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Ridiculous As They

Examines the Irony of Flaubert in Madame Bovary.



?Any man who sets up to judge his fellows thereby makes himself as ridiculous as they.?#
Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert?s novel, Madame Bovary, is a novel that has been recognised for many literary achievements, but perhaps foremost amongst them is the use of irony as an active, passive and self-reflexive tool in story telling. The multi layered ironies, or meta-ironies ? ironies feeding upon ironies ? foreshadow many post-modern principles and ridicule not simply the composite parts of human society, but also, in an almost Socratean manner, human-ness itself; the only knowledge available to humanity is that we are all ridiculous.#

The concept of irony is complex. ?The ironic consciousness says no to its own ideal, then denies this negation,?# claims Vladimir Jankelevitch, and Wayne C. Booth acknowledges the possibility that the ?very spirit and value (of irony) are violated by the effort to be clear about it.?# In Irony and the Ironic, Muecke lists no less than fifteen separate examples of types of specifically English language irony# and proceeds to observe how protean the very nature of irony remains, so that it seems to defy any single definition. Hazel Rowley?s definition of irony as ?a dual vision in which we, the readers, perceive a discrepancy between apparent (literal) meaning and assumed (ironic) meaning?# is workable, while appending that there are separate connotations to ironic meaning, that which is observable irony and not apparently presented by the ironist (an irony in itself as the ironist is, of course, present), and ironical meaning, being instructional irony presented obviously by the ironist. However, the keyword regarding irony is perception. The author?s dual vision meshing with the reader?s dual vision to create the potential of a meta-ironic vision, that may possess layers within layers of self negating and affirming meanings.

Flaubert is an acknowledged master of such meta-ironic subtleties. When Flaubert?s friend, Louis Bouilhet, recounted the tale of Madame Delamare, which was the framework from which Madame Bovary was produced, and spurred him on to write the ultimate anti-bourgeois novel, Flaubert?s initial reaction was revulsion.# How could he paint such mediocre people as Charles and Emma? This was the romantic and the bourgeois in Flaubert, for while he held up the ideal of bourgeois romanticism to ridicule, he knew he held himself up to ridicule. ?I am Emma Bovary,? he said.# This is the meta-irony of holding fictional characters up to ironic and ironical dissection by readers, the classic method of irony, while simultaneously posing a far more uncomfortable question. How similar to this are we that ridicule them?

It is Charles Bovary that frames the novel at either end and, while Emma?s position is attributed to tragedy, it is Charles who is most equated with stupidity and incompetence.# It is through the very eyes of ridicule that we are introduced to him, arriving at a school wearing a ridiculous hat, nervous and socially inept. The chapter is marked not only by symbolism, but also by a sometimes confusing artifice of narrative irony. The unknown narrator, presumably a fellow pupil, simultaneously exclaims that ?it would be impossible for any of us to remember the least thing about him (Charles) now? while immediately afterward describing Charles?s temperament, living situation, and the precise evening he would write to his mother.# Flaubert is making an intrinsically post-modern, ironic statement regarding the inherent unreliability of narrative and the mediation of language, pre-dating the deconstructionist philosophy of Jacques Derrida by over 100 years. Language, the very tool of the ironist, can ?never become a transparent window on the world-as-it-really-is,?# but simply give colour to the reflection of reality.

The dynamics of Charles and Emma?s relationship illustrate many ironic and ironical patterns. For instance, the verbal/instructional irony that Emma?s thoughts reveal to us with her romantic ideal of a ?post chaise? honeymoon and her disappointment in Charles who, if he could only ?read her thoughts? and act with empathy, despite not being able to describe the feelings herself, then ?it would have delivered her heart of a rich load.?# The dramatic/observable irony in the situation becomes manifest when we observe, after learning of what she expects of her ideal man, that such a hope is tragically flawed. The masculine ideal that is expected of Charles, then Rodolphe, then Leon, is unattainable. It is a fiction within a fiction.

Leon plays a role within two phases of the narrative. He is, at first, a figure of well recognised verbal irony ? an ineffectual, romantic clerk. When Emma and he first meet at The Golden Lion in Yonville, they enact a ?grotesque? scene designed, according to Flaubert, to ?poke fun? at ?all the poetic subjects? and the bourgeois who chatter about them, while not diminishing the pathos of the scene, but enhancing it.# The meta-ironic play here is in the perception of the reader who may immediately recognise the grotesque nature of Homais? one sided, inane conversation with Charles, but may not recognise the conversation between Leon and Emma as being equally grotesque. Flaubert believed in the senselessness of all social experience.# Is all conversation and therefore human interaction then grotesque? Solger said that ?in earthly art Irony has this meaning: conduct similar to God?s?# It is perhaps only God then that is able to look down upon humanity and truly find humour without fear of laughing at Himself.

In Leon?s second narrative phase, he seduces Emma and becomes her lover. In the Cathedral, the irony of juxtaposition between Leon?s carnal desires and morality are put into play. With Emma?s ?tottering virtue clinging for support? (an irony in itself considering the already fallen nature of Emma?s virtue), the beadle and Leon fight for Emma?s soul. A litany of religious symbols are invoked by the guided tour of the Cathedral, from the bell of Amboise to the Damned in the Flames of Hell! before Leon delivers the final ironic blow. ??Why not?? retorted the clerk. ?It?s done in Paris!??# And suddenly, with that single, pretentious piece of bourgeois ?unassailable logic?, after all the moral dilemmas that have been explored, Emma is decided. Eventually, with a note of tragic irony, Emma rediscovers ?in adultery all the banality of marriage,?# something that the reader has by now already detected as inevitable. The final irony of Leon?s position is that he ?becomes her mistress rather than she his.? It is his soul that is kissed away.# In a moment of cosmic, god-like irony, he that was considered the corrupter is the one corrupted.

Corruption is a key theme in Emma?s first adulterous relationship with Rodolphe. The reader is made well aware in advance of Rodolphe?s insincere advances. His wants are purely settled in the flesh, but, during the Agricultural Show, he is equally prepared to spout cynical platitudes of social revolutionism to attain what he desires as Lieuvain is to spout order retaining, counter-revolutionism. Both speeches are interwoven seamlessly to enhance this ironic effect.

Rodolphe?s motivations may be born from lust, but many truly tragically ironic results occur from actions born of love and honest affection. It is Charles who directs Emma into a position to fall into the arms of both Rodolphe and Leon by insisting on horse riding and piano lessons for her out of genuine love and affectionate concern. If he cared less about her then she would perhaps have not been given the opportunity to destroy herself. Likewise, if it were not for Justin?s love of Emma, he would never have allowed her upstairs to take the arsenic.

While Flaubert?s principal protagonists belong to the middle class, he uses stark, ironic juxtaposition between the classes as a tool of social illustration, marking him as an antecedent of Marxist criticism. On several occasions, he allows a resounding clash between the romantic image of the lower and upper classes and the realist scrutiny of his vision. Emma?s sight of the Duc de Laverdiere, with bloodshot eyes and dribbling gravy in a bib, when he had once ?lain in the Queen?s bed!?# is a shocking irony to her. Likewise, when Catherine Leroux finally mounts the stand at the Agricultural Show to accept her Silver Medal for fifty four years of labour, wizened and shrunken in her tattered garments?#, Flaubert the ironist positions the reader to evaluate the significance of this pittance, a pittance that the local Prefect was to busy to deal with personally. Knowing that her fate cannot much be altered by the twenty five francs that the award is worth, Catherine realises that the best result she could achieve would be to donate it to the cure, ?to say mass for me.? The hopes of the lower working class rest, pathetically, in the next world; their social existence determines their consciousness.#

Flaubert has been dubbed the creator of the contemporary novel.# ?There is no truth. There are only ways of seeing,?# he once said, foreshadowing post-modernism. Though he has been lumbered with the high priesthood of Realism, a position he rejected with some vehemence#, his use of free indirect discourse and irony ? spilling over into meta-irony ? subverts many of the common realist conventions. Flaubert never claimed that he was representing ?reality?. ?Art is not reality,? he wrote to Huysmans. ?Whatever else you do, you must choose from the elements which the former furnishes.?# While he is comfortable to adopt the position of God-hood as a writer, ?to be everywhere but not seen,? he, the master ironist, is the creator of the illusion and is therefore to be held up to as equal ridicule as any of his creations. While Flaubert hated the bourgeois, he himself was bourgeois. In fact, ?all life was a bourgeois phenomenon, a grotesque automatism that started every morning in his own shaving mirror.?#

Madame Bovary ends in tragedy for almost everyone except the most ridiculous figure of all, Homais ? the small minded, pedantic chemist. It is the malicious irony of the ridiculous, triumphant,# that is perhaps the greatest irony of all, and it is an irony that Flaubert and perhaps all of us are familiar with. The dialectic irony permeating the entirety of Flaubert?s novel is that life itself is an irony, from the most tragic, such as the life of Charles Bovary, to the most triumphant, such as Homais when he receives his much coveted Legion of Honour; it is that all things human are as inherently ridiculous as the act of pursuing them.

# Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1952, Introduction by Alan Russell, p.7.
# From Socrates, ?I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.? Elizabeth Knowles, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 726.
# Vaheed K. Ramazani, The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony, The University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1988, p. 1.
# Ibid., 1988, p. 2.
# D.C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic, Methuen & Co., London, 1982, pp. 8-13.
# Hazel Rowley, Realism: Gustave Flaubert?s Madame Bovary, Deakin University, Geelong, 1997, p. 27.
# Francis Stegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait, Macmillan, London, 1968, p. 221.
# Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, And Modern, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1961, p. 105.
# Raymond Giraud, ed., Flaubert, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1964, p. 100.
# Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1952, p. 21.
# Alex Preminger & T. V. F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1993, p. 277.
# Ibid. 1952, pp. 53-54.
# Hazel Rowley, op. cit., 1997, p. 27.
# Cesar Grana, Modernity And Its Discontents: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967, p. 103.
# Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, Elek Books, London, 1974, p. 185.
# Gustave Flaubert, op. cit., 1952, p. 255.
# Ibid., 1952, p. 301.
# Ibid., 1952, p. 289.
# Ibid., 1952, p. 62.
# Ibid., 1952, p. 163.
# ?It is not men?s consciousness that determines their social existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.?, Karl Marx. Alex Preminger & T. V. F. Brogan, eds., op. cit., 1993, p. 734.
# Raymond Giraud, op. cit., 1964, p. 98.
# Vaheed K. Ramazani, op. cit., 1988, p. 129.
# Enid Starkie, Flaubert: The Making of the Master, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 298.
# Hazel Rowley, op. cit., 1997, p. 22.
# Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1952, Introduction by Alan Russell, p.7.
# As opposed to ?the malicious ironies of adultery, triumphant.? Gustave Flaubert, op. cit., 1952, p. 197.



BIBLEOGRAPHY


Barzun, Jacques, Classic, Romantic, And Modern, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1961.

Culler, Jonathan, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, Elek Books, London, 1974.

Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1952.

Giraud, Raymond, ed., Flaubert, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1964.

Grana, Cesar, Modernity And Its Discontents: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967.

Kaplan, Louise J., Female Perversion: The Temptation of Emma Bovary, Anchor Books, New York, 1991.

Knowles, Elizabeth, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999.

Lang, Candace D., Irony /Humor: Critical Paradigms, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1988.

Muecke, D.C., Irony, Methuen & Co., London, 1976.

Muecke, D.C., Irony and the Ironic, Methuen & Co., London, 1982.

Preminger, Alex & Brogan, T. V. F., eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1993.

Ramazani, Vaheed K., The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony, The University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1988.

Rowley, Hazel, Realism: Gustave Flaubert?s Madame Bovary, Deakin University, Geelong, 1997

Starkie, Enid, Flaubert: The Making of the Master, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1971.

Stegmuller, Francis, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait, Macmillan, London, 1968,












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