Katia N's Reviews > Sentimental Education

In the letter to his mistress, Louise Colet, Gustav Flaubert wrote:

“There are, literally speaking, two distinct people within me. The one is in love with bombast, lyricism, great eagle-like flights, sonorities of phrasing and the grandest of ideas; the other scratches and digs down into the truth as far as he can, loves acknowledging a humble fact just as much as a large one, wants to make you almost physically feel the things he shows you; this latter one loves to laugh, and delights in the animality of the human being.”

In this novel, both Flauberts work in a fabulous ensemble and achieve a very special result. I personally fell for attraction of Flaubert-2. There were many moments in this book he succeeded in making me “physically feel the things he showed”. He has infected me with the poetry of “a humble” moments as well as multitudes those moments tend to contained.

As a result, there will be a lot of quoting Flaubert in what follows as i just cannot restrain myself in my delight of his way with the words. For example, Paris:

“Pink clouds were floating like scarves above the rooftops; the awnings of the shops were being rolled up; water-carts were pouring a fine rain on the dust; and an unusual freshness was mingling with the smells from the cafés, where, through the open doors, between the silver and gilt decorations, bouquets of flowers could be seen reflected in the tall mirrors”.

This is timeless. It is a moment I could have enjoyed while in Paris almost two centuries later. Flaubert manages to make this image very vivid, very poignant and totally complete: it cannot be bettered by adding or taking a way a single word.

Another moment comes just after a insurrection was brutally put down on the streets:

“An old man in his shirtsleeves was weeping at an open window, his eyes raised towards the sky. The Seine was flowing peacefully by. The sky was blue; birds were singing in the trees of the Tuileries.”

This contrast of a crying old man versus blue sky and singing birds tells much more about the tragedy in one sentence compared to endless paragraphs of detailed descriptions someone else might have required. There is something of Chekhov in this phrase. Only Chekhov came later of course; so very likely this comparison should work other way.

But the main tool of Flaubert-2 is irony. The whole edifice of this novel is an exercise on the whole spectrum from the mildly comic to angry, sad or grotesque.

His reconstructions of various social gatherings are incredibly astute and very funny. They also have not dated at all in spite of internet age, post-truth, AI, etc. He describes parties, political meetings, banker’s dinners and a lot more. Other writers would create these scenes in a way that I would usually diligently skip. Not Flaubert. A costumed party given by a famous courtesan ends as follows:

“The Angel was still in the dining-room, tucking into a mixture of butter and sardines; and the Fishwife, sitting beside her, was smoking cigarettes and giving her advice about life. At last the cabs arrived and the guests left...But the Angel, a prey to the first symptoms of indigestion, could not get up. The Medieval Knight carried her to the cab. ‘Mind her wings!’ shouted the Stevedore through the window. On the landing Mademoiselle Vatnaz said to Rosanette: ‘Goodbye, my dear! It was a lovely party!’”

Some of those people were also present in this room, but in a different capacity, one might hope:

“There were a great many grey heads and wigs; here and there a bald pate glistened; and the faces, which were either flushed or very pale, revealed in their degeneration the traces of an immense weariness, for the men there were mostly in politics or business.”

The one of the funniest episode is a duel. Duel has been a trope of the European literature since the 17th century at least. It is always a tragedy, tragic mistake, an honourable act. Not in Flaubert hands. He subverts it revealing all the absurd of this tradition. In this novel, the duel is a comic farce with both participants look pathetic for different reasons, and no one gets hurt. Someone said that the distance between the great and the pathetic is really a single step. I was thinking about it a lot while reading this novel.

Occasionally his irony is getting angrier:

"She was one of those Parisian spinsters who, every evening, when they have given their lessons, or tried to sell their little drawings or place their pitiful manuscripts, go home with mud on their petticoats, cook their dinner, eat it all alone, and then, with their feet on a foot-warmer, by the light of a smoking lamp, dream of a love-affair, a family, a home, a fortune – all the things they haven’t got. Consequently, like many others, she had greeted the Revolution as the harbinger of revenge; she was devoting herself passionately to Socialist propaganda. According to Mademoiselle Vatnaz, the emancipation of the proletariat was possible only through the emancipation of women....And seeing that the Government did not recognize their rights, they would have to conquer force by force. Ten thousand citizenesses, armed with good muskets, could make the Hôtel de Ville tremble.”

One could say Flaubert is merciless. But i found this ability to laugh at serious issues a very valuable skill. Sometimes I feel it has been lost in some examples of our contemporary debates and also in literature. Can this loss be a side effect of achievement the wider democratisation of the western society in the last century or so? I doubt it follows. At least i hope not necessary. We still should be able to laugh.

In extreme, Flaubert skilfully utilises the bombshell of grotesque:

“In the entrance-hall, standing on a pile of clothes, a prostitute was posing as a statue of Liberty, motionless and terrifying, with her eyes wide open."

Who can create more powerful and meaningful symbolism than a prostitute as a statue of Liberty. This symbol still has not lost its actuality and probably never will.

“Sentimental education” the main character, Frederic, gets through his life cannot escape the ironic gaze either. A few decades after the novel, Joris-Karl Huysmans said that the novel genre was somewhat in a crisis in the 60s as it mainly addressed “why did Monsieur So-and-So commit (or fail to commit) adultery with Madame So-and-So;”. On the surface this is exactly this novel. We are evidencing the shenanigans of Frederic between several women that are becoming (shenanigans, not women; but they are also actually) progressively more cynical and difficult to manage. Flaubert shows how the society and simple fact of experiencing life manages to “mould” an idealistic youth into a disillusioned man. But the irony is that he just about manages to get hold of an ideal. And when he faces the last and only chance to test it with reality, he choses not to do it. And his motivation, it seems, is pretty egoistic.

However, it is not only Flaubert-2 does heavy lifting. Flaubert-1 has also works hard. The novel is meticulously researched. Apparently, it took Flaubert more than five years to write it. He checked and researched all details including into the novel including production processes, political events, even shoes and type of china used. However, the research is never “sticking out from the stitches” or become an “information dump” as it is often happens in the novels written in our age. The dialogues of his characters discussing contemporary ideas sound like conversation not like a lecture in politics. These people were the children of the French revolution. By itself they’ve lived through the unrest of 1848-51; the majority have participated in it in some form or another. All of this forms the part of “big canvas” by Flaubert-1. However, interestingly, many of these debates and even the language of their discourse would not be out of place in our time.

This is the conversation between Frederic and his friend. To keep it nuanced, i will need a lengthy quote:

‘Because, just like the manufacturers who want to exclude foreign goods, these gentlemen (workers and other lower classes) demand the expulsion of all workers from England, Germany, Belgium, and Savoy. As for their intelligence, what good did their famous guilds do them under the Restoration? In 1830 they joined the National Guard, without even having the sense to get control of it! And, as soon as ’ 48 was over, didn’t the trade unions appear again with their own special banners? They even wanted their own representatives in the Chamber, who would have spoken just for them! Just like the beetroot deputies who never worry about anything but beetroot! Oh, I’ve had enough of those fellows! First they grovelled in front of Robespierre’s scaffold, then it was the Emperor’s boots, and after that Louis-Philippe’s umbrella. Scum, that’s what they are, always ready to serve anybody who’ll stuff their mouths with bread! People are always condemning the venality of Talleyrand and Mirabeau; but the messenger downstairs would sell his country for fifty centimes if you promised him a tariff of three francs for every errand he ran! Oh, what a mess we’re in! We ought to have set fire to every corner of Europe!’

Frédéric replied: ‘The spark was missing. You were just a lot of little shopkeepers at heart, and the best of you were doctrinaires. As for the workers, they’ve got every reason to complain; for apart from a million taken from the Civil List, which you granted them with the vilest flattery, you’ve given them nothing but fine phrases. The wages book remains in the employer’s hands, and the employee, even before the law, is still inferior to his master, because nobody takes his word. Altogether, the Republic strikes me as out of date. Who knows? Perhaps progress can only be achieved through an aristocracy or a single man. The initiative always comes from above. The people are still immature, whatever you may say.’

The debate is still ongoing it seems. But hopefully they are both wrong, at least partly in their conclusions.

This is the novel to revitalise my tainted belief that realism can be exciting and delightful if it is done by a great artist. However, I want to finish with Flaubert’s dream. In the one of his letters, he wrote:

“What seems beautiful to me, what I would most like to write, is a book about nothing, a book that is connected to nothing outside itself, one that would be held together strictly by the strength of its style, just like the earth which, hanging suspended in space, depends on nothing external to support it; a book that would have almost no subject, or at least one where the subject would be nearly invisible, if it could be done. The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer that the expression comes to the thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and blending into it, the more beautiful. I believe that the future of Art lies in this direction. .. This is why there is no such thing as an elevated or a degraded subject, and why one could almost set it up as an axiom that from the point of view of pure Art, there is no subject, style being in itself an absolute way of seeing things.”

I am not sure Flaubert has written such a book himself. But he has created the space. And in the 20th centuries the others like abstract visual artists and the writers like Borges, Beckett and Kafka could fill it in.