I just had a very Bouvard-Pécuchetian moment. After writing most of what I thought was a rather good review of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, I clumsily exed out the tab holding my unpublished review. All that hard work and no fruit to bear! Flaubert is a keen master of small human foibles taken to extremes. In Madame Bovary, his very funny, though perhaps severely misunderstood novel about a woman's mawkish sentimentality whose vitality exceeds her own, Flaubert plays with the elements of comedy and tragedy in such a way that our emotions toward Emma are constantly at odds. On the one hand, she is all schmaltz and vanity, she is shallow, she is vapid, but on the other hand, she represents that undying will in all of us that strives for our ideals, that unbendingly demands the perfect image of our future which is ever cast in front of out own imaginations. In Flaubert we are always dealing in extremes, in those who go too far, who do too much: who are self-destructive in their passions to the point of parody. In Bouvard and Pécuchet we are introduced to our dunce-capped duo: the embodiment of human failure and foolhardiness, but also of human endurance and academic fervor. Where Emma Bovary loves too much, but in a false love, an empty love, play-acted from pulp romances, Bouvard and Pécuchet seek an infinite knowledge, but lack the creative genius to form definite opinions, and instead fall on the contradictions and lacuna of scholarly texts on a number of subjects.Bouvard and Pécuchet meet and become instant friends, as close as brothers. Both work as copy clerks in Paris, and occupy cramped corner apartments, until Bouvard comes upon a large sum inheritance from his avuncular father-figure, and the two head off to live in the country. Like Emma, play-acting in love, Bouvard and Pécuchet are always acting at the proscenium of their solipsism (a shared solipsism, a double madness, folie à deux) and critical reality. Their madness is in their methods: they are copyists by vocation, and as such they can only copy, but never create. Sometimes Pécuchet pulled his manual from his pocket and studied a paragraph, standing, with his spade beside him, in the pose of the gardener decorating the book’s frontispiece.Like Pécuchet imitating the illustration in the book, the dunderheaded duo is ever ruined by their own lack of creative capacity. Their imaginations are purely proleptic: before opening a book they have already fully envisioned their success, but they ultimately lack the modest-temperament and genius required for that achievement. Despite their constant failures, the duo is dogged in their scholarship, and their itinerant passions are never extinguished by embarrassment or disheartedness. They are ever in the pursuit of their grande achievement, and care little wherein that achievement comes from: Like artists they craved applause. In Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert splits himself in two: the stock and liberal, libertine Bouvard, and the gaunt, conservative and virginal Pécuchet. Like in Madame Bovary, Flaubert's last novel is both a condemnation and a mea culpa of human stupidity: a final salut to both mental frailty and scholastic endurance. Our pied protagonists are always devouring book upon book, volume upon volume, and mirror their creator's voracious reading appetite: Flaubert claims to have read north of 1,500 books in preparation for writing Bouvard and Pécuchet. And whether Flaubert's unfinished masterpiece is an encyclopedic farce or, in fact, a farcical encyclopedia, is a matter of debate: the reader will be grateful to have a dictionary handy, for each academic whim and fancy is pursued in the parlance and nomenclature particular to that rite. The great tragedy, and the grade statement of the novel, which teases us and jocosely punishes our foolish friends, is: “Science is based on data supplied by a small corpus of knowledge. Perhaps it doesn’t apply to all the rest that we don’t know about, which is much more vast, and which we can never understand.”The worlds of science, of literature, of love, are much more in the shadow of our knowledge than in the light: there is ever more to know, and also that which cannot be taught, that which will never be precise or certain, but requires a creative cement to fill in the apertures. Bouvard and Pécuchet simply lack creative genius, they consume and consume knowledge, read books, study at length, but the inherent differences of opinion, vagaries of incomplete knowledge, and contradictions between authors are a pediment to what they believe is true success and enlightenment. They no longer had a single fixed idea bout individuals and events of that time. To form an impartial judgement, they would have to read every history, every memoir, every newspaper and manuscript, for the slightest omission could foster an error that would lead to others, and unto infinity. They gave up."They gave up" is the ringing leitmotif of our foolhardy duo, and despite their frequent differences of opinion, they are forever united in their surrender and transition to greener, untended pastures.Their minds always at work at something which is beyond their reach, they are often too mired in specifics to grasp the larger picture. Their bottom-up approach to everything is ultimately their undoing and frequently leads to their frustration and disappointment. Even in deciding where to live gives them tremendous trouble. For though they have a tremendous capacity for seeing all sides of an issue, they lack the power to synthesize and balance that knowledge to form a clear image of reality: At times they has almost reached a decision; then fearing they would regret it later, changed their minds, the chosen place striking them as unwholesome, or exposed to the sea winds, or too near a factory, or difficult to reach.It is hard not to love these clumsy copyists, for every failure is taken in stride, and both stooges and spectators are visited by laughter at the precipitous ruin. Like a slapstick commedia dell'arte, the novel is suffused with physical comedy, but also high-minded ideas and a doggedness of heart that is truly endearing to behold. Repeatedly, Flaubert refers to the misguided attempts and misadventures of our mock-heroes as having created "monsters" - great failures of applied knowledge. In their agriculurist-phase, after failing in cash crops and fruit, and moving on to garden vegetables: The cabbages were his only consolation. One in particular gave him hope. It blossomed, grew, ended up being huge and absolutely inedible. No matter. Pécuchet was glad to have produced a monster. It is the nature of their madness to produce monsters, but fortunately those monsters are largely innocuous: simply mementos of their own folly. However, it is the zealotry of their simple-mindedness which produces these monsters, and has the capacity to create devastation. Like the monomania of the church or the rigid single-mindedness of political demagogues, zealous ignorance is far more dangerous than Bouvard's and Pécuchet's creative impotence. For Flaubert, though his two stooges lack in any real creative power, and in fact, are life-long copyists no matter the manifestation of their ephemeral endeavors, the stubborn ignorance and deliberate blindness of many of his heroes' critics are more likely to incite the reader's censure. Bouvard and Pécuchet are simple men with an innocent, if practically useless goal of self-enlightment, but they are often subject to the iniquities of their fellow townspeople, whether in the form of harsh criticism, personal attacks, or outright swindling, their simpleness is constantly being taken advantage of by their more Machiavellian country-folk. Despite their flaws, Flaubert's protagonists are exceedingly brave, determined and happy: they refuse to submit, despite their follies, to the yokes of others' preaches, and pursue their own happiness with a dogged passion.Knowledge is a powerful thing: but power is morally neutral. It can be used to achieve progress, or halt and immolate progress; to save lives and to destroy them. Flaubert reminds us that complete knowledge is impossible, what we don't know always eclipses what we do, and the even greater shadow is what we don't know that we don't know. We cannot let this lack of knowledge rule us, we must seek to self-inform, to read in great volumes and in broad topics, to keep us from becoming narrow-minded. But equally important is to form our own knowledge, to synthesize what we take-in, to create our own views, to stand by them, but to remain always receptive and skeptical. It is a danger not to. Our Faustian fools give up everything in their pursuit of knowledge, but are unable to reconcile the quantity of views. As Bouvard and Pécuchet is a panorama of the follies in science and human knowledge, knowledge itself is the very mirror of that panorama. Every failure, folly, mistake, and every rare success feeds into the great accumulation of the human ken. Still, all their reading had gone to their brains.Bouvard, coming down with a cold, imagined he was getting pneumonia. Since leeches hadn’t relieved the twinge in his side, he resorted to a vesicatory, which affected his kidneys and made him think he was suffering from gallstones.Pécuchet felt some stiffness while pruning the arbor and vomited after his dinner, which left him terrified. Then, noticing that his skin was a bit sallow, he suspected a liver condition, wondered “Am I in pain?” and ended up deciding that he was.
Książka, która wykończyła Flauberta, rozpoczyna się wspaniałą lustrzaną sceną. W tle zamknięty dwiema śluzami leży kanał Saint-Martin, przy brzegu dwa rzędy beczułek, a na pierwszym planie w samym centrum kadru stoi ławka; nagle z przeciwnych stron, powiedzmy, że ten mniejszy z lewej, a wysoki postawny z prawej, wychodzą dwaj mężczyźni i jednocześnie na niej siadają. Gdyby na tym poprzestać, scena wydaje się całkiem zwykła, ale właśnie teraz Flaubert pozwala rozkwitnąć swojemu geniuszowi. Żeby otrzeć pot z czoła, zdjęli nakrycia głowy i każdy położył swoje obok siebie; wtedy mały człowieczek dostrzegł napisane w kapeluszu sąsiada: „Bouvard”; a ten z łatwością wyczytał w kaszkiecie jegomościa w surducie słowo: „Pécuchet”. Wspaniały pomysł na wprowadzenie i związanie ze sobą bohaterów. Aby dopełnić symetrię, autor dodaje Bouvardowi i Pécuchetowi po jednym przyjacielu i nudnym zawodzie; obaj panowie są kopistami.W życiu każdego mężczyzny przychodzi taki czas, gdy pragnie on jeszcze raz (albo chociaż raz) przeżyć wielką przygodę i odcisnąć piętno na rzeczywistości, niezależnie od tego, jak bolesne to by się dla niej okazało. Naszych bohaterów owa potrzeba dopada, kiedy mają po 47 lat. Wkrótce po spotkaniu nad kanałem zostają dobrymi przyjaciółmi. Łączy ich rozczarowanie światem, napędza potrzeba szydzenia z ludzkiej głupoty, a zwyczajne życie zaczyna mierzić. Na szczęście Bouvard dziedziczy pokaźny spadek, Pécuchet ma trochę oszczędności, do tego obaj obfitują w tak wielkie pokłady radośnie beztroskiej ignorancji, że pozazdrościłby im niejeden polityk. Postanawiają więc rzucić wszystko, kupić kawałek ziemi, wyjechać z miasta i poświęcić się wielkim sprawom.Wstawać będą przy śpiewie skowronków, żeby chodzić za pługiem, pójdą z koszykiem zbierać jabłka, będą patrzyli, jak robi się masło, młóci, strzyże owce, chodzi koło pasieki i będą się delektowali rykiem krów, zapachem siana. Upajają się własnymi wizjami o prawdziwym życiu na prawdziwej wsi. I przyspieszają wyjazd z mieszczańskiego Paryża.Jako nowi właściciele ziemscy szybko zabierają się do roboty. Przez znajomych zamawiają książki, studiują ogrodnictwo, planują, sadzą, sieją, znęcają się nad roślinami, które nie chcą rosnąć, tak jak powinny; jakby za nic miały ambicje spoconych neofitów. Znudzeni jednym pisarzem sięgają po innego, wierzą każdemu, wyśmiewają wszystkich. Czytając dzieła naukowe trafiają na przepaściste spory ideologiczne między autorami, jednak jako życiowi optymiści zbywają je krótkimi parsknięciami, głośno zatrzaskując zbędne tomiska. Matka natura sporo się nacierpi, zanim chłopcy zdadzą sobie sprawę z poniesionej klęski. Mimo to nie poddają się i skaczą od jednej dziedziny nauki do drugiej, z każdej wybierając tylko te fragmenty, które ich interesują. Błyskawicznie ferują wyroki, marząc o przyszłych sukcesach i sławie. Z politowaniem kręcą głowami nad niewiedzą otaczających ich ludzi. Każdemu sąw stanie udowodnić, że się myli. I to na dobre 150 lat przed wynalezieniem Facebooka.Po ogrodniczym fiasku motywuje ich niezmordowany entuzjazm. Z rozpędem rzucają się w chemię, potem obcują z anatomią, zostają zwolennikami zdrowego żywienia, z bystrością jastrzębi spoglądają w gwiazdy, grzebią w biologii, pasjonuje ich geologia, ale irytuje nieznośna nomenklatura; przecież ziemie z okresu dewońskiego nie znajdują się tylko w Devonshire. Niezrażeni szczegółami brną dalej. Zostają archeologami, przyglądają się kołom historii, badają literaturę, szybkim krokiem wchodzą w politykę, ale odbijają się od sporu lewicy z prawicą i wpadają w chwilowy kryzys. Wdają się w romanse, uprawiają gimnastykę, wywołują duchy, zabierają się za medycynę powodując wiatry u krowy. Następnie przychodzi czas na filozofię. Niestety gubią się w Spinozie i ściągają z Paryża poręczne opracowanie tematu. Przytłoczeni nadmiarem wiedzy tracą wiarę w ludzkość; rozważają samobójstwo. Ratuje ich religia. Są urzeczeni ewangelią i czystością duszy. Przed końcem książki zdążą jeszcze zaadoptować dwie sieroty, a także zaprojektować przebudowę Chavignolles, miasta w pobliżu którego mają farmę.W strukturę „Bouvarda i Pécucheta” ugodziły nieco założenia przyjęte przez Flauberta podczas pisania powieści, której daleko do misterności „Pani Bovary”. Oczywiście autor nie postradał na stare lata poczucia smaku. Satyra znakomicie odgrywa swoją rolę; książka jest prześmieszna, chociaż gna na złamanie karku; krótkie warczące zdania wypluwają w stronę czytelnika rój nazwisk i pojęć dawno już zapomnianych. W naturalny dla siebie sposób pan Gustaw pluje jadem na mieszczański sposób bycia i coś, co jego stryjeczny kuzyn, Nabokov, nazywał poszłost’. Wyżywa się okrutnie na swoich Don Kiszotach nauki, ale dopiero łącząc ten sadyzm z poczuciem humoru i współczuciem dla niefortunnych kopistów, wyrabia kunsztowniejszą formę.W końcu i tak zalała go krew. Podczas sporządzania notatek do ostatniego rozdziału Flaubert padł trupem. Kiedy umierał, musiał być wściekły, że coś tak prozaicznego jak życie ingeruje w tworzenie sztuki.
What do You think about Bouvard And Pecuchet (2006)?
DILETTANTI ALLO SBARAGLIOBouvard e Pecuchet, due anime semplici che ingenuamente credono di poter immagazzinare tutte le conoscenze in un unico sapere, metafora della cultura enciclopedica positivistica di stampo illuminista che pretendeva di dare una risposta completa a tutto. Una cultura al tramonto all'epoca in cui Flaubert scrive, che sta per lasciare il passo all'alba della "distruzione delle certezze".I due abbandonano Parigi e si rifugiano in una proprietà in campagna dove si dedicano alle loro passioni, agli studi e alle letture, per soddisfare il loro desiderio di conoscenza. Flaubert gioca e si diverte a prendere in giro un tale ridicolo accanimento “culturale”, destinato inesorabilmente al fallimento. Ogni testo, in qualsiasi branca del sapere, contiene teorie in contrasto tra loro o comunque contraddittorie le une con le altre, a dimostrazione che il tentativo di mettere ordine nel caos è impossibile da realizzare e che la contraddizione costituisce il fondamento del pensiero umano. Nonostante le continue sconfitte i due amici, che vengono descritti da Flaubert sempre in parallelo, sia nelle caratteristiche fisiche che nelle attività che svolgono, come se fossero un’unica persona vista da più lati, a sottolineare la personalità sfaccettata dell’essere umano, rimangono entusiasticamente convinti fino alla fine di poter riuscire nell’impresa: il romanzo, rimasto incompiuto per il sopraggiungere della morte di Flaubert, si interrompe proprio all’inizio di una nuova avventura, una conferenza per illustrare ai più le loro idee pedagogiche. Tuttavia restano gli appunti di Flaubert per il seguito del romanzo, dai quali possiamo ricostruire come egli intendeva concluderlo. La soluzione finale è quella di tornare alle origini, al punto di partenza, a copiare tutte le sciocchezze e le banalità prodotte dalla “conoscenza”.Come ho detto sopra, è evidente che Flaubert si è divertito nello scrivere questa sua ultima opera, ogni esperimento dei due “eroi” è raccontato con toni ironici, presentandoci i protagonisti come due macchiette; a fianco dell’ilarità che provoca la lettura vi è l’ amara (per chi leggeva all’epoca positivistica di fine ottocento) conclusione che “nessun grande genio ha concluso e neanche i grandi libri concludono, perché l’umanità è sempre in marcia ed essa stessa non conclude.”Per me un monito contro lo sfoggio inutile di cultura, che nasconde il vuoto, e uno stimolo all'umiltà.In fondo al libro vi è il “dizionario dei luoghi comuni”, in cui -dice Flaubert- “vi si troverà in ordine alfabetico, su tutti gli argomenti possibili, tutto ciò che bisogna dire in società per essere un uomo come si deve e amabile”. Quanta ironia in queste parole e quanta ironia nel dizionario. Un esempio: “IMBECILLI : Chiunque non la pensi come noi”.Interessante è l’introduzione di Sebastiano Vassalli, illuminante il saggio finale di Raimond Queneau.
—Sandra
Although Flaubert intended to make chumps of his protagonists, B&P are actually lovable eccentrics, whose inquiring minds put our dull unquestioning conformist lumps to shame. A tour through the humanities, sciences, and theologies woven around a tale of two civil servants free to pursue a life of the mind outside the drudgery of work, Flaubert’s last book is far from becoming the final masterpiece he intended, but still dazzles, tickles and titillates with erudition and high-class humour. Manny’s review, as ever, is the best.
—MJ Nicholls
Why didn't someone tell me that Flaubert died before finishing this book? I mean, I could easily have found out by reading the preface or looking it up on Wikipedia, but I wanted to avoid spoilers. I'm guessing he had a twist planned. In the last chapter, I bet good old B&P would have tried another hare-brained scheme and it would actually have worked. Or has their insane optimism somehow infected me?Anyway, I'm docking a star. Considering that you can lose a game outright by dying in the World Correspondence Chess Championships, I think Gustave has got off pretty lightly here.
—G.R. Reader
