"Salammbô": A RebuttalAuthor(s): Dennis PorterSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 70-72Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345040 .

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NOVELIFALL 1972

Salammbo: A Rebuttal

DENNIS PORTER

I find Professor Rose's argument subtle and occasionally illuminating as to details but mistaken as far as the meaning and significance of Salammbo as a whole is concerned. But I do admire her courage in taking on a considerable opposition that began with Sainte-Beuve and with the author himself, who in the letter to the Goncourts quoted in my original article denied the kind of meaning to his own work attributed to it by Professor Rose. It seems that our disagreements may be reduced to two fundamental ones. To begin with, although I agree that the novel is an attempt at the fusion of realist and parnassian aims, I do not find in the resulting hybrid confirmation of the fact that the two contradictory aesthetics can be combined into a viable form of literary life. And secondly, I find it even harder to look upon Flaubert as a concerned anti-war liberal-on the evidence of Sa- lammbo or anything else he wrote.

As far as Flaubert's historical realism is concerned, the labor of documentation to which he submitted himself is, of course, well-known, and I did not intend to imply he was not preoccupied with authenticity of detail. Where we differ is in our view of the use to which such an almost unparalleled accumulation of concrete detail is finally put-the meaning it is made to assume in the total structure of the novel. But before I discuss that I should first like to comment on Professor Rose's view of the main characters, since much of her case for Salammbo's distinction as historical novel rests on her evaluation of them.

She attaches a great deal of significance to the fact that Flaubert's portrayal of Salammbo and Matho is influenced by his concern for historical verisimilitude. That may well be true, but even if we ignore Matho-who strikes me as no more than an aggressive male principle in the guise of a bronze-thighed romantic primi- tive-it is still difficult to see in Salammbo herself anything more than one of the author's own idees refues, namely that of "oriental woman." Unlike Professor Rose, I do not know enough about Carthaginian civilization to speculate on whether "such people hardly have a self-concept." But I do know that Flaubert himself showed a special fondness for what he took to be Near Eastern woman in his time. Far from exhibiting shock at the socializing process that continued to make them cult objects in his own century, in fact, he expresses in his correspond- ence little but fascination with their strange and hieratic beauty and takes delight in the way it is set off by the surrounding squalor: "They possess the beauty of a ruminating bull, a running hound or a hovering eagle. They have a sense of fatal- ity, a conviction of the nothingness of man, which lends all their actions, poses and looks a quality of resigned grandeur."' I do not think Flaubert ever suggests in Salammbo or elsewhere that they should be educated out of such superb philo- sophic poise in order to resemble their sentimental European sisters.

1 Correspondance III (Paris: Conard, 1926-1933), p. 136. Translations from the French are my own.

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CRITICAL EXCHANGEISALAMMB6

Further, even if we concede Flaubert the prodigious feat of penetrating the Carthaginian mind (or absence of mind), such historical verisimilitude falls down with the anachronistic character of Hamilcar, who is in many ways the most in- teresting in the work. Although the Carthaginian general is, on the one hand, one of those legendary tyrannical masters of mankind, who had "explained" history to the young Flaubert,2 he is, on the other, a late romantic revolte and aesthete; he scorns the Carthaginian gods at the same time that he rivals them in exploiting the world's human and material resources on a monumental scale in order to cater to his own taste for the rare and the beautiful. In true Pamassian style, his cult of plastic beauty is grounded in metaphysical pessimism.

But my chief disagreement with Professor Rose relates to her belief that Sa- lammbo is designed to promote a humanitarian cause. Where she claims that the work is "an actively educative novel" (by which I take her to mean morally im- proving, since we would hardly go to Salammbo for Carthaginian social history), I share Flaubert's view of it as a work that does not say or prove anything-at least in the positive way that works of literature are traditionally expected "to say something." Whatever else he may be doing in Salammbo, in fact, he is certainly not concerned with exploring antiquity in order to find there lessons for modern Europe. If Salammbo has a purpose outside the "historical hashish trip" he as- sured the Goncourts it would provide, it is not to improve but to shock its readers out of their mid-nineteenth-century complacency. Edification, as he once re- minded a correspondent in connection with the Trois Contes, was not his forte.3

To see in Salammbo an anti-war novel, therefore, is to ignore the willed offen- siveness of the work. If, as Professor Rose states, thirteen-fifteenths of the novel are taken up with "battle, siege, torture, sacrifice," this is not because Flaubert wished to confront his contemporaries with the barbarism of war in order to make them gentler. On the contrary, he is out to overwhelm them with the horror that is of the world and demonstrate his own mastery of it. There is a deliberately shocking act of bravado involved in maintaining the cool distance of the absent author through some of the goriest scenes in Western literature. It seems, in fact, as if Salammbo were designed to address itself to two classes of readers simul- taneously. On the one hand, it fulfills the often repeated determination to offend and demoralize all lovers of life and humanity, and, on the other, it furnishes an orgy of sharply contrasting sensations to the disabused neophytes of art who treat given reality in their time as Flaubert affirmed it should be treated, with contempt.

In a letter from the Near East,4 he records how struck he was by the extraor- dinary green of a leper's hand but withholds all other comments on the man's

2 "I have a profound regard for the tyrannies of the classical world, which I consider the most splendid manifestation of humanity that has ever existed." Corr. I, p. 225.

8 "After Saint Antony, Saint Julian and then John-the-Baptist; I am surrounded by Saints. But as far as the latter is concerned I will do my best not to edify." Corr. VII, p. 309.

4 Corr, II, p. 241.

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NOVELIFALL 1972

condition. Whether willed or not, the attitude paraded there is that of the quint- essential aesthete and it is an attitude that is maintained throughout Salammbo. In other words, I find no evidence of a life-sustaining purpose in Flaubert's Cartha- ginian novel but, on the contrary, an expression of the horror of the flesh, endless reminders of "the nothingness of man" juxtaposed with monuments of art and images of an overwrought beauty. The fecundity of African nature that the book records is of a monstrous and indiscriminate kind; the vision projected is that of a continent swarming with expendable, insect-like hordes. Consequently, the moral to be drawn from the work is not pacifist but sadist. A world so unbearably encumbered cries out for its sadist destroyers in order that a balance may be preserved in nature. Tanit's fertility is as wanton as Molloch's destruction. Flau- bert's harsh truth-somewhat different from that of Sade's though related to it- is that no matter how hideous things become, there is no guiding spirit in the universe to take offence: "Man could wipe out his entire species without the uni- verse suffering in the slightest way."5

Finally, I can only say I find nothing in Professor Rose's article which leads me to modify my original assertion that Salammbo is a brilliant but flawed experi- ment, suggesting through its very failure the defining limits of the genre. Further- more, it fails to reconcile the contradictory aesthetic impulses working for expression within its author. The urge to represent historical reality in its concrete fullness is betrayed both by a blase antiquarian fascination with the curious and the monstrous, and the aesthete's determination to make every line ring with a brassy finality. The result is neither a satisfactory historical novel nor a sym- phonic prose poem of sustained grandeur-although it comes closer to this latter aim. What we have is elevated melodrama designed to support descriptive tours de force of a kind that Flaubert himself invented. The truths of history are sub- ordinated to a philosophico-aesthetic end that places life in the service of art and not vice versa.

5 Quoted by Maurice Nadeau, Marquis de Sade: Oeuvres (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1947), p. 28.

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