Gustave Flaubert, Trois contes. Nouvelle édition critique de Barbara Vinken, avec trois essais

Abstract

The enduring appeal and challenge of Flaubert’s Trois contes make a new edition or monograph elucidating these qualities a high point for specialists and new readers of Flaubert alike. Barbara Vinken’s rich study addresses the importance of the Trois contes, in terms of their detail and wider perspectives, in two halves. The first constitutes a comprehensively annotated edition of the Trois contes, so that they may be read as independent texts or as a triptych with their critical-exegetical apparatus constantly in view at the foot of each page. The second half dedicates a reappraisal to each conte, to focus on their specifically religious polemic as the missing link for Vinken in francophone Flaubert Studies. Close critical (re)reading is therefore actively encouraged and produced in the first half of the monograph, less to emphasize and demonstrate Flaubert’s virtuoso linguistic, historical, and compositional detail, than to highlight its range of erudition (including the ironies of certain allusions). To speed-read this edition for the immediate pleasures of Flaubert’s Trois contes would mean actively to override the multiple and extensive notes. The visibly larger reward is for attentive slow-reading, dwelling on critical glosses. Vinken’s propensity to tell rather than show then ratchets up in the three essays. These offer strong, almost Bloomian, intertextual exegetical contemplations, including in the religious sense, to highlight for example the comparative importance of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Geneviève: histoire d’une servante in an understanding of Félicité as an anti–Virgin Mary in Un cœur simple; or Victor Hugo’s Légende du beau Pécopin as cousin germain of La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, to make Julien a Nimrod figure. The didactic impulses of these essays are particularly magnified in Vinken’s study of Hérodias for its Roman ‘révélation ex negativo de l’histoire du salut’ (p. 225), to expand the provocative essay title ‘Iaokanaan, ou L’Église catholique romaine, fille de Babel’. Each critical essay then closes with reproductions of the artworks that, for Vinken, illustrate her arguments regarding the religious iconography in the conte in question. Although no conclusion attends to the connecting triptych that is the Trois contes, Vinken’s main contention that Flaubert’s work is a synoptic ‘dys-évangile’ (p. 228) will usefully stir up further responses to the question of the (anti-)religious in Flaubert. This argument pivots on Vinken’s reading of the tales and their endings as ironic, despite her quotation of Flaubert’s letter to Mme Roger de Genettes of 19 June 1876: ‘Cela n’est nullement ironique, comme vous supposez, mais au contraire très sérieux et très triste’ (cited p. 167, with incorrect note reference; the letter is found in Flaubert, Correspondance, v: Janvier 1876 – mai 1880, ed. by Jean Bruneau and Yvan Leclerc (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), p. 57). New students of Flaubert, however, often read the endings of the Trois contes in accordance with Flaubert’s touchingly serious appraisal, to understand his multiple appeal to things religious as the crucible and target of his writing. Vinken’s more prescriptive analysis then reveals other interpretative gaps in her edition. It overlooks the complex historical contexts of Flaubert’s writing of the Trois contes, such as the Franco-Prussian War and the final publication of his most religious text of all, La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874), which he had reworked throughout his life. Her edition also strikingly omits an editorial preface to acknowledge the source text for the first part of her study, and the vital work of previous editors of the Trois contes. These include Peter Michael Wetherill’s edition (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018), which Vinken uses in the essays in the second half of her study. It is then rather odd that new readers of Vinken’s edition cannot refer back to Flaubert’s text in its first half to engage with the textual evidence cited in her essays in the second.