We Live in Yonville

Notes on Madame Bovary

…dead-eyed in the center of nowhere, these millions of human
errors, going day to day and night to night through
their castrated motions,
it hurts the very earth, it hurts everything,
this waste
the horror of all this
waste.

– Charles Bukowski, from “The Masses”

When I was right out of college, in an attempt to improve my French, or maybe to convince myself I spoke it, I read Madame Bovary in the original. I honestly don’t know how. Here’s a typical passage, in Francis Steegmuller’s translation, a description of the approach to the fateful village of Yonville:

At the foot of the hill the road crosses the Rieule on a bridge, and then, becoming an avenue planted with young aspens, leads in a straight line to the first outlying houses. These are surrounded by hedges, and their yards are full of scattered outbuildings—cider presses, carriage houses and distilling sheds standing here and there under thick trees with ladders and poles leaning against their trunks and scythes hooked over their branches. The thatched roofs hide the top third or so of the low windows like fur caps pulled down over eyes, and each windowpane, thick and convex, has a bull’s-eye in its center like the bottom of a bottle.

All these physical descriptions: I can barely understand it in English. I’m sure that as I read in French, I remembered that in high school we’d been assigned one of Flaubert’s tales, Un Coeur Simple, and all of us, even the straight-A French-nerd suckups, heartily despised it. It was nothing but aspens and alders and fringed lampshades and different types of cloth and carriage. Flaubert is for fluent speakers.

My French isn’t much better than it was 20 years ago, so this time I read the book the real way, in English, and actually understood it. My god, what a book. My first time reading it I was just grateful I understood the plot and that part about the torn-up letter fluttering out of the carriage window like butterflies. This time I was really shaken. I’m still recovering. I’m not sure I’ve managed to leave that village with the thatched roofs and the cider presses and the fields around filled with bullrushes and oat stalks with little bell-shaped flowers.

Yonville at first reminded me a little of Springfield, in The Simpsons. A self-contained world with a cast of recurring characters who all have their little quirks and manias and catchphrases. Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, the garrulous Homais, and the rest of the characters we see around town have that toylike, cartoonish limitedness – spiritually, they only have four fingers, you could say. But where Springfield is basically benevolent, Yonville is – Hell. Is it Hell? No, not exactly. That would be too easy. Bovary is not dark comedy. Charles really loves Emma, a fact that both redeems human beings and makes the story tragic and terrible. The whole thing is so pitiless. We’re spared nothing. There’s a streak of sadism in Flaubert, in the way that great movie directors are sadistic. He knows how to turn the screw to get the maximum out of every scene, more than you would have thought possible, without ever turning maudlin or trashy. Emma’s death scene, for example. When Emma dies, her agony is terrible, but it has something inhuman about it, there’s no moral quality to it, it might almost be an animal dying. She is neither more nor less sympathetic than she’s ever been. But Charles’s pain makes us suffer.

A muffled scream escaped her; she pretended that she was feeling better and that she’d soon be getting up. But she was seized with convulsions.

“God!” she cried. “It’s horrible!”

He flung himself on his knees beside her bed.

“Speak to me! What did you eat? Answer, for heaven’s sake!”

And in his eyes she read a love such as she had never known.

Emma’s recognition humanizes her – dimly, briefly – and even makes her love Charles a little.¹

She slowly passed her hand through his hair. The sweetness of her touch was more than his grief could bear. He felt his entire being give way to despair at the thought of having to lose her just when she was showing him more love than ever in the past; and he could think of nothing to do — he knew nothing, dared nothing: the need for immediate action took away the last of his presence of mind.

The pain is at a maximum, the tragedy unbearable. But three pages later, while Emma is still dying, the empty-headed Homais, “temperamentally incapable of staying away from celebrities” is already giving a lunch for the Rouen doctor who came to examine her, and assaulting him, and us, with his insufferable prattling.

“I’ve even read about people being poisoned, Doctor — positively struck down — by blood sausages that had been subjected to excessive fumigation! At least, so it says in a very fine report, written by one of our leading pharmaceutical lights, one of our masters, the illustrious Cadet de Gassicourt!”

It’s a kind of obscenity, but it goes absolutely without comment from Flaubert. And it goes on like that, this sort of pissing on sorrow, in the hours and days after Emma’s death. I wonder if the greatest scene in the book is the one in which Homais and Bournisien, the useless priest, are sitting with Emma’s body at night, alternately arguing inanely about religion and dozing in their chairs before finally waking and taking a glass of brandy together, “chuckling a little without knowing why,” understanding briefly their essential comradeship.

It’s really dark, this book. Nabokov, if I remember, says in his essay about Bovary that Homais is its real villain. This is true. Lheureux, the fancy-goods dealer, may be the one to plan and carry out Emma’s destruction, but he’s just a predator, a kind of honest crook. He disgusts the reader far less than Homais. Lheureux at least is good at what he does – and indeed, by such efforts as his is progress achieved: by the book’s end, he has, with the capital to which Emma’s ruin has contributed, actually established a new business, a transportation service for Yonvillians. Whereas Homais, for all his talk about progress, is incapable of contributing anything to it: he writes and talks only nonsense, he sells nothing of value, none of his medicaments work (although he uses them himself), he believes his own twaddle, he wears the patented “electric health belt” that he sells in his pharmacy, he knows nothing, has no skills, and is a coward. And everyone in Yonville respects him, because everyone in Yonville is like him. No one rises above their petty concerns and pride and selfishness.

Selfishness of course is nothing new in French novels. Balzac’s characters, in the country and the city, are spectacularly, almost heroically selfish – Baudelaire wrote that in Balzac’s novels, “even the scullions have genius.” But no one has genius in Yonville. The point isn’t the selfishness, it’s the sense of vanity and futility to everything. I found especially chilling this description of the village’s resident artist, the tax collector Binet, a craftsman devoted to his lathe.

He was alone in his garret, busily copying, in wood, one of those ivory ornaments that beggar description, a conglomeration of half-moons and of spheres carved one inside the other, the whole thing standing erect like an obelisk and perfectly useless. He was just beginning on the last section: the end was in sight! In the chiaroscuro of his workshop the golden sawdust flew from his lathe like a spray of sparks under the hooves of a galloping horse; the two wheels spun and whirred; Binet was smiling, chin down and nostrils wide: he looked absorbed, in one of those states of utter bliss such as men seem to find only in humble activities, which divert the mind with easy challenges and gratify it with the most utter and complete success.

This is Yonville’s version of art: a stunted, sterile practice, the lathe turning, as the world turns, to no purpose except the production of useless trifles.

Emma herself is no better than the townspeople, of course. Her thoughts, like Homais’, are just a collection of received ideas. They’re received ideas from Paris, that’s all, and from novels. (If Homais represents Science, she represents Literature.) If anything, she appears to be more empty inside than her neighbors. She doesn’t even care about her daughter. I remember a documentary I once saw about some Wall Street Ponzi artist, much less significant than Madoff (he’d stolen some trifling amount like $400 million), who told the interviewer quite sincerely, almost naively, that he always felt like he should be living not just well but like the very richest people alive. Why not him? It bothered him. He wanted those nice things so much, he said, penthouses and Rothkos and whatever else, and it made him so frustrated that he didn’t have them, that in retrospect it was inevitable that he would end up taking shortcuts and stealing money instead of earning it. Watching him, I couldn’t help feeling that he wasn’t really to blame. He didn’t ask to be made that way. And that’s how I feel about Emma. She didn’t ask to be so self-centered. She didn’t ask to be so indifferent to ordinary pleasures (including love) and so keen on superficial ones. These superficial ones include, I think, her affairs. I’m not sure exactly what role Flaubert assigns, in his world, to sexual passion. Does it have a place apart from the futility of conventional existence? I’m not sure it does. Emma’s desire, her infatuation with her lovers, her charm and attractiveness and their desire for her, seem to be of a piece with everything else in Yonville: things that obsess human beings but are, essentially, banal and ordinary.

Reading Bovary, I had to think of Anna Karenina, that other great 19^th century novel about an adulterous woman. The two are so different. Flaubert is painterly (and, I would say, a miniaturist). Whereas with Tolstoy you think of a Beethoven symphony, of the titanic forces of nature, great, heavy structures, Schopenhauerian Will, the glories of the 19^th century. Just as much as Flaubert, Tolstoy understood the world of convention and falsity (what Nabokov called by the Russian word poshlust), but life, in his novels, is basically beautiful. I know someone who says that whenever she reads Tolstoy, she’s afraid she might become a Christian. This is not a concern with Flaubert. There are no saintly peasants in Yonville. There is no spirituality. You almost get the feeling that he worshipped his craft, the way other people sublimate their sexual desires in their work.

Where Tolstoy is right at the center of things – like God – Flaubert is on the outside, observing, dissecting, analyzing. But though he’s so full of acid, though he’s so cold, he doesn’t use this coldness to do satire or social commentary or vent spleen but to make his story’s tragedy as powerful as possible. Poor stupid Charles, the one character, it seems, who loves anybody, the only one in the whole book who isn’t full of shit (“You’re good, you’re different,” as Emma tells him on her deathbed) the one lifeline to decency and a world we recognize and can bear to live in. His grief, his mourning – are these meant to be as dull, unsympathetic and ridiculous as everything else about him? I think not. When I think of how in the months after Emma’s death, he pulls her armchair close to the fire and sits across from it all evening, I think of Lolita (another masterpiece with things to say about small-town life) and how sincere it gets at the end. Humbert telling a now-older Lolita that if there is any chance she’d ever live with him again, “I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries.” Nabokov describing the book as “a highly moral affair.”

I found myself pondering Madame Bovary darkly for days after I’d finished it. One of the easier reflections about it is about aspens and alders and the craziness of calling Flaubert’s style “realism.” First of all, what’s reality? It doesn’t exist. Even atoms aren’t real. More importantly, Flaubert’s version of the world, in which mediocrity is so avid, a living thing, a pervasive, almost demonic force, in which people live in a realm of superficiality, fakery, and imitation, within a cloud of vanity and futility: this is clearly, like, a little tendentious. That is to say, it’s hyperreal, a vision. What does it have to do with “reality”?

This vision sticks with me. After I finished the book, I found I had started to think of “Yonville” as a term describing all the things that happen to irritate me about daily life and the city I live in, which I could now see as an expression of some essential property of life: the blooming of falsity and mediocrity, its incredible robustness and tendency to thrive. On the subway, for example. That recording that says “This is an MTA accessible station. The elevator is at the rear of the platform,” grates the ear because the woman reading the message pronounces the simple words in a stilted, pretentious way, not the way she speaks but the way she thinks it’s supposed to sound. (“Yonville,” I mutter to myself.) And the subway ads, which I’m used to ignoring, now have a new quality. Though advertising different products, they seem identical: loud pitches from the crassest of salesman, all declaring that happiness is purchasable. Or – oh, just now, this public statement by United States Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, addressing one of his governmental colleagues across the aisle:

“You and the state’s entire Democrat leadership team have been flaming the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportation of illegals who invaded the country.”

“Flaming the flames”… “singular purpose”… When Flaubert has Homais say, “‘That is the question,’… as I read in the paper recently,” I thought perhaps that it might be a bit of a cheap shot, that it was laying it on a little thick. But no, they really do lay it on that thick in real life. The evil of banality… Are clichés not just bad style, but the work of the devil? Help me, I’m trapped. Like the sufferers of the psychiatric condition known as Cotard’s Syndrome, who believe they’ve died and are living in hell, I’ve become convinced I’m living in Yonville. It’s New York, it’s the USA, it’s the internet, but it’s still Yonville. It’s all Yonville…

1. “She would’ve been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”