History with style: the impassible writing of Flaubert - Gustave Flaubert

Style, Spring, 1996 by Jed Deppman

Marcel Proust, not only the novelist writing in the wake of Flaubert but also the critical reader, pasticheur, and essayist, draws attention to what is for him a specifically stylistic Flaubertian revolution. Proust's reading can be understood as a call to integrate the stylistic with the historiographical, to treat the "historiographical paradox" together with the "stylistic revolution." As we will see, this combination suggests that stylistic deviations in Flaubert's writing mark a shift in the history of the relationship of writing to history.

It is noteworthy that Proust, following in the tradition of stylistic criticism of Flaubert's work in general (for example, James, Auerbach, Ramazani), never really bothers to comment on the historical nature of Flaubert's texts, but rather almost obsessively analyzes their style. (We should not, however, lose sight of the fact that, for Proust, Flaubert's stylistic revolution is tantamount to a philosophical one.) Critics of both Proust and Flaubert have been content to amass, cite, and let speak for themselves Proust's commentaries on Flaubert, occasionally lamenting the fact that Proust did not treat questions other than style. Proust's writings on Flaubert are, however, among his most interestingly heterogeneous. Mentioned infrequently in Proust's correspondence and only occasionally by name, anyway - in the Recherche, Flaubert appears mainly in etudes of various kinds.(4)

Proust generalizes his findings on the style of Flaubert in an essay published toward the end of his life (which I will examine in the third part of this essay), but even in his earliest pastiches Proust demonstrates a mastery of such Flaubertian techniques as free indirect style, ternary structures, multiplication of the imperfect tense, and, most of all, what I will call (rechristening a modernist term) impassibility. To elucidate this peculiar stylistic trait and to articulate its implicit relation to the question of history and writing, I will consider the first Figaro pastiche, l'affaire Lemoine, which is Proust's simulation of Flaubert's writing of an historical event.(3)

Proust's pastiche of Flaubert is remarkable for the number of stylistic devices it renders, all of which advance the overall project: what exactly would Flaubert have done with the affaire Lemoine? The last half of the pastiche is in free indirect style and describes the reactions of the group of onlookers at the trial. Crediting Flaubert with a project of greater scope than that of a single consciousness or individual destiny, Proust has his author seize upon the trial setting in order to make statements about the people seeing it. As a group they muse about the affair, the millions they would have had if they had been the ones to discover the technique for making diamonds. They convince themselves that the accused has cheated them somehow, and Proust's Flaubert writes:

A ceux-la, l'exces de leur detresse etait la force de maudire l'accuse; mais tous le detestaient, jugeant qu'il les avait frustres de la debauche, des honneurs, de la celebrite, du genie; parfois de chimeres plus indefinissables, de ce que chacun recelait de profond et de doux, depuis son enfance, dans la niaiserie particuliere de son reve.(6) (Contre Sainte-Beuve 15)