Flaubert and the Rhetoric of Stupidity

8/12/2019 Flaubert and the Rhetoric of Stupidity

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Flaubert and the Rhetoric of StupidityAuthor(s): Leslie HillSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), pp. 333-344Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342893

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Flaubert and the Rhetoric of Stupidity

Leslie Hill

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world historical events andcharacters repeat themselves, as it were, twice. He forgot to add:the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.-MARx1The novels of Flaubert, it is perhaps fair to say, have come to denote, inmodern reflexion upon the history and development of the realistmimetic narrative, a fundamental shift in emphasis in the relationship ofthe author towards his material and his language. Flaubert, claims forexample Jean Rousset, stands forth in his age as "le premier en date desnon-figuratifs du roman moderne,"2 and although one may quarrel withthe unqualified nature of this statement, it is clear that Flaubert's modeof writing as a novelist is symptomatic of an unease with the conventionsof mimetic figuration such as was unthinkable in the work of his mostimmediate predecessors. For the writer himself, insofar as his corre-spondence allows the critic to judge, it was now a problem of styleand ofits inherent difficulties, now a question of content (of "le sujet"). Oscillat-ing between the polarities of these various Hydra's heads--on the onehand the opacification of language and on the other hand the growingbanality of contemporary reality-Flaubert arrives at an awareness ofthe near impossibility of a successful mimesis of reality. As he declares,characteristically, to Louise Colet, during the composition of MadameBovary,

J'en arrive a la conviction quelquefois qu'il est impossible 'ecrire.J'ain faire un dialogue de ma petite femme avec un cure, dialogue1. "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Ausgewdihlte chriften, 2 vols.(Berlin, 1970), 1:226.2. Formeet signification (Paris, 1963), p. 111.

333


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334 LeslieHill Flaubert and theRhetoricof Stupiditycanaille et epais, et, parce que le fonds est commun, il faut que lelangage soit d'autant plus propre. L'idee et les mots me manquent.Je n'ai que le sentiment...3

The specific drama of this shift in emphasis in Flaubert's writing canbe seen as the reemergence within the realist novel of rhetoric:rhetoricunderstood here not as artificial bombast but as a certain labour of style("le travail du style"), as the need to recompose, for aesthetic ends,everyday language in resonant and suggestive figures of style supported,as it were, by their inner force or intensity.4 This is to say that theparticular focus of Flaubert's writing shifts from the plot and frompsychological analysis as such (for, it must be stressed, the narrative levelsare maintained by Flaubert and are indeed reevaluated by this change inperspective) to henceforth revolve around the inner tensions of the writ-ten sentence: 'je voudrais," writes Flaubert, "faire des livres ouiil n'y ei tqu'a ecriredes phrases (si l'on peut dire cela), comme pour vivre il n'y aqu' respirer de l'air" (3:248).Flaubert's ideal is that of a prose which would possess the internalnecessity and homogeneity of verse and which would affirm its stylisticforce by being identifiably differentfrom the prose of that world whenceit would come and to which, inevitably, it would return. But, as Flaubertwas himself to find, this project already bears within itself the germs ofits inadequacy and incompletion:

Quelle chienne de chose que la prose Qa n'est jamais fini; il y atoujours a refaire. Je crois pourtant qu'on peut lui donner la consis-tance du vers, inchangeable, aussi rythmee, aussi sonore. Voila dumoins mon ambition (il y a une chose dont je suis stir, c'est quepersonne n'a jamais eu en tate un type de prose plus parfait quemoi; mais quant' l'execution, que de faiblesses, que de faiblesses,mon Dieu ). [2:468-69]

Flaubert finds himself confronted here with one of the constituent struc-tural traits of prose: its inevitable inadequation to its own object. Forwhereas in verse, as Valery was often to argue, "les conditions metriqueset musicales restreignent beaucoup l'indetermination," and "confbrent3. Correspondance, vols. (Paris, 1926-30), 3:162. All references to Flaubert's corre-

spondence will be to this edition and will be given in the text immediately after the quota-tion.4. See Correspondance, :345-46. For a modern approach to the relationship betweenrhetoric and modern literary language, see Francis Ponge, Pour un Malherbe(Paris, 1965).

Leslie Hill, fellow in Clare College, Cambridge University, is pres-ently doing research on Flaubert and on general aspects of the modernFrench novel. This essay is his first publication.


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CriticalInquiry Winter1976 335au langage naturel les qualites d'une matiere resistante,"5 in the case ofprose these constraints are created and destroyed within the duration ofeach sentence. The prose sentence remains indeterminate and appar-ently arbitrary, potentially commutable, unlike its verse counterpart,into all the sentences of the world.6 While verse, by virtue of its metricalstructure, is always distinguishable from everyday speech, prose can onlywin this privilege in the infinite process of correction, which, for beingendless, is never definitive.Each of Flaubert's sentences carries the imprint of the author's con-frontation with this contradiction, and the characteristic rhythms of hisstyle derive from the tension thus created between the literality andlapidary substantiality of each sentence and the detour of connotation bywhich each sentence emerges, visibly and at every moment, as a citationof that corpus of language and literature that, in the form of the doxa,has always preceded the writing of pure sentences. As Roland Barthesputs it,

Le drame de Flaubert ... devant la phrase peut s'enoncer ainsi: laphrase est un objet, en elle la finitude fascine, analogue a celle quiregle la maturation metrique du vers; mais en meme temps par lemecanisme ... de l'expansion, toute phrase est insaturable, on nedispose d'aucune raison structurelle de l'arreter ici plut6t que la.... Elle est comme l'arret gratuit d'une liberte infinie...: parceque la phrase est libre, l'ecrivain est condamne non a chercher lameilleure phrase, mais a assumer toute phrase: aucun dieu, fit-cecelui de l'art, ne peut la fonder a sa place.7It is in this process that Flaubert's writing constitutes itself, irremediably,as a journey and an adventure through and against the doxa, throughand against what he will call the "bitise" of received ideas. The notion ofa self-confident transcription of reality is henceforth impossible forFlaubert. Language becomes permeated with the contagious automatismand duplicity of those commonplaces which, as Jean Paulhan notes,"sont par excellence une expression oscillante et diverse, qui prate adouble ou quadruple entente, et comme un monstre de langage et dereflexion."8

5. Oeuvres,ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1957-60), 1:1339, 480.6. See Correspondance2:394, 3:235, 252, 321. It is in this sense that Flaubert can besaid to have encountered the arbitrary nature of the novel form long before Valery, whosaw in it a major failing of novel writing (see Oeuvres, 1:1468).7. "Flaubert et la phrase," in Le degreztro de l'&critureuivi de nouveaux essaiscritiques(Paris, 1972), p. 143.8. LesFleurs de Tarbes(Paris, 1941), p. 148. For an acute commentary of this situation,see Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas (Paris, 1943), pp. 97-107. The notion of transcription isone of the major theoretical propositions advanced by Balzac in the Avant-propos to LaComidie humaine: "la Societe frangaise allait etre l'historien, je ne devais etre que lesecretaire."


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336 LeslieHill Flaubertand the Rhetoricof StupidityThe theme of "bitise," of course, is one that preoccupied Flaubert

throughout his whole career, reaching its final formulation in theDictionnairedesidies refues and the unfinished Bouvardet P cuchet.9In thecontext of these works two questions must be asked: what is "betise"? andwhat is the import of Flaubert'sjourney through "betise"for the mimeticnovel?Flaubert himself, in an early and now famous letter, identifies in"betise"the effect of an inordinate desire to conclude:"Oui, la betise," hewrites, "consiste a vouloir conclure. Nous sommes un fil et nous voulonssavoir la trame" (2:239). This is to say that stupidity, for Flaubert, is less agiven content of discourse than a particular order of that discourseitself.1' It is the sign of an hasty and elliptical intervention into thoughtof a series of preconceived conclusions, the source of which may besituated in the doxa and in the rhetoric of verisimilitude that sustains thepersuasive power of the doxa. Stupidity, as the project of the Dictionnairedemonstrates, is an endless fabric of maxims and probable syllogisms thefunction of which is to determine the particular and the specific, thesingular and the different, as paradigmatic exempla of the larger dis-course of encyclopaedic universality expressed in the verisimilitude ofreceived ideas. It is in this sense that one can see in Flaubert's notion of"beitise" he denunciation by the writer of an especially vulgarised form(founded upon scientific positivism and upon the self-confidence of themiddle classes) of the Aristotelian concept of verisimilitude, which, builtaround the rhetorical figures of the probable syllogism-theenthymeme-and the exemplum (paradeigma), is directed towards win-ning adhesion to a particular thesis by appealing to generalities andprobabilities, and which constructs its arguments from material drawnfrom the doxa." It is this rhetoric of persuasion by verisimilitude that

9. Dictionnaire des idees refues, edition diplomatique etablie par Lea Caminiti (Paris,1966). Bouvard et Picuchet, edition critique precedee des scenarios inedits etablie par Al-berto Cento (Paris, 1964); all subsequent references to this work will be given in the text.For a general survey of the theme of"betise" in Flaubert, see Genevieve Bolleme, "Flaubertet la betise," in her Le second volume de Bouvard et Picuchet (Paris, 1966).10. Cf. Valery, Oeuvres, 1:1452.11. The concept of verisimilitude is a difficult one and one which has received muchcritical attention in recent years. I have taken the term here to refer to the complexnetwork of constraints by which the mimetic novelist, like the rhetorician, is able to engagehis audience in a contract of mutual recognition and to persuade them of the "sense ofreality" of his narrative, that this is a plausible interpretation of reality, worthy of belief(compare Aristotle, Poetics, 1454a). It is here that Aristotle's elaboration of mimesis and ofthe art of rhetoric is decisive. Both in the Poetics (1461b) and in the Rhetoric, Aristotledistinguishes two concepts with regard to the manner in which the artist or the rhetoriciansolicits from his audience the belief in the justness of his reconstruction of reality. The firstconcept is that ofpithanon, the plausible or the persuasive. This corresponds to the specula-tive consideration of what strategy will be most forceful in any given case. Rhetoric isindeed defined as "the faculty (dunamis)of observing in any given case the available meansof persuasion (pithanon)" (1355b). As such, pithanon is the sign of a desire to convince, a


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CriticalInquiry Winter1976 337Flaubert, in the various discourses of the lover, the dreamer and thepolitician, will throw into ironic relief in MadameBovary and L'lducationsentimentale.But if "betise" is an order of discourse and a rhetoric, with rootsreaching back to Aristotle, how is the writer to reject this rhetoric whenhis own language, as I have suggested, is ceaselessly drawn back, by itsvery transformability, into the endless net of received ideas? For stupid-ity is not merely elliptical in its implicit appeals to universal probability,but it is also infectiously metonymic, and by its contiguity with the writ-ing of the artist can transform this writing into pure stupidity.12 Indeed,Flaubert himself was to experience this infectious quality of "betise" inthe composition of Bouvard et Picuchet: "j'ai peur d'avoir la cervelleepuisee," he writes; "c'est peut-Ztre que je suis tropplein de mon sujet etque la betise de mes deux bonshommes m'envahit" 7:189, italics mine). Ifstupidity lies in the wish to conclude, what can be more stupid thanconcluding about the stupidity of stupidity?If, then, "bktise" is to be understood as an inherent disposition ofverisimilar discourse, and by the same token, of the mimetic novel, thedesire to move beyond the realm of stupidity can have but serious conse-quences for the position of the novelist towards his own language. If allmeaning can become assimilated by contagion to the rhetorical order ofstupidity, where is the novelist to take up his stand? Flaubert's corre-spondence sketches a dual strategy in response to this question.The first element of this strategy is irony. Flaubert refuses the temp-tation of condemning stupidity from a secure position of intellectualsuperiority: the polemical rage of Voltaire, for instance, who is theprivileged exemplum of this mode of artistocratic irony, with its "rictusdecision on the part of an individual in a particular situation. For this desire to convince tobecome fully operative in the context of an audience, it needs to be recast not as a plausibil-ity, but as a probability, as eikos.Aristotle defines eikos as "a thing that usually happens: not... anything whatever that usually happens, but only if it belongs to the class of the'contingent' or 'variable.' It bears the same relation to that in respect of which it is probableas the universal bears to the particular" (1357a). Eikos is on one level a collection ofcontents, of topoi. But it is more than this. For otherwise this would mean that worksderiving from different historical contexts would become unintelligible to the uninitiatedreader. Eikos is a patterning of discourse, a rhetorical syntax, based upon the integration ofthe singular in the universal, and translated in the text by the enthymeme (and the maxim)and the exemplum. The homogeneity of the mimetic novel derives from the way in whichthe desire to convince (pithanon) is mediated and dissimulated by a totalising, "natural"eikos,when, in other words, the narrator is "objective." It is when these two dimensions aredissociated, as in Bouvard et Picuchet, that all manner of disturbance is generated. (Allquotations from the Rhetoricare from the translation by W. Rhys Roberts, in The WorksofAristotle,ed. W. D. Ross, vol. 11 (Oxford, 1924).12. On the metonymic nature of realist writing, see Roman Jakobson, Studiesin ChildLanguageandAphasia(The Hague, 1971), p. 69; and Jacques Neefs, "Lafiguration realiste,"Poetique 16 (1973): 466-76. It is here that the complicity of "b&tise" nd the mimetic novelis apparent.


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338 Leslie Hill Flaubert and theRhetoricof Stupidityepouvantable" and its "science superficielle";13 in short, its haste to con-clude is precisely that which earns Voltaire his place in the Dictionnaire.Flaubert prefers to elaborate, as Barthes has often suggested, a moreimplicit and tacit mode of irony working within the language of stupidityrather than beyond it.14 In this perspective, what is written should notdiffer, in its literality,from the encyclopaedic fabric of "betise" itself butshould throw stupidity into ironic relief by the insistent activity of acertain rhetoric of style, operating through discontinuity and ellipticalcontrast, through unmarked changes in viewpoint and tempo, multiply-ing the intervals of sense in a refusal to conclude. The object of this ironywould be to unfold all fixed symbolic or metaphoric relations into aseries of metonymic itineraries of sense, which, by transforming narra-tive linearity into the conflictual interplay of differing interpretations ofevents and details, would show how conclusions are drawn and how theyare ironically exceeded by the play of the text.'5 The dictionary ofstupidity, in this manner, would be coextensive with its critique andwould draw its polemical actuality from the indeterminacy of thisparadox: as Flaubert himself proposes in a letter that I have alreadycited, with reference to the Dictionnaire:

Ce livre complktementait et precede d'une bonne preface oti l'onindiquerait comme quoi l'ouvrage a ete fait dans le but de rattacherle public a la tradition, a l'ordre, a la convention generale, etarrangee de telle maniere que le lecteur ne sache pas si on se foutde lui, oui ou non, ce serait peut- tre une oeuvre etrange, et capa-ble de reussir, car elle serait toute d'actualite. [2:237-38]But in order that an irony of this kind may become effective, thenovelist needs to maintain a fully recognisable and verisimilar traditionalnarrative structure. This is the second pole of Flaubert's strategy thatwill be developed decisively in Bouvard etPecuchetand which renders thiswork irreducible to any modern notion of the "anti-novel" that criticshave advanced in recent years.16 Indeed, without this prerequisite ofnarrative coherence as "regulative Fiktion,"'7 the work would be nomore than a satiric fantasy fully digestible, as a genre, by the rhetoric of

13. Dictionnairedes idiesrepues,p. 208.14. See Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris, 1970), pp. 104-5.15. See Marcel Proust, "A propos du 'style' de Flaubert," in ContreSainte-Beuve(Paris,1971), pp. 586-99; Alison Fairlie, "Some Patterns of Suggestion in L'lducation sentimen-tale," Australian Journal for French Studies 6, nos. 2-3 (1969): 266-93; Raymonde

Debray-Genette, "Les Figures du recit dans Un Coeursimple,"Poetique(1970): 348-64; andJonathan Culler, Flaubert (London, 1974).16. See for example A. Frescaroli, "I germi dell'anti-romanzo in Bouvardet P&cuchet,"Aevum 40 (January-April, 1966): 138-55.17. Nietzsche, Werke,ed. Karl Schlechta, 3 vols. (Munich, 1954), 1:206.


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CriticalInquiry Winter1976 339"betise." As Flaubert, with reference to the novel, replies to a letter fromTurgenev,

Malgre l'immense respect quej'ai pour votre sens critique ... je nesuis point de votre avis sur le maniere dont il faut prendre cesujet-la. S'il est traite brievement, d'une fagon concise et legere, cesera une fantaisie plus ou moins spirituelle, mais sans portee et sansvraisemblance, tandis qu'en detaillant et developpant, j'aurai l'airde croire a mon histoire, et on peut en faire une chose sierieuse etmeme effrayante. [7:178]The mordant ambivalence of Flaubert's critique of "betise" derives fromthe indeterminate mobility of this dual strategy. The dialectic thatFlaubert elaborates between the maintenance of the novel form and theeffraction of that rhetoric of verisimilitude upon which it is foundedallows him to preserve the intelligibility of his text while operating acritical reevaluation of the mimetic novel as such; the reader is faced, inBouvard et Picuchet, as Barthes argues, with "un etat tres subtil, presqueintenable, du discours: la narrativitie est deconstruite et l'histoire restecependant lisible."'8 Bouvard et Pcuichet is, in this way, both a traditionalnovel and a displacement of the novel form, its anamnesis and criticalreformulation.

In short, the question for Flaubert, in writing Bouvard et P&cuchet,can be summarised as the attempt to exploit the very proximity of hisown discourse with that of "betise": to turn against the elliptical andmetonymic rhetoric of stupidity the elliptical and metonymic rhetoric ofhis own writing. It is by pursuing this paradoxical enterprise thatFlaubert can be said to have brought literary realism to its culminationand to have supplied the basis for its inversion, and, moreover, to havecombined these conflictual tensions within the same text. It is by itsunwavering insistence upon this duplicity of Flaubert's writing thatBouvard et Picuchet stands, Janus-like, upon the horizons of modernityand of traditional mimesis, and its corrosive power derives preciselyfrom this parodox, from the possibility of writing paradoxically, that is,against the doxa.Critics have, of course, often underlined the elusiveness of this"strangely repelling and alluring text,"19and our task here is to examinethe effect upon the traditional novel of this fascination and to accountfor the unease suscitated in the reader by this work. I have chosen, as theobject of this inquiry, the fifth chapter of the novel, which relatesBouvard and Pecuchet's confrontation with literature.

This chapter is composed of a complex intermeshing of threeasymmetrical voices or discourses: those of Literature (novels and18. Le plaisir du texte (Paris, 1973), p. 18.19. Victor Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert (Princeton, 1966), p. 259.


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340 Leslie Hill Flaubertand theRhetoricof Stupiditydrama), of Criticism (theorists, grammarians and rhetoricians) and ofthe Reader (mainly Bouvard and Pecuchet themselves). The dissym-metry of this configuration of voices lies in the position of the "Reader,"whose discourse englobes the others and filters them through a certainrhetoric of "betise." It is in this sense that Bouvard and Pecuchet are theauthentic protagonists of the novel, and it is upon their discourse thatthe reader must, perforce, concentrate his attention.One may begin by attempting to establish a rhetorical synopsis oftheir reactions to literature. Their itinerary can be divided into twosegments: their confrontation with art and with critical theory. But Ishall limit myself here to a necessarily fragmentary summary of theirreading of novels, with the ambition of reconstructing some of the en-thymemes of stupidity enacted by the protagonists of the text:

1. The works of Walter Scott produce "comme la surprise d'un mondenouveau" (p. 395); the effect upon the reader is to resurrect asliving people what were previously "des fantimes et des noms" (p.395); therefore the works of Scott are an exact resemblance andillusion of real history.2. The historical novels of Dumas are exciting, leaving the reader"sans une minute pour la reflexion" (p. 396); other works, like thoseof Soulie, are less colourful; therefore an historical novel that is notcolourful and exciting is a boring novel.3. Some novels by Scott and Dumas are historically inexact; but goodhistorical novels suscitate the illusion of an exact resemblance to realhistory; therefore Scott and Dumas are unscientific and confused(pp. 396-97).4. The novels of Rousseau and Constant, on the other hand, are con-cerned with human emotions; but convincing novels must describethe historical milieu of their plots, and not merely concentrate uponfeelings; therefore psychological novels send the reader to sleep (p.398).5. The novels of Balzac provide a striking image of the complexity of"la vie moderne" (p. 398); the talent of the novelist lies in his powersof observation; therefore a novel is interesting in that it allows thereader to "descendre plus avant dans la connaissance des moeurs"(p. 399).6. The novels of Balzac provide a striking image of the complexity of"la vie moderne" (p. 398); but the novelist's function is to transcendthe limitations of middle-class banality; therefore only that art thatexalts the reader far from the "miseres de ce monde" (p. 399) isworthy of consideration.Clearly there can be no question here of attempting to constitute acatalogue of the enthymemes and maxims of stupidity that Flaubert has


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CriticalInquiry Winter1976 341dispersed within his text. This would be a nearly infinite task and couldonly be accomplished on the basis of an immense programme of read-ing; moreover, by obliging the reader to decide what was "betise," thisenterprise would earn him a privileged place in the Dictionnaire. And ifthe corpus of "betise" is impossible to reconstitute in this way,20 it is anindication on Flaubert's part that the essence of his novel lies in thetreatment of "betise," that "il n'y a pas de Vrai. Il n'y a que des manieresde voir" (8:370).What, then, is the role of the fictional perspective n which Flauberthas cast this journey through "betise"?It is readily apparent that none ofthe enthymemes that the above synopsis has attempted to reconstructfrom Bouvard et Picuchet is present in the text as such, but that each isfused by Flaubert into a syntactic sequence, observable both on the levelof style and of narration. Perhaps one of the most striking examples ofthis syntax is the long third paragraph of this fifth chapter, from whichwas reconstructed enthymeme 1, and which recounts the genesis ofa mimetic illusion:

Les hommes du passe qui n'etaient pour eux que des fant6mes oudes noms devinrent des etres vivants, rois, princes, sorciers, valets,gardes-chasses, moines, bohemiens, marchands et soldats, quideliberent, combattent, voyagent, trafiquent, mangent et boivent,chantent et prient, dans la salle d'armes des chaiteaux, sur le bancnoir des auberges, par les rues tortueuses des villes, sous l'auventdes echoppes, dans le cloitre des monasteres. Des paysages artiste-ment composes, entourent les scenes comme un decor de theitre.On suit des yeux un cavalier qui galope le long des greves. Onaspire au milieu des genets la fraicheur du vent, la lune eclaire deslacs oui glisse un bateau, le soleil fait reluire les cuirasses, la pluietombe sur les huttes de feuillages. Sans connaitre les modeles, ilstrouvaient ces peintures resemblantes, et l'illusion etait complete.L'hiver s'y passa. [P. 395]

On a manifest level, this passage retraces the manner in which the histor-ical novel, by a profusion of detail, suscitates what, as the final linesemphasise, is no more than an illusion of mimesis. But if the readerconsiders the underlying syntax of this description, a radically differentdimension to Flaubert's writing emerges. The insistent parallelisms ofthe style, with its repetitive series of nouns and verbs, tend quite deci-sively to dissolve this illusion of reality into a certain play of language.21The metonymic automatisms of Flaubert's style, which almost seems to

20. See Claude Mouchard, "Terre, technologie, roman," Litterature 15 (October,1974): 65-74.21. See the comments on Flaubert's syntax in the novel in Manfred Hardt, "FlaubertsSpaitwerk: Untersuchungen zu Bouvard et Pecuchet,"AnalectaRomanica, no. 27 (Frankfurt,1970).


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342 Leslie Hill Flaubert and theRhetoricof Stupiditygenerate itself as a "defilement continu, monotone, morne, indefini,"22effectively decompose the conventions of mimesis as conventions,and, bythe temporal shifts from the imperfect to the present, show howBouvard and Pecuchet (for this passage is a narrationof their experienceof reading) are themselves dissolved as sources of intellection, enrap-tured in the anonymity of "on."23The rhetoric of persuasion by veri-similitude that, in the form of the implicit enthymeme, suscitates theillusion of mimesis is not transcribed but enacted,fictionally and dramati-cally, by the protagonists of the novel in a process that slides beyond the"betise" of hasty intellection.In this way the syntax of Flaubert's style, by refusing to allowBouvard and Pecuchet to assume any position of commanding superior-ity towards the mimetic illusion-which they undergo rather than con-sciously create-places them in an ambivalent situation, that of being theuncomprehending actors of a rhetoric that precedes and traversesthem.24 This is to say that their role as dynamic novel protagonists issharply curtailed, and their function as focal centres of the novel-andthis is the measure of their own particular stupidity-resides in the ex-tent to which they allow themselves to be possessed, in turn, by thevarious encyclopaedic discourses that compose the primary material ofthe novel. This is one of the major displacements to which Flaubertsubjects the traditional narrative form, and one that is present already,in nuce, in his earlier novels; indeed, in Bouvard et Pecuchet, affirms onecritic, "nicht auf Personen oder Charaktere kam es Flaubert an, sondernauf die M6glichkeit, einen stereotypen Geschehnisablauf auf immerneuen Lebensbereichen durchspielen zu k6nnen."25 Bouvard andPecuchet become the sum of those discourses which, in a stupid inabil-ity to master, they traverse.It is here that the nature of their stupidity as novel protagonists maybegin to be circumscribed. I have already argued that Flaubert's repeti-tive style tends to annul them as subjects of intellection. The same is trueof the continuity of the novel as a whole. For the manner in which theypass from one discourse to another, from one adventure to another, isnot commanded by a series of conscious decisions, but rather by a per-verse oscillation from enthusiasm to disappointment. Flaubert does notmotivate the continuity of the novel according to some methodical, en-

22. Proust, p. 587.23. Cf. Alison Fairlie, "Flaubert et la conscience du reel," Essaysin FrenchLiterature4(November, 1967): 1-12, who suggests that "pendant des moments d'absorption totale enquelque chose d'exterieur au moi, les forces trompeuses ou paralysantes de la consciencede soi sont suspendues" (p. 4).24. It is in this way that BouvardetPecuchetstands in a similar transitional and criticalposition as Cervantes' Don Quixote.See Michel Foucault's brilliant analysis of this novel inLes Mots et les choses(Paris, 1966), pp. 60-64; and idem, "La Bibliotheque fantastique," inFlaubert, edited by Raymonde Debray-Genette (Paris, 1970), pp. 171-90.25. Hardt, p. 53.


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CriticalInquiry Winter1976 343cyclopaedic pattern (and, after all, the subtitle of the work, if we are tobelieve Flaubert's correspondence, was to be "Du defaut de la methodedans les sciences" [8:336]), but rather exploits the tradition of thenineteenth-century novel according to the psychologyof the protagonists.The kernel of this psychological motivation of the novel is in the pulsat-ing rhythm set up by the alternating aspirations and desires of Bouvardand Pecuchet.26 The most striking instance of this ironic return to thepsychology of desire, typical of the nineteenth-century novel, within thecritique of "betise," is the scene where Bouvard, with exemplary stupid-ity, attempts to woo Madame Bordin with the aid of Moliere and VictorHugo (pp. 402-3). This oblique reinterpretation of the desire to per-suade present in the rhetoric of verisimilitude (and already indicated byAristotle's use of the term pithanon) allows Flaubert to show, parodically,how its only claim to universality reposes upon an individualised desire oconvince. Henceforth the enthymemes of stupidity appear in the novel inan ironic light, as pure rhetoric; far from being all-inclusive, veri-similitude betrays a partisan reading of reality, for "la Vraisemblancedepend de qui l'observe, est une chose relative, passagere" (p. 411). Adehiscence, properly scandalous to all traditional notions of mimesis andverisimilitude, is opened here between the desire to convince and thediscourse aimed at assuring that conviction. The reader is confrontedwith the paradoxical situation of an eikosdeprived of its underlying forceand reinscribed as an agglutination of cultural stereotypes and of apithanon that no longer supports these stereotypes but which isreinscribed in the form of the perverse willingness of Bouvard andPecuchet to be convinced.The stupidity of Bouvard and Pecuchet, it is now possible to argue,lies in the way that they encounter civilisation with the sole motive oftheir own pleasure, and the conclusion that they reach at the end of thisfifth chapter, that "la moralite de l'Art se renferme pour chacun dans lec6t' qui flatte ses inter ts" (p. 415), is symptomatic of their own activities.But it ispreciselyor this reason thattherhetoricof the doxa remains,or them,aclosedworld, upon the circumference of which they move without everbeing able to conclude upon the reasons for their successive failures. It isto the extent that, in the eyes of the doxa, they are stupid that they eludethe universal circle of "betise." Their stupid inability to be objectivedestroys the very notion of objective stupidity itself.What thus is at stake in the novel is the conflict between the perversestupidity of Bouvard and Piecuchet and the universal stupidity of thedoxa. By recomposing the circle of scientific knowledge and receivedideas in a fictional form, Flaubert decisively displaces the epistemologicalsecurity of science and the doxa.27His novel dramatises, as Nietzsche was

26. See Claude Vivien, "Copie," Le Nouveau Commerce9 (1967): 29-43.27. See Raymonde Debray-Genette, "Flaubert: Science et ecriture," Littkrature15(1974): 41-51; and Jacques Neefs, "Salammbb:extes critiques," ibid., 52-64.


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344 LeslieHill Flaubertand the Rhetoricof Stupidityto write, with specific reference to the theme of"betise" in Flaubert, "diePhilosophie der 'Regel' im Kampfe mit der 'Ausnahme.' "28 The writingof Flaubert elaborates the beginnings of that paradoxical science (but isit not the force of Bouvard etPecuchetto be paradoxical?) which would befictional in its effects and which would be the science of the particular, ofthe exteriority of the exception to the universal rule, of that movementof difference which is original to all phenomena and their condition ofexistence: "Pas de reflexions copions II faut que la page s'emplisse, quele 'monument' se compl2ete-e'galite de tout, du bien et du mal, du Beauet du laid, de l'insignifiant et du caracteristique. Il n'y a de vrai que lesphenome'nes.29

This is the essential lesson that Flaubert, through Bouvard etPicuchet, leaves to the writers of modernity. How can one write if lan-guage and novelistic discourse have already been devoured by the veri-similitude of mimesis, by the doxa and the stereotype, by "cultural lan-guage become nature"?30Only by pitting against the metonymic orderof "betise" and mimesis the disorder of a certain "metonymie creatrice"31that relaunches and renews the narrative as an endless pursuit throughmeaning and cultural discourse, unfolding and interpreting the con-catenations of sense that are the essence of "betise"; by living the activityof writing as a constant re-reading of the texts of the past, by operatingat each turning of the text the rupture between the old and the new, theuniversal and the singular, between mimesis and its effraction."Il existe chez Flaubert," wrote Charles Du Bos, "comme une inten-site de la stupeur, et en general une prodigieuse intensite de tous les etatsdits negatifs. II part, si l'on peut ainsi s'exprimer, de la positivite dunegatif."32 A specifically modern adventure begins here: a pursuitthrough sense and non-sense, into the margins of the self and society, anitinerary of writing that penetrates into the limits of the human, as Kafkawas to write, "an den Grenzen des Menschlichen fiberhaupt."33 It isFlaubert's achievement to have inscribed the beginnings of this processwithin the narrative text of mimesis.

28. Werke,2:683. Compare Valery, Oeuvres,2:64. See also Bouvard et Picuchet, p. 552,and the commentary given by Alberto Cento, Commentaire e "BouvardetPicuchet"(Naples,1973), p. 114.29. From a scenario sketching the conclusion to the novel, BouvardetPkcuchet,p. 125.30. Culler, p. 161.31. Roman Jakobson, Questionsdepoktique Paris, 1973), p. 136. See Jacqueline Risset,"La Poetique mise en questions," Critique322 (March, 1974): 223-34.32. Approximations (Paris, 1922), p.162.33. Entry for 28 March 1911, Tagebiicher1910-23 (Frankfurt, 1967), p. 41. It is, ofcourse, the same Kafka who (10 February 1915) notes that "ich schreibe 'Bouvard etPicuchet' sehr frfihzeitig" (ibid., p. 331).

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Flaubert and the Rhetoric of Stupidity