Five Fictions in Search of Truth [Course Book ed.] 9781400828913

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IVE FICTIONS IN SEARCH OF TRUTH

Myra Jehle n

PRINCETON

UNIVERSITY

PRINCETON

AND

OXFORD

PRESS

Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW Henri Matisse, Paysage de Saint-Tropez, 1904. ©2008 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Un artiste doit se rendre compte, quand il raisonne, que son tableau est factice, mais quand il peint, il doit avoir ce sentiment qu’il a copié la nature. Et même quand il s’en est écarté, il doit lui rester cette conviction que ce n’a été que pour la rendre plus complètement. An artist must realize, when he reasons, that his painting is artifice, but when he paints, he must feel that he is copying nature. And even when he distances himself from nature, it should be with the conviction that he does so only in order to render her more completely. Henri Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art, 51-52 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jehlen, Myra. Five fictions in search of truth / Myra Jehlen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–691–13612–7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Fiction—20th century— History and criticism. 2. Fiction—19th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PN3503.J44 2008 809.3—dc22 2008002145 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Berkeley Oldstyle typeface Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOR RICHARD POIRIER

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`

ALRAUX,

drunk with our age, can say about Cézanne:

“It is not the mountain he wants to realize but the picture.” All that Cézanne said and did was not enough to make Malraux understand what no earlier age could have failed to understand: that to Cézanne the realization of the picture necessarily involved the realization of the mountain. And whether we like it or not, notice or not, the mountain is still there to be realized. Man and the world are all that they ever were—their attractions are, in the end, irresistible; the painter will not hold out against them long. —Randall Jarrell

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Vontents PROLOGUE A Real Madeleine Is a Work of Art

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CHAPTER ONE Salammbô: Three Rough Stones beneath a Rainy Sky

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CHAPTER TWO The Sacred Fount: The Case of the Man Who Suddenly Grew Smart

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CHAPTER THREE The Ambassadors: What He Saw Was Exactly the Right Thing

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CHAPTER FOUR Lolita: A Beautiful, Banal, Eden-Red Apple

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CHAPTER FIVE A Simple Heart: Félicité and the Holy Parrot

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Acknowledgments

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Notes

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Index

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cÜÉÄÉzâx A Real Madeleine Is a Work of Art

I A croissant dipped in a café-au-lait would not have worked the trick of recovering the past for Marcel Proust, only a morsel of madeleine halfdissolved in a teaspoon of linden-tea. Proust’s memory of Sunday mornings in Combray might have been lost forever had a confection made of flour, butter, sugar, and eggs, delicately flavored with lemon and vanilla, and then baked in a ridged mold, not intervened one day as he was having tea with his mother. Remembrance of the past needed study of the present: Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, sends a madeleine to catch a madeleine, one experience to evoke another, and literature is both the process and the outcome. In literature, invention is discovery: Marcel does not make up the meaning of the madeleine, he finds it out.1 When its taste fills him with a mysterious joy, he has been thinking of quite other matters and, in fact, seems to have mostly forgotten Combray, except for the sorrow of bedtime. Nor is there a shock of recognition to accompany the shock of pleasure. Mystified, and sensing that something hugely significant lurks in his astonishing response, Marcel peers after it into the recesses of his mind, but the something is skittish. He falls back, waits patiently, is disappointed, waits again, until, finally, a memory rises slowly from oceanic depths. The memory he pursues lies within while still being an affair of the world outside, both in content (the happy times in Aunt Léonie’s room) and in the method of its recovery. Since it takes a second tea-soaked biscuit to recover the memory of the first, all through In Search of Lost Time, knowledge will depend on serendipity. Repetition is crucial and repetition waits on circumstances in the world out there. Marcel’s posture before his own epiphany is appropriately diffident. At the same time, one’s recovery of lost memory is hardly selfeffacing. In the last volume of the Search, Time Regained, after a series of episodes like that of the madeleine, Marcel envisions something like a power of

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personal resuscitation. Ordinarily the past, into which each present moment instantly slides, languishes in a limbo of semi-abstraction, so that (given the delay with which consciousness operates) life’s meaning is lost faster than it is produced. But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self, which seemed—had perhaps for long years seemed—to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it. A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And one can understand that this man should have confidence in his joy, even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain within it the reasons for this joy, one can understand that the word “death” should have no meaning for him; situated outside time, why should he fear the future? (Time Regained, 264–65) Mais qu’un bruit, qu’une odeur, déjà entendu ou respirée jadis, le soient de nouveau, à la fois dans le présent et dans le passé, réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits, aussitôt l’essence permanente et habituellement cachée des choses se trouve libérée, et notre vrai moi qui, parfois depuis longtemps, semblait mort, mais ne l’était pas entièrement, s’éveille, s’anime en recevant la céleste nourriture qui lui est apportée. Une minute affranchie l’ordre du temps a recrée en nous pour la sentir l’homme affranchi de l’ordre du temps. Et celui-lá, on comprend qu’il soit confiant de sa joie, même si le goût d’une madeleine ne semble pas contenir logiquement les raisons de cette joie, on comprend que le mot de “mort” n’ait pas de sens pour lui; situé hors du temps, que pourrait-il craindre de l’avenir? (Le Temps retrouvé, 451)

Who is this man feeding on divine fruit that frees him, not from mortality but even better, from the myopia of the temporal and lifts the veil that conceals the abiding truths of life from the living? A writer. Madeleine number one and madeleine number two each pertain to the order of time and the world, but their juxtaposition in the writer’s imagination reveals a larger reality. Proust wrote scornfully about the kind of literary realism content to describe how things appear on the surface.2 But this was only to claim a more adequate, more profound realism, one that incorporated experience: the significance of the madeleine along with its physical reality. The house of reality has many mansions, among them the mansion of the interior life. Proust treated his interior life, his memories, his impressions, as an objectively existing territory to which he gained access when objective con-

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ditions permitted it. The taste of the madeleine, the uneven pavements in the piazza San Marco that recalled the courtyard he had watched Swann cross one evening, these experiences that trigger memories, do not occur at Marcel’s will, and he is glad of it. For by occurring in response to unprejudiced, unprogrammed events, they vouch for the truth they recall: “And I realized that this must be the mark of their authenticity” (274). (Et je sentais que ce devait être la griffe de leur authenticité [457].) His authenticity depends on theirs. Art enables “the discovery of our true life, of reality as we have felt it to be, which differs so greatly from what we think it is” (277) ([la découverte de] notre vraie vie, [de] la réalité telle que nous l’avons sentie et qui diffère tellement de ce que nous croyons” [450]). What we believe is distorted by subjectivity, but somewhere in the past exists a real experience, and it is when we recapture this reality objectively that we really live it. The logic is clear: life becomes real in its writing. “Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived— is literature” (298). (La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent pleinement vécue, c’est la littérature [474].) Proust took great care to make it clear that by life he meant not only one’s personal life: But art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awareness of the lives of other people—for style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain for ever the secret of every individual. Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. (299) Notre vie; et aussi la vie des autres; car le style pour l’écrivain aussi bien que la couleur pour le peintre est une question non de technique mais de vision. Il est de la révélation, qui serait impossible par des moyens directs et conscients, de la différence qualitative qu’il y a dans la façon dont nous apparaît le monde, différence qui, s’il n’y avait pas l’art, resterait le secret eternel de chacun. Par l’art seulement nous pouvons sortir de nous, savoir ce que voit un autre de cet univers qui n’est pas le même que le nôtre et dont les paysages nous seraient restés aussi inconnus que ceux qu’il peut y avoir dans la lune. (474)

Literature is a voyage to Earth’s farthest horizon, to the moon; and when it is a voyage into oneself, we go to survey interior landscapes as if they were on the moon. Science and art are allies, logic and intuition work

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together. “The impression is for the writer what the experiment is for the scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression” (276). (L’impression est pour l’écrivain ce qu’est l’expérimentation pour le savant, avec cette différence que chez le savant le travail de l’intelligence précède et chez l’écrivain vient après [459].) The actual and the real, the real and the true, authenticity and self-knowledge, properly understood and practiced, are the coherent categories of the paradoxical (in being often conducted through invention and even fantasy) but not contradictory pursuit of knowledge that is literature’s highest calling. The madeleine episode exemplifies this scientific process in which objects play the essential role. Initially, an object lent an actual taste to the pleasure of visits to a favorite aunt; now the past reappears tasting of madeleines. Marcel’s mind does not assign itself objective correlatives arbitrarily. Subjectivity itself is an objective event that a literary work embodies in its own objective existence. In an article about Flaubert’s style (see note 2), Proust found the perfect occasion to express his irritation with certain readers who should have known better when they cited the episode of the madeleine to show that Swann’s Way was an essay in subjectivity, “a sort of collection of memories following one another by association of ideas” (une sorte de recueil de souvenirs s’enchaînant selon les lois fortuites de l’association des idées [328]). This is exactly what Swann’s Way is not. Instead of flowing along the stream of consciousness, it swims against the current in search of the source; reality is both its origin, which is an actual fact of the matter, and its destination, which is a work of art composed of and composing real experiences. In fact, both in the one case and in the other, whether I was concerned with impressions like the one which I had received from the sight of the steeples of Martinville or with reminiscences like that of the unevenness of the two steps or the taste of the madeleine, the task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think—that is to say, to draw forth from the shadow—what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent. And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of the work of art? (Time Regained, 273) En somme, dans un cas comme dans l’autre, qu’il s’agisse d’impressions comme celle que m’avait donnée la vue des clochers de Martinville, ou de réminiscences comme celle de l’inégalité des deux marches ou le goût de la madeleine, il fallait tâcher d’interpréter les sensations comme les signes d’autant de lois et d’idées, en essayant de penser, c’est-à-dire de faire sortir de la pénombre ce que j’avais senti, de le convertir en un équivalent spirituel. Or, ce moyen qui me parassait le seul, qu’était-ce autre chose que faire une oeuvre d’art? (Le Temps retrouvé, 457)

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The careless readers who mistook Swann’s Way for a personal memoir had a partial excuse in that the particular that is both origin and destination in Marcel’s search is not the classic exterior venue of the real. He himself begins searching for the madeleine’s astonishing effect where it might be expected to arise, in the tea, the biscuit, the room, on his tongue. Only when this normal approach fails does he turn elsewhere. “I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how?”3 How can he look into himself and not create as much as he discovers? He solves the problem by incorporating it, observing that creation and discovery are anyway intertwined. To create is never to invent out of whole cloth, but to search out the truth using one’s imagination or intuition of whatever it is that hovers out of reach of observation. Finding himself unable to recover the elusive memory directly—successive swallows of tea only dull the impression— Marcel resorts to a strategy that combines creation and search. He approaches the elusive knowledge formally, treating sensation and image as organized events. The objective of the Search is to realize life beyond what its narrator understands of it along the way, a project for the aesthetic intellect. I will not be writing about Proust beyond this prologue but have begun by invoking his great epic of the interior life for its unlikely and thereby striking demonstration of literature’s commitment to objective reality. Objective reality, not absolute: Proust’s aspiration to recall the past as he lived it offers an excellent representation of the distinction, essential to my thesis, between objective and absolute truth. Proust sought to know exactly what happened to him, including how it affected him, and this knowledge was an affair of objects, touchable, visible, audible, sometimes intelligible, sometimes not. He would know these objects, the stuff and circumstances of his life, no less objectively for not knowing them absolutely. Literature has nothing to do, can do nothing with absolute truth, which, taken as given, the way religion takes it, bypasses understanding and precludes knowledge. On the contrary, as the narrator Marcel explains, literature happens when writers try to figure things out as objectively, as truly as they can.

II This is a book in praise of literature, and in particular of literature as a way to know, to discover the truth. The five fictions of my title are Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô and A Simple Heart, Henry James’s The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I could have written about many other works but chose these because their authors were particularly explicit in regard to the idea I wanted to explore and, indeed, expound, that, insofar as the facts of nature and society can be ascertained, a well-made fiction is the best

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way to fetch and weigh them. In that each took this as a principle of his writing, Flaubert was a major reference for James, and James and Flaubert for Nabokov. For all three, the issue was never whether fiction and truth were linked, but how: how, formally, to produce a well-made story, in which case it would find out the truth. I write “the truth” conscious that it is a phrase to raise eyebrows. Yet Flaubert, James, and Nabokov were not naïve in their ambition, and none knew better that reality can wear many faces. Working to make their fictions portray the truth, they posited (to repeat the distinction I made earlier) not any single absolute truth, but a truth that was nonetheless objective, one among several that were possible: fiction and reality shared the same range of possibilities. Their novels were to describe the real world more fully than it was otherwise apparent, and invent only what could have happened. When Flaubert confessed that he had invented an aqueduct for his fictional Carthage, despite knowing from his research that there had been none in the historical city until after the time of Salammbô, he insisted that this invention in no way attenuated the truth of his novel. A Carthaginian aqueduct was a distinct possibility. (See page 22, figure 1.) His invention implemented the real; it was as real as the real, as true as the truth, maybe more so. He was not making an extravagant claim. On the contrary, it will emerge, I hope, from this series of readings that being true to the real world is the ordinary, necessary condition that authors of fiction set for their works. Flaubert was particularly explicit in pointing to the ground on which he staked his claim: the aqueduct’s truth was assured by an aspect of fiction that trumped all its other aspects and subsumed them, namely, its form. He had not been arbitrary in adding an aqueduct to the archeological landscape but had acted in response to a formal imperative. The aqueduct was the creature of Salammbô’s plot. It was not inevitable, it was perhaps inadvisable. In a letter Flaubert actually regretted its invention: he had been cowardly, he should have persisted and found something to the purpose in the historical record. But cowardly or not, he still maintained, through its remarkable formal expediency—its truth to the story—the aqueduct was true, it was real. It had emerged out of the work of form, and form, plot in this case but as well style working at the level of words and sentences, was a guarantee of truth. By the force of its own logic and necessities, form could bring out the logic and necessities of the object it described. So fiction-writers approach reality formally from the first. Their initial responses to a potential subject are formal speculations. This in turn heightens the importance of the subject on which they speculate: the right form guarantees the content, and the right content is a formal necessity. Henry James often expanded on this theme. One of the prefaces in which he summed up his critical career describes how a novel first appeared to him wonderfully adumbrated in a friend’s report of a conversation the friend had

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had with a mutual acquaintance.4 The anecdote of the conversation was a box full of story-making materials: there was a model protagonist (a middleaged writer of reflective bent) speaking on the most pregnant of subjects (living life to the hilt), and the conversation’s setting, an “old Paris garden,” was a “token” in which “were sealed up values infinitely precious.” James recalled gloating over his gift: “There was of course the seal to break and each item of the packet to count over and estimate.” Best among the packet’s wonderful contents was a hint that the protagonist-to-be had recently come to see something new about himself, “so that the business of my tale and the march of my action, not to say the precious moral of everything is just my demonstration of this process of vision.” The task the anecdote set James, and he embraced with such a sense of opportunity, was to describe the unfolding of this protagonist’s consciousness with a clarity and depth unavailable to the man’s own un-enhanced eye. It was a real subject made for James’s signature form. Writing the preface, he was pleased to note that his writer’s instinct had been sound, and that The Ambassadors, his favorite of all his novels, had fulfilled the promise of its worldly origin, to which he could point as a sort of primal scene, still visible at the heart of the novel. The connection that was evident for Flaubert and James, between writing and discovering the truth, has become controversial, in part through the influence of the postmodernist theory of the relation of language to reality that both questions fiction’s claim to tell the truth and finds “truth” itself a suspect idea. Moreover, the foundational definition of postmodernism— “To simplify extremely, we take ‘postmodern’ to designate incredulity in regard to meta-narratives”5—by raising disbelief into a formal principle, has rendered form as suspect as truth. The meta-narratives in question have been denounced by postmodernists for being as duplicitous in form as in content. Indeed, it is the form of the meta-narrative that is viewed as its most misleading aspect. I have no quarrel with disbelieving meta-narratives but see no reason to extend an incredulity toward the meta-narrative of bourgeois progress into a suspension of belief in Le Père Goriot. Flaubert yielded to no one in his furious scorn for meta-narratives, while believing as fiercely in the power of form and style to find the truth and ensure its telling. For him, to describe was to penetrate beneath appearances. He represented appearances so as to reveal their unapparent truths. The postmodernist sense of representation, on the contrary, casts it as an alternative to true description. More relative even than interpretation, its ties to reality cut, anchors in the sea of the actual world weighed, postmodernist representation is a re-representation. When such a re-representation is not naïve, it lies, and writing becomes obfuscation. Flaubert, James, and Nabokov recognized (who does not?) that no

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complete or exact account of things can ever be acquired or tendered. But relativism is not the only alternative to empiricism. Taking “true” as a judgment and uncertainty as grounds for finding out, they tried for the most likely story. In the five fictions that provide the material for this book, representation emerges as an ambition to take hold of a more encompassing, knowing, disinterested, in a word, truer reality than can be apprehended directly and in the moment with eyes, ears, and hands. More than to these, more than to philosophy, in order to apprehend the real, Flaubert, James, and Nabokov gave priority of judgment to form: it was the work of form, they believed, that made their fiction truer. Postmodernism, incorporating it in the category of discourse, has generally neglected literature’s peculiarly formal nature. I have sought here to recall this special quality and to retrieve the idea that form is inherently truth-seeking; that, better than any other way of representing the world, artistic form takes in uncertainty yet decides. Indeed, what Flaubert, James, and Nabokov—Proust too—took as axiomatic about form, that it was material, physical, concrete, could be, I think, a major contribution to current studies of how we think, the ways we know. Fiction is certainly not the only way to describe reality immanently. Newton wrote about the earthly fate of apples, Poincaré about the difference between pies and donuts. But they wrote in ciphers and symbols, while Flaubert, James, and Nabokov addressed reality in its own tongue, in a common language of concrete detail. Proust’s memories-become-literature, “ideal without being abstract,”6 are both reason and matter, and suggest that the mind’s aesthetic capability may be its greatest cognitive attribute. For Flaubert, James, and Nabokov, literature came about immanently, in active rejection of transcendence. In the first chapter I will quote from a letter in which Flaubert mused that he might have been a great mystic, but for his love of form. This is in the context of telling Louise Colet about the terrible night he has spent reading Balzac’s Louis Lambert, in whose hero, maddened by metaphysics, Flaubert is terrified he may recognize himself.7 Only literary form has kept him from the same fate, by recasting metaphysics into physics. Firmly under the jurisdiction of the law of gravity, he has resisted the siren song of disembodied transcendence, to which he could not have listened and still written, there being no abstract, theoretical, ideal Madame Bovary. That form was a kind of stuff in itself, and lent this stuff to its content, is the inspiration for repeated emphatic paragraphs in his correspondence. For instance: “Style is life! it’s the very blood of thought!” (Le style c’est la vie! c’est le sang même de la pensée!) Or, “Form is the very flesh of thought, as thought is its soul, its life.” (La forme est la chair même de la pensée, comme la pensée en est l’âme, la vie.) Or, stooping to simile despite

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his often expressed contempt for comparison: “Form is like the sweat of thought. When it agitates itself within us, it sweats poetry.” (La forme est comme la sueur de la pensée. Quand elle s’agite en nous, elle transpire en poésie.) Or, explaining to Louise Colet that the most provincial hamlet was as good for writing about as Constantinople: “The artist has to elevate everything; he is like a pump, he has inside himself a great pipe that descends into the bowels of things, into the deep layers. He breathes in and makes what lay flat under the earth and no one ever saw burst into giant sheaves in the sun.” (L’artiste doit tout élever; il est comme une pompe, il a en lui un grand tuyau qui descend aux entrailles des choses, dans les couches profondes. Il aspire et fait jaillir au soleil en gerbes géantes ce qui était sous terre et ce qu’on ne voyait pas.) Style was matter, it engendered matter, and it gave birth in blood and sweat. In the same letter in which Flaubert credits form with keeping him terrestrial when he might have transcended into lunacy, he describes himself subject to another kind of mental dilation. For once, he tells his friend, the writing of Madame Bovary is going well, and this anomaly has been accompanied by a certain “exaltation” or “vibration.” “At the slightest idea that is about to come to me, I feel something like that odd sensation one feels in one’s nails when passing near a harp. This damn book! It hurts; how I feel it!” (A la moindre idée qui va me venir, j’éprouve quelque chose de cet effet singulier que l’on ressent aux ongles en passant près d’une harpe. Quel sacré livre! Il me fait mal; comme je le sens!)8 Art is the most radically immanent of our ways of thinking, and its process, as Flaubert described it, crossing modes of consciousness on its way into the depths of the mind, extends reason seamlessly into intuition. Flaubert wrote every sentence twenty, thirty, forty times, sometimes shouting them aloud so he could hear them, sense them. When he finally arrived at what was then a perfectly evident solution, the explanation for this being at last the right sentence (its clarity, elegance, and simplicity) was indistinguishably rational and intuitive: a fusion of thought and taste. James, for his part, often spoke of finding a subject by intuition, a “glimpse” at a dinner party or riding about London. Nabokov ascribed Lolita to a newspaper paragraph that caught his eye one day, although it was years before he made anything out of its account of a caged gorilla trying to write. These moments of inspiration were not emotional states. The exaltation, the vibration Flaubert felt upon getting Madame Bovary right was a bodily response to a mental state, and he insisted that it had nothing to do with his feelings, although he reacted to it with feeling. He once waxed very wroth with a book whose terrible writing, he said, arose from the author’s emotionalism: “One does not write with one’s heart but with one’s head, once again.” (On n’écrit pas avec son coeur, mais avec sa tête, encore une

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fois.)9 The ideal expressed in his eternal war on adjectives was a writing that, suffused with its subject, has passed beyond eloquence to description. The point was to write so that the writing worked free of one’s partiality, of one’s heart, using all the resources of the mind, conscious and unconscious, known and unknown, since the goal was to know what was unknown. James, advising a young writer to be one on whom nothing was lost, was describing the same process at another stage. His point was that a writer starts work by looking outward, toward the world, and must not lose anything of what he sees, not just because it might be just the thing for him, but because it is not his thing. This gossip at a London dinner party, that silhouette in the doorway of a Roman museum, is a momentary settling of the kaleidoscope of circumstance. A writer needs to attend to possibility, and James took his own advice, not only in finding his subjects but in the form in which he developed them. The unfolding of a James story leaves no aspect of its possibilities unexamined nor, to that extent, unrealized; and the rejected possibilities remain, after the close of the novel, as tangible as those selected. Isabel Archer’s refusal of Caspar Goodwood and her return to her odious husband at the end of Portrait of a Lady make entire sense without diminishing our knowledge of the alternatives to that decision, which remain permanently accessible to the reader, hardly even inflected by the ending. A literary work has to produce an ending, but these endings are seldom conclusive in shaping our understanding of what has been going on. Readers are notoriously critical in regard to endings and disapprove of them as often as not. This is one sign that literature is peculiarly unteleological, preserving the knowledge lost to choice or happenstance, and in that way soothing the nostalgia of unused opportunities, of paths not taken. In the last paragraph of his preface to The Golden Bowl, which, because of its length, I have put into a note, James wrote that “our literary deeds enjoy this marked advantage over many of our acts, that, though they go forth into the world and stray even in the desert, they don’t to the same extent lose themselves.”10 This passage promises the preservation not just of memory but of unrealized possibility, and this seems to me an important reason for trusting in literature, personally and politically. By preserving and valuing lost or demoted knowledge, it represents as well the contingency of any established order: however partisan the writer, the work is almost certain, through its form, to exceed his or her conviction. In the quip that a writer writes better than he or she knows, the paradox is only apparent, not real: by its nature, literature knows better than anyone.11 I conclude with a glance ahead to the first chapter, which is about Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, a baroque, orientalist fable that may not be selfevident as an illustration of fiction’s commitment to truth. The solidly real-

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istic Madame Bovary could appear more suitable, yet it was in connection with writing Salammbô that Flaubert was most explicit about the necessary relation of his fiction to facts, the truth, the real. Also, Salammbô is a perfect case in point in not defining “the real” naïvely. Its sometimes phantasmagoric scenes and events are all based on archival research, or so Flaubert claimed. But he never said he was simply reporting what he had read. He extrapolated, speculated, guessed, imagined: he argued fiercely that his Carthage was real, his admission that he had invented at least one piece of it not withstanding. Having chosen a subject about which it was impossible to be strictly accurate, he represented reality in Salammbô in much the same way any physical reality is represented in scientific models: Flaubert’s Carthage is plausible, probable, surely analogous to whichever of the possibilities for that city was in fact realized by history. I want to recall Proust’s association of literature and science to suggest that Flaubert can be seen as having elaborated the laws of aesthetics the way a scientist would the formulas of physical laws. He treated beauty as an organizing principle and style as a tool, in order to discover truths about the past and about his own time that were not empirically evident. It could be said of Carthage and Pont l’Évêque, of Salammbô and Félicité, that Flaubert worked them out by dint of form and style: the ancient capital and the modern village, the princess and the servant are “ideal without being abstract,” true in that they are beautiful and made beautiful in the quest for truth. In literature if not in life, seeking truth brings power. “Here is why I love art,” Flaubert wrote. It’s because at least there, in the world of fiction, everything is freedom.—You are sufficient unto all its needs, you do everything there, you are at once the king and his people, active and passive, sacrifice and priest. No limits; humanity is for you a puppet with bells that you ring at the end of his sentences, like a tumbler those at his shoe-tips. (I have often that way avenged myself nicely on my existence. I deeded myself piles of lovely things with my pen. I gave myself women, money, travels.) How the cramped soul unfolds in this blue yonder that extends all the way to the frontiers of the True. Voilà pourquoi j’aime l’art. C’est que là, au moins, tout est liberté dans ce monde des fictions.—On y assouvit tout, on y fait tout, on est à la fois son roi et son peuple, actif et passif, victime et prêtre. Pas de limites; l’humanité y est pour vous un pantin à grelots que l’on fait sonner au bout de sa phrase comme un bâteleur au bout de son pied. (Je me suis souvent ainsi bien vengé de l’existence. Je me suis repassé un tas de douceurs avec ma plume. Je me suis donné des femmes, de l’argent, des voyages). Comme l’âme courbée se déploie dans cet azur, qui ne s’arrête qu’aux frontières du Vrai.12

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The capital “V” of his “Vrai” enobles the mundane truth but does not abstract it. Flaubert was no Platonist, and the world of his fiction was free not from reality but within it. There are more things in literature than in life: in life, contingency excludes; in literature, it includes. Past contingencies of time, place, circumstance, and chance, art could travel beyond existence to the frontiers of the True, where reality abounds with women, money, voyages, princesses, gods, and aqueducts.

bÇx Salammbô Three Rough Stones beneath a Rainy Sky

I Salammbô is not widely read, and so I begin with a plot summary. The heroine who lends the novel her name is the daughter of Hamilcar, Carthage’s greatest general in that city’s days of imperial glory. As the story opens, Carthage has just emerged more or less triumphant from the first Punic War. However, for that war, the Carthaginians hired an army of Mercenaries, or Barbarians, gathered from all over Africa, and these soldiers now await their pay. The rich merchants of Carthage renege, and the enraged Mercenaries turn on their former employers. The new war proceeds indecisively until a former Carthaginian slave, Spendius, tells Mâtho, the Mercenary general, about a temple to Tanit, Carthage’s patron goddess, in which stands a statue to the goddess adorned with a mantle that is the gage of Tanit’s protection. By stealing the sacred relic, Mâtho and the slave can demoralize the Carthaginians. Mâtho and Spendius sneak into the temple and carry away the mantle. When he discovers the theft, Tanit’s high priest dispatches Salammbô to Mâtho’s tent to recover the mantle. Earlier, at a great feast offered by Hamilcar to thank the Mercenaries for their help in winning the war, Mâtho had glimpsed and loved the beautiful Salammbô. When she now appears in his tent, he is confused by passion and lets her carry off the relic. Nothing decisive emerges from this incident, the fortunes of war wax and wane, but Carthage is eventually victorious, and Mâtho, taken prisoner, is put to death by being made to run a gauntlet of thousands of Carthaginians jostling to flay him alive. He dies at the end of this ghastly journey, falling before the tribune upon which Salammbô stands with the nobility of Carthage. When he falls at her feet, she too sinks lifeless, and her death closes the novel. Published right after Madame Bovary and so benefiting from its success and notoriety, Salammbô still did not find a ready public, nor has it since.

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Probably most of those who have read it today had it assigned in school for qualities other than readability: its brilliant writing, its exquisite French, and its immense learning, the last commensurately disputed. Salammbô’s setting being a city best known for its annihilation, Flaubert’s depiction was naturally difficult to document. But Flaubert was adamant in defense of its total truth and entire veracity, as for instance against the formidable chief conservationist of the Department of Antiquities of the Louvre, an archeologist named Guillaume Froehner. Froehner impugned almost every one of the political and cultural features with which Flaubert had endowed the city and its inhabitants, as, for instance, the gods, at least half of whom Froehner was certain Flaubert had invented: “Who ever heard of an Aptoukhos, a Schaoûl or a Mastiman? Who does not know that Micipsa was not divine but a man of flesh and bone, king of Numidia?”1 In a very long article filled with the details that Flaubert had gotten wrong, the Louvre’s ranking orientalist scoffed at Flaubert’s supposed research, which had managed to confuse the facts and traduce the feel of ancient Carthage. His never had and never could have existed. Indeed, it was this broader failure that Froehner regretted most: getting the details wrong might not have been fatal, had Flaubert had any credible sense of the whole. Flaubert, scorning an easier global defense of his Carthage, rejoined that every single detail, every deity, every rite and ceremony, every outcropping in the landscape, the precious stones in the treasury, the pebbles on the beach, the ramparts, the women’s fashions, the musical instruments, the dance steps, the recipes, each had its unimpeachable source, or, more often, several. “Who ever heard of an Aptoukhos?” Who? D’Avezac (Cyrénaïque) referring to a temple in the surroundings of Cyrène; “of a Schaoûl?”, but that’s a name I gave a slave (see my page 91); “or of a Mastiman?” He is mentioned as a god by Corippus. (See Johanneis and Mem. de l’Académie des Inscript., volume 12, p. 181.) “Who doesn’t know that Micipsa was not a divinity but a man?” This is exactly what I say, sir, and very clearly too, on the same page 91, when Salammbô calls her slaves, “Come here, Kroum, Enva, Micipsa, Schaoûl!” (391; my translation)

Froehner accused Flaubert of having dug Hamilcar’s treasure out of medieval Christian lore? “Sir! The stones were all there in Pliny and Theophrastus” (393). He could go on, and did at length, invoking as well, Herodotus (from whom he had learned that the Lydians in Xerxes’s army wore women’s dresses) (393), the Bible, “Cahen, volume XVI, 37” (392), Armandi, Florus, Diodorus, Cicero (on infant sacrifice) (391), and, of course, Polybius who was his major source. To top off this avalanche of a rebuttal, and lest the tribe of Froehner mislead posterity, Flaubert gathered a dossier of what he called “justifications” to be placed alongside the manuscript in the reserves of the

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Bibliothèque Nationale (“Dossier constitué par G. Flaubert, ms. NAF 23 662 du département des Manuscripts de la Bibliothèque nationale, fol. 147 a 168.”), where it testifies to Salammbô’s learning to this day.2 Without taking sides, we can simply say that Salammbô represents an enormous work of scholarly research. Before beginning to write, Flaubert spent long months reading and digging in archives. The first mention of the novel in his correspondence tells a friend that he is in Paris studying archeology.3 Reconstructing the everyday life of ancient Carthage was a Herculean task. Flaubert fretted about the mountain of books he had to read and lamented his meager findings. He pored over classics and gathered reports of the latest digs, but Carthage remained hazy, and for too long he could not start writing. “For the last six weeks,” he wrote to his friend Ernest Feydeau, “I back away from Carthage like a coward. I pile notes upon notes, books upon books, because I don’t feel on track. I don’t see my target clearly.” (Depuis six semaines, je recule comme un lâche devant Carthage. J’accumule notes sur notes, livres sur livres, car je ne me sens pas en train. Je ne vois pas nettement mon objectif.) If he could not bring his novel to life, it must be because his knowledge of the history was not sufficiently intimate. “For a book to ‘sweat’ the truth, you have to be stuffed to the gills with your subject. Then the color comes naturally, like something that is bound to happen and like the flowering of the idea itself.” (Pour qu’un livre ‘sue’ la vérité, il faut être bourré de son sujet par dessus les oreilles. Alors la couleur vient tout naturellement, comme un résultat fatal et comme une floraison de l’idée même.)4 Earlier, during the travail of Madame Bovary, he had groaned to Louise Colet about the terrible headaches he developed by reading deep into the night on the subject of club feet in order to write the chapter about Charles Bovary’s botched surgery. It was the only way, he explained; “To write, you need to know everything.” (Il faudrait tout connaître pour écrire.)5 Three months after despairing that he could ever impart enough heat to his thankless tale to make it sweat truth, Flaubert was finally writing, but not happily. To Feydeau, he grumbled that it was hell trying to create “a continuous truth, that is, a series of significant and likely details in an environment two thousand years away” (une vérité constante, à savoir une série de détails saillants et probables dans un milieu qui est à deux mille ans d’ici). At that distance, every description involves translating basic terms and references, and “what an abyss this opens between the absolute and the work!” (quel abîme cela creuse entre l’absolu et l’oeuvre!)6 The vision he found so appalling, of an abyss between the work and the absolute (“the absolute” meaning not one absolute truth but the totality of possibilities that contained the reality the work strives to capture), implies, as an ideal opposite, no division between the writing and its object.

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The task of the writer is to connect them.7 Choosing a vanished city as his subject, Flaubert had made his task exceptionally difficult. Six months into the writing, the vertigo of that abyss became intolerable, and he threw over books and notes to go look for himself, though all there was to see were broken walls and the lay of the land. Returning, he wrote Feydeau that he was starting over, he had had it completely wrong. “I knock it all down. It was absurd! impossible! False!” ( Je démolis tout. C’était absurde! impossible! Faux!)8 Better informed, he still labored under the handicap of his subject’s excessive exoticism. But there was a way, he explained to Feydeau, to bridge the chasm of time and strangeness, and to strike the exact note, sound the precise tone (“la note juste”). The explanation formulates a central principle of his writing. “This can be attained by an exceedingly intense condensation of the idea.” (Cela s’obtient par une condensation excessive de l’idée.) (Italics original.)9 Salammbô’s opening paragraphs illustrate this intimacy of form and fact.10 It was at Megara,11 a suburb of Carthage, in Hamilcar’s gardens. The soldiers whom he had commanded in Sicily were treating themselves to a great feast to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Eryx, and as their master was away and there were a large number of them, they ate and drank in complete freedom. The captains, in their bronze buskins, had occupied the central path, under a purple, gold-fringed awning, which stretched from the stable wall to the first terrace of the palace; the bulk of the soldiers were spread out under the trees, where numerous flat-roofed buildings could be seen, presses, cellars, stores, bakeries, and arsenals, with a yard for the elephants, pits for the wild beasts, a prison for the slaves. Fig-trees surrounded the kitchens; a sycamore wood extended as far as clumps of greenery, where pomegranates shone resplendent among the white tufts of the cotton-shrubs; vines, heavy with bunches of fruit, climbed up the pine branches; a bed of roses bloomed beneath the plane-trees; here and there on the lawns lilies swayed; the paths were sprinkled with black sand, mixed with powdered coral, and in the middle the cypress avenue stretched from one end to the other with a double colonnade of green obelisks.12 The palace, built of yellow-flecked Numidian marble, rose up at the back with its four terraced storeys on massive foundations. With its great ebony staircase going straight up, the prow of a defeated galley fixed in the corners of each step, with its scarlet doors quartered with a black cross, its bronze grills as protection against scorpions below, and its trellisses of gilded rods blocking apertures above, it seemed to the soldiers, in its savage opulence, to be as solemn and impenetrable as Hamilcar’s own features.13

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C’était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d’Hamilcar. Les soldats qu’il avait commandés en Sicile se donnaient un grand festin pour célébrer le jour anniversaire de la bataille d’Eryx, et comme le maître était absent et qu’ils se trouvaient nombreux, ils mangeaient et ils buvaient en pleine liberté. Les capitaines, portant des cothurnes de bronze, s’étaient placés dans le chemin du milieu, sous un voile de pourpre à franges d’or, qui s’étendait depuis le mur des écuries jusqu’à la première terrasse du palais; le commun des soldats était répandu sous les arbres, où l’on distinguait quantité de bâtiments à toit plat, pressoirs, celliers, magasins, boulangeries et arsenaux, avec une cour pour les éléphants, des fosses pour les bêtes féroces, une prison pour les esclaves. Des figuiers entouraient les cuisines; un bois de sycomores se prolongeait jusqu’à des masses de verdure, où des grenades resplendissaient parmi les touffes blanches des cotonniers: des vignes, chargées de grappes, montaient dans le branchage des pins; un champ de roses s’épanouissait sous des platanes; de place en place sur des gazons, se balançaient des lis; un sable noir mêlé à de la poudre de corail, parsemait les sentiers, et, au milieu, l’avenue des cyprès faisait d’un bout à l’autre comme une double colonnade d’obélisques verts. Le palais, bâti en marbre numidique tacheté de jaune, superposait tout au fond, sur de larges assises, ses quatre étages en terrasses. Avec son grand escalier droit en bois d’ébène, portant aux angles de chaque marche la proue d’une galère vaincue, avec ses portes rouges écartelées d’une croix noire, ses grillages d’airain qui le défendaient en bas des scorpions, et ses treillis de baguettes dorées qui bouchaient en haut ses ouvertures, il semblait aux soldats, dans son opulence farouche, aussi solennel et impénétrable que le visage d’Hamilcar.14

After the fuss and fury of its preparation, the first sentence—“It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar”—sits quite still. It lists in apposition three places with nothing to inflect them, not an adjective, not a metaphor or simile, only the identifying name and location: at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar. Precise without offering any qualifications, with no transitive verbs to impart even a potential for activity, it has only its rhythm to give it life, and to prevent its resolving into mere geographical notation. Herman Melville’s opening of Moby Dick, “Call me Ishmael,” begins that story by commanding an immediate response. “It was at Megara” makes no sign to anyone. By the third clause, which reaps the self-evidence of the second, which had already garnered that of the first, knowing exactly where the story is taking place (“It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar”) has the effect opposite to Ishmael’s interpolation, of

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explicitly not pulling us in, even keeping us off. It is sonorous rather than communicative. Also, organizing itself around the verb “to be” is the closest a sentence can come to not having a verb. Salammbô’s first sentence makes its one “was” do for all three of its clauses and is consequently almost inert, active only enough to denote the identities that connect Megara, Carthage, and Hamilcar’s gardens. The “was,” doing little more than ensuring grammatical decorum, says that each succeeding phrase is what it is; together, they are what they are, and the whole sentence this short of tautology. The second sentence, a new beginning with its own paragraph, is more engaging. The syntax is again mostly immobile, flatly declarative, and the sentence is doubly end-stopped, by its period and by the end of the paragraph. However, the content is livelier, in that it contains persons and actions; and, in the second half, something just may be stirring. We have learned, in the first half, that the assembled soldiers are having a feast to celebrate their victory in a major battle.15 The second clause does seem to be signaling a dangerous situation: “and as their master was away and there were a large number of them, they ate and drank in complete freedom” (et comme le maître était absent et qu’ils se trouvaient nombreux, ils mangeaient et ils buvaient en pleine liberté). The general is away, the soldiers are on their own: this could be a worry. Not yet. The prose allays any rising concern by putting the explanation first (as their master was away), so that danger is overlain with reason. The narration proceeds in the same calm voice. An eternity of declarative sentences, stretching over four or five pages, tells us everything about how and where the men have disposed themselves on the grounds, and what the grounds themselves are like. There are, for instance, many kinds of outbuildings, including storage sheds, stables, enclosures for the wild beasts, and a prison. Then there are many varieties of trees and plants, arranged in beds and along paths of black sand mingled with powdered coral. There is a palace built of marble with an ebony staircase, its windows guarded with golden bars. Everywhere there are men of all nations and races, dressed in every kind of woven cloth, in feathers and furs, painted, bejeweled, whole and maimed, jovial and fierce, standing, sitting, and lying about. There are slender Greeks alongside Egyptians who walk with their shoulders oddly hunched, jostling archers from Cappadocia who have the habit of painting large flowers on their bodies, Lydians wearing women’s robes and earrings. Torrents of these men pour through all the paths of the gardens. A cacophony of languages rings out: Ionian endings clashing with the consonants of desert tribes, these as harsh as the cries of jackals, and a heavy Dorian patois contending with Celtic syllables, rolling like the wheels of battle chariots. Luxurious furnishings have been set out for the feast: embroidered cushions grouped around enormous platters made of silver or fine hard

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woods, low tables covered with scarlet cloths. The birds in a green sauce, which comprise the first course of the feast, are followed by every variety of shellfish to be found on the Punic coast. Then antelope with their horns, peacocks with their feathers, entire sheep stewed in sweet wine, roast of camel and buffalo, not forgetting small dogs fattened with olives, a dish that only Carthaginians like and that everyone else finds disgusting, heavy round cheeses, mounds of fruits and breads, served on great amber dishes. The men drink Greek wines along with others from Campagna, also fermented liquors made from lotus and other aromatic plants. They eat, drink, sing, vomit, dance; they are euphoric, depressed, and, finally, violent. Violence explodes, as the dependent clause of the second sentence predicted (“as the master was away and there were a large number of them”) before it was shushed by the impassive grammar. Lying about somnolently replete, the soldiers become aware of a distant chanting, which turns out to be coming from the enclosure where Hamilcar keeps his slaves. Some soldiers go off to free these slaves, one of whom reveals the existence, in the palace treasury, of a set of precious goblets. The soldiers demand to be served in these goblets, the palace servants refuse, and the Barbarians deem themselves insulted. From insult, they pass to injury: in the commotion, a Barbarian rolls on the ground in a fit, the others think he has been poisoned, then that they have all been poisoned; they fall upon the slaves they have just freed, and, intoxicated with the bloodshed, the drunken, leaderless horde goes on a rampage. Breaking into an inner courtyard, some soldiers come upon a small pond against whose bottom of white pebbles and gold dust can be seen a school of brilliantly colored giant fish, their mouths encrusted with jewels. These fish, the narrative explains, are sacred descendants of a primordial devilfish from whose egg emerged the goddess Tanit. The soldiers haul the sacred fish out by the gills and, throwing them into caldrons of boiling water, are vastly amused to see them thrashing about in agony. Chaos descends: The surging crowd of soldiers jostled each other. They were no longer afraid. They began drinking again. The perfumes flowing from their brows wet their ragged tunics with large drops, and as they leaned with both hands on the tables, which seemed to them to be tossing about like ships at sea, they drunkenly gazed round so that they could devour with their eyes what they could not seize. Others walked right through the dishes on their crimson cloths and kicked to pieces the ivory stools and glass Tyrian phials. The sound of songs blended with the death-rattle of the slaves dying amid the broken cups. They demanded wine, food, gold. They cried out for women. They raved in a hundred languages. Some of them thought they were at the baths, because of the mist floating around them, or, noticing the foliage, imagined they were out hunting and ran upon their companions as though they were wild beasts. The trees caught fire one after another, and

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the towering masses of greenery, from which emerged long white spirals, looked like volcanoes beginning to smoke. The clamour redoubled; the wounded lions roared in the darkness. (24) La houle des soldats se poussait. Ils n’avaient plus peur. Ils recommençaient à boire. Les parfums qui leur coulaient du front mouillaient de gouttes larges leurs tuniques en lambeaux, et s’appuyant des deux poings sur les tables qui leur semblaient osciller comme des navires, ils promenaient à l’entour leurs gros yeux ivres, pour dévorer par la vue ce qu’ils ne pouvaient prendre. D’autres, marchant tout au milieu des plats sur les nappes de pourpre, cassaient à coups de pied les escabeaux d’ivoire et les fioles tyriennes en verre. Les chansons se mêlaient au râle des esclaves agonisant parmi les coupes brisées. Ils demandaient du vin, des viandes, de l’or. Ils criaient pour avoir des femmes. Ils déliraient en cent langages. Quelques-uns se croyaient aux étuves, â cause de la buée qui flottait autour d’eux, ou bien, apercevant des feuillages, ils s’imaginaient être à la chasse et couraient sur leurs compagnons comme sur des bêtes sauvages. L’incendie de l’un à l’autre gagnait tous les arbres, et les hautes masses de verdure, d’où s’échappaient de longues spirales blanches, semblaient des volcans qui commencent à fumer. La clameur redoublait; les lions blessés rugissaient dans l’ombre. (717)

The soldiers flail about in a frenzy of demands and frustrations, the fire spreads, a clamor of men and beasts rises to the skies. The syntax abets a new mobility. Most of the sentences are shorter, and the long ones, unfettered by semicolons, move faster. Yet, for all the men running amok, the fires like volcanoes on the verge of eruption, and the roaring lions, there is still no story, only motion. Enraged human beings hurl themselves at one another, thrash about, kill, are killed, triumph, fall, scream, wail, walk, and talk, without any of this launching a story. Neither protagonist nor plot has yet emerged. The most aware character could have offered only a partial view of the situation in Hamilcar’s garden; no character and no plot could ever bridge Flaubert’s “abyss between the absolute and the work” as completely as does this writing. Grammatical structure—“and as their master was away and there were a large number of them, they ate and drank in complete freedom”—and a composition of exact, often technical terms, arrayed by an infallible syntax into an exorbitance of hallucinatory tableaux, warn calmly of an impending catastrophe no one seems to sense, not even Hamilcar, carelessly absent. The writing piles up scenes of feasting and fury with the precision of someone building a house of cards kept up, however vulnerably, by its own architectural laws. Inevitably, the cards fall, but the grammar describes the collapse as precisely as it did the construction. (“Some of [the soldiers] thought they

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were at the baths, because of the mist floating around them, or, noticing the foliage, imagined they were out hunting and ran upon their companions like wild beasts. . . . The clamour redoubled [it neither merely augmented nor grew incalculably]; the wounded lions roared in the darkness.”) For all the noise, there is an impression of silence, as if none of the actors in the scene was capable of really hearing the lions, the death-rattles of the slaughtered slaves, the screams and deliriums. There seems to be a barrier between what these actors know of the world and what Flaubert’s writing will reveal of it. Though more intelligent characters than the brutal mercenaries will emerge—Hamilcar, Mâtho, Hannon—their understandings will still appear implicit, instinctual rather than intellectual. The last sentence of the novel explains the death of Salammbô not, as my plot summary may have suggested, as the last paroxysm of a mind in distress, but as the fulfillment of a superstition the novel has never embraced. “Thus died Hamilcar’s daughter, for having touched Tanit’s veil” (282). (Ainsi mourut la fille d’Hamilcar pour avoir touché au manteau de Tanit [994].) Note that this does not ascribe her death to her own belief that touching Tanit’s veil would kill her; it just says she died for having touched it. The reason for Salammbô’s death belongs to the novel’s pretext; its text offers no explanation, although we could imagine one or two (of a broken heart; of being torn between her passion for Mâtho and her love of her father and of Carthage), and seems uninterested in finding one. No wonder Salammbô is one of the great unreadable books.16 Its exhaustive expositions make exhausting reading. An unvaryingly intense illumination produces a bewildering glare. We cannot connect to the story by sympathizing with its heroes and heroines, who are made into puppets by the writing’s exclusive authority. We are passive spectators in an enchanted world. In regard to such attenuated beings as Mâtho and Salammbô, it seems futile to speculate about other futures than their overdetermined fates. In sum, the beginning of Salammbô promises a luxury of wonderfully detailed narrative, magnificence and horror, pomp and circumstance, all of it emerging from a mine of facts cut and polished like rare stones by Flaubert’s writing, so that they reveal hitherto unseen facets. But nothing about this beginning implies new developments, of the sort (characteristic of the novel as a genre) that is plotted by enterprising characters to reroute destiny.

II Yet there is one enterprising character in Salammbô, and he does manage to produce a new development. It is this character, the slave Spendius, who sparks the violence in the opening scene by revealing the existence of

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the precious goblets hidden in Hamilcar’s coffers. He next reveals the existence of an aqueduct, which provides access to Carthage and the temple of Tanit. Elsewhere in the novel, it is the narration that presents to us the various features of both the inanimate and animate worlds of Salammbô, but Spendius wields his knowledge himself, to his own ends. In so doing, he behaves in the usual way of characters in novels, producing a plot out of a personal ambition enabled by his knowledge of the world. Except that, in a narrative whose cardinal principle, according to its author, was its historical veracity, Spendius’s facts are historically false. The part of Salammbô that is like an ordinary novel unfolds in relation to the novel’s one acknowledged untruth. For there was no aqueduct in Carthage, and Flaubert, far from concealing that he had invented the one in Salammbô, volunteered the information to his friend and critic, Sainte-Beuve,17 who had written a gently critical review of the just-published Salammbô. Flaubert answered with a lengthy defense, which nonetheless concluded: I confess! My secret opinion is that there was no aqueduct in Carthage despite the ruins visible there today. Therefore, I was careful to forestall all objections by a hypocritical sentence addressed to the archeologists.18 I took a firm stand recalling that the aqueduct was at the time a new Roman invention, and that the one presently visible [at Carthage] was rebuilt on the site of the old one. I was pursued by the memory of Belisarius breaching the Roman aqueduct of Carthage, and besides it made a lovely entry point for Spendius and Mâtho. Never mind! my aqueduct was cowardly! Confiteor! Opposite: Fig. 1. In a dossier of materials Flaubert used as background for Salammbô, a list of queries in the author’s handwriting and addressed to himself shows his determination to describe Carthage as it really was. The first query sets the tone: “how to explain the quantity of underground passages, and arches—all the constructions seem to have been supported by arches” (comment expliquer la quantité de souterrains, & voutes—toutes les constructions étaient donc voutées). But number 6 on the list speaks to Flaubert’s special worry over the aqueduct: “Is it absurd to suppose the Roman aqueduct built on the remains of a Punic aqueduct? And idem for the cisterns?” (y a t-il absurdité à supposer l’aqueduc romain, bati sur les restes d’un aqueduc punique, id. pour les citernes). Number 10 shows him still brooding over the possibility that after all there may have existed a Punic aqueduct before the Romans built theirs: “Why does Falbe [a member of the ‘Society for the Exploration of Carthage’ (founded 1837) who drew the first archeological map of the city] say that the large cisterns are Punic? What difference [between these and] the little ones?” (pourquoi F dit-il que les grandes citernes sont puniques? quelle différence avec les petites?). If Flaubert invented his aqueduct, it was not with a light heart, nor without a sense (aesthetic, intuitive) that it must somehow have existed. Reproduced by permission of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

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Aveu! mon opinion secrète est qu’il n’y avait point d’aqueduc à Carthage, malgré les ruines actuelles de l’aqueduc. Aussi, ai-je eu soin de prévenir d’avance toutes les objections par une phrase hypocrite à l’adresse des archéologues. J’ai mis les pieds dans le plat lourdement, en rappelant que c’était une invention romaine alors nouvelle, et que l’aqueduc d’à présent a été refait sur l’ancien. Le souvenir de Belisarius coupant l’aqueduc (romain) de Carthage m’a poursuivi, et puis c’était une belle entrée pour Spendius et Mâtho. N’importe! mon aqueduc est une lacheté! Confiteor!

The tone of this confession is especially interesting for its contrast, not only with the tone in which Flaubert defended his scholarly honor before the bar of ancient archeology, but with that of all his correspondence about Salammbô. He could not even begin to write Salammbô, he had insisted to Feydeau, Colet, the Goncourts, and everyone else to whom he was then writing, unless he knew everything about the historical Carthage, and this was because the fictional Carthage, in order to be true as literature, had to be accurate in every detail. To write, one has to know everything because only then will the work sweat the truth. Here, in the letter to Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert reported as a pleasant prank having invented an essential piece of Carthaginian architecture. As literary gentlemen and scholars, Flaubert winked, he and Sainte-Beuve understood that a work’s truthfulness did not stand or fall on a pile of stones. Then, when Sainte-Beuve responded in kind, one professional to another, not even questioning the truth of certain descriptions, but only the likelihood of the truth’s being accessible, Flaubert was insulted. This is what Sainte-Beuve had written: Descriptions being the major part of the book, I have to say a few words about them. They have precision, depth, and sometimes an African grandeur, as to the landscape, but overall they are very monotonous. I would have liked a more graded arrangement and an observation of natural perspective. I will never get used to this picturesque method which consists of describing exhaustively and projecting uniformly, what cannot be seen, cannot reasonably be noticed. For example, if one walks at night in the dark or just by starlight, one ought not describe the blue stones on which one is walking, nor yellow spots on a horse’s chest, since no one sees them. Les descriptions étant la partie capitale du livre, j’en dois dire quelques mots. Elles ont de l’exactitude, du relief, parfois de la grandeur africaine, en ce qui concerne le paysage, mais, en tout, bien de la monotonie. J’y voudrais plus de gradation, et qu’on y observât la perspective naturelle. Je ne m’accoutumerai jamais à ce procédé pittoresque qui consiste à décrire à satiété, et avec une saillie partout égale, ce qu’on ne voit pas, ce qu’on ne peut raisonnablement remarquer. Par exemple, si l’on marche la nuit dans l’obscurité ou à la simple clarté des étoiles, on ne devrait pas décrire minutieusement des

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pierres bleues sur lesquelles on marche, ou des taches jaunes au poitrail d’un cheval, puisque personne ne les voit.19

To this, Flaubert responded not at all in the mood of his “Confiteor!” No more winking at objective facts: true is true. “If I put blue before stones, it is because blue is the exact word, believe me, and be equally persuaded that one distinguishes the colors of stones very well by starlight. Ask all those who have traveled to the Orient, or go see for yourself.” (Si je mets bleues après pierres, c’est que bleues est le mot juste, croyez-moi, et soyez également persuadé que l’on distingue très bien la couleur des pierres à la clarté des étoiles. Interrogez là-dessus tous les voyageurs en Orient, ou allez-y voir.)20 Everything in his descriptions was strictly true; he had written “blue” because it was the exact word (the phrase le mot juste merges style and science). Sainte-Beuve objected that one would not see colors by night? Well, in fact, starlight is wholly adequate, and Flaubert concluded as he had in answering Froehner and company: if you have questions about the reality of what I have described, go ask those who have seen Carthage, or go look for yourself. As he had. What of the aqueduct whose ruins he thus saw for himself were not of the historical period in which his story was set? About this, he had nothing to say. I want to dwell on it a little longer nevertheless because the three stages I have just retraced—the invention of the aqueduct, Flaubert’s confession, and his denial that it made a liar out of him—nicely outline the terms of his commitment to his fiction’s truthfulness. Flaubert had addressed the question of literary invention earlier. To his frequent correspondent Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, who thought she recognized herself in Emma, he answered that this was quite impossible: “Madame Bovary has nothing of the true in it. It is a totally invented story; I have put nothing in it either of my feelings or of my life” (italics in original). (Madame Bovary n’a rien de vrai. C’est une histoire totalement inventée; je n’y ai rien mis ni de mes sentiments ni de mon existence.) Vaunting invention in opposition to subjective truth, he lined up invention with literature and opposed both to experience. The personal slant lent by experience distorted the truth of things. Mlle de Chantepie must never take a literary portrait for a depiction of the author’s personal experience: “The illusion [of subjective truth] (if there is one) comes on the contrary from the impersonality of the work. It is one of my principles that one must not write oneself. The artist should be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful, felt everywhere and never seen (italics in original).” (L’illusion [s’il y en a une] vient au contraire de l’impersonnalité de l’oeuvre. C’est un de mes principes, qu’il ne faut pas s’écrire. L’artiste doit être dans son oeuvre comme Dieu dans la création, invisible et tout-puissant; qu’on le sente partout, mais qu’on ne le voie pas.) The letter continues, stressing that the high status Flaubert accords here to invention (inconsistently, given the low status he assigns it when it is

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represented by the “cowardly” aqueduct) rests on its participation in the quest for an objective reality. Invention and discovery merge: “Also, Art has to raise itself above personal feelings and nervous susceptibilities! It is time we lent it, through the most rigorous method, the precision of the physical sciences!” (Et puis, l’Art doit s’élever au-dessus des affections personnelles et des susceptibilités nerveuses. Il est temps de lui donner, par une méthode impitoyable, la précision des sciences physiques!) Earlier, to Louise Colet, furious at her rejection of the corrections he proposed for a poem she had shown him, he claimed to have developed over many years a “mathematical precision in the matter of taste!” (une précision mathématique en fait de goût!).21 We should recall, reading this call to scientific, mathematical precision, that the person issuing it in his personal letters is a writer of novels and tales, and that his audience is, in the first instance, a decidedly literary lady, and in the other, a writer of fictions herself. His point is clear: fiction is not an exercise of subjectivity but an effort at objectivity. As Flaubert defined invention in the letter to Mlle de Chantepie, it is the opposite of subjectivity, as free as he can make it from the bias of his personal experience. The invention of the aqueduct was not an important departure from the all-important principle of accuracy. It was a contrivance, a gimmick, hence “cowardly,” an inferior sort of writing, but not a betrayal. So long as the invented aqueduct was in aid of discovery, everything was fine—it could be treated, entre nous, as a little trick on accuracy. In fact, Flaubert concluded his defense to SainteBeuve of Salammbô’s truth by shrugging off the whole thing: At any rate, according to all appearances and my personal impressions, I believe that I have constructed something that resembles Carthage. But that is not the question, I don’t give a damn about archeology! If the color is not unified, if the details are incoherent, if the moral values don’t derive from the religion and the actions from the passions, if the characters are inconsistent, if the costumes are not appropriate to local customs and the architecture to the climate, if there is lacking, in a word, harmony, the work is false. Otherwise not. It all goes together. Cependant, d’après toutes les vraisemblances et mes impressions à moi, je crois avoir fait quelque chose qui ressemble à Carthage. Mais là n’est pas la question, je me moque de l’archéologie! Si la couleur n’est pas une, si les détails détonnent, si les moeurs ne dérivent pas de la religion et les faits des passions, si les caractères ne sont pas suivis, si les costumes ne sont pas apropriés aux usages et les architectures au climat, s’il n’y a pas, en un mot, harmonie, je suis dans le faux. Sinon, non. Tout se tient.22

The claim that his Carthage resembled the original appealed to fact. The claim that the fictive Carthage is a true Carthage appeals to a different

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objective criterion: harmony. In the letter to Mlle de Chantepie, immediately following his recommendation of scientific rigor as a model for literature, he also specified that literary rigor was peculiarly a linguistic affair: “Style nonetheless remains for me the major difficulty, form, the indefinable Beautiful resulting from the very conception and which is the splendor of the True, as Plato said (italics in original).” (La difficulté capitale, pour moi, n’en reste pas moins le style, la forme, le Beau indéfinissable résultant de la conception même et qui est la splendeur du Vrai, comme disait Platon.) Invoking Plato in resonant periods addressed to an ardent admirer was perhaps not the best occasion for precision. But the gist of what Flaubert was saying is familiar from his other writings on the subject: style is the link to truth, and beauty the guarantee of style, therefore of truth. A few days later, writing again to Mlle de Chantepie, he was still ruminating on the business of the relation between the true and the beautiful when he recalled for her the story of Goethe, who is said to have cried out, on his deathbed, for more light. Flaubert understood perfectly: “Oh! Yes, light! Were it to burn through to our guts. It is wonderfully voluptuous to learn, to assimilate to yourself the True through the intermediary of the Beautiful.” (Oh! Oui, de la lumière! Dût-elle nous brûler jusqu’aux entrailles! C’est une grande volupté que d’apprendre, que de s’assimiler le Vrai par l’intermédiaire du Beau.)23 Invention, on the other hand, was a matter of plot and convenience (the aqueduct took Spendius and Mâtho back and forth to the temple of Tanit), and while its invention was no great sin (not the sin it would have been to project into Salammbô some personal taste or feeling), the aqueduct was not up to Flaubert’s standard of truth, and therefore of beauty. The clarity that was Salammbô’s ultimate task and privilege would not emerge from the parts dealing with the aqueduct; it was useful, period. Enough said. But there might be more to say. For the aqueduct, merely convenient in the theft of the sacred mantle, later in the story bids to become pivotal, and actually to turn the plot 180 degrees away from the historical record. In this second instance of its usefulness, the aqueduct lends its name to the whole chapter, although it is in play only in the last page and a half, as if Flaubert, in thinking of a name for his chapter, had thought disproportionately long about what was ostensibly only a small part.

III In the preceding chapter, the Barbarians have suffered a fearful defeat. “The Aqueduct” opens on a scene of devastation: “Twelve hours later all that remained of the Mercenaries was a heap of wounded, dead and dying (195–211).” (Douze heures après, il ne restait plus des Mercenaires qu’un tas

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de blessés, de morts et d’agonisants. [898–916]) One of the novel’s signature portrayals of repellent misery follows shortly: Armour, pitchforks, trumpets, bits of wood, iron and bronze, corn, straw, and clothes were scattered amongst the corpses; here and there some nearly extinguished fire-arrow burned against a heap of baggage; the ground, in certain places, disappeared beneath shields; the corpses of horses lay one after another like a chain of little mounds; one could see legs, sandals, arms, coats of mail and helmeted heads, kept in by their chinstraps and rolling about like balls [note that the simile of “little mounds,” as here that of “balls,” de-animates the dead, a familiar process throughout Flaubert’s descriptions]; scalps hung on thorns; in pools of blood disembowelled elephants lay in their death throes, still carrying their towers; there were sticky things underfoot and muddy patches, though it had not rained. This confused mass of corpses filled the entire mountain-side from top to bottom. (195) Des cuirasses, des fourches, des clairons, des morceaux de bois, de fer et d’airain, du blé, de la paille et des vêtements s’éparpillaient au milieu des cadavres; ça et là quelque phalarique prête à s’éteindre brûlait contre un monceau de bagages; la terre, en de certains endroits, disparaissait sous les boucliers; des charognes de chevaux se suivaient comme une série de monticules; on apercevait des jambes, des sandales, des bras, des cottes de mailles et des têtes dans leurs casques, maintenues par la mentonnière et qui roulaient comme des boules; des chevelures pendaient aux épines; dans des mares de sang, des éléphants, les entrailles ouvertes, râlaient couchés avec leurs tours; on marchait sur des choses gluantes et il y avait des flaques de boue, bien que la pluie n’eût pas tombé. Cette confusion de cadavres occupait, du haut en bas, la montagne toute entière. (899)

These terrible sights are oddly easy to look upon; not only easy to see, through the vivid writing, but easy to contemplate because the writing is not only vivid, it is also lifeless. (Recall the “little mounds” and the “balls.) The defeated Mercenaries appear caught up less in death and dying than in detail. Six paragraphs later, precision is still paramount: “[The bodies of the dead] lay stretched out in long lines, on their backs, their mouths open, their lances beside them; or else they were piled up in disorder and often, to find those who were missing, a whole heap had to be dug into” (196). (Ils se trouvaient étendus par longues lignes, sur le dos, la bouche ouverte, avec leurs lances auprès d’eux; ou bien ils s’entassaient pêle-mêle, et souvent, pour découvrir ceux qui manquaient, il fallait creuser tout un monceau [900].) The evenness of that last sentence gainsays any frenzy its content might suggest: the dead were stretched out in long rows, “or else” they were

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piled up, so that often, the passage explains carefully, to find those who were missing (more of that reasoning prose we recall from the very first sentence) it was necessary (note the absence of actors and the use of the infinitive) to dig down into the heaps. All this is appalling but, in its rationality, restful. The burden of these descriptions is the truth of the matter: this is an account of how defeat is, not of how it feels. By its negation—“Twelve hours later, all that remained of the Mercenaries was a heap of wounded, dead and dying”—the opening sentence implies the ultimate in action, the way the calm that follows implies the worst of the storm, but the implication has no resonance. All this is to say that we are deep in the narrative mode of the opening pages. The pageant of suffering that exhibits none of the participants’ suffering is a soundless concert, a frozen inferno, a ritual torment. When packs of yellow dogs slink in to feed on the corpses, the survivors set about burning them. “The dying rolled about in the bloody mud and bit their injured hands in their rage” (197). (Les moribonds se roulaient dans la boue sanglante en mordant de rage leurs poings mutilés [901].) It is uncannily as if nothing were happening; soon nothing is: the wood for the pyres runs out, and the survivors lapse into sleep. It is the dominant verb tense in these horrific sentences that largely accounts for their repose. Proust, in the article on Flaubert’s style I cited earlier,24 wrote about Flaubert’s constant use of the past imperfect which robbed the characters of initiative: “This imperfect is used to narrate not only what people say, but their entire lives. A Sentimental Education is a long account of an entire life without the characters taking so to speak an active role in the action.” (Cet imparfait sert à rapporter non seulement, les paroles, mais toute la vie des gens. L’Éducation Sentimentale est un long rapport de toute une vie, sans que les personnages prennent pour ainsi dire une part active à l’action [78].) I would modify this analysis a little to say that Flaubert’s past imperfect embraces the characters’ speech, their lives, and also the settings in which they move without differentiating among them; and that the resulting unified account depicts the first two, the people and their lives, in the mode of the third, the settings. Everything in the opening paragraph we looked at earlier, beginning “It was at Megara,” is of the order of a reconstructed, continuing setting; the opening scenes are populated not by living beings, but by ongoing situations. Proust wrote about L’Éducation Sentimentale, that what had been before Flaubert, action, became, in his work, impression (75). In Salammbô, action verbs work like adjectives. The imperfect denotes an action that continues indeterminately, so that its wont is to repeat. “The dying rolled about [were rolling about] in the bloody mud and bit [while biting] their injured hands [mutilated fists] in their rage.” (Les moribonds se roulaient dans la boue sanglante en mordant de rage leurs poings mutilés.) Where the passage employs the historic past

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(either the passé simple or the passé composé), which describes a completed action, the action becomes a condition, a mode of being that is then subsumed to the imperfect. For instance, when, the next morning, the still-living awaken to see soldiers passing by, these first appear in the historic past but pass immediately into the past imperfect: “In the first light of dawn there appeared at the Barbarians’ furthest lines soldiers filing [who were filing] with helmets raised on the ends of pikes; as they greeted the Mercenaries, they asked [would ask] if they had no message for their homelands” (198). (Aux blancheurs de l’aube, il parut sur les limites des Barbares, des soldats qui défilaient avec des casques levés au bout des piques; en saluant les Mercenaires, ils leur demandaient s’ils n’avaient rien à faire dire dans leurs patries [901].) Time is suspended: some soldiers are walking by, others are watching them. The verbs describing everyone’s actions have the effect of qualifying adjectives and seem to describe the actors themselves, not as actors defined by what they actually do, but rather as to how their various activities make them appear. In this way, the chapter of the aqueduct proceeds in hideous quietude, with men and beasts less engaged in what they are doing than carried along by a doing set in motion elsewhere.25 The passing soldiers are prisoners of war the Carthaginians have released, partly to get them out of the city, partly in the hope that they will sow dissent in the ranks of their former comrades. Accosted by these fellow Barbarians who, however, are on their way home, the defeated soldiers, still more dejected, look about for a way to vent their frustration. They fall on their own prisoners and kill them. This all happens almost entirely in the past imperfect; one group, dubbed “The Eaters of Unclean Things,” is particularly skilled at torture: “They infected [were inflaming] the wounds by pouring on them dust, vinegar, shards of pottery; others waited [were waiting (in the sense of waiting their turn)] behind them; blood was flowing and they were as joyful as the wine-harvesters around the bubbling vats” (199). (Ils envenimaient les blessures en y versant de la poussière, du vinaigre, des éclats de poterie; d’autres attendaient derriere eux; le sang coulait et ils se réjouissaient comme font les vendangeurs autour des cuves fumantes [903].) Atrocity can be ornamental, and in this passage, atrocity is more display than event. So far the entire chapter has been mostly exhibition. Mâtho’s double despair—over both the destruction of his army and his failure earlier to capture Salammbô when she came to his tent seeking the veil—is remarkably inactive. He is a portrait of hopelessness and appears to have conceded the battle. Walking among the bonfires where broken weapons, equipment, and bodies smolder, he stops often to brood. “Then with the toe of his boot he [would push] into the flames any objects that spilled over, so that nothing should remain” (199). (Puis du bout de son cothurne, il repoussait vers la flamme des choses qui débordaient, pour que rien ne subsistât [903].) Now, like a bolt from the blue, Spendius erupts into “The Aque-

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duct” and scatters its imperfect tenses and painterly horrors: “Suddenly, and as if coming from nowhere [without anyone being able to guess from where he has emerged] Spendius appeared” (199). (Tout à coup, et sans qu’on pût deviner de quel point il surgissait, Spendius parut [903].) His entrance on this scene is high drama: he comes in limping, having bound splinters from a broken lance to his thigh so that they dig in at every step. Even pain, which other men suffer, Spendius acts out. Mâtho rouses himself enough to order Spendius to stop his masquerade and address himself to their desperate situation. Spendius asks nothing better. Having gotten the attention of the disheartened men with threats of still greater torments should they surrender, he promises them victory with one final assault. For the next ten pages, Spendius is everywhere doing everything. He cajoles, threatens, promises, lies, shouts, pleads, whispers, demands, commands, with the result that Mâtho finds himself at the head of a reconstituted army. The war resumes, and seems to be headed for a decision, as the Barbarians close in on Hamilcar’s Carthaginian army headed home. A roused Mâtho gallops along the lines of his men, pressing the pursuit. The gates of the city are opening to receive its fleeing warriors; still, Spendius may yet get the Barbarian troop to catch up. Then: At the entry to Khamon [at the gate], Hamilcar could be seen. He turned round and shouted to his men to move aside. He dismounted from his horse; and spurring it on the rump with the sword in his hand sent it into the Barbarians. It was an Oryngian stallion, fed on balls of flour, which bent its knees for its master to mount. But why was he sending it off? Was it a sacrifice? The great horse galloped [was galloping] amongst the lances, knocked [knocking] men over, and catching its hooves in its entrails, [falling], then [standing] up again with furious efforts; and while they [were scattering], [were trying] to stop it or [looking] on in amazement, the Carthaginians had joined up again; they went in; the huge gate clanged shut behind them. (206) Sur le seuil de Khamon, on aperçut Hamilcar. Il se retourna en criant à ses hommes de s’écarter. Il descendit de son cheval; et du glaive qu’il tenait, en le piquant à la croupe, il l’envoya sur les Barbares. C’était un étalon orynge qu’on nourrissait avec des boulettes de farine, et qui pliait les genoux pour laisser monter son maître. Pourquoi donc le renvoyait-il? Était-ce un sacrifice? Le grand cheval galopait au milieu des lances, renversait les hommes, et, s’embarrassant les pieds dans ses entrailles, tombait, puis se

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relevait avec des bonds furieux; et pendant qu’ils s’écartaient, tâchaient de l’arrêter ou regardaient tout surpris, les Carthaginois s’étaient rejoints; ils entrèrent; la porte énorme se referma derrière eux, en retentissant. (911)

At first, in this passage, it seems as if Spendius has met his match: Hamilcar moves rapidly forward in the historic past tense. He too has a plan, and when, at the end of the first paragraph, he sends his horse back among the pursuing Barbarians, we seem to be on the familiar novelistic ground where characters react to one another’s actions and generate plots. However, the Carthaginian general commands the action for only two sentences. A new paragraph shifts its attention to the horse itself. This shift need not have sidelined Hamilcar, but just moved the focus of the description onward to his trick. But it is not the trick that is the focus, it is the horse. “It was an Oryngian stallion, fed [who was nourished: back to the past imperfect] on balls of flour, which bent its knees for its master to mount.” The horse is not now either feeding or bending to receive its master; these are the behaviors of peace, not of urgent war, and their description moves us clear away from the action at hand. The two questions that complete the paragraph confirm Hamilcar’s loss of control over the narrative. Why has he sent the stallion galloping back? Could it be a sacrifice? Were we still with Hamilcar, we would know the answer; or we would await the answer in certitude. Instead we look around, as lost as the soldiers. When the narration returns to the scene at hand, Hamilcar has disappeared and confusion reigns; confusion and violence, where before there was clarity and only the necessary force (as when he slaps the stallion on its rump to make it gallop off). The men must be jabbing their lances at the horse so that its entrails come out onto the ground to be caught up by its hooves. So we surmise, since the only explanations now available are supplied by the description, which is more interested in depicting than in explaining. An event has become a scene: the confrontation of Spendius and Hamilcar loses its focus to become a vista of men and horses. There is much pointless tumult and shouting. Earlier, when Spendius controlled the script, everything had a point. [Spendius] looked so convinced and triumphant that Mâtho, surprised in his torpor, felt himself carried away. These words came at the most intense point of his distress, drove his despair to vengeance, revealed a quarry for his anger. He leaped at one of the camels of the baggage train, tore off its halter; with the long rope he flogged the stragglers: and ran to right and left, alternately, at the rear of the army, like a dog driving a flock of sheep. [Note that his ongoing motion is one entire forward momentum.] (205–6) Il avait l’air si convaincu et triomphant que Mâtho, surpris dans sa torpeur, se sentit enchaîné. Ces paroles survenaient au plus fort de sa détresse, pous-

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saient son désespoir à la vengeance, montraient une pâture à sa colère. Il bondit sur un des chameaux qui étaient dans les bagages, lui arracha son licou; avec la longue corde, il frappait à tour de bras les traînards; et il courait de droite et de gauche, alternativement, sur le derrière de l’armée, comme un chien qui pousse un troupeau. (910)

Describing the soldiers gaping at the horse galloping among them, it is as if Flaubert, like a child erasing lines someone else has drawn in the sand, were erasing all those Spendius had drawn pointing straight at Carthage. For his part, Hamilcar has succeeded, his stratagem has worked; but only to cover a retreat. There can be no heroes here because the description is not interested in heroes. Spendius is defeated ultimately not by Hamilcar, but by Flaubert’s lack of interest in the former slave’s efforts, treated by the text as epiphenomena. The essence of the situation is captured instead by the style in which it is depicted. With Spendius and then Hamilcar superseded, one long sentence enacts everything: the galloping horse knocking men down, entangling its hooves in its own entrails, galloping again; while, for their part, the men either move away, or try to stop the horse, or look on in astonishment; meanwhile, the Carthaginians regroup, they enter the city, the great gate closes with a loud clang. The one long sentence is not out to win any war, only to see things clearly. It has no stake in the outcome of the encounter; its commitment is to embrace, to know, everything that happens. Omniscience in novels is more often instrumental; here it is the goal as well as where the action is. For all its furious activity, the galloping horse does not itself inhabit a scene of action, but a panorama transfixed by a dramatic image. Some soldiers scatter in the stallion’s path, others move to stop it, still others stand still in surprise; Hamilcar watches as his troops pass through the gates; the gates shut. With its slash of violence across a landscape of confusion, the scene might have been painted by Delacroix or Géricault. Spendius now disappears for four pages, while armies gather from all over Africa to besiege hated Carthage. A confusion of races, languages, costumes, arms, beasts of burden, attendants, wives, livestock, and stores of all kinds blooms in the plain; every color, sound, texture, smell is represented. But “Carthage could hold out for a long time” (209). (Carthage pouvait longtemps résister [914].) It has thick walls, ample supplies. Eventually, of course, Carthage must win; but in Salammbô at this moment it is not evident how history is to be fulfilled. What happens next makes this even less evident. Spendius reenters with a new plan, a better one in that it depends only on him. Untrammeled by hopeless allies and a preemptive narration, he will execute his plan in a bare page and a half, start to finish, a page and a half of a prose almost wholly in the major key of the historic past.

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The former slave practiced for several days shooting arrows at flamingoes on the lake. Then one evening when the moon was up he asked Mâtho to light a big fire of straw in the middle of the night, at the same time as all his men were to shout loudly; and taking Zarxas with him, he went off along the shore of the gulf in the direction of Tunis. When they were level with the last arches, they turned straight back to the aqueduct; the place was without cover; they crawled forward to the base of the pillars. (210) L’ancien esclave s’exerca pendant plusieurs jours à tirer des flèches contre les phénicoptères du Lac. [The historic past in this sentence (s’exerça) is significant since Spendius is said to exercise for several nights, an ongoing situation that could as readily or more be described in the imperfect.] Puis un soir que la lune brillait [an imperfect tense that provides an ongoing situation for the precision of “one night”], il pria [historic past properly referring to “one night”] Mâtho d’allumer au milieu de la nuit un grand feu de paille, en même temps que tous ses hommes pousseraient des cris [same situation as that of the moon: the men would all cry out at one time]; et prenant avec lui Zarxas, il s’en alla par le bord du golfe, dans la direction de Tunis. A la hauteur des dernières arches, ils revinrent droit vers l’aqueduc; la place était découverte: ils s’avancèrent en rampant jusqu’à la base des piliers. (915)

His plan is to breach the aqueduct. In contrast to the single long sentence describing Hamilcar’s horse trick, the account of the breach separates distinct activities into separate sentences. In the first, Spendius practices shooting arrows (with the idea of shooting down the aqueduct’s lone guard). In the second sentence, he instructs Mâtho on how to distract the sentinels, while he and an assistant begin a roundabout approach to the aqueduct. In the third, we see Spendius and an accomplice crawling to the base of its pillars. The forward momentum of the enterprise unfolds in linear sequence: “When they were level with the last arches, they turned straight back to the aqueduct; the place was without cover; they crawled forward to the base of the pillars.” A pictorial imperative had the earlier passage about the horse pointing in all directions to embrace all the possibilities: the horse was galloping, he was knocking over some men, other men were seen escaping from him. This confusion did have an effect, of allowing the Carthaginians to escape into the city; but their achievement only stopped a development, without being capable of lengthening into an event of its own. The paragraph depicting the actual breaching of the aqueduct opens with a dependent clause, as if the sentence, impatient to get to the event that is its point, were unwilling to take the time to explain a fact whose import is merely instrumental. Spendius is about to reenter the aqueduct.

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Calculating the distance from the number of steps he took, he arrived right at the place where he had noticed a slanting crack; and for three hours, until morning, he toiled continuously, furiously, scarcely able to breathe through the chinks in the slabs above, tormented with fears and expecting to die a score of times. At last a crack was heard; a huge stone, rebounding on the lower arches, rolled to the bottom, and suddenly a cataract, a whole river fell from the sky on to the plain. The aqueduct, cut in the middle, was gushing out. It meant death for Carthage, victory for the Barbarians. (211) En calculant la distance d’après le nombre de ses pas, il arriva juste à l’endroit où il avait remarqué une fissure oblique; et pendant trois heures, jusqu’au matin, il travailla d’une façon continue, furieuse, respirant à peine par les interstices des dalles supérieures, assailli d’angoisses et vingt fois croyant mourir. Enfin, on entendit un craquement; une pierre énorme, en ricochant sur les arcs inférieurs, roula jusqu’en bas, et, tout à coup, un cataracte, un fleuve entier tomba du ciel dans la plaine. L’aqueduc, coupé par le milieu, se déversait. C’était la mort pour Carthage, et la victoire pour les Barbares. (916)

The last sentence, whose exact translation is a flat statement of fact—“It meant death for Carthage, victory for the Barbarians”—draws the conclusion of a narrative syllogism, whereby a real person performing real acts gets realistic results. As there is no question of the reality of the breach Spendius has made in the aqueduct, so it is clear that without water, Carthage cannot survive. It is all over; the Barbarians are victorious. But no. It is not over; and when it is, it will not be the Barbarians who are victorious, it will be Carthage, just as it was in history. The aqueduct has twice in the plot seemed to give the victory to the Barbarians, and twice they have not had it. The theft of the veil (the thieves entered the city secretly through the aqueduct) should have demoralized Carthage and did, but then the veil was restored. The loss of its water should doom the city and will bring about horrible suffering, but the water too will be restored. Meanwhile, the waters of the aqueduct have emptied themselves into the plain like an entire river falling from the sky, and the chapter closes with a triumphant Spendius, stunned with his success, atop the broken aqueduct. Then he straightened up. He swept the horizon with a haughty look as if to say “All that is now mine!” Applause broke out from the Barbarians; the Carthaginians, at last understanding their disaster, howled with despair. Then he began to run over the platform from end to end—and like a charioteer triumphing in the Olympic games, Spendius, exultant with pride, lifted up his arms. (211) Puis il se redressa. Il parcourut l’horizon d’un air superbe qui semblait dire: “Tout cela maintenant est à moi!” Les applaudissements des Barbares

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éclatèrent; les Carthaginois, comprenant enfin leur désastre, hurlaient de désespoir. Alors il se mit a courir sur la plateforme d’un bout à l’autre, et comme un conducteur de char triomphant aux jeux Olympiques, Spendius, éperdu d’orgueil, levait les bras. (916)

There is no irony in this classic portrait of triumph; Spendius has the right to claim everything, he has done everything to get it. This could easily be the last paragraph of the novel. Yet, two brief chapters later, the novel has discarded Spendius’s stupendous achievement as if it had never been. Not that he gives up, or even slows down. In the next chapter, he continues to press toward victory. He sets about building various engines to break into the city. When these fail, he organizes the erection of a platform to the height of the walls, so as to launch an assault from level ground. Meanwhile, Carthage has exhausted the small reservoir of water remaining after the catastrophic breach and is consequently suffering the torments of thirst. Thousands are dying hideously, and their corpses, swollen in the summer heat, will not fit into coffins for burial so that, at every cross-street, funeral pyres pour a sickening smoke into the pestilential air. Spendius should have won the day, except that Carthage has a champion of its own. The chapter following “The Aqueduct” is entitled “Moloch” for the war god who, Flaubert’s research had uncovered, was the complement to the fertility goddess Tanit, or possibly an avatar of Tanit herself. In “Moloch,” Salammbô resumes the path of history, the pagan god ousts the modern protagonist, religion ousts technology, and style ousts plot. Indeed, style is about to displace not only plot but reason, with which style has up to now been congruent. However exotic, Salammbô thus far has also been insistently grounded in reason. Its syntax continually explains: “The soldiers [Hamilcar] had commanded in Sicily were treating themselves to a great feast to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Eryx, and [two reasons emerge] as their master was away and there were a large number of them, they ate and drank in complete freedom.” When all hell breaks loose, it is also for good reason: the rumor circulates that better plate exists than that on which they are being served, and the soldiers, feeling they have been insulted, demand a set of precious cups whose withholding is the reason for the ensuing riot. The soldiers are discontented because they have not been paid. They have not been paid because the Carthaginian rich are unwilling to part with their treasure. Mâtho sees Salammbô and falls in love with her. When she comes to his tent to recuperate Tanit’s mantle, his love causes him to allow her to take it back. It was reasonable for Carthage to feel doomed by the loss of its talisman. We were not required to share its superstition in order to make sense of this sense of doom. So far, Salammbô has been a modern story about the ancient past. No more: the desperate citizens of Carthage offer up their chil-

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dren to a pagan god, and their sacrifice is rewarded by a saving rain. Not a few drops of rain, not a drizzle, but a downpour that fills the reservoirs. It is not possible to read this as a coincidence. Doing so not only would trivialize the entire horrific episode but would be counter to the way we make sense of what we read. The downpour has to be taken as Moloch’s response. The narration itself stands witness to this inescapable conclusion. “Moloch” ends in a vision of hell, with infants being fed faster and faster into the oven of the god’s belly, parents arriving from everywhere, dragging their crying children, the faithful pressing forward to receive the shower of falling ash. The last sentence of the chapter describes the Barbarians peering over the walls, agog with horror. The first sentence of the next chapter links the sacrifice directly to the rain: “The Carthaginians had not yet returned to their homes when the clouds piled up ever more densely; those who were looking up at the colossus [the statue of Moloch] felt large drops on their foreheads, and the rain came down” (243). (Les Carthaginois n’étaient pas rentrés dans leurs maisons que les nuages s’amoncelèrent plus épais; ceux qui levaient la tête vers le colosse sentirent sur leur front de grosses gouttes, et la pluie tomba [950].) The narration does not endorse the Carthaginians’ madness. Revived by the rain, they are first joyful, but then, “although they had no remorse, they found themselves carried away by the frenzy resulting from complicity in irreparable crimes” (243–44) (bien qu’ils n’eussent pas de remords, ils se trouvaient emportés par cette frénésie que donne la complicité des crimes irréparables [951]). But having named the child sacrifice an irreparable crime, the same narration is silent about its extraordinary effectiveness, as if this posed no problem, as if the only thing to explain in the event was the procedure by which the infernal deed was done. “Moloch” features passages like this one, describing the delivery of more and more children into the burning maw of the god via two mechanical iron arms that lower to receive his victims, and raise to tip them into the fire: However the God’s appetite was not appeased. He kept wanting more. In order to provide him with more they were piled on his hands with a big chain on top fastening them down. Some devout men had at first tried to count them, to see if their number corresponded to the days of the solar year; but others were added and it was impossible to distinguish them in the dizzy movement of the horrible arms. This lasted a long time, indefinitely until the evening. By then the inner walls shone less brightly. Burning flesh could now be seen. Some even thought they could recognize hair, limbs, whole bodies. (241) Cependant l’appétit du Dieu ne s’apaisait pas. Il en voulait toujours. Afin de lui en fournir davantage, on les empila sur ses mains avec une grosse chaîne par-dessus, qui les retenait. Des dévots au commencement avaient voulu les

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compter, pour voir si leur nombre correspondait aux jours de l’année solaire; mais on en mit d’autres, et il était impossible de les distinguer dans le mouvement vertigineux des horribles bras. Cela dura longtemps, indéfiniment jusqu’au soir. Puis les parois intérieures prirent un éclat plus sombre. Alors on aperçut des chairs qui brûlaient. Quelques-uns même croyaient reconnaître des cheveux, des membres, des corps entiers. (949)

This describes a series of actions and effects we can hardly believe occurred yet cannot doubt, the proof that the infant holocaust really happened being, still more unbelievably, that it worked. But if we are not to throw up our hands when presented with an account of how Moloch rewarded the sacrifice of Carthage’s children with a life-saving rain, we have to have another ground than its content for not finding this account fatally incoherent, and therefore distancing ourselves from the whole episode as an atrocity born of superstition, rather than understanding it and taking it as a supreme manifestation of the Carthaginian order of things. The causal relation of the sacrifice and the rain cannot be made persuasive on the ground of its real likelihood, and Flaubert made no effort to make such causality credible as an actual possibility. Instead, the narrative viability of the child sacrifice flows directly from the style in which it is narrated—from an objective description that uses exhaustive detail (exhaustive both as to its abundance of facts and its formal achievement) for proof. It is style that has the final authority to make Moloch defeat Spendius’s plan, when just pages earlier the very narration, unable, within the possibilities presented by the plot, to imagine otherwise, had declared his plan a complete success. In the chapter “Moloch,” style usurps the novel’s generic authority, hijacks the plot, which it returns to history with itself as regent. Style is able to do this out of the authority Flaubert granted it as the most powerful means inside writing to achieve what he repeated to all and sundry was writing’s ultimate goal, namely, to grasp its matter directly, mano a mano. The Moloch episode is a touchstone of Flaubert’s philosophy of writing, unfolding at the extreme edge of that philosophy, where, like any philosophy at its extreme, it borders on absurdity. How can any writing make credible to a nineteenth-century reader (as realism, not fantasy) a causal relation between burning babies and replenishing a city’s water supply? But this absurdity emerges only in the paraphrase; it does not exist within the text. The issue for the reader in the Moloch episode is not to suspend disbelief, but to set belief aside and accept description as explanation. “Moloch,” for all its pagan gods and miracles, does not take Salammbô into magical realism (which flaunts its departure from common sense as not only its form but its content). Quite the contrary: though it

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opens with the implausible rain, the chapter that follows “Moloch” goes on to describe a battle whose provenance is strictly historical, or at least attested to in Polybius’s History. The chimerical “Moloch” seems to have provided a path deep into history, part of the system of paths that Flaubert boasted to Sainte-Beuve, in a passage cited earlier, delved deeper into history than orientalists, not equipped with the sounding devices of his prose, had ever penetrated. In that passage, having made an empirical claim that his Carthage did in fact mirror the historical original (he had been able to tell even at night that blue stones were blue), he went on to base his case on a principle of descriptive validity. He was certain of their color, not only from having observed it, but from having described it in a way that made it harmonize with its context. (“If the color is not unified, if the details are incoherent . . . if there is lacking, in a word, harmony, the work is false. Otherwise not.”) Even in relation to archeology’s own knowledge, harmony trumped archeology. Harmony was one stylistic device; another was that “exceedingly intense condensation of the idea” with which Flaubert had crossed the “abyss” separating his novel from its alien subject. Together, these make up a stylistic rationality in terms of which even so outrageous a description as that of the rain following the sacrifice fits Salammbô’s claim of absolute realism. The notion that as long as the description was harmonious it was certain to be in accord with its subject looks close to a tautology only because its terms are so radically interdependent. Harmony and a true account of reality were each constructed by their mutual coherence. This was not to propose that truth is beauty, beauty truth. Truth was not immediately beautiful just because it was true, nor beauty immediately true just because it was beautiful. They were related not by identity or conjunction, but by work: by the process of polishing sentences and of condensing ideas into images whose power was a voucher of veracity. This understanding of the functional relation of beauty to truth recalls (appropriately, given Flaubert’s ambition for a literature as rigorous as the physical sciences) a mathematician’s notion of a beautiful proof, its elegance and economy testifying to its validity. The final product of both proof and sentence is a new lucidity about the world, a greater clarity. The same letter to Mlle de Chantepie contained a second passage I also cited, invoking Goethe’s appeal for more light and concluding, “It is wonderfully voluptuous to learn, to assimilate to yourself the True through the intermediary of the Beautiful.” Flaubert’s vocation was to produce sentences through whose intermediary the world might be known truly. A sentence near the beginning of “The Aqueduct” is often cited as one of his most beautiful. It depicts the Mercenaries brooding on their defeat: “But the Latins were grieved [regretted] not to be able to collect the ashes in urns; the Nomads missed [regretted] the hot sands in which bodies

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become mummified, and the Celts missed the three rough stones [and the Celts, three rough stones], beneath a rainy sky, deep in a bay full of islands” (197). (Mais les Latins se désolaient de ne pas recueillir leurs cendres dans les urnes; les Nomades regrettaient la chaleur des sables où les corps se momifient, et les Celtes, trois pierres brutes, sous un ciel pluvieux, au fond d’un golfe plein d’îlots [901].) (The published translation inserts the verb “missed” into the last clause, unaccountably restoring what the history of the manuscript shows Flaubert had removed as the culmination of a long process of revision.26) This wonderful sentence embodies the whole connection among Flaubert’s understanding of literature as a way to know, his sense that the writing itself (representation through style rather than through invention) was the right instrument for seizing reality when elegance reveals the truth in the clutter, and his representation of all the aspects of his story—its characters, their speeches and actions, their historical situation—as uniformly states of being, and therefore parts of the story that ask to be described, rather than acted out. The reign of the past imperfect over the whole sentence is sufficiently hegemonic to project its regime into the last, verbless clause, completing the transformation of action into condition. The Latins’ desolation is communicated by a reflexive verb (se désolaient), that might as well be an adjective. In the second clause, regretting has still less to do with any action: the Nomads regret the hot sands of their country that mummify the dead. In an earlier version, Flaubert had emphasized the passivity of the operation, writing “where the bodies become mummified by themselves” (où les corps se momifient d’eux mêmes); but he evidently judged, in the final version, that the Nomads’ passivity was a condition sufficient to itself. By the third clause, the actors (Celts) command only an implied verb, being reduced grammatically to equivalence with “three rough stones, beneath a rainy sky, deep in a bay full of islands.” If the people sprawl about, the sentence does not. Flaubert revised it to make it shorter and shorter. We have just looked at the example of his omitting “of themselves”; he also cut an account of how the Latins, desolate at not gathering up the ashes of their dead, would have amplified the ceremony by placing them in urns, then in columbariums, having searched the funeral pyres for fragments of bone to include in the urns. The last clause originally repeated “regretted.” Verbless, “the Celts, three rough stones,27 beneath a rainy sky, deep in a bay full of islands” is description freed from all responsibility to narrative or even interpretation. Without a verb, the three phrases depend on their aesthetic qualities for their power to take hold of the real: for example, on the aesthetic effect of their apposition, which merges idea and matter, bringing out the idea of the fraught but complementary relation of stone and water, with the material bodies of words and the

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physics of rhythm. Thus equipped, a sentence that writes its way to a virtually empty landscape is at the heart of the operation of rediscovering Carthage. Style is accustomed to carrying most of the burden of discovery in poetry but is usually less laden in prose. Indeed, the sentence I have been parsing is not easily distinguished from poetry. The three clauses, their number echoed in the three rough stones of the last one, which is itself composed of three phrases, advance in a pronounced rhythm, the final clause falling toward the final phrase, which is octosyllabic like the first. Flaubert’s ambition, he wrote Louise Colet, was “to give prose the rhythm of verse (while leaving it prose and very much prose).”28 Still, his need to make his prose, albeit poetic, bear an unusual portion of the work’s meaning may be the source of one controversial aspect of Flaubert’s writing—namely, its reputed sadism, already invoked by SainteBeuve who complained, in his review of Salammbô, that Flaubert had written some of the most lovely sentences in literature to invoke monstrosities. He launches into archeology without any sense of discipline, he invents, to top off his obsequies, torments, mutilations of corpses, singular, refined, foul horrors. A touch of sadistic imagination enters into these descriptions of events that were already hard enough to take in their reality. There is something twisted here that one must absolutely dare to point out. If I had to do with a dead author, I would say that this perhaps reflected a flaw in his soul; but since we all know that M. Flaubert is very much alive, that we love him and he loves us, that he is cordial, generous, kind, one of the best and straightest natures in the world, I say it boldly: this is a lapse in taste, a grievous error of craft. His fear of sentimentality, of bourgeois mawkishness has thrown him into the opposite excess: he cultivates atrocity. The man is good, excellent, the book is cruel. He thinks it a proof of strength to appear inhuman in his books. Il passe à l’archéologie incontinent; il invente, sur la fin des ces funérailles, des supplices, des mutilations de cadavres, des horreurs singulières, raffinées, immondes. Une pointe d’imagination sadique se mêle à ces descriptions, déjà bien assez fortes dans leur réalité. Il y là un travers qu’il faut absolument oser signaler. Si j’avais affaire à un auteur mort, je dirais qu’il y a peut-être chez lui un défaut de l’âme; mais comme nous connaissons tous M. Flaubert comme très vivant, que nous l’aimons et qu’il nous aime, qu’il est cordial, généreux, bon, une des meilleures et des plus droites natures qui existent, je dis hardiment: il y a là un défaut de goût et un vice d’école. La peur de la sensiblerie, de la pleurnicherie bourgeoise l’a jeté de parti pris, dans l’excès contraire: il cultive l’atrocité. L’homme est bon, excellent, le livre cruel. Il croit que c’est une preuve de force de paraître inhumain dans ses livres. (Club edition, 430–31)

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Flaubert bristled. In the same response to Sainte-Beuve’s review where he confessed to inventing the aqueduct while insisting that everything else was exactly factual, he defended not just his facts but his reputation. While we are telling one another home truths, he wrote Sainte-Beuve, I shall admit frankly, my dear teacher, that “a touch of sadistic imagination” wounded me a little. All your words are serious matters. Such a word coming from you, once printed, becomes itself almost a stain [on my reputation]. Have you forgotten that I stood trial accused of an outrage to morality [this refers to the legal prosecution of Madame Bovary], and that the imbeciles and the wicked make themselves weapons out of everything? Don’t be surprised if one day you read, in one of those scandal sheets, something like this: “M. G. Flaubert is a disciple of Sade. His friend, his godfather, a master-critic, said it himself clearly enough, though with that finesse and teasing affability that, etc.” What will I be able to answer,—and do? Et puisque nous sommes en train de nous dire nos quatre vérités, franchement je vous avouerai, cher maître, que “la pointe d’imagination sadique” m’a un peu blessé. Toutes vos paroles sont graves. Or un tel mot de vous, lorsque il est imprimé, devient presque une flétrissure. Oubliez-vous que je me suis assis sur les bacs de la Correctionelle comme prévenu d’outrage aux moeurs, et que les imbéciles et les méchants se font des armes de tout? Ne soyez donc pas étonné si un de ces jours vous lisez dans quelque petit journal diffamateur, comme il en existe, quelque chose d’analogue à ceci: “M. G. Flaubert est un disciple de Sade. Son ami, parrain, un maître en fait de critique, l’a dit lui-même assez clairement, bien qu’avec une finesse et cette bonhomie railleuse qui, etc.” Qu’aurais-je à répondre,—et à faire? (Club edition, 448)

This response both confirms and ignores Sainte-Beuve’s exculpation: the cruel writings, the critic had said explicitly, did not reflect the man. But Flaubert, declaring himself deeply offended by the charge of sadism, did not refute the description of his writing as flagrantly, even pruriently, violent. Indeed, in a letter to the Goncourt brothers written as he was nearing the end of Salammbô, Flaubert invoked the Marquis directly: “I am half-way through my last chapter. I throw myself into writing farces that will nauseate honest folks. I accumulate horror upon horror. Twenty thousand of my men have just starved to death and eaten one another; the others will end under the feet of elephants or in the jaws of lions.” (Je suis à la moitié à peu près de mon dernier chapitre. Je me livre à des farces qui soulèveront de dégoût le coeur des honnêtes gens. J’accumule horreurs sur horreurs. Vingt mille de mes bonshommes viennent de crever de faim et de s’entre-manger; le reste finira sous la patte des éléphants et dans la gueule des lions.)29

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Flaubert insisted that this wallowing in entrails and burning of babies30 was not for the pleasure of it but was imposed on him by his subject. When he was just beginning Salammbô, he had already explained the problem to Feydeau: “What a dog of a subject! On my word of honor! I’m afraid it’s going to be infernally clichéd and rococo. On the other hand, since it has to be violent, I fall into melodrama. It’s a thing to break one’s neck over, in god’s name!” (Quel chien de sujet! Parole d’honneur! j’ai peur que ce ne soit pas poncif et rococo en diable. D’un autre côté, comme il faut faire violent, je tombe dans le melodrama. C’est à se casser la gueule, nom d’un petit bonhomme!)31 Cliché, rococo, melodrama: what needs to be avoided at all costs is a language whose meaning is set prior to its use. A cliché, the rococo, and melodrama have in common that they are formal jargons in which, as in any jargon, it is impossible by definition to say anything new, since the crux of one’s effort is to make apparent a familiar template. Against cliché, Flaubert invoked the incredible; against rococo, repellent deformity; and against melodrama, he marshaled levels and kinds of violence nothing could domesticate. Melodrama is sentimental and represents violence through the feelings of victims or observers. Salammbô presents violence for its own sake, not as felt but as inflicted: anything and everything to distinguish reading from empathy, and to make the writing stand out as writing.32 For example, soon after the feast in Hamilcar’s gardens, the Barbarian army agrees to leave Carthage, tricked into thinking it will be paid once it is on the road. One day’s march out of the city, the soldiers come upon a grisly scene. A nauseating odor leads them to a row of enormous lions, crucified and putrefying. Here is the description of one of the lions, then of several: Its huge muzzle drooped on its chest, and its two forepaws, half concealed under its luxuriant mane, were widely separated like the wings of a bird. Its ribs stuck out, one by one, beneath the taut skin; its hind legs, nailed one on top of the other, rose a little; and black blood, flowing through the hair, had collected in stalactites at the bottom of its tail, which hung straight down along the cross. The soldiers stood around amusing themselves; they called it consul and Roman citizen and threw stones at its eyes to drive away the flies. A hundred yards further on they saw two more, then there suddenly appeared a whole line of crosses with lions hanging on them. Some had been dead for so long that nothing remained on the wood but the remnants of their skeletons; others half eaten away had their faces contorted in hideous grimaces; some of them were enormous, the tree of the cross bent beneath them and they swayed in the wind, while flocks of crows wheeled ceaselessly above their heads. Such was the vengeance of Carthaginian

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peasants when they caught a wild beast; they hoped to terrify the others by such examples. The Barbarians stopped laughing and for a long time were seized with amazement. “What sort of people are these,” they thought, “who amuse themselves by crucifying lions.” (38) Son mufle énorme lui retombait sur la poitrine, et ses deux pattes antérieures, disparaissant à demi sous l’abondance de sa crinière, étaient largement écartées comme les deux ailes d’un oiseau. Ses côtes, une à une, saillissaient sous sa peau tendue; ses jambes de derrière, clouées l’une contre l’autre, remontaient un peu; et du sang noir, coulant parmi ses poils, avait ramassé des stalactites au bas de sa queue qui pendait droite le long de la croix. Les soldats se divertirent autour; ils l’appelaient consul et citoyen de Rome et lui jetèrent des cailloux dans les yeux, pour faire envoler les moucherons. Cent pas plus loin ils en virent deux autres, puis tout à coup parut une longue file de croix supportant des lions. Les uns étaient morts depuis si longtemps qu’il ne restait plus contre le bois que le débris de leurs squelettes; d’autres à moitié rongés tordaient la gueule en faisant une horrible grimace; il y en avait d’énormes, l’arbre de la croix pliait sous eux et ils se balançaient au vent, tandis que sur leur tête des bandes de corbeaux tournoyaient dans l’air, sans jamais s’arrêter. Ainsi se vengeaient les paysans carthaginois quand ils avaient pris quelque bête féroce; ils espéraient par cet exemple terrifier les autres. Les Barbares, cessant de rire, tombèrent dans un long étonnement. “Quel est ce peuple, pensaient-ils, qui s’amuse à crucifier des lions!” (731–32)

The description of the tortured lions is its own situation that the writing surveys first, before it says anything about the soldiers’ response. The public for this survey is the reader. Only the reader has the omni-vision to register the particularly painful detail of the disposition of the lion’s body along the cross: “Its ribs stuck out, one by one, beneath the taut skin; its hind legs, nailed one on top of the other, rose a little [note the precision: they rose a little]; and black blood, flowing through the hair, had collected in stalactites at the bottom of its tail, which hung straight down along the cross.” The inadequacy of the soldiers’ reaction—they are first amused, then terrified, but mostly uncomprehending—contrasts with the intensity of the reader’s. Together, the scene’s lack of mediation and its grotesque character ensures that the unfiltered vision is excruciatingly tangible, and as tangibly a vision. The tableau of the crucified lions Flaubert describes for us is larger, deeper, more detailed, more real than the one he has the Barbarians see, or than we might see for ourselves: reading the description of the crucified lions is, in the current idiom, an exercise in extreme knowing.

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Earlier, in regard to Flaubert’s explanation to Feydeau that the only way to bridge the abyss between the alien world of ancient Carthage and his novel was by an “exceedingly intense condensation of the idea,” I suggested that one illustration of this method lay in the dense prose of the opening paragraphs. The picture of the lion’s bloody tail is a second illustration, an idea condensed into an image of which one detail, the lion’s nailed-together legs rising a little way up the cross, is an emblem of the work of the aesthetic intellect, which finds things out by representing them. Flaubert once wrote to Louise Colet, “Without a love of form, I might have been a great mystic.” (Sans amour de la forme, j’eusse été peutêtre un grand mystique.)33 A mystic seeks out the meaning of the world by detaching himself from the real; a formalist, by attaching himself to real forms. Flaubert was earthbound by form, tethered to a young woman with hair powdered with mauve sand, hung about with ropes of pearls and luminous stones iridescent as a lamprey’s scales;34 also to men vomiting at the sight of crows pecking out the eyes of putrefying lions. His obsessive revisions of sentences, like that describing the mourning Mercenaries, were progressive discoveries of their real subjects. The implication of the idea that form knows the world both directly and materially is that to know in other ways, either abstractly or, like an archeologist, without a formal aspect to one’s inquiry, is to know not only differently but less: either to have a rarefied idea of matters whose nature is dense, or the opposite, to know the matter of things without their meaning. Saint Anthony, in Flaubert’s favorite of his own works,35 struggles mightily to be a mystic and fails, unable to resist the devil of matter. Saint Anthony’s passion is his author’s, expressed for instance in the nearly unreadable passages that describe the burning children. Form, here one with Moloch’s blazing belly, scorches the reader who may shrink from finding out quite so much. But for Flaubert (“Oh! Yes, light! Were it to burn through to our guts”), such passages were the fulfillment of writing. Froehner began the review that so enraged Flaubert with a satirical account of a short-lived museum of antiquities that had been all the rage and was now deservedly defunct. Both the pretentious organizers of the museum and its visitors had displayed a risible ignorance. Happily, that episode was ended, but now a new, even more ambitious pretender to ancient learning had risen up. Never mind that Carthage had been annihilated twice over and a Roman city erected on its ruins: a novelist had rebuilt it, and his Carthage was sublime, truer to ancient Carthage than the original.36 What roused Froehner’s ire was less the novelist’s boast that he had matched the archeologist’s erudition than his presentation of Salammbô as possessing a deeper knowledge of Carthage than lay in Froehner’s archeology. Flaubert told his friends that to write literature you have to know everything. The contro-

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versy, then as now, arose over the converse: that writing literature is a way to find out. A question that may have emerged over the course of this chapter will only grow more insistent in the course of reading the next chapter, which focuses on Henry James’s The Sacred Fount, so I take it up here as a sort of transition. The eccentric, sometimes perverse Salammbô and the overwrought Sacred Fount might appear odd choices to exemplify the proposition that the ambition to know by writing beautifully is a normal, ordinary literary preoccupation. To put it another way, I have described Salammbô as a magnificent work that fails as a novel, and I will be describing The Sacred Fount also as a novelistic failure: the question, then, is why take as examples of fiction’s pursuit of truth works that mostly fail as fiction? Part of my answer is that both Salammbô and The Sacred Fount enact the logical conclusion of a proposition not generally pressed so far, and while logical conclusions tend to the absurd, retrospectively, they make the moderate version of an idea emerge more fully than it does in its own moderate terms. More to the point, if Salammbô and The Sacred Fount are, admittedly, extreme instances of the epistemological aesthetic at work, and flawed by their extremism which may largely supplant ordinary human interest, they are in their artistic self-consciousness urgently, passionately engaged with real life. In the outer precincts of aesthetic knowledge, they pursue everyday realities. Part of the fun in reading Froehner’s denunciation of the esoteric errors in Flaubert’s Carthage is reflecting that, of course, its extravagantly orientalized merchants are also a gallery of bourgeois rogues. While rendering them as faithful to their ancient models as he could, Flaubert was always working out the resemblance to his neighbors. The Sacred Fount, with, as we will see, a slightly crazed narrator prying into the secret concatenation between life and love, is no academic exercise. Its central idea is that romantic love is actually, physically, a battle in which one lover drains the life force of the other. Completed just moments before James wrote his most accomplished works, The Sacred Fount is the ultimate representation of his ongoing subject—the costs and benefits of human exchanges—in a work that is as well a formal culmination, just not the best one he arrived at. The Sacred Fount is the only one of James’s novels narrated in the first person, and this exceptional strategy, combined with its extravagant idea, suggests that he was not falling back from his enterprise, but pressing toward its limit. In short, what there is of failure in Salammbô and in The Sacred Fount is of the stuff of success, and, as is generally the case when the limits of an enterprise are made visible, most telling about the enterprise itself.

gãÉ The Sacred Fount The Case of the Man Who Suddenly Grew Smart

I I ended the last chapter saying that what there is of failure in Salammbô and The Sacred Fount is of the stuff of success. Nonetheless, while Salammbô is brilliant Flaubert, The Sacred Fount is not brilliant James. What it comes to is that, as a theme, the pursuit of truth beyond the ordinary reach of even extraordinary people did not work very well for James. What there is of failure in The Sacred Fount is the stuff of success in his next novel, The Ambassadors. I will suggest eventually that, in The Sacred Fount, James went awry in the search for his truth, which was not composed, like Flaubert’s, of facts but of psychological and moral experience. As it happens, to go back long before The Sacred Fount, James met Flaubert, talked with him, read him, and had a great deal to say about him.1 So in taking Flaubert and James to represent the two dominant novelistic interpretations of my theme—how literary form explores the real world—I can set out on the firm ground of James’s own account of their similarities and differences. The differences are more immediately evident. The Sacred Fount and Salammbô could stand in for the proverbial duo of apples and oranges: to Salammbô’s monumental tableaux of gorgeousness and horror, James’s novel counters with scenes of circumspect dialogue and sotto voce musing. This is an unlikely pair stylistically as well: Salammbô’s sentences, from which Flaubert plucked adjectives like lice, are controlled by important, self-assured nouns; whereas nouns in The Sacred Fount hand over most of their authority to qualifiers and modifiers (“Beautiful, abysmal, involuntary, her exquisite weakness simply opened up the depths it would have closed” [101]).2 Yet, as James developed his own craft of fiction, Flaubert was possibly his most important reference. James’s invocations of Flaubert would never become wholly positive, but at first they were mostly negative. He did ultimately hail Flaubert

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as “the novelist,” and again, “the novelist’s novelist.”3 But this was in 1902, by which time he often heard himself addressed as “Master,”4 and the tribute was a graceful compliment from one acclaimed writer to another. Indeed, even this was not entirely complimentary, as he explained a little later in the same essay. What he meant was that Flaubert’s brilliance made him supreme as an example from whom other novelists could learn, perhaps especially from his mistakes.5 As to these, James thought the same in 1902 as in 1874: the most important of Flaubert’s literary faults was failing to develop the interior worlds of characters. The 1874 version is not as polite: M. Flaubert’s theory as a novelist, briefly expressed, is to begin on the outside. Human life, he says, is before all things a spectacle, a thing to be looked at, seen, apprehended, enjoyed with the eyes. What our eyes show us is all that we are sure of; so with this we will, at any rate, begin. As this is infinitely curious and entertaining, if we know how to look at it, and as such looking consumes a great deal of time and space, it is very possible that with this also we may end. We admit nevertheless that there is something else, beneath and behind, that belongs to the realm of vagueness and uncertainty, and into this we must occasionally dip. It crops up sometimes irrepressibly, and of course we don’t positively count it out. On the whole, we will leave it to take care of itself, and let it come off as it may. If we propose to represent the pictorial side of life, of course we must do it thoroughly well—we must be complete. There must be no botching, no bungling, no scamping; it must be a very serious matter. We will “render” things—anything, everything, from a chimney-pot to the shoulders of a duchess—as painters render them. We believe there is a certain particular phrase, better than any other, for everything in the world, and the thoroughly accomplished writer ends by finding it. We care only for what is—we know nothing about what ought to be. Human life is interesting, because we are in it and of it; all kinds of curious things are taking place in it (we don’t analyze the curious—for artists it is an ultimate fact); we select as many of them as possible. Some of the most curious are the most disagreeable, but the chance for “rendering” in the disagreeable is as great as anywhere else (some people think even greater), and moreover the disagreeable is extremely characteristic. The real is the most satisfactory thing in the world, and if once we fairly get into it, nothing shall frighten us back. (170–71)

On the evidence of Salammbô (“an archeological novel of the highest pretensions,” he had declared it two pages earlier), James had certainly captured the principle of Flaubert’s writing, namely, description. But he was essentially mistaken about how Flaubert understood description, which was, differently from James, as the mode of writing that penetrated farthest and deepest. That is, Flaubert understood description to be capable of taking in everything, of being everything, of being, as James put it a touch

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mockingly, “complete.” He did not assume, with James, that description was limited to surfaces, neither literally nor epistemologically. In the passage above, James has Flaubert admitting, “there is something else, beneath and behind, that belongs to the realm of vagueness and uncertainty,” but this scheme of a two-tiered reality would have made little sense to him. What Salammbô, Spendius, even Emma Bovary, thought and felt was located in another part of the forest, not in another realm: inside was just a place to describe next. Though not in Salammbô, Flaubert’s characters sometimes do have an interior dimension, as does Emma. But the truth of which Flaubert was in pursuit emerged from the narrator’s descriptions, not from Emma’s daydreams, let alone from the somnolent reveries of a long-ago Carthaginian princess. Emma’s interior is inadequate, and it is the narrator’s purpose to expose its inadequacy by confronting her clichéd, at times delusional world, with his own description of the real world outside. Her interior world is not its own reality, except insofar as it mistakes the world out there. But for James the division between the outside world and the life within was both insurmountable and essential to the meaning of both realms. Inside was where reality realized itself. From James’s perspective, Flaubert was radically in error in writing about what “is” separately from “what ought to be.” (“We care only for what is—we know nothing about what ought to be.”) “What is” is partial and completes itself in its moral imperative. Treating subjects like objects, all of them as varieties of “anything, everything,” Flaubert, according to James, could depict only a truncated reality. A chimneypot became no more than a duchess, who herself devolved into a pair of shoulders. (“We will ‘render’ things—anything, everything, from a chimneypot to the shoulders of a duchess.”) The implication of this criticism of Flaubert—that James himself meant to develop a literary method penetrating to the more significant sphere of reality that was the life within—was clear and would be fulfilled. In time, in his late fiction (The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl), James’s account of reality stipulated chimneypots and shoulders on the way to the duchess’s innermost thoughts. But not in The Sacred Fount. Chronologically, the novel that is the focus of this chapter belongs in the category of “late James,” having been written in 1900–1901, on the threshold of The Ambassadors. But although The Sacred Fount is in quest of innermost thoughts, they might as well be chimney-pots and shoulders. James’s dismissive account of Flaubert’s brand of realism in the passage I cited earlier could be applied verbatim to The Sacred Fount: it begins (and remains) on the outside, gives credence only to what can be seen with the eyes, and is motivated entirely by curiosity. Early on, the narrator enlists the aid of a portrait painter for his training in observing the surface play of faces, where the story unfolds. (“We will ‘render’ things,” James had mockingly imagined Flaubert explaining, “as painters render them.”) Reading The Sacred Fount, we do not think to wonder what

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the characters at issue are thinking. In this, we follow the narrator, who is doctrinally opposed to such probing; the rule of his game is that he must learn everything from what he observes. He does not even allow himself to spy, to look inside rooms or behind doors, so precise is his commitment to a knowledge displayed on the outside. In the single instance in which this narrator projects himself into the mind of one of the persons he is investigating, it is to imagine a conversation in which she might have acknowledged how well he has understood her situation: less a case of psychological penetration than of self-congratulation on the acuteness of his own observations. I will come back to this scene that marks all the difference and all the similarity between James and Flaubert. But first I return to the beginning, when James first encountered Flaubert and was not impressed. The passage I cited earlier, about Flaubert’s writing only about the outside of things, is from an article entitled “The Minor French Novelists”: besides Charles de Bernard, “Octave Feuillet, Gustave Flaubert, Ernest Feydeau, Edmond About, MM. de Goncourt, Gustave Droz, the younger Dumas, Victor Cherbulliez, Erckmann-Chatrian—these are some of the names that immediately present themselves” (167). The first of these, Charles de Bernard, was “not to be recommended to people who have anything of especial importance at hand to read.” On the other hand, “If the prime purpose of a novel is to give us pleasure, Charles de Bernard is a better novelist than Gustave Flaubert” (160). This is not an accidental comparison, for it turns out that the two are related by what they lack. “Charles de Bernard’s talent is great—very great, greater than the impression it leaves; and the reason why this clever man remains so persistently second-rate is, to my sense, because he had no morality. By this I of course do not mean that he did not choose to write didactic tales, winding up with a goodly lecture, and a distribution of prizes and punishments. I mean that he had no moral emotion, no preference, no instincts—no moral imagination, in a word” (166). Flaubert’s carelessness about “the realm of vagueness and uncertainty” showed the same debility as to the issues underlying his beloved facts. Charles de Bernard was more fun to read, but neither was really worth reading: they were not serious. James had already had occasion not to take Flaubert seriously, on the very question of morality. The first time he wrote about Flaubert was to review the just-published La Tentation de Saint Antoine in 1874, two years before the minor novelists article (289–94). The Tentation review has all the air of youthful sophistication, in which a degree of disdain is de rigueur. In the Tentation, James saw saddening evidence that Flaubert, apparently exhausted by Madame Bovary, had outlived his talent. James had his doubts about that novel as well, but all in all it worked. “The facts in ‘Madame Bovary’ were elaborate marvels of description [this is not a compliment], but they were also, by good luck, extremely interesting in them-

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selves, whereas the facts in ‘Salammbô,’ in ‘L’Education sentimentale,’ and in the performance before us [the Tentation], appeal so very meagrely to our sympathy that they completely fail in their appeal to our credulity.” The connection between sympathy and credulity ties artistic success to the moral imagination and assigns morality a basic, necessary role in understanding. In Flaubert’s writing, the absence of an appeal to his readers’ sympathy is not only a moral but an epistemological failure. Indeed, the damage done to understanding by invoking it outside the context of moral sympathy is reciprocal: morality is equally inaccessible on its own. In the same review of the Tentation in which he complains of its failure to achieve credulity, James complains that Madame Bovary fails to impart a clear moral lesson. “‘Madame Bovary,’ we confess, has always seemed to us a great work,” wrote Henry James in his Paris springtime, “and capable really of being applied to educational purposes. It is an elaborate picture of vice, but it represents it as so indefeasibly commingled with misery that in a really enlightened system of education it would form exactly the volume to put into the hands of young persons in whom vicious tendencies had been distinctly perceived, and who were wavering as to which way they should let the balance fall” (290). He was evidently pleased with this turn on the commonplace about forbidding novels to the young as liable to instill libertine notions, for he repeated it two years later in the “Minor French Novelists” piece we have already looked at. This later version invokes a satirical story by Hippolyte Taine6 about a Frenchman describing to a prudish spinster a work that “cannot fail to win the approval of all persons interested in the propagation of virtue.” When the good woman asks the name of the exemplary work, the Frenchman answers, “Madame Bovary; or, The Consequences of Misconduct” (169). Of course, Taine was ridiculing the English spinster, while James was having fun instead with Madame Bovary, and being irreverent toward that beleaguered work’s ordeal in the courts. Having just begun—in 1874, he was thirty-three and, of his novels, had published only Roderick Hudson—James was brash and rash. Since the aesthetic dimension of literature was inseparable from the ethical (how he came by this conviction needs no explaining), Flaubert’s fictional world was only half a world; his earth was flat. In 1874 Flaubert was fifty-three, had published everything he was to publish but Bouvard et Pécuchet, left unfinished on his death six years later, and was an eminence at whose Sunday afternoons at 240 faubourg St. Honoré the best of the Paris literary scene gathered. Introduced there by Turgenev, James attended several times and found he liked very much the man whose work he had not liked at all.7 Several letters report his pleasant surprise at meeting the “simple, kindly, elderly,” charmingly stout Flaubert, who proved not only shy but naïve. James declared that seeing the man had quite changed his view of the

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work. However, the transformation may not have been quite so dramatic, since one of these letters was written in December 1875, and another on February 3, 1876, the same month in which he published his article on the minor French novelists that contained the passage making light of Flaubert’s propensity for rendering the world rather than reflecting upon it. That James published the 1876 article, which expresses a view of Flaubert no different from that in the 1874 article written before they met, suggests that his criticism of Flaubert went deep, deeper than congeniality and good manners. The crux of this criticism—that Flaubert, brilliant at depicting surfaces, ignored the life beneath—was clearly not a passing judgment; it remained James’s major, and eventually his only, objection. Nearly twenty years separate “The Minor French Novelists” from a review James wrote of Flaubert’s correspondence in 1893. Flaubert had died in 1880, and James had grown older while publishing The Europeans, Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, Princess Casamassima, The Aspern Papers, and The Tragic Muse. He had also written a number of major short stories, including “The Lesson of the Master” and “The Pupil,” as well as several plays including a stage version of The American. A collection of stories featuring “The Real Thing” appeared that year. He had, in sum, become “Henry James.” The review of the Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert begins by regretting the whole event. It was a sad irony that a man whose cardinal principle was never to write himself into his work—“‘May I be skinned alive,’” James quoted Flaubert, “‘before I ever turn my private feelings to literary account’” (295)—should suffer such posthumous exposure. Besides, James judged that the collection had been assembled by Flaubert’s niece without an eye to style, a capital betrayal of her fastidious uncle. But the problem extended beyond her carelessness, in that the letters represented Flaubert at his worst, not only stylistically, but personally. James did not think any writer’s correspondence should be published, and he hoped that someday readers would not demand it. On that happy day, however, the publication of Flaubert’s letters might appear particularly unfortunate: “Then we shall perhaps be sorry to have had it drummed into us that the author of calm, firm masterpieces, of ‘Madame Bovary,’ of ‘Salammbô,’ of ‘Saint-Julien l’Hospitalier,’ was narrow and noisy, and had not personally and morally, as it were, the great dignity of his literary ideal” (297). If a little back-handed, this is still, given James’s earlier evaluation, praise of a high order. Flaubert’s progress in James’s judgment makes interesting charting: from his relatively high perch during the period James was visiting him in Paris almost twenty years earlier, the man seemed to have fallen; commensurately, the work had risen. “Calm, firm masterpieces,” not only Madame Bovary but Salammbô, itself once “an archeological novel of the highest pretensions,” are now stipulated embodiments of a “literary ideal” of “great dignity.”

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The earlier review of the Tentation recognized neither ideal nor dignity. “He proceeds,” James had then written (the verb “proceeds” already projecting a silly pretension), “upon the assumption that these innumerable marvels of observation [referring to a specific passage] will hold together without the underlying moral unity of what is called a ‘purpose,’ and that the reader will proceed eagerly from point to point, stopping just sufficiently short of complete hallucination to remember the author’s cleverness” (291). The later review occasioned by the Correspondance discerns in it the very strongest sense of purpose: “[The letters’] great interest is that they exhibit an extraordinary singleness of aim.” There is no question of Flaubert showing off; James takes him with a seriousness that seems to involve having forgotten having taken him lightly in the past. Yet, alongside the new appreciation, the gist of the earlier criticism persists virtually unchanged. The sentence about Flaubert’s “extraordinary singleness of aim” continues to say that the letters reveal an artist who is “not only disinterested, but absolutely dishumanized” (297). “Disinterested” shows breadth, but “dishumanized” shows shallowness, superficiality: a serious Flaubert remained in James’s understanding essentially as he had been, and James liked this no better in 1893 than in 1874. The review of the Correspondance includes a lengthy account of Madame Bovary that encapsulates this combination of change and continuity. He began “Madame Bovary” from afar off, not as an amusement or a profit or a clever novel or even a work of art or a morceau de vie, as his successors say to-day, not even, either as the best thing he could make it; but as a premeditated classic, a masterpiece pure and simple, a thing of conscious perfection and a contribution of the first magnitude to the literature of his country. There would have been every congruity in his encountering proportionate failure and the full face of that irony in things of which he was so inveterate a student. A writer of tales who should have taken the extravagance of his design for the subject of a sad “novelette” could never have permitted himself any termination of such a story but an effective anticlimax. The masterpiece at the end of years would inevitably fall very flat and the overweening spirit be left somehow to its illusions. The solution, in fact, was very different, and as Flaubert had deliberately sown, so exactly and magnificently did he reap. The perfection of “Madame Bovary” is one of the commonplaces of criticism, the position of it one of the highest a man of letters dare dream of, the possession of it one of the glories of France. (300)

Referring to the perfection of Madame Bovary as a commonplace is a lovely move, flattering all at once the author, the reader, and the critic. It is a convocation to an artistic event in which all three participate to their joint honor. It also has the contrary effect, of relegating the novel to an event, and moreover a typical one. It is very nice for a novel to be one of the glories

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of France, better than to be inglorious; but in its presentation of established values, its perfection a commonplace, Madame Bovary appears not quite a culminating artistic triumph, which, one senses, would be less readily adjudicated, more self-reliant. In the context, the “perfection” of Flaubert’s novel seems the fulfillment of limited criteria. No longer disdainful, James is not really admiring. The review of the letters collection projects a Flaubert who is no longer absurd, and instead almost tragic. It is only a reader here and there in all the wide world who understands to-day, or who ever understood, what Gustave Flaubert tried for; and it is only when such a reader is also a writer, and a tolerably tormented one, that he particularly cares. Poor Flaubert’s great revenge, however, far beyond that of any editorial treachery [so James characterized the publication of the letters], is that when this occasional witness does care he cares very peculiarly and very tenderly, and much more than he may be able successfully to say. Then the great irritated style-seeker becomes, in the embracing mind, an object of interest and honor; not so much for what he altogether achieved, as for the way he strove and for the inspiring image that he presents. (306)

It is the thought that counts. Flaubert’s gifts to literature, for all the perfection of Madame Bovary, are far from perfect. As the review continues, it repeats some familiar judgments. “‘Salammbô,’ in which we breathe the air of pure aesthetics, is as hard as stone; ‘L’Education,’ for the same reason, is as cold as death; ‘Saint-Antoine’ is a medley of wonderful bristling metals and polished agates, and the drollery of ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’ (a work as sad as something perverse and puerile done for a wager) about as contagious as the smile of a keeper showing you through the wards of a madhouse” (306). Cold as death is worse than hard as stone, and the deterioration continues: a medley is not even a proper work, Flaubert’s last work is ridiculous without being funny. By the end of his run-down, James seems to have worked himself up to utter dismissal, which, however, he follows with this: “To the end of time there will be something flippant, something perhaps even ‘clever’ to be said about his immense ado about nothing. Those for some of whose moments, on the contrary, this ado will be as stirring as music, will belong to the group that has dabbled in the same material and striven with the same striving” (307). For, “[i]f there is something tragi-comic in the scene [of Flaubert’s maniacal writing and rewriting], as of a tenacity in the void or a life laid down for grammar, the impression passes when we turn from the painful process to the sharp and splendid result” (308). Still, the splendid result is never, in James’s account, other than formal; splendid, yes, but hard as stone and cold as death. The recommendation seems to be to hate the work and love the author.

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The review’s conclusion explains this division. Having a paragraph earlier observed that “[t]he invisible [world] Flaubert scarcely touches; his vocabulary and all his methods were unadjusted and alien to it. . . . he had no faith in the power of the moral to offer a surface”8 (312), James ended with a pathetic tribute to an author whom his lack of faith had kept from entering a writer’s promised land: Let Flaubert always be cited as one of the devotees and even, when people are fond of the word, as one of the martyrs of the plastic idea; but let him be still more considerately preserved and more fully presented as one of the most conspicuous of the faithless. For it was not that he went too far, it was on the contrary that he stopped too short. He hovered forever at the public door, in the outer court, the splendor of which very properly beguiled him, and in which he seems still to stand as upright as a sentinel and as shapely as a statue. But that immobility and even that erectness were paid too dear. The shining arms were meant to carry further, the other doors were meant to open. He should have listened at the chamber of the soul. This would have floated him on a deeper tide; [and, perhaps noting that he had been waxing incantatory, James concluded:] above all it would have calmed his nerves. (313–14)

It is not at once clear how listening at the chamber of the soul would do good to Flaubert’s nerves, but that it would improve his work is something James had said all along. As we have seen, his constant complaint was that Flaubert was uninterested in the interiority of his characters; James had come to appreciate Flaubert’s form, but he would never lessen his criticism of Flaubert’s treatment of characters. Writing the introduction for an English translation of Madame Bovary9 was, in fact, the occasion for his most scathing criticism, not just of the novel in question but especially of L’Éducation sentimentale. Madame Bovary was Flaubert’s greatest work, and it was in itself splendid. James had written earlier of its “perfection,” and here he expanded on that theme: “Madame Bovary” has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment. [But it is a peculiarly limited perfection:] For it deals not in the least, as to unapproachability, with things exalted or refined; it only confers on its sufficiently vulgar elements of exhibition a final unsurpassable form. The form is in itself as interesting, as active, as much of the essence of the subject as the idea, and yet so close is its fit and so inseparable its life that we catch it at no moment on any errand of its own. That verily is to be interesting—all round; that is to be genuine and whole. The work is a classic because the thing, such as it is, is

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ideally done, and because it shows that in such doing eternal beauty may dwell. (325)

Yet, at the very heart of this perfect classic, there was a fatal flaw. French critics had praised Emma Bovary’s wonderful representativeness; others attributed part of what they saw as her exceptional vitality, on the contrary, to a certain resemblance, in her imaginative cast of mind, to her author. James would have none of it: “Our complaint is that Emma Bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her creator, is really too small an affair” (326). No large story could be told through so small a heroine. What James found especially telling was that Emma’s reduced capacity was no aberration: if she was undersized, in Flaubert’s fictional universe, so were they all. She associates herself with Frédéric Moreau in “L’Éducation” to suggest for us a question that can be answered, I hold, only to Flaubert’s detriment. Emma taken alone would possibly not so directly press it, but in her company the hero of our author’s second study of the “real” drives it home. Why did Flaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, such inferior and in the case of Frédéric such abject human specimens? I insist only in respect to the latter, the perfection of Madame Bovary scarce leaving one much warrant for wishing anything other. [Perfection, we mark, is not the highest virtue:] Even here, however, the general scale and size of Emma, who is small even of her sort, should be a warning to hyperbole. If I say that in the matter of Frédéric at all events the answer is inevitably detrimental I mean that it weighs heavily on our author’s general credit. He wished in each case to make a picture of experience—middling experience, it is true—and of the world close to him; but if he imagined nothing better for his purpose than such a heroine and such a hero, both such limited reflectors and registers, we are forced to believe it to have been by a defect of his mind. And that sign of weakness remains even if it be objected that the images in question were addressed to his purpose better than others would have been: the purpose itself then shows as inferior. (326–27)

Those are tough words, tougher even than those with which, in his very first article on Flaubert, the review of the Tentation, he had shrugged off a minor writer (“He proceeds upon the assumption that [marvels of observation] will hold together without the underlying moral unity of what is called a ‘purpose,’ and that the reader will proceed eagerly from point to point, stopping just sufficiently short of complete hallucination to remember the author’s cleverness” [291]). An inferior purpose is worse than none; James is no longer criticizing Flaubert merely for not being serious (for being perverse, arrogant, and French10), but for a serious moral error. His is

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a sin of commission, its worst representation the treatment in L’Éducation sentimentale of Mme Arnoux, Frédéric’s married mistress and “exactly the author’s one marked attempt, here or elsewhere, to represent beauty otherwise than for the senses, beauty of character and life; and what becomes of the attempt is a matter highly significant” (329). The error in regard to Mme Arnoux is that “she is offered us quite preponderantely through Frédéric’s vision of her, that we see her practically in no other light” (330). Frédéric possessing an inferior sensibility, he cannot convey the purportedly superior sensibility of his mistress. The result is that the novel is never able to attain the moral importance implicit in its heroine. This error was not only egregious in itself; it dishonored Flaubert himself by “the unconsciousness of error in respect to the opportunity that would have counted as his finest.” We feel not so much that Flaubert misses it, for that we could bear; but that he doesn’t know he misses it is what stamps the blunder. We do not pretend to say how he might have shown us Madame Arnoux better—that was his own affair. What is ours is that he really thought he was showing her as well as he could, or as she might be shown; at which we veil our faces. For once that he had a conception quite apart, apart I mean from the array of his other conceptions and more delicate than any, he “went,” as we say, and spoiled it. (330–31)

Yet, along with being scathing, this criticism is also gentle. The passage continues, “Let me add in all tenderness, and to make up for possibly too much insistence, that [the Madame Arnoux blunder] is the only stain on his shield; let me even confess that I should not wonder if, when all is said, it is a blemish no one has ever noticed” (331). Perhaps, the Master implied, no one was as fastidious as he in the matter of giving characters every chance and talent. James’s last go at Flaubert, in the magisterial mode of an introduction to that author’s greatest work, therefore has it both ways, one old, one newer. It repeats, and even develops, James’s original complaint—that Flaubert is an author of outsides—but it also gives full due to Flaubert’s writing; it even embraces Flaubert as a fellow, one who is inside James’s universe, however misguidedly he travels it. Flaubert, from being an exotic phenomenon, has become relevant. To profit by the mistakes of the novelist’s novelist, you have to embrace much of what he does, you almost have to identify with him. The other French giant, Balzac, for example, whom James recognized as “a great genius” (35) when he was still listing Flaubert among the minor French novelists, seems never to have become relevant. James wrote two long essays about Balzac: one in 1902 on the occasion of the appearance in English of Balzac’s novel Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, and a second three years later as a lecture to be delivered in Phila-

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delphia.11 Like his late writings on Flaubert, these on Balzac show remarkable tenacity. James mended his manners about French writers, but he seems never to have amended his judgment. About Balzac he was categorical: he was “the only member of his order really monumental, the sturdiest-seated mass that rises in our path” (99); a literary universe in himself: “a tract on which we might all of us together quite pitch our little tents, open our little booths, deal in our little wares, and not materially either diminish the area or impede the circulation of the occupant”; he was a “Gulliver among the pigmies” (91). “In intensity of imaginative power, the power of evoking visible objects and figures, seeing them themselves with the force of hallucination and making others see them all but just as vividly, [Balzac and Dickens] . . . have had no rivals but each other and Shakespeare” (89). Balzac was without doubt “the first and foremost member of his craft” (90), “the father of us all” (121), “the master of us all” (138), “our towering idol” (139). James could visualize the idol with appropriate gusto, a colossus “with huge feet fairly ploughing the sand of our desert . . . the very type and model of the projector and creator; so that when I think, either with envy or with terror, of the nature and the effort of the Novelist, I think of something that reaches its highest expression in him” (122). For all that, the very language in which James praised Balzac (his extravagant superlatives almost making fun) speaks to the lack of any sense of kinship. James damned Balzac with too-strong praise. He is a prodigious force of nature (where, James wondered, did he ever find the time to go into the world and gather his materials? [123–24]). The single quality Balzac’s writing lacks is “that slight but needful thing—charm” (68). A definition of charm emerges by default: “[This lack of charm] accounts for his want of grace, his want of the lightness associated with an amusing literary form, his bristling surface, his closeness of texture, so rough with richness, yet so productive of the effect we have in mind when we speak of not being able to see the wood for the trees” (93). Small stuff, and yet, “It was certainly a priori not to be expected we should feel it of him, but our hero is after all not in his magnificence totally an artist: which would be the strangest thing possible, one must hasten to add, were not the smallness of the practical difference so made even stranger” (94). Small stuff, he repeats, and yet. Upon the monumental Balzac, James turned the gaze of an informed tourist, gaping at the edifice’s vertiginous towers, wondering how it was ever erected. Yet, for all that they may be marginal, Balzac’s artistic shortfalls, even as they are dismissed as above or recuperated into strengths, keep providing the punch line. In a last article on Balzac, written in 1913 for the Times Literary Supplement, James translated want of charm into “grand vulgarity” and suggested that in treating certain subjects, namely, describing a grosser class of characters than James’s, this “serves him rather than betrays.”

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“His fertile vulgarity, his peccant taste, so fallible for delicacies, so unerring for simplicities,” proved itself “immensely human” (151). None of which could be said of Flaubert, who was totally an artist, if a little inhuman both in the practice of his art and in its results. Artistry did not make Flaubert, in James’s account, a greater writer than Balzac; indeed, if Balzac’s errors produced a surprisingly small “practical difference,” Flaubert’s one error was fatal in at least one novel, L’Éducation sentimentale, and badly undermined all his writings. But Flaubert’s failure was important to James as Balzac’s greatness was not. James generalized this importance into the designation “the novelist’s novelist,” a writer from whose errors other writers could learn. Errors, in order to constitute lessons, have to be relevant to the student. Balzac was not, but Flaubert clearly was; James said so, and he specified the lesson: the major thing in writing novels was to go inside the characters. James corrected the capital error of Flaubert’s Madame Arnoux everywhere in his writing, but surpassingly in his last novels, The Ambassadors (completed 1901), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904–1905), contemporaries of the 1902 Madame Bovary introduction. In the prefaces (written 1904–1905) to these three novels, James describes doing exactly the opposite, in his development of characters, of what he took Flaubert to have done in L’Éducation sentimentale. There is no preface for the fourth novel James wrote in this period (finishing it in 1900 and starting at once on The Ambassadors), for the reason that he did not include it in the definitive edition of his works for which the prefaces were written.12 The Sacred Fount is never included in appreciative references to the glory of “late James.” I turn to this “ill-starred novel” (appropriating James’s term for L’Éducation sentimentale), proposing to take it as a possibly telling conundrum: a work written at the very top of James’s form that exhibits just the externalist, objectifying way with characters he had mocked, castigated, or simply regretted in Flaubert.

II There are those who would have happily appropriated for The Sacred Fount another of James’s terms for Flaubert’s work, to wit, “an immense ado about nothing” (308). Rebecca West, for instance, who summed up the novel as the story of “how a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason, in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows.”13 Critics since have not found much to add to her summary, but here is a more circumstantial account.

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A weekend visitor, the nameless narrator, has a theory that, in great passions, one partner feeds on the other (the title refers to a fountain of youth thus constituted by a lover for a beloved). While a guest at an English country house, the narrator observes that a fellow guest, Grace Brissenden, whom he knows to be in her forties, suddenly looks twenty-five; while her husband, Briss or “poor Briss,” not yet thirty, looks at least sixty. A test of the narrator’s vampire principle proposes itself when another guest, Gilbert Long, whom the narrator has always known to be a remarkably obtuse fellow, displays a new wealth of wit and perspicacity. The narrator will try out his theory by uncovering the partner to Long’s transformation. If the theory holds, this partner is a once-brilliant woman who “must logically have been idiotised” (103). He confides his project to two other guests, one of whom is Grace Brissenden, the rejuvenated wife, who does not suspect she herself is his first example. The other guest the narrator enlists is Ford Obert, a famous portrait painter, with a professional eye for physiognomies. The hunt proceeds through the weekend, across various rooms and gardens, over tea and dinner, until, with the end of the weekend in sight, the narrator is fairly certain he sees his goal. Just as he is about to close in, however, Grace Brissenden pushes him off the path which might have led to herself, since she too is engaged in a vampiric duo. She offers a patently false solution that is also irrefutable. The narrator, routed, runs away, having failed to penetrate into the precinct of the sacred fount. He seems distraught at his defeat. He tells us that leaving Mrs. Brissenden: “I almost breathlessly hurried” (219). Yet a reader may be forgiven for not sharing his panic, our sense of him being so very slight. James himself seems to have had little feeling for him and would probably have been surprised to learn that this runt among his creations was embraced by another writer of the first distinction, Jorge Luis Borges, who paid The Sacred Fount the sincerest compliment, after plagiarism, of comparing it to a work of his own, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim.” This is the story of a young student who suspects that a previously abject companion who has suddenly shown signs of great intelligence is reflecting a distant brilliance; the student sets out to discover what he is certain will be a sublime Teacher. The seeker is certain he can find the Teacher, or Al-Mu’tasim, by retracing the trajectory of the rays of his intelligence back from the miraculously inspirited young man to their source. By this means, the student expects to arrive before AlMu’tasim himself. Borges saw an analogy between this story and The Sacred Fount: “The narrator, in James’s delicate novel, investigates whether or not B is influenced by A or C; in ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’ the narrator feels a presentiment or divines through B the extremely remote existence of Z, whom B does not know.”14 Similarly, James’s narrator hopes to follow the beam of Gilbert Long’s intelligence back to its unknown source.

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Borges’s sense that James’s story and his own resembled one another was a bad sign. Borges’s tales are literally metaphysical, in that their direct objects are not the characters and situations they describe, but the tales themselves. “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” for instance, is secondarily, even incidentally, about the student’s quest, and primarily about the story of the student’s quest. (It is no accident that Flaubert and Borges are frequently paired as writers whose first subject is writing.) James’s stories, of course, are the opposite, their primary interest lying in their characters. We have seen that James considered Flaubert’s not giving Madame Arnoux a voice of her own an unpardonable artistic sin. Borges was on to something about The Sacred Fount whose characters are inaccessible except through the reports of a narrator who reduces them to walking-talking parts of a program. Yet, The Sacred Fount is also a literal implementation of James’s advice to Flaubert to listen at the chamber of the soul. A sign that things are not quite right with this version of the Jamesian injunction to move inside, however, is that the narrator worries that his plan to probe the psychological vitals of two of his fellow guests may pose a moral problem. He asks his co-investigator, the painter Obert, whether it is right “‘To nose about for a relation that a lady has her reasons for keeping secret’” and is greatly relieved when Obert interrupts with a denial: “‘is made not only quite inoffensive, I hold’—he immediately took me up—‘but positively honourable, by being confined to psychologic evidence.’” The narrator wonders “‘Honourable to whom?’” and the prompt answer ought to take care of any remaining scruples. Nosing about is an entirely creditable pursuit that shows a keen mind: “Resting on the kind of signs that the game takes account of when fairly played—resting on psychologic signs alone, it’s a high application of intelligence. What’s ignoble is the detective and the keyhole” (57). Detectives and keyholes are not at issue of course; this is a house party, the narrator is a guest, not a detective, and his kneeling at a keyhole is unimaginable. More to the point, the morally excellent approach laid out by Obert is James’s own, in all his fiction. It is the approach, as we saw, that he blamed Flaubert for not taking, instead hovering at the public door, staying in the outer court. Why then does the question of the narrator’s moral right to go inside even arise? Unnamed and undescribed, the narrator is essentially an author; there is no reason for him to appear more intrusive than Strether in The Ambassadors, who, for his part, never worries that he is violating his fellows when he tries to understand them. Strether has other scruples but not this one. In a James novel, trying to understand others is, as Obert says, “a high application of intelligence,” indeed, the highest. Something is wrong if this principle of James’s writing, cardinal to his practice and theory alike, is in question; if in imagining his characters, including the narrator, James imagines them worrying about what is everywhere else in his writing—what all his other characters take to be—self-evidently the

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right thing. At the same time, one does see why the narrator is worried; and, in context, Obert’s answer is not wholly reassuring. In a scene about midway through the novel, the narrator, tracking through the interior depths of a suspect, is almost sadistic. He has come to think that May Server, a particularly appealing and intelligent young woman who appears to be trying to conceal suffering, is the fountain of Gilbert Long’s newfound wit. May Server is all that is lovely. The narrator, wishing to speak with her, makes a pretext of inviting her to look at some pictures in one of the stately house’s many rooms, this one with, in addition to its pastels, a frescoed ceiling. Obert and Gilbert Long are already in the room when the narrator enters with Mrs. Server, and the narrator happily wonders whether he is not about to have proof of his surmise. The proof of it would be, between her and her imputed lover, the absence of anything that was not perfectly natural. Mrs. Server, with her eyes raised to the painted dome, with response charmed almost to solemnity in her exquisite face, struck me at this moment, I had to concede, as more than ever a person to have a lover imputed. The place, save for its pictures of a later date, a triumph of the florid decoration of two centuries ago, evidently met her special taste, and a kind of profane piety had dropped on her, drizzling down, in the cold light, in silver, in crystal, in faint, mixed delicacies of colour, almost as on a pilgrim at a shrine. I don’t know what it was in her— save, that is, the positive pitch of delicacy in her beauty—that made her, so impressed and presented, indescribably touching. She was like an awestruck child; she might have been herself—all Greuze tints, all pale pinks, and blues and pearly whites and candid eyes—an old dead pastel under glass. (48)

This is classic James (written in his classic years): a male narrator with a hypothesis is watching closely; a young woman, delicate of body and soul, is full of an intellectual emotion; a house provides a refined cultural and historical setting; there is art to provide stuff for both conversation and description. Above all and as typically, the elaborate game is being played for the highest stake: the narrator means to discover May Server’s vital secret. It was probably the narrator’s drama-queen diction that set off Rebecca West: Mrs. Server, with her “exquisite face,” is “indescribably touching,” adorned in “profane piety . . . like a “pilgrim at a shrine.” She is a child; no, she is “an old dead pastel under glass,” illustrating his elegy of love and death. Any number of James passages feature such hyperbole, but the distance taken by the narrator makes this passage different. His description of Mrs. Server as “indescribably touching,” the slight ring of mockery, may express the selfironizing to which the narrator is rather prone. But as this irony often seems a tic of self-regard, the “indescribably touching” too tends to flatter his exceptional sensitivity. In a later conversation, the narrator tries as a ploy to tell Mrs. Server he has a fancy that Brissenden, poor Briss (Grace Brissenden’s

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prematurely aged husband), is in love with her. “‘What made you have such a fancy?’” May Server wonders. “‘What makes me ever have any?’ I laughed. ‘My extraordinary interest in my fellow-creatures. I have more than most men. I’ve never really seen anyone with half so much. That breeds observation, and observation breeds ideas’” (108). Again, the narrator is speaking as James, who as we have already noted famously once advised an aspiring young writer to be as one on whom nothing is lost. Yet here we feel we cannot quite approve. Something is definitely wrong in the passage I mentioned earlier, in which the narrator turns brutal toward poor pastel May Server. The passage is part of a chapter-long encounter with her,15 in the course of which the narrator becomes certain she is the one he seeks. The narrator has been roaming the estate grounds when he glimpses her in the distance, similarly engaged. To prevent her escaping him, as he sees she would like to do, he sits down on a bench and visibly awaits her. She advances “slowly and a little wearily,” having, he thinks, “folded up her manner in her flounced parasol, which she seemed to drag after her as a sorry soldier his musket.” When she stands in front of him, “with her smile that had by this time sunk quite to dimness,” she seems to him quite done in. “She went through the form of expression, but what told me everything was the way the form of expression broke down. Her lovely grimace, the light of the previous hours, was as blurred as a bit of brushwork in water-colour spoiled by the upsetting of the artist’s glass. She fixed me with it as she had fixed during the day forty persons, but it fluttered like a bird with a broken wing” (98–99). Since he has suggested, to explain his presence on the very bench, that he too has sought repose, she asks what has happened to him; in answer to which, “‘Oh,’ I laughed, ‘what is it that has happened to you?’” My question had not been in the least intended for pressure, but it made her turn and look at me, and this, I quickly recognized, was all the answer the most pitiless curiosity could have desired—all the more, as well, that the intention in it had been no greater than in my words. Beautiful, abysmal, involuntary, her exquisite weakness simply opened up the depths it would have closed. It was in short a supremely unsuccessful attempt to say nothing. It said everything, and by the end of a minute my chatter— none the less out of place for being all audible—was hushed to positive awe by what it had conveyed. I saw as I had never seen before what consuming passion can make of the marked mortal on whom, with fixed beak and claws, it has settled as on a prey. She reminded me of a sponge wrung dry and with fine pores agape. Voided and scraped of everything, her shell was merely crushable. So it was brought home to me that the victim could be abased, and so it disengaged itself from these things that the abasement could be conscious. That was Mrs. Server’s tragedy, that her consciousness

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survived—survived with a force that made it struggle and dissemble. This consciousness was all her secret—it was at any rate all mine. I promised myself roundly that I would henceforth keep clear of any other. (101)

Let me repeat what is becoming more and more evident, that the narrator of The Sacred Fount is engaged in an enterprise that was usually James’s meat and drink. When the narrator arrives at the understanding, or at the belief, that May Server’s innermost reality is a struggle to retain her full self-consciousness against the onslaught of a debilitating passion, he has penetrated (or believes he has) to what James, in connection with what we might call his Madame Arnoux principle, defined as the kind of knowledge it is fiction’s highest task to achieve. Any retreat from the heights of this goal is damning, as much morally as aesthetically. The narrator who closes with his subject on the ground of consciousness is doing exactly what he should. But we wish he would stop; go back to the outer court and stand around with Flaubert watching from a distance. Instead he pushes in deeper. As they talk, he suddenly glimpses the possibility of having not only knowledge but proof. I had puzzled out everything and put everything together; I was as morally confident and as intellectually triumphant as I have frankly here described myself; but there was no objective test to which I had yet exposed my theory. The chance to apply one—and it would be infallible—had suddenly cropped up. There would be excitement, amusement, discernment in it; it would be indeed but a more roundabout expression of interest and sympathy. It would, above all, pack the question I had for so many hours been occupied with into the compass of a needle-point. I was dazzled by my opportunity. (105)

The test is the one I have already mentioned: the narrator will claim to think that “poor Briss” is in love with May Server. “She would give herself away supremely if she showed she suspected me of placing my finger on the spot—if she understood the person I had not named to be nameable as Gilbert Long” (105). This is becoming a little silly, but not enough to erase the chill of the narrator’s attitude toward a woman we increasingly see as his victim. It is all very well for him to posit his sympathy (“[trapping her into self-betrayal] would be indeed but a more roundabout expression of interest and sympathy”). But when, pressing closer and closer, he sees or interprets something she says as “the expiring struggle of her native lucidity” (107); when he worries that she may break down “if I didn’t look out” (109), we are less interested than appalled. Shortly after, observing still more closely, he notices that “There came constantly into her aspect, I should say, the strangest alternatives, as I can only most conveniently call them, of presence and absence— something like intermissions of intensity, cessations and resumptions of life.

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They were like the slow flickers of a troubled flame, breathed upon and then left, burning up and burning down. She had really burnt down—I mean so far as her sense of things went—while I stood there” (111). With this a terrible contradiction has overtaken the narrator, although he seems unaware of it: he has pursued the knowledge of May Server’s consciousness not to an ultimate revelation, but virtually to its extinction. All this is far worse than what happened as a result of Flaubert’s treatment of Madame Arnoux, whose consciousness he only failed to develop as interestingly as he might have. But the frustrating career of the Sacred Fount narrator (doubly frustrating because he is not aware of his failure, or not yet) does have an oddly Flaubertian cast. What earlier I characterized as the narrator’s brutal treatment of May Server, the way he pushes her insistently to the brink of a breakdown (or to what he believes is the brink of a breakdown, which, morally, amounts to the same thing), is not the expression of an inherent cruelty. On the contrary, James projects the narrator possessed of every delicacy of character. If he is sadistic here, it is in the same sense as Flaubert is: the pleasure he derives from May Server’s pain lies in the way it illumines her beauty, and also the beauty of the situation in which they find themselves so intimately linked, yet with such opposite stakes. It is beauty, the quest for an ultimate sight of beauty which, as it did for Flaubert, comes as a guarantee of truth, that makes him prepared to inflict pain even, as we saw, to the extinction of his object; the lure of beauty makes him not just prepared but eager to inflict pain. At one turn of the interminable cat-and-mouse game that we have been following, the narrator pauses appreciatively: “She gave me a hint of drops and inconsequences that might indeed have opened up abysses, and all the while she smiled and smiled.” He takes her to be implicated in her torment, and the contrast between her pain and the beauty she, or even the pain, produces is essential to both. Yet whatever she did or failed of, as I even then observed to myself, how she remained lovely! One’s pleasure in that helped one somehow not to break down on one’s own side—since breaking down was in question—for commiseration. I didn’t know what she might have hours of for the man— whoever he was—to whom her sacrifice had been made; but I doubted if for any other person she had ever been so beautiful as she was for me at these moments. To have kept her so, to have made her more so—how might that result of their relation not in fact have shone as a blinding light into the eyes of her lover? What would he have been bound to make out in her after all but her passion and her beauty? (110–11)

The pleasure in beauty that steels an observer against commiseration, as in Flaubert’s descriptions, has a logic whereby the observer has an interest in the pain of the observed actually intensifying. The narrator in the

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passages we have just seen is enormously excited by May Server’s distress; not that he does not pity her: the test by which he means to expose her definitively is actually, as he says, “a more roundabout expression of interest and sympathy.” But his pity is part of his excitement and, far from wanting to spare her pain, he wants only “to have kept her so [beautiful and distressed at once], to have made her more so.” That this excitement of the narrator’s is very far from the sympathetic interest the narration takes in Isabel Archer’s sorrow is evident, but the reason, the principle of the difference is not. May Server is the same kind of sensitive, intelligent woman as is Isabel, the kind James saw embodied as well in Madame Arnoux. Yet May Server inspires an interest more like that Flaubert took in his characters, and which, according to James, blinded him to the opportunity Madame Arnoux presented to take a better sort of interest. The narrator strikes this Flaubertian stance directly in the way he speaks of art and projects himself as an artist elaborating scenes and characters. He has done as James said a writer should do, he has gone inside; but something is very amiss in the way he has done so, because his sympathy for what he discovers turns actually cruel. In retrospect, the scene we have been reading, in which the narrator’s tone grows repellently shrill, was overexcited from the start, with the narrator roaming the grounds in a state of “extraordinary elation” brought on by a sense “that the more things I fitted together the larger sense, every way, they made” (96). Already, the more he knows, the less he feels morally responsible to his knowledge: “[that his theory was working out] justified my indiscreet curiosity; it crowned my underhand process with beauty. The beauty perhaps was only for me—the beauty of having been right; it made at all events an element in which, while the long day softly dropped, I wandered and drifted and securely floated” (96). Floating, then, in a beauty whose aesthetic values are particularly linked to him, wandering the grounds, he has a sort of epiphany, with himself as the realized spirit. I am going to go back briefly over the scene of May Server’s painful interview with the narrator, to focus on his sense of its unfolding as a formal process. I scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in the grounds of some castle of enchantment. I had positively encountered nothing to compare with this since the days of fairy-tales and of childish imagination of the impossible. Then I used to circle round enchanted castles, for then I moved in a world in which the strange “came true.” It was the coming true that was the proof of the enchantment, which, moreover, was naturally never so great as when such coming was, to such a degree and by the most romantic stroke of all, the fruit of one’s own wizardry. I was positively—so had the wheel revolved—proud of my work. I had thought it all out, and to have thought it was, wonderfully, to have brought it. Yet I recall

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how I even then knew on the spot that there was something supreme I should have failed to bring unless I had happened suddenly to become aware of the very presence of the haunting principle, as it were, of my thought. This was the light in which Mrs. Server, walking alone now, apparently, in the grey wood and pausing at sight of me, showed herself in her clear dress at the end of a vista. It was exactly as if she had been there by the operation of my intelligence, or even by that—in a still happier way— of my feeling. My excitement, as I have called it, on seeing her, was assuredly emotion. Yet what was this feeling, really?—of which, at the point we had thus reached, I seemed to myself to have gathered from all things an invitation to render some account. (97)

His account is of an emotion like “an extraordinary tenderness,” which he expresses, when he sees that she is hesitating over whether to pretend she has not seen him, by blocking her escape. “While I moved a few steps toward her, I felt almost as noiseless and guarded as if I were trapping a bird or stalking a fawn” (98). But it is not wholly her suffering beauty that moves him; the setting seems to be moving him as much: My few steps brought me to a spot where another perspective crossed our own, so that they made together a verdurous circle with an evening sky above and great lengthening, arching recesses in which the twilight thickened. Oh, it was quite sufficiently the castle of enchantment, and when I noticed four old stone seats, massive and mossy and symmetrically placed, I recognised not only the influence, in my adventure, of the grand style, but the familiar identity of this consecrated nook, which was so much of the type of all the bemused and remembered. We were in a beautiful old picture, we were in a beautiful old tale, and it wouldn’t be the fault of Newmarch [the name of the country estate where they are staying] if some other green carrefour, not far off, didn’t balance with this one and offer the alternative of niches, in the greenness, occupied by weather-stained statues on florid pedestals. (98)

We were in a beautiful old picture: not, we were looking at a beautiful old picture, but we were inside it. The relation of characters to painting, sometimes music, in James’s writing is a sort of internecine struggle. Characters show real as against art. It is a sign of the authenticity of the old French families Christopher Newman encounters in The American that the pictures on their walls have neither been chosen nor retained for their artistic value. On the other hand, Gilbert Osmond’s passion for art objects in Portrait of a Lady is not a saving grace. James’s stories appreciate pictures, in their place; people and pictures, as representations, are not the same. But they are the same for the narrator of The Sacred Fount, who takes a picture, a tale, or a mind as the same situation: “We were in a beautiful old picture,

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we were in a beautiful old tale. . . . I sat straight down on the nearest of the benches, for this struck me as the best way to express the conception with which the sight of Mrs. Server filled me. It showed her that if I watched her I also waited for her, and that I was therefore not affected in any manner she really need deprecate” (98). If ever someone could be accused, as James accused Flaubert, of an aestheticizing and thereby dehumanizing stance, it is this narrator who seems to have interpreted James’s own central principle—going inside characters— as an injunction to treat others’ interior worlds like his own backyard: an expanse all his to explore and describe. About the narrator it can be said, as James said of Flaubert, that he thinks “human life . . . is above all things a spectacle, a thing to be looked at, seen, apprehended, enjoyed with the eyes” (170). Like Flaubert, according to James, this narrator finds human life “interesting” and “curious” and is rather more curious about “the disagreeable.” He is determined to learn May Server’s secret, whatever it costs her to reveal it, simply because, like a mountain, it is there: it is at the heart of the real and “[t]he real is the most satisfactory thing in the world, and if once we fairly get into it, nothing shall frighten us back” (171). But here there emerges a difference between the narrator and Flaubert: the narrator is not so intrepid. In fact, he is made to turn and flee by what seems at first sight a rather small setback. Having determined, through such exercises as we have been tracing, that May Server is indeed Gilbert Long’s sacred fount, he approaches his collaborator in detection, Grace Brissenden, and tells her so. But she, whether in self-defense or for some other reason we ignore (the narrator has not bothered with her interior life since he thinks he already knows her secret), counters with a solution of her own. Hers makes nonsense of his: she maintains that her husband has had advances from May Server whom he reports to be “awfully sharp.” Instead of May Server, it must be Lady John who is Gilbert Long’s donor; but Lady John is notoriously dim herself, so that if she is indeed Long’s secret flame, the theory of the sacred fount, whereby vitality is dispensed to the beloved and lost to the lover, has been disproved. Mrs. Brissenden has played her trump card: since it is her own husband she claims has told her that May Server is not after all debilitated (so little so, she is chasing him), the poor narrator, lacking any equivalent evidence for his side, cannot make his case. Grace Brissenden has smashed him (“smash” is his verb). In response to his refusal of her account, and his look implying at once his own solution (May Server) and his knowledge of Mrs. Brissenden’s own blood-sucking practices, she dismisses him with, “‘My poor dear, you are crazy, and I bid you good-night!’” (218). Whereupon, She had so had the last word that, to get out of its planted presence, I shook myself, as I had done before, from my thought. When once I had started to my room indeed—and to preparation for a livelier start as soon as the house

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should stir again—I almost breathlessly hurried. Such a last word—the word that put me altogether nowhere—was too unacceptable not to prescribe afresh that prompt test of escape to other air for which I had earlier in the evening seen so much reason [he has had earlier warnings Mrs. Briss was rallying her forces]. I should certainly never again, on the spot, quite hang together, even though it wasn’t really that I hadn’t three times her method. What I too fatally lacked was her tone. (219)

It is as if the demon of exteriorizing has turned on him and he is outside. Or else, it turns out that two can play at the narrator’s game, and Grace Brissenden has just trumped his bid: his description of a desperate May Server, so desperate she has been trying to erect a smokescreen by flirting with poor Briss, with a claim that the flirting is no smokescreen but the real thing. Who can gainsay what his wife says he told her that he observed in relation to his own person? Outlook for outlook, Grace B’s observation post is the better situated. Even so, the narrator, with three times her method, might have made his description stick. That it does not, he tells us, is not the fault of his reasoning nor of his research, but of his tone. It is not the demon of exteriorizing that has got him, but the demon he has ignored, who lives inside, where the narrator has been wandering impervious to the spirit of the place. You can observe all you want, you can observe everything there is to observe, you can, as James said of Flaubert, “‘render’ things—anything, everything, from a chimney-pot to the shoulders of a duchess” (170); but apparently you cannot cash in all this rendering into bankable knowledge. That requires tone. As to what constitutes “tone,” we might derive something like a definition from another instance in which James refers to it as an essential part of the art of the novel, in the introduction to The Two Young Brides (Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées). There, explaining what he meant by saying of Balzac that he was “after all not in his magnificence totally an artist” (94), James described him as part sociologist, part novelist. This incoherence was evident, for instance, in “the fatal break of ‘tone,’—the one unpardonable sin for the novelist” (96) that ruins the story “Le Curé de Village.” In this story, the character of Madame Graslin starts out wonderfully. “Her drama is a particularly inward one, interesting, and in the highest degree, so long as she herself, her nature, her behaviour, her personal history and the relations in which they place her, control the picture and feed our illusion.” All this “only until, at a given moment, [Balzac’s] attention ruthlessly transfers itself from inside to outside, from the centre of his subject to its circumference” (95–96). With this shift, Madame Graslin falls apart. She retains all her outstanding features, for instance not only her “economic opportunities” but her social “visions,” that is, her method of being in the world; but she loses her personal vitality, her force of character—her tone. I think James was here using “tone” in something close to a musi-

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cal sense: tone is the living breath and resonance of the character, his or her inward life. The narrator of The Sacred Fount is fatally lacking in tone. When confronted by a character who suddenly insists on her own tone, he has none with which to counter. His failure elaborates James’s objection to the Flaubert way with characters, for it is the way as well of the Sacred Fount narrator, who does not fail as a character, which he scarcely is, but as a narrator. In the latter role, he has approached the inwardness of his fellow guests as a settled state, seeking to capture their psychological physiognomies the way the painter Obert captures faces. But by taking inwardness to be composed of settled states, the narrator ends up painting by the numbers: “portrait of a vampire, or of a victim,” “portrait of a clever woman or of a stupid man.” Grace Brissenden defeats the narrator by revealing an interiority that is not a state of things but a mode of being, not static but fluid, an unfolding drama: a resounding tone. He flees the scene realizing that he has, as means to deal with her, only facts, logic: method. A tone is made of interactions; the narrator has failed to recognize, in his investigation of the case of the sacred fount, that its protagonists, self-possessed and endowed with an authorial capacity of their own, are all the time advancing cases of their own, so that his most careful observations are still behindhand. In short, having tested it, James had confirmed that the form of Flaubert’s depiction of characters occluded in that process exactly what he, James, valued most. The particular interest of Madame Graslin’s drama for him lay in its being “particularly inward.” The narrator of The Sacred Fount treats Grace Brissenden’s drama and May Server’s as if they were outward, much like Emma Bovary’s. Flaubert was well satisfied with what his narrator knew when he finished parsing Emma’s mind and soul, but James’s disaffection with his narrator’s parsing is evident first in the enforced flight that aborts the vampire hunt and then, two years later, in the repudiation of The Sacred Fount when he did not include it in the New York edition. Weeks after finishing his failed novel, James began writing the one he would declare his very best, The Ambassadors. Like that of The Sacred Fount, the Ambassadors’ narrator, Lewis Lambert Strether, is trying to suss out the true nature of certain amorous relations. He, however, pursues his truth onto the shifting terrain of self-reflection and self-knowledge, the protagonists’ at issue and his own. He has sufficient tone for an entire symphony.

g{Üxx The Ambassadors What He Saw Was Exactly the Right Thing

I The Ambassadors sang true for Henry James from its first intimation, and he recalled the happy event in the preface to the New York edition. One day, his friend Jonathan Sturges repeated “with great appreciation, a thing or two said to him by a man of distinction.” The man of distinction (it was William Dean Howells) had offered avuncular advice, urging his young friend, “Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to.” The exchange had taken place at a garden party at James Whistler’s elegant house in St.-Germain-des-Prés. Two Americans in Paris, the elder reflecting wistfully, if a little tritely, on his life, the younger polite and amused: James had his “glimpse.” The observation there listened to and gathered up had contained part of the “note” [“note” combines subject and tone] that I was to recognize on the spot as to my purpose—had contained in fact the greater part; the rest was in the place and the time and the scene they sketched: these constituents clustered and combined to give me further support, to give me what I may call the note absolute. There it stands, accordingly, full in the tideway; driven in, with hard taps, like some strong stake for the noose of a cable, the swirl of the current roundabout it. What amplified the hint to more than the bulk of hints in general was the gift with it of the old Paris garden, for in that token were sealed up values infinitely precious. There was of course the seal to break and each item of the packet to count over and handle and estimate; but somehow, in the light of the hint, all the elements of a situation of the sort most to my taste were there. I could even remember no occasion on which, so confronted, I had found it of a livelier interest to take stock, in this fashion, of suggested wealth. For I think, verily, that there are degrees of merit in subjects—in spite of the fact that to treat even one of the most ambiguous with due decency we must for the time, for the

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feverish and prejudiced hour, at least figure its merit and its dignity as possibly absolute. What it comes to, doubtless, is that even among the supremely good—since with such alone is it one’s theory of one’s honour to be concerned—there is an ideal beauty of goodness the invoked action of which is to raise the artistic faith to its maximum. Then truly, I hold, one’s theme may be said to shine, and that of “The Ambassadors,” I confess, wore this glow for me from beginning to end. (French Writers, 1305–06)

The poor narrator of The Sacred Fount had understood much of this and recognized, for instance in his chance encounter with May Server as they both walked the Newmarch grounds, a similarly fecund coincidence of event and setting. He heard the note his subject sounded; he just could not muster an adequate response. Starting over immediately after that debacle, James had entrusted the response to a master of tone, a man who is all resonance, nuance, variation; one whose intelligence is nine parts mindfulness, with the tenth part morality and reasoning, the latter posited, but not featured, as it was by the Sacred Fount narrator. This narrative approach had proved so successful, its result so happy, he could permit himself “such an extreme of complacency” as he was confessing to in the preface without appearing “publicly fatuous” (1306). A gracious letter to Howells on completing the novel explained its origin the same way and with the same combination of mannerly modesty and artistic satisfaction. James had found “charming” Howells’s “five words” urging Sturges to live, live . . . . Probably, Howells would not even remember issuing such an injunction, but there it was: it had given James “the faint vague germ, the mere point of the start, of a subject.” If not for Howells, the novel might never have happened. Though, of course, “in the very act of striking me as a germ” the inspiring words had “got away from you or from anything like you! had become impersonal and independent.” Still, he concluded, “The moral is that you are responsible for the whole business. But I’ve had it, since the book was finished, much at heart to tell you so. May you carry the burden bravely!”1 The slight incoherence of James’s acknowledgment—it was your “five words” that gave me the nub of my story, but they were not your words anymore when I took them over, and the novel is all your doing—could simply express discomfort over Howells’s self-exposure. James may have sought to shield Howells from embarrassment, while at the same time giving credit where it was due. He was paying tribute at once to privacy and to authorship, a very modern contradiction. But there is, if not a contradiction, a double effect in the way James described using the incident, which figures at once as a central plot element within the novel and, apparently, still in relation to the novel, as an obdurately real event. In fact, the real event’s continuing real—retaining its independent existence in James’s mind all the

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while he was producing a fictional version of it—seems to clinch its supreme power to inspire fiction. “Never,” James explained at the beginning of the preface, “can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion, and never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the mass as an independent particle” (1304). The real sentence has become fictional without losing its historical force, which it wields simultaneously with its fictional force; or rather, not simultaneously but in oscillation. I took those words from you, he wrote Howells, and was inspired by them to write my story; (in the fictional mode) but they were not your words, they became mine because I put them into my story; (in the historical mode) the responsibility is yours, carry it bravely. Of course, this last thrust was a joke. But James was not joking when he said that Howells’s words had given him his “note.” He was not joking either when he used Howells’s words verbatim: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”2 Two sentences, one real, one fictional, the two identical, yet entirely distinct. Borges, who so admired The Sacred Fount, might have found something more to approve in James’s exact replication of Howells’s words, anticipating Borges’s Pierre Menard, author of a Don Quixote identical with the original yet absolutely distinct from it. An important difference between Menard’s (Borges’s) text and James’s is that James’s—“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to” (1304)—is not a text. In fact, that Howells’s words were really spoken by a real person is crucial to James’s use of them. Howells’s mot is “some strong stake for the noose of a cable” tethering The Ambassadors to an actual personal history. There exist three replicas of that stake, three versions of Sturges’s report. The first is the one James recorded in his journal the day after Sturges’s visit: “Oh, you are young, you are young—be glad of it; be glad of it and live. Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do— but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now. I haven’t done so—and now I’m old. It’s too late. It has gone past me—I’ve lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!”

In the journal entry, James has written, “I amplify and improve a little—but that was the tone.”3 Another version is the one we have been considering, the one in the preface: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of

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freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of a reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you don’t make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!” (1304)

The next is the longest version, the one spoken inside the novel, the literary, the written version. “It’s not too late for you, on any side, and you don’t strike me as in danger of missing the train; besides which people can be in general pretty well trusted, of course—with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here—to keep an eye on the fleeting hour. All the same don’t forget that you’re young—blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? This place and these impressions—mild as you may find them to wind a man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people I’ve seen at his place—well, have had their abundant message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh I do see, at least; and more than you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. The affair—I mean the affair of life—couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is poured—so that one “takes” the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it; one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t quite know which. Of course at present I’m a case of reaction against the mistake; and the voice of reaction should, no doubt, always be taken with an allowance. But that doesn’t affect the point that the right time is now yours. The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. You’ve plenty; that’s the great thing; you’re as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully young. Don’t at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I don’t take you for a fool, or I shouldn’t be addressing you thus awfully. Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!” (Ambassadors, 215–16)

The preface version, written after the novel’s version, which itself elaborates the journal version, shows, by summarizing the novel version, how insubstantial as to meaning that elaboration has been. As spoken by Strether,

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the novel’s protagonist and quasi-narrator, the speech has more words, but the sentiment is only the more remarkably identical. The novel account contains no new substance. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” the “five words” James refers to in his letter to Howells and elsewhere, are cited verbatim. Howells had invoked his interlocutor’s youth and his own middle age, had noted the place and the occasion, had declared it too late for him and pleaded with the young man to profit by his example and live! The Ambassadors’ long version adds the image of the train that waited at the station and has now left, also that of life as a tin mold, but sums up in exactly the terms from which it set out: “one lives in fine as one can.” In the end we are at the beginning, with Howells: “Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!” Howells’s little speech had not only priority in James’s writing of The Ambassadors, therefore, but authority. Flaubert would not have imagined granting either priority or authority to any historical account of Carthage. Even the facts he gathered at such exhaustive and exhausting length were subject to the authority of his style. History’s facts were indubitably facts, no one had more respect for history’s facts, but they could never dislodge Flaubert’s facts, vide that vexed aqueduct, true even if invented. History in Salammbô is neither grain of suggestion nor stake nor independent particle. Everything floats with the current of Flaubert’s writing; or, rather, the current of the writing is everything, a flow of objects he had turned up by dint of ruining his sight peering through the lens of form and style. The question this contrast raises, of course, is a crucial one for this book, whose ongoing project is to explicate the different ways three different writers expressed a common sense of literary form as the ultimate resource for knowledge of the world, as well as the ultimate test of its validity. In chapter 2, James was seen complaining that Flaubert made only partial use of the powers of literary form. Instead of going inside where the meanings are, he “hovered forever at the public door, in the outer court.” He stopped too soon: “the shining arms were meant to carry further, the other doors were meant to open” (French Writers, 313–14). I proposed in that chapter to see his criticism of Flaubert as reflecting James’s own sense that literary form was an instrument for discovering realities lying beyond direct observation; thus imparting to form more power than did Flaubert. Yet James’s celebration of the found reality of Howells’s “five words” as the core of The Ambassadors—he did place the prodigious words at the center of the novel—seems to impart a permanent primary authority to the real real, a deference that Flaubert, for all his obsessive research, would never have shown, and that James, as we saw in the last chapter, associated, not intending thereby to flatter him, with the colossal writer he found perhaps not wholly an artist, Balzac. Actually, this apparent contradiction, between not just acknowledging but celebrating the autonomy of the real, while taking the task of writing

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to be knowing it better than it knows itself, is at the center of the writing of The Ambassadors. The same contradiction was also at the center of The Sacred Fount’s writing: the understandings by which certain individuals try to live out their difficult plights versus the proof of a theory whose transcending explanation would appropriate and cancel. There, the narrator, doctrinally and, it turns out, catastrophically blind to the very phenomenon of self-possession,4 which is the key embodiment of the autonomy of the real, fails even to see a problem. But in this next novel, The Ambassadors, everything and everyone stares at it constantly. Here the problem for both characters and author is how to combine the ethical and the aesthetic, the moral and the formal, feeling and knowledge. The preface announces this problem when it insists that in the beginning of James’s most consummate fiction was Howells’s little speech to Sturges, and when it both claims and disclaims those “five words.” As he repeated in his objections to Flaubert’s choice of subjects, the most important, essential reality, the most worthy of literary exploration, was the personal, ethical life. Self-possession being the condition for ethical life, a fictional manner that took an entire aesthetic possession of such a subject as that of an aging man issuing injunctions to “live, live!” would be immoral as well as inadequate. “I rejoiced,” James went on in the preface, “in the promise of a hero so mature, who would give me thereby the more to bite into—since it’s only into thickened motive and accumulated character, I think, that the painter of life bites more than a little” (1306). The definitive reproach to inconsequential Emma, the antithesis of the paper-thin Salammbô, James’s mature hero, thick with character, his steps encumbered by a lifetime’s accumulation of motives, comes in trailing clouds of mortality. That was the whole point— it was what made him the ideal sitter for a painter who was a painter of life.

II I will begin reading The Ambassadors, therefore, as James began its writing, with Lewis Lambert Strether of Woollett, Massachussetts. A man of letters, of middle age and middling success, he finds himself dispatched to Europe on a mission for Mrs. Newsome, the rich widow whose money supports the magazine he edits. Besides being her employee, he is to be her husband, and his mission seems a test of this engagement. He is to bring back Mrs. Newsome’s son Chad who has postponed too long his return from one of those trips abroad young men take before settling down to the family business. Chad should now be assuming his place at home, but he lingers in Paris, and his mother believes there is a woman behind it. Indeed there is, an older woman though still young, a married woman. Strether, meeting the

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exquisite and intelligent Madame de Vionnet, understands how an erstwhile boorish Chad has become charming. But if the Parisian woman’s influence has been all to the good, the man from New England is not entirely easy ascribing such improvement to an illicit relation. He seems almost consciously to decide to believe what is intimated to him shortly after his arrival—that the affair that keeps Chad in Paris is chaste. Strether’s informant, little Bilham, calls it “a virtuous attachment” (187), and Strether takes this as indicating an affair of the heart and not of the flesh. However, James’s account of the conversation tips off the reader who, like Chad’s relations, never doubts the nature of the affair. Strether’s error works therefore to mark the point of departure for his Parisian journey: he assumes a conflict between virtue and pleasure which it will be the effort of everyone he meets to refute. Paris will reveal to him the virtue in pleasure, and the sin in its denial. Yet even blinkered by Woollett’s puritan dichotomy, he is neither prudish nor insensible to the possibility of physical passion. When he later accuses himself of willful blindness, it will be on the eve of a positive decision not to become involved in a carnal relation of his own, and both refusals, the past and the present, carry a creditable erotic charge. Indeed, from the moment Strether arrives in Europe, or not even quite, when he is still safe in England, there is about him an air of possibility, a covert potential eroticism like the forecast of an easterly heading for the harbor. Indeed, it is two young and beautiful women who are chiefly responsible for helping Strether to evolve into the man he always was and might never have become. The first, whom he meets upon landing, is Maria Gostrey, a sophisticated, lovely expatriate. She will make him the offer he refuses. The other woman is Chad’s mistress, Marie de Vionnet. By the time he recognizes the true nature of Chad’s liaison, Strether has been sufficiently enlightened by these knowing friends to see that the young American will be a better man if he stays in Europe at the side of his French mistress, as he, Strether, is a better man for having come to Europe. Nonetheless, in the end, he decides to return home so as not to profit by the betrayal of Mrs. Newsome’s trust (he has urged, indeed pleaded with Chad to stay in Paris), though it is clear to him that betrayal of such a trust is in every way preferable to its acquittal. His sacrifice will be in vain. On his side, Chad will abandon Madame de Vionnet and go home to his mother, the family business, and a wife suited to both, this last probably a certain “Mamie” who comes to Paris as part of a second delegation sent by Mrs. Newsome when she concludes, time passing, that Strether is not up to his task. Mamie is “a young lady of twenty-two” whose manner in her Paris hotel room suggests she “might have been ‘receiving’ for Woollett.” Blue-eyed and blessed with perfect teeth, she

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sports a “very small, too small, nose” (325) in the measure of the sad, even the ridiculous insufficiency Paris has revealed in poor Strether’s American situation. (The description of Mamie, her manner, and her nose is his.) The Ambassadors plot turns on Strether’s confrontation of the nature of Chad’s romantic liaison and, broadly, on his understanding of Paris life and of himself in relation to it. It turns on knowledge. Strether is officially, to himself and to his friends, a seeker after knowledge, announced as such by the novel’s first words, “Strether’s first question . . . .” However, the sentence veers off, almost turns around: “Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted” (55). This is hardly a plunge into the unknown. Strether starts out by confirming his arrival (at a previously booked hotel), and by looking up an old friend; “yet,” we learn that he is not “wholly” unhappy to find his project of reunion thwarted. Not quite arrived in Paris, having just crossed over into England, the ambassador is a little disposed to leave his attaché case on the desk and wander awhile. He has launched, or at least he has launched into launching. Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a room “only if not noisy,” reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound. The same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh’s presence at the dock, that had led him to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old Waymarsh—if not even, for that matter, to himself—there was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn’t see enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned5 as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive—the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note” of Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether’s part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a sufficient degree. (55)

Strether is on the lookout for the same quiddity in regard to Europe as gave James his first sense of the novel: a note, a gist of the matter, its pith and pitch; an emanation that is at the origin of Proust’s madeleine, that which, in experience, will evolve into the objective aspect of memory, the

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taste of the madeleine. But the last sentence is already impatient of commas and qualifications. Dear old Waymarsh, anxious for quiet where Strether strains to hear the first note of Europe, marks the beginning of Strether’s journey, the place he leaves from. This opening paragraph is almost too plain, as if James wanted to be certain readers would understand Strether, understand and be indulgent. Strether’s promising instinct, after all, has been to meet Europe unchaperoned. To what end is unclear, but it hovers with sufficient energy to become incarnated presently in the person of Maria Gostrey, who happens to be staying at the same hotel. When she materializes in the garden of the hotel, Strether rejoices on having started his journey, or at least left home. The grade is easy, he hardly has to lift his foot to climb the first step. Maria Gostrey even knows Waymarsh, her inquiry after that gentleman being the irreproachable occasion for the first conversation. The limits of propriety are not breached, but by the end of the first chapter, Strether has been led a considerable distance: he has asked Maria to “‘get me out,’” meaning, he explains, not out of meeting Waymarsh that evening, but portentously “‘out of the terror.’” He explains that by “terror” he means “the obsession of the other thing” that haunts his every participation, even in the present delightful occasion. He yearns to be wholly at one with the event, any event, “the thing of the moment”: he seems to have decided that knowledge requires immersion, to know a thing whole one has to be whole in the knowing. He asks Maria to teach him the form of living more than its content; she agrees, and they set to at once. Everything goes swimmingly. Waymarsh, by now arrived, accompanies them on a walk through town and offers himself as an instructive contrast, pausing before “the plateglass of ironmongers and saddlers, while Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper and smart neckties” (81). And yet. It turns out that Waymarsh is actually better informed than Strether on matters of fashion: “The weary lawyer—it was unmistakeable—had a conception of dress” (81). In fact, Waymarsh knows a lot, despite not being interested. Waymarsh is a puritan, a descendant of the first and arguably the only American intellectuals, the only ones to have believed that reason was the face of God. While Maria Gostrey charms Strether into an embrace of the moment that will yield the intimate knowledge of which he has declared himself terrified, Waymarsh steals a march on both of them. Suddenly, as the three walk along Chester Street, Waymarsh dashes into a jewelry shop. Maria drolly declares she fears he is about to do something foolish and suggests they follow him, but Strether, in the same register, says no: “‘Not for worlds. Besides we can’t. We’re paralyzed. We exchange a long scared look, we publicly tremble. The thing is, you see, we “realize.” He has struck for freedom’” (83). The scene is mostly theirs, theirs the wit and the fun; but not its content. As Waymarsh has been the one to

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act, he will also keep his reason to himself, to the end. This is the paragraph that closes book 1 of The Ambassadors: If Waymarsh was somber he was also indeed almost sublime. He told them nothing, left his absence unexplained, and though they were convinced he had made some extraordinary purchase they were never to learn its nature. He only glowered grandly at the tops of the old gables [the street is lined with gabled buildings]. “It’s the sacred rage,” Strether had had further time to say; and this sacred rage was to become between them, for convenient comprehension, the description of one of his periodical necessities. It was Strether who eventually contended that it did make him better than they. But by that time Miss Gostrey was convinced that she didn’t want to be better than Strether. (85)

Book 1, which opened with Strether’s question, ends with his not getting an answer. It is not a very important answer that he is missing, and not getting it is at least as telling as the answer would be: Maria and Strether’s bond of ignorance becomes the sign of their superior understanding. But the writing that tells of the permanent mystery of Waymarsh’s purchase sports an oddly solemn syntax. The transcendent impossibility of “They were never to learn . . . was to become . . .” is almost comically portentous. More naturally, James might have written “they would never know . . . would become.” Instead, “They were never to know” lends the narration an emphatic authority it will not wield elsewhere in the novel. It does not matter what Waymarsh has bought, if anything. Then why does the passage make such a thing of it, giving it pride of place at the conclusion of the first book?6 The passage makes a thing out of Waymarsh’s purchase, when it might have been a gesture. We are made to reflect that there is a fact of the matter about Waymarsh’s errand, a fact that will never be known. The very ignorance of his two friends testifies to this impenetrable fact. Having watched the event take place, they testify to its substance, which is unattainable: “they were never to learn its nature.” That Waymarsh himself should foment mystery, and a mystery, besides, set in a jewelry store with all its connotations of luxurious indulgence, goes counter to his representing Mrs. Newsome’s New England piety; it is also odd that the sophisticated Miss Gostrey should be unable to unriddle such an apparently mundane secret. As for Strether, he associates his old friend’s impenetrability with a “sacred rage,” perhaps a version of the fury of his forebears’ concatenation with their angry god’s own rage. One thing seems to emerge from all this: the universe of understanding into which Maria Gostrey is to lead Strether is a limited universe, a sublunary knowledge of this life, without pretense to transcendence. Waymarsh may indeed know more, and not only about clothes; there is some mystery too about a wayward wife. He certainly suspects more. Eventually, he will be more effec-

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tive than Strether, sending a tattling letter to Mrs. Newsome to report that her envoy is not carrying out his mission, thus bringing on the second landing I mentioned earlier, which includes the egregious Mamie. Mamie in her maiden innocence is like Waymarsh in his puritan rigor: they embrace principle rather than life, smugly gratified in presuming that they have to choose. The moral of Strether’s Parisian sojourn is embrace life, and his tale is about how it is not at all clear what embracing life implies as to principle. Waymarsh’s way, which is also that of the Woollett ladies, is to not explore; he travels not to see but to confirm. But as his counterpart, Strether is not his opposite, only his critic. The voyage of discovery upon which Strether and all of The Ambassadors embarks envisages, instead of triumphant clarity, a greater sense of the problem, beginning modestly with the recognition that principles are problematic. Indeed, to Waymarsh’s certainty, Strether begins by proposing not even uncertainty but puzzlement. If James thought that Flaubert had limited what he could find out about life through art by his exclusively aesthetic approach—by treating the world as a collection of objects and ignoring the world of feeling—it was evidently not because he thought that an art that went what he considered to be further, and penetrated to the inner world of feeling, would arrive at total knowledge. Starting out on what he seems to have guessed would be his furthest fictional exploration, James stipulated, in the never-to-be-resolved mystery of Waymarsh’s errand, that an ethical approach also incurred limits. Strether and Maria are absolutely barred from knowing what Waymarsh has gone to buy. Strether’s humorous reply to Maria’s humorous suggestion that they follow him into the shop, so as to prevent his doing anything foolish, sets out a structural principle of the novel’s narration. I repeat Strether’s answer: “‘Not for worlds. Besides we can’t. We’re paralyzed. We exchange a long scared look, we publicly tremble. The thing is, you see, we “realize.” He has struck for freedom.’” So he has, and even Waymarsh’s freedom is not a joke, or not only. The ethical limits the aesthetic as surely as the reverse. Strether limits himself to this rule, and no one, not just Maria Gostrey, would want to be better than Strether. Except possibly his author: Strether is not James, and I will come back later to the discrepancy.

III First, a more serious instance of the limits of what can be seen standing in the inner courtyard of the soul. The plot of The Ambassadors turns, as we have seen, on a mystery, an unknown: is Madame de Vionnet Chad’s mistress? Yes or no, do they sleep together? Without lying in so many words, Chad’s friend Bilham has led Strether to think that the relation is en-

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tirely sentimental. Early on, Strether asks nothing better than to believe this and finds evidence for it in Chad’s new affective delicacy and improved manners. But advised to the contrary by Waymarsh, Mrs. Newsome has sent her daughter, the odious Sarah Pocock (trailing Mamie) to see for herself, and the encounters between Mrs. Pocock and Strether have been exceedingly unpleasant. The Woollett delegation has just left Paris after a last terrible interview in which Strether has announced his intention to urge Chad to remain in Paris in the orbit of Madame de Vionnet’s wonderfully improving influence. Strether has cast his die, he can only go forward. (We are some sixty pages from the end of the novel.) Until now, the Bois de Boulogne has been his outer frontier, and now he plans a trip into the countryside, into “that French ruralism, with its cool special green, into which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window of the picture-frame” (452). To say the obvious, he will follow James’s advice to Flaubert and go through into the interior of his subject. The passage continues: [French ruralism] had been as yet for the most part but a land of fancy for him—the background of fiction, the medium of art, the nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but practically also well-nigh as consecrated. [In short, the realm of the aesthetic.] Romance could weave itself, for Strether’s sense, out of elements mild enough; and even after what he had, as he felt, lately “been through,” he could thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that would remind him of a certain small Lambinet7 that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer’s and that he had quite absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he remembered, at a price he had been instructed to believe the lowest ever named for a Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to recognize, all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He had dreamed—had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase of a work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest; but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the picture he would have bought—the particular production that had made him for the moment overstep the modesty of nature. He was quite aware that if he were to see it again he should perhaps have a drop or a shock, and he never found himself wishing that the wheel of time would turn it up again, just as he had seen it in the maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine of Tremont Street. It would be a different thing, however, to see the remembered mixture resolved back into its elements—to assist at the restoration to nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in Boston, the background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-coloured sanctum, the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars, the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady woody horizon. (452–53)

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Fig. 2. The painting by Émile-Charles Lambinet that Strether fails to buy is not identified, but this one, with its riverbank and two figures seated in a canoe, seems a likely candidate. Reproduced by permission of Mark Murray Fine Paintings, New York.

To repeat, Strether recalls the episode of the missed purchase of a painting as a missed opportunity actually to live. Calling it an adventure, he worries he might be shocked if he were to see it again, would rather not. The timeless qualities of the painting are subsumed in the more important dimension of his lifetime. The usual progression translates a living model into art, and Strether is doing the reverse, a move already predicted by the representation of his earlier encounter with the painting as a living adventure. This reversal characterizes a man who, at fifty-five, has been a widower practically from his youth. When he gave himself “insanely to merely missing the mother,” he banished and thus lost also the son, “his little dull boy,” whose dullness was perhaps the result of neglect. He thus reflects, early in the story, that Maria Gostrey is the first woman he has ever invited to dinner and the theater: “he had never taken anyone anywhere” (91). Having early turned away from life, among his losses, that of the Lambinet is now the one to inspire whatever recovery of his life might still be possible. The bizarre idea

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of restoring a painting to nature is the only way he can imagine returning to life: he is to himself a character trying to come to life. There is, of course, no recapturing a pre-art perception of nature and the world, no more than a pre-lapsarian. Form is as fatal as knowledge. Having seen “the poplars, the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady woody horizon” as a Lambinet landscape, he cannot now see them as they might be in nature. He does not try for that, but only for a perception of the world not freer of art, but somewhat freer of himself, and not even of his intellect, just of the constraints of his story. As he is, a middleaged man from Woollett, Massachussetts, he is going to travel outside his own plot and listen for the note of the French countryside. Why not? As much as he can, he returns agency to the world out there: “He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that it should stop a few times after getting out of the banlieue; he threw himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint of where to alight. His theory of his excursion was that he could alight anywhere—not nearer to Paris than an hour’s run—on catching a suggestion of the particular note required.” He is treating the countryside, hopelessly pervaded by consciousness as it is for him, as if it were the artist and he a visitor at an exposition. The strategy works: It [the note] made its sign, the suggestion—weather, air, light, colour and his mood all favouring—at the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up at just the right spot, and he found himself getting out as securely as if to keep an appointment. It will be felt of him that he could amuse himself, at his age, with very small things if it be again noted that his appointment was only with a superseded Boston fashion. He hadn’t gone far without the quick confidence that it would be quite sufficiently kept. The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river [recall the Lambinet: “the poplars, the willows, the rushes, the river”]— a river of which he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, the name—fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it. He did this last, for an hour, to his heart’s content, making for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his impression and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them again and reached the maroon-coloured wall. (453)

It is commonly said that a great painting makes its subject appear real; not that a painting conjures reality itself. But the enchantment that reigns in this countryside is more powerful than the ordinary: it does not create so much as it recreates, fulfills, reveals. It reveals, for instance, that Strether has valued his friendship with Madame de Vionnet even more than

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he had realized back in Paris. At their last meeting, he recalls telling her of his intention to urge Chad to stay with her, “He had wanted her to feel that, as he was disinterested now, so she herself should be, and she had showed she felt it, and he had showed he was grateful, and it had been for all the world as if he were calling for the first time” (456). Of course he recognizes that, “under the spell of the picture,” he is remembering that meeting as if it were a scene in a play. But this heightening of life into art does not make either the recollection less real or its meaning less trustworthy. At one point in his ruminations, Strether imagines himself in a Maupassant tale, being driven to the station by a driver “who naturally wouldn’t fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted nightcap and of the genius of response,” with whom he converses in fluent French, although in Paris he has hardly dared speak a sentence or two (454). But here as well, Strether has not climbed into a story, he has passed through it and into a reality that had been inaccessible to him, as earlier the painting had been inaccessible but was now his natural environment: He really continued in the picture—that being for himself his situation— all the rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was still, was indeed more than ever upon him when, toward six o’clock, he found himself amicably engaged with a stout white-capped deep-voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the biggest village, a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and crookedness, set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing behind or before it—one couldn’t say which; at the bottom, in particular, of the inn-garden. (457)

The inn-keeper’s proposition of a côtelette de veau à l’oseille (457) clinches the matter; a veal cutlet with sorrel is unimpeachable testimony to the real. Strether wanders down to the river at the bottom of the garden to await, with his dinner, the consummation of his discovery of the truth about life. Floating in on the river, borne on its current, comes the evidence that he has been utterly deluded. At first, he mistakes this catastrophic evidence for its contrary, a confirming continuation of the understanding to which he has only just, but with such confidence, broken through: What he saw was exactly the right thing—a boat advancing round the bend and containing a man who held the paddles and a lady, at the stern, with a pink parasol. It was suddenly as if these figures, or something like them, had been wanted in the picture, had been wanted more or less all day, and had now drifted into sight, with the slow current, on purpose to fill up the measure. (461)

The approaching boat is exactly the right thing in the same way the landscape and the day have been exactly right; or almost, since he now sees

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it was awaiting the culmination of the man and woman just drifting in. In completing the formal arrangement, they seem to bring an aesthetic ratification of Strether’s truth. Moreover, that it need not have been precisely these two figures, that it could have been “something like them,” does not qualify but extends the ratification, rendering it global. A lone fisherman with his dog, a boy asleep in a rowboat drifting down the river, would have done as well. The truth the young man and the woman with the pink parasol prove by completing the picture is a general principle that Strether has grasped at last, and, he hopes, not too late. That he has come late to the wisdom of pleasure only confirms it, and the young couple seem especially important to the picture in their evident prior experience of the pleasures it suggests. They appear before him as models of the right way to live: “a young man in shirt-sleeves, a young woman easy and fair, who had pulled pleasantly up from some other place and, being acquainted with the neighborhood, had known what this particular retreat could offer them” (461). The inn-keeper had told him that two persons had been by earlier to order an evening meal and that they would be his companions at her table. He understands that these are the persons, clearly adepts at such experiences as delightful dinners in inn gardens: “The air quite thickened, at their approach, with further intimations; the intimation that they were expert, familiar, frequent—that this wouldn’t at all events be the first time. They knew how to do it, he vaguely felt—and it made them but the more idyllic . . .” (461). In the middle of the sentence, right after “but the more idyllic,” something very like an earthquake is felt in the enchanted land: “They knew how to do it, he vaguely felt—and it made them but the more idyllic, though at the very moment of the impression, as happened, their boat seemed to have begun to drift wide, the oarsman letting it go.” The idea that experience made the couple more idyllic had already seemed suspect, the emphasis— but the more idyllic—recalling that, in the Western tradition, knowledge tends to destroy idylls rather than to support them. Strether’s insistence on the contrary is possibly self-serving: though in some regards an innocent, and ignorant of many things of the world, the childless widower is nonetheless a dubious candidate for a return to Eden. Of Maria Gostrey, he has asked and received sophistication, and thought to enter into the Lambinet paradise not only a wise but a knowing man. That this was possible—that knowledge might be compatible with, even lead to the perfect life—was the heady conviction he had developed over that so far perfect day, and thought proven in the evidence of experience displayed by the approaching couple. But knowledge has done them down as well: “at the very moment of the impression [that they were idyllic], as happened, their boat seemed to have begun to drift wide, the oarsman letting it go.” There is nothing of the inconsequence of “as happened” in the oarsman’s reaction of course. And in

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the next sentence, Strether, already fallen into knowledge, begins to form an understanding a world apart from the one he has been forming all that wonderful day. “[The boat] had by this time none the less come much nearer— near enough for Strether to dream the lady in the stern had for some reason taken account of his being there to watch them.” They all three advance into knowledge not now of pleasure and the wisdom of taking it, but of one another. “She had remarked on [his being there to watch them] sharply, yet her companion hadn’t turned around; it was in fact almost as if our friend had felt her bid him keep still. She had taken in something as a result of which their course had wavered, and it continued to waver while they just stood off.” For his part, on the bank, Strether is making his own deductions and advancing upon an astonishing discovery: “This little effect [the stillunidentified woman’s sharp remark] was sudden and rapid, so rapid that Strether’s sense of it was separate only for an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had within the minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point in the shining scene.” Beauty, which just before had seemed an instrument to reveal truth, seems now to have become an arrangement to conceal it. For the truth that emerges on the instant is almost the reverse of the one that seemed manifest in the lovely coincidence of the Lambinet painting and its model in the French countryside. This coincidence proves that apparently easy agreement of beauty with harmless self-realization to have been a sham. “It was too prodigious, a chance in a million, but, if [Strether] knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his back and kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll, who had responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none other than Chad” (461–62). The orderly world in which he so rejoiced moments before—that had presented an innkeeper just when she was wanted, a church steeple at just the right place in the cluster of village houses, would later arrange, Strether had been certain of it, to send the right driver with whom he could speak French to take him to the train station—has parodied itself in the incredible advent of the illicit lovers: “Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day in the country—though it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that their country could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the first at recognition, the first to feel, across the water, the shock—for it appeared to come to that—of their wonderful accident.” The pattern of peoples’ lives is woven by their relations, and here the pattern is like a spider web that at first they struggle, much like flies, to escape. “Strether became aware [seeing that Madame de Vionnet has recognized him], of what was taking place—that her recognition had been even stranger for the pair in the boat, that her immediate impulse had been to control it, and that she was quickly and intensely debating with Chad the risk of betrayal.”

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From wondrous harmony with all manner of men, beasts, the grass under his feet, and the sky overhead, Strether has fallen into a universe in which friends struggle to keep from meeting. “He saw that they would show nothing if they could feel sure he hadn’t made them out; so that he had before him for a few seconds his own hesitation.” Coincidence and radical disjunction are the twin travesties of a meaningful order. “It was a sharp fantastic crisis that had popped up as if in a dream, and it had had only to last the few seconds to make him feel it as quite horrible. They were thus, on either side, trying the other side, and all for some reason that broke the stillness like some unprovoked harsh note.” Of course the worst they could make of the incident would be to pretend it had not happened, by which it, or what it (the “reason”) revealed about the couple and about their relations with Strether would be established as its defining truth. They avoid this worst, Strether realizing “that he had but one thing to do—to settle their common question by some sign of surprise and joy.” He has avoided “the violence of their having ‘cut’ him, out there in the eye of nature, on the assumption that he wouldn’t know it. He awaited them with a face from which he was conscious of not being able quite to banish this idea that they would have gone on, not seeing and not knowing, missing their dinner and disappointing their hostess, had he himself taken a line to match.” Going on, they would have negated everything—sight and knowledge—and left him who had been exactly where he wanted to be now exactly nowhere. “That at least was what darkened his vision for the moment.” But if we are in a queer fiction or even a farce, we are not in a tragedy. Indeed, when the boat has bumped at the landing-place and the three have been brought together where they ought not to be together but could not avoid, it all turns into comedy, at first even a light comedy of errors: “They could so much better at last, on either side, treat it as a wild extravagance of hazard, that the situation was made elastic by the amount of explanation called into play” (462–63). What Strether had seen as exactly right has turned out to be exactly wrong, for the order in which he was fitting it. Now, preventing radical disorder has taken psychological acuity; but it has taken, more than that, aesthetic intelligence. Queer fiction, farce, but not tragedy: he has managed to deliver them all three into a form in which they and the meaning of their stories, as well as their common story, survives and continues. The three set about rewriting their separate stories into a common comedy. The departing thunder of the storm that almost destroyed everything is still rumbling in his worrying thought of their perhaps secretly suspecting him of having plotted this coincidence, taking such pains as might be to give it the semblance of an accident. That possibility—as their imputation—didn’t of course bear

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looking into for an instant. . . . Disclaimers of intention would have been as tactless as his presence was practically gross; and the narrowest escape they either of them had was his lucky escape, in the event, from making any. Nothing of the sort, so far as surface and sound were involved, was even in question; surface and sound all made for their common ridiculous good fortune, for the general invraisemblance of the occasion, for the charming chance that they had, the others, in passing, ordered some food to be ready, the charming chance that he had himself not eaten, the charming chance, even more, that their little plans, their hours, their train, in short, from la-bas, ` would all match for their return together to Paris. (463)

They sit down to their veal cutlets with sorrel, accompanied by a light local wine. This repast, the expectation of which Strether had earlier taken as a token of his penetration into not only a better but a truer reality, has turned out to be the setting in which truth will indeed emerge, but the truth of a lie. It was with the lie that they had eaten and drunk and talked and laughed, that they had waited for their carriole [to take them to the station] rather impatiently, and had then got into the vehicle and, sensibly subsiding, driven their three or four miles through the darkening summer night. The eating and drinking, which had been a resource, had had the effect of having served its turn; the talk and laughter had done as much; and it was during their somewhat tedious progress to the station [the same journey Strether had imagined for himself as a time of sprightly conversation all in miraculously excellent French], during the waits there, the further delays [they now inhabit a world in which means of conveyance are not placed at hand by a formal necessity], their submission to fatigue, their silences in the dim compartment of the much-stopping train, that he prepared himself for reflexions to come. (466)

Cataclysm averted, life goes on. Strether is no longer inside the painting, however, and on the contrary it is the distinction between art and life that he now appeals to organize his understanding of things. “It had been a performance, Madame de Vionnet’s manner, and though it had to that degree faltered toward the end, as through her ceasing to believe in it, as if she had asked herself, or Chad had found a moment surreptitiously to ask her, what after all was the use, a performance it had none the less quite handsomely remained, with the final fact about it that it was on the whole easier to keep up than to abandon” (465–66). In retrospect, Strether is immensely grateful for that performance and its continuation to the end. There may have been some excess in the monologue she produces to account for the incongruence of their having with them none of the paraphernalia (coats, shawls) that generally adorn

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even one day’s travel, but it served to spare him the embarrassment of a parting at the inn, and his being “reduced to giving them his blessing for an idyllic retreat down the river. He had had in the actual case to make-believe more than he liked, but this was nothing, it struck him, to what the other event would have required. Could he, literally, quite have faced the other event?” Yet, he reflects, “It was the quantity of make-believe involved and so vividly exemplified that most disagreed with his spiritual stomach.” So that, once safely past the danger of a scene of avowal, he moves from dwelling on the unpleasantness of the pretense “to the other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of the intimacy revealed.” Madame de Vionnet’s performance had presupposed her intimacy with Chad, who would take his cue from her, and whom she could take for granted as her co-actor. The chapter, which opened on Strether’s aesthetic fulfillment looking out over the river winding through the French countryside (“What he saw was exactly the right thing”) closes with him back in his room, mourning the deprived state of his interior life. That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest reverted to: intimacy, at such a point, was like that—and what in the world else would one have wished it to be like? It was all very well for him to feel the pity of its being so much like lying; he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility [the nature of the relation between Chad and his friend] in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll. He had made them— and by no fault of their own—momentarily pull it for him, the possibility, out of this vagueness; and must he not therefore take it now as they had had simply, with whatever thin attenuations, to give it to him? The very question, it may be added, made him feel lonely and cold. There was the element of the awkward all round, but Chad and Madame de Vionnet had at least the comfort that they could talk it over together. With whom could he talk of such things?—unless indeed always, at almost any stage, with Maria? [Strether has the lucidity to realize even in this first moment of his new understanding that his deprivation has an element of choice about it.] He foresaw that Miss Gostrey would come again into requisition on the morrow; though it wasn’t to be denied that he was already a little afraid of her “What on earth—that’s what I want to know now—had you then supposed?” He recognized at last that he really had been trying all along to suppose nothing. Verily, verily, his labour had been lost. He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things. (468)

This is the end of the chapter, and of the novel’s penultimate book. Barely forty pages remain to the end, and in fact the plot has reached its conclusion. Strether had been sent to Paris to recover Chad Newsome for his mother and his country. The recovery required knowing why he was overstaying his sojourn abroad, and Strether, who, by his own admission, tem-

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porized about acquiring this knowledge, has now had it thrust upon him. No matter that he did not really want to know, he knows. Along the way, the plot developed a serious complication in Strether’s increasing reluctance to accomplish his mission; by the time he learns the extent of Chad’s Parisian engagement, Strether has decided to advise the young man to stay. There is really nothing more that can happen; new events would mean a whole new plot: any sequel would have to start with the protagonist’s rejection of the project he has pursued in the first part, would constitute a contraversion rather than a sequence. “Sequel,” however, is Strether’s term for the events beginning the morning after the fateful meeting on the river. “Strether couldn’t have said he had during the previous hours definitely expected it; yet when, later on, that morning—though no later indeed than for his coming forth at ten o’clock—he saw the concierge produce, on his approach, a petit bleu delivered since his letters had been sent up, he recognized the appearance as the first symptom of a sequel” (471). The telegram, which he expects to be from Chad, is instead from Madame de Vionnet, inviting him to visit her that evening. He will go to that meeting wondering, but also expecting something dramatic. An event. Awaiting her in her drawing room, he looks out the window and has inklings of important changes to come. “Strether had all along been subject to sudden gusts of fancy in connexion with such matters as these—odd starts of the historic sense, suppositions and divination with no warrant but their intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates, the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the smell of the public temper—or perhaps simply the smell of blood.” When Madame de Vionnet enters the room she is dressed “in the simplest coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame Roland [a guillotined revolutionary] must on the scaffold have worn something like it” (475). The inklings of dramatic change must have been just “the effect of the thunder in the air, which had hung about all day without release” (475), as he had told himself deprecatingly. But when he understands that he has been summoned to a scene of resignation rather than revolution, his characteristic irony does not protect him from “a vague disappointment; a drop that was deeper even than the fall of his elation the previous night” (481). Madame de Vionnet expresses a flattering affection for himself; acknowledges her passion for Chad; and though asking whether there is not a chance that Strether might after all remain in Paris, she shows only helplessness in the face of Chad’s departure, if not immediate, nonetheless eventual. The events of the preceding day have not catapulted the participants into a scene of change. The scene in the Parisian drawing room—lighted by candles reflected in the polished floor bared for summer, “redundant” curtains hanging at the open windows—is a

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perfect setting in which a heroine sits not expecting anything to develop, only to end. It is not that the encounter on the river bank has been without issue. On the contrary, while it has not changed anything nor will lead to any change, it has intensified everything: Strether observes that “his intervention had absolutely aided and intensified their intimacy.” “He had absolutely become, himself, with his perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his fears, the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost an added link and certainly a common priceless ground for them to meet upon” (477–78). Which is to say that the crisis of his discovery has provided the terms and conditions under which the plot has fulfilled itself. The affair’s inevitable end is now under way. Chad has in fact disappeared immediately on returning to Paris. He has gone to London; it will never be entirely clear to what end. To Maria Gostrey’s question, later, as whether there was another woman in London, Strether answers, “‘Yes. No’” (511). Business seems a more powerful draw for Chad, who is fast exiting forward. He is, Strether and Maria agree, the son of his businessman father (508). Going abroad will have improved his manners and refined his tastes, but the essential man will remain for all of Marie de Vionnet’s improvements. When a disabused Strether, following the fateful meeting by the river, receives Mme de Vionnet’s invitation to visit, he reflects that “She had settled with Chad after he left them that she would, for her satisfaction, assure herself [of any change the meeting may have wrought in Strether’s attitude toward them], and Chad had, as usual, let her have her way. Chad was always letting people have their way when he felt that it would somehow turn his wheel for him; it somehow always did turn his wheel” (477). Earlier, in the course of the inn dinner, he had already both wondered at the couples’ intimacy and deprecated the man’s character: “It was part of the deep impression for Strether, and not the least of the deep interest, that they could so communicate—that Chad in particular could let her know he left it to her. He habitually left things to others, as Strether was so well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in these meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration of his famous knowing how to live” (466). James seems to have disliked Chad as much as Strether did. That they both now reveal their dislike is similarly the effect of both their changed positions. Strether seeks out Chad in order to tell him, “‘You’ll be a brute, you know—you’ll be guilty of the last infamy—if you ever forsake her,’” and later, “‘You’d not only be, as I say, a brute; you’d be . . . a criminal of the deepest dye’” (499, 501). The stark idiom expresses his disillusioned expectation that Chad will be a brute, already is one. As for his own dislike of Chad, James put it as a judgment not on his moral character but on his aesthetic stance. When he returns to take up

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the family business, Chad means to modernize it. At the end of the conversation in which Strether has enjoined Chad to stay in Paris, the young man almost inconsequentially mentions that “he had been getting some news of the art of advertisement.” In fact he “had encountered a revelation. Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as the great new force. ‘It really does the thing, you know.’” They were face to face under the street-lamp as they had been the first night, and Strether, no doubt, looked blank. “Affects, you mean, the sale of the object advertised?” “Yes—but affects it extraordinarily; really beyond what one had supposed. I mean of course when it’s done as one makes out that, in our roaring age, it can be done. I’ve been finding out a little; though it doubtless doesn’t amount to much more than what you originally, so awfully vividly— and all very nearly, that first night—put before me. [He refers to Strether’s initial attempt to carry out his mission by persuading Chad to think of returning home.] It’s an art like another, and infinite like all the arts.” He went on as if for the joke of it—almost as if his friend’s face amused him. “In the hands, naturally, of a master. The right man must take hold. With the right man to work it c’est un monde.” (504–5)

“Chad” now implies “cad.” Appealing to him, by “all you hold sacred,” to not even think of leaving, Strether is aware that Chad holds little sacred. But his speech about advertising, and the joke with which he concludes, reveals him something of an abomination in the face of literature, at least as the novel he inhabits implies its definition. Chad’s theory that advertising is an “art like another” is pernicious because it is not entirely false. Like literature in The Ambassadors, advertising, defined by Chad, “does the thing,” builds a whole world. As he explains to Strether, its effect is not marginal, it transforms sales (affects them extraordinarily; beyond what one had supposed): it produces a transformed object. Advertising is representation, a formal process: an art. Its goal, however, as Mr. Newsome’s son rejoices in it, is not to uncover any hitherto unperceived, interior truth about this or that, possibly about the object of common household use that has made the Newsome fortune, but the opposite: to make the object appear better than it is, better than it would look if seen clearly. The trajectory is not outward toward knowledge, but backward from knowledge (the advertiser’s knowledge of the actual value of the object to be sold), to a necessarily duplicitous representation. Art, in Chad’s theory of the art of advertising, is making things appear other than they are. The master of the art of advertising makes the truth disappear. (Having Chad usurp, in relation to his definition of art, the title “master” [“in the hands, naturally, of a master”] signals not only his arrogance but James’s distaste.) Chad’s encomium to advertising concludes a discussion in which

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Strether has instead urged Chad to pursue true value, his own as Madame de Vionnet has been enhancing it. “‘I feel,’” he tells the young man, “‘how much more she can do for you. She hasn’t done it all yet. Stay with her at least till she has.’” Chad leaps at the possibility of a wise retort and asks whether Strether would have him leave her then? But the older man will not be provoked. “‘Don’t leave her before. When you’ve got all that can be got— I don’t say,’ he added a trifle grimly. ‘That will be the proper time. But as, for you, from such a woman, there will always be something to be got, my remark’s not a wrong to her.’” He adds, “‘I remember you, you know, as you were.’” Chad, dangerously close to simpering, fills in, “‘An awful ass, wasn’t I?’” But Strether is not playing, and he is serious when he retorts, “‘Your value has quintupled’” (501–2). It is to this that Chad answers by laying out his dream of creating fake values more persuasive than the true. Chad is a deplorable young man, that much is clear; but the exchange reveals something about Strether as well; namely, that, the occasion arising, he can have rather a sharp way about him. His declaration to Chad that if he leaves Mme de Vionnet he will be “a brute . . . guilty of the last infamy,” “a criminal of the deepest dye” is unexpectedly violent. Strether’s impeccable integrity has been a pillar of The Ambassadors society. But so have his moderation, his subtlety of judgment, the complexity of his perceptions, with all these expressed in his excellent manners. Moreover, he has not just now discovered Chad’s exploitative bent, we have been told earlier that “he was well aware” of it, so that the force with which he bursts out is not entirely motivated. What has happened to make so polite and measured a man turn downright rude? The shock of learning the true nature of Chad’s affair is not a sufficient explanation because the discovery left him surprised mostly at himself. The reaction he projects as Maria Gostrey’s—“‘What on earth—that’s what I want to know now—had you then supposed?’”—is really his own, and it is a rhetorical question: what else could their relation be? Strether is no prude, and he is uncommonly intelligent. The fortuitous meeting on the riverbank does not enlighten him, it rather forces him to admit what he already knows. Even their having hidden their relation, he reflects, is not so terrible. In Madame de Vionnet’s drawing room, he reflects that “their eminent ‘lie,’ Chad’s and hers, was simply after all such an inevitable tribute to good taste as he couldn’t have wished them not to render” (477). One clue to his sharpness with Chad may lie in an equally sharp interior monologue two days earlier, in the course of his conversation with Chad’s mistress whose own suffering he had not suspected. She too has been hiding things from herself, he reflects, or been unable to see them. She saw good in Chad that was not there. She had made him better, she had made him best, she had made him anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme queerness that he

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was none the less only Chad. Strether had the sense that he, a little, had made him too; his high appreciation had, as it were, consecrated her work. The work, however admirable, was nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it was marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts, aberrations (however one classed them) within the common experience, should be so transcendently prized. It might have made Strether hot or shy, as such secrets of others brought home sometimes do make us; but he was held there by something so hard that it was fairly grim. This was not the discomposure of last night; that had quite passed—such discomposures were a detail; the real coercion was to see a man ineffably adored. (482)

The “real coercion,” the resentment of which makes Strether so uncharacteristically rude with Chad, is being forced to look upon the sight of a strong affection, too strong an affection: in a word, sex, making an intelligent woman stupid, or anyway less intelligent. Marie de Vionnet has before her eyes a very ordinary young man whom she values as a demigod (transcendently, with ineffable adoration). Intimacy, in particular physical intimacy (companionship in earthly joys), distorts her vision; she sees her own feelings and takes them for realities. It is as if Proust had concluded from recalling his pleasure in tea-soaked madeleines that they were indeed the best of all biscuits. Everything in Strether’s being rejects that diminution of vision, to which, it occurs to him, he has himself contributed. The grimness of Mme de Vionnet’s blindness overcomes his embarrassment; instead of hot and shy, instead of attracted as he has been earlier, he is appalled. Transcendent love demeans her. “She was older for him to-night, visibly less exempt from the touch of time; but she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying for her young man. The only thing was that she judged herself as the maidservant wouldn’t; the weakness of which wisdom too, the dishonour of which judgement, seemed but to sink her lower” (483). His invocation of maidservants is less a reflection of Strether’s class snobbery than of his wont to see the world as an arrangement of forms. “[A] maidservant crying for her young man” is a formal identification, and as a maidservant Mme de Vionnet would have lived her dilemma as a melodrama. But her self-awareness precludes melodrama, while the disingenuously trivializing formula, “the only thing was,” measures the enormity of self-awareness, its terrible dangers. For if feeling is the trigger for melodrama, knowledge is tragedy’s trigger, and while Mme de Vionnet’s knowledge redeems her looking older and vulgarly troubled, it threatens the worst. From the precarious height of this knowledge, she tells Strether she regrets most of all his lowered esteem of her—“‘It’s how you see me, it’s how you see me’—she caught her breath with it—‘and it’s as I am, and as I must take

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myself, and of course it’s no matter’” (483). It is after this, in response not only to her tearful appeal but to his own unspoken admission that he does see her diminished, that he sets out to convince Chad to stay with her, in the almost violent terms we read earlier. The deterioration of Marie de Vionnet’s judgment through love (she judges herself clearly but not Chad) is no detail for Strether, but the center of the affair, and of his own affair with Paris. He is furious with Chad for being such that loving him reduces her. But it is not clear, certainly not to Strether, that there is another way of loving, or anyway of sexual love. Asking only that he not snub her (his fear on the riverbank that he himself was to be snubbed has turned out to be a misapprehension of a piece with the rest of the story he now is willing to hear), Mme de Vionnet mourns that “‘You’d do everything for us but be mixed up with us.’” She repeats then that what she fears most is what he has been thinking of her, and to his protest that “‘I didn’t think anything. I never think a step further than I’m obliged to,’” her response is sad proof of her penetrating intelligence. “‘That’s perfectly false, I believe,’ she returned—‘except that you may, no doubt, often pull up when things become too ugly; or even, I’ll say, to save you a protest, too beautiful’” (484). To say things too ugly and things too beautiful is not to say ugly things and beautiful things. Too ugly and too beautiful is a judgment rather than an aesthetic state, and Marie de Vionnet has shrewdly understood that, as Strether tells her himself, he does not make judgments: he only observes. That is, he would like to only observe (the counterpart of his stance being James’s only describing), but since the fateful day in the country, he has been besieged by appeals to his judgment, from Marie de Vionnet, Maria Gostrey, and not least disturbingly from himself. He is off balance, as if from the riverbank he had started sliding into the river. Back in Paris he has to brace himself against an appeal not so much for help (he is quite willing to offer that), as for engagement. Or, to come to the point, he has to brace himself against sex, and not only as a spectator. From the riverbank where the true relation between Marie de Vionnet and Chad is revealed to Strether, passing through his meeting with that unfortunate woman as we have just been considering it, there is a straight line to the novel’s closing scene only twenty-five pages later. The legendary frustration of that scene for most readers is generally ascribed to Strether’s refusal of Miss Gostrey’s invitation to stay in Paris when it is so evident, to him as well as to everyone else inside the novel and out, that this would be not only a better life but exactly the one he desires. On closer attention, however, his reasoning is less perverse. The chapter, the novel’s last, opens with a sentence that seems bent on short-circuiting the energy of what should be the novel’s great climax; for while Strether has concluded his mission as to Chad, his own affairs are not yet settled. That he has personal affairs to settle has been an unexpected fruit

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of his errand for Mrs. Newsome, and the dedication of the last chapter to his own business rather than hers ratifies Strether’s achievement of an errand of his own. Yet the opening sentence could render the rest of the chapter epiphenomenal: “He had, however, within two days, another separation to face.” If we end the chapter with the sense that its outcome not only is momentous but was by no means predetermined, this is because it takes up a conversation Strether has been conducting sotto voce since the fateful day on the river. As it was Maria Gostrey’s voice in his head when he chided himself with having been willfully blind (“‘What on earth—that’s what I want to know now—had you then supposed?’”), it is her voice that finally forces the issue, or forces Strether to face the issue. He has come to her house to say goodbye. He has been there many times but “the place had never before struck him as so sacred to pleasant knowledge, to intimate charm, to antique order, to a neatness that was almost august” (507).8 The table at which they are breakfasting is set with “small old crockery and old silver.” Strether is lapped in an exquisite domesticity in which it would seem out of the way to invoke the terrible emotions that so disordered Mme de Vionnet at their last meeting. Yet the conversation moves to these at once, and it is soon clear that the disorder is not Marie de Vionnet’s alone. To Strether’s humorous report that Chad accused him of being “‘exciting,’” and his own observation that the young man is grown restless, Miss Gostrey answers, “‘You’ve excited me,’” and “‘I’m distinctly restless.’” Strether protests that she has in fact grown calmer from knowing him, and that indeed they are at the moment in “a haunt of ancient peace.” To which her answer ups the ante: “‘I wish with all my heart,’ she presently replied, ‘I could make you treat it as a haven of rest.’” She has proposed. We are at the end of the novel which we now understand to have been in part organized by a marriage plot now on the verge of resolution. Strether has come to Paris and met the woman of his life, and by all the imperatives of the novel’s form, he should now marry her. But if Mme de Vionnet’s story was to fulfill neither the plots of melodrama nor of tragedy, Strether’s will not fulfill the marriage plot.9 He demurs: “‘It wouldn’t give me—that would be the trouble—what it will, no doubt, still give you. I’m not,’ he explained, leaning back in his chair, but with his eyes on a small ripe round melon—‘in real harmony with what surrounds me. You are. I take it too hard. You don’t. It makes—that’s what it comes to in the end—a fool of me.’ [The paragraph concludes:] Then at a tangent, ‘What has he been doing in London?’ he demanded.” Not such a tangent as all that: what Strether suspects Chad has been doing in London is pursuing a second affair, and this vulgar promiscuity is very much to Strether’s point. He is taking Chad hard, it is making a fool of him, and somehow that vulnerability is entangled with the seduction of Maria Gostrey’s dining room. She understands perfectly that the issue for Strether

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is the connection between Chad’s carnality and the pleasures of her table, so augustly neat but set with a bowl of small, round, ripe melons. She does not try to deny the connection; on the contrary, she insists on the pleasure she is offering him. “‘There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you,’” and to his acknowledgment, “‘There’s nothing,’ she repeated, ‘in all the world.’” The idiom is that of a sexual offer, and it is no less erotic for Strether’s glossing it as an offer “of exquisite service, of lightened care, for the rest of his days.” Service and care informed throughout by “beauty and knowledge,” all this in the tone of passion: it is everything he has ever wanted, or rather everything he did not know to want just a few months earlier but will now miss forever. “It was awkward, it was almost stupid, not to seem to prize such things; yet none the less, so far as they made his opportunity they made it only for a moment.” For Strether has arrived at a definitive statement of why he must not stay with her: “He had got it at last, ‘To be right.’” He explains: “‘That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.’” At first sight, such punctilio seems rather unworthy, besides being, as she points out, a little disingenuous. “‘But with your wonderful impressions you’ll have got a great deal.’” Yes, he recognizes that he has gotten a great deal, has been altogether transformed by his Parisian experiences. But none of what he has gotten is problematical; it is getting her that would make him wrong. She would be something “for himself,” and would make him the terminus of his quest. So there it stands, with one final refinement that she provides, “‘It isn’t so much your being “right”—it’s your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so.’” Exactly. His being right might not have been fatal to her proposition; it is fatal because he is right by force not of feeling or even reasoning but of sight, by virtue of his overwhelming propensity to observe, which commitment to observation is the key to his definition of “right.” His horrible sharp eye has been everything all along. What he saw and what he did not see have made up all the story. Now he sees the truth of Chad’s affair, as well as the truth that, in all good common sense, he himself should enter into an intimate relation with Maria Gostrey. But if Maria’s argument for his staying with her is indubitably true, its very emotional, erotic truth makes it not “right”; will make him not right. He says “right” rather than “good” because his sense of morality is inseparably ethical and aesthetic: wishing to be “right,” he wants to be true to the truth he has uncovered. Staying in Paris with Maria Gostrey would be to cash in on this truth. He has a larger ambition, to continue traveling (starting with returning to Woollett), his travels henceforth informed by what he has learned. To give priority to his horrible sharp eye: to keep looking; or, in another word, to keep writing. The distinction between settling into the truth and taking it as grounds for further search harks back to the beginning of this book and

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Proust’s recovery of the past by the agency of a madeleine. To pursue the lost past, Proust did not decide to eat more madeleines. It was not the madeleine he sought but the truth, rather the truths, it led to. Married to Maria Gostrey, or become her lover, Strether would have ended the process that had led him to that culmination. This is not an existential impasse, not a matter of keeping options open; rather, the impasse is epistemological: a matter of closing off avenues of knowledge. Chad, his counterpart in the world—his enthusiasm for advertising sums up the ways the young man is the mirror-opposite of the older—has demonstrated a mode of being capable of change but never complexity. Mme de Vionnet’s tutelage has improved him, no doubt he will undergo other alterations, yet each of his avatars will be as if terminal, the contingency of its form opaque to his lack of aesthetic understanding. He is a man of no imagination, which is why he must not abandon his mistress because, lacking aesthetic capability, at least he should be virtuous. From the start of the novel, Strether has been all imagination, and, following the episode of the Lambinet painting that led to a revelation of real life, he is definitively aware of his kaleidoscopic disposition, his predominant interest in everything. Nothing is lost on him; he would regret more than anything that anything were. It has turned out that Strether would not have taken his own advice to “live, live” had he been able to; indeed, with Maria Gostrey he is able to, and he demurs. The conclusive carnality of the Chad–Marie de Vionnet affair has pointed the way to a similar conclusion of Strether’s own Parisian quest. But to put it in such formal terms is to expose the impossibility of such a conclusion: Strether can hardly follow Chad. James rejected the marriage plot for The Ambassadors for the same reason he multiplied the marriages in What Maisie Knew: to keep Strether and Maisie safe from resolution, the resolution of consummation, of ordinary sexual passion in his case, of an ordinary childhood in hers. Maisie’s ignorance of life gives her the same advantage as an instrument of knowledge as Strether’s mature intelligence. Great innocence and great knowledge are two faces of the same kind of observer. Innocence and knowledge both provide their protagonists with a position that keeps them thinking aesthetically: not from experience but from observation, therefore not about this or that, but potentially about anything, or everything. As a writer, Strether is an unsuccessful James who shies away from Maria Gostrey’s offer of marriage for the same reason he would have liked to write more and better. The knowledge of life he wants is a compendium of possibilities: its objectivity is not bound to a single object. Defeated, Maria Gostrey “sighed it at last all comically, all tragically away.” Though there will be neither a comic nor a tragic ending to their story, nor even a properly novelistic conclusion (so the readers protest), this is not a defeat of form, but on the contrary its continuation, which is assured, exactly, by Strether’s being an unsuccessful writer. Had he been successful, or even grown successful as

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a result of his embassy to Paris, his voyage would have become instrumental, the questions it raised, moot. There is nothing like a telos to cancel the meaning of a process. James was interested in the problem of how a man like Strether is to live his life, not of how he is to enjoy its ultimate successes, or, for that matter, its failures. And living one’s life, a process that precedes both successes and failures, at least in their ultimate forms, requires ongoing and undetermined, or underdetermined, understandings and decisions. In short, Strether is an unsuccessful writer, perhaps, so that he may be a good pragmatist. It is certainly not out of the question that at some future date (dear Reader), Strether will publish a brilliant book of essays or even a masterful novel. It is difficult to imagine his doing so living in Paris, which by and in itself would be a final determination, a happy ending. None of James’s novels have such happy endings, which would betray both the process and the point of their making. James complained about Flaubert that he never penetrated into the inner sanctum of the psyche. Strether has done just that, and it is the territory he wanders to the end of the novel, and presumably beyond. What he sees from that river bank, where at first everything is exactly right, is not the opposite of the exactly right, but how it could become its opposite: how everything could go wrong. Had they pretended not to see him, for instance, everything would have gone wrong. Their cutting Strether must have exploded the Lambinet landscape, convicted it of a sentimental lie. Life, in its most peremptory guise as sexual passion, would have emerged the opposite of art. But the catastrophe was avoided, and the awkward dinner and return to town demonstrated the possibility that life and art might cooperate. Only, cooperation is not enough, for it means an art limited to knowing what can be learned without art. Strether has lived his life in such a spirit of cooperation, taking a modest approach to art, and seeking from his own work as well as that of others, enrichment rather than riches. Now, he sees he has asked of life and offered it too little; he has neither lived nor written to the full. But given the chance to make up the missing part of his life, he refuses it as threatening his ability to be “right”: to get it right. Instead of experience, he will pursue a knowledge of experience whose concreteness does not incur the limits that ultimately arrest carnality at a postcoital tristesse. Still, the last pages, and especially the last paragraph, of The Ambassadors are exceedingly sexy. Despite being briskly dismissed, as we saw, in the first sentence of the chapter (“He had, however, within two days, another separation to face”), in the scene I have just described, the possibility of something still to happen fairly throbs. In the “intimate charm” of the small apartment, on a table whose shining board is “bare of a cloth and proud of its perfect surface,” an “excited” and “distinctly restless” Miss Gostrey offers a man she loves a ripe round fruit. For all the urgency of their talk, Strether is

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not indifferent to the offer. “He came back to his breakfast; he partook presently of the charming melon, which she liberally cut for him, and it was only after this that he met her question.” (She has asked what he finds particularly troubling about Chad.) The setting, placing them close to one another at a small table in a small room overlooking an enclosed garden, the sensuality of shared food, intensifies the play of their conversation, implies physical touch. Maria presses her case, and her last statement of it is downright brazen, as we saw. Strether has been coming to his resolution to leave her certain that “She’d moreover understand—she always understood.” But James, not so sure, continues, “That indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on.” What she goes on with is astonishing in not only its directness but its innuendo. “‘There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you.’” When he answers evasively? embarrassedly? placatingly? “‘Oh yes—I know,’” she is not yet put off: “‘There’s nothing,’ she repeated, ‘in all the world.’” It is no use, he will not stay, and when she gives up: “‘I can’t indeed resist you,’” his response—“‘Then there we are!’”—rings triumphant. He seems more than ever charged with energy, passion, desire. Although James makes no attempt to imagine the scene of his return to the land of the Newsomes, even for those it frustrates, there is no sadness to this ending. Strether has achieved his goal: he sees, he understands, he knows; we can imagine, when nothing else of his resettlement in New England is imaginable, that he may write. We saw that the longer he wrote, the better James thought of Flaubert’s seeking for truth aesthetically, through style. He only wished that Flaubert had used style to go further. Strether, choosing style over sex, will go deeper into life and in more directions than Miss Gostrey could have led him. Strether is James’s answer to Flaubert. For if, according to James, Flaubert went to the edge of knowledge and shone the light emanating from style and form into the dark beyond, James gave style and form a human shape and brought him along so they could look together. The problem was that human shape incurred human desire. In Strether’s refusal, James represented a choice of art over life. It is not an obvious choice: the life Strether is offered and rejects would have been ruled by “beauty and knowledge.” But he hardly hesitates: “so far as they [beauty and knowledge] made his opportunity they made it only for a moment.” In short, Strether is attracted but not in love. James is precise in defining his hero’s dispassionate state and the merely ephemeral temptation presented by Maria Gostrey’s person and attributes, which “so far as they made his opportunity they made it only for a moment” (emphasis added). His taking the measure of his detachment is almost brutal, and one winces for a Maria whose intelligence is easily equal to perceiving how deeply Strether is not in love. Indeed, a certain brutality inflects not only the drama of this closing

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scene but its formal organization, which itself seems unfair to Maria; for the reader now knows more than she does, while her entire mode of being has been to know everything. Knowing has been her glory, and her undeserved demotion from knowledge signals not just the story’s end but the oddity of this end. There is, I think, no other James work that concludes with the protagonist’s detachment. From Christopher Newman, who nobly renounces avenging his love, to Isabel Archer, who assumes her terrible mistake, to Milly Theale and Maggie Verver, who rather insidiously triumph, an immersion, a passionate embrace of the object of their quests has been the characters’ final step to the story’s horizon. But with these immersions, the protagonists were settled; James had worked them out. It is a still unsettled Strether who, on the contrary, works out his fellow protagonists, placing himself apart and proposing to go on. Had he stayed with Maria, that would have been the end of his story. Returning to America, he sets out on its continuation. Rejecting erotic passion, he remains artistically potent, or may have just become so. When he explains to Maria that his only logic is not to have got anything for himself, by refusing to cash in, to stop, he emerges as the successful opposite as well as the cognate of the narrator of The Sacred Fount, who was driven out of his story for the detachment with which he tried to impose his resolution upon it. In this context, I would venture an explanation of why Strether is named after Balzac’s madman, Louis Lambert.10 That poor soul was overcome by the passion of metaphysics; Strether successfully resists the equal and opposite temptation of physical passion. In the terms both of Balzac’s novel and of James’s, the trick is to survive immersion so as to write another book. Louis Lambert did not survive; Lewis Lambert Strether did. There is a third possibility: whether the protagonist of my fourth fiction survives is ambiguous, but passion destroys his writing.

YÉâÜ Lolita A Beautiful, Banal, Eden-Red Apple

I Humbert Humbert, narrator and protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), is an amoral and demoralized Strether. Like Strether, H.H. arrives in a new world whose physical and cultural landscape he is eager to explore, and he proves as apt a student. But where Strether declined “to have got anything for myself” through his new knowledge, Humbert intends to get himself everything, including something forbidden. For H.H. lusts after a child, a delectable girl, Lolita, her very name an occasion for lubricious indulgence, “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta,”1 the feel, the sound, the flesh of young America, in whom he incarnates a phantom passion from his past (a little like Strether’s for his lost Lambinet), a girl-child he loved and lost, long ago and far away. Deviant sex is popularly associated with old, decadent civilizations, but Humbert Humbert has discovered that a new world is depravity’s ideal venue. Indeed, he describes his transgression as a sort of frontier-crossing: “in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet2 the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity.” The eschatological is an important dimension of the New World narrative, and apparently of Humbert’s as well. “Despite our tiffs,” he recalls, “despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise— a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames—but still a paradise” (166). His apostrophe to nymphets glossed by the commonplace inevitably hovering over it—America as a redemptive second Eden—by debauching Lolita, Humbert defiles the very Garden.

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Where sin is concerned, there is traditionally a link between the flesh and the word, and, like Strether, Humbert Humbert, traveler in a strange land, is a man of letters. He opens his story under the aegis of Edgar Allan Poe by recalling that his “initial girl-child,” back when he was a boy in Europe, was named Annabel, though going by his account he may be giving her the name in retrospect for Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Boy and girl, Humbert and Annabel loved once upon a summer “in a princedom by the sea.”3 The name of Poe’s real child-bride was not Annabel but Virginia. There is an element of bad faith already signaled here in Humbert’s opportunistic confusion of literature and reality.4 He also invokes, as forebears, Dante and Petrarch (“After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen. . . . And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind” [19]). Never mind that Dante and Petrarch adored their girls in poems rather than in the flesh; likewise, his self-consciously literary confession, written when it is all over, in a jail cell and on command from his lawyer for use in the upcoming trial, elides the distinction between life and art in its very title—Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male—both mock-sensational fiction and mock-psychological report.5 Humbert Humbert, illustrating James’s writerly suspicions of monolithic narrations (suspicions that The Sacred Fount had abundantly confirmed), is not just authoritative but autocratic: he undertakes to write his story not to find anything out but to prove something. He means to press wit, a creature of dissent, into the service of justification (or of denunciation, which amounts to the same thing). Of course, the denatured fiction he offers up as his confession—fiction that has been turned from inquiry into selfserving demonstration—is of his concocting, not Nabokov’s. But there is good evidence in Lolita for James’s proposition that first-person narrators or other incarnations of “muffled majesty” badly compromise the fictional enterprise. Lolita turns on the same cautionary principle in its form as in its content: to pursue knowledge, art (or life) has to be agnostic to the end; but Humbert is writing liturgy. Lolita searches reality for its truths differently from the fictions of Flaubert and James: it tries out whether knowledge, obtained by an aesthetic process and realized in the substance of form, can be incarnated: whether art can be not only material but carnal. Flaubert’s literary sadism, though he pretended to fear personal repercussions from Sainte-Beuve’s accusation of his writing, was not an affair of the flesh. It never occurred to anyone that the sadistic Salammbô was pornographic. The point of James’s identification of Howells’s little speech as the origin of The Ambassadors was to not conflate them, to play rather on the distinction between life and literature. But Humbert Humbert’s tale could be pornography: Nabokov rather thinks it is. Indeed, Humbert Humbert is not just a demoralized but a rogue Strether;

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Strether’s monstrous id, we might say, if not fearful of raising the ghost of a Nabokov enraged by the psychoanalytic term. He would not object to H.H. being designated a monster, for he is one literally and explicitly, a being who exaggerates the norm into its abnormal, deviant counterpart. He is a sexual monster, and also, as I have suggested, a literary one who represents the desire to know the real by aesthetic means, as a sophisticated carnality. He makes the link himself when he punctuates the rhapsodic opening of his Confession (“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul”) with a witty but programmatic “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” In fact, this early sentence invokes, as a context for the humorous story we seem to be starting, a very serious issue, namely, the old association between writing and mortal sin; the notion that a certain way of wielding words, wit one of the foremost of that category, is a form of blasphemy. Humbert disdains religion, and Nabokov supports him. Yet, in the quip about murderers and their prose style, in Humbert’s self-comparison to Dante, in his description of his situation with Lolita as a paradise with a sky the color of hell-flames, in the first of such instances, an appeal to his future jury to consider how tempting was Lolita (“Look at this tangle of thorns”), Nabokov seems to be attributing a religious dimension (even if mockreligious) to Humbert’s moral predicament. Lolita is hardly a pious story, nor Nabokov a pious writer. Still, the philosophical ground of Lolita does not appear to be entirely secular. Though various religious fervors appear to move the characters in Salammbô, and therefore drive its plot, they make no claim on the reader. The novel’s last sentence—“Thus died Hamilcar’s daughter, for touching Tanit’s veil” (Ainsi mourut la fille d’Hamilcar pour avoir touché au manteau de Tanit) marks the difference between Flaubert’s stance and Nabokov’s. The explanation that Salammbô died for having trespassed against the goddess makes sense only within the cult of Tanit; the reader is not asked to believe it. Of course, Carthage’s religion is entirely foreign to Flaubert and his readers, therefore unlikely to seem motivating; while Humbert Humbert appeals to a Judeo-Christianity bred in Nabokov’s bones as in most of his readers’. All the same, Flaubert made no attempt to translate the cult of Tanit into, say, the cult of the Madonna. He treated religion as an affair of archeology rather than philosophy and never adopted, as his novel’s, any of its concerns. In contrast, Humbert’s opening gambit about a paradise in hell, followed by numerous other such images and references that we will see, suggests that Nabokov accepted for himself, for his novel, and therefore as at least one way of representing the issues he treated in Lolita, a religious hermeneutic. We might have expected something similar in The Ambassadors, whose New England-bred author was also the brother of William James, but there is no hint of it. Strether’s lesson to Bilham (“Live, live!”) is, on the

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novel’s behalf, a declaration of secular intent. In their scanning of the moral horizon, James and Strether are alike resolutely sublunary. If life turns out too difficult, art is a worthy option, with neither heaven nor hell in the offing. Chad should have stayed in Europe, for Madame de Vionnet and for art. Piety and sin did not come into it, not even for the Newsomes, whose judgments run to what is proper more than what is right. Waymarsh, that good Puritan, makes no transcendent claim but confines himself to his own better judgment. According to James, at Flaubert’s worst, as in his mistreatment of Madame Arnoux, he was careless with his characters’ psyches, insufficiently respectful because insufficiently interested. James himself was scrupulous in this regard in a measure worthy of the exorbitantly scrupulous Strether. But neither Flaubert nor James nor their characters in their moral deliberations reported to a higher authority. In their secular universes, the pursuit of knowledge was secular and, while the choice of the truth to be pursued was disputable (as James disputed Flaubert’s), the pursuit itself was not at issue. In Lolita, fiction’s pursuit of truth is not just misapplied, it is evil. In Lolita, Nabokov deplored, while savoring, a project literally damned from the start. This project reveals that the formal exploration of the real world has a doppelgänger who pushes knowledge too far beyond concrete possession to carnal rape. As the plot advances, Nabokov even distances himself from his narrator’s push into carnal knowledge. But his contribution to this book’s examination of the relation of literature and knowledge lies in his having conceived of carnal desire as already implied in the ambition to know concretely. Fiction’s quest for truth is not only at risk of continuing into transgression for Nabokov; this is its inherent tendency. Humbert Humbert is not satisfied with knowing Lolita the way Flaubert or James might have: concretely, in every detail. He wants the knowledge dubbed “biblical” for its implication, in the penetration of another body, of a blasphemous usurpation of the power of self-incarnation. Humbert’s bodily possession of Lolita aims to outdo Flaubert’s representation of Carthage and James’s of the intricacies of Strether’s mind. Though they do not conceive of their representations in this way, Nabokov’s account of Humbert’s way does have a certain relevance to theirs. It suggests that, possibly, even when blasphemy is not in question, nor rape, the pursuit of knowledge that takes formal hold of its object is not without a kind of aggression toward this object. (Was there a faint note of aggression in James’s letter to Howells?) If form can be not only inquisitive but also invasive, as in Humbert’s passion to know everything of Lolita, Strether’s “only logic”—not to have gained anything for himself—looks better and better. In this light, even Flaubert’s agnosticism toward the horrors he details may reveal itself the wholesome companion of his sadism, which we said worked against the

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thrall of beauty to make evident an utmost truth; the agnosticism would be required to keep this truth honest. The truth Humbert Humbert tells in his Confession is corrupt, as much for its content—celebrating the expense of spirit in a waste of shame— as for its purpose, to aid in the legal evasion of responsibility. But Lolita is a comic novel with a queasy, melodramatic, rather than tragic ending. The self-mocking sentence at the beginning (“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”) enjoins a knowing, even an ironic, reading. Moreover, H.H. is a mock-hero whose only authority lies in his literary savoir-faire (as he might say). Still, his quest proving fatal, it may be well to take note of his route.

II We will retrace his route following his map, since Lolita is told retrospectively, and, as he writes under a pseudonym, we will never know Humbert Humbert’s real name. Despite his territorial control, the time lag, and the anonymity, however, Nabokov does not suggest we should doubt his narrator’s tale. At times H.H. exclaims over the terrible story he is telling, declares his remorse and his despair, or just glosses the current situation with later developments. But the confessional writer and the man are one. Lolita is not a Bildungsroman, although H.H. undergoes a rigorous education in American Studies, nor is it a conversion narrative, though written in a jailhouse. Indeed, the character of Humbert Humbert is incompatible with both: sophistication is his major trait and wit his mode. He may not have known in what precise circumstances, but he always knew that, as mothers say, this game would end in tears. His story is off-color, salacious, unchaste, but elegantly told. Humbert Humbert is a gentleman and a scholar awaiting trial for a murder notable for the “pederosis”6 that was its apparent motive. Born in Paris of mixed French, Austrian, and English descent, in short the quintessential incarnation of old Europe, H.H. in his thirties found himself at loose ends and accepted the terms of an inheritance that required him to emigrate to the new world. In the United States, after some years of this and that, desultory literary work and one or two mental breakdowns, he wanders into a small New England town where he takes lodgings with a youngish widow, Charlotte Haze, who has a twelve-year-old daughter ominously named Dolores, for whom he fashions the mellifluous nickname of “Lolita.” The girl is the summation of Humbert’s erotic fantasies, and to get at her, he marries her mother. When the mother serendipitously is killed crossing the street, H.H. becomes Lolita’s guardian and is soon ensconced in faux incest, the fake part being his fatherhood. Fearful of nosy neighbors, he

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takes Lolita off on a summer-long car journey that ends in the small college town of Beardsley (which Nabokov invented and named after Aubrey Beardsley but probably modeled on Wellesley, Massachussetts, Nabokov having taught at Wellesley College). The school year over, the two leave Beardsley on a second trek, in the course of which Lolita escapes him. Several years later, she writes him asking for money: she is married, pregnant, poor. Humbert visits, promises help (which he delivers), but he also extracts the name of the man who helped her escape, a certain Clare Quilty, a minor dramatist and producer of pornographic films. H.H. kills Quilty and is arrested; his lawyer having requested an account of the murder’s extenuating circumstances to help in the defense, Humbert produces the manuscript of Lolita, or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male. One of the surprises of this manuscript, one that his lawyer must have been pleased to discover, is that Humbert did not originally plan to possess his little mistress. He envisaged a partial carnality, which is in fact what he achieves in the first part of the story, to his complete satisfaction. His first such blissful enjoyment of Lolita is had en famille. In this episode, which takes place shortly after Humbert moves into the Haze household, mother, daughter, and boarder are sunning themselves in the garden on a hot Sunday morning. Lolita in a black two-piece bathing suit has just grabbed the comic section of the newspaper and “retreated to her mat near her phocine mamma.” There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvature of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently, the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up. As I looked on, through prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I felt that my perception of her, if properly concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss immediately; but, like some predator that prefers a moving prey to a motionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with one of the various girlish movements she made now and then as she read, such as trying to scratch the middle of her back and revealing a stippled armpit—but fat Haze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me and asking me for a light, and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular fraud. (42–43)

Without Charlotte’s rude interruption, Humbert was home free and, while he disparages his private pleasure wittily as “beggar’s bliss” and “pitiful attainment,” the sensuality of the passage strikes a different tone. Had fat Haze not intruded with her inanities, H.H. would have been a wholly happy

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man. Not long after, in fact, such an oblique jouissance does leave him wholly happy, and Humbert, his cup overflowing, has for the moment no greater ambition than to multiply occasions exactly like the following, which occurs shortly after the scene in the garden. This second time, Humbert, in Sunday déshabillé of pajamas and dressing gown, is reading in the “sunlit living room” when Lolita enters carrying “a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.” His description of the apple as “banal” shows a Humbert as conscious as Nabokov of the formal nature of the situation, that is, of his forming it as he might a fictional episode. But while he keeps his wits about him and recognizes full well that the idyllic scene is unfolding in a mock-Eden, his disabused vision in no way mitigates, but rather intensifies the scene’s real erotic charge. My heart beat like a drum as she sat down, cool skirt ballooning, subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit. She tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it—it made a cupped polished plop. Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple. “Give it back,” she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of her palms. I produced Delicious. She grasped and bit into it, and my heart was like snow under crimson skin, and with the monkeyish nimbleness that was so typical of that American nymphet, she snatched out of my abstract grip the magazine I had opened (pity no film had recorded the curious pattern, the monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves). (57–58)

After some tussle and tumble, “the impudent child extended her legs across my lap.” By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane. Sitting there, on the sofa, I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her guileless limbs. It was no easy matter to divert the little maiden’s attention while I performed the obscure adjustments necessary for the success of the trick. Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter—and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an illusional, if not factual, sense, with the physically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and robe) between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. (58–59)

His passion may be unspeakable but it inspires a remarkable fluency. The narration keeps up with events, comments on them, offers explanations, and appends descriptive phrases that appear equal not just to the physical sensation but to its actual realization. The full complexity of

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Fig. 3. Two still photographs from Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962).

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realization comes into play in his description of both the feeling itself and the consciousness of the feeling that pushes it into a still higher register. Certainly, the passage gives no sense of his being less than ecstatic. The episode goes on for several pages. From talking fast, H.H. begins to sing, as possibly better adapted to the unfolding comedy, a made-up ditty about “my Carmen, my little Carmen,” and presently Lolita takes over the song and he concentrates on his own interior silent chant. She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock. (59)

His attention, in his avowed madness, to the precise geometry of his situation, and of hers, is no diversion, but the very stuff of sex. Asprawl, Lolita’s legs stretch from one corner of the couch over to his lap where he sits near the other corner but not all the way, the corner itself being occupied by a pile of magazines (we imagine the arrangement pruriently); with precision we visualize the exact placement of girl and man, girl half on top of man, and therefore the exact proximity of “beast and beauty.” Lust has its mechanics which it is lustful to think and tell about. As she strained to chuck the core of her abolished apple into the fender, her young weight, her shameless innocent shanks and round bottom, shifted in my tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap; and all of a sudden a mysterious change came over my senses. I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body. What had begun as a delicious distension of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life. (59–60)

The same as with his unspeakable passion, feelings that transcend all other considerations seem yet to issue in an equally surpassing expressiveness whose literary turn, that is to say, whose aesthetic values are instruments of discovery Flaubert might have carried off to his own quarry. In Nabokov’s conception, however, at this point, at this pitch of descriptive, aesthetic energy, the literary achieves an otherwise impossible knowledge. Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss (a nicety of physiological equipoise comparable to certain techniques in the arts) I kept repeating

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chance words after her—barmen, alarmin’, my charmin’, my carmen, ahmen, ahahamen—as one talking and laughing in his sleep while my happy hand crept up her sunny leg as far as the shadow of decency allowed. The day before she had collided with the heavy chest in the hall and—“Look, look!”—I gasped—“look what you’ve done, what you’ve done to yourself, ah, look”; for there was, I swear, a yellowish-violet bruise on her lovely nymphet thigh which my huge hairy hand massaged and slowly enveloped— and because of her very perfunctory underthings, there seemed to be nothing to prevent my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin—just as you might tickle and caress a giggling child—just that—and: “Oh it’s nothing at all,” she cried with a sudden shrill note in her voice, and she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back, and her teeth rested on her glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury [the reminder that this is a written account, not the event itself, flaunting the supremacy of literature over life], almost reached her bare neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known. (60–61)

The peril that has been averted, that the unfolding passage had brought this close, is his actually reaching “the hot hollow of her groin”; had he gone all the way, the design, the organization, the form of the passage would have been unfulfilled, and H.H. as well. Instead his desire has been gloriously realized, and indeed, he will never again attain such a height of pleasure. Even as he is enjoying a postcoital lunch downtown (I “had not been so hungry for years” [62]), topping off the pleasures of the couch with those of the table, the plot moves on, barring all repetitions of the magnificent bloodless rape. The absent Charlotte, it turns out, has been arranging to send her inconvenient daughter to summer camp, whence she is to go to boarding school. The plot thickens. Driving off with Lolita, camp-bound, Mrs. Haze leaves behind a letter avowing passionate love and proposing holy matrimony. Humbert decides to accept fate’s invitation to become his nymphet’s stepfather. It seems only moments later that his wife, prying one day, finds his all-revealing diary. In a rage, she banishes him forever; but destiny intervenes again and she dies under the wheels of a passing car. Ushered into the sole guardianship of the little orphan Lolita, H.H. goes off to retrieve her at camp. He is uncertain how to proceed, postpones telling the girl she has lost her mother, and stops off, on the way back, at an inn, The Enchanted Hunters (as a writer, witty H.H. is immensely fond of puns and double entendres), where he plots a retake of that splendid Sunday morning. This time he will employ a sleeping potion to render the prey quiescent to his caresses. But his surrogate bliss is not to be repeated, showing that Humbert Humbert does not understand what he is dealing with, in this matter of the pursuit of carnal knowledge; a preternaturally awake Lolita rushes him into the real thing.

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This proves a great disappointment. In contrast to the two scenes we have just read, that in which he actually posseses her remains essentially undescribed. Humbert impatiently refuses to go into details and just gives us the bare bones: the sleeping potion having failed, he is restricted to trying nuzzling games which Lolita scorns, proposing that instead they play a game she learned at camp. When he claims not to know this game, she shows him. “‘Here,’ says Lolita, ‘is where we start.’” H.H. grumpily stipulates the rest: “I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account of Lolita’s presumption.” Suffice it to say that not a trace of modesty did I perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved. She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation was no business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo in an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget unconnected with me. While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid’s life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strange predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way—at least while I could still bear it. (133–34)

He implies an unbearable excitement at the end of this passage, but it has hardly conveyed so much as interest. The tone is sardonic, detached, the content sociological. The situation is that of a cultivated and sensitive European confronted with an American child whose indelicate ways he attributes to her bringing up. He disapproves. As for jouissance, there is no mention of it except perhaps by inference from that last hint. The contrast is absolute between this recording of a mechanical event and the earlier euphoric account of his virtuous virtual enjoyment. By comparison with that epiphany, reached by dint of applying a combination of linguistic and literary forms to an experience of the real (a real girl who had thrown her legs across his real lap), the result of a brute encounter with carnal reality is a definite disappointment. It has not only less feeling, but less substance. At the same time, for Humbert Humbert, real lecher after real girl-children, there is no going back from carnal to merely concrete knowledge. We may replay the fall, but the plot always comes out the same.7 But Humbert’s experience of falling has an intellectual feature peculiar to him. Indeed, he proves not only the prudence but the wisdom of the Strether decision when his new relation to Lolita seems to infect his relation to art as well. Declining impatiently to describe his first congress with Lolita— “But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called ‘sex’ at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality”—he proclaims a higher purpose: “A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets” (134). “Perilous magic” is the stuff not of

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“so-called ‘sex’” but of permanent fixing, of representation; but representation, because it can convey more than the unbeguiling elements of animality, poses a threat: “I have to tread carefully,” lest a portrait of his nymphet prove too enticing: “It would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita!” (134). So he will not describe Lolita, but instead paint a surrogate portrait of his desire. Even its venue will be surrogate; not the inn bedroom where the dubious deed was done, but a public room where appetites are owned and satisfied openly, and the related sin, gluttony, afflicts only the sinner. “Had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments:” There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flameflower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child. (135)

The hypothetical mural retraces the story of Humbert’s exotic, perverse, quasi-sadistic desires and their coincidence with a mundane reality that, incredibly, seems to be fulfilling them. It is probably not bad, as murals go, but not very good either; at least H.H. does not seem to think it is. It certainly lacks, as putative picture and as description, the brilliance of his earlier descriptions, of Lolita sunbathing and especially of Lolita and her apple. It lacks as well the pleasure that animated those earlier portraits, his pleasure not only in the situations but in their depiction. Something is not right, in both reality and art as they emerge from the crisis of that anticlimactic deflowering. Humbert Humbert had taken possession of a delicious nymphet, exactly such a one as he has dreamed of since he was a boy, but the memory only depresses him, and not because he has now lost her; there was something wrong from the start. I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world—nymphet love. The beastly and

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beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why? (135)

Earlier, when only a thin cotton fabric separated “his gagged bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body,” he thought only of bringing them into “correspondence.” Now “beast” has turned into “beastly,” equivocal noun into censorial adjective, and “beauty” has hardened its opposition to become a judgmental term, “beautiful.” The blissful attainment of “correspondence” has become an excruciating incapacity “to fix” a “borderline.” Earlier he wanted to fix the perilous magic of nymphets, now to fix the borderline between the beastly and the beautiful. If to fix is to get hold of and define, and fixing is a work of representation, the question he asks himself is indeed puzzling. That fated night at The Enchanted Hunters, he penetrated fully into the mystery of nymphet love. Yet now he is tormented, not by guilt, but by his inability to describe or name or represent the complex understanding he acquired. Actually tasting the fruits of love seems to have transformed an erotic Parnassus into a literary Tantalus: “The beastly and the beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?”

III This question, which has all the marks of announcing a crucial articulation, closes the first half of the novel and, apposite though it is, the second half does not take it up. In fact, turning away from what has appeared to be, has been, a culminating moment, the novel now seems to be proposing to organize itself altogether differently. Thus far, events have been rushing toward a catastrophic implosion in the union of Humbert and Lolita. Everyone has conspired and everything has converged in a travesty of the marriage plot. Lolita’s second part opens on a centrifugal project, a voyage out, the novel now in its other basic mode, the travel narrative. In the first part, Humbert Humbert arrived in a small New England town and burrowed in. In the second part, he takes to the road on a journey that eventually covers some twenty-seven thousand miles of American heartland. At first, just getting out of the house is bracing, though Humbert is mostly preoccupied with finding new housing. The way Salammbô pores over battlefields and The Ambassadors visits drawing rooms and gardens, Lolita lingers over American dwellings: New England farm houses with rooms to let, midwestern frame houses furnished in “plush and plate style” (176), and especially motels. “It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States,” is how he begins part 2, but in the next sentence, he is recalling the motels at which they stopped. “To any other type of tourist accommodation

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I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel—clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love” (145). There follow four virtuoso pages on the architecture and corresponding culture of the motel. The material for this guide to American road hostelry was gathered by Nabokov and his wife Vera over twenty summers of car journeys in quest of butterflies.8 Besides many remarkable Lepidoptera (deposited in three gratifyingly major museums), they also collected choice samples of the flora and fauna of mid-twentieth-century middle-American life, such as the motels that had sprung up all over the country along streams of automobile travelers. Of course, Humbert has practical reasons for taking an interest in motels, those serendipitous nests for lecherous fathers and their sleepy daughters. But his zest in describing them has the feel of pure fun, and particularly of literary fun. He fairly chortles. “We came to know—nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation—the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as ‘shaded’ or ‘spacious’ or ‘landscaped grounds’” (145). Translating “we came to know” into fancy French as “nous connûmes” (the passé simple being seldom spoken) connotes writing, as does the invocation of Flaubert, writer of writers. Following this, the description of motel trees as “Chateaubriandesque” conjures up the belles lettres of European travel in the New World. Humbert Humbert’s summoning of the pious Chateaubriand into the courtyard of the motel where the direst unchastity is about to take place is a bit of Humbertian sacrilege, but it is a literary sacrilege. He is showing off his writerliness, and, judging by the restored wit of these pages, this posturing is getting him over the bewilderment of the last pages of part 1, where he despaired of ever getting at the crux of his own narrative. Evidently, though he has been unable to fix the magic of nymphets, he is master of the lesser charm of motels. He is off again writing, and, reassured by an inviolable concreteness, he revels in the luxury of names and details. Nous connûmes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements of their repetitious names—all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac’s Courts. There was sometimes a special line in the write-up, such as “Children welcome, pets allowed” (You are welcome, you are allowed). The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an endless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitely non-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while in use, to turn instantly beastly [even “beastly” has lost its terrors] hot or blindingly cold upon you, depending on whether your neighbor turned on his cold or his hot to deprive you of a necessary complement in the shower you had so carefully blended. (146)

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All goes well for some pages. Humbert has recovered his cultural equilibrium and his identity as a traveler in the New World toting baggage from the old. He happily recalls as a child poring over maps of North America (209); he realizes at one point that the odd familiarity of the landscape is a memory of painted oilcloths imported from America that hung in his Central European nursery and “fascinated a drowsy child at bed time” (152) The hovering shadow of Proust testifies to Humbert Humbert’s comparable merit.9 In these moments, Nabokov is very close to his narrator with whom he shares memories as he shares his stack of motel fold-outs. Fellow Europeans and fellow writers, author and narrator explore a foreign landscape. They are both travelers into the unknown, as the oilcloth pictures prove to have been too sketchy and “gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist” (152). In such passages, the two-headed beautiful-beastly monster in abeyance, Humbert appears simply a writer contemplating a simple landscape, pen poised, puzzling over how best to describe it, invoking other artists to help him in his reverent enterprise; for there is nothing here of blasphemy. His desire for the concrete, the thing itself, the detail, expresses itself in evocation and invocation. He seems satisfied to have what he seeks to know remain out there: There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quicksilverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas. (152–53)

There being here no problem about fixing the borderline between the natural and the artistic, the beastly is as good a subject as the beautiful. Anything is grist for poetic description. Right after the designated beauty of “somewhere in Kansas,” Humbert turns his writerly gaze on a more mixed scene. Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. A great user of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by toilet signs—Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck’s-Doe’s;

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while lost in an artist’s dream, I would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distant hill scrambling out—scarred but still untamed—from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it. (153)

H.H., with his cosmopolite’s ironic eye and refined taste, seems to be writing a Baedeker for the disenchanted traveler. Although one of his refined tastes is for little girls, for the nonce he is after the pleasures of landscape and social comedy, interests with which his author can associate himself un-ambivalently as together they criss-cross an absurd but sometimes rather beautiful America, chortling companionably. Alas, the calm is of the variety that precedes a storm. Only a few pages into part 2, the disenchanted Baedeker turns into a guide to hell. Almost right away, still agog at what he has achieved, H.H. is beset by a paradoxical, even a contradictory disability. Having fulfilled his scandalous desire, able at last to satisfy the most extreme of his refined tastes, he seems to lose his hold on the disenchantment, on the irony of which his scandalous desire had appeared to be the quintessence. In a word, Humbert Humbert turns sentimental. The second paragraph of the motel riff we have already seen beginning part 2 goes like this: Nous connûmes the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream. (146)

The first sentence, still clutching Flaubert, has nothing to do with the second. In the first, a certain severity of idiom accords with a rhythm constituted by the absence of inflection among the variety of motel operators. The second sentence, which begins by breaking with the quick-step momentum of the first to impose a deliberate drag (“And sometimes trains . . .”), is all lamentation and long swoops. The first is dead-pan, the second pulls all the stops of the sentimental organ. The cliché of trains passing in the night; the subjunctive (“would cry”), which in English always sounds a little fey; poeticizing parallel constructions (“the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plagency, mingling power and hysteria”); a sighing alliteration (“hot and humid,” “heartrending”) reinforced by the contrast of the unaspirated “o” of “ominous” (“heartrending and ominous”); the weighty diction and sound of “plagency.” Humbert evidently intends the contrast between the two sentences (he announces it by beginning the sentence with “And”) but does not intend it to be witty, or the second would be as airily stylish as the first. Instead it bears the stamp of sincerity, its selfconsciousness rendering it not stylish but didactic.

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Humbert Humbert will again write in the style of the first sentence, but control of the ensemble of his writing will more and more pass to the style of the second. Increasingly, the first is overruled. Cool Humbert seems to be developing a feverish sensibility and is constantly having poetic fits. For instance: And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called “sage brush” appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue and blue into dream and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.10 (153)

The last part of the sentence, following the semicolon, about the cows, has the feel of the old Humbert, as if he had put in a semicolon to give himself a chance to pull up against the avalanche of objective correlatives, the gush of “ands” and “and thens,” the unreadable overwriting of “windtortured withered stalks all along the highway”: it is not enough to compound hyphenation with alliteration (“wind-tortured withered stalks”), the compound has to be propelled not just “along the highway” but “all along the highway.” Poor Humbert Humbert meant to take in America, as he meant to take in Lolita, but he seems no sooner started on his journey than he is sinking in a quicksand of sentimental prose Charlotte Haze might have admired. Though afflicted with sentimentalism, he is perfectly lucid; he knows he has gone wrong, that what he imagined as a journey of discovery, of a world of sensations he had not hoped to penetrate and an unknown country, has proven a descent into the mire of banality. “We had been everywhere,” he notes at the end of the first summer’s travels. “We had really seen nothing” (175–76). Worse: the journey has not only failed to reach its own goal, it has despoiled what it could not discover. “And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep” (175–76). This passage closes the narrative of the first summer’s journey, for they will now settle into Beardsley for the winter. It is one time—there are not many—when Humbert insists that his retrospective view of things is significantly different, better informed. Yet his telling us that he had feigned sleep while Lolita sobbed belies the difference: he knew then what he tells us now, that she was abjectly unhappy; and he was then what he is now,

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abjectly unhappy. In this way, of being nothing new, expressing no discovered truth, even his remorse fails him. Meanwhile, the transcontinental voyage has been a counterdiscovery: they have covered over the country’s truth with the detritus of their perversion.11 The problem is not that the voyage out has proven a voyage in: that would mean only that Humbert has been writing a novel. But the voyage in has not penetrated to any new territory either: circling himself, Humbert Humbert has been as incapable of insight as of vision. He fancied he was striking out for new worlds, but he is only running, and not even running free. One day, during the second summer journey, he realizes he is being tracked by an “Aztec Red Convertible” (217). The pursuer is Clare Quilty, “another Humbert,” another amateur of girl-children, although Quilty uses them less for pleasure than for profit (he makes pornographic films), being himself, as he later explains to Humbert, more or less impotent. It turns out that Quilty was a feature of Lolita’s life before Humbert ever saw her; which means that H.H. himself, author, he thought, of his own story, has been all along a feature of someone else’s. The Haze family dentist, it turns out, was Clare Quilty’s uncle, Dr. Quilty, and the nephew had long ago marked Mrs. Haze’s lovely daughter for future reference. Accidentally running into her during her Humbert captivity, he has offered to help Lolita escape, promising to make her a movie star; Quilty is trailing them on the watch for an opportunity to snatch her away. The opportunity comes, and Lolita disappears from Humbert’s life, until she writes him the fateful letter that takes him on the road one last time, to find and kill Quilty; not long after which, H.H. ends his own travels in a prison cell. For Humbert Humbert the scene of the murder is also a stylistic crisis. He has been lurching between a darkening irony and sentimentality. On the one hand, there have been grimly self-mocking moments, such as when, driven half mad by his suspicions—is it a boyfriend who is following them? a detective?—he contemplates in its box the gun he has inherited from Charlotte’s first husband and which accompanies him on the journey. Along with the gun, he now recalls with the appreciation of American idiom that had made him rejoice in the signs of motels, came “a 1938 catalogue which cheerily said in part: ‘Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well as on the person.’” In this mood, he sees humor in his present situation as well: “There [the gun] lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb” (216). Indeed, the gun, its own terminal melodrama dwarfing any sentimentality he might manufacture, seems to be keeping him from entirely losing his sense of humor. “It occurred to me,” he thinks later in the journey, “that if I were really losing my mind, I might end up by murdering somebody. In fact— said high-and-dry Humbert to floundering Humbert—it might be quite clever

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to prepare things—to transfer the weapon from box to pocket—so as to be ready to take advantage of the spell of insanity when it does come” (229). On the other hand, there are the trains crying in the night that we have already seen, and many other such maudlin passages, contributions of the floundering Humbert to a narrative more and more divided. Humbert tries desperately to maintain his balance between what we took to be his constitutional irony and a monomaniacal fury at losing Lolita, that impossible synthesis of aesthetic and carnal knowledge (“light of my life, fire of my loins”). Approaching Quilty’s house, gun in hand, high-and-dry Humbert seems to be ascendant. A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back [he had passed by earlier scouting the area] to Grimm Road, but when I reached Pavor Manor, the sun was visible again, burning like a man, and the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house seemed to stand in a kind of daze, reflecting as it were my own state, for I could not help realizing, as my feet touched the springy and insecure ground, that I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation business. (293)

We are in Poe country, and Humbert’s is a very creditable imitation of the ironic sentimentality of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The sun “burning like a man” and the screaming birds could slip into that tale unnoticed. Then, in the second sentence, he mocks his mock-Poe with reassuring self-awareness: this is a meta-Poe-world, the projection of a drunken writerly imagination. He keeps his wit long enough to approach the house (“A guardedly ironic silence answered my bell”), enter, go up the stairs, down some hallways, in and out of several rooms, until he meets up with an equally shaky, “grayfaced, baggy-eyed,” hairy-calved, purple-robed Clare Quilty. But here again inelegant hyphens signal the choking of strong emotion, and indeed, poor Humbert now topples into simple fury. “To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage . . . [sic] To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands . . . [sic] To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain . . . [sic] To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling—oh my darling, this was intolerable bliss!” (294–95) Quilty, drunk, is also befuddled—he takes H.H. for a man from the phone company come to collect on an overdue bill. But unfettered by the formulas of sentiment, he easily takes the upper hand in their dialogue. Humbert, playing it straight, hurls his first question, “‘Do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?’”12 Quilty, guessing the man wants to establish the accuracy of the phone charges, is happy to grant any and all her pseudonyms: “‘Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place, Paradise Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?’” The

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destruction of Humbert’s stylistic credibility has begun; echoing Humbert’s earlier description of his life with Lolita as a paradise with a hell-flame colored sky, Quilty’s has retroactively turned that description into self-pitying hyperbole. His answer to the question “Who cares?” is catastrophic: “‘I do Quilty. You see, I am her father.’” “‘Nonsense,’” says Quilty, not only sensibly but accurately. “‘You are not. You are some foreign literary agent. A Frenchman once translated my Proud Flesh as La Fierté de la Chair. Absurd.’” Precisely: that was an absurd translation, failing to get the point of the original that the flesh was itself proud, not that it harbored pride. The paradox in the original—flesh is unconscious, how can it have pride?—is undone in the translation into a dubious piety. The similar mind-flesh paradox of Humbert Humbert—foreign literary gentleman and obsessed pedophile —has also come undone, as he translates himself for Quilty into a dubious piety: “‘She was my child, Quilty’” (296). Yes and no, no and yes: that had been what made it all so exciting. But now, Humbert Humbert, fatally, means it. After which, he becomes absurd in himself rather than a wielder of absurdity; having lost his existentialist wits, through with style, through really with language, Humbert points his gun. He has gone native, become a hero of kisskiss bang-bang. Gone the days when “nous connûmes” “Sunset Motels” and “U-Beam Cottages”: H.H. is no longer in the business of knowing. This transformation appears to contradict what I said at the beginning, that, although retrospective, the narrative depicts H.H. living his story progressively, as it unfolded. So it does, but H.H. changes with the story; that is, he gives at each point a contemporary rather than a current account of his own stance and role. The exuberant Humbert who so harmlessly, guiltlessly found his joy on a sunny Sunday morning is in his narrative essentially as he was then; the tormented Humbert who struggles to keep his sense of irony from asphyxiation in a thickening fog of pathos is also as he was then. Writing his Confession, he recalls himself as he was and tells the story as it went. The jailed Humbert Humbert is as he is when he has recovered himself sufficiently to write his story. He is by then cumulatively a very adequate sum of narrative powers. But in the murder scene earlier he is so far down in his literary coefficients, his author, once so companionate he invoked Proust as a common forebear, here abandoned H.H. and actually betrayed him with Quilty. Humbert is made to hand over the text. It happens like this. Right after losing Lolita, H.H. has a nervous breakdown that he nurses in a “Quebec sanatorium where I had stayed before.” During “my retreat” outside the United States with its peculiar strains and stresses, he composes a poem that he later recognizes, by “psychoanalyzing” it, was “really a maniac’s masterpiece.” It matches exactly the landscapes “drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers” (255, 257). Humbert shares his author’s wellknown scorn for psychoanalysis and has already ridiculed the Beardsley school counselor and her attempt to enlighten him about the psychology of pubescent girls. Daringly modern in her discussion of anal and genital

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zones, she is oblivious to the flagrant sexual transgression unfolding before her. His invocation of psychoanalysis in regard to the poem expresses a saving self-mockery, irony turned on himself. In the protracted tussle of the murder, grimly trying to hang on to the vestiges of his writerly self—who keeps harping, futilely, on the absurdity of a duel to the death between “two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin” (299)—he hands a second version of the poem to Quilty to read aloud as his death sentence. “‘Here goes,’” says Quilty, “‘I see it’s in verse.’” Because you took advantage of a sinner because you took advantage because you took because you took advantage of my disadvantage . . . [Quilty:] “That’s good, you know. That’s damned good.” . . . when I stood Adam-naked Before a federal law and all its stinging stars [Quilty:] “Oh, grand stuff!” . . . Because you took advantage of a sin when I was helpless moulting moist and tender hoping for the best dreaming of marriage in a mountain state aye of a litter of Lolitas . . . 13 [Quilty:] “Didn’t get that.” Because you took advantage of my inner essential innocence because you cheated me— [Quilty:] “A little repetitious, what? Where was I?” Because you cheated me of my redemption because you took her at the age when lads play with erector sets [Quilty:] “Getting smutty, eh?” a little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye

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ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did and because of all I did not you have to die. [Quilty:] “Well, sir, this is certainly a fine poem. Your best as far as I am concerned.” (299–300)

Certain lines (“from her wax-browed and dignified protector”) are no doubt self-mocking, but H.H. evidently intends everything that follows to be read seriously. Taking a dull doll to pieces and throwing away its head is an embarrassingly mawkish image. Quilty’s closing comment seals the poem’s fatuity with its own, which is clearly mocking: “‘Your best as far as I am concerned,’” says one degenerate hack to the other. Quilty’s punctuating interjections have pointed up the tawdry cleverness of Humbert’s poem (“advantage of my disadvantage”; “a federal law and all its stinging stars”); its redundancy (“‘A little repetitious, what? Where was I?’”); its childish prurience (lads playing with erector sets); its pulp bathos (little downy girls still wearing poppies and eating popcorn). Humbert meant to impose his text on Quilty; Quilty has taken it over and the story with it. Even after Humbert pumps him full of bullets from the late Mr. Haze’s revolver, Quilty remains in charge. Leaving the dying man in his bedroom, H.H. descends to the ground floor of the house where a party seems to be underway. To his announcement that he has killed their host, one of the merrymakers answers jovially that they should all do it to him one day. Quilty crawls onto the stair landing and finally dies, but this is not immediately apparent. There is loud music. “This, I said to myself, was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty. With a heavy heart I left the house and walked through the spotted blaze of the sun to my car. Two other cars were parked on both sides of it, and I had some trouble squeezing out” (305). Sic transit gloria. Humbert Humbert, actor in Quilty’s play, his place in the world reduced to an inadequate parking space (soon to a jail cell), has lost his hold more surely than the dead Quilty from having been more surely engaged with Lolita. Quilty only wanted to use her in his pornographic films; H.H. knew her intimately in real life. Out of this knowledge, which at one point seemed the utmost truth he could attain, he has culled a desolating inauthenticity. His claim to fatherhood is less perverse than inauthentic, as becomes clear in what he announces to be the closing passage of his story (the book, however, continues beyond it). Leaving Quilty’s house, he drives away deliberately on the wrong

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side of the road. But this perversity is only a transitory phase. When the police begin to follow him, he drives off the road altogether and comes to a stop in a field. There, awaiting arrest, he recalls another time, soon after Lolita’s disappearance, when he had also driven into a field. That time, he was high on a hill and, after a while, hearing a chorus of sounds rising from below, he had looked down to see “a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley.” The field, the flowers, the roofs of the houses below, even the “orelike glitter of the city dump,” it is all very beautiful, but the sounds are best. And [another sentence beginning with the sigh of an “and”] soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. This then is my story. (307–8)

It is a little too much irony that Humbert Humbert, pedophile and murderer, has ended a faux Norman Rockwell, teary over small mining towns, laughing children, and the crack of baseball bats. The irony is not his. It could have been Quilty’s, for even a pornographer, as we have just seen, despite his business being so literal, is wittier than this pedophile; it was certainly Nabokov’s. But Humbert Humbert is telling it straight, apparently no longer of the company of those who, consciously and with intent, when they tell, represent the literary company. Nabokov explained the meaning of his loss of the capability of form in a parable told in a small afterword he wrote to accompany the controversial first publication in the United States of excerpts from Lolita: The first little throb of Lolita went through me late in 1939 or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.

If the relation of this parable to the story of a middle-aged man obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl seems obscure, Nabokov went on to say, there was in fact none to be found. “The impulse I record had no textual connection

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with the ensuing train of thought, which resulted, however, in a prototype of my present novel, a short story some thirty pages long” (311). The passage with which Humbert Humbert closes his tale is a clue, I think, to his relation to the caged ape. In it, H.H. becomes terminally literal, to the point of barring representation as such. Lolita is a child, he a child-molester. That is all, and it is all wrong. All the ways Lolita has represented more than herself—as a figure of beauty, innocence, stupidity, cunning, vulgarity and delicacy, vitality—all the ways she exceeds her categorical identity as a girl-child, have lapsed. The same for Humbert Humbert: he too is flattened in that anecdote to his type, or not even, to his cipher. Like the ape, Humbert is here drawing only the bars of his cage—the structural members of his situation. A man, a child, a crime. The problem of course, the precipitating cause, and indeed justification, for this terminal literalism and abstraction is the third term, the sin: as Humbert Humbert finally concedes, nothing can modulate the brute fact of what he has done to Lolita, any attempt to render it figurative turns instantly into sophistry. What he recognizes at the last is that even his misery is uninteresting: nothing of what he has felt or done or tried to do matters: Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet: The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. (283)

His abuse of Lolita has to “not matter a jot” in order not to matter completely. There is no intermediary position; it is like death: one is not a little or a lot dead, but dead or not; or it is like any primal innocence, as a child’s. The old poet (apparently Nabokov’s invention) makes the connection: access to beauty, for pleasure or profit or both as in art, is permitted only within the limits of morality. There are rules, and, along with mortality, morality constitutes bars. You can look through the bars of the cage and draw the world beyond, as far as you can see beyond (James thought Flaubert had cast his sight too short); or you can take the bars themselves for the subject, in which case you might be a tragic hero, but more likely an ape. The novel is not a form for tragic heroes. Strether, ideal protagonist of an ideal novel, saw far beyond his cage by staying far back from the bars; while Humbert Humbert threw himself at them. In time, he does see his error, and that it is fatal. Nothing can redeem his sin: life is not a joke. The novel ratifies this judgment by countering his carnal possession of Lolita with the total loss of himself. H.H. ends

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in a cage, drawing the bars for his keepers, his drawing and writing providing him only a “melancholy and very local palliative.”14 This last phrase follows logically if paradoxically: cultivated, erudite Humbert Humbert seems not to place much value on art. In the last sentences of the novel, he tells Lolita that it is well he outlived Quilty because he has thus been able to write the book that will make her “live in the minds of later generations.” “I am thinking,” he explains, “of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art” (309). For Humbert Humbert, art is a consolation prize.

IV However, the first prize, to have and to hold the real Lolita, is a boobyprize, and the gist of an odd, disgruntled essay of Nabokov’s, entitled “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,”15 is, moreover, that only a booby would pursue it. If this essay is any gloss, Humbert Humbert has not only been foolish, he has revealed himself a fool, and his rarefied passion, a banal vulgarity. The essay begins with a familiar denunciation of the horde: “Commonsense has trampled down many a gentle genius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam of some too early truth; commonsense has back-kicked dirt at the loveliest of queer paintings because a blue tree seemed madness to its well-meaning hoof; commonsense has prompted ugly but strong nations to crush their fair but frail neighbors the moment a gap in history offered a chance that it would have been ridiculous not to exploit” (Lectures, 372). Moreover, the enemies of gentle geniuses are not only uncomprehending, they are also violent, bad people. The essay’s major thesis is the conjunction of commonsense and evil, grounded in their common abstraction. Commonsense works like a crude, unreflective arithmetic, Nabokov explained, juggling ciphers whose real-life referents are of no interest to it; “badness is in fact the lack of something rather than a noxious presence; and thus being abstract and bodiless it occupies no real space in our inner world.” This Augustinian definition becomes the ground for saying that using commonsense leads to criminal conclusions, since, reasoning on empty, the man of commonsense is incapable of visualizing consequences. “Criminals are usually people lacking imagination, for its development even on the poor lines of commonsense would have prevented them from doing evil by disclosing to their mental eye a woodcut depicting handcuffs; and creative imagination in its turn would have led them to seek an outlet in fiction and make the characters in their books do more thoroughly what they might themselves have bungled in real life” (Lectures, 375–76). It is difficult not to see in this passage a reference to Nabokov’s arch-

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criminal, the first hint of whom as a character-to-be was an image of an ape drawing the bars of his cage, unable to look beyond them. H.H. is indeed not only abusive but myopic in his criminal obsession and, for all his purported sophistication, rather conventional in his tastes and ways. Criminals, Nabokov explained, are all notoriously prone to triteness: “Lacking real imagination, [criminals] content themselves with such half-witted banalities as seeing themselves gloriously driving into Los Angeles in that swell stolen car with that swell golden girl who had helped to butcher its owner” (Lectures, 376). Bargaining for his life, Quilty is not insulting Humbert by offering in compensation for one nymphet the address of “‘a Mrs. Vibrissa’” with a store of daughters and granddaughters, the use of his wardrobe, and the run of “‘an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs’” (Lolita, 301–2). But if Humbert Humbert ends little more than a Hollywood cliché, he does differ from the genre in being conscious of his triteness. The ape took a long time getting around to drawing the bars of his cage; perhaps he was on the verge of drawing the view through the bars. For a time, H.H. saw further, not as far as it would have taken to write a novel (though he did keep a journal), but as far as fantasy. Besides its bliss, that wonderful Sunday produced a model of how he might have had his girl harmlessly. In the glowing aftermath, he had congratulated himself. I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady’s new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact. Thus had I delicately constructed my ignoble, ardent, sinful dream; and still Lolita was safe—and I was safe. What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her own. The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark. (62)

At moments like this, with H.H. all but an author himself, what with his creating and constructing, Nabokov seemed in substantial sympathy with him; this is to say that Nabokov appears to enter into Humbert’s desire for Lolita. Indeed, the easy contempt with which he dismissed unimaginatively commonsensical criminals in the essay on commonsense could hardly have fueled the writing of Lolita. On the contrary, Humbert Humbert’s account of that signal Sunday illustrates Nabokov’s highest principle, in life and writing both, namely, the supreme value of the concrete. Before he dwindled into cliché and thus abstraction, H.H. had a joyful appreciation for the

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actual stuff of which nymphets were made. In the passages in which he glories in the tones of Lolita’s flesh, her smell and the length of her toes, for instance in the Sunday morning scene, Humbert writes at the top of Nabokov’s form and is not entirely lost. For the concrete is a moral as well as an aesthetic principle. If “badness” is “abstract and bodiless,” “good—and ‘goodness’” is something that is irrationally concrete. “[G]oodness” is something round and creamy, and beautifully flushed, something in a clean apron with warm bare arms that have nursed and comforted us, something in a word just as real as the bread or the fruit to which the advertisement alludes; and the best advertisements are composed by sly people who know how to touch off the rockets of individual imaginations, which knowledge is the commonsense of trade using the instruments of irrational perception for its own perfectly rational ends.16 (Lectures, 375)

The concrete is simply the stuff itself of life and commerce, of goodness, and of art. Nabokov once told an interviewer that, for him, concreteness was the crux of both writing and reading: “During my years of teaching literature at Cornell and elsewhere I demanded of my students the passion of science and the patience of poetry. As an artist and scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam.”17 Now, the last two comparisons are actually between disparate objects. “Obscure” and “clear” are matched opposites, but not “facts” and “symbols” (a fact can be obvious and a symbol obscure); and the basic difference between fruit and jam is not that the first is wild and the second synthetic. The plump lady in the apron could have produced a real jam of 100 percent fruit without additives; but Nabokov seems to have sought as an objective correlative something unworked: not even farmed, let alone boiled. Fact and symbol offer the same contrast, between something given and something worked. He was saying that he preferred, as the ground of writing, a primary relation to a primary reality. His taking the prodigiously crafted Eugene Onegin as an example of “discovered wild fruit” clarifies that what is at issue is the writer’s relation to his materials, whatever they are: his work is to translate them. In the case of Pushkin’s verse novel, Nabokov had produced “a crib, a pony, an absolutely literal translation of the thing, with copious and pedantic notes whose bulk far exceeds the text of the poem.” Eugene Onegin being itself a text (an articulate reality), his task had been to provide access to it, not to produce a text of his own. “Only a paraphrase ‘reads well’; my translation does not; it is honest and clumsy, ponderous and slavishly faithful. I have several notes to every stanza (of which there are more than 400, counting the variants). This commentary contains a discussion of the original melody and a complete explication of the text.”18

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“Honest and clumsy, ponderous and slavishly faithful” is ceremonial self-abnegation before the master, but it also strikes a genuine note that rings clear in a sort of fable Nabokov wove in the essay on commonsense. This fable unfolds as a commentary on a cartoon he once saw, depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way down that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good. (Lectures, 373–74)

The note is the clearer for being paradoxical: the falling chimney sweep, with all his presence of mind, is utterly helpless, and his helplessness is essential to the meaning of his pondering the misspelled word on the sign-board. As he insisted on his nonintervention in Pushkin’s text, Nabokov here proposes, as “the highest form of consciousness,” an alert responsiveness that yet ignores an overwhelming reality. We are all crashing to our deaths; meanwhile we notice things: not the given fact that we are crashing down, but the sights on the way, which in themselves, by existing and populating the world with interesting things to see and think about, show it to be “good.” This is more a philosophy of writing than a philosophy of life. Like the chimney sweep, the writer is to be, paradoxically, completely disinterested and completely interested.19 The chimney sweep’s epistemology is aesthetically based and derives all knowledge from description, the more minute the more telling; then it leaves the matter there, never moving on to generalize, but only to further observation. Its specialty is detail at one end, material effect at the other: it runs to producing woodcuts of handcuffs instead of crimes, or parachutes. Nabokov’s ideal representation of the writer as chimney sweep was Nikolai Gogol, about whom he published a book in 1944.20 This was a sort of handbook for the New Directions “Makers of Modern Literature” series, but Nabokov asserted himself by beginning with a chapter stylishly entitled “His Death and His Youth,” and ending with an account of how the publisher insisted on a concluding chronology. (The publisher was right to insist, and the humorous, critical, affectionate chronology is itself worth the trip.) We learn at the same time that the publisher vetoed Nabokov’s suggestion to substitute for the usual portrait of the subject a picture of Gogol’s nose. “Not his face and shoulders, etc. but only his nose. A big solitary sharp

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nose—neatly outlined in ink like the enlarged figure of some important part of a curious zoological specimen.” The publisher said (according to Nabokov) that it would kill the book. Perhaps, but it would have been very useful to have a graphic statement of the essay’s central perception, namely, that Gogol’s greatness (Nabokov considered him in The Overcoat “the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced”) depended on “the curiously physical side of Gogol’s genius. The belly is the belle of his stories, the nose is their beau.” A “nasal leitmotif” runs through all his work; “Noses drip, noses twitch, noses are lovingly or roughly handled; one drunkard attempts to saw off the nose of another; the inhabitants of the moon (so a madman discovers) are Noses” (Nikolai Gogol, 3–4). His own “big sharp nose was of such length and mobility that in the days of his youth he had been able (being something of an amateur contortionist), to bring its tip and his underlip in ghoulish contact; this nose was his keenest and most essential outer part” (3). This remarkable nose would be the seat of its owner’s final torment when Gogol was desperately sick and the doctor was desperately incompetent. With as fine a misjudgment of symptoms, as clear an anticipation of the methods of Charcot, Dr. Auvers (or Hovert) had his patient plunged into a warm bath where his head was soused with cold water after which he was put to bed with half-a-dozen plump leeches affixed to his nose. He had groaned and cried and weakly struggled while his wretched body (you could feel the spine through the stomach) was carried to the deep wooden bath; he shivered as he lay naked in bed and kept pleading to have the leeches removed: they were dangling from his nose and kept getting into his mouth (Lift them, keep them away,—he pleaded) and he tried to sweep them off so that his hands had to be held by stout Auvert’s (or Hauvers’s) hefty assistant. (2)

This horrific scene is full of empathy with poor Gogol in the hands of an obtuse quack. But Nabokov’s point in telling the story was not its “human appeal which I deplore” (2). He wanted to demonstrate in his own writing about Gogol’s life the intimacy with physical reality that he found to be the central trait of Gogol’s writing. Nabokov emphasized that this intimate reality was not originally Gogol’s own. To produce the recalcitrant second volume of Dead Souls, Gogol had apparently asked friends and acquaintances to write him letters detailing the “bare facts” they encountered on their daily paths. Flaubert would have issued the same instructions: they were “to describe things—just describe them” (119). But what Nabokov sought was someting on the order of the chimney sweep’s misspelled word which, in order to see, he had to know the right spelling; or it was knowing that his correspondents saw trees looking green, while he colored them blue. In Nabokov’s reading, “The absurd was Gogol’s favorite muse” (141);

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and the absurd was a deeper vision of the real: the hero of The Overcoat “is absurd because he is pathetic, because he is human and because he has been engendered by the very forces which seem to be in such contrast to him” (141–42). The absurd is what emerges when, like the chimney sweep but unlike the ape, you look through the bars: So what is that queer world, glimpses of which we keep catching through the gaps of the harmless looking sentences? It is in a way the real one but it looks wildly absurd to us, accustomed as we are to the stage setting that screens it. It is from these glimpses that the main character of The Overcoat, the meek little clerk, is formed, so that he embodies the spirit of that secret but real world which breaks through Gogol’s style. (143)

Gogol, chimney sweep, gentle genius, emerges from Nabokov’s portrait barely viable yet unabashed before a living reality he scrutinizes in every detail as the face (not the mask Ahab accused, but the face) of knowledge. Those who think Turgenev a great writer, Nabokov warned, will not appreciate Gogol. But the diver, the seeker for black pearls, the man who prefers the monsters of the deep to the sunshades on the beach, will find in The Overcoat shadows linking our state of existence to those other states and modes which we dimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception. The prose of Pushkin is three-dimensional; that of Gogol is four-dimensional, at least. He may be compared to his contemporary, the mathematician Lobachevsky, who blasted Euclid and discovered a century ago many of the theories which Einstein later developed. (145)

“Four-dimensional, at least,” Gogol’s prose was the stuff of an imaginative realism both the opposite of literal realism and its furthest unfolding. Humbert Humbert, finding green trees an insufficient palliative for his great aesthetic desire, took a can of blue paint to the woods. The result was to poison the trees and get H.H. arrested for vandalism. But Nabokov never meant by this outcome to show that the woods were really green. Had Humbert looked and not touched, he might have seen that the trees were already blue; only he would have needed to be, instead of a murderer penning his confession, a “genius” writing fiction.

Y|äx A Simple Heart Félicité and the Holy Parrot

Salammbô, the first of this book’s five fictions, is a work of sublime beauty, but one would probably not read it for the story. In the previous chapter, on Lolita, the aesthetic pursuit of truth finds itself in conflict with the ethical truth and waxes sentimental instead. But this final chapter is about a work in which story and beauty, morality and irony are all supremely fulfilled. Every word of Salammbô reflected prodigies of archival research into matters long ago and far away. Indeed, the first chapter of this book was animated by the defiant paradox of Flaubert’s claiming every word of that story true to life when he had taken a subject not only mostly unknown but unknowable. Symmetrically, this concluding chapter is about a tale set in Flaubert’s native Pont-l’Évêque and populated by familiar characters modeled on persons he had actually known. Besides symmetry, what also makes this story a fitting close is its being part of Flaubert’s last completed work. A Simple Heart (Un coeur simple) is one of three tales in Three Tales (Trois Contes),1 published in 1877, three years before Flaubert died. A Simple Heart is the first tale in the published volume but the second in the order of writing. The second in the volume, The Legend of SaintJulian the Hospitaller (La Légende de Saint-Julien l’Hospitalier), is set in the Middle Ages, and the last, Hérodias, in biblical times. It was Flaubert who arranged the three in this order, putting the contemporary story first, followed by the others in reverse historical order, from modern to medieval to ancient. I shall not take up the last two except to note that in this late work (he did not know it as his last, obviously, and was also occupied during its writing with the huge project of Bouvard et Pécuchet, which he never finished2), Flaubert gathered examples of his three principal modes, with a story of manners, a saint’s life, and a story of antiquity. A Simple Heart is selfcontained, however.3 It is only some thirty to forty pages long, depending on

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Fig. 4. The first page of the manuscript of A Simple Heart showing Flaubert’s legendary revising. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).

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the edition, but retraces the course of the entire lifetime of a certain Madame Aubain’s excellent servant, Félicité. Before coming to work for Mme Aubain, a widow with two children, Félicité had a difficult childhood, then a disappointing love affair. Her life as a servant has not been easy either: “For a hundred francs a year, she did the cooking and cleaning, sewed, did the laundry, ironed, knew how to bridle a horse, fatten fowl, churn butter, and remained loyal to her mistress—who, however, was not a pleasant person” (A Simple Heart, 1). (Pour cent francs par an, elle faisait la cuisine et le ménage, cousait, lavait, repassait, savait brider un cheval, engraisser les volailles, battre le beurre, et resta fidèle à sa maitresse,—qui cependant n’était pas une personne agréable [Un coeur simple, 591].) Félicité is devoted to Mme Aubain’s two children, Virginie and Paul, and also lavishes her spinster’s hopes and meager savings on her nephew, Victor, but he dies young on a distant shore. Virginie, always a worry because of her weak chest, soon succumbs; Paul grows up good only at accumulating debts and is no comfort. Mme Aubain sighs a great deal as she sits at her sewing. Félicité works and mourns her dead, and is so deprived of life that she hardly ages. Then a wonderful thing happens: a departing neighbor leaves behind a South American parrot named Loulou. Mme Aubain gives the resplendent bird, green, pink, blue, and gold, to Félicité, and it becomes for her “almost a son, a lover” (49) (presque un fils, un amoureux [615]). However, one cold winter dawn, Loulou is found dead; Félicité is inconsolable, and Mme Aubain, finally losing patience, tells her to just get the parrot stuffed. Thereafter, installed on a shelf in her room, Loulou greets Félicité every morning, “gorgeous, erect on a tree branch which was screwed down on a mahogany pedestal, one foot in the air, his head tilted to the side, chewing on a nut, which the taxidermist, out of a love for the grandiose, had gilded” (52) (splendide, droit sur une branche d’arbre, qui se vissait dans un socle d’acajou, une patte en l’air, la tête oblique, et mordant une noix, que l’empailleur, par amour du grandiose, avait dorée [617]). In due course, Mme Aubain having died, Félicité is left alone in the house with the stuffed bird. Years pass, her right to remain in the house is precarious, and, afraid to ask for repairs, she spends a winter under a leaky roof. At Easter, she coughs up blood and the doctor says it is pneumonia. As she lies on her death-bed, the procession of the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament passes by and pauses at an altar below her window that is one of its stations. Earlier, Félicité, already too weak to make an offering for display on the altar, had lent Loulou instead. He is there now, part of an overflowing cornucopia. Green garlands hung on the altar, which was decorated with a frill of English lace. In the middle there was a little box that held relics, two orange trees in the corners, and, all along it, silver candles and porcelain vases,

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from which sprung sunflowers, lilies, peonies, foxglove, clusters of hydrangeas. This heap of brilliant colors slanted down, from the first tier to the rug spread on the pavement; and rare things attracted the eye. A silver gilt sugar-bowl had a crown of violets, pendants made of precious Alençon stones sparkled on moss, two Chinese screens showed their landscapes. Loulou, hidden beneath some roses, let only his blue face be seen, like a plaque of lapis lazuli. (61) Des guirlandes vertes pendaient sur l’autel, orné d’un falbala en point d’Angleterre. Il y avait au milieu un petit cadre enfermant des reliques, deux orangers dans les angles, et, tout le long, des flambeaux d’argent et des vases en porcelaine, d’où s’élançaient des tournesols, des lis, des pivoines, des digitales, des touffes d’hortensias. Ce monceau de couleurs éclatantes descendait obliquement, du premier étage jusqu’au tapis se prolongeant sur les pavés; et des choses rares tiraient les yeux. Un sucrier de vermeil avait une couronne de violettes, des pendeloques en pierres d’Alençon brillaient sur de la mousse, deux écrans chinois montraient leurs paysages. Loulou, caché sous des roses, ne laissait voir que son front bleu, pareil à une plaque de lapis. (622)

Loulou is the proper finish for this description of material bounty: while his forehead is still radiant, there is a reason the rest of him is hidden under roses. A little before, when one of the old ladies attending Félicité’s death brought her Loulou so she could say goodbye to him, we learned that, with the advancing years, worms have been eating at him and that his stuffing of rotting straw protrudes from his belly. But if, in her decomposing Loulou, Félicité has reached the outer edge of this material realm, nothing indicates she is going anywhere beyond. She kisses Loulou one last time; below her window, the priests swing their censers, scattering incense. An azure vapor rose up into Félicité’s room. She widened her nostrils, breathing it in with a mystical sensuality; then closed her eyes. Her lips smiled. The movements of her heart slowed down little by little, more uncertain, more gentle each time, the way a fountain runs dry, the way an echo disappears; and when she exhaled her last breath, she thought she saw, as the skies parted, a giant parrot, hovering above her head. (61–62) Une vapeur d’azur monta dans la chambre de Félicité. Elle avança les narines, en la humant avec une sensualité mystique; puis ferma les paupières. Ses lèvres souriaient. Les mouvements de son coeur se ralentirent un à un, plus vagues chaque fois, plus doux, comme une fontaine s’épuise, comme un écho disparaît; et quand elle exhala son dernier souffle, elle crut voir, dans les cieux entr’ouverts, un perroquet gigantesque, planant au-dessus de sa tête. (622)

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Even for Flaubert, who knew his way around irony, this paragraph is a master stroke. The ostensible content is Félicité’s pious vision of the heavens opening to receive her. That is the paragraph’s plot and what the women at the death-bed believe they are watching. An unwary reader, moved to sentiment if not sentimentality, might take this to be Félicité’s own understanding, and that she has muddled Loulou with the Holy Spirit. But nothing in the paragraph supports that reading; quite the contrary. From the incense rising to the dying woman’s room, to her nostrils widened to receive it with “mystical sensuality” (no contradiction indicated), to her closing eyes, her smiling lips, her slowing heartbeats coming fewer and fewer like a fountain running out, to her vision of a great parrot as she breathes her last breath, nothing of religion occurs, only things of the earth: incense, a nose, lips, a heart, and, to top it all off, a vision of a real parrot. The paragraph is wholly composed of terrestrial objects and visions, and the joke of the parrot’s substitution for the spirit of God is on religion, not on Félicité, whose last vision is no religious epiphany. Félicité is not given to transcendent visions. When, with the approach of death, her delirium abates, she visualizes the procession passing outside as an entirely worldly event. All the school-children, all the choir and the firemen walked on the sidewalks, while in the middle of the street proceeded: first the verger armed with his halberd, the beadle with a large cross, the schoolteacher watching over the children, the nun anxious about her little girls; three of the prettiest, curly-haired like angels, were throwing rose petals in the air; the deacon, his arms spread apart, conducted the music; and two thurifers at each step turned toward the Blessed Sacrament, which was being carried, under a canopy of dark red velvet held up by four churchwardens, by the priest in his beautiful chasuble. A flood of people brought up the rear, between the white cloths that covered the walls of houses; and they arrived at the bottom of the hill. (59–60) Tous les enfants des écoles, les chantres et les pompiers marchaient sur les trottoirs, tandis qu’au milieu de la rue, s’avançaient: premièrement le suisse armé de sa hallebarde, le bedeau avec une grande croix, l’instituteur surveillant les gamins, la religieuse inquiète de ses petites filles; trois des plus mignonnes, frisées comme des anges, jetaient dans l’air des pétales de roses; le diacre, les bras écartés, modérait la musique; et deux encenseurs se retournaient à chaque pas vers le Saint-Sacrement, que portait, sous un dais de velours ponceau tenu par quatre fabriciens, M. le curé, dans sa belle chasuble. Un flot de monde se poussait derrière, entre les nappes blanches couvrant le mur des maisons; et l’on arriva au bas de la côte. (621)

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The narrative insists, improbably but explicitly, that Félicité is picturing all this herself: “Thinking about the procession, she could see it, as if she were following it” (59). (En songeant à la procession, elle la voyait, comme si elle l’eût suivie [621].) It is thus putatively not only Flaubert’s fierce secularism animating this description. Félicité is the one imagining the village worthies parading with statues and censers, some pompous in the certainty that, as adepts of the power that rules the universe, they participate in it, others worried by the responsibility. The outstretched arms of the deacon, the continual turning around of the censer-bearers, the three little girls prettily throwing rose petals, sketch an animated caricature that is Félicité’s own as well, even if for her the caricature carries no implied judgment. No judgment either for or against: her piety has represented the letter of belief, no more, no less, except where it has been able to annex her genuine feeling for the natural world. While accompanying Virginie in the preparations for her first communion, Félicité had discovered Christianity’s agrarian lore. She recognized all the references in the Bible from her own experience; “Sowings, harvests, wine presses, all those familiar things the Gospel speaks of, existed in her life; the passage of God had sanctified them; and she loved lambs more tenderly for love of the Lamb, doves because of the Holy Ghost” (24). (Les semailles, les moissons, les pressoirs, toutes ces choses familières dont parle l’Évangile, se trouvaient dans sa vie; le passage de Dieu les avait sanctifiés; et elle aima plus tendrement les agneaux par amour de l’Agneau, les colombes à cause du Saint-Esprit [601].) She embraced evangelical iconography as material truth. That the Lamb be a lamb posed no problem; she could easily imagine Christ looking like a lamb, since she sees lambs all the time. As for the Holy Spirit being a dove, that too she could see. But she was puzzled that It could be simultaneously also fire and breath. “She found it difficult to imagine his appearance; for he was not only a bird, but also a fire, and other times a breath. It might be his light that flutters about at night on the edges of swamps, his breathing that pushes the clouds, his voice that makes bells harmonious; and she remained in adoration, taking pleasure in the coolness of the walls and the tranquility of the church” (24). (Elle avait peine à imaginer sa personne; car il n’était pas seulement oiseau, mais encore un feu, et d’autres fois un souffle. C’est peut-être sa lumière qui voltige la nuit aux bords des marécages, son haleine qui pousse les nuées, sa voix qui rend les cloches harmonieuses; et elle demeurait dans une adoration, jouissant de la fraîcheur des murs et la tranquillité de l’église [601].) Félicité’s speculations, in the first clause of the second sentence, as to whether it might be the Holy Spirit flitting like a light in the swamp, pushing the clouds along in the sky, and lending harmony to the church bells, is all in the present tense, flanked by the past tense of the preceding sentence

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and that of the second clause of this second one. (The distinction is perhaps starker in French than in English.) She sees the world as eternally present and in the present, and her literalism precludes, along with the added understandings accessible from a critical distance, recognizing the mystery of the Holy Spirit as a mystery. She makes of crucifixes and statues of the Virgin items of mundane knowledge. Félicité’s final vision, enthroning the stuffed rotting parrot instead of the insubstantial and confusing Holy Spirit, makes Loulou an apotheosis but not an incarnation. In his own once magnificent, now shredding self, he is the final destination of Félicité’s love, not a stand-in. The sentence describing his apparition implies no mistake on her part: “she thought she saw, as the skies parted, a giant parrot, hovering above her head” (62) (elle crut voir, dans les cieux entr’ouverts, un perroquet gigantesque, planant audessus de sa tête [622]). This does not say that she thought she saw the Holy Spirit in the form of a parrot, but that she thought she saw a parrot; the Holy Spirit is nowhere to be seen. She is not seeing the Holy Spirit in the guise of Loulou, nor mistaking Loulou for the Holy Spirit: simply, in the opening sky, she thinks she sees Loulou. Of course, she is quite unconscious of any sacrilege. Like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn (whose first-person narration is reliable only as description and mostly wrong as interpretation), she does not know that she knows what she knows, but she does know it, and she would have told her story no differently had she understood it as we do. Lacking all intellectual authority, nonetheless she sees true. This is to say that Félicité is sufficient to her story not only morally and emotionally, but aesthetically. The reassurance that, in the glorious stuffed parrot, she has recuperated her beloved Loulou is not only emotional but aesthetic. The vision of Loulou soothes her dying as much aesthetically as emotionally, and the confusion she feels before the incomprehensible Holy Spirit, implausibly bird, fire, and breath all in one while remaining three, is mostly an aesthetic response: what can this being possibly look like, what sort of shape, of beauty, can it have? Loulou is tangibly, visibly beautiful; he was beautiful in life, and he is beautiful in art. She first takes to him because he is from America, where her lost nephew traveled. But once the parrot is hers, she loves him for himself—for his beauty first, then for his speech, three phrases she has taught him: “Pretty boy! Your servant, Monsieur! Hail Mary full of grace!” (45) (“Charmant garçon! Serviteur, Monsieur! Je vous salue, Marie!” [613]). In time he becomes more articulate. “As if to amuse her, he would mimic the click-clack of the roasting spit, the shrill cry of a fish vendor, the saw of the carpenter who lived across the way; and, at the sound of the doorbell, imitated Madame Aubain: ‘Félicité! The door! The door!’” (49) (Comme pour la distraire, il reproduisait le

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tic-tac du tournebroche, l’appel aigu d’un vendeur de poisson, la scie du menusier qui logeait en face; et, aux coups de la sonnette, imitait Mme Aubain: “Félicité! la porte! la porte!” [615]). By this time she has become deaf and hears nothing but him. They have conversations as she works in the kitchen. Alive, he is for her artin-life; dead, he will be life-in-art until at her last moment, he is art-in-death. Loulou reveals to Félicité, that simple heart, the complexity of the psyche that results in the creation of art. For, along with its unorthodox orientation toward the concreteness of earth rather than toward the abstraction of heaven, Félicité’s last vision is also unexpectedly complex in the way it handles reality. That the parrot upon whom she bestows her last kiss (instead of kissing the crucifix) has been a very messy bird and is now a very rotten relic does not mitigate his glory as he soars aloft in her imagination. But then she has already demonstrated her instinctive grasp of poetic imagery which her literalism clinches and confirms. The stuffed parrot is the last and greatest of an accumulation of meaningful objects. Arriving from the embalmer’s, he takes his place in a bedroom that “resembled both a chapel and bazaar, so many religious objects and miscellaneous things did it contain” (avait l’air tout à la fois d’une chapelle et d’un bazar tant il contenait d’objets religieux et de choses hétéroclites). A big wardrobe made it difficult to open the door. Opposite the window overlooking the garden, a bull’s-eye window looked out on the courtyard; a table, next to the trestle bed, held a water jug, two combs, and a cube of blue soap in a chipped dish. One saw on the walls: rosaries, medals, several pretty Virgins, a holy water stoup made of coconut shell; on the chest of drawers, covered with a sheet like an altar, the shell box Victor had given her; then a watering can and a ball, penmanship notebooks, the illustrated geography book, a pair of girl’s boots; and on the mirror stud, hooked on by its ribbons, the little plush hat! [It had belonged to Virginie.] Félicité carried this sort of respect so far that she kept one of Monsieur’s [Monsieur Aubain’s] frock coats. All the old things that Madame Aubain didn’t want, she took for her room. That is why there were artificial flowers on the edge of the dresser, and the portrait of the Comte d’Artois in the recess of the dormer window. (52–53) Une grande armoire gênait pour ouvrir la porte. En face de la fenêtre surplombant le jardin, un oeil-de-boeuf regardait la cour; une table, près du lit de sangle, supportait un pot-à l’eau, deux peignes, et un cube de savon bleu dans une assiette ébréchée. On voyait contre les murs: des chapelets, des médailles, plusieurs bonnes Vierges, un bénitier en noix de coco; sur la commode, couverte d’un drap comme un autel, la boîte en coquillage que lui avait donnée Victor; puis un arrosoir et un ballon, des cahiers d’écrit-

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ure, la géographie en estampes, une paire de bottines; et au clou du miroir, accroché par ses rubans, le petit chapeau de peluche! Félicité poussait même ce genre de respect si loin, qu’elle conservait une des redingotes de Monsieur. Toutes les vieilleries dont ne voulait plus Mme Aubain, elle les prenait pour sa chambre. C’est ainsi qu’il y avait des fleurs artificielles au bord de la commode, et le portrait du comte d’Artois dans l’enfoncement de la lucarne. (617)

The wit turns on Félicité’s lack of discrimination in her collecting, which, by disregarding the inherent identities of disparate objects, mockingly reduces the dignity of certain among them to the level of the meanest. The religious objects in particular are slighted by their amalgamation with earthly remains—holy water with a water jug and soap, a rosary with a dead girl’s little plush hat, engravings of the Virgin with Monsieur Aubain’s old coat. But the joke is not at Félicité’s expense, and in fact its outcome, like the outcome of her innocent literalism, is all to her credit: we read not only with amusement but with approval. The passage seconds her, like her jumbling rosaries pell-mell with shell boxes given by departed nephews, religious medals with boots and geography books. All belong to the same order of things, namely, the order of things. If anything consecrates the religious things in this conglomeration of objects, it is Félicité’s having assembled them; in no way is it the reverse, that the religious things consecrate her collection. In Félicité’s room, extra-terrestrial religious fantasy is repatriated. Loulou does Félicité good by his reality; and in turning to him she is wise, however unconsciously. As for the grotesque aspect of Loulou’s substituting for the Holy Ghost, the worms in its belly recalling the flies infesting the eyes of the crucified lions in Salammbô, this grotesque is intrinsic to the real, a normal function of death and decay. (Flaubert’s writings offer numerous examples of this development into monstrosity.4) It is good that Félicité loves Loulou, and la Simonne is right to hold him out so Félicité can bestow her last kiss on him rather than on a crucifix, emblem of a contrary denial of the reality of death and decay. Critics have often linked the portrait of Félicité to that of Catherine Leroux, the old servant who receives a medal during the country fair in Madame Bovary.5 Catherine, however, is inert in relation to the meanings that swarm about her and understands nothing beyond the information that the medal she has received is worth twenty-five francs she can give to the priest to say masses. The joke is on Catherine as much as on her betters at the fair, and what sympathy we have for her rather than for them is condescendingly sentimental. Félicité is naïve but not only naïve; she is also exceptionally shrewd and understands the terms of her world perfectly, a housekeeper in the full sense of the word, driving hard bargains at the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s.

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She is at the top of her profession; the very first sentence identifies her that way: “For half a century, the housewives of Pont-l’Évêque envied Mme Aubain her servant, Félicité.” (Pendant un demi-siècle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l’Évêque envièrent à Madame Aubain sa servante Félicité.) There is no condescension in Flaubert’s description of her dying vision; the account is joyfully complicit. It is a nice twist for a person of Félicité’s limitations to be the one of Flaubert’s characters to see most truly.6 But this may be giving her too much positive authority: it is enough that she is iconoclastic. Of course, in honoring Loulou, Félicité has no intention of dishonoring the Holy Spirit. She could not conceive of so doing: there is no blasphemy in her idolatry. The stuffed parrot is Félicité’s creation with which she is well pleased, but not only gods and devils create, so do artists. The stuffed parrot is like all art, a full-fledged member of the fraternity of intractable, untranscendental, irreducible, real things that make up this world—like Proust’s madeleine. In other words, Félicité’s Loulou in the sky brings a message from Flaubert that the word in the beginning of literature is already embodied in the stuff of the real world, in the sounds, rhythms, images that make language substantial in itself, so that meaning is inextricable from expression. Literature in A Simple Heart is no more an incarnation than Loulou, but, like him, a thing of matter from the start. Félicité’s stuffed parrot—“gorgeous, erect on a tree branch, which was screwed down on a mahogany pedestal, one foot in the air, his head tilted to the side, chewing on a nut, which the taxidermist, out of a love for the grandiose, had gilded”—existed first in the flesh and passed directly into a physical representation. The narration carefully explains that worms were eating Loulou “[e]ven though it was not a corpse” (58) (Bien qu’il ne fût pas un cadavre [620]). It is no part of the divine plan for Loulou to be eaten by worms; he is not returning to the dust while his spirit ascends. He will soon be tossed in the dust-bin, having never been other than the physical object of a lonely woman’s sublunary love. Art and religion in A Simple Heart are ontologically incompatible.7 In Félicité’s death-bed vision, Loulou neither merges with nor represents the Holy Spirit but preempts it. The azure vapor that drifts into the room from censers waved below is no more the breath of the Holy Spirit than the parrot Loulou is the Dove. Félicité’s last sight of her cherished parrot is not a first glimpse of heaven: she could never quite see the Holy Spirit— bird? fire? breath?—and, reading the story, neither can we. But Loulou, we see clear as day. Literature, as represented by A Simple Heart, turns on truth, not on faith, which would reduce it to allegory. Literary allegories themselves unfold away from their prior set meanings by exploring these, thickening ciphers into realities. The literary part is the reality, the knowledge of the real

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brought out and discovered. On May 2, 1880, six days before Flaubert died at the age of fifty-eight of a cerebral hemorrhage, he wrote to his niece Caroline with excellent news. For an episode in Bouvard et Pécuchet, he had needed to confirm a bit of botanical lore sought by these gentlemen who, at that point in the novel, were occupied in learning everything about plants. He had written to persons who should have been able to give him his information but had not obtained it; one correspondent, his old friend Frédéric Baudry, answered none of the questions, instead advising Flaubert not to take up matters about which he knew nothing. So exactly wrong a recommendation to one writing the story of two encyclopedists naturally incensed Flaubert, who persevered. Finally, success! The faithful Guy de Maupassant traced the plant at issue and Flaubert was triumphant. Guy has sent me my botanical information: I was right! You’ve been trounced M. Baudry! My information comes from the professor of botanical science at the Botanical Gardens; and I was right because the esthetic is the True, and at a certain intellectual level (when you have the right method) you never make a mistake. Reality does not bend to the ideal, but confirms it. Guy m’a envoyé mon renseignement botanique: j’avais raison! Enfoncé M. Baudry! Je tiens mon renseignement du professeur de botanique du Jardin des plantes; et j’avais raison parce que l’esthétique est le Vrai, et qu’à un certain degré intellectuel (quand on a de la méthode) on ne se trompe pas.8

He was crowing, of course, but not just crowing. If the agonies that getting things right put him through suggested mistakes were possible after all, still, he was describing a process, a way of working and its tools; and this invocation of means made it reasonable, not incredible, to claim to have captured the True. Had he boasted of inspiration or proclaimed faith, his little victory dance might have appeared either mad or arrogant; but he invoked only the mundane tools of mind: style, form, aesthetic structures, and models: “the right method.” This remarkable method, probably the most remarkable of all methods, could be applied to discovering the truth of anything and everything, of madeleines and lilies of the valley, also of war, love, betrayal, friendship, rape, self-sacrifice, murder, death, and life.

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T cknowledgments Five Fictions in Search of Truth grew out of a seminar on the relations between literature and history, where a group of remarkable students turned most often to the thorniest work on the reading list, Flaubert’s Salammbô. Their embrace of this rather abstruse novel seemed almost perverse, until I thought I saw the reason: Salammbô, by being so extravagantly literary while as extravagantly historical, carried our discussions farthest into the terrain where literature discovered history by inventing it. However, the concurrence of invention and fact proved a refractory subject, and this book would not have happened without the help of friends and colleagues who read, and said not only yes but no. David Halperin was dubious at the junctures where it could help the most. Patricia Spacks’s warm encouragement came with her sharp eye for a misreading. Colette Gaudin corrected and discriminated; Evelyn Keller and Christopher Kutz asked for philosophical precision. Jessica Riskin, through a series of drafts, was, as always, rigorous while generous, and also the reverse. Marilyn Young, characteristically, asked obvious questions of which I had never thought, and heard my claim that literature’s is the true story with a historian’s skepticism. My assistants, Bob Bettendorf, Lauren Butcher, Cornelius Collins, and Stephanie Volmer, not only brought everything I asked for but helped me discover what I wanted. Virginia Gilmartin’s scrupulous intelligence is evident throughout. I gratefully took the advice of two anonymous readers. At the end, I had the great good luck to be read by Hanne Winarsky at Princeton University Press, who saw at once everything I had tried to do, and also showed me what more was needed. This book is dedicated to Richard Poirier, whose own style is proof that style is art.

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aotes Prologue 1. Suggesting that this is a general understanding among writers, at least among modern writers, Henry Fielding’s eighteenth-century definition of invention is exactly Proust’s: “Concerning [Invention and Judgment which are both called by the collective Name of Genius] many seem to have fallen into very great Errors; For by Invention, I believe, is generally understood a creative Faculty, which would indeed prove most Romance Writers to have the highest Pretensions to it; whereas by Invention is really meant no more (and so the Word signifies) than Discovery, or finding out; or to explain it at large, a quick and sagacious Penetration into the true Essence of all the Objects of our Contemplation.” Tom Jones, book 9, chap. 1 (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2002), 491. I am grateful for this reference to Patricia Meyer Spacks. 2. “And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with ‘describing things,’ with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time” (Time Regained, 284, in In Search of Lost Time, vol. 6 [New York: Modern Library, 2003]). (De sorte que la littérature qui se contente de “décrire les choses,” d’en donner seulement un misérable relevé de lignes et de surfaces, est celle qui, tout en s’appelant réaliste, est la plus éloignée de la réalité, celle qui nous appauvrit et nous attriste le plus, car elle coupe brusquement toute communication de notre moi présent avec le passé, dont les choses gardaient l’essence, et l’avenir où elles nous incitent à la goûter de nouveau [Le temps retrouvé, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 463 – 64]). Subsequent page references to Le temps retrouvé and Time Regained are cited in the text. He had in mind the realism of the Goncourt brothers, also Flaubert’s, whose style he considered the only evidence of his genius. “À propos du style de Flaubert,” La nouvelle revue française, 14, 72 – 90 (1 January 1920): 6; reprinted in Proust, Écrits sur l’art (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 314 – 29. “But finally, since we recognize Flaubert’s genius only in the beauty of his style and the perpetual oddities of a distorting syntax, let us note another of these oddities: for example an adverb that ends not only a sentence but a book.” (Mais enfin puisque nous sommes avertis du génie de Flaubert seulement par la beauté de son style et les singularités immuables d’une syntaxe déformante, notons encore une de ces singularités: par exemple un ad-

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verbe finissant non seulement une phrase, une période, mais un livre.) (My translation.) Hérodias, the last of the tales in Trois Contes, ends with this sentence, referring to the head of John the Baptist: “Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portèrent alternativement.” (Since it was very heavy, they carried it alternatingly.) At the same time, Proust undertook this article expressly to defend Flaubert against Albert Thibaudet, who had written that Flaubert “was not inherently a great writer and that a complete verbal mastery did not come to him naturally.” (My translation of “n’est pas un grand écrivain de race et que la pleine maîtrise verbale ne lui était pas donnée dans sa nature même.”) Thibaudet, “Sur le style de Flaubert,” La nouvelle revue francaise, 13, 69 –75 (1 November 1919): 943. In a letter dated 31 March 1920 (Correspondance de Marcel Proust, [Paris: Plou, 1970–1993], vol. 19, no. 72, 173–78). Thibaudet subsequently wrote to Proust that he was mortified to have been taken as denigrating Flaubert when he was defending him against other critics. There is more on this controversy over Flaubert’s style in chapter 1, with relation to his peculiar way with verb tenses. As for Proust’s denigration of Flaubert’s positivist way with the real, I will only invoke Bouvard et Pécuchet, its copyist heroes and its definitive send-up of empirical realism. 3. I continue the passage: “What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day” (Swann’s Way, 61, in In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1 [New York: Modern Library 2003]). (Je pose la tasse et me tourne vers mon esprit. C’est à lui de trouver la vérité. Mais comment? Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l’esprit se sent dépassé par lui-même; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur où il doit chercher et où tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher? pas seulement: créer. Il est en face de quelque chose qui n’est pas encore et que seul il peut réaliser, puis faire entrer dans sa lumière [Du côté de chez Swann, Bibliothéque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 45]). 4. This refers to the Ambassadors preface. Henry James; French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1304 –21. Subsequent references in text to French Writers. 5. In Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979), 7. “En simplifiant à l’extrême, on tient pour ‘postmoderne’ l’incrédulité à l’égard des métarécits” (my translation in text). 6. See earlier citation from Time Regained, 264 –65. 7. Not only Flaubert was especially struck by Balzac’s novel, so was James, and named the protagonist who, of all his characters, most resembled him Lewis Lambert Strether. It is tempting to speculate that both writers recognized a familiar in the poor madman and were marking the distinction between, as I say in the text, his metaphysics and the physics of literature in which they immersed and thereby saved themselves. 8. Flaubert; Correspondance II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); subsequently Correspondance II); four letters to Louise Colet: 1 September 1852 (145); 27 March 1853 (286); 25 June 1853 (362); 27 December 1852 (219). Another instance of the same insistence on the physical nature of form: also 15–16

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May 1852 (91): “Where indeed Form is lacking, the Idea is no longer. To seek the one is to seek the other. They are as inseparable as substance and color, and that is why art is Truth itself.” (Où la Forme, en effet, manque, l’Idée n’est plus. Chercher l’un, c’est chercher l’autre. Ils sont aussi inséparables que la substance l’est de la couleur, et c’est pour cela que l’art est la Vérité même.) Indeed, his dislike of “comparisons” can be ascribed, I think, to the same sense that form has substance, so that comparisons—similes and metaphors, as well as many adjectives—produce a jumbled stuff. To compare, one needs to abstract, while the truth is immanent. He described his accordingly physical loathing in a letter to Louise Colet: “I am devoured by comparisons as one might be by lice, and I pass all my time in crushing them out. My sentences swarm with them.” (Je suis dévoré de comparaisons, comme on l’est de poux, et je ne passe mon temps qu’à les écraser; mes phrases en grouillent) (Correspondance II, 27 December 1852, 220). (Jean Bruneau in the Pléiade writes that in likening comparisons to lice, Flaubert was inspired by Plutarch’s life of the Roman dictator Sylla, who, dissolute and diseased, was devoured by lice: 1127, p. 220, n. 4.) 9. Correspondance II, letter dated 25 September 1853 (163). Jean Bruneau in a Pléiade note identifies the book as probably Victor Hugo’s Napoléon le petit. 10. I begin citing about halfway down this very long paragraph which continues, [More than that, our literary deeds enjoy this marked advantage over many of our acts, that, though they go forth into the world and stray even in the desert, they don’t to the same extent lose themselves;] their attachment and reference to us, however strained, needn’t necessarily lapse—while of the tie that binds us to them we may make almost anything we like. We are condemned, in other words, whether we will or no, to abandon and outlive, to forget and disown and hand over to desolation, many vital or social performances—if only because the traces, records, connexions, the very memorials we would fain preserve, are practically impossible to rescue for that purpose from the general mixture. We give them up even when we wouldn’t— it is not a question of choice. Not so on the other hand our really “done” things of this superior and more appreciable order—which leave us indeed all licence of disconnexion and disavowal, but positively impose on us no such necessity. Our relation to them is essentially traceable, and in that fact abides, we feel, the incomparable luxury of the artist. It rests altogether with himself not to break with his values, not to “give away” his importances. Not to be disconnected, for the tradition of behaviour, he has but to feel that he is not; by his lightest touch the whole chain of relation and responsibility is reconstituted. Thus if he is always doing he can scarce, by his own measure, ever have done. All of which means for him conduct with a vengeance, since it is conduct minutely and publicly attested. Our noted behaviour at large may show for ragged, because it perpetually escapes our control; we have again and again to consent to its appearing in undress—that is in no state to brook criticism. But on all the ground to which the pretension of performance by a series of exquisite laws may apply there reigns one sovereign truth—which decrees that, as art is nothing if not exemplary, care nothing if not active, finish nothing if not consistent, the proved error is the base apologetic deed, the helpless regret is the barren commentary, and “connexions” are employable for finer purposes than mere gaping contrition. (French Writers, 1340– 41)

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11. This supreme capability implies a way of reading as pliant to the work as possible: not ultimately compliant (obviously one is not obliged to embrace the vision of a finished work), but locally pliant. Reading locally is very important, I think, because writing is done locally. Observing that Lolita is narrated retrospectively, its ending foretold, is neither as interesting nor as telling as watching Nabokov find that his story has come to a premature conclusion in the middle, and seeing how he starts it off again on a different path. For all the scenarios Flaubert drew up before writing, he struggled his way from one sentence to the next, and his major discoveries occurred in that process. A work’s progress is never wholly teleological, and not only changes of direction but abandonment looms to the end. In chapter 2, James will be seen ending The Sacred Fount by fiat, essentially abandoning it. I would not want this call for local, pliant reading to invoke the method called “close-reading.” In its original form, close-reading intentionally neglected a work’s context, which drastically limits one’s ability to understand its language and terms. Bleak House is more than a study in fog imagery. But close-reading seems to me almost more problematical in its present form. Stipulating a context (generally political but not necessarily), current close-readers appear peculiarly lacking in good-will, treating works like legal documents which they submit to a sort of lexical scholasticism. I have tried, in the chapters that follow, to read along with the writing. 12. Correspondance II, 15 –16 May 1852, 91 (88–92). See, in relation to this idea of inventing/discovering the True, note 3 above about Proust’s very similar anti-empirical realism.

Chapter 1 Salammbô 1. My translation. The entire exchange is reprinted in Salammbô, Oeuvres completes de Gustave Flaubert, 16 vols. (Paris: Club de l’Honnête Homme, 1971– 1975), 2:377. This invaluable edition includes all the documents of the “Querelle,” as it is called, “the Quarrel,” an account of Salammbô’s sources and the dossier of research Flaubert assembled in response to Froehner and his colleagues. It also contains lists and reproductions of other materials documenting Flaubert’s research. See also the “Notice” at the front of the volume (36 – 37), which offers an account of the research Flaubert did on embarking on the project. See too Correspondance II, 1356– 57, n. 3, for a list of the books Alfred Baudry found for Flaubert on the subject of Carthage; also letter to Frédéric Baudry, 24 June 1857, in ibid., 735 – 36. Alfred Thibaudet is categorical on the matter: “The question of the archeology, in regard to the recreation attempted in Salammbô, has been resolved for a long time. Its archeological value is nil. . . . The same is not the case with the very remarkable historical sense the work displays. The idea of Carthage he conveys is the right one. He has exactly grasped the reasons for its greatness and for its weakness. He represents these in a perfectly solid, clear and authoritative historical style.” (La question archéologique, en ce qui concerne la restitution tentée dans Salammbô, est résolue depuis longtemps. La valeur archéologique de l’ouvrage est nulle. . . . Il n’en va pas de même du sens historique très remarquable dont il fait preuve. L’idée qu’il donne de Carthage

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est juste. Il a saisi avec exactitude les causes de sa grandeur et de sa faiblesse. Il les a exprimées dans un style historique d’une solidité, d’une netteté, d’une autorité parfaites.) Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert, Sa vie, ses romans, son style (Paris: Gallimard, 1999 [Plon, 1935]). Thibaudet is the author of the article on Flaubert in La nouvelle revue française to which Proust was responding in his own subsequent article, “À propos du ‘style’ de Flaubert” (both cited in the prologue above, n. 2). 2. Reproduced in Club de l’Honnête Homme under Flaubert’s own title, “Salammbô, sources et méthode,” 2:489 – 512. The ms. number given in the table of contents is 28662; in the volume itself, 23 662. The folios include such entries as (my translation): “Under a pile of emeralds” (idem.). “I put in many emeralds because they were considered to represent chastity. Theophrastus, Treatise on stones” (493). Or: “Leprosie: has been badly described in the medical books I’ve read. The article in the Dictionary of Medical Sciences v. XI, contains some good observations made in Martigues near Marseilles” (497). Or: “For the chariots and the elephants: Elien and Stewechius: notes on Vegetius,” to which the editor has appended: “Godescale Steewech, called Stewechius, ed. Vegetius: De Re militari . . . Accessit G. Stewechii in Vegetium commentarius, Antverpiae, 1585, in-4.” Another cache of Flaubert’s preparatory notes for Salammbô is at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. The two dossiers of these notes, located in the Heineman Collection, are numbered MAH 83 and MAH 84. For a more complete account of the Morgan Library holdings on Flaubert, see Helen C. Zagona, “Flaubert Manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library,” French Review 63, 3 (February 1990): 524 – 27. See also page 22. 3. Letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 March 1857. Correspondance II, 691. 4. Letter to Feydeau, 6 August 1857, Correspondance II, 752. 5. Letter to Colet, 7 April 1854. The same letter cites Ronsard’s advice to writers to learn various crafts in order to cull therein the metaphors for their poems. 6. Letter to Feydeau, end of November 1857, Correspondance II, 782–83. 7. This formulation of the problem of writing in relation to its subject runs parallel to Proust’s strategy of joining a present to a past incident. Flaubert’s work would figure as the part of self-consciousness, and the “absolute” as the objective past to be retrieved. 8. Letter to Feydeau, 20 June 1858. Correspondance II, 817. A longer selection may give a clearer sense of the passage: “I must tell you that Carthage has to be completely redone. I am demolishing it entirely. It was absurd! Impossible! I think I’m going to arrive at the right tone. I begin to understand my characters and to be interested in them. It’s already a great deal.” (Je t’apprendrai que Carthage est complètement à refaire ou plutôt à faire. Je demolis tout. C’était absurde! Impossible! Faux! Je crois que je vais arriver au ton juste. Je commence à comprendre mes personnages et à m’y intéresser. C’est déjà beaucoup.) 9. Correspondance II, end of November 1857, 782–83. I have translated “une condensation excessive” as “an exceedingly intense condensation.” This seems to me a better translation in that the French word “excessive” is not quite as negative as its English cognate. This is the full paragraph: “The difficulty lies in finding the precisely right note. This is achieved through an exceedingly intense condensation of the idea, whether this happens naturally or is willed, but it is not easy to create an ongoing truth, that is a series of significant and likely details in an environment two

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thousand years away. To be understood in fact you have to be offering a continual translation, and what an abyss this opens between the absolute and the work!” (La difficulté est de trouver la note juste. Cela s’obtient par une condensation excessive de l’idée, que ce soit naturellement ou à force de volonté, mais il n’est pas aisé de s’imaginer une vérité constante, à savoir une série de détails saillants et probables dans un milieu qui est à deux mille ans d’ici. Pour être entendu, d’ailleurs, il faut faire une sorte de traduction permanente, et quel abîme cela creuse entre l’absolu et l’oeuvre!) 10. This being the first of many extended quotations from the text, I take it as the opportunity to explain that, in this chapter as in those that follow, I always quote passages in full, do not use ellipses, and not try to break up paragraphs. Since virtually everything I have to say flows from reading the text as carefully as I can, I have thought it essential to present the actual writing. I therefore include both the published English translation and the French original. 11. Megara the suburb of Carthage should not be confused with Megara the Attic Greek city. On the Carthaginian Megara, a suburb to the north of the city and considered its garden, see M’hamed Hassine Fantar, Carthage, La cité punique (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 1995), 46, 120 n. 10. 12. This translation could imply an avenue of actual obelisks; but the “obelisks” are cypresses: the original says “l’avenue de cyprès faisait . . . comme une double colonnade” (the avenue of cypresses . . . like a double colonnade). 13. Salammbô, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 17. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent translations of the novel are taken from this edition. However, in brackets I sometimes propose alternative translations of words and phrases. 14. Salammbô, Oeuvres I, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 709–10. All citations are from this edition; further page references will be in the text. 15. Flaubert’s major historical source was the account of the War of the Mercenaries in the History of Polybius (Histoire, vol. 1, chaps. 65–88, pp. 70–96, in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1970]). He read Polybius in Dom. Vincent Thuillier’s Polybe (Paris, 1727), where the War of the Mercenaries appears in chaps. 15 –18. Here, therefore, is a brief summary of Polybius’s account. The origins of Carthage, a city of merchants and traders, are obscure. In the Aeneid, Virgil reported its founding by Queen Dido with colonists from Phoenicia and Cyprus, another mercantile city on the gulf of Tunis. (The ruins of Carthage lie some fifteen kilometers or eight miles outside present-day Tunis.) The competition between Carthage and Greece over the island of Sicily extended into hostilities with Rome and erupted in the first Punic War, 264 – 241 B.C.E. The expenses and devastations of that war led to the Mercenary War and to a change in the way Carthage governed itself, from an oligarchic Council to an elected Council of Suffetes. The general Hamilcar Barca became the leading member of this Council of Suffetes. His son, Hannibal, whom in Salammbô he saves from a propitiatory holocaust, was the principal figure in the second Punic War, 218 – 201 B.C.E. (Salammbô is Hannibal’s older sister.) The third Punic War, 149–146 B.C.E., was definitive. For years, the Roman Cato the Elder had been campaigning for the destruction of Carthage as an insupportable threat (“Carthaga delenda est” [Carthage must be destroyed] was his repeated slogan, interpolated in every speech whatever its subject), and now the deed was done.

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Carthage was razed to the ground. This is the story Flaubert read, and while it is generally credited, I should add, on the principle of full disclosure, that Polybius, the main source of modern knowledge about the Punic Wars, was closely associated with Scipio the Emilian, the general who defeated Carthage. 16. There is not unanimity on this score. The critic Alfred Thibaudet rejected Faguet’s witty plaint that scaling a mountainous Salammbô is as boring as it is difficult, exclaiming, “What an absurdity! When I was sixteen or seventeen, I read Salammbô all at one go with as much passion as I devoted to the Enfants du Capitaine Grant when I was twelve. And I reread it from one end to the other, without any weariness, quite the contrary, and it is certain that many do and especially have done the same.” (Quelle absurdité! A seize ou dix-sept ans, j’ai lu Salammbô d’affilée avec autant de passion que j’en mettais à douze à dévorer les Enfants du Capitaine Grant. Et je la relis d’un bout à l’autre sans la moindre fatigue, bien au contraire. Et il est certain que beaucoup en font et surtout en ont fait autant.) (Gustave Flaubert, 136). I quote Thibaudet at length because I have found no one else who shares his judgment. 17. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804 –1869) was arguably the most influential critic of his time. Proust, in his essay “Contre Sainte-Beuve” (1908–1910), rejected his critical method for its biographical basis, which Proust considered futile and misleading. The self who writes is not, for Proust, the everyday self: “[The self who writes,] if we want to try to understand him, we can find him deep in ourselves by trying to re-create him.” (Ce moi-là, si nous voulons essayer de le comprendre, c’est au fond de nous-même, en essayant de le recréer en nous, que nous pouvons y parvenir.) (Contre Sainte-Beuve, suivi de Nouveaux Mélanges [Paris: Gallimard, 1954], 136–37.) 18. More than a sentence, a paragraph, actually, following Spendius’s revelation of the existence of the aqueduct to Mâtho: The aqueduct of which he spoke crossed the whole isthmus at an angle—a considerable work later enlarged by the Romans. Though despising other nations, Carthage had clumsily taken this new invention from them, as Rome herself had done with the Punic galley; and five rows of superimposed arches, in a squat style of architecture, with buttresses at the base and lions’ heads at the top, came out at the Western end of the Acropolis, when they plunged under the town to pour almost a river into the cisterns of Megara. (70 –71) L’aqueduc dont il parlait traversait obliquement l’isthme entier,—ouvrage considérable agrandi plus tard par les Romains. Malgré son dédain des autres peuples, Carthage leur avait pris gauchement cette invention nouvelle, comme Rome ellemême avait fait de la galère punique; et cinq rangs d’arcs superposés, d’une architecture trapue, avec des contreforts à la base et des têtes de lion au sommet, aboutissaient à la partie occidentale de l’Acropole, où ils s’enfonçaient sous la ville pour déverser presque une rivière dans les citernes de Mégara. (767) (See page 22.)

19. Article by Sainte-Beuve on Salammbô. Last part of a series of three, 22 December 1862. The Club de l’Honnête Homme edition from which I cite does not identify the original site of publication for this part, nor does the Pléiade edition, which says only that parts 1 and 2 were originally published in Le Constitutionel. The Club edition does say that the three articles were eventually published together in the

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Nouveaux Lundis, 4:31 passim. This passage is from section 3 of the third article, “Des descriptions et du style,” 439. 20. Letter to Sainte-Beuve, 23–24 December 1862, Correspondance III, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), subsequently Correspondance III, 283. The passage begins with these two sentences: “Quant au style, j’ai moins sacrifié dans ce livre-là que dans l’autre à la rondeur de la phrase et à la période. Les métaphores y sont rares et les épithèts positives.” (As for style, I made fewer sacrifices in this book than in the other to the turn of a sentence and to the period. The metaphors are rare and the epithets positive.) 21. Correspondance II, 691; also 1357, n. 4. Flaubert here repeats what he had written five years earlier in a letter to Louise Colet (9 December 1852; Correspondance II, 204): “The author in his work must be like God in the universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.” (L’auteur, dans son oeuvre, doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout, et visible nulle part.) Stephen Daedalus would intone the same sentiment in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (New York: Modern Library, 1928, 252). For another instance of Flaubert’s influence on modernist writings, see Nathalie Sarraute’s invocation of his principle that form was the point and the power of literature in her Flaubert le précurseur (Flaubert the Precursor), in Preuves, February 1965, reprinted in Paul Valery et l’enfant d’éléphant, Flaubert le précurseur, Paris: Gallimard, 1986. See also Flaubert’s letter to Emile Cailteaux, 4 June 1857, who had written asking for the model upon which Emma was based: “No, Monsieur, I had no model. Madame Bovary is pure invention. All the characters in this book are completely imaginary, and Yonville-l’Abbaye itself is a place that does not exist, as well as the Rieulle, etc. Which doesn’t prevent people here in Normandy wanting to discover in my novel a whole host of allusions. If I had made any, my portraits would be less resembling, because I would have had personalities in view, and what I have wanted on the contrary is to reproduce types.” (Non, Monsieur, aucun mode`le n’a posé devant moi. Madame Bovary est une pure invention. Tous les personages de ce livre sont complètement imaginés, et Yonville-l’Abbaye lui-même est un pays qui n’existe pas, ainsi que la Rieulle, etc. Ce qui n’empêche pas qu’ici, en Normandie, on n’ait voulu découvrir dans mon roman une foule d’allusions. Si j’en avais fait, mes portraits seraient moins ressemblants, parce que j’aurais eu en vue des personnalités et que j’ai voulu, au contraire, reproduire des types) (Correspondance II, 728, 1383 n. 1). On the other hand, Flaubert’s most famous statement about his work, probably apocryphal, is the response he is said to have given another correspondent when she asked where he had found the original of Mme Bovary: “Emma c’est moi.” René Descharmes seems to be the source for this, as he explained in a footnote in his Flaubert, sa vie, son caractère et ses idées avant 1857 (Paris, 1909; reprinted Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), 103, n. 3: “A person who knows Mlle Amelie Bosquet, Flaubert’s correspondent, very well, told me recently that having asked the novelist where he had found the model for the character of Mme Bovary, he had answered directly, and repeated several times, ‘I am Mme Bovary, she is drawn after me.’” (Une personne qui a connu très intimement Mlle Amélie Bosquet, la correspondante de Flaubert, me racontait dernièrement que Mlle Bosquet ayant demandé au romancier d’où il avait tiré le personage de Mme Bovary, il aurait répondu très nettement, et plusieurs fois

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répété: “Mme Bovary, c’est moi!—D’après moi.” On this much-discussed contradiction between Flaubert’s insistence on the impersonality of the literary work, especially his own, and this claim to be at the origin of his most famous character, see also Jean Bruneau, Les Débuts littéraires de Gustave Flaubert 1831–1845 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), 478–84. Some of the talk about Flaubert’s putative relation to Emma Bovary focuses on the issue of gender. Sartre in L’idiot de la famille saw Flaubert as feminine; Baudelaire, on the contrary, thought that Emma was really a man. See “Madame Bovary,” in L’Artiste 18 October 1857; collected in L’Art romantique, 1868. Oeuvres Complètes de Charles Baudelaire, vol. 3: L’Art Romantique (Paris: Calman Levy, 1880); “Critiques littérairés,” “Madame Bovary,” 407– 22. Because Flaubert couldn’t turn himself into a woman, “madame Bovary est restée un homme . . . un bizarre Androgyne” (madame Bovary remained a man . . . a bizarre Androgyne). Baudelaire also referred to “la qualité toute virile qui nourrit son sang artériel” (the virile quality that nourishes the blood of her arteries) (417). Taking my cue from Flaubert’s multiple penned commitments to impersonality, I would like to follow Jean Bruneau (and many others, for instance Julian Barnes, “Flaubert, C’est Moi,” New York Review of Books, 25 May 2006, 13) in taking this to be his definitive position, and any apparently contradictory statement to be explained as either a way of putting off an importunate questioner or, if partly serious, a reference to his personal experience of the society Emma inhabits. See also Claudine Gothot-Mersch, La Genèse de Madame Bovary (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1966), 81–86. Finally, for the idea that taste should have the precision of mathematics, see letter to Louise Colet, 14 March 1853, Correspondance II, 269. 22. Letter to Sainte-Beuve, 23 – 24 December 1862, Correspondance II, 283. 23. Letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 30 March 1857, Correspondance II, 698. The paragraph continues for another sentence, also stressing the scientific impersonality of the clear: “The ideal condition resulting from this joy would be, it seems to me, a sort of sanctity, which may be higher than the other kind in that it is more disinterested.” (L’état idéal résultant de cette joie me semble une espèce de sainteté, qui est peut-être plus haute que l’autre, parce qu’elle est plus désintéressée.) 24. “À propos du style de Flaubert.” See note 1. 25. Gertrude Stein wrote The Making of Americans in an extreme version, almost a caricature, of this style, attributing actions to characters not as deeds, but as qualities. See my article, “Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans,” in Il Romanzo (Rome: Einaudi, 2002). 26. The successive drafts are discussed in Notice, Club edition, 38 – 39. I reproduce them here as they represent the case more dramatically than I can describe it. The words in parentheses are those Flaubert crossed out on the first draft of a text; the italics indicate words that replace an original word in a previous text. First text: Those who were born on the banks of the Nile regretted for their companions the hollows of mountains, painted sepulchers, embalming salts, rafts floating out to sea. The Celts regretted (burial mounds) a rough stone rising in a field on the shore of a breaking sea in a bay filled with islands. Ceux qui étaient nés sur les bords du Nil regrettaient pour leurs compagnons les creux des montagnes, les hypogées peints, les natrons, les canapés flottant à la mer.

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Les Celtes regrettaient (les tumulus) une pierre de granit levée sur un champ au bord (d’une mer déchiquetée) d’un golfe plein d’ilots.

Second text: The Latins were desolate at not (being able) to collect (the ashes) in urns that would then be shut up in columbariums and (from the pyres) they collected fragments of bone (which they then placed in their boats) which they wrapped in cloths and pressed to their breasts hoping later to bring them home. The Celts regretted (for their companions) three rough stones in a sterile field beneath a sky covered with clouds (around) deep in a bay filled with islands. Les Latins se désolaient de ne (pouvoir) pas recueillir (les cendres) leurs cendres dans des urnes que l’on enfermerait ensuite dans les columbariums et, (dans les bûchers) ils ramassaient des fragments d’os (qu’ils mettaient ensuite dans leur barque) qu’ils enveloppaient d’un linge et serraient sur leur poitrine espérant les rapporter plus tard. Les Celtes regrettaient (pour leurs compagnons) trois pierres de granit (dans un champ stérile) sous un ciel couvert de nuages (autour) au fond d’un golfe plein d’îlots.

Third text: The nomads regretted (for their companions) the heat of the sand where bodies mummify of themselves and the Celtiberians three rough stones beneath a rainy sky (covered with clouds), around a bay filled with islands. Les nomades regrettaient (pour leurs compagnons) la chaleur des sables où les corps d’eux-mêmes se momifient et les Celtibériens trois pierres de granit sous un ciel (couvert de nuages) pluvieux, autour d’un golfe plein d’îlots.

Final text: The Latins were desolate at not being able to gather their ashes in urns; the nomads regretted the heat of the sands where bodies would mummify and the Celts, three rough stones, beneath a rainy sky, deep in a bay filled with islands. Les Latins se désolaient de ne pas recueillir leurs cendres dans les urnes; les nomades regrettaient la chaleur des sables où les corps se momifient et les Celtes, trois pierres brutes, sous un ciel pluvieux, au fond d’un golfe plein d’îlots.

Note that the second text is filled to bursting with anthropological and archeological facts that Flaubert pruned as being, in the stylistic awkwardness they caused, not conducive to the larger knowledge he was after. All three versions before the last that Flaubert took as final include a verb in the last clause. In relation to this sentence, see also Proust, in “À propos du style de Flaubert”: And Flaubert was thrilled when he found in writers from the past an anticipation of Flaubert, for example in Montesquieu: “Alexander’s vices were extreme like his virtues; he was terrible in his anger; it made him cruel.” But if Flaubert delighted in such sentences, it was clearly not because they were correct, but because by allowing the launching at the heart of a proposition of an arc that would not descend until the middle of the next proposition, they assured the tight hermetic continuity of his style.

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Et Flaubert était ravi quand il retrouvait dans les écrivains du passé une anticipation de Flaubert, dans Montesquieu, par exemple: “Les vices d’Alexandre étaient extrêmes commes ses vertus; il était terrible dans la colère; elle le rendait cruel” (74). Mais si Flaubert faisait ses délices de telles phrases, ce n’était évidemment pas à cause de leur correction, mais parce qu’en permettant de faire jaillir du coeur d’une proposition l’arceau qui ne retombera qu’en plein milieu de la proposition suivante, elles assuraient l’étroite, l’hermétique continuité du style.

I am here suggesting that this hermetic style embraced the truth of the external world as well; this paradox being literature’s engine or its energy. Proust was sufficiently struck by the apparent relation between Montesquieu’s and Flaubert’s sentences to write two months later in a letter to Léon Daudet (Correspondance de Marcel Proust, 1920, “Peu après le 7 mars 1920,” 19:147– 48): “When one thinks about Flaubert, one should always remember that the sentence he admired most in the French language is that sentence of Montesquieu’s.” (Quand on pense à Flaubert, il faut toujours se rappeler que la phrase qu’il admirait le plus dans la langue française est cette phrase de Montesquieu). Proust’s engagement with Flaubert’s style was already evident in a parody he wrote in 1909 (published in Pastiches et mélanges [Paris: Gallimard, 2005 (1919)], 22 – 26). This parody features the following sentence: “Et ils finissaient par ne plus voir que deux grappes de fleurs violettes, descendant jusqu’à l’eau rapide qu’elles touchent presque, dans la lumière crue d’un après-midi sans soleil, le long d’un mur rougeâtre qui s’effritait” (26). (And they ended up seeing nothing but two clumps of purple flowers, descending toward the rapidly flowing water which they almost touched, in the raw light of a sunless afternoon, along a reddish wall that was crumbling away). Even the translation shows Proust imitating the structure of Flaubert’s famous sentence in the succession of clauses strung together with neither an “and” nor a connecting verb. 27. I have omitted in this repetition the “the” in the translation which reads, “the three rough stones.” It is not there in the original and in the translation seems ungrammatical or at least confusing. 28. “To wish to give prose the rhythm of verse (while leaving it prose and very prose) and to write ordinary life the way one writes history or epic (without altering the subject) may be an absurdity. This is what I ask myself sometimes. But it may be as well a great and very original enterprise!” (Vouloir donner à la prose le rythme du vers [en la laissant prose et très prose] et écrire la vie ordinaire comme on écrit l’histoire ou l’épopée [sans dénaturer le sujet] est peut-être une absurdité. Voilà ce que je me demande parfois. Mais c’est peut-être aussi une grande tentative et très originale!) 27 March 1853, Correspondance II, 287. 29. For letter to Goncourts, see Correspondance. III, Letter to Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 2 January 1862, 194 – 95. Jerome is the most libertine of six monks who receive Justine in their church, and his story of incest, murder, and other perversities closes Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu, vol. 1, Editions 10/18 (Paris: Poche, 1978), 267– 442. The Pléiade edition notes say that Flaubert read these volumes in La Nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu, Oeuvres complètes du marquis de Sade (Paris: Cercle du livre précieux), 3:164 passim, and 7:57 passim. The critic Alcide Dusolier, in another review of the just published Salammbô, also accused Flaubert of sadism: “Flaubert who joins to the rage of refinement the rage of description” (qui unit à la rage du raffinement la rage de la descrip-

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tion), has written Salammbô “in cold rage” (une rage froide). His research has provided him with “the supreme compendium of ferocity!” (le suprême compendium de la férocité!). “Horror grows ever greater, and M. Flaubert, who is patient and who loves to eternalize descriptions, smiles. (Patiens quia aeternus.).” (L’horreur croît de plus en plus, et M. Flaubert, qui est patient et qui aime éterniser les descriptions, sourit. [Patiens quia aeternus.])” Club edition, 405, 406. In the same article, Dusolier puts particularly well something I have wanted to evoke in my account of the odd lack of event or movement, even of action, in Salammbô for all its extravagant violence: “Salammbô is the triumph of immobility” (Salammbô, c’est le triomphe de l’immobilité). Club edition, 408. See also letter to Feydeau, September 1859, Correspondance III, 41: “Je suis en plein dans une bataille d’éléphants et je te prie de croire que je tue les hommes comme les mouches. Je verse le sang à flots.” (I am deep into a battle of elephants and I beg you to believe that I kill men like flies. I shed torrents of blood.). Letter to Jules Duplan, 2 January 1862, Correspondance III, 193: “C’est fait, je viens d’en sortir. J’ai vingt milles hommes qui viennent de crever, et de se manger réciproquement (onanisme à plusieurs, usage de villages). J’ai là, je crois, des détails coquets. Et j’espère soulever de dégoût le coeur des honnêtes gens.” (That’s it, I’m through. I have twenty thousand men who have just died and eaten one another reciprocally [group onanisme, country style]. I think I’ve got some delightful details. And I hope to turn the stomachs of honest folk.) Finally, having finished the revision of Salammbô, Flaubert wrote to Jules Duplan complaining he was exhausted but could not sleep (10 June 1862, Correspondance III, 220): “Je rêvasse des sujets de livres noirs et terribles [sic].” (I dream of subjects for books black and terrible.) All this, however, has to be read in the self-ironizing tone in which it is written. 30. Sainte-Beuve questioned the historical status of child sacrifice, citing Montesquieu, who placed its abolition two centuries earlier (Club edition, 432). Flaubert, dismissing Montesquieu’s source, declared himself to have not the shadow of a doubt that it had happened (“Cette horreur ne fait pas dans mon esprit un doute”) (Club edition, 449). 31. Letter to Feydeau, end of November 1857, Correspondance II, 782–83. 32. Violence is not the only way to achieve this effect, obviously. The writing in Madame Bovary is not violent though it is as vivid. But the inferiority of the characters’ understanding with relation to their situations works there as violence does in Salammbô, to give a distinct priority to the writing. At the end of the novel, a character finally adequate to the situation walks into the story to seal the subordinate status of all the others, who have never understood. This character, Docteur Larivière (said to be modeled on Flaubert’s father), confirms Emma’s doom and sheds a tear over it, confirming also that there is not and never was anything to be done, given the lethal effect not just of arsenic but of stupidity. What the novel knows here too is conveyed not in the characters’ feelings, but in the destiny they have incurred; in the plot not as lived but as inflicted. (A novel published in 2007, Philippe Doumenc’s Contre-enqûete sur la mort d’Emma Bovary, proposes that the great doctor was in fact Emma’s murderer.) 33. 27 December 1852, Correspondance II, 218. I referred to this letter in the prologue, in the context of the same proposition—that form is a material entity and not an abstraction. In a letter to Feydeau, Flaubert complained about the failed verses of a currently playing verse play that he found deplorable in its arbitrary use

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of the form of poetry where it was not called for. “What a fake art! and what an absence of true form this external application of it! Ah! These fellows believe in the old comparison: form is the coat. No! Form is the very flesh of thought, as thought is its soul, its life.” (Quel art factice! Et quelle absence de véritable forme que cette prétendue forme extérieure! Ah! c’est que ces gaillards-là s’en tiennent à la vieille comparaison: la forme est le manteau. Mais non! La forme est la chair même de la pensée, comme la pensée en est l’âme, la vie.) (Correspondance II, 286.) 34. Here is part of the description of Salammbô emerging from the palace before the astonished soldiers feasting in her father’s gardens: Her hair, powdered with mauve sand, was piled up like a tower in the style of the Canaanite virgins and made her look taller. Ropes of pearls fastened to her temples fell to the corners of her mouth, rose red like a half-open pomegranate. On her breast clustered luminous stones iridescent as a lamprey’s scales. Her arms, adorned with diamonds, were left bare outside a sleeveless tunic, spangled with red flowers on a dead black background. Between her ankles she wore a golden chain to control her pace, and her great, dark purple mantle, cut from some unknown material, trailed a broad wake behind her with every step she took. (25) Sa chevelure, poudrée d’un sable violet, et réunie en forme de tour selon la mode des vierges chananéennes, la faisait paraître plus grande. Des tresses de perles attachées à ses tempes descendaient jusqu’aux coins de sa bouche, rose comme une grenade entr’ouverte. Il y avait sur sa poitrine un assemblage de pierres lumineuses, imitant par leur bigarrure les écailles d’une murène. Ses bras, garnis de diamants, sortaient nus de sa tunique sans manches, étoilée de fleurs rouges sur un fond tout noir. Elle portait entre les chevilles une chaînette d’or pour régler sa marche, et son grand manteau de pourpre sombre, taillé dans une étoffe inconnue, trainait derrière elle, faisant à chacun de ses pas comme une large vague qui la suivait. (718)

Note the “unknown material” of her cloak, the “unknown” marking a vanishing point on the horizon of this world of concrete detail. Everything else but the material of her cloak is known, laid out in a glaring light that allows for no reciprocity of vision: the author (and the reader) see, the rest is seen. 35. For the world generally, Flaubert’s signature work is Madame Bovary; for him, it was La Tentation de Saint Antoine. Though the first is written in the idiom and with the stuff of the everyday, and the second describes hallucinations, there is no difference in their common ambition to penetrate to the ultimate real: the everyday real as much as the hallucinatory. 36. The full text reads: But no sooner had [the organizers of the Campana Museum] disappeared, than a new event stunned the world of antiquarians. Carthage has been found, Carthage has risen from the ashes, Carthage is springing up from its ruins, more beautiful, more triumphant, more monumental than Hamilcar and Hannibal had ever known her. In vain did Cato a hundred times over call down anathema on this city; in vain did Scipio Emilian utterly destroy it; in vain did Julius Caesar, that most skillful destroyer, try to bury it under a Roman city; the Tyrian capital re-emerges into the light of day. A famous writer dug into the depths of his imagination, and suddenly Carthage arose completely rebuilt; what the erudition of the whole world was not able to do, he, the

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novelist, has done, and his Carthage is sublime, and his Carthage is more real than the ancient Carthage; his Carthage is the truest Carthage that has ever existed. Mais à peine ont-ils [the organizers of the Campana museum] disparu, qu’un nouvel événement vient jeter soudain la stupéfaction dans les rangs des antiquaires. Carthage est retrouvée, Carthage est sortie des cendres, Carthage renaît de ses ruines, plus belle, plus triomphante, plus monumentale qu’Hamilcar et Hannibal ne l’ont connue. Vainement Cato a cent fois appelé l’anathème sur cette ville; vainement Scipion Emilien l’a détruite de fond en comble; vainement Jules César, plus habile destructeur, a tenté de l’ensevelir sous une ville romaine; la ville tyrienne reparaît à la lumière du jour. Un écrivain fameux a creusé les arcanes de son imagination, et soudain Carthage en est sortie rebâtie de toutes pièces; ce que toute l’érudition du monde n’avait pu faire, lui, le romancier, l’a fait, et sa Carthage à lui est sublime, et sa Carthage est plus réelle que la Carthage ancienne; sa Carthage est la plus vraie Carthage qui ait jamais existé. (Club edition, 372 –73)

Chapter 2 The Sacred Fount 1. Much has been written on this subject, of course, and, not claiming to discover anything new, I invoke James’s account of his thinking about Flaubert as it enters into my particular readings of James. I have been unable to find any reciprocal account of Flaubert’s view of James; there is no mention I know of in Flaubert’s letters or journals of the meetings James wrote about. 2. All page references to The Sacred Fount (1901) are to the New Directions edition, with accompanying essays by Leon Edel and R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1995 [1983]). 3. Introduction to Madame Bovary (London: Heineman, 1902); reprinted in French Writers, 316, 346. Subsequent page numbers in the text refer to this work. See Edel, The Master: 1901–1916 (New York: Avon, 1978), 93, for more on the provenance of this introduction. 4. It was Joseph Conrad who initiated this honorific, according to Leon Edel in the last volume of his biography of James, The Master: 1901–1916. 5. The most important of these mistakes is (as we will see later) the treatment of Madame Arnoux in L’Éducation Sentimentale: “Thus it is that as the work of a ‘grand écrivain’ ‘L’Éducation,’ large, laboured, immensely ‘written,’ with beautiful passages and a general emptiness, with a kind of leak in its stored sadness, moreover, by which its moral dignity escapes—thus it is that Flaubert’s ill-starred novel is a curiosity for a literary museum. Thus it is also that it suggests a hundred reflections, and suggests perhaps most of them directly to the intending labourer in the same field. If in short, as I have said, Flaubert is the novelist’s novelist, this performance does more than any other toward making him so” (French Writers, 329). 6. Vie et opinions de Thomas Frédéric Graindorge (1863–1865); published as a volume 1867. 7. See Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881, 214 –26

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(“Councils of the Gods”). Edel thinks that the first “afternoon” was on 12 December 1875, thus midway between the first and the second articles from which I have been citing. A 20 December letter to his father reported that “I took a mighty fancy to F. as well [as to Turgenev]; he is not at all what his books led me to expect. ‘C’est un naïf,’ as Tourgénieff says—a great, stout, handsome, simple, kindly, elderly fellow, rather embarrassed at having a stranger presented to him, and bothering himself over what he can say and do. He is about the style of figure of old Dumas, but with a serious, sober face, a big moustache, and a mottled red complexion. He looks like some weather beaten old military man.” (Leon Edel, ed., Henry James Letters, vol. 2, 1875– 1883 [Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1975], 14 –15.) In a 24 January 1876 letter, James told his mother he had spent another “Sunday afternoon at Flaubert’s with his cénacle: E. de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, etc. They are a queer lot, and intellectually very remote from my own sympathies. They are extremely narrow and it makes me rather scorn them that not a mother’s son of them can read English. But this hardly matters, for they couldn’t really understand it if they did” (ibid., 20–21). A letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, 3 February 1876, again describes attending Flaubert’s salon; James wrote this part of the letter in French: Tu vois que je suis dans les conseils des dieux—que je suis lancé en plein Olympe. J’ai vu deux ou trois fois Flaubert, (par Tourgénieff avec lequel il est trés lié)—et il m’a fait un acceuil fort gracieux. C’est un grand gaillard à visage sanguin, à l’encolure d’athlète, mais très simple et très doux de manières, très naìf et très sincère de caractère et pas du tout pétillant d’esprit. Depuis que je le connais j’envisage ses livres tout autrement que je n’ai fait jusqu’ici. Nous causerons un jour de ça. J’ai rencontré chez lui deux fois sa petite école—Zola, Goncourt, Daudet etc. Cela m’a intéressé bien qu’évidement je ne pousserai pas bien loin dans leur intimité. Ce sont des garçons d’un grand talent, mais je les trouve affreusement bornés. (24 –25) You see that I am admitted to the councils of the gods—that I am launched into Olympus. I have seen Flaubert two or three times (through Turgenev with whom he is very close)—and he received me most graciously. He’s a large fellow of reddish complexion, with the shoulders of an athlete, but very simple, very gentle, modest [naïve] of manner, very sincere and not at all witty. Since I know him, I think of his books very differently from the way I did before. We will discuss all this one day. At his house, I twice met his little school—Zola, Goncourt, Daudet etc. I found this interesting although obviously I will not pursue their friendship any further. They are fellows of great talent but I find them terribly limited.

He also described an afternoon at Flaubert’s in a letter to Alice, 22 February 1876. To William Dean Howells, he wrote on 28 May 1876 that he had just been to visit Flaubert, “it being his time for receiving, and his last Sunday in Paris, and I owing him a farewell. He is a very fine old fellow, and the most interesting man and strongest artist of his circle” (52 – 53). It may be that he learned of Taine, and therefore of his anecdote, at a Flaubert afternoon. A letter from Flaubert to George Sand (16 December 1875, Correspondance IV, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1998], subsequently Correspondance IV, 996 – 97) remarks, “On parle beaucoup du livre de Taine qui vient de paraître et que je ne connais pas encore.” (There is a great deal of talk about Taine’s book which has just been published and which I don’t yet

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know.) The book at issue is not the one from which James cites, however, but Les origines de la France contemporaine; vol. 1, l’Ancien régime. Also of interest for James’s personal relation to Flaubert is a letter of introduction to Flaubert that James wrote from London in April 1878 for Lord Houghton. The letter is midway between acquaintance and friendship, claiming more than the first but with a formality that reflects the limits of the second. “Je suis fort heureux, pour moi-même, de trouver une occasion propice de me rappeler à votre bon souvenir et de vous remercier de nouveau de ces procédés amicaux par lesquels vous m’avez donné le droit de vous adresser en ami” (165 – 66). (I am very happy on my own behalf, to find a good occasion to recall myself to your memory and to thank you again for the friendly treatment which has given me the right to address you as a friend.) 8. I would recall here his earlier account of Flaubert’s work (French Writers, 170–71): “We admit nevertheless that there is something else, beneath and behind, that belongs to the realm of vagueness and uncertainty, and into this we must occasionally dip. It crops up sometimes irrepressibly, and of course we don’t positively count it out.” 9. (London: Heinemann, 1902). 10. James had precise views on the French national character. See, for instance, the conclusion of the Tentation review: His book being, with its great effort and its strangely absent charm, the really painful failure it seems to us, it would not have been worth while to call attention to it if it were not that it pointed to more things than the author’s own deficiencies. It seems to us to throw a tolerably vivid light on the present condition of the French literary intellect. 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 helpless. In the perception of the materially curious, in fantastic refinement of taste and marked ingenuity of expression, they seem to us now to have reached the limits of the possible. Behind M. Flaubert stands a whole society of aesthetic raffinés, demanding stronger and stronger spices in its intellectual diet. But we doubt whether he or any of his companions can permanently satisfy their public, for the simple reason that the human mind, even in indifferent health, does after all need to be nourished, and thrives but scantily on a regimen of pigments and sauces. It needs sooner or later—to prolong our metaphor—to detect a body-flavor, and we shall be very much surprised if it ever detects one in “La Tentation de Saint Antoine.” (French Writers, 294)

11. The first was a companion to his introduction of Madame Bovary, published by Heinemann, the same year. See reprinted versions in French Writers, 90– 115, 115–51. 12. James proposed the New York Edition (under that name) to Scribner’s in July 1905. He did not list The Sacred Fount among “all my principal novels,” although he did include several shorter works. 13. (New York: New Directions, 1995 [1901]). Subsequent page references are to this edition of The Sacred Fount. 14. In Ficciones (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993 (1941), 4. 15. Chap. 8, 96–113.

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Chapter 3 The Ambassadors 1. Sturges reported his conversation with Howells (which had taken place eighteen months earlier) in October 1895, and James wrote it down in his notebook the next day. It was some three or four years before he developed it into a novel. See F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, eds., The Notebooks of Henry James (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 225 – 29; the scenario for The Ambassadors is reproduced in this volume, 372 – 415. Leon Edel described the same incident in The Master, 71–73. When he finished writing The Ambassadors, James wrote to Howells (10 August 1901) and reported the conversation with Sturges and how it had sown the seed of the novel. Here is the whole citation: At Torquay, once, our young friend Jon. Sturges came down to spend some days near me, and, lately from Paris, repeated to me five words you had said to him one day on his meeting you during a call at Whistler’s. I thought the words charming—you have probably quite forgotten them; and the whole incident suggestive—so far as it was an incident; and, more than this, they presently caused me to see in them the faint vague germ, the mere point of the start, of a subject. I noted them, to that end, as I note everything; and years afterwards (that is three or four) the subject sprang at me, one day, out of my notebook. I don’t know if it be good; at any rate it has been treated, now, for whatever it is; and my point is that it had long before—it had in the very act of striking me as a germ—got away from you or from anything like you! had become impersonal and independent. Nevertheless your initials figure in my little note; and if you hadn’t said the five words to Jonathan he wouldn’t have had them (most sympathetically and interestingly) to relate, and I shouldn’t have had them to work in my imagination. The moral is that you are responsible for the whole business. But I’ve had it, since the book was finished, much at heart to tell you so. May you carry the burden bravely! (Edel, ed., Henry James Letters, vol. 4, 1895–1916, 199)

2. In The Ambassadors (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986 [1903]), 215. Subsequent citations in the text are to this edition. 3. Matthiessen and Murdock, eds., The Notebooks of Henry James, 226. 4. Recall that the conversation between the narrator and the painter Obert as to whether their investigation might not be morally wrong resolves itself as a decision that makes its rectitude depend entirely on its means; exonerating what they are doing so long as they do it properly, transforming morality into manners. 5. Exceptionally, and with no further development, James put himself forward as narrator. 6. There are other instances of this tense form in the novel, but they are positive rather than negative, promising therefore rather than forbidding. In book 3, part 2, “Our friend was to go over it afterwards . . . .” Also, “He was to know afterwards . . . .” In these cases, the narration enlarges the character’s (Strether’s) authority; in the Waymarsh episode, it bars his way to knowledge. 7. Émile-Charles Lambinet (1815 –1877) was a Norman landscape painter whom James had admired. His “Washerwoman on the Bank of a River” is his most often-cited painting. (See page 83.)

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8. All the citations that follow are to the last chapter of The Ambassadors, 507–12. 9. James’s repeated praises of the novel as a form always turned on its capaciousness, here demonstrated in its forbearance to Mme de Vionnet and to Strether, who get to not carry out the formal necessities they have invoked. 10. Balzac, Louis Lambert; see prologue above, n. 7.

Chapter 4 Lolita 1. The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 9. All subsequent citations of Lolita are to this edition. 2. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first use of “nymphet” to the poet Drayton in 1612; the second is to Nabokov. 3. The story is perhaps too well-known to repeat here, but some precision may be useful. Poe was twenty-seven when he married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm. “Annabel Lee” mourns her death at twenty-four. It includes the lines “I was a child and she was a child,” and “In a kingdom by the sea.” Humbert’s phrase, “in a princedom by the sea,” is typical of his unrelenting allusiveness. Later in the novel, “Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m’imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. ‘Monsieur Poe-poe,’ as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert’s classes in Paris called the poet-poet” (43). 4. See discussion further in this chapter of Nabokov’s essay “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” which lambastes such confusion. 5. Nabokov had nothing but scorn for psychological theories and their practitioners, and the foreword to Lolita by its purported editor, a fictional psychiatrist named John Ray Jr., Ph.D., was intended to preempt such analyses, of both Nabokov and his novel. 6. More commonly, “pedophilia.” “I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis” (55; 363; no. 55/3, 257). 7. The doctrine of the fortunate fall proposes, instead of a return to innocence, the redemption of sinful knowledge through knowledge and choice of the good; the latter imparting man a higher status, a closer resemblance to God, the fall becomes a fortunate event. 8. On Nabokov’s research in general, still the best source seems to me The Annotated Lolita, xxix–xliii. On butterflies in particular, see more recently Dmitry Sokolenko, “The Nabokov Code,” exhibition beginning 3 July 2006 at the Vladimir Nabokov museum in St. Petersburg, New York Times, 26 July 2006, B6. Nabokov studied butterflies and even discovered two or three new species. 9. Later, H.H. will invoke Proust explicitly, as a precursor of whom he evidently thinks himself entirely worthy: “This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called ‘Dolores Disparue,’ there would be little sense in analyz-

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ing the three empty years that followed” (253). (The reference to Proust’s Albertine Disparue, vol. 4 of À la recherche du temps perdu, suggests the range of Humbert’s ambition for his confession.) 10. From its beginning with “and,” generally a signal in his writing to prepare for emotion; to the tawdry “blue into dream” that the pre-Enchanted Hunters Humbert would have scoffed at; to the sentimental tic of personalizing, “the desert would meet us”; to the heavy breathing of six hyphenations in one sentence, this is a sentence to embarrass an ironist of even lesser pretensions. 11. I would want to resist an allegorical interpretation here, allegory being exactly what Lolita is not, what would flatten and reduce it to a ciphered cliché. I mean rather that it seems to me going against the grain of the book, and of Nabokov’s thinking generally, to see in this passage a reference to the original conquest of the continent and with what we know of its despoliation. Nabokov, we also know, did not find America despoiled but instead a little too innocent, and richly endowed with the possibilities of youth, if lacking the complexities and understandings that come with age. 12. The Annotated Lolita explains the “Colo.” with reference to a butterfly find of Nabokov’s at Telluride near Dolores, Colorado. 13. At one point, Humbert, since nymphets are only nymphets for two or three years, has plotted fathering his own supply on Lolita. 14. Much earlier he had referred to adult women, with whom society was willing he consort, as “palliative agents” (18). 15. Published as the last essay in Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers, 371–80 (New York: Harvest Books, 1980). 16. This is also Chad’s view, as he expresses it to Strether, of the way advertising, “an art like another,” “scientifically worked,” “really does the thing” (see chap. 3). 17. The interviewer, whose name Nabokov could not recall when it came to publishing the interview, was one of four with whom he spoke in June 1962 when he arrived in New York for the film premiere of Lolita. The text he printed in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973) was a typescript (probably his wife’s) “from my notes immediately after the interview” (3). “[I]mmediately” emphasizes that the printed version says exactly what he said and meant. The passage I have cited responds to a request to describe his present work, a translation of Eugene Onegin. 18. Strong Opinions, 7. 19. Nabokov’s chimney sweep fulfills James’s injunction to a young writer to be one on whom nothing is lost. 20. Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1944). Page references cited in text.

Chapter 5 A Simple Heart 1. Trois contes, Oeuvres II, Editions de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1952); 575–678; Un coeur simple, 591– 622. I have used a translation of Un coeur simple that appears alone, without the other two tales, because it seems to me the best available: A Simple Heart, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2004).

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2. Bouvard and Pécuchet are copyists and firm friends who, when one of them receives an inheritance, retire to the country to undertake the study of everything. Their investigations, under such headings as Agriculture and History, lead nowhere or, more often, into ridiculous error. The absurdity of their project lies less in its grandiosity than in their complete lack of method, their naïve empiricism being a comic travesty of Flaubert’s own scrupulously formal realism. In the end, they will return to their first occupation, which in a sense they have never abandoned, since without a method, all one can learn of the world is to transcribe it. 3. For instance, Gertrude Stein, adapting Trois contes as Three Lives, took up, without danger of incoherence, only A Simple Heart. Stein’s first story, “The Good Anna,” is a loose translation of Flaubert’s tale, and the other two, “Melanctha” and “The Gentle Lena,” are variations on the theme of women who serve. 4. One example I offer here for the feel of the thing is Hannon, a Carthaginian leader, captured by the Barbarians who set about crucifying him. The description of his body when they strip him for the cross, and then of his suffering on the cross, is a particularly repellent example of Flaubert’s way with the grotesque, which he fashions out of physical details. Hannon is obese, and the fat on his legs hangs down to hide his toenails; his tears when he realizes his fate is sealed run along furrows of tubercular sores on his cheeks. Salammbô, 974; 264. 5. In the “Comices” episode, part 2, chap. 8; for the section specifically about her, 428–29, Madame Bovary, Oeuvres I (New York: Modern Library, 1982), 169–70. 6. Docteur Larivière, who appears for the first time in the novel at Emma’s deathbed, also sees true, but he is not really a character, rather a walk-on commentator. 7. To the proposition that this is generally the case, the Bible is not evidence to the contrary, its stories being notoriously irreconcilable with orthodox doctrine. 8. Note that Bouvard and Pécuchet make nothing but mistakes. Oeuvres Complètes de Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance (Paris: Louis Conard, 1933), 9:33, letter 1990, “A sa nièce Caroline, dimanche, 2 mai 1880.” (As of 2007, the Pléiade edition of the correspondence has not yet reached this date.) My translation.

\ndex aesthetic. See beauty/aesthetic Ambassadors, The ( James), 71–102; and ethics/morality, 61, 76, 81, 98, 105–6; form/style in, 7, 75, 84, 88, 95, 99–100, 102; inspiration for, 6–7, 71–76, 104, 161n1; plot of, 76–78, 90–92; sex in, 77, 95–98, 100–102; and truth/reality, 70, 72–76, 84–91, 94–95, 98–99 American, The ( James), 67 “Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, The” (Borges), 60–61 “Art of Literature and Commonsense, The” (Nabokov), 127

Bouvard et Pécuchet (Flaubert), 51, 54, 133, 143, 164n2, 165n8 Bruneau, Jean, 149nn8 and 9, 154n21

Balzac, Honoré de, 75; “Le Curé de village,” 69; James on, 57–59, 69; Louis Lambert, 8, 102, 148n7, 162n10; Le Père Goriot, 7; The Two Young Brides (Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées), 57, 69 Barnes, Julian, 154n21 Baudelaire, Charles, 154n21 Baudry, Frédéric, 143, 150n1 beauty/aesthetic: and Flaubert, 11, 27, 39–41, 45–51, 101, 133, 138–39, 142–43; and James, 46–50, 51, 56–57, 62–69, 76, 81, 87, 101; and knowledge/epistemology, 10, 15–16, 24–25, 33, 46, 51, 62, 64–65, 68, 69, 70, 75–76, 78–81, 86–87, 93, 101–6, 111, 121, 124, 130, 132; and Nabokov, 103–7, 113–15, 126, 129; and truth/reality, 5–9, 10–12, 14–16, 23–27, 38–40, 44–45, 47, 67, 75–76, 84–91, 94–95, 98–99, 107, 128–32, 143 Bernard, Charles de, 50 Borges, Jorge Luis, 73; “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” 60–61; on The Sacred Fount, 60–61

Éducation sentimentale, L’ (Flaubert), 29, 54, 55, 56–57, 59, 159n5 epistemology. See knowledge/epistemology

Colet, Louise, 8, 9, 15, 24, 26, 41, 45, 148n8, 151n5, 155n21 Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert): James’s review of, 52–55 “Curé de village, Le” (Balzac), 69 Descharmes, René, 154n21 Dusolier, Alcide, 156n31

Feydeau, Ernest, 15, 24, 43, 45, 151nn4, 6, and 8, 157n33 Fielding, Henry: on invention as discovery, 147n1 Flaubert, Gustave: and ethics/morality, 50–51, 56–57; and form/style, 6, 7–10, 11, 17–21, 27–45, 75, 101, 133, 137, 142–43, 147n2, 148n8, 156n28, 157nn34 and 35; and form/style relating to description, 24–25, 48–49; and form/style relating to tone, 16; and invention as discovery, 6, 22–27, 45, 150n12; James on, 47–57, 59, 61, 68, 69, 70, 75, 76, 101, 106, 159n7; and knowledge/epistemology, 14–16, 24–25, 33, 39–40, 45–46, 138–39, 143; Proust on, 29, 147n2, 156n28; and sadism, 41–45, 65–66, 104, 156n31; and truth/reality, 5–9, 10–12, 14–16, 23–27, 38–40, 44–45, 140–43, 147n2, 148n8

168

INDEX

Flaubert, Gustave (works): Bouvard et Pécuchet, 54, 133, 143, 164n2, 165n8; Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert ( James’s review of), 52–55; L’Éducation sentimentale, 54, 55, 56–57, 59, 159n5; Madame Bovary, 8, 9, 15, 25, 49, 50–51, 52, 53–54, 55–56, 141, 154n21, 157n34; Salammbô (see Salammbô [Flaubert]); A Simple Heart (Un coeur simple) (see Simple Heart, A [Flaubert]); La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony), 50–51, 53, 54; Trois contes, 133, 148n2, 164n1 form/style: and description, 24–25, 48–49; and Flaubert, 6, 7–10, 11, 17–21, 27–45, 75, 101, 133, 137, 142–43, 147n2, 148n8, 156n28, 157nn34 and 35; and James, 6–8, 10, 75, 84–85, 88, 95, 99–102; and Nabokov, 7–8, 104, 106, 107, 109, 112, 116–18, 122–26; and Proust, 8; and representation, 7–8; and tone, 16, 69–70, 71–72 Froehner, Guillaume, 14, 45–46 Gogol, Nikolai, 130–32 Golden Bowl, The ( James), 10, 59 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 24, 42, 50, 147n2, 156n31, 160n7 Gothot-Mersch, Claudine, 155n21 Howells, William Dean, 71–76, 104, 160n7, 161n1 In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) (Proust), 1–5, 78–79, 99, 147n2, 148n3, 163n9 invention as discovery: in Flaubert, 6, 23–27, 45, 150n12; Henry Fielding on, 147n1; in Proust, 1–5, 150n12 James, Henry: on Balzac, 57–59, 69; on Charles de Bernard, 50; and ethics/ morality, 56–57, 61–62, 65–70, 76, 81, 98, 106; on Flaubert, 47–57, 59, 61, 68, 69, 70, 75, 76, 101, 106, 159n7; and form/style, 6–8, 10, 75, 84–85, 88, 95,

99–102; and form/style relating to tone, 69–70, 71–72; and inner life of characters, 48–50, 55, 59, 61–70, 100; and knowledge/epistemology, 10, 46, 51, 64–66, 68–69, 75–76, 78, 79, 80–81, 86–87, 93, 99, 101–2; and sadism, 65–66; and secularism, 105–6; and truth/reality, 5–8, 10, 75–76, 84–91, 94–95, 98–99; and use of pictorial art, 62–63, 67–68, 82–85 James, Henry (works): The Ambassadors (see Ambassadors, The [ James]); The American, 67; The Golden Bowl, 10, 59; “The Minor French Novelists,” 50, 51; The Portrait of a Lady, 10, 67; review of Correspondance de Flaubert, 52–55; The Sacred Fount (see Sacred Fount, The [ James]); What Maisie Knew, 99; The Wings of the Dove, 59 Jarrell, Randall, vii knowledge/epistemology: and beauty/aesthetic, 10, 15–16, 24–25, 33, 46, 51, 62, 64–65, 68, 69, 70, 75–76, 78–81, 86–87, 93, 101–6, 111, 121, 124, 130, 132; and Flaubert, 14–16, 24–25, 33, 39–40, 45–46, 138–39, 143; and James, 10, 46, 51, 64–66, 68–69, 75–76, 78, 79, 80–81, 86–87, 93, 99, 101–2; and Nabokov, 103–6, 111, 113–15, 119–22, 124, 130, 132; and Proust, 4–5. See also science and literature Lambinet, Émile-Charles, 82–84, 83 (fig.), 100, 162n7 Leroyer de Chantepie, Mademoiselle MarieSophie, 25–26, 27, 39 Lolita (Nabokov), 103–32, 110 (fig.); compared to The Ambassadors, 103–6, 115; compared to The Sacred Fount, 104; compared to Salammbô, 104–6, 115; and ethics/morality, 106, 126, 129; form/style in, 104, 106, 107, 109, 112, 115, 116–18, 122–26; inspiration for, 9; plot of, 107–8, 112, 120; and religion, 103, 105, 106; sex in, 103–15, 128–29; and truth/reality, 104–5, 106–7, 113, 128–29, 133

INDEX

Louis Lambert (Balzac), 8, 102, 148n7, 162n10 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 8, 9, 15, 25, 49, 50–51, 52, 53–54, 55–56, 141, 154n21, 157n34 Matisse, Henri: on art and nature, iv; Paysage de Saint-Tropez, ii (fig.) Maupassant, Guy de, 85, 143 “Minor French Novelists, The” ( James), 50, 51 Nabokov, Vladimir: and form/style, 7–8, 104, 106, 107, 115, 118; on Gogol, 130–32; and knowledge/epistemology, 103–6, 113–15, 119–22, 124, 130, 132; and truth/reality, 5–6, 7–8, 104–5, 106–7, 128–32 Nabokov, Vladimir (works): “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” 127; Eugene Onegin (translation of), 129; Lolita (see Lolita [Nabokov]); Nikolai Gogol, 130–32 objectivity, 2–3, 5, 7–8, 26, 140–41, 151n7; versus subjectivity, 4, 26 Père Goriot, Le (Balzac), 7 Poe, Edgar Allan, 104, 121, 163n3 Portrait of a Lady, The ( James), 10, 67 postmodernism, 7–8 Proust, Marcel: on Flaubert’s style, 29, 147n2, 156n28; on form/style, 3, 8; and invention as discovery, 1–5, 150n12; and knowledge/epistemology, 4–5; In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), 1–5, 78–79, 99, 147n2, 148n3, 163n9; and truth/reality, 2–5, 99; on the writer, 95, 117, 153n17 reading, local, 149n11 reality. See truth/reality religion and secularism: and Flaubert, 4, 21, 36–39, 105, 106–7, 135–42; and James, 105–6; and Nabokov, 103, 105, 106 Sacred Fount, The ( James), 46, 47–50, 59–70, 72; Borges on, 60–61; compared to

169 Salammbô, 47; inner life of characters in, 61–70; plot of, 60; and truth/reality, 76; use of pictorial art in, 62–63, 67–68 sadism: and Flaubert, 41–45, 65–66, 104, 156n31; and James, 65–66 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 19, 20, 23–26, 41–42, 104, 153n17, 155n22, 157n32 Salammbô (Flaubert), 13–46; aqueduct in, 6, 22 (fig.), 23–24, 26, 27, 34–36; compared to The Sacred Fount, 47; ending of, 21; form/style in, 11, 17–21, 27–45, 48, 49, 75, 165n4; invention as discovery in, 6, 23–27; James on, 48, 52, 54; opening of, 16–21, 29; plot of, 13; religion in, 4, 21, 36–39, 105, 106–7; research for, 14–15, 23–25, 133, 150n1; truth/reality in, 5–6, 10–11, 14–16, 23–27, 38–40, 44–45, 150n1; verb tenses in, 29–33, 40 Sarraute, Natalie, 154n21 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 154n21 science and literature, 3–4, 8, 9, 11, 26, 27, 129, 132. See also knowledge/epistemology secularism. See religion and secularism sex: in The Ambassadors, 95–98, 100–102; in Lolita, 103–15, 128–29 Simple Heart, A (Un coeur simple) (Flaubert), 133–43; form/style in, 133, 137, 142–43; manuscript of, 134 (fig.); plot of, 135; religion and secularism in, 135–42; truth/ reality in, 140–43 Stein, Gertrude, 155n27, 165n3 Sturges, Jonathan, 71, 72, 73, 76 style. See form/style Taine, Hippolyte, 51, 160n7 Tentation de Saint Antoine, La (The Temptation of Saint Anthony) (Flaubert), 50–51, 53, 54 Thibaudet, Albert, 148n2, 150n1, 152n16 Trois contes (Flaubert), 133, 148n2, 164n1 truth/reality: and beauty/aesthetic, 5–9, 10–12, 11, 14–16, 23–27, 27, 38–40, 39, 44–45, 47, 65, 67, 75–76, 84–91, 94–95, 98–99, 107, 128–32, 143; and Flaubert, 5–9, 10–12, 14–16, 23–27, 38–40, 44–45,

170

INDEX

truth/reality (continued) 140–43, 147n2, 148n8; and James, 5–8, 10, 75–76, 84–91, 94–95, 98–99; and Nabokov, 5–6, 7–8, 104–5, 106–7, 128–32; and Proust, 2–5, 99 Turgenev, Ivan, 51, 132, 159n7

Two Young Brides, The (Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées) (Balzac), 57, 69 West, Rebecca, 59, 62 What Maisie Knew ( James), 99 Wings of the Dove, The ( James), 59