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

Style, Spring, 1996 by Jed Deppman

In fact, Salammbo becomes, in the light of this letter, a rigorous presentation of ignorance - rigorous because Flaubert does insist on a certain possibility for harmony. What exactly is "harmony," one might ask, and what grounds it if it attaches to no external or historico-cultural reality of the kind Sainte-Beuve faithfully, fatalistically holds as a measuring rod? Harmony seems to be a kind of pure, self-sustaining writing, both consistent and complete, of the sort that admits only of stylistic or formalist-structuralist critique and not of sociological, historical, or cultural disproof. Indeed, Flaubert's terse formula for this project underscores both his concern for technical accuracy and his awareness of artifice: "Moi, j'ai voulu fixer un mirage en appliquant a l'Antiquite les procedes du roman moderne, et j'ai tache d'etre simple" (I wanted to fix a mirage by applying to antiquity the procedures of the modern novel, and I tried to be simple). Here, as always, Flaubert stresses that the disjunction between the laws that govern a modern novel and those that govern scientific recovery of the past in any form. To freeze a mirage and give it the shimmering stability Flaubert wants, the text must be impassible as well as coherent: its morals must derive from the religion of the text, its dress must be appropriate to the weather, and so forth. The text, that is, should be faithful to its constructed artificial self, at the same time maintaining the logicity and consistency of artifice and flaunting impassibly its incommensurability with any existing representation of the real world.

Salammbo, whom Flaubert uses consistently to figure naive mimesis, is herself instructive on the question of impassible harmony. She is announced in the text as a Dido-figure whose fatal obsession is the goddess Tanith: she dies Dido's death (both are dressed in purple) in Dido's city of Carthage and echoes the familiar words "Ah! pauvre Carthage! lamentable ville!" Like Dido, Salammbo functions as a centralizing and attractive locus for unknowable otherness, appearing first as a speaker of unknown tongues and mysteries - "[l]es soldats, sans comprendre ce qu'elle disait, se tassaient autour d'elle" ([t]he soldiers, without understanding what she was saying, grouped around her) (Salammbo 57) - and never diminishing or even giving a measure to her distance from the world. Although the identification is figured much differently here than in Vergil, Salammbo, like Dido, becomes her city and her goddess:(12)

Ayant ainsi le peuple a ses pieds, le firmament sur sa tete, et autour d'elle l'immensite de la mer, le golfe, les montagnes et les perspectives des provinces, Salammbo resplendissante se confondait avec Tanit et semblait le genie meme de Carthage, son ame corporifiee. (462; my emphasis)

Having thus the people at her feet, the firmament on her head, and all around her the immensity of the sea, the gulf, the mountains and the views of the provinces, shining Salammbo was confused with Tanith and seemed to be the very genius of Carthage, its soul embodied.