A moral history of a generation

Aheadboard in a room at the Hôtel Littéraire Gustave Flaubert in Rouen – the city where its namesake was born – boasts a curiously dispiriting quotation:

He travelled.
He came to know the melancholy of steamboats, cold mornings awakening in tents, the dizzying sameness of landscapes and ruins, the bitterness of interrupted friendships.
He returned.
He went back to society, and he had other loves. But the persistent memory of the first one rendered them all insipid; moreover, that vehement desire that is the very flower of sensation had dissipated. Years passed; he went on living with an idle mind and an inert heart.

The passage, in French at the hotel, but quoted here in Raymond N. MacKenzie’s new translation, is from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. The novel, which up until this point has tracked the life of a young bourgeois named Frédéric Moreau, suddenly skips over his middle years to see his ambitions thwarted by mediocrity and age. This shift in narration is powerful: by omitting those intervening years Flaubert has Moreau’s disillusionment cut more deeply. Marcel Proust called it the “most beautiful” thing about the book, though for a hotel room it is questionable – a joke, perhaps, on tourists who might not read French. The book itself is scarcely more jovial, although it certainly can be funny.

Published in 1869, Sentimental Education portrays the coming of age of its central character in the years before France’s Second Empire, an ironic hero whose self-absorption prevents him from any meaningful engagement in life. His involvement in the Revolution of 1848, which led to the first modern democratic election with universal male suffrage, dwindles in comparison to his failed attempts to seduce Madame Arnoux, the object of his affection. His friends fare no better. Flaubert meant the book to be a “moral history” of how the inner lives of his generation were shaped and disillusioned by contemporary events. “The only amusing thing about 1848”, wrote Charles Baudelaire, who unlike Flaubert participated in the revolt, “was that everyone was constructing utopias like castles in the air.”

The novel sold poorly and its publisher lost money. Two years later, neglected by readers and misunderstood by critics, its author declared to his friend Maxime du Camp as they surveyed the wreckage of Paris after the bloody suppression of the 1871 Commune that if Sentimental Education had been properly understood, the destruction around them could have been averted.

The novel is less widely read than Madame Bovary (1857), and its reputation has taken time to build. Émile Zola championed it in the following decades, as, in the early twentieth century, did Ford Madox Ford and Willa Cather – Franz Kafka even described it as his favourite book. More immersive tableau than standard storytelling, it is remarkable for its world-building. The biographer Frederick Brown described its depiction of Moreau’s life as “a saga of free association”; it is almost what we might today call plotless fiction. Using historical accounts as a backdrop, the story erupts, by the end of the second section, into the events of 1848 that established France’s brief and flawed Second Republic, which ended with Louis Napoléon’s 1851 coup d’état. Praised by both historians and literary critics, Sentimental Education’s historical accuracy gives it the feeling of reportage with fictional characters. What keeps the book relevant, however, is not its fidelity to historical record or formal innovation, but its vision of human folly: how people live through the chaos of political change and how a society that encourages self-interest suffers for it. The publication of MacKenzie’s new translation, and the chance to reconsider it, feels aptly timed.

Flaubert never directly presents the moral of a story, only the actions and thoughts of his characters. At the time this use of irony was a radical and provocative approach to storytelling. He moves seamlessly between external events and the thoughts of his characters without commenting on them, using free indirect narration. One evening, for example, Moreau finds himself caught up in a protest: “To put an end to this, plainclothes policemen were seizing the most unruly demonstrators and dragging them brutally off. Frédéric, despite his indignation at the sight, said nothing; they might arrest him along with the others, and then he would miss Madame Arnoux.” The semicolon shifts from the actions of the police officers to Moreau’s perspective, ending with his self-centeredness.

The subtlety and rigour that Flaubert paid to composition, in many ways, makes translating him a daunting task. As James Wood once wrote, “he assassinated repetition, unwanted clichés, clumsy sonorities”. MacKenzie’s translation often captures the lyricism of the original, although words in his version occasionally repeat when they do not in Flaubert’s, and where others in English could have avoided it. For example, he at times adds more “that”s than exist in the French, a language that, grammatically, requires more than English. A repetition of the word “like” in another paragraph adds an infelicity. One sentence ends with the phrase “he sank into a mental state that was like intoxication”, while the next begins: “Like an architect”. In the French the first is not constructed as a simile (“il sentit une ivresse le submerger”). The echoed structure in MacKenzie’s version could have been avoided, for example, by staying closer to French syntax. I quibble here not to take issue with the translator’s work, which includes some fascinating choices (even, in this case, the verb “sank”), but to point out the challenges posed by the strict constraints that Flaubert imposed on himself.

There is also the author’s attention to prose as an aural experience. Flaubert famously read his works aloud, once insisting on a four-day-long, thirty-two-hour recitation of The Temptation of Saint Anthony to his closest friends. The critic Albert Thibaudet wrote that for Flaubert compositions were “like a symphony”, considering him one of the “musicians of the sentence” and further claiming that the author’s rhythmic use of “et” contributed to the sonorous effect of his language. Take, as an example of its musicality, a phrase that MacKenzie captures well. During a summer in his youth Moreau and his friend Charles Deslauriers watch fields of wheat undulate in the sun while “the scent of angelica blew over them in the breeze”. The as in “angelica” rise above the rest of the vowels, buoyed by those bs, like a current of air on which the scent wafts. The reverie in the original, however, is punctuated suddenly by the subsequent sentence: “Le pion les appelait”. The call for students to come back to class breaks the enchantment. In French the following phrase has the pair returning to their studies (“on s’en revenait”, which rhymes with “appelait”), then resumes descriptions of the landscape while they head to school. Here MacKenzie opts to conjoin the parataxis: “When the monitor called them, they started back …” It’s an understandable choice, because the conjunction gives the word “monitor” the context for its meaning, but it sacrifices one of Flaubert’s brilliant stylistic techniques, what Proust called its “grammatical beauty”: cascading parallel syntax that build narrative momentum and help give his prose its unique music.

Throughout the novel MacKenzie brings Flaubert’s vivid descriptions to life, helping to transport the reader to the mid-nineteenth-century city. Along with his attention to the historical fabric of the text, his translator’s introduction and footnotes are excellent. Most important, he retains the book’s humour and its balance of satire and warmth, particularly in the dialogue of the bourgeoisie and the revolutionaries. “Irony”, Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet in 1852, “takes nothing away from pathos. On the contrary, it adds to it.” One memorable slapstick scene in the Bois du Boulogne involves a duel with a vicomte:

His head tilted back, his arms spread out wide, and he fell flat on his back in a faint. Joseph got him sitting up and, holding smelling salts to his nose, shook him violently. The vicomte opened his eyes and then, like a madman, abruptly leaped up and grabbed his sword.

By this point it is too late: he has already lost, having grazed his thumb and drawn blood when he fainted.

But for all its irony, what, in the end, is the lesson of Sentimental Education? Flaubert opted not to instruct his readers, but simply to depict the actions of his characters. On the final page Moreau and Deslauriers reminisce after years of estrangement. They remember a botched attempt in their teens to visit a brothel. By returning contrapuntally to a minor scene that was only briefly mentioned near the beginning of the book, the novel focuses its vision of human folly. In its final line the two agree that this unsuccessful attempt to hire prostitutes was “the best time of their lives”. In 1869 this ending scandalized readers and critics. The suggestion that such a memory – not, for example, the revolutionary events of 1848 – was their crowning happiness dispelled any highfalutin pretense of ideals. The irony of the ending nudges us to look at our own flaws and admit our own moral and ideological vicissitudes. Some critics have even spotted traces of autobiographical detail in the character of Moreau. Flaubert lets no one off the hook, not even himself.

Aaron Peck is a writer and critic whose work has recently appeared in Aperture, Frieze and the Wire

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post A moral history of a generation appeared first on TLS.