This year marks the 200th anniversary of Flaubert's birth. This great writer who lived alone and grew old is regarded as the founder of modern Western novels. His works depict the customs of French society in the mid-to-late 19th century.
For example, "Emotional Education" presents the wave of the February Revolution of 1848 in France; "The Temptation of Saint Anton" is full of rebellion against religious delusions and aversion to materialistic society; "Madame Bovary" provokes people to think about moral strength and bad customs; "Dictionary of Mediocrity" is even more cynical, overlooking the foolishness of the bourgeois elite and the vulgar...
In the art of rhetoric and the dissection of human nature and psychology, Flaubert is an epoch-making presence in the history of Western literature.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), a famous French writer, was born in France to a family of traditional doctors and is regarded as the founder of the modern Western novel
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > realism to defeat Romanticism</h1>
Balzac, Flaubert, the nineteenth-century Masters of French Realist Literature, plus Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant and others, are regarded by us as a camp of realist writers.
Realism is a revolt against Romanticism, and from the perspective of historical development, the Romantic movement is a reflection of individual freedom and self-expression in the period of the rise of the Western bourgeoisie, and politically a rebellion against the patriarchal tradition. The key word of romance is "bourgeoisie", the romantic historical and political background is the unsuccessful French Revolution, the ideological background is the classical philosophy of German idealism, so in Gorky's eyes, romanticism is divided into positive and negative factions, negative romanticism whitewashes reality, and reality compromises, falling into the ideological abyss of love and death, and positive romanticism still has a negative side!
Because Romanticism's study of the sublime, tragic, genius, freedom, and individual characteristics focuses on the spirit and indulges emotions, it is in line with the historical trend that materialist realism resists Romanticism.
This historical trend has been pushed backwards, and to our place, today, literary education is still about the "political correctness" of realism.
"The Sunday at Flaubert's House" is Maupassant's classic short story, which has been repeatedly selected as a language textbook. Maupassant, a student of Flaubert, seems to have incarnated himself as a professional primary school Chinese teacher in 21st-century China in this essay, demonstrating a full range of "realistic" character depictions from portraits, movements, language, looks to psychology, just to reflect the characteristics of the characters and highlight the personality of the characters.
Maupassant (1850-1893), one of the world's three great masters of the short story, Flaubert was his literary mentor
Flaubert, who was obviously a reclusive man, was analyzed to be hospitable, cheerful, cheerful, easily agitated, and amiable, because Maupassant wrote: "I saw Flaubert making a big move (as if he were going to fly), stepping from this person to that person, and driving his clothes and pants bulging, like the sails of a fishing boat." He smiled and slapped his hand on the shoulder a few times..."
The Enlightenment– Romanticism – Realism, this line, as if something was wrong.
Flaubert openly objected to the veneration of him as a realist bishop:
"Everyone agrees that everything called 'realism' has nothing to do with me, even though they want to see me as a bishop of realism... Everything a naturalist pursues is something I despise... All I seek everywhere is beauty. ”
Schiller first used the word "realism" in literature and art, but the word is philosophically classical. According to Schiller, the opposition between classicism and romanticism is the opposition between realism and idealism. Greek classicism is realism, and goethe and he both see it that way.
After half a day, from classicism to romanticism to realism, it seems to be playing back again, and it is not so simple that we can grasp the character description as the content of the entrance examination.
Sartre took flaubert out and wrote the 3,000-page Idiot in the Family, a stunning work of literary criticism. Through the upbringing of Flaubert, a literary scholar, he tried to illustrate how man "internalized" the external society from an early age—that is, Schiller said that realism is idealism; and how he chose under the constraints of society—to prove his own existentialism.
Plunge headlong into the fog of doctrine, from which we will fish out Flaubert.
Zola, an important French critical realist writer of the second half of the 19th century, considered Flaubert to be the "father of naturalism"
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="212" > Flaubert overthrew himself</h1>
Gorky turned his head and said, "In the great artists, realism and romanticism always seem to be united. (Gorky: TheSis Studies, p. 163, People's Literature Publishing House, 1978) But what he said said could not change anything, we only took what we needed politically.
Back at Flaubert, he met Hugo at the age of 19 in a literary social network in Paris. Hugo was so romantic that no one labeled him as "romantic" other than "romantic."
Hugo's life was vigorous, he earned a lot of money through writing and drama, always surrounded by flowers, never abandoned the original match, personally went to the street to agitate for revolution, took the initiative to exile himself, and built his own house, and died and was buried in the Pantheon...
Flaubert lived on his estate, guarded his mother, spent his life in the country house left by his father, never married, he had no intention of making money from writing, and with great contempt, he was a provincial countryman far from the political whirlpool, and although he spent several months a year socializing in Paris, he was also very careful. He did not bury the Pantheon...
Compared with Hugo, Flaubert's life was too lackluster, just as we have the impression that realism is romanticism.
But Flaubert never wanted to "bring down" Hugo, and at first his writing took a romantic path. He began to create literature at the age of 15, first allowing passion to flow in his pen, writing very quickly, and also won the reputation of "precocious genius".
From 1843 to 1845, Flaubert, in his early twenties, wrote The Education of Emotions, and from 1848 to 1849 he wrote The Temptation of St. Anton.
Neither of these two manuscripts, however, is the Emotional Education and The Temptation of St. Anton as we see it today. Hugo summoned literary confidants and recited the first drafts to them for several days, but they were all denied. He locked the manuscript in a drawer, and after middle age, the creative style has changed greatly, which can be described as a "transition from romanticism to realism", which has been completely rewritten, resulting in the "Emotional Education" and "The Temptation of St. Anton" that we see today.
Flaubert did not "bring down" Hugo, he was the first to knock down himself.
This is how his friend rejected the first draft of The Temptation of St. Anton:
"Now that you cannot restrain your lyrical tendencies, it is better that you choose a subject, and the flow of emotion here is so ridiculous that you have to be careful, to reject your tendency, to choose a practical subject, a story of bourgeois life rich... Then you force yourself to write him out in a natural mood. ”
So Flaubert restrained his romantic passion, chose a real social story that happened at that time, and wrote his most famous masterpiece, Madame Bovary. The hero of the story prototype is a student from the hospital where his father is the director, and the incident was quite sensational at the time, and it was published in the newspaper of Flaubert's hometown of Rouen.
Flaubert decided to write the story, but he was sober, and it was a tyrannical tale of a woman's infidelity.
Flaubert's Collected Novels, translated by Kengo Lee
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="213" > Madame Bovary destroys the narrative</h1>
Flaubert was born in Rouen in the Normandy region of northwestern France in 1821, the son of a well-known physician in the medical profession, and at the age of 3 Flaubert began to serve as the director of the Municipal Hospital of Rouen. He grew up playing in the dissection room, and it was there that his "miserable and arrogant" personality began to form. Specifically, "I don't love life at all, and I'm not afraid of death at all," and "At any time, I can safely plunge into the dark ravine." ”
Therefore, the narrative of Madame Bovary will not be sensationalized by the fact that it is a story of death, and the author deals with it with a very insubstant indifference, so that it is not even a tragedy.
Sartre described in his 1947 book What is Literature:
"Flaubert's sentence is deaf and blind, without blood, without a trace of life; a deep silence separates it from the next; it falls into the void, never to return, and falls with its prey."
Sartre had read Flaubert's books in his childhood, and when he grew up, he re-read them, and it was strange that it was not out of liking, but on the contrary, he felt that Flaubert was a man who made him feel unhappy. In this unhappiness, he retained for a long time to think about Flaubert. In his 1943 philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, he expressed the idea of writing a book on Frefenstein's psychoanalysis.
So, Sartre pointed out, it was not Flaubert's weakness, but Flaubert's style. Hen Troia, a Russian-American author of Flaubert, published in the 1980s, said: "The impartiality of the writer to his characters, and the writer's erasure of himself after the events he depicts, is the big question that Flaubert pondered day and night." He mentioned dozens, hundreds of times in correspondence that the writer should disappear into the work, just as God disappeared into creation. ”
This is why Sartre said that Flaubert's sentence was "deaf and dumb, without blood, without a trace of anger". Why did Flaubert do this? Because before him, the author of the novel often jumped out from behind the story, made a lot of arguments, and even preached morally. "Madame Bovary" is obviously a story that can easily be written by previous novelists as moral preaching, for example, this is the story of the Chinese version of Pan Jinlian, and in "Jin Ping Mei", there are authors who are wary of the world -
"The people of the world, the camp is chased by the camp, the rush is urgent, can not jump out of the seven emotions and six desires, can not break the circle of wine and wealth." In the end, it is very important to end up together! ”
In 1965, Gérard Genet, one of the representatives of structuralist narratology and literary semiotics, wrote The Silence of Flaubert, pointing out that in Flaubert's novels, a large number of trivial and self-disciplined descriptions are regarded as "the element of incidental", and their arbitrary insertion destroys the narrative and narrative discourse, ultimately leading to the "escape of meaning".
Otherwise, what kind of cautionary significance would Madame Bovary have? "Is it virtue for a woman to be talentless"? That's something that was killed long ago by Romanticism.
That being said, the writer cannot write things out of the ordinary, and Flaubert has no partiality toward Madame Bovary, and must be rude when it is time to be rude. This unapologetic effect, and the author never tries to explain Madame Bovary's motives, points out, "even its purpose is to hang or space".
Li Jianwu (1906-1982) was a famous writer, dramatist and translator in modern times, and an outstanding expert in French literature
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="214" > dreams shine into reality</h1>
However, "Madame Bovary" is not obscure, and the reader who is purely for the sake of watching the plot can still get a complete story of an unfaithful wife, and the heart can roll up ten thousand grass and mud horses, without the slightest feeling that the purpose of reading with voyeurism is first and foremost morally unclean.
At the beginning of the publication of Madame Bovary, there was a social uproar, Flaubert was prosecuted, and the novel was accused of "bad customs and desecration of religion". But not long after, the court acquitted him. After all, this was already after the European Revolution of 1848, and this lawsuit became the best propaganda for Flaubert, and he rose to fame and established his position in the literary world.
Flaubert himself never married, and writing Madame Bovary proves that he had the "misogyny" we know today?
We can see how the writer describes Madame Bovary Emma—
Father thought that she had been looking for a sewing box for a long time, and impatiently said two words to her; she did not resist, but, in the middle of the slit, pierced her finger, and then put it in her mouth.
The whiteness of the nails surprised Charlie, shiny, fine-tipped, cut in an almond pattern, cleaner than Diop's tusks. In fact, the hands are not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, the joints are a little thinner; and they are also too long, and the lines around them are not soft. She is beautiful in her eyes: because of her eyelashes, the brown color seems to be black. Eyes looking at you, without scruples, with an innocent and bold look.
Genet points out that Flaubert's distinction between dream and reality is unclear, "using all modes of perception (especially touch) of the presence of matter", as exemplified by the depiction of Emma's fingers — "shiny, pointed", and that the effects of light and shadow and amplification exacerbate the dream. This approach fits the writer's penchant for "gaze meditation," but it's actually contrary to the dramatic requirements of the plot—and there's nothing wrong with portraying a lady in this way.
Although the writer depicts Emma in the third person, he substitutes the perspective on Dr. Charles Bovary—"the eyes are looking at you..." This is what literary critics later summarized as a "free paraphrase", and attributed the earliest invention of this technique to Flaubert.
This paragraph is still a fairly normal depiction, basically objective without judgment, such as depicting Emma's clean fingers, but "in fact, the hands are not beautiful", popular novels or moral novels will not be so calm and objective, have to dig a pit such as "snake and scorpion beauty" for readers to jump in, but Flaubert is not like this, he does not move, but also borrows Charlie's eyes to warn of the danger in front of him.
Flaubert was withdrawn from the story, and there was no basis for measuring his motivations or preferences in terms of his personal private life. Because Emma was destined to be destroyed, Flaubert accepted the consequences with doctoral rigor, but did not want the moral law to be forced in causation, so the best thing to do was not to let the reader see the attitude of the writer, who was just a recluse behind the narrative.
When children are undecided, they often have to turn back to look at their parents, and the writer is like that parent, hiding it so that the child cannot find it, which helps the growth of the "reader child".
The constantly being adapted and remade "Madame Bovary"
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="215" > Flaubert's problem</h1>
Lee Waswol was a good translator of Flaubert. Chinese netizens recognized that his translation was the most faithful to the original text. We can see from Flaubert's sentences that the rhythm is bright and light, away from the heaviness and away from the huge structure. As far as Chinese is concerned, such a text does not have the feeling of obsolescence of many translated works in the Republic of China period. The work of translation is to make us enjoy reading Flaubert rather than reading Madame Bovary's story.
Proust, with his high sensitivity as a fellow French novelist, wrote a paper in 1920 entitled "On flaubert's style", which was published in the New France Review. In his dissertation, he notes that Flaubert was the first to "free the changing times from attachment to anecdotes and dregs of history." He was the first to compose music for them."
In fact, Proust praises Flaubert's grammatical peculiarities such as the unfinished past tense and the use of conjunctions, which of course are not easy to see in our translations. But apart from the sentence pattern, Flaubert's blank spaces, which have no traces of inflection, are considered more important by Proust.
With the increasing and updating of Later generations of Flaubert's research, especially after the founding of literary semiotics, the confusion of Flaubert's works in the academic community focused on one point. The Canadian scholar Graham Falconer pointed out this problem in an essay on the "non-certainty" of Flaubert and Henri James, which he called the "Flaubert problem", which means: "The meaning of the whole work is missing or temporarily missing." In fact, the "Flaubert question" has become an important proper noun in the history of literature, the history of literary criticism, and the study of Flaubert.
After reading Madame Bovary, we are not sure what the author is trying to say. The critic Malraux said that Flaubert wrote a kind of "beautiful paralyzing novel", which we may understand as a novel without intention, a novel that does not intend to be made. From the "new French novel" of later generations to many novels today, this category falls into this category.
So where does this lack of intent ultimately point? Roland Barthes argues that this is only an indirect literary language, and finally it means something. The American structuralist scholar Jonathan Kahler, in his 1974 monograph Flaubert: The Use of Non-Determinism, argued: "Flaubert has mastered what Barthes called an indirect literary language... This mode of writing attempts to question the conceptual system that controls the world..."
So what is the "conceptual system that controls the world"?
Flaubert once confessed to his lover that he had a "brain disease" when he was 21 years old, but the type of disease is difficult to determine, similar to epilepsy. The Russian writer Dostoevsky, who was the same age as him, suffered from epilepsy, and when he was sick, he suddenly fainted and convulsed, spit foam in his mouth, and made sheep calls. But Flaubert's symptoms were much milder, and he felt a fire in his eyes, and many hallucinations followed, and he lay on the bed and groaned in pain, and of course convulsed. But after a few minutes he fell asleep, sometimes for several days at once.
Flaubert read his father's collection of books, hoping to find a symptomatic answer. He did not find an answer, but he discovered some absurd, abstract theories, and afterwards he recalled: "I was very skeptical of medicine, but very much in hygiene. ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="216" > "realism" and salvation</h1>
Although the number of later episodes was less frequent than in the early stages, Flaubert never completely got rid of the disease. His father was the most famous surgeon in Normandy, France, but he couldn't do anything about his son's strange illness.
In fact, judging from Flaubert's hallucinations, this disease may not fall within the scope of epilepsy, but is more like a functional mental disorder. In the 1840s, research and treatment of mental illness in France had not yet begun, and it was not until Flaubert's later years that psychiatry progressed in Europe under the research of Freud and others. Therefore, Flaubert could only learn to save himself.
Freud pointed out that many mentally ill people are unable to attain liberation mainly because they are afraid of self-knowledge, let alone seeking a solution for themselves.
From Flaubert's letters to his lover, we can read a great deal of inward observation and introspection: "I have always been extremely averse to movement. I think this belongs to the beast side of survival. "Three days of physical movement will cost me fifteen days, because I will have to spend my strength to calm down again." "I hate getting dressed, undressing, eating, and so on."
At the same time, he felt that his illness also exposed the "ignorance of the doctors and gentlemen", "They advised me to rest, but what is the use of rest?" Entertainment, avoiding loneliness and so on, a bunch of impractical stuff. I only believe in one square, time! And I always think about myself, and I feel bored. ”
He had already said that he was not afraid of death, "I am a man, not so much because of death as it is because of pain." "The downside of pain is that it makes us feel too much about life." He considers himself a reclusive countryman, and work is a punishment, "which is a bit condescending: work degrades one's identity." ”
Should pain be avoided? "There are people who are not suffering, people who have no nerves. Happy people! Yet how many things they were deprived of! He thinks that the bourgeoisie is "infected with the mood of the people" is terrible, that all political parties are "shallow, hypocritical and childlike", that he hates all despotism, that "the Socialist Party ... They dream of organizing and legislating a monastic-like society" and that "the concept of heaven is actually more hell than the concept of hell."
"I want infinite beauty", for which he worked day and night, writing a novel for years without utilitarianism, and even changing its manuscript several times.
He spoke more than once of "patience" and "reason", and many times of "will" and "matter", which actually played an important role in Flaubert's introspection and self-help. He said that Madame Bovary "is a book of tenacity of the will" and that it has no other merit, "at least patience is one".
As for "matter," he said, "we should be accustomed to seeing the world as a work of art, and we must reproduce the various acts of this work of art in our work." He emphasized: "The less we get involved in things, the more capable we are to represent it as it is." ”
This is actually Zhuangzi's "theory of qi and things" of "forgetting things and forgetting them", and it is also Wang Guowei's "realm of no self" in the language of things. With the help of "matter", Flaubert was able to stabilize the frenzied fanaticism of his romanticism, and his "realism" was his way of overcoming the patience, will, reason, and materiality of the modern diseases of human society in the early days of human society and his own diseases.
END
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Original Zizhidao Education New Educator Magazine, text/Zhang Zhe