Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the French writer Flaubert, and we have specially invited Tang Zhen, a member of the French Fraubert and Maupassant Friends Association, to tell us about the lesser-known side of Flaubert. Why is Flaubert said to be Naxos and a born writer? How were Madame Bovary and Sarangpo created?
200 years ago today, a baby boy fell to the ground in the Flaubert family in Normandy, France, and the birth of this boy (Gustave Flaubert, Gustave Flaubert, 1821.12.12-1880.05.08) brought some concern to the family for a while: it was a stupid child at the age of nine who stuttered and could not express his full meaning. However, the accidents of decades later are difficult to predict: in the ranks of French realist writers such as Hugo, Balzac, Zola and Maupassant in the 19th century, Flaubert was seen, and his literary achievements were comparable to those of him.
Gustav Flaubert
Malraux, the great French writer of the 20th century, believed that the spirit of the heroic spirit could mutate, penetrate time and space, penetrate into people's hearts, and infect people's souls.
The power to penetrate the hearts of others comes from the writer's own perception, although Maupassant believes that Flaubert is like a puppet manipulator, in the process of creation, trying his best to cover up the thread in his hand and hide himself, but Flaubert's freedom from the self is achieved in the process of full devotion. He uses the keen eyes and perception of a photographer to capture objective truth and beauty to describe things, rather than using subjective ideas to draw a framework. For Flaubert, the description was not easy. Balzac may have written a work in one night or three nights, while the "clumsy" Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary (first edition in 1857), sometimes writing two or three pages a week, and a work of about three hundred pages took him five years. Slow work can sometimes make him sweat profusely, making it difficult to jump into a satisfactory chapter. This work was forged in his nearly ten years of literary cultivation, and the accumulation of two years of reading in the Paris Cottage (1843-1845) laid a solid foundation for his creation. This period of loneliness, irritability and hopelessness had tormented and even roared, but short-term epilepsy had made him understand himself, and isolation from his family had made him lose his illusion of reality. His awareness of his lack of literary standards forced him to read the works of Byron, Rabelais, Rousseau, Lamartine, Hugo, Sade, and others in large quantities, distinguishing between the muddy and inferior expressions and the noble passions of Homer and Shakespeare. A long decade of polishing led him to successfully write several chapters of the novel "Madame Bovary" and "understand what he should do". Flaubert, who was slow to correct the time, thus defeated the accusations of secular religion against this work and became a pioneer in the creation of a new literary art. Emma, who bucked the trend and based on real characters, was real and vivid, and also aroused our sympathy for the female fiction characters of Nala in Ibsen's "Doll's House" (1879) and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (the first edition of the novel of the same name in 1877).
Manuscript of Madame Bovary
Flaubert thought that writers deserved admiration in three ways: they had the power to produce effects on the reader, to enchant the reader, which was the power to make the writer a poet and an artist; they had an inseparable understanding of reality and beauty, they could capture the interconnection between reality and things, and they could accurately describe details and illusions; they could do unego creations, both hidden and everywhere, and they used this strategy to make the interrelated results in fiction reach the end smoothly. His standard of appreciation has also become the criterion for his future practice of creation.
Immersing himself in reading cultivated Flaubert's literary accomplishment, and traveling out also carved deep memory scars in his heart and accumulated materials for creation. The creation of Sarangpo (originally carthage, 1862) was inspired by his field trip to North Africa (Carthage), and in 1849 he and his friend Dican traveled to Egypt and other places for two years, where he witnessed the "contempt for the flesh" of slavery during the construction of the pyramids, the beaten slaves on the streets of Cairo, the women who were roughly trafficked, and the smirks of the cane holders. He wrote: "I would like to see and hear sorrow and pain everywhere. I smelled lemons and corpses, and saw the pierced graves showing rotting skeletons. Fascinated by the Arabic language and delighted that he was called "mustache daddy" by the Arabs, he put on the Nubian costume, he gave up the coffee in the hotel when he tried roast lamb, boiled lamb hooves and gusgus. He admired the nomadic Bedouins of the desert and felt he could mingle with them. It was these real experiences, coupled with careful examination of the literature, that allowed him to spend four years to complete this work that has precise descriptions in customs, religious rituals and even clothing, utensils, and houses, and the various descriptions of ancient slave societies and the embellishments of the beautiful woman Sarangpo are inseparable from the accumulation of materials and the support of rich imagination.
Sarangpo
Flaubert was not prolific in his lifetime, officially publishing only five novels and three short stories. Later generations found that he was a narcissistic handwriting maniac, in his letter to a friend, he swore that he would never let his manuscript be paid, nor was he willing to revise the proof of the publishing house, and he wanted to review the emotions expressed in the text on his manuscript, which made the publishing house a big headache. His manuscripts left gold of literary value, and he himself left the image of Naxos and the natural writer among the writers.
Flaubert's family was well-off, and both his father and brother were famous surgeons in Rouen. He was not a money worshipper and did not despise gold. After his death, there was only a meager savings in the jar. He adhered to the principle that art was free of charge and never intended to make money by writing. He does not pander to flattery and writes for those who understand him and not form the market. He refused to adapt Madame Bovary into a play, even if the loss was 20 times higher than the royalties. In his 25-year publishing career, Flaubert did not earn more than 45,000 francs, and Hugo's Les Misérables had a maximum copyright income of 300,000 francs. Flaubert's successor, Maupassant, also earned 28,000 francs a year in copyright, and in 1882 he earned 40,000 francs a year for newspapers. Flaubert defined himself as a man who wrote with a pen, not as someone else. He said, I have my own style, my style is not paid, valuable works of art must have commercial value.
André Gide (1869-1951), winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature, regarded Flaubert as his orientation as a young man. He commented that Flaubert's works were superior to his own, that in the process of practicing impersonalization, he knew how to get rid of the routine and show his personality, that he could forget himself when he intersected with pens and words, that he could keep himself away from autobiography in shaping characters, and that he could introduce objective and true images and events. May Flaubert's works and personalities still penetrate our hearts to this day.