Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:

In 1986, Gore Vidal, as only he could, made a lethal distinction between what Flaubert tried to do in what he wrote and what, more than a century later, American writers of fiction considered adequate: “To the end of a long life, he kept on making the only thing he thought worth making: sense, a quality almost entirely lacking in American literature where stupidity - if sufficiently sincere and authentic - is deeply revered and easily achieved.” Vidal then added: “In our post-literary time, it is hard to believe that once upon a time a life could be devoted to the perfection of an art form, and of all the art forms the novel was the most - exigent, to use a modest word. Today the novel is either a commodity that anyone can put together, or it is an artifact, which means nothing or anything or everything, depending on one’s literary theory.”

If this seems to prove the accuracy of Nietzsche’s prediction that when everyone learned to read, no one would know how to write, and the prescience of Schopenhauer’s remark that with the advent of mass publications, “everyone can now read themselves stupid,” a hundred years before Gore Vidal made his complaint about the state of American literature, Henry James made his own complaint, not about American fiction, but about Gustave Flaubert.

“M. Flaubert and his contemporaries have pushed so far the education of the senses and the cultivation of the grotesque in literature and the arts that it has left them morally stranded and hopeless.” James describes Flaubert as “Sedentary, cloistered, passionate, cynical, tormented in his life of magnificent expression…..” But, as James understood, it was only this “sedentary, cloistered, passionate” life that allowed Flaubert to write Madame Bovary, the novel about which James is unstinting in his praise. “The perfection of Madame Bovary is one of the commonplaces of criticism.” And it is only because of Flaubert’s obsession with perfection that James can call Flaubert the “novelists’ novelist.”

Which is not to say that Henry James liked it. The story is “too small an affair,” and the characters “abject human beings,” and Emma Bovary “not the least little bit complicated.’’ And James is right. There is nothing heroic; nothing, or almost nothing, that would make anyone who reads it wish they had known any of these people. Charles Bovary nearly fails medical school, becomes an ‘officer of health,’ which is one degree below a doctor, and marries a widow, a much older woman, because he thinks her wealthy. When she dies, three years later, he marries Emma who, after eight years of marriage in which she has two tempestuous love affairs and contracts debts she cannot pay, kills herself and leaves behind a distraught husband and a motherless child.

The question is how could Flaubert - how could anyone - turn a story as drearily predictable as this into one of the greatest novels ever written? The answer, or part of the answer, the first part of an answer, is style; the form, the way Flaubert managed to turn prose into poetry; or, rather, into something close to music. This did not happen because of a natural gift, as if he could, without conscious effort, dash off whole paragraphs in no more time than it took to move his pen across the page. He spent five full years writing Madame Bovary, five years in which the constant every day effort was to find the one right word to make the perfect sentence, perfect because, as he explained, “A really good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, something you cannot change, and just as rhythmic and sonorous.”

The effort was exhaustive. In January of l853, after he had already been working on the novel for two years, he wrote to one of his few friends, “It has taken me five days to write one page.” This was not unusual. It took three months to write thirty pages describing “my great scene of the county fair.” It was worth it. He had been able to accomplish something that had not been done before, turn the written word into music, classical music. “If ever the values of a symphony have been transformed to literature, it will be in this chapter of my book. It must be a vibrating totality of sounds. One should hear simultaneously the bellowing of the bulls, the murmurs of love, and the phrases of politicians.”

Flaubert was not interested in writing something that, as agents and publishers would put it today, would sell; he had nothing but contempt for those who thought of literature - or anything else - in terms of what people might want to buy. “Mankind, for him,” insisted Henry James, “was made up of the three of four persons, Ivan Turgenev in the number, who perceived what he was trying for, and of the innumerable millions who didn’t.” And of that small number who understood what Flaubert was attempting, Marcel Proust, having spent his own long years creating a work that deals with time, discovered how Flaubert was able to convey the sense, the feeling, of time passing, of the flow, the unity and continuity of time. It was the use of the imperfect. This is lost for readers of the English translations of Madame Bovary. What should read: “She would begin by looking around to see if,” reads instead, “She began by looking.” What should read, “Her thoughts, aimless at first, would wander,” reads instead, “Her thoughts, aimless at first, wandered.” A characteristic quality is changed into a single event, an event without any necessary connection to any habitual feature of conduct or personality. The sense of time has been removed.

The question remains, and becomes more interesting - Why did Flaubert, a writer who would spend days sitting alone in his study, the study in the house he had inherited from his father, a study in which he worked for forty years, a study where he was constantly trying to get a single sentence exactly right, a writer who fully expected to produce a classic when he began Madame Bovary, write about the depressing lives of philistines and mediocrities? Why, in other words, did he decide to write about the bourgeoisie? What was he trying to do?

Flaubert began to write Madame Bovary in l851. The story, however, is set not in the present, the middle of the nineteenth century, but in the past; not the distant past, just a few decades earlier, the first third of the century. Charles Bovary is born in l815, just after what one of the most insightful writers of the 20th century called the “last event of truly European significance…the French Revolution and Napoleon’s attempt to unify politically and legally the European states and peoples.” From that point forward, Europe “no longer lived with faith in a genuine mission; it simply disseminated its wares and its scientific and technological civilization in every direction.”

This was the bourgeois revolution. History, after this, according to Hegel, and not just Hegel, would be a history without heroic deeds. Everyone would think of themselves not as citizens, willing and even eager to perform their duties, all sharing a common belief in how they should live, but as private individuals free to think for themselves and get for themselves whatever seemed good to them. Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary to show the result.

Charles Bovary is dull as dust. He attends medical school, but the courses “were to him as so many sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness.” He fails, and then, finally, passes his examinations by “ceaselessly learning all the old questions by heart.” Bovary is lazy, without much intelligence, but sufficiently methodical to be capable of achieving a minimal competence. And that is all he wants. He marries, the first time, for financial security. A comfortable existence is his only real ambition. He falls in love with Emma because of the way she looks. Her hands are not beautiful, but her eyes are. They seemed black, “because of the lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness.”

Emma is in love with Charles, or thinks she is, because, later, after they are married, she thinks she must have been mistaken. She does not find the happiness she had expected. What she thought would happen, what she thought her happiness would be, was what she had learned from the reading she done, the novels she had read, the novels that had taught her that a man should “know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries.” But Charles, her husband, was nothing like this. At the end of the day, “he ate dinner, went to bed, and lay on his back and snored.” Emma began to imagine what it would be like married to someone “handsome, distinguished, witty.”

Charles thinks Emma is happy, but she resents his “easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.” She dreams of Paris where everything is “full of ideal, ambitious, fantastic frenzy.” The closer things are to her, the more she dislikes them. She would have liked to have a famous name; she knew she was every bit as good as the women who had one. “She wanted at the same time to die and to live in Paris.” She is supremely discontented. She reads all the latest authors, like Balzac and George Sand, and sees in them “imaginary satisfaction for her own desires.”

Emma, like everyone else, is free to think what she wants and to read what she likes. Everyone becomes not different, but the same, all driven by the same desire to have more of what, as far as they can see, everyone wants, all the pleasure, all the thrilling, but safe, adventures money makes possible. This is the world of the bourgeoisie, a world in which the search for excitement becomes the boredom of routine, the world in which Emma Bovary believed the only life worth living was what she had learned through the eyes of authors she has had the misfortune to take seriously. It is an interesting question whether her life would have been different, whether she would have found contentment with a husband who adored her and a child who depended upon her, had she been able to read in advance the novel Gustave Flaubert would later write about her.

Flaubert would have doubted that it would have made any difference at all. In his unfinished novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, he attempted to compile a catalogue of human stupidity. The catalogue included everything that was considered truth in an age that had abandoned both religion and thought. It is a catalogue of nearly everything we now believe.