Michel Winock’s biography captures Gustave Flaubert the misanthrope

Michel Winock distinguishes himself as a biographer in his contextualised analysis of Flaubert’s fiction.

Paris, 1856. Another time, another place, but still the perennial human stupidity of keying ­errors made its presence felt, even if back then it was the mishandling of heavy lead type. When Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was about to be presented to the public for the first time in the Revue de Paris, its forthcoming serialisation was announced by leaving out the letter l from the author’s name. The novelist responded: “Gustave Faubert is the name of a grocer in the Rue de Richelieu, opposite the Comedie Francaise! This debut seems far from auspicious to me … Even before I appear, they skin me.’’ There we have it, all of Flaubert’s ebullient misanthropy, in that one humorous cuss. For the great progenitor of the modern novel, whose work turned style into content and help­ed germinate talents such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Nathalie Sarraute, Roland Barthes and Georges Perec, language really was, as Barthes would have it, ‘‘a skin’’.

By the time Madame Bovary was published he had devoted 20 years to the pursuit of a pristine, self-negating prose, despite the fact he knew it was destined to be flayed by what he perceived as the idiocy of literary salons and the reading public alike. For Flaubert that missing l was the resounding, and in some ways, triumphant proof that he’d been right along. Of course Flaubert’s novel — I was about to write ‘‘tale’’ but felt his patrician ghost shudder — of a woman educated beyond her social class and therefore disgusted by the rural environment to which she is condemned, became not only a cause celebre in France but a raging bestseller when it was finally published as a single volume in 1857. In its pages wowsers of the July Monarchy found truths so unmitigated by ornament, prudery or lazy sentiment that they described the novel as an obscenity. They dragged Flaubert through the courts, only to find their inanities dispatched by the novelist’s legal team and the everlasting readership of the novel assured. Talk about a backfire.

Doubly so when one considers that the scandal surrounding the book unwittingly served to smuggle the revolution of Flaubert’s art into the hands of an unsuspecting mainstream. A full 20 years before Cezanne had begun to resolve a new unifying X-ray vision through his radically impersonal paintings of landscape, human beings and apples, Flaubert took a cold Platonic scalpel to modern life in order to dramatise both the passionate structure of the interior human and what he considered to be its imbecilic, pretentious and often tragic social manifestations.

Often caricatured as a literary monk slaving over his prose in the quiet of rural Normandy, Flaubert, as French historian Michel Winock emphasises in this new biography, was also a great metropolitan raconteur. He raged, quipped and roared his way through a life divided between the solitary graft of research and writing in his gueuloir, or shouting parlour, on the banks of the Seine in Croisset, and a gregarious social life of conversation, theatre and brothel-going in Paris. Thus, in Winock’s discussion of Madame ­Bovary and Flaubert’s great realist novel of the Second Empire, Sentimental Education, he shows how the author’s credo that art should approximate the cold impersonality of science was always and inevitably entangled with the acidic intensity of his perspective on human nature. Winock makes a compelling case therefore that we have not been left with aesthetically chaste novels of a quasi-scientific nature but rather with luminous amalgamations of an irrepressible misanthropy on the one hand and the dispassionate lineaments of Mediterranean classicism on the other.

Winock distinguishes himself as a biographer in his clear-eyed analysis of the fiction within its politically convulsive historical context. Undoubtedly his book comes late in the mile-high body of Flaubert scholarship — there have been two other major biographies in this century alone — but the well is bottomless, it seems. As recently as 2010 Lydia Davis managed to refresh Madame Bovary with a beautiful new treatment of its sonics and rhythms in English, while Colm Toibin’s 2014 masterpiece Nora Webster is in its own way an Irish homage to Madame Bovary with what Julian Barnes would call the ‘‘significant weather’’ removed.

As Winock hints at in his generous coverage of the sea of other scholarship, it is in the ongoing influence of Flaubert on writers such as Davis and Toibin, and thus on the wider evolution of the modern novel, that we can best sense the depths of his influence. Novelists of the nouveau roman school of the 1960s, for instance, acknowledged a debt to perhaps no one more than Flaubert, as did Georges Perec, whose first novel, the hyper-crisp 1965 portrait of French yuppiedom, Things, included at least seven specific borrowings from the master and can be read as a highly deliberate acceptance of the Flaubertian baton.

Despite his taste for party life it does remain the case that Flaubert’s existence was primarily devoted to the creation of beauty through the making of supremely balanced sentences. This was indeed his only moral order. Winock charts this obsession through the turbulent period Flaubert lived through until, after years of being supported by his private income, the novelist was rendered bankrupt by a profligate nephew just as France endured the humiliations of German invasion and the subsequent eruptions of the Paris Commune in 1871.

Suffering privations to which he was unaccustomed, such as having to temporarily give up his sanctuary at Croisset for invading German soldiers, Flaubert began now to rail with the patriotic bourgeoise, rather than against it, in a desperate attempt to make sense of difficulties beyond his control.

It was fitting then that when the tumult settled down and the birth of modern capitalism in France got under way, Flaubert returned to what he had started with, the theme of human stupidity. His last novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet, the picaresque story of two public servants who come into money and move to the country to fulfil their lifestyle fantasies, is in its way an uncanny rendition of what the white middle class of the Western world were destined to become. Think Grand Designs, think SeaChange, think of the way we automatically regurgitate whatever garnish of information takes our fancy in the media.

When Flaubert succumbed to a stroke at the age of 59, Bouvard and Pecuchet remained unfinished. It was nevertheless published in the year after he died and eventually became coupled with a project he had been working on in the margins of his novels for many decades, The Dictionary of Received Ideas. Along with his magnificent correspondence, the dictionary is the writer’s pithiest achievement. Part Dada, part Seinfeld, it is a playful list of merciless ironies that remains pertinent to this day. Winock chooses to conclude this biography with a few highly accessible lists of his own. These include a petite anthologie of Flaubert quotations under thematic headings, and an excellent assemblage of quotes on Flaubert’s work from others, also set under thematic headings. These additions are in keeping with Winock’s readable style and talent for the great historical overview. In this way his biography can be welcomed by dedicated Flaubertians and twittering dilettantes alike.

Gregory Day is a novelist and poet. His most recent novel is Archipelago of Souls.

Flaubert

By Michel Winock

Translated by Nicholas Elliott

The Belnap Press, 560pp, $79.99 (HB)