The chronotope and the generation of meaning in novels and paintings

Criticism, Spring, 1994 by Janice Best

In seeking to discuss paintings and descriptions,(17) I shall look at the manner in which each artist inscribes the effects of time in the space that he describes or depicts. My analyses will show that places of ambiguity played an important role in the generation of artistic meanings in the works of Flaubert and Manet through the links which each artist established between these places and the temporality of transition.

Places of encounter and of ambiguity in L'Education sentimentale

In the Paris of L'Education sentimentale, places of neutrality have a particular importance: in L'Art Industriel, the hybrid boutique of Jacques Arnoux, public balls, drawing rooms of prostitutes race tracks, political clubs(18) were all convenient meeting places for persons of different class and opinion. There, rivalries could brush elbows familiarly ("les rivalites se coudoyaient familierement"), reactionaries from different sides could meet ("les reactionnaires de bords differents se rencontraient" [E.S., 65,421]), and high society women and gentlemen could delight in or be scandalised by the presence of loose women (E.S., 237).

One such place of neutrality is the bordello to which the novel's hero, Frederic, and his friend, Deslauriers, paid an unsuccessful visit before the start of the novel's action. Although Flaubert does not reveal the details of this scene until the end of the novel, Frederic's stance at the door of the bordello, with his bouquet of flowers stolen from his mother's garden, unable to chose between the many different women offered to him, is in fact the one in which he will find himself at almost every turning point of the novel--at the racetrack where the three worlds, and the three women he frequents, are first united; at the outbreak of the 1848 revolution as during the bloody reprisal of the 1851 coup d'etat; or yet again at the moment of his fiancee's wedding to his best friend. He seems always to be on the threshold between several different worlds and several possible courses of action. Frederic's inability to keep conflicting appointments in worlds which can meet only in places of social ambiguity is symbolic of his particular stance at the doorway of the bordello itself. Unwilling to accept the lack of distinctions implied by the bordello, yet unable to live simultaneously in the separate worlds proposed by society, Frederic fails to engage in any concrete action. The chronotope of the threshold which, according to Bakhtin is often associated with the more general theme of the encounter (Esthetique, 389), takes on new meaning here. Associated less with the idea of a crisis or a turning point in life (as in the works of Dostoievski), it has become at once the symbol of failure and the figure of conflicting spatial and temporal dimensions.

It is in his opening description of the boat trip(19) that Flaubert sets the stage for this world of ambiguous social distinctions in which Frederic will always be temporally out of step. The first scene of the novel emphasizes fluidity and imprecision: the boat itself, by the regularity of its movement, seems to be immobile; the monuments of Paris, half hidden by the fog, disappear; the hills on the edges of the river rise up and disappear, without eliciting any interest. The boat, which carries Frederic backward away from Paris, also places him with a mixture of classes and of professions. Strolling upon the bridge, reciting melancholy verses to himself, he must mingle with people from the middle class, workers, shop owners with their wives and children, hunters with their dogs, sailors, and peasants. The sordid aspect of his fellow passengers' clothing is reinforced by the filth littering the bridge of the boat itself: