Jean Ricardou tends to evaluate literature by its degree of self-representation: the major work is a book composed in such a way that it can support its own dédoublement and the inclusion of various fragments of itself; it is one that aspires to the seemingly impossible notion of a ‘book within a book’ (1967, p. 190). This normally takes the form of intense exploitation of the device now known as the mise en abyme: from play within a play, story within a story, or picture within a picture, the mise en abyme escalates in the nouveau roman into a profusion of explanatory metaphors and internal references. While I have tended so far to indicate ways in which the supposed modernity of Flaubert has been overplayed, in this chapter I shall consider the possibility that the ideal book about nothing, ‘sans attache extérieure’ (Corr. (B) II, p. 31 (1852)), might logically refer only to itself, and could usefully be viewed as an organized tautology. But just as I have already claimed that Flaubert's characters are accomplices of a certain sort of writing, here I shall explore another area of complicity. I shall seek to demonstrate that Flaubert's complicated networks of internal references, reflections and repetitions depend for their operation on the fictional behaviour and psychologies of his main protagonists.

An example from Madame Bovary illustrates precisely the overall effect of a novel which reflects and repeats itself, and the different mechanisms of repetition through which Flaubert typically organizes his representations.