Are you carp or prawns: notes on Madame Bovary

I started it (the Lydia Davis translation) and thought, alright: clever, steely-eyed, good with light. Sterile. Good with light. Good with light and temperature. Good with light and times of day. Good with ego and pride. Good with hunger. See: Rodolphe, casually weighing Emma’s tumble into oblivion:

“That one’s gasping for love like a carp for water on a kitchen table.”

Funny (horribly, meanly funny).

See: Rodolphe, on the heels of that last observation:

“Virginie is definitely beginning to grow fat. She’s so tiresome with her enthusiasms. And what a passion she has for prawns.”

Ladies, choose: Flaubert wants to know are you carp or prawns. There are no other answers. And fish, like guests (or, apparently, ladies) go off after three days.

Not that Emma cares; her mind is on more pleasurable things, like receiving compliments:

It was the first time [she] had heard such things said to her; and her pride, like a person relaxing in a steam bath, stretched out languidly in the warmth of the words.

Flaubert never gets excited, changes his cool pace for no one. “A person relaxing in a bath” – so stiff, so formal. All the better to desiccate you with. But despite all this gimlet neutrality, look: he just tenderly popped the pride of his quite vulnerable hero into its own warm bath. A royal prerogative; only the best for Emma, he seems to agree – an understandable dream, even if it does kill her.

This is the thing that strikes me – for all that ruin (unhurried scalpel stripping these imaginary lives off the bone tendon by tendon), Flaubert gives Emma such a gleaming share, of pleasure, of abandonment, of dignity.

Not constantly: those early scenes with Léon are awkward and tortured and laughable; the late ones too. It’s painful for the reader to toil through the wreckage of these botched hours: no slowing down, no speeding up. But then you get those golden mornings and afternoons. Who cares if the men are cynical, self-absorbed and highly inadequate; if the villains wait in the wings. When life can be so beautiful. When someone meets you on its stage for a breath of sun and you realise that all along the secret to flying was to just to walk off the ground, like that – keep walking upwards until you are suspended in air.

“Be careful, be careful” Monsieur Homais heavy-handedly shouts, as Emma and Rodolphe heavy-handedly race off, heavy-handedly rocking in their saddles.

“As soon as he felt the earth, Emma’s horse broke into a gallop.”

It’s a metaphor, see? These cold, matter-of-fact phrases are puffball fungi, spreading more spores than you can possibly see, repeated loops of meaning drifting through the pages.

—-

Good with light:

The evening shadows were coming down; the horizontal sun, passing between the branches, dazzled her eyes. Here and there, all around her, in the leaves or on the ground, patches of light shimmered as if hummingbirds in flight had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to be coming from the trees; she could feel her heart beginning to beat again, and her blood flowing through her flesh like a river of milk.

The silence, the sweetness, the semicolons. The river of milk. My god it’s unbearable.

Then:

she heard in the far distance, beyond the woods, on the other hills, a vague and prolonged cry, a voice that lingered on the air, and she listened to it silently as it mingled like a strain of music with the last vibrations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, cigar between his teeth, mended with his penknife one of the bridles which was broken.

Sex so good you float outside your own body, listening meditatively to your own sounds. Sex so good you scare the horses.

(I would cut “throbbing” – bit much.)

Emma is moved to cry like this again later, just once, at the opera: a “sharp cry that merged with the vibrations of the closing chords”. She’s promptly carried off on torrents of sentiment – but the feeling of that cry is deep and real. Even later, her self-aggrandising materialism at full throttle in a seedy hotel room, her instinct for delight shines through as something true:

laugh[ing] a deep, voluptuous laugh when the froth from the champagne overflowed the rim of the delicate glass onto the rings of her fingers.

Our inchoate longings for love, beauty, affection are above contempt, says Flaubert. He’d give every person their steam bath, if he could; only we’re all so fallible and stupid and doomed.

—-

Rewind to forest: post-coital, pre- everything being terrible.

She was charming, on horseback!

Charming to whom? Rodolphe, obviously, (sympathies to Virginie the prawn) but mostly herself. All that milk. To be charming, on horseback! (To use commas like this!) Precipitous doesn’t mean not wonderful.

Emma courts exposure on pre-dawn sorties, exquisitely stepped out between semi-colons:

when the plank bridge for the cows had been raised, she had to follow the walls that lined the stream; the bank was slippery; to keep from falling, she would cling to the clumps of faded wildflowers. Then she would strike out across the plowed fields, sinking down, stumbling, and catching her thin little boots. Her scarf, tied over her head, would flutter in the wind in the pastures; she was afraid of the cattle, she would start start running; she would arrive out of breath, her cheeks pink, her whole body exhaling a cool fragrance of sap, leaves, and fresh air. Rodolphe, at that hour, was still asleep. She was like a spring morning coming into his bedroom.

Intrepid for love, intrepid for sex because they are the same. The fact that this is a cutting satire on Emma’s romance-addled brain doesn’t make it less beautiful for her, or me – or Flaubert. As proof: the gentle, approving yellow curtains in Rodolphe’s boudoir.

(That cow plank will be crossed back later, by the way; those “thin little boots” get a shabby cameo in someone else’s daydream: it’s extremely high-stakes pick-up sticks and nothing, nothing, is missed.)

No real happiness for Emma, though – her natural expressiveness curdles without security. To block out the anxiety, she bombards Rodolphe with cloying proclamations, aping her (lame, sentimental) idea of what it is to be “lovers”. Their silver courtship corrodes with distressing speed:

… certain of being loved, he stopped making any effort, and imperceptibly his manner changed … He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. He could not perceive – this man of such broad experience – the differences in feeling that might underlie the similarities of expression. Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness.

I don’t know that he’s the asshole here. Everyone loses. Poor Emma. Poor Rodolphe. By the time he’s cynically sifting through old letters, love souvenirs indiscriminately stashed in the requisitely tawdry tin box, Emma’s hopes are nil.

Indeed, these women, flocking into his thoughts all at the same time impeded and diminished one another, as though levelled by the sameness of his love.

(This in 1856; maybe the issue isn’t the apps.)

—-

Rodolphe ghosts her (really badly) and she casts around for grand meaning to stuff the ensuing vacuum.

Sometimes she grazes against it (e.g. the whole of page 233, blazing with simple, gorgeous lust for life – too beautiful to chop, so included in full at the bottom). More often she tarnishes herself; knowingly, despairingly, defiantly, subbing dissolution in for intensity – as in the aforementioned hotel, for Léon, who is too mediocre to distinguish the two.

She laughed, wept, sang, danced, sent down for sorbets, wanted to smoke cigarettes, seemed to him extravagant, but adorable, splendid.

Which is just how Emma is trying to seem; to trick herself back into innocence, to the woman clinging rakishly to those heavily metaphorical wildflowers. She doesn’t really respect Léon; her instincts are too good; and when he fails to come through on his one service (unquestioning devotion, ideally financial) she turns on him.

But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.

Flaubert shifts dispassionately into doomsday gear.

Léon is now “bored” by Emma’s emotions. Haste and and desperation are in her very clothes, the “thin string of her corset, which would whistle around her hips like a slithering snake.” Except sex no longer works.

Afterwards:

on that forehead beaded with cold droplets, on those stammering lips, in those wild eyes, in the clasp of those arms, there was something extremely, undefined, and bleak, that seemed to Léon to slip subtly between them as though to separate them.

Fish and guests.

—-

Nabokov says this book is “prose doing what poetry is supposed to do”. Perfect enough not to need elaboration.

He also talks about all the colour – and probably sensitised me to it – but it’s the blue that gets me: her interiors, her private futures.

He notes her veil in the forest; the “blue-tinged immensity”, the “azure infinity” contemplated the same night; the glass bottle in the apothecary, fatefully glimpsed (another faultless bit of authorial architecture).

But also: the light in her father’s farm kitchen; her lush tropical gondola fantasy, a life that is “easy and ample …. infinite, harmonious, blue”; the tear in her eye in her final, ignoble pleas to Rodolphe, “like water from a rainstorm in the blue chalice of a flower”. Most appallingly on her father (fearful symmetry): colour from his new smock running with warm tears down his face on the road to his daughter’s funeral.

Earlier on, she contemplates suicide from a high window:

… the blue of the sky was coming into her, the air circulating inside her hollow skull, she had only to give in, to let herself be taken; and the whirring of the lathe never stopped, like a furious voice calling her.

“Emma! Emma!” Charles shouted.

She stopped.

(No, I won’t talk about Charles – too painful, too ridiculous, too late; pathos makes me squirm.)

That repeated “stopped”; that furious voice and silly shout. Is it funny? Devastating? There’s more of that “dazzling light”, too – if Flaubert has a moral, it’s only that we all are hopelessly tangled by our pasts and our hopes. Emma’s are made trivial by her own wish to survive, to be alright.

But Flaubert does anoint her with Romance, at last; and there’s nothing cheap about it.

One other person, at that hour, was not sleeping.

On the grave, among the pine trees, a boy was on his knees weeping, and his chest, racked by sobs, was heaving in the darkness, under the pressure of an immense regret softer than the moon and more fathomless than the night.

It’s life that’s the cheap part: the undertaker, eyeballing this midnight vigil, triumphantly declares the heartbroken boy his long-pursued cemetery potato thief.

Page 233. Please note the fish.