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

Style, Spring, 1996 by Jed Deppman

Perhaps the most widespread of these impassible techniques and the most antithetical to historical writing, however, is the use of tropes of causal explanation in the free indirect style. This particular technique exposes a text's lack of objectivity by reasonably obscuring the text's own reasoning. It is often offered as a grand law, although it is impossible to tell whether the law is "thought" by a character who is distanced from us as readers or whether it represents the narrator's intervening to explain the context. This technique is illustrated in Salammbo when the elders decide to perform the sacrifice to Moloch:

Tous approuverent en opinant de la tete successivement; et, d'apres les rites, il dut repondre au grand pretre: "Oui, que cela soit." Alors les Anciens decreterent le sacrifice par une periphrase traditionelle, - parce qu'il y a des choses plus genantes d dire qu'a execute. (385; my emphasis)

They all approved by nodding their heads successively; and, according to the rites, he had to respond to the great priest: "Yes, let it be so." Then the Ancients decreed the sacrifice by a traditional euphemism, - because there are things more difficult to say than to execute.

Flaubert's use of the free indirect style here will not allow us to read the last clause as "what the Ancients were thinking" any more than it will allow us to understand it as a grand law imposed from outside to explain the text. This essentially impassible "parce que" clause attaches to no voice and to no grounded reasoning, and thus it is all the more absurd for its inherent claim to explanatory power. "Because there are things more difficult to say than to do" is a commonplace of sorts in French, but is it a commonplace for the Ancients, who may or may not be thinking along those lines? Is it provided by the narrator to explain the actions of those "others," or is it how those others think to themselves? The clause is not necessarily attached to the voice of the narrator, especially in a context where the logic of traditional periphrasis is in question. Note also that the "traditional periphrase" to which the narrator refers - the euphemism that the Ancients themselves are supposed to utter - does not appear in the text but is kept secret? not known? by the narrator; rather the "because" clause, itself a kind of traditional periphrase, comes in its place. The Ancients say a euphemism in place of an explicit decree because it is easier to do something than to say it, and we are not privy to the euphemism actually used but only to a euphemism of unknown origin - who says it? - explaining why the Ancients used a euphemism. Of course, the phrase is perfect for the free indirect style, which we as readers may or may not hear. All of Flaubert's texts indulge in a range of impassible usages of the free indirect style wide enough to disrupt any "fatalist" historiographical project.

Although it requires further elucidation, Flaubert's stylistic impassibility can be characterized as follows: