Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert (Rouen, December 12, 1821 - Croisset, May 8, 1880) was a French writer. Considered one of the best Western novelists, he is best known for his novel Madame Bovary, in addition to her scrupulous devotion to her art and style, best exemplified by her endless search for le mot juste ('the exact word').
Biography
Gustave Flaubert was the second son of Achille Cléophas (1784-1846) and Anne Justine, née Fleuriot (1793-1872). His father, chief surgeon at Rouen Hospital, served as a model for the character of Dr. Lariviēre in Madame Bovary . His mother was related to some of the oldest families in Normandy.
On May 15, 1832, he entered the Royal College of Rouen, where he attended eighth grade. He continued his studies at the Rouen college and institute without much enthusiasm. At school he was considered irresponsible. However, he started in literature at the age of eleven. During the summer of 1836 he met Élisa Schlésinger in Trouville. This meeting marked him a lot, which he later reflected in his novel Sentimental Education .
Graduated in 1839, in August 1840 he passed the baccalauréat exam. In the lottery for military service he was exempt, and he then began his law studies in Paris without much conviction. In his youth Flaubert was full of vigor and, despite his shyness, he possessed a certain grace, he was very enthusiastic and individualistic and apparently had no ambition. He met Victor Hugo. In the late 1840s, he traveled through the Pyrenees and Corsica. Back in Paris he wasted time daydreaming, living off the income provided by his estate. In June 1844, Flaubert, who loved the countryside and hated the city, left his law studies on the pretext of recovering from a fit of epilepsy, a disease he always tried to hide, and left Paris to return to Croisset, near Rouen, where she lived with her mother and later with her niece. This property, a house on a pleasant plot on the banks of the Seine, was Flaubert's home until the end of his days. This is also where he began his first literary works, for example the first version of The sentimental education .
In 1846 his father and sister died, two months after they fell ill. Flaubert took care of his niece. He began a stormy relationship with the poet Louise Colet that lasted ten years and from which a very important correspondence resulted. The letters that she addressed to him were preserved and, according to Emile Faguet, this relationship was the only important sentimental episode in the life of Flaubert, who never married.
In Paris he attended the Revolution of 1848, which he observed with a very critical gaze (as in Sentimental Education). During the Second French Empire he frequented the most influential Parisian salons and among others was related to George Sand.
Productive stage
Between May 24, 1848, and September 12, 1849, he wrote the first version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony. At that time his closest friend was Máxime du Camp (1822- 1894), with whom he toured the region of Brittany in 1846 and made a long journey (1849-1851) in which he toured Italy, Greece, Egypt, Jerusalem and Constantinople. This trip made a great impression on Flaubert's imagination, and since then, except for occasional visits to Paris, he never left Croisset.
Returning from his trip to the Orient, in 1851 he began to write Madame Bovary. He had previously written the novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony , but he was not happy with the result. It took him 56 months to write Madame Bovary, which was first published as a serial in the Revue de Paris in 1857. The authorities took legal action against the publisher and the author, accused of violating morality, but they were declared innocent, unlike Baudelaire, whom the same court had sentenced for the same reasons for his work The Flowers of Evil, also published that same year.
When Madame Bovary appeared in book format, it received a warm reception. Flaubert was able to afford a visit to Carthage between the months of April and June 1858, in order to document himself for his next novel, Salambó , which he did not finish until 1862, despite the uninterrupted work of him.
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He then resumed the study of the customs of his time and, using many of his memories of his youth and childhood, on September 1, 1864 he began to write the second version of Sentimental Education, which was published in 1869 by the publisher Michel Lévy. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Prussian soldiers occupied his house. Flaubert then began to suffer from nervous diseases.
Death or misunderstanding alienated him from his friends. In 1872 he lost his mother, and his hitherto good economic situation worsened. His niece, Mme. Commonville, took care of him. At that time, he established a relationship of intimate friendship with George Sand, with whom he maintained a correspondence of immense artistic interest, and from time to time he saw his Parisian acquaintances, Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgenev, Edmond Rostand and Jules goncourt; but nothing indicated the proximity of Flaubert's death, sunk in desolation and melancholy. However, he did not stop working with the same dedication as before. The temptation of Saint Anthony, of which some fragments were published in 1857, was finally completed and published by the Charpentier publishing house in 1874. In that year he was greatly disappointed due to the failure of his work theater The candidate. In 1877 Flaubert published Three Tales ("A Simple Heart", "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller" and "Herodias") for the Charpentier publishing house. He spent the rest of his days tirelessly working on a satire on the futility of human knowledge and the omnipresence of mediocrity, which he had begun in the period 1872-1874, then abandoned and resumed in 1877, but ultimately left unfinished.. This is his depressing and disconcerting Bouvard and Pécuchet , published posthumously in March 1881 by the Lemerre publishing house and which Flaubert considered to be his masterpiece.
Flaubert aged rapidly after 1870, and looked like an old man when he died in 1880, at the age of 58. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage at Croisset, but was buried in the family vault at the Rouen Cemetery. In 1890 a monument by Henri Chapu dedicated to Flaubert was inaugurated in the Rouen museum.
Flaubert's character offered several peculiarities. He was shy and even extremely sensitive and arrogant, he went from absolute silence to an embarrassing and noisy verbiage; he oscillated between a despair that was nothing short of nihilistic and an almost Rabelaisian vitality and joie de vivre. He had a great tendency to loneliness and social withdrawal. The same inconsistencies marked his physique; he had a robust physiognomy but suffered from epilepsy from childhood; he too was a neurotic obsessed with writing, a pretext for his depressions and his enthusiasms, when he commented on some of the happiest pages of the classics. His anti-bourgeois hatred began in his childhood and became a kind of monomania, especially visible in his last work, the Bouvard and Pécuchet . He despised vulgarity, mediocrity, pettyness, the materialism of the bourgeois, and also his habits, his lack of intelligence and his contempt for beauty.
Works
Novels
- 1857: Madame Bovary
- 1862: Salambó (Salammbô)
- 1869: Sentimental education (L'éducation sentimentale)
- 1881: Bouvard and Pécuchet (Bouvard et Pécuchet)
Stories
- 1877: Three stories (Trois contes)
- 1901: Memories of a Crazy (Mémoires d’un fou)
- 1910: November. Fragments of any style (November)
Theater
- 1874: The candidate (Le candidat)
Others
- 1874: The Temptation of San Antonio (La tentation de Saint Antoine)
- 1913: Dictionary of the ideas received (Dictionnaire des idées reçues)
Legacy
Flaubert was a contemporary of Baudelaire, and like him, occupies a key position in 19th century literature. In his time he was rejected for moral reasons and admired for his literary strength at the same time. Today he is considered one of the greatest novelists of his century. He stands between the romantic generation, the realist generation of Stendhal and Balzac and the naturalist generation of Zola and Guy de Maupassant. His concern and interest in realism and the aesthetics of his works justifies the lengthy work of preparing each of his works: he tests his texts by reading them aloud, the famous "test of" gueuloir”.
In the assessment of critic James Wood:
The novelists should thank Flaubert as the poets thank spring; everything starts with him again. There really is a time before Flaubert and a while after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers consider the modern realistic narrative, and its influence is almost too familiar to be visible. It hardly stands out from the good prose that favors the story and the bright detail; that privileges a high degree of visual notoriety; that maintains a non-sentimental compost and knows to withdraw, as a good valet, from the superfluous comments; that judges the good and the bad with neutrality; that seeks the truth, even at the cost of reproofing us; and that the fingerprints of the author in all are paradoxically, not traceable. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not everything until Flaubert.
As a writer, as well as a pure stylist, Flaubert was almost equal parts romantic and realist. 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 makes of the figures in his main romances. The extent to which Flaubert's fame has spread since his death presents "an interesting chapter of literary history in itself". He is also credited with spreading the popularity of the color Tuscany Cypress, a color often mentioned in her masterpiece Madame Bovary.
Flaubert's thin and precise writing style has had a great influence on 20th century writers such as Franz Kafka and J.M. Coetzee. As Vladimir Nabokov commented in his famous lecture series:
The greatest literary influence on Kafka was that of Flaubert. Flaubert, who detested the pretty prose, would have applauded Kafka's attitude towards his tool. Kafka liked to extract his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, without intrusion of the author's private feelings; this was exactly the method of Flaubert through which he achieved a singular poetic effect. The legacy of their working habits can therefore be described as preparing the way for a slower and more introspective way of writing.
The publication of Madame Bovary in 1856 was followed by more scandal than admiration; at first it was not understood that this novel was the beginning of something new: the scrupulously truthful portrayal of life. Little by little, this aspect of her genius was accepted, and she began to crowd out all the others. At the time of his death, he was considered the most influential French royalist. In this respect, Flaubert exerted an extraordinary influence on Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, and Émile Zola. Even after the decline of the royalist school, Flaubert did not lose face in the literary community; he continues to attract other writers because of his deep commitment to aesthetic principles, his devotion to style, and his indefatigable search for the perfect expression.
His Complete Works (8 vols., 1885) were printed from the original manuscripts, and included, in addition to the works already mentioned, the two plays Le Candidat and Le Château des cœurs. Another edition (10 vols.) appeared in 1873-85. Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand was published in 1884 with an introduction by Guy de Maupassant.
Almost all the great literary personalities of the 20th century have admired or written about Flaubert, including philosophers and sociologists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Paul Sartre, the latter whose partially psychoanalytic portrait of Flaubert in The Idiot of the Family was published in 1971. Georges Perec named Education sentimental as one of his favorite novels. Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa is another great admirer of Flaubert. Apart from his 1975 essay Perpetual Orgy. Flaubert and Madame Bovary, devoted exclusively to Flaubert's art, lucid discussions can be found in Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist (2003). In a public lecture delivered in May 1966 at the Kaufmann Art Gallery in New York, Marshall McLuhan stated "All my knowledge of the media was obtained from people like Flaubert and Rimbaud and Baudelaire."