12  Prelude to the Twentieth Century

When I think of The Book of our century, I don’t turn to À la recherche or Ulysses or The Man without Qualities, those majestic constructions, exemplary not only for their genius but for their precision and obsessiveness as well, to which public opinion now grants due respect, as to those cathedrals made of toothpicks that some provincial hermit has spent the best years of his life silently building. I think, instead, of a book in which one seems to breathe the more exclusive air of the last century. That was the time when it was written, and it remained unfinished at its author’s death. I am thinking of Bouvard et Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert. This book is the inevitable pavement on which all our footsteps move: in Kamchatka and in Patagonia, par les champs et par les grèves, between suburbs and ruins, wherever the ground has been leveled by those two Titans who met one hot Sunday afternoon in summer on a bench on the Boulevard Bourdon and immediately recognized that each had a hat in which he had written his name: Bouvard, Pécuchet. “Look, we’ve both had the same idea, to write our names in our hats.” “Good Lord, yes, somebody might take mine at the office!”

Sub specie aeternitatis, the meeting between these two obscure copyists is probably no less significant than the one between Napoleon and Goethe. And its two actors deserve the title of Founding Heroes of our world. Just as the twelve labors of Hercules correspond to an equal number of constellations in the zodiac, so the sorry adventures of the two clerks eager to draw on Knowledge run from one end to the other of our Psychical Earth and enfold it on every side. The convolutions of their brains are a labyrinth in which one day, with ecumenical faith, all the things of which we had long been proud were received: the Arts and Sciences, in a mutual embrace. They speak to us of a world that for the first time had been completely written down: in newspapers and recipes, in bons mots and condolences, bold paradoxes and fearful warnings, cold technical manuals and spiritual guides. And every element in this Scripture adhered to every other, thanks to a wonderful universal glue: Stupidity.

That was the background of everything, behind which opened only the silence of sidereal spaces. Bouvard and Pécuchet, these two geniuses who are still misunderstood today (they had at least one indispensable quality of genius: They took everything literally) and who are even accused of being imbeciles, were the first to have a horrific vision of the solidarity of the Whole. They saw the Universal Equivalence produced by Stupidity the same way that visionaries once saw oneness in a speck of dust and the flaming stars. And they understood that in the face of that Ineffability, no word need be added. All that was left was a single act of devotion: to copy, because repetition, here as in any ritual, is commemoration of the Unrepeatable.

“What are we going about it?—Don’t think! Let’s copy. The page has to be filled, the ‘monument’ completed. Everything equal, good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, the insignificant and the typical. Nothing is real except phenomena.” Having come to the end of their adventures, they have a double copyist’s desk built for themselves. And they start copying everything, buying piles of wastepaper by weight. The unfinished second volume of Bouvard et Pécuchet was to be a vast, still pond of quotations.

In his last years, Flaubert was “a ravaged old heart.” From the windows in his house at Croisset, he watched the boats drift by on the Seine and talked to his dog. He even avoided taking walks because they ended by plunging him into depression, forcing him to endure his own company. Then the past attacked him to the marrow of his bones, and he remembered that he was not only a fanatic of “Art” (always with that pathetic capital letter) but “the last of the little seamstresses,” a soul that had always had to barricade itself against a sharp and painful sensibility, unable to sustain the conflict of life. Perhaps his doctor did not realize how right he was when he called him “an overgrown hysterical girl.”

“Life only seems bearable to me when one succeeds in avoiding it,” Flaubert once wrote to his friend George Sand. And behind those words one glimpses the “complete presentiment” of life that he had had as a very young man: It had presented itself to him as “a disgusting odor of cooking issuing from a ventilation duct.” And yet he would go on craving it in the hallucinatory state of writing. In these last years, with his mother dead and his income reduced, Flaubert all of a sudden found himself in an “endless solitude,” exhausted by his stubborn march toward an unknown destination. And he was aware of being simultaneously “the desert, the traveler, and the camel.”

Once again he was in the throes of a book, a manuscript that grew with maddening slowness: Bouvard et Pécuchet, an “abominable book,” an “impossible book,” “a crushing and frightful undertaking,” which sometimes seemed to him demented and not far removed from the craziness of his two protagonists. In order to recount the stages of their epos without pedantry, he read and annotated more than fifteen hundred volumes, most of them inane, pretentious, empty, dull. Even “great authors” got mixed up in this ludicrous caravan. Everywhere he found material for his “monument,” which he hoped would prove worthy of that jealous and implacable deity, the “infinite” being to whom he was dedicating it: Stupidity.

What was the burning fury that drove him? At first it was the desire for revenge. Bouvard et Pécuchet was to be an opportunity to “spit bile,” to “vent anger.” The plan of the book seemed to be summed up in one sentence: “I will vomit on my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me.” O naïveté! Just as his two characters had been naive when they gave up their jobs and, drawing on a small inheritance, retired to the country to explore knowledge, so their author—the devotee of “Art”—had deluded himself into thinking he was using these two characters to demonstrate something, hurling them against an invisible enemy. Instead, these two characters devoured their author. “Madame Bovary c’est moi”—this too famous remark shines in its esoteric significance only if we understand it as the corollary to a theorem that Flaubert did not utter but discovered: “We are all Bouvard and Pécuchet” (and obviously Flaubert to begin with).

This is the flash of intuition that illuminated his last years. As the two heroes gradually begin studying landscape gardening (unwittingly inventing and liquidating the avant-garde) and Celticism, geology and mnemonics, tragedy and pedagogy, politics and magnetism—and while their author went on tracking them, reading through thousands of intolerable pages—Flaubert approached the mocking truth: “Bouvard and Pécuchet fill me to such a point that I have become them! Their stupidity is mine, and this kills me.”

If the “Art” that Flaubert always mentioned, even in letters to his niece, was of a certain unprecedented kind compared to the art of which Horace and Alexander Pope wrote, then Stupidity, which is the subject of Bouvard et Pécuchet, was also an unprecedented and grandiose phenomenon. It too required a capital letter. But why, just at this time, did that primordial characteristic of man advance so many claims? Here we must make a historical digression. Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, one sees the twin emergence of Stupidity and kitsch. Both are perennial powers whose signs can be recognized everywhere and in every period, but at a precise point in history they unveil their Medusa faces. Henceforth, everything in the world is born accompanied by its degraded Double; not only every knickknack but every idea.

Just as there is romantic kitsch and classical kitsch, as well as the Renaissance, Gothic, and “modern” varieties, so now Stupidity reformulates Platonism and paleontology, emotions and rationality, rebellion and subjugation, disbelief and devotion. The two bonshommes Bouvard and Pécuchet (and Flaubert inside them) then discover that Stupidity is no longer a characteristic of certain ideas. On the contrary, with the even-handed impassiveness of a god, it distributes itself in all directions: among believers and atheists, countryfolk and city dwellers, poets and mathematicians. Stupidity is the bloodthirsty paper realm of public opinion.

Thus, Bouvard et Pécuchet is not the story of two poor idiots who try to lay their hands on knowledge and founder every time in quicksand. Rather, it is the one inevitable modern Odyssey, the debilitating itinerary that every “new man” is forced to undertake, in Flaubert’s time as in our own. Knowledge triumphs as soon as all wisdom has foundered along with taste, which was its last, discreet, and volatile heir. Unless there is initiation, anyone can find himself, when faced with knowledge, in the position of Bouvard and Pécuchet. And like them, the “new men” are perfectly formless beings, blank slates (this is what philosophers claim so that they can write on them themselves), elastic and empty bodies, devoid of roots, and yet all the more goaded by infernal goodwill to create for themselves what cannot be created but can only be had beforehand: roots. They clutch at knowledge, at every single branch of the great tree of knowledge, in order to hide in its foliage and from there draw nourishment from the soil. But every bough breaks. Their nothingness is always too heavy.

Flaubert recognized that he too (like the rest of us) was a “new man.” He knew that he was recounting an Odyssey with no Ithaca at which to land. But he recounted it also in order to put to the severest test the only antidote he recognized as effective: “Art.” Perhaps he thought that “Art” might force Stupidity into a further and still more mysterious metamorphosis, the one to which he had once alluded in a letter: “Masterpieces are stupid; they have a tranquil air, like the actual productions of nature, like large animals and mountains.” And it is like a large, unfathomable animal that Bouvard et Pécuchet gazes at us today.