Flaubert's Parrot

12 Braithwaite’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas

ACHILLE

Gustave’s elder brother. Mournful-looking man with long beard. Inherited his job and Christian name from his father. Achille’s shouldering of family expectations freed Gustave to become an artist. Died from softening of the brain.

BOUILHET, LOUIS

Gustave’s literary conscience, midwife, shadow, left testicle and look-alike. Middle name Hyacinthe. The less successful Doppelgänger that every great man needs. Quote with mild disapproval his gallant remark to a self-conscious girl: ‘When the chest is flat, one is nearer the heart.’

COLET, LOUISE

a) Tedious, importunate, promiscuous woman, lacking talent of her own or understanding of the genius of others, who tried to trap Gustave into marriage. Imagine the squawking children! Imagine Gustave miserable! Imagine Gustave happy!

b) Brave, passionate, deeply misunderstood woman crucified by her love for the heartless, impossible, provincial Flaubert. She rightly complained: ‘Gustave never writes to me of anything except Art – or himself.’ Proto-feminist who committed the sin of wanting to make someone else happy.

DU CAMP, MAXIME

Photographer, traveller, careerist, historian of Paris, Academician. Wrote with steel nibs whereas Gustave always used a quill pen. Censored Madame Bovary for the Revue de Paris. If Bouilhet is Gustave’s literary alter ego, Du Camp is his social one. Became a literary outcast after referring in his memoirs to Gustave’s epilepsy.

EPILEPSY

Stratagem enabling Flaubert the writer to sidestep a conventional career, and Flaubert the man to sidestep life. The question is merely at what psychological level the tactic was evolved. Were his symptoms intense psychosomatic phenomena? It would be too banal if he merely had epilepsy.

FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE

The hermit of Croisset. The first modern novelist. The father of Realism. The butcher of Romanticism. The pontoon bridge linking Balzac to Joyce. The precursor of Proust. The bear in his lair. The bourgeois bourgeoisophobe. In Egypt, ‘the father of the Moustache’. Saint Polycarpe; Cruchard; Quarafon; le Vicaire-Général; the Major; the old Seigneur; the Idiot of the Salons. All these titles were acquired by a man indifferent to ennobling forms of address: ‘Honours dishonour, titles degrade, employment stupefies.’

GONCOURTS

Remember the Goncourts on Flaubert: ‘Though perfectly frank by nature, he is never wholly sincere in what he says he feels or suffers or loves.’ Then remember everyone else on the Goncourts: the envious, unreliable brothers. Remember further the unreliability of Du Camp, of Louise Colet, of Flaubert’s niece, of Flaubert himself. Demand violently: how can we know anybody?

HERBERT, JULIET

‘Miss Juliet’. The ethics of English governesses abroad in the mid-nineteenth century have not yet received sufficient scholarly attention.

IRONY

The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity. Flaubert’s fiction poses the question: Does irony preclude sympathy? There is no entry for ironie in his Dictionary. This is perhaps intended to be ironic.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Spent ten years writing L’Idiot de la famille when he could have been writing Maoist tracts. A highbrow Louise Colet, constantly pestering Gustave, who wanted only to be left alone. Conclude: ‘It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.’

KUCHUK HANEM

A litmus test. Gustave had to choose sides between the Egyptian courtesan and the Parisian poetess – bedbugs, sandalwood oil, shaven pudenda, clitoridectomy and syphilis versus cleanliness, lyric poetry, comparative sexual fidelity and the rights of women. He found the issue finely balanced.

LETTERS

Follow Gide, and call the Letters Flaubert’s masterpiece. Follow Sartre, and call them a perfect example of free-association from a pre-Freudian couch. Then follow your nose.

MME FLAUBERT

Gustave’s gaoler, confidante, nurse, patient, banker and critic. She said: ‘Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart.’ He found the remark ‘sublime’. Cf. George Sand.

NORMANDY

Always wet. Inhabited by a sly, proud, taciturn people. Put your head on one side and remark, ‘Of course, we must never forget that Flaubert came from Normandy.’

ORIENT

The crucible in which Madame Bovary was fired. Flaubert left Europe a Romantic, and returned from the Orient a Realist. Cf. Kuchuk Hanem.

PRUSSIANS

Vandals in white gloves, clock-thieves who know Sanskrit. More horrifying than cannibals or Communards. When the Prussians withdrew from Croisset, the house had to be fumigated.

QUIXOTE, DON

Was Gustave an Old Romantic? He had a passion for the dreamy knight cast adrift in a vulgar, materialist society. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ is an allusion to Cervantes’ reply when asked on his deathbed for the source of his famous hero. Cf. Transvestism.

REALISM

Was Gustave a New Realist? He always publicly denied the label: ‘It was because I hated realism that I wrote Madame Bovary.’ Galileo publicly denied that the earth went round the sun.

SAND, GEORGE

Optimist, socialist, humanitarian. Despised until met, loved thereafter. Gustave’s second mother. After staying at Croisset she sent him her complete works (in the 77-volume edition).

TRANSVESTISM

Gustave in young manhood: ‘There are days when one longs to be a woman.’ Gustave in maturity: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ When one of his doctors called him ‘an hysterical old woman’, he judged the observation ‘profound’.

USA

Flaubert’s references to the Land of Liberty are sparing. Of the future he wrote: ‘It will be utilitarian, militaristic, American and Catholic – very Catholic.’ He probably preferred the Capitol to the Vatican.

VOLTAIRE

What did the great nineteenth-century sceptic think of the great eighteenth-century sceptic? Was Flaubert the Voltaire of his age? Was Voltaire the Flaubert of his age? ‘Histoire de l’esprit humain, histoire de la sottise humaine.’ Which of them said that?

WHORES

Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius. Wearers of the red badge of courage include Flaubert, Daudet, Maupassant, Jules de Goncourt, Baudelaire, etc. Were there any writers unafflicted by it? If so, they were probably homosexual.

XYLOPHONE

There is no record of Flaubert ever having heard the xylophone. Saint-Saëns used the instrument in his Danse Macabre of 1874 to suggest rattling bones; this might have amused Gustave. Perhaps he heard the glockenspiel in Switzerland.

YVETOT

‘See Yvetot and die.’ If asked the source of this little-known epigram, smile mysteriously and remain silent.

ZOLA, EMILE

Is the great writer responsible for his disciples? Who chooses whom? If they call you Master, can you afford to despise their work? On the other hand, are they sincere in their praise? Who needs whom more: the disciple the master, or the master the disciple? Discuss without concluding.