‘I'm fed up with Bovary. They wear me out with it'
(16 February 1879, Georges Charpentier)Late in his life, Flaubert would insist that he never wanted to hear of Madame Bovary again: ‘the name alone annoys me’ (13 June 1879, RdG). This disaffection, we saw, was part of its very writing as a book undertaken against the grain of Flaubert's desire: ‘don't judge me on it… it was a matter of set purpose, an exercise in composition’ (30 October 1856, RdG). Exasperatingly, his first published novel, cut off from his natural lyricism ('everything I like isn't in it', ibid), achieved a notoriety that fixed him as its author, just'Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary'. And this even as his work continued, as the other novels were published: Salammbo (1862), the purple novel of war and passion in the Carthage of antiquity, begun soon after Madame Bovary; the second Education sentimentale (1869), using the career of its (anti-) hero in Paris in the 1840s and 50s to grasp the historical reality of contemporary society; and those two great extreme projects that sum up his raison d'ecrire: La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874), the book of the unleashing of the imagination through saintly ascesis, and Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881), the posthumous novel of the two clerks who set out to explore human knowledge from geology to literature, agriculture to theology, and who end up back at a desk copying, like Flaubert himself, the compiler of this commonplace book, lost - impersonal - in all the stupidity of the human. Since his death, each of these novels has, in fact, been singled out as centrally - and often exclusively - important: for James, for Sartre, Flaubert was Madame Bovary; for Proust, for Kafka, he was supremely L'Education sentimentale; for Valery, who not unlike Flaubert himself detested Madame Bovary and ‘its ‘'truth'’ of reconstituted mediocrity', the significant book was La Tentation; for Barthes and others in recent years, it has been Bouvard et Pecuchet; and mention must also be made again of the Correspondance which has itself been treated as a major book, a great portrait-novel-document of the modern writer.