Dix-Neuf

Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuxiémistes

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Introduction

Anne Green, Mary Orr & Timothy Unwin

To cite this article: Anne Green, Mary Orr & Timothy Unwin (2011) Introduction, Dix-Neuf, 15:1,
1-14, DOI: 10.1179/147873111X12973011702121

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dix-neuf, Vol. 15 No. 1, April, 2011, 1–14

Introduction
Anne Green, Mary Orr, and Timothy Unwin

The fourteen contributions to Flaubert Studies collected in this special issue are
advancing a self-reflective critical tradition within Anglophone communities of French
scholars. In 1999, New Approaches in Flaubert Studies edited by Tony Williams
and Mary Orr sought ‘to take stock of the principal developments [. . .] since the
publication of Flaubert: la Dimension du texte [Wetherill, 1982]’ (1982: vii). In their
foreword, Williams and Orr noted how ‘the emergence of gender studies, genetic
studies and the systematic analysis of symbolic motifs’ summed up the various ways
in which the canonical views of Flaubert had changed in the intervening ten years
(1999: vii), which had seen a decline in the importance of Sartre and in the prominence
of psychoanalytical frames of reading. In the Preface, Alan Raitt was more categorical:
‘after over a century of research, there are, strictly speaking, no totally new approaches
to Flaubert. But there are certainly new angles on old approaches and new applica-
tions of old approaches. [. . .] It is of course a measure of Flaubert’s inexhaustible
greatness that he has to be invented anew for each successive generation’ (1999: x).
Over a decade later, it again seemed appropriate to reassess these generational
interests and angles on Flaubert studies, and to test the validity of the Dimensions,
New Approaches and critical trends that Wetherill (1982), Williams and Orr (1999),
Porter (2001), Unwin (2004) and Séginger (2005) had all identified as particular
to defining decades since 1980. A panel of Flaubert scholars old and new, all thor-
oughly engaged with the internet revolution and with markedly ‘networked’ research
interests, was brought together at the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes conference in
Bristol in 2009 by Mary Orr to explore such questions. This session spearheaded
the third major UK Flaubert study day, held in Southampton in April 2010, which
allowed the three editors of this collection better to define and recalibrate its empha-
ses. Although the working title of the study day, ‘Flaubert: twenty-first-century
perspectives’, provided a focus and provoked wide-ranging debate (Worton, 2010), it
made the editors wary of trumpeting ‘new approaches’ or, indeed, of fixing ‘twenty-
first-century’ perspectives prematurely. Instead, the more openly understated but no
less challenging title Flaubert: Shifting Perspectives puts the spotlight on the critical
necessity of holding together a range of retro- and prospective vantage points that
transcend artificial periodization by decade or critical theory.
In this collection, therefore, the editors underline the importance of critical conti-
nuities with particular accents, of redefinition and extension of methodologies and
approaches, and of rediscoveries of ‘old’ research topics such as ‘sources’ in later
growth areas. If deconstruction and gender studies no longer epitomize the predominant
interests in Flaubert research, their lessons and methodologies — critical attention
to various competing discourses for example — still clearly invigorate attention to

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2011 DOI 10.1179/147873111X12973011702121

2 ANNE GREEN, MARY ORR, and TIMOTHY UNWIN

language in the essays here. Recent studies by Tipper (2003), Zollinger (2007) and
Sugaya (2010) show how the systematic analysis of symbolic motifs in Flaubert’s
published works, and genetic investigation of his medical and other dossiers, continue
to be fruitful. The essays in this collection, however, do more than pursue one or
other of these approaches, just as they engage with relevant specialist research and
contemporary theory that extends far beyond ‘critique de la critique’ as Séginger
defines ‘Anglophone’ Flaubert studies (2005: 8). The recognizably distinctive contri-
bution to Flaubert research outside France that all the contributions make is their
carefully argued use of more than one key critical approach. Anne Green’s work on
the manuscripts of Sous Napoléon Trois, Scarlett Baron’s comparative investigation
of the Joyce manuscripts, and Timothy Chesters’s examination of Flaubert’s reading
notes on Corneille demonstrate how genetic critical methodologies can be extended
and developed when they are informed by socio-historical and comparative literary-
critical approaches. In different but complementary ways, Larry Duffy’s essay on
Flaubert’s knowledge of pharmacy or Mary Orr’s contribution on Flaubert’s exten-
sive natural scientific reading and understanding through discussion with scientist
friends further stretches the remits for what Flaubert’s avant-textes should include.
At the same time, Shifting Perspectives seeks to avoid a mere accumulation of
nicer critical nuances, or a proliferation of ways to read Flaubert in the twenty-first
century, as if these were still to be located in various ‘schools’ of criticism or formed
by national inflection. Timothy Unwin’s opening essay frames the larger scope of this
collection and its ambitions. Shifting Perspectives proposes to shape critical debates
in which Flaubert’s corpus continues to be defining. All fourteen contributions there-
fore variously and collectively exemplify translingual, dynamic, and inter-connective
encounters with Flaubert’s texts through close readings that engage overtly with
specific avant-textes, intertexts, and contexts. To a greater degree than in New
Approaches, for example, and as a continuity and challenge to it, the recitative in all
the contributions here is the putting into perspective of vital interpersonal (as well as
interdisciplinary) critical exchanges and salient items of reading — by Flaubert and
by his critics, including later writers or critical theorists in other traditions — that
complicate any simple, linear, and progressive plots in research on Flaubert.
Shifting, that is the ability to move, sums up for us the locus of Flaubert’s
inexhaustibility for our times, as for his. Alan Raitt’s delimitation of ‘new angles on
old approaches and new applications of old approaches’ now appears too narrowly
preoccupied with what the critic brings to the text, rather than with what the
text can bring to the critic in changing cultural and critical environments. Flaubert’s
published works all tell complex stories about how these environments can be defined
when their orders are dissolved or redrawn in periods of intense upheaval — political,
ideological, economic, social, personal, and emotional. His works are thus important
configurations of how narrative disorders, rather than narrative ordering (with its
discourses and genres of history, science, and art), are the only way to make sense of
the chaos of orders and orders of chaos his works also describe. So as to locate the
spirit and letter of Flaubert’s narratives of disordering, we suggest three areas of
‘shifting perspectives’ that most profitably unpack them.
‘Spaces and places’ is the first arena of shifting perspectives which we treat in
dedicated sub-sections of this introduction, because it speaks directly to the other
 INTRODUCTION 3

two, ‘Writing Life’ and ‘Flaubertian Interfaces’. Each subsection sets out particular
emphases of its ‘shifting perspective’ and elucidates some of the common concerns
of the essays grouped within it. However, because the shifting quality of our perspec-
tives is so important, we signal how contributions attributed to one section fit with
the concerns of those in the two others. So, while contributions within ‘Spaces and
Places’ or ‘Writing Life’, such as those by Seabrook and Duffy respectively, could equally
well have sat in ‘Flaubertian Interfaces’ for their engagements with ‘intertextuality’,
their positioning in the collection makes its larger point. We leave to the reader the
making of many different reconnections between the ten longer essays, because the
three configurations we suggest allow alternative reclassifications to emerge. The
final part of this collection then contains four shorter essays by new scholars to make
the case for that continual re-evaluation of prior categories that is the constant of the
whole collection. While we again suggest ways in which this most recent work recon-
nects to ‘Spaces and Places’, ‘Writing Life’, and ‘Flaubertian Interfaces’, the collection
thus also seeks to echo the open-mindedness of Flaubert’s own published work.

Spaces and places

Travel, movement, and the spaces that they open up are everywhere in Flaubert’s
writing, and continue to offer new perspectives to the reader. Over the last decade
and a half, much has been written on and around this theme. Such work has ranged
broadly, covering (for example) Flaubert’s representation of motion (Duffy, 2005),
his sense of the pictorial or literary aspects of travel (Tooke, 2004; Dord-Crouslé,
2004), his evocations of social mobility (Olds, 1997; Orr, 2005a) and tourism (Unwin
in Flaubert, 2001b), his stylistic experimentations around the exotic (Yee, 2008), and
the links between travel and the movement or progression of ideas (Rees, 2010;
Seabrook, 2010). Flaubert’s journey to Egypt and the Middle East, influentially
represented by Edward Said as long ago as 1978 as a paradigmatically Western,
assimilationist mode of travel, continues to attract attention, and the questions raised
by exoticism in Flaubert’s work have been explored most fully in recent years by
Mary Orr and Jennifer Yee (Orr, 2008; Yee, 2008 and 2010).
Adrianne Tooke pointed out in 2004 that recent critical approaches had tended to
focus on either the aesthetic or the ideological aspects of Flaubert’s travel writing, but
that few had attempted to tackle the tricky area of connections between the two
(Tooke, 2004: 53). Tooke’s own chapter shows how the observations and the style of
Flaubert’s travel accounts are reworked in his fiction, influencing its aesthetic vision;
and she also stresses his self-conscious fascination with the clichés of travel writing.
Travel and movement are thus intimately bound up with a writing practice and with
a reflection about the processes of writing. But Flaubert’s aesthetics are also linked
to his intrinsically modern sense of places and spaces, as Larry Duffy demonstrates
in his study of the phenomenology of motion in L’Éducation sentimentale (Duffy,
2005). That modern sense of space and place in Flaubert has also been stressed by
Timothy Unwin who considers the portrayal of Trouville as a tourist space, with
its clichés and banalities, in Mémoires d’un fou (Flaubert, 2001b: xiv–xv). Unwin’s
contribution to the present collection pursues the challenges laid down by scholars
such as Duffy and Tooke, by seeking to define more clearly both how notions of
4 ANNE GREEN, MARY ORR, and TIMOTHY UNWIN

movement operate in Flaubert’s vision of a modern world, and how that vision
impacts upon his aesthetic approach. Spaces and places in Flaubert’s work are much
more than the locations that he travels in and through: they are also spaces of the
imagination, sites of textual movement and of ‘word travel’. Unwin thus looks at a
range of Flaubertian topics in relation to travel and movement: authenticity, bêtise,
the portrayal of human relationships, hallucination, and poetic vision. Among the
areas touched upon here that might merit further investigation by future scholars are
Flaubert’s epilepsy and the lessons that the writer learned from it, for it is perhaps
time to move out of the long shadow cast by Sartre’s famous réquisitoire and return
to a freshly informed analysis of the ways in which epilepsy functions artistically
in Flaubert. Focusing on two of Flaubert’s early novels, Unwin also highlights an
area of the Flaubertian corpus that is now benefiting from renewed attention (Rees,
2010; Raitt, 2010; and Kapoor and Seabrook in this collection of essays). Novembre,
especially, might be seen as key to Flaubert’s developing concept of space, place,
movement, and the exotic.
The role of the exotic is central to Flaubert’s concept of travel, and attention has
understandably been focused on its many and varied appearances throughout his
writing. Jennifer Yee’s work on the exotic is now bringing an exciting and original
dimension to the subject, and raising new challenges for scholars to pursue. There
are at least three reasons for this. First, Yee’s work, operating in the framework of
postcolonial theory, offers a challenge to the assimilationist paradigm of Said. Thus,
she sees Salammbô, for example, as a novel that disrupts the attempt to impose an
imperialistic narrative on the exotic Other (Yee, 2008). Second, Yee stresses that the
exotic is present not just in the obvious places in Flaubert, but also in some of the
texts where we might least expect to find it, notably in L’Éducation sentimentale
(Yee, 2010: 5). Finally, and most importantly, Yee stresses that there is a fundamental
link between the evocation of exoticism and certain stylistic practices. False or
delayed antitheses, combined with metonymical slippage and ambivalence, result in
undecidability and open-endedness in the Flaubertian text. Thus the exotic motif,
while appearing to point outwards to a colonial context, also returns us to the com-
modity fetishism of nineteenth-century Paris, raising questions about how the text
generates (or obfuscates) meaning. Exoticism seems to fade into an ‘effet d’exotisme’,
and, in an approach that explicitly acknowledges Culler, Yee stresses the undermining
of naively thematic readings in Flaubert’s work. The link between the exotic and
the uses of metonymy thus grounds the discussion of Flaubert’s colonial spaces
firmly within a novelistic practice, and brings us to a new awareness of his intensely
writerly approach to the exotic.
Complementing Unwin’s stress on Flaubertian travel as mindspace, Michael
Seabrook has been fruitfully examining another mindspace in Flaubert, that of the
Germanic atmosphere that is so pervasively present in the early work. We are dealing
here with a different form of movement than the physical motion of coaches or steam-
ships which interests scholars like Duffy or Rees: here it is the movement of ideas
across cultures, and the transformative effect of those ideas as they travel. Seabrook
has argued that the young Flaubert’s particular receptiveness to German literature
and ideas results in the presence of a number of dark tropes in his early writings that
are characteristically Germanic. By working in and through the translated German
 INTRODUCTION 5

works that he reads so intensively in his early years, Flaubert is shown to be opening
up his writing, and reaching far beyond the confines of his own tradition. Seabrook’s
work has demonstrated, importantly, that this is not merely about incorporating
German topoi into texts written in French. On the contrary, Flaubert’s writing reveals
a complex process of transculturation, indeed of ‘shifting perspective’, not least
through generic hybridity that enables it to incorporate other literary traditions in a
new vision. Seabrook’s article in the present collection pursues this agenda further by
looking afresh at Smar in terms of its Germanic origins, and particularly in terms of
the intertextual relationship with Faust. There is much new work to be done in this
area, where the concepts of travel and mindspace merge seamlessly with questions
about Flaubert’s reading and intertextual practices. Seabrook’s work thus sits pre-
cisely at the interface between two newly regenerated strands of Flaubert studies, and
his focus on the early works complements the rising interest in that part of the corpus
among British scholars.

Writing life
The most significant event of the past ten years of Flaubert studies has without a
doubt been the publication in 2007 of the fifth and final volume of the Pléiade edition
of the Correspondance, thirty-four years after the publication of volume one. This
monumental work with its detailed editorial notes finally gives scholars access to
the full span of Flaubert’s letters, while its invaluable index allows much easier
navigation and cross-referencing than before. Volume five includes eighty-three
previously unpublished or partially published letters; these, together with the redating
of some of the correspondence and the expert editorial annotations, offer readers a
much clearer sense of Flaubert’s relationships and intellectual activity during the last
years of his life. The completed Pléiade Correspondance thus intersects in two distinct
ways with trends in Flaubert criticism over the past decade, both of which are evident
in the present collection: first, an interest in revisiting Flaubert’s life and interrogating
it in new and exciting ways; and second, a recognition that Flaubert’s corpus has not
yet been fully published, and that some surprises still wait to be uncovered.
That Flaubert’s life continues to intrigue is clear from the three important
Anglophone biographies which appeared between 2001 and 2009, each very different.
Geoffrey Wall adopts a Freudian approach in Flaubert. A Life (2001), delicately
exploring family relationships and aiming to take the reader into Flaubert’s thoughts
and feelings. Frederick Brown’s more neutral and much longer, document-based
2006 study sets Flaubert firmly within his historical context, while Andrew Brown’s
‘brief life’ of Flaubert (2009) makes no claim to have unearthed new facts, yet offers
a fresh and lively perspective of the writer and his work by dint of concise expression,
judicious selection, and a keen eye for the quirky detail. Flaubert does not take centre
stage in The Magnificent Mrs Tennant, David Waller’s fascinating 2009 biography of
the former Gertrude Collier and her family (whom the Flauberts first met in Trouville
in 1842), yet it throws new light on Flaubert’s life, not least by revealing a cache
of letters discovered too late for inclusion in the Correspondance, and it inserts him
into Gertrude’s wide and illustrious international social circle. While aimed at a more
popular readership, Susannah Patton’s copiously illustrated literary travel guide, A
6 ANNE GREEN, MARY ORR, and TIMOTHY UNWIN

Journey into Flaubert’s Normandy (2007), offers further evidence of a recent and
commercially supported surge of interest in Flaubert the man. Although Ann
Jefferson’s study of Biography and the Question of Literature in France (2007) deals
only in passing with Flaubert, its thoughtful reappraisal of the forms and function
of life-writing further confirms this recent intensification of interest in literary bio-
graphy — a trend which would have dismayed Flaubert, who was adamant that the
personal life of the artist had nothing to do with his art: ‘L’Art n’a rien à démêler
avec l’artiste’ (Flaubert, 1973–2007: 2, 140; hereafter C).
But as several of the contributors to this collection prove, there is a relationship
between art and artist, and it can be close and highly revealing. While the old-
fashioned ‘l’homme et l’œuvre’ approach was abandoned long ago, the more recent
practice of treating works as disembodied texts, seemingly divorced from any human
agency, also appears to be on the wane. Instead, new and suppler ways of bringing
together art and author are in evidence in this collection of essays.
The most overtly biographical contribution, that of Geoffrey Wall, comes to
Flaubert by an oblique route. Wall excavates a traumatic incident involving Flaubert’s
father and grandfather during the Terror — an incident that left little written trace
other than a brief account in the Goncourts’ Journal. Although Wall has succeeded
in tracking down documentary evidence of the episode, the establishment of facts
interests him less than the way in which they were transmitted and turned into a
kind of fiction — into what he calls a ‘psychological artefact’. Wall shows how the
form and resonance of the resulting narrative derived from its historical context,
as, ‘real or imagined or poised between the two, this scene became a cherished
piece of family legend’. His concern is with how the incident might have affected
both generations of father-son relationships, and with how Achille-Cléophas’s philo-
sophical and medical formation consequently filters through into his son’s literary
aesthetic.
Larry Duffy’s essay is also concerned with historical and intellectual contextualiza-
tion. In his re-examination of Madame Bovary’s Homais in the light of the shifting
relationship between the disciplines of chemistry, pharmacy, and medicine in the first
part of the nineteenth century, Duffy, like Wall, is careful to make it clear that he is
not simply identifying sources. For example, the many similarities he finds between
Homais and the real-life Rouen pharmacist and prolific contributor to scientific jour-
nals, Guillaume Dubuc, are not, he stresses, reductive attempts to identify real-life
models. Instead, he shows how Homais’s pharmaceutical rhetoric echoes Dubuc’s
discursive patterns, and proposes that Homais is ‘in a sense Dubuc’s discursive prod-
uct and representative’. Rather in the way that recent biographers have experimented
with more fluid ways of representing Flaubert’s life, Duffy sees Flaubert as negotiat-
ing a new path between the worlds of fiction and reality: in Duffy’s words, Madame
Bovary ‘destabiliz[es] the relationship between the literary and the extraliterary,
killing off the idea of a purely literary work uncontaminated by material reality’.
The relationship between art and life again comes under the microscope in Anne
Green’s article on Sous Napoléon III. By moving between the manuscripts of
Flaubert’s projected last novel and the final volume of his Correspondance, she
convincingly challenges the received view of Sous Napoléon III as a novel firmly
rooted in the Second Empire. While the novel was clearly to have been set in the reign
 INTRODUCTION 7

of Napoleon III, Green reveals how consistently it was fed by Flaubert’s personal
troubles and social experiences in the years following the collapse of the Second
Empire. In the case of Sous Napoléon III, the art-life connection turns out to be
inescapable since the plans are studded with the names of Flaubert’s friends and
acquaintances. Like Wall and Duffy, however, Green is careful to avoid simplistic
source-spotting. She makes it clear that none of the characters is directly modelled on
Louis Bouilhet, for example, yet she discerns many of Bouilhet’s qualities and ideas
in the manuscripts and persuasively argues that his posthumous memory helped to
shape the plot. By showing how closely the plans intersect with Flaubert’s fluctuating
frame of mind in his final decade, Green reinterprets the Sous Napoléon III project
as a means whereby Flaubert could vent some of the bitterness and frustration of his
post-Second Empire years. Weaving together Flaubert’s life and writing, she throws
new light on both.
Green’s contribution is also an example of the second category of Flaubert studies
highlighted by the final volume of the Correspondance, for it brings previously
unpublished manuscript material to the attention of scholars. It is evident from her
article, as from Timothy Chesters’s piece on Flaubert’s annotations on Corneille’s
Médée and from his recent article on Flaubert’s unpublished reading notes on Montaigne
(Chesters, 2009), that not all Flaubert’s writing is yet in the public domain. Over the
past ten years the Rouen Flaubert website (<http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr>) has played
an invaluable role in making manuscript material — particularly the Madame
Bovary manuscripts — available in an easily accessible and searchable form, but there
is more to come. As Yvan Leclerc’s preface to volume five of the Correspondance
makes clear, more letters will certainly emerge (C, 5: x–xi). Further privately owned
manuscripts will eventually come to light, and combined with the new and imagina-
tive ways of interrogating Flaubert’s life and letters that this collection demonstrates,
should help to ensure that Flaubert studies remain as productive and stimulating an
intellectual area as they are today.

Flaubertian interfaces
It is easy to forget that much of Flaubert’s work now in print or otherwise in the
public domain (thanks to electronic resources such as Gallica and the ‘sites Flaubert’
in Paris, Rouen, and Munich), was not intended for publication. Such paradoxes are
part of what makes The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert (Unwin, 2004) a defining
volume of the last ten years in Anglophone Flaubert Studies. Its individual chapters
specifically draw out Flaubert’s achievements in various genres (travel writing, thea-
tre, letters) alongside the historical, visual, documentary, and aesthetic qualities of his
fiction. The contributors also stress the rich legacies of Flaubert’s ‘published’ writing
in terms of his manuscripts and of the works of other novelists, both in and outside
France. A less parochial, less anachronistic Flaubert bobs up in these many intercon-
nected facets of his writing, in a display of what ‘French’ critical theorists on both
sides of the Atlantic (and Channel) would have more readily termed his towering
‘intertextuality’.
Flaubert’s ‘intertextuality’ — the encyclopaedic reading and research, the webs
of literary and cultural allusions, the multiple rewritings of all his published
8 ANNE GREEN, MARY ORR, and TIMOTHY UNWIN

works — has aptly been summed up by Foucault as a ‘bibliothèque fantastique’.

But Flaubert’s ‘intertexuality’ also includes his wider-reaching influence on the
modern novel in several genres, for example, the novel of female adultery or the
encyclopaedic novel. Both these angles on the intertextual Flaubert are particularly
visible in Anglophone critical studies since 2000. A cluster focuses on the importance
of Madame Bovary (Raitt, 2002; Overton, 2002) as a defining novel for later French
exponents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Mauriac (Gallagher,
2005). Fox (2008) has also reframed Madame Bovary as an experimental novel or
anti-novel by investigating Flaubert’s knowledge and transposition of Cervantes’s
Don Quixote as its generic forerunner. Posy Simmonds’s English graphic novel,
Gemma Bovery, serialized in the Guardian in 1999, further exemplifies the visual
and intermedial inexhaustibility of Flaubert’s text, which had already seen numerous
film adaptations and transpositions by French and non-French directors. Those most
famously by Minelli in 1949, Chabrol in 1991, and Tim Fywell’s BBC production
in 2000 are the subject of Mary Donaldson Evans’s seminal Madame Bovary at the
Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context. Her comparative angles and the terms of
her subtitle offer a neat encapsulation of the main concerns and contributions of the
essays in the ‘Flaubertian interfaces’ section. In four very different but interconnected
ways, these contributions return to and reassess why Flaubert’s œuvre is paradigmatic
of key twentieth-century French critical theories of ‘text’ — source and influence
studies (Seznec, 1949), comparative (world) literary studies (Porter, 2001; Herschberg
Pierrot, 2009), deconstruction (Foucault, 1983), and genetic criticism (Le Calvez,
2009) — by finding in Flaubert’s ‘intertextuality’ a sum which is much greater than
all these parts or, indeed, ‘intertextuality’ itself. The strategic choice of the word
‘interfaces’ therefore reflects the bigger subject area in current Flaubert research
that the four essays variously circumscribe. They all underscore how ‘Flaubertian
interfaces’ incorporate not only textual, but also interpersonal and intermedial
avenues of investigation.
In his ‘Flaubert the Reader: the Case of Corneille’s Médée’, Timothy Chesters
immediately strikes at the importance of ‘text’ as central to ‘intertextuality’ by look-
ing at Flaubert as a highly attentive reader and literary critic of works by favoured
authors. Chesters examines and interprets Flaubert’s markings of his copy of Médée
as ‘spasms of self-recognition’ in a fellow Rouennais playwright, whose work was
also misunderstood. The allusions to Corneille in Madame Bovary — in the famous
fiacre ride, for example — are then much more than local colour or homage. They
signify an intense creative impetus that Joyce and Beckett will in turn replicate through
their close readings of the works of Flaubert.
Scarlett Baron’s essay, ‘Invisible Author Gods: Flaubert, Joyce and Intertextual
Theory’ takes up the question of the creative reverberation of Flaubert’s writing in
later authors by investigating Joyce’s citational practices as also a demonstration
of ‘the afterlife of critical theory’. In close readings of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, she finds numerous purloinings from Flaubert’s Correspondance
and Madame Bovary that map onto Stephen Dedalus’s ‘bovaryiste’ but also detached
behaviour as a budding figure of the invisible author-god desiring to create ex nihilo.
Baron’s intertextual and genetic examination of Joyce’s later, self-consciously multi-
citational works for their multiple reference networks to Flaubert convincingly argues
 INTRODUCTION 9

that theories of ‘intertextuality’ only partially catch up with what Flaubert and Joyce
had already inaugurated in their writing practices.
Creative copying and the question of the original are also the subjects of Kate
Rees’s ‘Double-Seater Desks, Broken Bicycles, Mating Dogs: The Dynamic of the Duo
in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet and Beckett’s Mercier et Camier’. She focuses on
the vital dynamics of the double when this is doubled again by Beckett’s work.
As text and writing practice, Mercier et Camier exemplifies for Rees Beckett’s shared
understanding with Flaubert of realism as ‘realization that the world is contradictory
and chaotic’. Her mapping of Beckett’s many allusions to Bouvard et Pécuchet under-
scores the nature of the ‘absurdity and artifice’ of Flaubert’s unfinished work pre-
cisely in its recycling procedures. This is not repetition or copying ad infinitum, but
rather an acknowledgement of sustaining pairs in the face of incomprehensibility.
Incomprehensibility has long been the critical verdict on Flaubert’s Tentation de
saint Antoine, but in ‘Antoine, Reader of his Age: The Intertextual Tentation and its
Intertexts of Science’ Mary Orr returns to the many textual and contextual interfaces
of the final version of the text by focusing instead, like Chesters, on Flaubert the
reader. This move then allows her to investigate Antoine as the visionary ‘reader
of his age’, the only reliable double for how the reader should approach the text.
Orr argues through close readings of the ‘Indian’ sections of the Tentation — the
Gymnosophist in tableau four and the opening of tableau five — that the work is not
‘undecideable’ when these bizarre manifestations are also taken at face value. The
religious and scientific ramifications of the text then produce and clarify one another
as a critical vision of Flaubert’s France.
Taken together the four essays provide interesting dual perspectives on two
areas that were overlooked in The Cambridge Companion: the ‘Flaubert’ of recent
specialist critics, and ‘Flaubert the critic’. Chesters’s essay on Flaubert’s reading
of Corneille further meshes with Seabrook’s similar concern to elucidate Flaubert’s
reading of Goethe and other German Romantics as a commentary for his times. Such
dual perspectives on Flaubert’s self-conscious aesthetics are undoubtedly clarified
through their informed transformation in the works of his significant modernist
others, Joyce and Beckett, as Baron and Rees demonstrate. The subtitle of Mary
Orr’s essay, ‘The Intertextual Tentation and its Intertexts of Science’, reminds and
challenges Flaubert’s critics to be more alert to Flaubert as a critic of the movements
of his age. To understand these, it is important to read the many works that Flaubert
is known to have read, particularly in the domains of theology, comparative religion
and science. Second, the ‘interlectorial’ discussions Flaubert conducted with his expert
friends direct the critic to look beyond textual ‘sources’ to the many ideological
resources that shaped and structured his encyclopaedic works.
By examining texts at the end and beginning of Flaubert’s œuvre, Anne Green and
Sucheta Kapoor also confirm in their essays for this collection that omissions and
silences can elicit some of the most fruitful re-engagements with Flaubert’s work. By
shifting critical perspectives from an expressly aloof, ‘writerly’ Flaubert, these contri-
butions do not contradict Yee’s contribution to understanding Flaubert’s intensely
writerly approach to the exotic. On the contrary, they allow Flaubert to be better
understood as a writer always in the making, through his circumstances, interests and
previous writing. To classify his works as Œuvres de jeunesse or ‘late’ works is to
10 ANNE GREEN, MARY ORR, and TIMOTHY UNWIN

construct falsely linear, positivistic and un-holistic demarcations. The many circles
and re-circulations of themes that his works contain provide rhythms of engagement
that transcend narrow audience appeal or critical fashion in his own times or in ours.
In 1999 Diana Knight noted that ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet is no longer the emblematic
text’ (171). The work by Kate Rees, Emma Bielecki, and Aude Campmas in this
collection already amply demonstrates that novel’s critical resurgence, as is readily
endorsed by contributors to Philippe Dufour’s Flaubert lecteur (2009). It behoves the
contemporary critic and reader of Flaubert’s text(s) therefore to be mindful of such
cycles in critical industry and reception. Flaubert’s reading and writings of his age
were already so many critical interfaces from which we still have much to learn.

New researchers on Flaubert

The final section of this collection consists of shorter papers by emerging scholars
who have recently completed their doctorates. One interesting point about these
researchers is that, unlike the majority of the more established contributors to
this collection, only one (Sucheta Kapoor) made Flaubert the central focus of her
doctoral thesis. Is this because students embarking on postgraduate work are deterred
by a belief — which the present collection thoroughly disproves — that Flaubert has
been so thoroughly worked over that there remains nothing more to be said about
him? Or is it simply that other subjects and other areas seemed more appealing?
Whatever the reason, these new researchers have brought fresh perspectives to
Flaubert as they approach him from a multiplicity of directions. While the diversity
of their approaches to Flaubert is striking, however, these studies have an important
common feature: all of them situate Flaubert within a broader intellectual context,
either seeing him in relation to the ideas and practices of his contemporaries, or
considering how his own ideas and practices feed into the work of later writers. In
this respect they follow a trend noticeable throughout the current collection — they
confirm a recent widening of Flaubert studies, whereby the author is positioned
within a long and richly interwoven intellectual and cultural history.
For example, Emma Bielecki takes as her starting point the evolution of the
French nineteenth-century culture of collecting. She shows how a shift from the old-
fashioned culture of the curieux to that of the modern collectionneur is reflected in
Bouvard et Pécuchet. Whereas the all-embracing curieux was interested in everything,
the collectionneur is only concerned with one specific class of objects. Arguing that
Bouvard et Pécuchet ‘pulverises curiosity, as its heroes move from one discipline
to another, without apparently ever remembering or learning anything’, Bielecki
shows how the novel’s structure echoes the ‘notions of seriality, partiality, and frag-
mentation that structure the modern culture of collecting, and, indeed, modernity
itself’. Thus by embedding Bouvard et Pécuchet firmly within the context of shifting
attitudes to material culture, Bielecki sheds new light on Flaubert’s novel. At the same
time, however, she turns her focus outwards, suggesting that Bouvard et Pécuchet
offers a means of investigating much broader questions about the epistemological
dimension of material culture in nineteenth-century France.
Bouvard et Pécuchet is also the focus of Aude Campmas’s paper, but this time
the lens through which the novel is viewed is the history of the garden, framed by
 INTRODUCTION 11

contemporary ideas about the relationship between man and nature. Campmas shows
how Flaubert undermines Rousseauistic notions about the beneficence of nature,
aligning himself rather with a fin-de-siècle sense of nature as a vengeful, destructive,
hostile force. Moving beyond Flaubert’s evident delight in nature’s ability to sabotage
bourgeois enterprises as he describes the destruction of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s
espaliers and melon cloches, she traces Flaubert’s successive descriptions of their garden
and shows how it undergoes a kind of historical acceleration: starting from medieval
simplicity and order, it accumulates elements from gardens of every subsequent
period — including Renaissance geometricality, Baroque vistas, eighteenth-century
ruins and chinoiserie, and the bric-a-brac of the Exhibition age — to become what
Campmas calls ‘le jardin des jardins’. She points out that, like the Garden of Eden
whose gardener, Adam, was given the power to name and to know, gardens have
long been associated with classification and taxonomy; Bouvard and Pécuchet’s
garden, however, results in a confusion that defies classification and destroys
meaning. By encompassing all gardens, it has turned into ‘la représentation concrète
de l’emballement des systèmes’. Testifying to the inadequacy of language and the
failure of systematization that form a central theme of Flaubert’s novel, the garden
in Bouvard et Pécuchet, Campmas argues, stands as a concrete symbol of the
unnameable and the unclassifiable.
In her study of Quidquid volueris, Sucheta Kapoor likewise demonstrates the value
of approaching Flaubert via the history of ideas — in this case, nineteenth-century
anthropological thought. Kapoor is particularly interested in the implications of
Djalioh’s silence. Whereas Sartre interpreted the ape-man’s muteness from a stand-
point of psychoanalysis and Marxism, attributing it to Flaubert’s own psychological
difficulties and political inertia, Kapoor’s approach challenges that reading and opens
up a new perspective on the tale. Her starting-point is the ideas emanating from
members of the Société des observateurs de l’homme, founded in 1799 by Louis-
François Jauffret, and in particular Jauffret’s interest in speech as a crucial factor in
man’s progress to civilization. If Jauffret emphasizes the need to compare ‘civilized’
language and habits with those of ‘primitive’ man, Flaubert’s depiction of Djalioh
is shown to question the underlying assumptions of Jauffret and his colleagues. As
Kapoor points out, ‘From the outset the portrait of Djalioh [. . .] appears to resist
the ideologues’ stance on language, speech, evolution, abnormality, education and
philanthropy’. Djalioh’s silence challenges ‘civilized’ norms of behaviour and hints at
a purity of passion that intelligence cannot fathom. In this respect, Kapoor argues,
Djalioh may be seen as a precursor to Charles Bovary, while the mentality of Paul,
his master, reflects that of the empiricist ideologues. Kapoor’s argument is that
Djalioh’s silence is used by Flaubert as ‘an aesthetic device to resist the authority of
science, language and idées reçues’; instead, it becomes an alternative language, the
language of art. Through close readings of the text, she shows that by dramatizing a
rejection of nineteenth-century empirical anthropology, Quidquid volueris ultimately
reveals Flaubert’s refusal of the primacy of pure reason.
Whereas Bielecki, Campmas, and Kapoor set Flaubert within a history of ideas
stretching back over several centuries, Jason Hartford projects him forward into the
world of André Gide. Focusing on Gide’s allusion in Les Cahiers d’André Walter to
Flaubert’s image of the galloping sphinx fleeing like a jackal, Hartford extends the
12 ANNE GREEN, MARY ORR, and TIMOTHY UNWIN

idea of readership explored elsewhere in this collection, notably by Chesters and Orr,
in order to consider how Gide read Flaubert and how and why this particular image
engaged his imagination. Gide’s partial identification with Flaubert, coupled with his
hostility to him, are seen as fundamental to the Cahiers d’André Walter reference:
Hartford suggests that the jackal image is taken up by Gide both as a symbol of his
own ‘scavenging’ from La Tentation de saint Antoine and as an ‘ego-ideal who faces
the “monster” down’.

Conclusion
It seems clear from the range of contributions to this collection that Flaubert studies
remain an exceptionally stimulating and productive research area. Whether re-read
in conjunction with the writings of early modern and nineteenth-century thinkers,
re-examined in the light of new manuscript material, repositioned within the context
of new biographical approaches, or reappraised through the eyes of twentieth-
century writers, Flaubert’s work is constantly responsive to the new and exciting
critical perspectives that are developing around it.

Coda
The three editors of this issue have in its making rediscovered a part of Flaubert’s
writing that awaits fuller investigation: Flaubert the editor of the work of his closest
and most respected friends and critics. His careful reading, sharpened pen, ready sug-
gestions, applause of fine formulation, wit, and polish have been the standards we
sought to bring to our exchanges with our contributors, among whom we also count.
The editors would like to thank Modern Languages at the University of Southampton
for generous financial support for the initiating conference, and Nigel Harkness and
Nicholas White for their facilitation of this project as a special issue of Dix-Neuf.

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