Pick out 200-year-old Flaubert

12 December marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gustave Flaubert. I was reading Julian Barnes's tribute to Flaubert's Parrot, and a Shanghai friend posted in the group the "Madame Bovary" he was reading, translated by Mr. Li Jianwu. Another friend lamented that he had read two versions, but had not read a translation of Lee Ken-woo.

It seems that the greatest French novelist of the 19th century still has no shortage of readers today, and is even becoming more and more popular. Let's summarize the story of Madame Bovary: a provincial peasant girl, married to a doctor, became a middle-class wife, growing weary of her doctor husband, who fell victim to vanity, became a victim of consumerism, went from buying jewelry to accepting usury, and finally embarked on a road of no return of desire – it seems, isn't this a current story, but many people are taking out online loans.

However, Flaubert certainly would not agree with my moral judgment. When he says, "Madame Bovary is me," he is not only emphasizing authenticity, but also a sense of understanding, and he would not agree with us judging her so lightly. Emma was an "ordinary person", probably any woman, and it was from the story of ordinary people that Flaubert experienced the fate of the whole human race.

Flaubert's father and brother were both doctors, as were the novel's protagonist, Monsieur Bovary. Although the writer himself did not study medicine, he also had the same precise characteristics as a doctor's surgery. The hardcover translation of Li Kengo of the People's Literature Publishing House, the illustration in front of the main text, is a cartoon entitled "Flaubert is dissecting Madame Bovary". The writer in the painting, holding a scalpel instead of a pen, does not appear as the "patient" Emma.

Flaubert was born into a wealthy middle-class family, had a seizure when he was in college, returned home to recuperate, and never "went to work" in his life. He regards writing as his own career, not for fame or profit, but only to write the most satisfactory work. In his early years, he spent 4 years writing a book "The Temptation of St. Anthony", invited a friend to come over after it was finished, and spent a few days reading it to him, but the evaluation was "very bad, better burn it". "Emotional Education", which is also an early work, is also badly written. But Flaubert did not give up, but rewrote these two subjects until he matured.

That's probably his greatest place. He can rewrite a subject matter over and over again until he is satisfied. For him, the most important thing is not the story itself, but how to tell the story. He was an excellent stylist, and even in novels, every sentence strived to be accurate and precise.

Milan Kundera, also a stylist, admired Flaubert. He believed that Flaubert could "evoke reality most implicitly with the least amount of words." Kundera also contrasted the sentences he had imitated with the passages in Madame Bovary, "The sentences I have made resemble empty clothes hanging from the shelves of clothes, but in Flaubert's hands they are worn on characters who are not at all dry." Nabokov, who was also a stylist and a fan of Flaubert, also personally translated a version of Madame Bovary, but did not receive much praise.

The descriptions in Flaubert's novels are not careless, but are examined by the eyes of a doctor. He once warned the writer that he could repeatedly observe and depict a tree until he grasped the unique soul of the tree. That's what he did himself, and in A Simple Heart, the maid lives a lonely life in her later years, with a parrot. In fact, Flaubert's family not only had a maid who took care of him for many years, but also a parrot, which he observed for a long time when he was writing.

In Flaubert's Parrot, Barnes tells an interesting story. An expert in French literature at Oxford University pointed out that One of the great failures of Madame Bovary: Flaubert wrote about Emma's eyes, which appeared in three colors before and after. After some research, Barnes found that Emma's prototype was a neighbor of Flaubert, and the writer's friend recalled that the eyes of this female neighbor would show different colors because of different emotions. In fact, even the carriage in which Emma famously stole and the curtain it pulled down have a real reference, and for a while the writer himself was hanging out in Paris, for fear of being recognized, and closed the curtain in the carriage.

Flaubert advocated that when writing novels, the writer himself should "disappear completely" and retreat into the background. This is a supreme realm and the honest practice of a master of realism. But doesn't this precise style also reflect the posture of a writer? The writer really does not appear in the form of "I", but he is indeed everywhere and crosses time and space. He once said that if he was rich enough, he would buy all the "Madame Bovary" on the market and destroy it, but in fact it was doomed to be futile, because the book became immortal after it was written.

Source: China Youth Daily client