Science and Confusion: On Flaubert's Temptation

Abstract

spoke often in his letters of a desire to make criticism, literary style, and even politics scientific. Recent critics have tended to assume that the meaning of Flaubert's lies always elsewhere than in practices of the natural sciences as he and his contemporaries knew them. When Raymonde Debray-Genette writes, for example, Flaubert n'emprunte veritablement a la science que l'idee d'une g6neralit6 probable, she implicitly subsumes science to an aesthetic category, to a documentary vraisemblable which justifies-or better authorizes-prior acts of the imagination.1 Likewise there has long been a tendency among readers of the Bovary to see in science a threatening but ridiculous discourse of power inscribed in the young Gustave's Oedipal conflict with his father, the doctor.2 Ultimately Flaubert's rhetoric of science must be brought to bear on the process of writing itself, if not also on the real-life vicissitudes that conditioned that process. But I will argue in this essay that only by postponing the subsumption to aesthetics or personal history, only by looking first at the nineteenth-century science behind Flaubert's rhetoric, can you see how was at once tempted by science as an institution of power and drawn to confusion, the very negation of science and its ruses. My reading of the motley bustle that is La Tentation de saint Antoine will show how actually wrote the contradictory temptations of science and confusion into the final, 1874 version of that text. And it'will