"Against the stupidity of my age I feel waves of hatred that suffocate me,” Gustave Flaubert wrote to his old friend Louis Bouilhet in September 1855:
“The taste of shit comes to my mouth.... I want to keep it there, congeal it, harden it, make it into a paste to daub all over the nineteenth century, as Indian pagodas are gilded with cow dung; and who knows, maybe it will endure."
Like other self-hating bourgeois intellectuals, Flaubert resented his own prosperous class, the dumbed-down, money-grubbing, bulging-belly middle class, and he was never loath to complain about bourgeois stupidity. He was logically bound to resent bourgeois happiness because stupidity, he had said, in combination with selfishness and health, is necessary for happiness.
Alas that being wise to the world’s stupidity can render one miserable absent faith in some imagined nonsense that breaks logic’s stupefying hold on the human mind; e.g. the irrational Logos or one-god of good and evil from which human logic flees as it absurdly rationalizes ambiguity.
“We suffer from one thing only: Absurdity,” sayeth Flaubert.
We are in the same boat, a ship of fools. Do not blame the plebeians alone for their stupidity for they are stupid by nature. Besides complaining about our slavish, dumbed-down, democratic culture, the politics of resentment obliges intellectuals to complain of their dumbed-up masters, the idiotology-stupefied leadership.
“The enlightened classes must be enlightened. Begin by the head, which is the sickest, the rest will follow.”
In an 1852, letter to Louise Colet, his ravishing Parisian paramour, Flaubert said man would be stupid without the Meaningless:
“If the sense of man’s imperfections, of the meaninglessness of life, were to perish…we would be more stupid than birds that at least perch on trees.”
Well, birds perch on trees because they do not intentionally create meaningful goals to which they fly off to in different directions. An “existentialist” of “absurdist” cast knows life is meaningless, that it is impossible for mind to understand nature because they are inherently incompatible; wherefore he may be happy that he does not have the stupidity that Flaubert said is prerequisite to bourgeois happiness.
Flaubert would rather not complain about the Surd, the deafness and dumbness of nature to humankind’s desires, and man’s natural inability to be what he would be rather than what he is, which makes of human existence an absurd exercise in futility:
“Let nothing distress us,” he wrote to Colet, “to complain of everything that grieves or annoys us is to complain of the very nature of life. You and I are created to depict it, nothing more.”
Was not Flaubert’s famous dedication to “Art for Art’s sake” along with his supposedly realistic, dispassionate, scientific depiction of the world as it is, no matter how absurd, a complaint, nonetheless, about the general nature of the world, since the motivation for the complaint is a repudiation of that world?
People of No would not even get out of bed in the morning if there were nothing to complain about. Surely civilization must have something worth complaining if meaningful improvement can be obtained. That is, humankind would not progress without complaints and suggestions for their resolution. Hopefully the resolutions necessary for moral progress, of which there has been rather little over thousands of years, will be nonviolent even though conservative academics have said behind the lines that morals cannot improve without the trials and tribulations of war, so there is no other reason to wage it.
He would have plenty to complain about in his 1871 correspondence. He was in a dark mood, and for good reason. The Franco-Prussian war had been disastrous for France. Defeat led to defeat after defeat. Emperor (Louis) Napoleon III and his army had capitulated on September 2, 1870. That was followed by a bloodless revolution in Paris. Thus fell the Second Empire, and the Third Republic began after Bismarck insisted on the election of a national assembly. On January 18, 1871, the Prussian king was crowned emperor of a united Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. On February 17, 1871, M. Thiers was appointed chief executive, under control of the assembly. The war would be renewed under the new Republic; the Paris Commune, outraged at the sight of marching German troops, revolted, and was put down by troops on May 21, 1871.
“The war had made a profound impression upon (Gustave); his old Latin blood had revolted at this return to barbarity,” recounted his niece Caroline Commanville’s biographical account.
He had in fact been appointed lieutenant in the National Guard, but he refused to wear the Legion of Honor. His house in Croisset had been occupied by the Prussians, much to his dismay, which had caused him to flee to paltry quarters in nearby Rouen where he stayed ten months—any dislocation from his accustomed studio severely disturbed his work:
“The fatal lack of employment that a disturbed life brings, the thought of his study, his books, his home soiled by the presence of the enemy, brought to my uncle's heart and mind frightful anxiety and grief. The arts appeared to him dead. Why? Was it possible? Could it be that an intelligent country would cause these billows of blood? But there were scholars who were holding Paris in siege, and hurling projectiles against the monuments!”
Fortunately for him, the billeted officers did little damage to his home:
“He thought that he should return to his house to find nothing there. He was deceived; save some trifling objects without value, such as cards, a penknife, or a paper-cutter, they had respected absolutely all that belonged to him. One thing only about the return was suffocating, the odour of the Prussian, as the French call it, an odour of greased boots. The walls were impregnated with it, through their stay there of three long months, and it was necessary to paint and redecorate the rooms in order to get rid of it.”
“The good bourgeois is becoming more and more stupid!” Flaubert complained on 14 November 1871 from his home. “He does not even go to vote! The brute beasts surpass him in their instinct for self-preservation. Poor France! Poor us!”
He was preoccupied with editing his work to death until it perfectly matched his paralytic reality. He kept his romantic muse, Louise Colet, at arm's length in Paris and wrote to her from his sanctuary near Rouen, advising her at a distance to think only of style. Jean-Paul Sartre imagined in The Family Idiot that Flaubert's imagined world, his Imaginary, was not lifelike or dynamic, that it was static, in the sense of a self-defensive, immutable, fixed stance. His Imaginary was style. Pure style absent content is devoid of meaning, is formless form, and amounts to nothing really. Nothing is perfect, the end of everything.
"What shall we believe in, then?" Flaubert rhetorically asked George Sand. "In nothing!" he replied to himself. "That is the beginning of wisdom."
Nothing may be the beginning of wisdom, as if something could be made of nothing, but it is certainly not its end. Flaubert may have been a pithiatic idiot or morose moron as Sartre obsessively proposed because he was looking for himself or his roots in another master of French literature, but his Madame Bovary has inspired many a story since it was painstakingly composed.
XYX
Art by Sebastian Ferreira
permission granted