Gustave Flaubert (UK:/ˈfloʊbɛər/FLOH-bair,US:/floʊˈbɛər/floh-BAIR;[1][2]French:[ɡystavflobɛʁ]; 12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent ofliterary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality".[3] He is known especially for hisdebut novelMadame Bovary (1857), hisCorrespondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style andaesthetics. The celebrated short story writerGuy de Maupassant was aprotégé of Flaubert.
Flaubert was born inRouen, in theSeine-Maritime department ofUpper Normandy, in northern France. He was the second son of Anne Justine Caroline (née Fleuriot; 1793–1872) and Achille-Cléophas Flaubert (1784–1846), director and senior surgeon of the major hospital in Rouen.[4] He began writing at an early age, as early as eight according to some sources.[5]
He was educated at theLycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen,[6] and did not leave until 1840, whereupon he went to Paris to studylaw. In Paris, he was an indifferent student and found the city distasteful. He made a few acquaintances, includingVictor Hugo. Toward the end of 1840, he traveled in thePyrenees andCorsica.[7] In 1846, after an attack ofepilepsy, he left Paris and abandoned the study of law.
From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poetLouise Colet;his letters to her survived.[7] After leaving Paris, he returned to Croisset, near theSeine, close to Rouen, and lived there for the rest of his life. He did however make occasional visits to Paris and England, where he apparently had a mistress.
Politically, Flaubert described himself as a "romantic and liberal old dunce" (vieille ganache romantique et libérale),[8] an "enragedliberal" (libéral enragé), a hater of all despotism, and one who celebrated every protest of the individual against power and monopolies.[9][10]
With his lifelong friendMaxime Du Camp, he traveled inBrittany in 1846.[7] In 1849–50 he went on a long journey to the Middle East, visitingGreece and Egypt. InBeirut he contractedsyphilis. He spent five weeks inIstanbul in 1850. He visitedCarthage in 1858 to conduct research for his novelSalammbô.
Flaubert did not marry or have children. In a 1852 letter to Colet, he explained his reasons for not wanting children, saying he would "transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence".
Flaubert was very open about his sexual activities with prostitutes in his travel writings. He suspected that achancre on his penis was from aMaronite or aTurkish girl.[11] He also engaged in intercourse with male prostitutes in Beirut and Egypt; in one of his letters, he describes a "pockmarked young rascal wearing a white turban".[12][13]
According to his biographer Émile Faguet, his affair with Louise Colet was his only serious romantic relationship.[14]
Flaubert was a diligent worker and often complained in his letters to friends about the strenuous nature of his work. He was close to his niece, Caroline Commanville, and had a close friendship and correspondence withGeorge Sand. He occasionally visited Parisian acquaintances, includingÉmile Zola,Alphonse Daudet,Ivan Turgenev, andEdmond andJules de Goncourt.
The 1870s were a difficult time for Flaubert. Prussian soldiers occupied his house during theWar of 1870, and his mother died in 1872. After her death, he fell into financial difficulty due to business failures on the part of his niece's husband. Flaubert lived withvenereal diseases most of his life. His health declined and he died at Croisset of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1880 at the age of 58. He was buried in the family vault in the cemetery of Rouen. A monument to him byHenri Chapu was unveiled at the museum of Rouen.[7]
His first finished work wasNovember, a novella, which was completed in 1842.[15]
In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of a novel,The Temptation of Saint Anthony. He read the novel aloud toLouis Bouilhet andMaxime Du Camp over the course of four days, not allowing them to interrupt or give any opinions. At the end of the reading, his friends told him to throw the manuscript in the fire, suggesting instead that he focus on day-to-day life rather than fantastic subjects.[16]
In 1850, after returning from Egypt, Flaubert began work onMadame Bovary. The novel, which took five years to write, was serialized in theRevue de Paris in 1856. The government brought an action against the publisher and author on the charge of immorality,[7] which was heard during the following year, but both were acquitted. WhenMadame Bovary appeared in book form, it met with a warm reception.
In 1858, Flaubert travelled toCarthage to gather material for his next novel,Salammbô. The novel was completed in 1862 after four years of work.[17]
Drawing on his youth, Flaubert next wroteL'Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education), an effort that took seven years. This was his last complete novel, published in the year 1869. The story focuses on the romantic life of a young man named Frédéric Moreau at the time of the French Revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire.[18]
In the 1870s, Flaubert wrote an unsuccessful drama,Le Candidat, and he published a reworked version ofThe Temptation of Saint Anthony, portions of which had been published as early as 1857. He devoted much of his time to an ongoing project,Les Deux Cloportes (The Two Woodlice), which later becameBouvard et Pécuchet, breaking the obsessive project only to write theThree Tales between 1875 and 1877. This book comprises three stories:Un Cœur simple (A Simple Heart),La Légende de Saint-Julien l'Hospitalier (The Legend of St.Julian the Hospitaller), andHérodias (Herodias). After the publication of the stories, he spent the remainder of his life toiling onBouvard et Pécuchet, the unfinished version of which was posthumously published in 1881. It was a grand satire on the futility of human knowledge and the ubiquity of mediocrity.[7] Flaubert believed the work to be his masterpiece, though the novel received only a very small print run and mostly lukewarm reviews.
Flaubert was a prolific letter writer, and his letters have been collected in several publications.
At the time of his death, he may have been working on a further historical novel, based on theBattle of Thermopylae.[19]
Flaubert famously avoided the inexact, the abstract and the vaguely inapt expression, and scrupulously eschewed thecliché.[20] In a letter toGeorge Sand he said that he spent his time "trying to write harmonious sentences, avoidingassonances".[21][22]
Flaubert believed in and pursued the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key means to achieve high quality in literary art.[23] He worked in sullen solitude, sometimes occupying a week in the completion of one page, never satisfied with what he had composed.[7] In Flaubert's correspondence he intimates this, explaining correct prose did not flow out of him and that his style was achieved through work and revision.[20] Flaubert said he wished to forge a style "that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind." He famously said that "an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."[24]
This painstaking style of writing is also evident when one compares Flaubert's output over a lifetime to that of his peers (for exampleBalzac orZola). Flaubert published much less prolifically than was the norm for his time and never got near the pace of a novel a year, as his peers often achieved during their peaks of activity.Walter Pater famously called Flaubert the "martyr of style".[23][25][26][27]
Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring; it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this inDefoe orAusten orBalzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.
As a writer, other than a pure stylist, Flaubert was nearly equal partsromantic andrealist.[20] Hence, members of various schools, especially realists and formalists, have traced their origins to his work. The exactitude with which he adapts his expressions to his purpose can be seen in all parts of his work, especially in the portraits he draws of the figures in his principal romances. The degree to which Flaubert's fame has extended since his death presents "an interesting chapter of literary history in itself".[7] He is also credited with spreading the popularity of the color Tuscany Cypress, a color often mentioned in his chef-d'œuvreMadame Bovary.
Flaubert's lean and precise writing style has had a large influence on 20th-century writers such asFranz Kafka andJ. M. Coetzee. AsVladimir Nabokov discussed in his famous lecture series:[29]
The greatest literary influence upon Kafka was Flaubert's. Flaubert who loathed pretty-pretty prose would have applauded Kafka's attitude towards his tool. Kafka liked to draw his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of the author's private sentiments; this was exactly Flaubert's method through which he achieved a singular poetic effect. The legacy of his work habits can best be described, therefore, as paving the way towards a slower and more introspective manner of writing.
The publication ofMadame Bovary in 1856 was followed by more scandal than admiration; it was not understood at first that this novel was the beginning of something new: the scrupulously truthful portraiture of life. Gradually, this aspect of his genius was accepted, and it began to crowd out all others. At the time of his death, he was widely regarded as the most influential French Realist. Under this aspect Flaubert exercised an extraordinary influence overGuy de Maupassant,Edmond de Goncourt,Alphonse Daudet, andÉmile Zola.[7] Even after the decline of the Realist school, Flaubert did not lose prestige in the literary community; he continues to appeal to other writers because of his deep commitment to aesthetic principles, his devotion to style, and his indefatigable pursuit of the perfect expression.
HisŒuvres Complètes (8 vols., 1885) were printed from the original manuscripts, and included, besides the works mentioned already, the two playsLe Candidat andLe Château des cœurs. Another edition (10 vols.) appeared in 1873–85. Flaubert's correspondence withGeorge Sand was published in 1884 with an introduction by Guy de Maupassant.[7]
On the occasion of Flaubert's 198th birthday (12 December 2019), a group of researchers atCNRS published a neural language model under his name.[31][32]
Flaubert and Turgenev, a Friendship in Letters: The Complete Correspondence (ed. Barbara Beaumont, 1985)
Correspondence with George Sand:
The George Sand–Gustave Flaubert Letters, translated by Aimée G. Leffingwell McKenzie (A. L. McKenzie), introduced by Stuart Sherman (1921), available at the Gutenberg website asE-text No. 5115
^Kvas, Kornelije (2020).The Boundaries of Realism in World Literature. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books. p. 159.ISBN978-1-7936-0910-6.
^"Gustave Flaubert's Life",Madame Bovary, Alma Classics edition, p. 309, publ 2010,ISBN978-1-84749-322-4
^Gustave Flaubert,The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)ISBN0-674-52636-8
^Weisberg, Richard H. (1984).The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction. Yale University Press. p. 89.
^Séginger, Gisèle (2005). "Le Roman de la Momie et Salammbô. Deux romans archéologiques contre l'Histoire".Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Budé.1 (2):135–151.doi:10.3406/bude.2005.3651.
^abChandler, Edmund (1958),Pater on style: an examination of the essay on "Style" and the textual history of "Marius the Epicurean", p. 17,Pater then digress into a discussion of Flaubert and the monumental labours that have earned him the title of the 'martyr' of style. Pater quotes a French critic describing Flaubert's principle of 'le mot juste', which, he believed, was the means to the quality of the literary art (that is, 'truth') that lies beyond incidental and ornamental beauty. Flaubert's obsession with the thought that there exists the precise word or phrase for everything to be expressed shows, Pater suggests, the influence of a philosophical idea—those exact correlations between the world of ideas and the world of words can be found.
^Flaubert, Gustave.The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857. Translated by Steegmuller, Francis.
^Menand, Louis (2007),Discovering modernism: T.S. Eliot and his context, Oxford University Press, USA, p. 59,ISBN9780195159929,This difficult virtue of "restraint" Pater thought exemplified by Flaubert, whom he made not the hero (for style has no heroes) but the martyr of style.
^Conlon, John J. "The Martyr of Style: Gustave Flaubert," in Walter Pater and the French Tradition, 1982
^Magill, Frank Northen (1987),Critical survey of literary theory, vol. 3, Salem Press, p. 1089,ISBN9780893563936,in a discussion of style in which he glorifies Gustave Flaubert as "the martyr of style," he extols Flaubert's workmanship as a model for all writers, including English.
