The Sheila Variations

I couldnt' stand 'The Scarlet Letter.' Endless, intolerable book about moany Puritans. Blah.

Oh.

I loved The Scarlet Letter. It's one of my favorites.

But Madame Bovary - did you read that one? I just used Scarlet Letter as a comparison - because the WP did.

No, I haven't read Madame Bovary. Not really my cuppa.

No, you are not missing anything. The book is wretched. Flaubert would use 20 pages to describe the color of a building, rather than just calling it brown. Its incredibly tedious and dull.

I can't believe that the article referes to Madame Bovary as 'perfection'. I thought that was reserved for War and Peace.

Yeah... after reading that article, I am pretty sure the author just got the cliff notes...

"In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence"

Yeah.. I don't remember this book saying anything concisely. I felt like I was living 'years of boredom' during the week I spent reading the book.

Tedious. Good word. That's what I felt about it, too. It seemed to stay on the surface ... or something. Yawn.

I think boring readers to death was one of the stylistic risks Flaubert consciously took when he wrote Madame Bovary. The book is about ennui, which we do not have an exact word for, but which is most closely captured by concepts like boredom, lassitude, inertia. Flaubert was deeply attuned to the connection between style and content, and he tortured his prose in ways that were both, for him, a consummate aesthetic experiment in minute realism, and a consummately dangerous experiment in matching style to subject matter when the subject matter is not itself inherently beautiful, thrilling, engaging, entertaining. This is not a novel that wants to let a reader in. It's a novel that wants to push a reader away--but still to keep that reader reading anyhow. So it's metafiction, Flaubert's difficult, frustrating effort to thwart the seamlessness of literary realism, which he found revolting in and of itself but which he also saw as the extremely dangerous medium by which cliched thinking and feeling are propagated. It works for me to read the novel as a phenomenal stylistic experiment, and to see the themes--of addictively shallow reading, addictively shallow sex, addictively shallow social climbing, addictive ruinous shopping--as secondary to that experiment. There's quite a story line to Madame Bovary--but readers who say the story line does not do it for them are actually responding quite sensitively to the novel. It was never supposed to.

My favorite line from the novel: "The human tongue is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes to set a bear to dancing when we would make the stars weep with our melodies." That's the difficulty of the novel, the explanation behind its impossibly off-putting style, and the difficulty, too, of Flaubert's famously tortured experience writing it.

Erin- So are you saying that Flaubert was consciously writing Madame Bovary to be boring in order to stylistically match the subject matter?

I suppose then, seen in that light, the experiment doesn't work (for me). Ulysses was an experiment, too, and that's one of my favorite books of all time. Ulysses also holds its cards close to its chest - but to me, it's a joy, a delight, a mystery, it's frustrating, it's challenging - and I find all of that FUN, rather than annoying.

Flaubert seems too fussy for me.

However, thanks, as always, for your perspective, and your great articulation of it.

Oh, and what you say, Erin - about Flaubert wanting the style to match the content - I like that, and most writers do not have the skill to pull that off. Joyce, to my mind, was the best at it.

Ulysses wouldn't work if the entire thing was written in one style - if the whole thing were, say, written in the over-blown prose of the Nausikaa section. Yuk.

Madame Bovary holds a special place for me, one of the books I read (and subsequently reread, along with "The House of Seven Gables", "The Sun Also Rises" and "Absalom, Absalom") many Septembers ago, unearthing structures that prop up story.

I imagine that isn't a very satifying defense, "I like it because I used to like it and it reminds me of being young", but that's the way it is with so many things these days.

Nabokov has an interesting essay on the novel in "Lectures on Literature"

I read it in high school and was not particularly impressed. My remembrance is that it was rather tedious. I just didn't feel the same sort of connection with the author that I feel when reading writers like Lawrence, Dostoevsky or numerous others. But that was a long time ago - I'm sure I'll give it another shot one of these days...