Linguistic Realism in Flaubert's "Bouvard et Pecuchet"

Abstract

Realism, Ortega writes, is the exemplum crucis of esthetics.' This is true quite simply because realism derives its claim to truth from something which is outside the realm of art: nature, the real, the given. The task of the literary realist consists in making his reader forget that he is reading a book, that his experience is being mediated through a symbolic system of signification. Cervantes discovered the most effective formula to accomplish this task: the hero will himself be a reader of books and a believer in their truth, their transparency; his actions will constitute an attempt to interpret the world in their terms and his failure to do so will authenticate the which defeats him as somehow non-bookish, material, unmediated. Thus the reality unmasks the purely metaphorical status of earlier literary language in order to mask the metaphorical status of the language he himself is using. The hero of realism typically believes in the continuity between literature and reality, but his own reality is established by the novelist's revelation of the gap, the essential difference, between a self-reflexive system of signs and the concrete presence of things. Of all Flaubert's novels Madame Bovary most closely represents this prototype. Emma's belief in the realizability of fiction, her faith that her experience can correspond to literary models, is ultimately the cause of her suicide. For the dimension of fiction is the imaginary, the absent, and the Quixotic attempt to materialize this absence is bound to be defeated in confrontation with the inert mass of the phenomenal world. But in Flaubert's novel this emphasis on the incompatibility of the written and the real, developed mimetically on the level of plot, is counteracted by the striking similarity in the stylistic treatment accorded both elements of the dialectic. Emma's romantic dreams and the hum-drum events of everyday life which shatter them are created in the same meticulously constructed prose with its famous ternary rhythms, harmonious sound effects, pervasive use of style indirect libre and progressive et. As Proust puts it: In Flaubert's style . . . all parts of reality are converted into a single substance, with vast surfaces which shimmer monotonously. . . . Everything that was different has been converted and absorbed.2 Flaubert's homogeneous style is actually calculated to destroy the contrast between the imagined and the real which his language creates through its referential transparency. He felt that literary language, instead of pretending to be full of