I am not fluent in French, but I can read it thanks to a couple of years of college study. If I were an expert in French rather than English, Gustave Flaubert might rank as my favorite writer. (Sorry, Willie Shakespeare, but old Gus might have been one of your favorite writers, too. I could imagine you adapting Madame Bovary for the stage.)

I’ve reread that classic French novel in an able translation by Lowell Bair. And I’ve revisited commentary on the book by a critic I learned to admire early in my career as a scholar. His name is Erich Auerbach, and his 1953 book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature endures as a worthy classic of twentieth-century modernist criticism.

It turns out that Auerbach is an excellent X-ray reader. In helping us understand how an artist like Flaubert represented or imitated reality (the word mimesis is Greek for “imitation”), he offers writers, at least indirectly, advice on how we, too, can undertake one of the most important literary tasks, whether in fiction or nonfiction: to hold up a mirror to the world and create a convincing version that readers can enter.

If you have yet to read Madame Bovary, please put it on your list. Emma is a great character, a true romantic, sensuous and sentimental but also ambitious, seeking escape from the suffocating routines of provincial France. She finds a devoted husband, Charles. He is a doctor, but ordinary, narrow-minded, oafish, and lacking the dashing spirit Emma so desperately desires. She tries to break away, but her rebellion leads to her tragic decline—her suffering and death being the inevitable outcomes.

Flaubert captures his heroine’s ennui in a nutshell:

But it was especially at mealtimes that she felt she could bear her life no longer, in that little room on the ground floor with its smoking stove, squeaking door, sweating walls and damp stone floor. All the bitterness of life seemed to be served up to her on her plate, and as the steam rose from the boiled meat, waves of nausea rose from the depths of her soul. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble a few hazelnuts, or lean on her elbow and idly make lines in the oilcloth with her knife.

Before I share some of Auerbach’s X-ray insights, let me offer a few of my own. I begin with a strategic question that many writers must answer: How do you generate interest and energy by describing a moment in time when nothing seems to be happening? That is the case here. If we sat at that table with Charles and Emma, it would appear—at the level of our senses—that nothing of significance was occurring.

This, sadly, too often reflects our daily lives. I am on the couch watching a baseball game, my feet up, eating a slice of reheated pizza and drinking a Coke, while my wife sits beside me knitting a baby blanket. Our cat, Willow, sits between us. This is a moment that might be going on in a thousand households. Domestic routine. Yet who knows what simmers beneath the surface? I am now making this up: maybe she worries about me or is angry with me because I sit around all weekend watching sports and eating junk food. She eats good food and goes to yoga class four days a week. She tries to cook healthful meals for the family, while I prefer a bag of white powdered doughnuts and a glass of chocolate milk. So she really loves me and cares about me and wants me to lead a long life. Or maybe she has her eye on that neighbor down the street who jogs with his shirt off, and maybe she wishes her husband could be more like him. Or maybe the man sitting beside her is her meal ticket, the one whose work has provided her with a standard of living she enjoys, and that is what she doesn’t want to lose.

The external details of our lives can sometimes mask the turmoil that constitutes our inner selves. But they can offer clues as to the tempests inside. That’s the trick Flaubert executes with consummate skill in this passage. And that’s what we should be striving for in our own writing.

DETAILS OF DESPERATION

Let’s begin with that first clause, which feels, even in a narrative context, like a traditional thesis statement in a paragraph: “But it was especially at mealtimes that she felt she could bear her life no longer.…” That is a powerful statement of negation, desperation, perhaps suicide, and it leads us to a search for evidence: What, in fact, could she be experiencing that is so destructive it would lead her to abandon hope? It should not escape us that Flaubert locates such desperation “at mealtimes.” Think of the good associations meals have: nourishment, family, celebration, community, holy communion. But we also know from common experience how such moments of coming together can bring out the worst in married couples and extended families.

What are the sources of such hopelessness? The room begins to talk to Emma and to readers: “in that little room on the ground floor with its smoking stove, squeaking door, sweating walls and damp stone floor.” Every word carries meaning: she dreams of mansions, we learn, but the room is little; she imagines towers and balconies overlooking gorgeous landscapes, but she lives on the ground floor. Each part of the room seems noxious, attacking and irritating rather than satisfying the senses. The stove smokes, the door squeaks, the walls sweat, and the floor is cold and damp.

It’s worth noting here that the translator inverts the order of the elements from Flaubert’s original. In French it reads: “avec le poêle qui fumait, la porte qui criait, les murs qui suintaient, les pavés humides,” literally, “with the stove that smokes, the door that squeaks, the walls that sweat, the floor [that is] damp.” The original—except for that last phrase, which ends with humides—derives meaning from verbs, not adjectives. It’s as if each element in the room is an agent assigned to drive Emma to madness.

BITTERNESS ON A PLATE

In the second sentence, Flaubert makes a common move for writers. Using both literal and metaphoric language, he guides the reader up and down the ladder of abstraction—between language that expresses specific things and language that expresses ideas. He begins with “All the bitterness of life seemed to be served up to her on her plate.” Notice the quick move between the painful abstraction “the bitterness of life” (in French it’s rendered more painful as the bitterness of “l’existence”) and the idea of it being served on a plate, which might seem like a cliché if it were not taking place at the dinner table.

Then comes “and as the steam rose from the boiled meat, waves of nausea rose from the depths of her soul.” As in the earlier litany of kitchen irritants, Flaubert makes use of parallel constructions, in this case to match opposites. As the steam rises from the meat, nausea rises from her soul. It’s not as parallel in the French, and the translator has again inverted the author’s original order, which places a final emphasis in the sentence not on soul but rather on the feelings of nausea. The meal, which should be nurturing, provokes only metaphysical and emotional dyspepsia. Pass the Alma Seltzer. Or the Pepto Abysmal.

SMALL GESTURES FILLED WITH MEANING

Charles does not enter the picture until the third sentence, where he rates only a few words: “Charles was a slow eater.” That description says nothing about his character out of the context of Emma’s frustration. When something is boring or painful, we pray that it will pass quickly. As he eats so slowly, Emma is trapped in her thoughts and idle gestures: “she would nibble a few hazelnuts, or lean on her elbow and idly make lines in the oilcloth with her knife.” I was fascinated by the balance in this part of the sentence between the nibbling of the nuts and the idle handling of the knife. There is a sense of danger, to be sure—to herself, perhaps to others—an existential angst that might anticipate the work of a French writer of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre. The titles of some of his works—Nausea and No Exit—could easily apply to Emma Bovary.

But once again, I see a slightly different emphasis in the French of Flaubert and the English of his translator. Flaubert did not save “knife” (couteau) for the final emphatic word. A literal translation of the French original would go something like this: “With the point of a knife she amuses herself by poking at the surface of the oilcloth [la toile cirée].” The emphasis at the end falls on her stabbing the oilcloth—the cheap covering over the table. Most crucial is what is not there: an expensive tablecloth she would own in the life she imagines.

MYSTERY OF MOTIVE

Let’s examine what Erich Auerbach sees beneath this passage: “The paragraph itself presents a picture—man and wife together at mealtime. But the picture is not presented in and for itself; it is subordinated to the dominant subject, Emma’s despair.”

That much is clear, and it represents the kind of insight a critic makes when he is describing the theme of a literary work. It’s about despair, we say, the way we say that Othello is about jealousy. Discussion of theme in literature is meant to be expansive but often limits our choices and our vision of the work, for a masterpiece such as Othello turns out to be about many things. As is Madame Bovary.

I am tempted to argue that what makes Shakespeare’s work superior to Flaubert’s—however great—is what Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt describes as the “opacity of motive.” The theory is that the less we know about someone’s motive (such as Iago’s), or the greater the complexity of the motive (such as Hamlet’s), the greater the work of art.

In Othello, for example, we know that Shakespeare drew upon an earlier version of the story in which the motives of Iago were clear. In the source, Iago plays his vengeful trick upon Othello, resulting in the murder of Desdemona out of anger and jealousy. He is in love with Desdemona himself, but she doesn’t see it. Shakespeare’s version removes that motive and replaces it with—nothing. Remember Iago’s chilling final words: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.”

While readers want an answer to the question of why, the work is often better if a character’s motivations remain cloudy. Emma’s motivations are not opaque, but they are complex, and they feel as real as that knife on the tablecloth. That complexity should remind writers to avoid the logical fallacy of the single cause: that the mass killer did what he did because of “mental illness,” or “easy access to guns,” or “the influence of violent video games.” In fiction, the complexity of motive adds texture to a work and mystery and intrigue to the experience of reading.

ARROW OF INDIRECTION

Auerbach has stated something obvious—that the subject of Flaubert’s story is Emma’s despair. More helpful is the critic’s sense of how the author communicates that feeling or message. He argues that Flaubert does this through indirection—not through the expression of opinion but through a description of Emma’s experience, internal and external:

We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no opinion and makes no comment. His role is limited to selecting the events and translating them into language; and this is done in the conviction that every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could do. Upon this conviction—that is, upon a profound faith in the truth of language responsibly, candidly, and carefully employed—Flaubert’s artistic practice rests.

That the author’s opinion may be unspoken does not mean that he lacks an opinion. It does mean that he or she expresses ideas and feelings—especially related to character—indirectly. One version of this writing technique comes from the old school: show, don’t tell. (Although we must respect Francine Prose’s warning that not every emotion in a narrative needs to be acted out.) I prefer the advice from the late journalist and author Richard Ben Cramer, who wrote masterfully about politics and sports. He once told me that he measured his research by its ability to lead him to a clear, dominant feeling concerning the person he was writing about, be it Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dole, or Joe DiMaggio. He then asked himself: “What led me to feel that way?” In search of an answer, he reexamined the most convincing evidence. His final job was to present that evidence to the reader in the form of scenes, dialogue, character details, and anecdotes. The idea was to create a vicarious experience for the reader, one that would guide the reader toward the same dominant feeling, knowing full well that no writer can control a reader’s reaction to the work.

WRITING LESSONS

1. Look for the smallest domestic details that reveal the complexities of a character’s inner life. Those complexities will almost always include the negative, problematic, or painful feelings of existence, the crosses we bear, the steps we regret.

2. What the characters are not doing is as important, and sometimes more important, than their direct actions and reveals aspects of their histories and personalities. Emma’s passivity in the kitchen, marked by tiny, futile gestures, speaks more loudly than crashed dishes on the floor.

3. In the absence of action by the characters, some force must step in and replace it. This includes inanimate objects. A door can act. Or a wall. Or a plate. Or something on the plate. All this and more is happening in Flaubert’s passage.

4. Given the choice between a word in adjective or verb form, opt for the verb, which tends to be stronger. I prefer Flaubert’s original phrasing to that of his translator. A door that squeaks speaks louder than a squeaking door. This effect can be enhanced by parallel constructions, used sometimes to compare equal elements and sometimes to contrast them.

5. Use the routine setting to generate metaphors—in this case the plate, which holds unpalatable food, but also bitterness. Move up and down the ladder of abstraction from the level of ideas to the level of specific evidence and back.

6. In human experience, motivation is a cracked mirror, never providing a pure reflection. Avoid, in both fiction and nonfiction, any simple explanation for why characters make important choices.

7. Gather evidence until you reach a dominant feeling about your source. Present that evidence—without editorial opinion—to influence (but not determine) the reader’s response. Show and tell when you must, with a preference for showing.

8