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

Style, Spring, 1996 by Jed Deppman

Again, this is utterly impassible in the sense I have described: we know neither for whom Salammbo "was confused with Tanith" nor to whom she seemed to be the very genius of Carthage. Both "se confondait" and "semblait" are deliberately ambiguous: they could refer to Salammbo herself, to the people of the city, indeed, even to the narrator, who so often in this text paints detailed and overperfect images. Vergil also equates linguistic entity with external reality - a confusion Flaubert scrupulously maintains in the final lines of the text - but this confusion is never thematized as Dido's own obsession.(13) Flaubert repeatedly stresses this specific aspect of Salammbo:

De son bras etendu, il [Schahabarim] montrait dans Belier la porte de la generation humaine, dans le Capricorne, celle du retour vers les Dieux; et Salammbo s'efforcait de les apercevoir, car elle prenait ces conceptions pour des realites; elle acceptait comme vrais en eux-memes de purs symboles et jusqu'a des manieres de langage, distinction qui n'etait pas, non plus, toujours bien nette pour le pretre. (288; my emphasis)

With his arm extended, he [Schahabarim] showed in Aries the gate of human generation, in Capricorn, that of the return to the Gods; and Salammbo tried to glimpse them, because she took these conceptions for realities; she accepted as true in themselves the pure symbols and even the flourishes of language, a distinction which was not, itself, always very clear for the priest.

Even putting aside the indeterminable narration, which seems to condemn Salammbo's constitutive logocentrism,(14) the problem announced here informs everything up to the last sentence in the text, which is itself studiously irreducible, a kind of paradigmatic sentence for Proust's impassible pastiche: "Ainsi mourut la fille d'Hamilcar pour avoir touche au manteau de Tanit" (In this way the daughter of Hamilcar died for having touched the veil of Tanith) (Salammbo 469). The difficulty here again is that causality in the case of Salammbo's death is both foregrounded - "for having touched" - and left indeterminate: the tropes of explanation and finality again appear, but they invite a range of interpretations. In what sense is this a "real" causal explanation for her death? Is it what the narrator thinks, what the people think, or what Salammbo thinks? Or is it more metaphorical, that is, a figure for Salammbo's hubristic error of "taking herself for a divinity"? The latter is what we must conclude if we condemn Salammbo for her logocentrism, and it seems to be a real possibility; after all, Matho took her for Tanith and she impassibly refused to answer or interpret his question, providing instead the purely paratactic juxtaposition of two names:

[Matho] "-A moins, peut-etre, que tune sois Tanit?" [Salammbo] "-Moi, Tanit!" (312)

[Matho] "Unless, perhaps, you are Tanith?" [Salammbo] "Me, Tanith!"

And, indeed, the people have just credited her with killing the greatest enemy of the city by the sheer force of her stare.