Stéréotypes, idées reçues et lieux communs dans l’œuvre et la Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert undeniably represents a fascinating case with regard to stereotyping, especially if one considers not only his masterpiece, Madame Bovary, but also his last volume, left unfinished in perhaps a symbolic way, Bouvard et Pécuchet, and the collections of clichés included in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues and Le Sottisier. What is prosaic is important for the novelist. Moreover, in his Correspondence we find a real and fascinating interest in the topic of the cliché. A key sentence concerning what is commonplace suggestively describes Charles Bovary’s conversation: “Charles’ conversation was as flat as a pavement, and people’s ideas paraded on it in their ordinary outfit, without vibrating with emotion, with laughter or with daydreaming” (my translation). Essentially, our aim is to dwell on language and gesture stereotypes as presented in some of Flaubert’s novels as well as in the short story Un cœur simple (A Simple Heart) and even in his travel notes. Furthermore, through the agency of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ample work L’Idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot), it is our aim to look into the language mechanisms which lead to mal du siècle in Flaubert’s view, namely the stupidity of wanting a conclusion and the circulation of received ideas.

Flaubert et la caricature : l’exigence de la modernité

Quelquefois caricaturé par ses contemporains, Flaubert suscite les réactions dans l'outrance, lui qui ose dans sa Correspondance abonder dans la caricature selon ses humeurs et ses opinions en excellant dans l'hyperbole et l ’emphase. Un mot de son cru le résume : « hénaurrrme ». Au demeurant, ses personnages les plus mémorables sont des caricatures : de l ’amour avec Emma, de la bêtise avec Bouvard et Pécuchet, de la bonté avec Félicité d'Un Cœur simple… Dans la fabrique flaubertienne, l'incarnation est intrinsèquement liée à la déformation, elle-même dégradée en parodie. Car la caricature chez Flaubert est partie prenante d'une pensée nihiliste : le romancier participe d ’une déconstruction généralisée de la société bourgeoise parune caricature évidemment politique même si l ’écrivain se défend d ’utiliser l'œuvre comme une tribune, au nom de l'autotélisme de l ’art. Au fond, c'est la modernité de Flaubert qui justifie le goût et l'usage de la caricature.

Naturaleza y artificio en los paisajes de Flaubert

This paper focuses on the evolution of the sentiment of landscape in Gustave Flaubert’s work, both in his travel stories (in Brittany and, especially, in Near East, with the famous Voyage en Orient) and in his major literary works (Salammbô, Madame Bovary, L’éducation sentimentale, Bouvard et Pécuchet). It is part of a more general and collective research in the School of Architecture of Granada about the image of architecture, town and landscape in literature and painting.

The Warring Brothers: Borges Reads Kafka and Flaubert

This article examines the preparatory materials that Borges used to teach courses at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores in Buenos Aires, on Kafka in 1951 and on Flaubert in 1952. Though several well known essays emerged from these courses – “Kafka y sus precursors”, “Flaubert y su destino ejemplar” and “Vindicación de Bouvard et Pécuchet” – the manuscripts reveal far more of Borges's research and thinking about the two authors. Key concepts that he develops in these essays include his unusual (and influential) idea of the “precursor” that is only revealed through reading later works and heterodox ideas about realism and verisimilitude.

Le bourdon mathématique de Flaubert

A first glance would suffice to realize that amongst the fields of knowledge expe-rienced in Bouvard et Pécuchet mathematics is one of the very few absences. This is in-deed strange, bearing in mind it is the “queen of all sciences” and the basis for the main scientific disciplines. This peculiar absence is attributed to Flaubert’s lack of knowledge of the subject, justified as it is with the aid of his letters of complaint during his school years. However, it is not difficult to find in his novels numerous references that, once analyzed, reveal a twofold conception of mathematics.Also, the analysis of Bouvard et Pecuchet, and of his plans, papers and drafts, shows that Mathematics is not absent in this novel but it is rather the object of a game of concealment that begins in the opening sen-tences. Being aware of the place that mathematics occupies within the novel should give the field a new dimension.

Flaubert versus the Enlightenment: The Libidinal Economy of Knowledge in Bouvard et Pécuchet

This article reads Flaubert's unfinished final novel Bouvard et Pécuchet as a two-volume epic that demonstrates the secret of the encyclopedia: the fact that different calculi of truth functions can be seen to operate independently in different areas of knowledge, that knowledge itself contains contradictions. Taking Lukács's distinction between “narrative” and “descriptive” realism as a starting point, I argue that Bouvard in fact “narrates” the very changes Lukács describes, depicting a historical shift that speaks not only to changes in literary practice but to fundamental changes in the theory and organization of knowledge itself (compare Umberto Eco's From Tree to Labyrinth). Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's theory of the “proletarianization of consumption” in the postmodern “libidinal economy,” I read Flaubert as offering a prophetic Marxist critique of the political economy (centered around the consumption of information) that determines Bouvard and Pécuchet's estate. The novel's structure as an immoralist bildungsroman—in which the protagonists’ faithful pursuit of Enlightenment ideals eventually leads them to directly reject those ideals—corresponds to and predicts the situation diagnosed by Stiegler in For a New Critique of Political Economy. Finally, I point to a cycle of sublimation and desublimation in the novel regarding knowledge and stupidity, a complex cycle that nonetheless makes it possible to read the ascetic-aesthetic copy-mapping project of volume 2 (the Sottisier) as a cynical but effective response to dehumanizing capitalist processes like proletarianization and the desublimation of knowledge.

Trials of Curiosity: Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine and Bouvard et Pécuchet

Flaubert regarded his last two novels, La Tentation de saint Antoine and the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet, as companion pieces. For all their obvious differences in terms of setting and generic models, certain similarities have struck readers, not least the way in which both works depart from the parameters of the writer’s influential poetics. Among the most prominent similarities are an unmistakable and at times tiresome repetitiveness and the overwhelming encyclopedic scope of the scientific knowledge and disciplines informing both works. The essay charts the different generic lineages that make for the difficulty in situating Flaubert’s late work to then discuss a theme that is often overlooked: curiositas. Hans Blumenberg’s magisterial history of curiosity, Der Prozeß der theoretischen Neugierde, allows us to account for the peculiar mix of science and religion, gnostic and scientific curiosity, in La Tentation, while the philosopher’s short study Das Lachen der Thrakerin, an extension of the curiosity book, casts a new light on the ambivalent status of libido sciendi in Bouvard et Pécuchet.