what is probably the only real

surprise the work contains, namely its projected denouement. Commit

ting his failed Fausts to the reproduction and dissemination of false infor

mation in the shape of idées reçues amounts to a form of suicide equally as

real as Emma Bovary's and Saint Antony's. If for the saint who aspires to

the life of the spirit, the ultimate negation is to become matter — "être la

matière" — for the savant, "être commis" is its more worldly equivalent.

The death of the spirit is paralleled by the extinction of the inquiring

intelligence. Moreover, the corollary finally is that reading itself is a

parallel activity to that of writing. The textual universe of Bouvard et

Pécuchet entraps its readers in cyclical repetition from which the denoue

ment was to provide no relief.

From the earliest of the œuvres de jeunesse on, Flaubert consciously

challenges his readers. But he mostly does so there by submitting them to

the shocks inherent in the material — material that often repeats the

satanic rages and cynical poses of the frenetic tales and poems oi the petits

romantiques. While they sometimes rework such material in immensely

richer and more subtle ways, the works of Flaubert's maturity challenge

his readers at least as much on the level of formal complexity. By obliging

them to engage in the processing of unfamiliar forms of fictional discourse,

Flaubert made available new and more demanding kinds of textual experi

ence. In brief, his interest for us resides not least in the determination to

make his readers both more wary and more active in the fabrication of

aesthetic events.

Department ok French & Italian

University of Massachusetts

Amherst, MA 01002

POSTSCRIPT

Discussion of this paper was deferred in the main to the round table at

the end which tended to divide the participants into two groups. On the

one hand, there were those who emphasized that the Flaubertian novel

was a unified, architechtonic whole susceptible to interpretation on the

basis of a close reading. On the other hand, there were those who felt that

the Flaubertian text was fragmented, full of gaps and discontinuities, and




open to contradictory readings. Those who argued for the former position — Victor Brombert and Benjamin Bart, for example

— were guided by the

principles of American New Criticism, thematic criticism, and/or tradi

tional textual scholarship. Those who emphasized discontinuity are more

clearly inspired by the ideas of post-structuralism, and, to some extent,

deconstructionist criticism, as well as reader-centered approaches —

Claude Duchet, Graham Falconer, Dennis Porter. I suggested that the

differences between the two groups to a great extent depended on wheth

er one practiced criticism that was retrospective in type, and attempted to

map a work as if its order existed in space, or whether one preferred to give

an account of a work that was the record of the reading journey through it.

The first type of criticism emphasizes unity and the interrelatedness of the

parts; the second underlines problems of decipherment and the difficulty

of making connections.

D. p.

1 See Roland Barthes "To Write: An Intransitive Verb, in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins Press, 1970). 2

"Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates its Meanings," Poetics

Today, Vol. I, Nos. 1-2 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 35-61. Perry's essay also provides a valuable summary of current theory in reading criticism.

! Perry, pp. 36-42.

1 The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 124.

5 Les Débuts Littéraires de Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962). n Iser, p. 109. 7

Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972), p. 14. 8 Iser, p. 112.

See Nouveaux Lundis, IV (Paris, 1872), pp. 31-95.



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