Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

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Vaudeville and the Jesus Prayer – Amy Hungerford

April 6, 2012

Some quotes from the novel:

“It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so–I don’t know–not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless–and sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

 ”I feel so funny. I think I’m going crazy. Maybe I’m already crazy.”
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

 ”Seymour once said to me – in a crosstown bus, of all places – that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.”
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.”
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.”
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.”
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“You take a look around your college campus, and the world, and politics, and one season of summer stock, and you listen to the conversation of a bunch of nitwit college students, and you decide that everything’s ego, ego, ego, and the only intelligent thing for a girl to do is to lie around and shave her head and say the Jesus prayer and beg God for little mystical experience that’ll maker her nice and happy.”
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“The only think you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to – be God’s actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to–there’s nothing wrong in trying.”
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.”
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

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The nutshell history of faith in the fifties I have given here deposits us at the start of the sixties with an abiding tension between “faith in faith” and specific religious conviction. Lionel Trilling used terms that straddle this divide as he insisted on the spiritual quality of recent literature in 1961. In an essay titled “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” Trilling argued that modern literature (what we would call modernist literature, though he speaks of it as if it were contemporary)” asks us … if we are saved or damned — more than anything else, our literature is concerned with salvation. No literature has ever been so intensely spiritual as ours. While Trilling does not “venture to call it actually religious,” he yet sees in modern literature “the special intensity of concern with the spiritual life which Hegel noted when he spoke of the great modern phenomenon of the secularization of spirituality.” Trilling looks slightly more mystical than Kenneth Burke, who in the same year published The Rhetoric of Religion, which itself walks a fine line between theology and literary criticism while proclaiming a complete secularity.

Burke argues that words about God are in essence words about words. Understanding words about God, in sacred texts such as Augustine’s Confessions, allows us to know something about language itself when those words about God return to the secular realm with new religious valences. This mode of studying words — which Burke calls “logology,” echoing “theology” — substitutes a secular understanding of transcendent language for the sacred understanding of the divine Logos. But Burke’s logology nevertheless bumps literature toward the transcendental meaning traditionally accruing to religion.

If words about God are really words about words, it doesn’t take much to reverse the equation and arrive adjacent to Trilling, to suggest that words about words — so many of which are found in literary texts — are in some sense words about God. That is the reversal at the heart of J. D. Salinger’s contribution to the literary discourse of 1961, the novel Franny and Zooey. The novel provides a case through which we can see how a literary text negotiates the relationship between words and God at this particular moment. It exemplifies how a writer might locate religious experience in meaningless language, and how doing so might alleviate the tension between specific doctrine and religious pluralism without giving in to secularism.

The narrative of Franny and Zooey follows young Franny Glass’s spiritual crisis from the moment she collapses in a college-town diner to the family’s apartment in New York, where she has holed up with her mother, Bessie; her father, Les; and her older brother, Zooey. Part I of the novel covers the scene in a town that looks much like New Haven or Princeton; it was published first in the New Yorker in 1955.

The much longer part II, also published as a separate story in the New Yorker, in 1957, takes place in the apartment, first in the bathroom where Zooey and his mother talk, then in the living room where Zooey finds Franny snuffling on the couch, and finally in two bedrooms — the upstairs room that had belonged to two older Glass brothers, Buddy and Seymour, and the downstairs bedroom belonging to their parents. Between these two bedrooms, a telephone conversation takes place between Zooey and Franny, a conversation that provides the climax and the conclusion of the novel.

The narrative tension in the novel is generated by religious questions that swirl around an instance of ritualized religious language — the Jesus prayer that Franny began to mutter unceasingly to herself shortly before meeting her boyfriend, Lane, an English major at an Ivy League university. In saying the prayer, she is trying to To follow the Russian Orthodox mystical classic, The Way of the Pilgrim, out of the spiritual bankruptcy represented by Vassar College and her blueblood boyfriend.

When I make this claim about the centrality of the novel’s religious concerns, it should be said that I am contradicting the narrator, who insists that the plot does not hinge “on religious mystification” and that it “isn’t a mystical story” at all, but “a compound, or multiple, love story.” I will show how Salinger ensures that this is it a religious story in the face of his narrator’s insistence that it isn’t one; indeed, the novel’s simultaneous denial and assertion of religious meaning is the first hint as to how Salinger will approach the problem of doctrine.

So what exactly does the novel say about religion? In the first place, Zooey’s monologues on religion respond both to Franny’s breakdown and to their elder brothers’ preoccupation with spiritual matters. As Buddy reminds Zooey in an old letter Zooey reads in the bathtub, Buddy and Seymour decided to take over the education of their younger siblings to promote the children’s spiritual development. Buddy writes that Seymour had begun to believe that education shouldn’t “begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge … to be in a state of pure consciousness — satori — is to be with God before he said, Let there be light” (65). The older Glass brothers attempted to pass this quest on to their siblings by offering them all the best nuggets they had found in their reading, many of which they also inscribed on a panel of white-painted beaverboard nailed to the back of their bedroom door.

Franny’s response to her brothers’ instruction is to say the Jesus prayer. Her practice aligns with their teaching because she utters the prayer as a ritual practice leading to religious enlightenment, not as the result of existing belief. Surprisingly, it is precisely this lack of doctrinal content that Zooey criticizes. He castigates Franny for rolling “Jesus and St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi’s grandfather all into one” (166). According to Zooey, “If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis’s consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he’d ‘ye picked him…. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master” (171, original emphasis).

If we listen to Zooey, praying specifically — knowing the Jesus to whom one is praying — will solve at a stroke all the other problems he sees in Franny’s approach to the prayer. Christ embodies the principle of selfless love, through which one avoids both the acquisitiveness of which he accuses Franny (she wants to acquire wisdom by saying the prayer) and the harm she is doing to others (to her parents, who are worried about her, and to Professor Tupper, the pompous don leading her religion seminar, whom she mocks). Zooey argues that the specificity of Jesus — as opposed to St. Francis — is that Jesus values any human being more than any hint or beast; even a Professor Tupper qualifies for his love.

Specificity looks quite different, though, when, Zooey moves to impersonate his brother Buddy when later calling Franny on the phone from Buddy and Seymour’s bedroom. He resorts to this measure having failed, in the living room, to do more than browbeat his sister in her misery. Upon entering his brothers’ room to place the call, Zooey first pays homage to the beaverboard panel of quotations. He appears in the doorway with a clean white handkerchief spread on the top of his Bead, as if entering a holy place. The beaverboard panel, which we read over his shoulder, suggests the brothers’ syncretic view of religious wisdom, with quotations from Ramakrishna, Kafka, Mu-Mon-Kwan, Ring Lardner, St. Francis de Sales, and Tolstoy.

As if to underscore that syncretism, the quotation from Ramakrishna has the sage admonishing a disciple who wants to teach the people to be more accurate in their worship, to worship God instead of images of the gods. “Do you think God does not know he is being worshipped in the images and pictures?” Ramakrishna asks. If a worshipper should make a mistake, do you not think that God will know his intent?” (178-79). The no-knowledge upon which Seymour and Buddy’s studies were converging is syncretic because the very negation at the root of it denies the importance of the specificity Ramakrishna’s disciple wants to instill and that Zooey argues for in the Jesus prayer. The setup for Zooey’s phone call thus puts the nature and status of syncretism at stake.

Zooey’s ensuing monologue, delivered over the phone to the still-snuffling Franny, solves the tension between syncretism and specificity, between wisdom and no-knowledge, by transforming a theory of religion into a theory of acting. At first, this theory still looks simply Christian. He tells Franny that when their brother Seymour found Zooey disdainful of the audiences they entertained as radio quiz show contestants on the program “It’s a Wise Child,” he told Zooey to shine his shoes and do his best “for the Fat Lady.” The imaginary Fat Lady is the abstract but extravagantly embodied human being who is always entitled to one’s love. The Fat Lady is also doubled in Zooey himself: he later tells Franny that he and Buddy, unbeknownst to Franny, drove up to see her perform in “Playboy of the Western World” the previous summer, joining the anonymous audience beyond the footlights.

Zooey’s point (and Seymour’s) is that one must project one’s love outward from the stage to all of common humanity, regardless of whom one is addressing, on the off chance — or rather, on the certainty — that someone out there is entitled to the love you project. Zooey could not make his incarnational theology more explicit: “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady … don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? .. Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy” (202, original emphasis). And Franny receives the wisdom: “For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands” (202).

The Christian message thus transmitted and received is not the last word in Franny and Zooey on acting as a religious practice, though these words are not far from the novel’s actual last word. It is rather the paragraph following, the one that does contain the novel’s last words, that completes the religious vision of the Narrative: “A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She [Franny] appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers” (202). She hangs up the phone and falls asleep in her parents’ bed, and the novel is ended. What would it mean for the dial tone to contain all the spiritual wisdom of the world, or, for that matter, all the wisdom of the novel? How does it reflect back on Zooey’s Christian message?

The novel’s religious views about acting, which I’ve begun to detail, explain why Salinger leaves us with doctrine and dial tone. Zooey tells Franny that because she is a good actress, “the only religious thing you can do, is act… be God’s actress” (198). Zooey’s own acting career, as he describes it to Franny, commits him to acting in this way, no matter the quality of his material. It is thus the capacity to act — to assume the identities and voices of others and occupy them for a time, returning then to some other state of consciousness — that represents the religious understanding at work in the novel. The content of the acting is spiritually irrelevant. If the specificity of Christ is that he was the most unimitative master,” the specificity of God’s actress is that she is the most imitative master, moving easily from imitatio Christi to the imitation of Hamlet.

By locating religious enlightenment in acting, Zooey preserves the structure of the syncretism his twinned homage to the beaverboard and his Christian hermeneutics represent. That syncretism insists upon the specific content of religious wisdom but finds that content converging in a space of no-knowledge, the consciousness of God before He said “Let there be light.” God’s “light,” in Buddy’s letter, specifically includes Shakespeare and all of literature, pointing toward the incarnational logic of plays as such as well as the incarnational logic of the novel itself. The play and the novel are incarnations of the divine word; as instances of verbal performance, they point back always to the silence they break, to the moment before all incarnation and all speech. They point back, as it were, to the dial tone.

Salinger gives us a prose style that places the author of the novel in that originary position. The author himself is always acting. We can see this in Salinger’s self-conscious use of cliches and mannerisms, which intensifies toward the climax of Zooey’s call to Franny. We are told that Zooey’s “shirt was, in the familiar phrase, wringing wet” (172) and that “this was the first time in almost seven years that Zooey had, in the ready-made dramatic idiom, ‘set foot’ in Seymour’s and Buddy’s old room” (175). Of that room we are told that “a stranger with a flair for cocktail-party descriptive prose might have commented that the room … looked as if it had once been tenanted by two struggling twelve-year-old lawyers” (181). The novel’s debt to drama is evident as well in the structure and staging of the narrative. the action — mostly histrionic family conversation, giving us no other access to the inner thoughts of the characters — moves in spatial unity from room to room.

The narrative focuses on characters’ precise movements within those spaces; this is almost excruciating in the bathroom scene where Zooey and his mother, Bessie, converse. Precariously balanced objects such as Buddy’s letter on the edge of the bathtub, Bessie’s cigarette on the edge of the vanity, or Zooey’s razor clattering from the sink into the metal trash can, sensually register the slightest movement of the two bodies within the space. Zooey’s nakedness, and Bessie’s constantly adjusted housecoat, not to mention the incest taboo against which Salinger thereby brushes up, make us acutely aware of their physicality. These formal elements, as well as the narrator’s claim that the story is a “prose home movie” (47), all suggest that writing as Salinger pursues it is modeled on acting: on the structures and demands of the stage (or of the film’s frame) as a physical space, on the assumption of different voices and the interplay of these.

Thus perhaps the most powerfully endorsed mode of religious art in the novel is not writing or drama but something like Vaudeville, the source of Bessie and Les’s now-faded fame. We see such a vision of Vaudeville in Seymour’s diary, which we read with Zooey as he sits at Seymour’s desk. The passage we see brims with pleasure in the details of a performance the family stages in the living room to celebrate Seymour’s birthday. The ideal art is something like that performance, something like family Vaudeville.

Set in the Upper West Side apartment, Vaudeville can be fully revealed as religious art because the family love it represents is in fact divine love; as Zooey reminds Franny, even the chicken soup Bessie repeatedly offers is “consecrated chicken soup” (196). The novel suggests that pretense without love is just pretension (this is what Franny’s unbearable boyfriend, Lane, represents), though continually inventive pretense — the hallmark of Vaudeville as a genre — constitutes a transcendent state of being and communicates divine love.

Vaudeville’s status as the ultimate religious art illuminates the novel’s verbal hedging about Buddy’s identity as the narrator and accounts, in a formal sense, for why Zooey impersonates his brother Buddy when he calls Franny. At the start of part II, the narrator, having confessed that he is Buddy, announces that he will continue to refer to Buddy (to himself, that is) in the third person. If “Buddy” is thus multiplied by two, he is multiplied by three and then by four in the course of the novel. Zooey impersonates Buddy on the phone with Franny, and throughout the ensuing conversation (during which Franny quickly finds him out) he calls her “buddy,” a slangy pet name.

It is as if Zooey speaks to the abstracted narrator of the story and to his brother and to his sister all at once. Of course, since Salinger is the author of Zooey’s voice even while Salinger assumes the voice of Buddy-as-narrator, Salinger is talking to himself in the telephone scene, too. All of which, along with the power of Zooey’s rhetoric and his message, places Zooey in the position of the truly “wise child,” displacing the announced narrator as the arbiter of wisdom, incarnating the wisdom that Seymour — who committed suicide — seems to have possessed but with which he could not live.” And so we must read back to the moment when the narrator contradicts Zooey about the essentially religious nature of the story.

This is a religious story (which as Zooey tells us in his phone call, must also therefore be a love story), the more because it is Zooey who tells us so through the layers of impersonation. Franny and Zooey is a religious novel in its own terms, then, because it lets us hear the divine dial tone as well as the performance of sacred human speech. The latter we hear in multiple forms: as a family’s private language, and as the endlessly inventive languages of art, all dramatized into something like a Vaudeville routine. Like Franny, the novel knows when to stop listening to the dial tone and when to launch into virtuosic voice.

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If you have the time, catch Professor Hungerford in her element here. She uses Franny & Zooey to illustrate or model how literary critics advance arguments.

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Eliot On Realizing A Humane And Moderate Politics – Roger Scruton

November 23, 2011

T.S. Eliot

An amazing essay that you will read and reread again, posing as it does vital questions about ourselves and who we are as seen through the poetry and criticism of Thomas Stearns Eliot. I confess to have been totally entranced by it. Roger Scruton is a fine scholar and really knows how to grasp the essentials of Eliot and his worldview.  We are so much the better for it.

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ELIOT’S LIFE BEGAN WITH A QUESTION: the question of modern life and its meaning. His literary work was a long, studious, and sincere attempt to provide an answer. In the course of this enterprise, Eliot re-shaped the English language, changed the forms of English verse, and produced some of the most memorable utterances in our literature. Although an impressive scholar, with a mastery of languages and literatures that he reveals but does not dwell upon in his writings.

Eliot was also a man of the world. He worked first as a teacher, then in a London bank, and then in the publishing house of Faber and Faber, which he made into the foremost publisher of poetry and criticism in its day. His unhappy first marriage did not impede his active participation in the literary life of London, over which he exerted an influence every bit as great as André Breton over the literary life of Paris.

His refusal, through all this, to adopt the mantle of the bohemian, to claim the tinsel crown of artist, or to mock the “bourgeois” lifestyle, sets him apart from the continental tradition which he otherwise did so much to promote. He realized that the true task of the artist in the modern world is one not of repudiation but of reconciliation.

For Eliot, the artist inherits, in heightened and self-conscious form, the very same anxieties that are the stuff of ordinary experience. The poet who takes his words seriously is the voice of mankind, interceding for those who live around him, and gaining on their behalf the gift of consciousness with which to overcome the wretchedness of secular life. He too is an ordinary bourgeois, and his highest prize is to live unnoticed amidst those who know nothing of his art — as the saint may live unnoticed among those for whom he dies.

To find the roots of Eliot’s political thinking, we must go back to the modernism that found such striking expression in The Waste Land. English literature in the early part of the twentieth century was to a great extent captured by pre-modern imagery, by references to a form of life (such as we find in Thomas Hardy) that had vanished forever, and by verse forms which derived from the repertoire of romantic isolation.

It had not undergone that extraordinary education which Baudelaire and his successors had imposed upon the French — in which antiquated forms like the sonnet were wrenched free of their pastoral and religious connotations and fitted out with the language of the modern city, in order to convey the new and hallucinatory sense of an irreparable fault, whereby modern man is divided from all that has preceded him.

Eliot’s admiration for Baudelaire arose from his desire to write verse that was as true to the experience of the modern city as Baudelaire’s had been to the experience of Paris. Eliot also recognized in Baudelaire the new character of the religious impulse under the conditions of modern life: “The important fact about Baudelaire,” he wrote, “is that he was essentially a Christian, born out of his due time, and a classicist, born out of his due time.”

Eliot’s indictment of the neo-romantic literature of his day was not merely a literary complaint. He believed that his contemporaries’ use of worn-out poetic diction and lilting rhythms betrayed a serious moral weakness: a failure to observe life as it really is, a failure to feel what must be felt towards the experience that is inescapably ours. And this failure is not confined, he believed, to literature, but runs through the whole of modern life. The search for a new literary idiom is therefore part of a larger search — for the reality of modern experience. Only then can we confront our situation and ask ourselves what should be done about it.

Eliot’s deep distrust of secular humanism — and of the socialist and democratic ideas of society which he believed to stem from it — reflected his critique of the neo-romantics. The humanist, with his myth of man’s goodness, is taking refuge in an easy falsehood. He is living in a world of make-believe, trying to avoid the real emotional cost of seeing things as they are. His vice is the vice of Edwardian and “Georgian” poetry — the vice of sentimentality, which causes us not merely to speak and write in clichés, but to feel in clichés too, lest we should be troubled by the truth of our condition.

The task of the artistic modernist, as Eliot later expressed it, borrowing a phrase from Mallarmé, is “to purify the dialect of the tribe”: that is, to find the words, rhythms, and artistic forms that would make contact again with our experience — not my experience, or yours, but our experience, the experience that unites us as living here and now. And it is only because he had captured this experience — in particular, in the bleak vision ofThe Waste Land — that Eliot was able to find a path to its meaning.

He summarizes his attitude to the everyday language of modern life and politics in his essay on the Anglican bishop Lancelot Andrewes, and it is worth quoting the passage in full:

To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing — when a word half-understood, torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader the utter meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt except the dogmas of sciences of which we have read in the newspapers, when the language of theology itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysticism of popular philosophy, tends to become a language of tergiversation [vocab: evasion of straightforward action or clear-cut statement]– Andrewes may seem pedantic and verbose. It is only when we have saturated ourselves in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find his examination of words terminating in the ecstasy of assent. Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it.
For Lancelot Andrewes (London: Faber, 1970 [1929])

For Eliot, words had begun to lose their precision — not in spite of science, but because of it; not in spite of the loss of true religious belief, but because of it; not in spite of the proliferation of technical terms, but because of it. Our modern ways of speaking no longer enable us to “take a word and derive the world from it”: on the contrary, they veil the world, since they convey no lived response to it. They are mere counters in a game of cliché, designed to fill up the silence, to conceal the void which has come upon us as the old gods have departed from their haunts among us.

That is why modern ways of thinking are not, as a rule, orthodoxies, but heresies — a heresy being a truth that has been exaggerated into falsehood, a truth in which we have taken refuge, so to speak, investing in it all our unexamined anxieties and expecting from it answers to questions which we have not troubled ourselves to understand. In the philosophies that prevail in modern life — utilitarianism, pragmatism, behaviorism — we find that “words have a habit of changing their meaning. . .or else they are made, in a most ruthless and piratical manner, to walk the plank.” The same is true, Eliot implies, whenever the humanist heresy takes over: whenever we treat man as God, and so believe that our thoughts and our words need be measured by no other standard but themselves.

Eliot was brought up in a democracy. He inherited that great fund of public spirit which is the gift of American democracy to the modern world and the cause of so much ignorant hatred of America. But he was not a democrat in his sensibility. Eliot believed that culture could not be entrusted to the democratic process precisely because of the carelessness with words, this habit of unthinking cliché, which would always arise when every person is regarded as having an equal right to express himself. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism he writes:

When the poet finds himself in an age in which there is no intellectual aristocracy, when power is in the hands of a class so democratized that while still a class it represents itself to be the whole nation; when the only alternatives seem to be to talk to a coterie or soliloquize, the difficulties of the poet and the necessity of criticism become greater.
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 [1961]), 22.

Hence, the critic has, for Eliot, an enhanced significance in the modern, democratic world. It is he who must act to restore what the aristocratic ideal of taste would have spontaneously generated — a language in which words are used with their full meaning and in order to show the world as it is. Those nurtured on empty sentiment have no weapons with which to deal with the reality of a god-forsaken world. They fall at once from sentimentality into cynicism, and so lose the power either to experience life or to live with its imperfection.

Eliot therefore perceived an enormous danger in the liberal and “scientific” humanism which was offered by the prophets of his day. This liberalism seemed to him to be the avatar of moral chaos, since it would permit any sentiment to flourish and would deaden all critical judgement with the idea of a democratic right to speak — which becomes, insensibly, a democratic right to feel.

Although “human kind cannot bear very much reality” — as he expresses the point, first in Murder in the Cathedral, and then in Four Quartets — the purpose of a culture is to retain that elusive thing called “sensibility”: the habit of right feeling. Barbarism ensues, not because people have lost their skills and scientific knowledge, nor is it averted by retaining those things; rather, barbarism comes through a loss of culture, since it is only through culture that the important realities can be truly perceived.

Eliot’s thought here is difficult to state precisely. And it is worth drawing a parallel with a thinker whom he disliked: Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the crisis of modernity had come about because of the loss of the Christian faith. This loss of faith is the inevitable result of science and the growth of knowledge. At the same time, it is not possible for mankind really to live without faith; and for us, who have inherited all the habits and concepts of a Christian culture, that faith must be Christianity. Take away the faith, and you do not take away a body of doctrine only, nor do you leave a clear, uncluttered landscape in which man at last is visible for what he is. Rather, you take away the power to perceive other and more important truths, truths about our condition which cannot, without the benefit of faith, be properly confronted — such as the truth of our mortality.

The solution that Nietzsche impetuously embraced in this quandary was to deny the sovereignty of truth altogether — to say that “there are no truths,” and to build a philosophy of life on the ruins of both science and religion in the name of a purely aesthetic ideal. Eliot saw the absurdity of that response. Yet the paradox remains. The truths that mattered to Eliot are truths of feeling, truths about the weight of human life. Science does not make these truths more easily perceivable: on the contrary, it releases into the human psyche a flock of fantasies — liberalism, humanism, utilitarianism, and the rest — which distract it with the futile hope for a scientific morality.

The result is a corruption of the very language of feeling, a decline from sensibility to sentimentality, and a veiling of the human world. The paradox, then, is this: the falsehoods of religious faith enable us to perceive the truths that matter. The truths of science, endowed with an absolute authority, hide the truths that matter, and make human reality imperceivable. Eliot’s solution to the paradox was compelled by the path that he had taken to its discovery — the path of poetry, with the agonizing examples of poets whose precision, perception, and sincerity were the effects of Christian belief. The solution was to embrace the Christian faith — not, as Tertullian did, because of the paradox, but rather in spite of it.

This explains Eliot’s growing conviction that culture and religion are in the last analysis indissoluble. The disease of sentimentality could be overcome, he believed, only by a high culture in which the work of purification was constantly carried on. This is the task of the critic and the artist, and it is a hard task:

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition –
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. . . .
East Coker in The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot

This work of purification is a dialogue across the generations with those who belong to the tradition: only the few can take part in it, while the mass of mankind stays below, assailed by those “undisciplined squads of emotion.” The high culture of the few is, however, a moral necessity for the many, for it permits human reality to show itself, and so to guide our conduct.

But why should the mass of mankind, lost as they are in bathos, “distracted from distraction by distraction,” be guided by “those who know” (to use Dante’s pregnant phrase)? The answer must lie in religion, and in particular in the common language which a traditional religion bestows, both on the high culture of art and on the common culture of a people. Religion is the life-blood of a culture. It provides the store of symbols, stories, and doctrines that enable us to communicate about our destiny. It forms, through the sacred texts and liturgies, the constant point to which the poet and the critic can return — the language alike of ordinary believers and of the poets who must confront the ever-new conditions of life in the aftermath of knowledge, of life in a fallen world.

For Eliot, however, religion in general, and the Christian religion in particular, should not be seen merely in Platonic terms as an attitude towards what is eternal and unchanging. The truth of our condition is that we are historical beings who find whatever consolation and knowledge is vouchsafed to us in time. The consolations of religion come to us in temporal costume, through institutions that are alive with the spirit of history. To rediscover our religion is not to rise free from the temporal order; it is not to deny history and corruption, in order to contemplate the timeless truths. On the contrary, it is to enter more deeply into history, so as to find in the merely transitory the mark and the sign of that which never passes: it is to discover the “point of intersection of the timeless with time,” which is, according to Four Quartets, the occupation of the saint.

Thus there emerges the strangest and most compelling of parallels: that between the saint and martyr of Murder in the Cathedral and the meditating poet of Four Quartets. Just as the first brings, through his martyrdom, the light of eternity into the darkness of the people of Canterbury (represented as a chorus of women), so does the poet “redeem the time,” by finding in the stream of time those timeless moments which point beyond time. And the attempt by the poet to rediscover and belong to a tradition that will give sense and meaning to his language is one with the attempt to find a tradition of belief, of behavior, and of historical allegiance, that will give sense and meaning to the community. The real significance of a religion lies less in the abstract doctrine than in the institutions which cause it to endure. It lies also in the sacraments and ceremonies, in which the eternal becomes present and what might have been coincides with what is.

FOR ELIOT, therefore, conversion was not a matter merely of acknowledging the truth of Christ. It involved a conscious gesture of belonging, whereby he united his poetical labors with the perpetual labor of the Anglican church. For the Anglican church is peculiar in this: that it has never defined itself as “protestant”; that it has always sought to accept rather than protest against its inheritance, while embracing the daring belief that the truths of Christianity have been offered in a local form to the people of England.

It is a church which takes its historical nature seriously, acknowledging that its duty is less to spread the gospel among mankind than to sanctify a specific community. And in order to fit itself for this role, the Anglican church has, through its divines and liturgists, shaped the English language according to the Christian message, while also bringing that message into the here and now of England. In “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets, the poet finds himself in the village retreat where an Anglican saint had retired to pray with his family. He conveys what to many is the eternal truth of the Anglican confession, in lines which are among the most famous that have ever been written in English:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
Little Gidding in The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot

Later, returning to this theme of communication with the dead – our dead — and referring to those brief moments of meaning which are the only sure gift of sensibility, Eliot completes the thought:

We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
Little Gidding in The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot

Much has been written about “Little Gidding,” the atmosphere of which stays in the mind of every cultivated Englishman who reads it. What is important, however, is less the atmosphere of the poem than the thought which advances through it. For here Eliot achieves that for which he envies Dante — namely, a poetry of belief, in which belief and words are one, and in which the thought cannot be prized free from the controlled and beautiful language. Moreover, there is one influence throughout which is inescapable — the King James Bible, and the Anglican liturgy that grew alongside it. Without being consciously biblical, and while using only modern and colloquial English, Eliot endows his verse with the authority of liturgy, and with the resonance of faith.

These lines take us back to the core belief of modern conservatism, which Burke expressed in the following terms: Society, he wrote, is indeed a contract; but not a contract among the living only; rather, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. And, he argued, only those who listen to the dead are fit custodians of future generations. Eliot’s complex theory of tradition gives sense and form to this idea. For he makes clear that the most important thing that future generations can inherit from us is our culture. Culture is the repository of an experience which is at once local and placeless, present and timeless, the experience of a community as sanctified by time. This we can pass on only if we too inherit it.

Therefore, we must listen to the voices of the dead, and capture their meaning in those brief, elusive moments when “History is now and England.” In a religious community, such moments are a part of everyday life. For us, in the modern world, religion and culture are both to be gained through a work of sacrifice. But it is a sacrifice upon which everything depends. Hence, by an extraordinary route, the modernist poet becomes the traditionalist priest: and the stylistic achievement of the first is one with the spiritual achievement of the second.

To many people, Eliot’s theory of culture and tradition is too arduous, imposing an impossible duty upon the educated elite. To others, however, it has been a vital inspiration. For let us ask ourselves just what is required of “one who knows.” Should he, in the modern world, devote himself like Sartre or Foucault to undermining the “structures” of bourgeois society, to scoffing at manners and morals, and ruining the institutions upon which he depends for his exalted status? Should he play the part of a modern Socrates, questioning everything and affirming nothing? Should he go along with the mindless culture of play, the post-modernist fantasy world in which all is permitted since neither permission nor interdiction have any sense?

To answer yes to any of those questions is in effect to live by negation, to grant nothing to human life beyond the mockery of it. It is to inaugurate and endorse the new world of “transgression,” a world which will not reproduce itself, since it will undermine the very motive which causes a society to reproduce. The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order and set an example of orderly living. The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order, and allow the future to emerge. But it will not emerge, as we know. These philosophies of the “new world” are lies and delusions, products of a sentimentality which has veiled the facts of human nature.

We can do nothing unless we first amend ourselves. The task is to rediscover the world which made us, to see ourselves as part of something greater, which depends upon us for its survival — and which still can live in us, if we can achieve that “condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything),” to which Eliot directs us.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Little Gidding in The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot

Such is the conservative message for our time. It is a message beyond politics, a message of liturgical weight and authority. But it is a message which must be received, if humane and moderate politics is to remain a possibility.

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How Poetry Finds Laws of Moral Existence – Russell Kirk

November 17, 2011

Russell Kirk and friend

Pure Poetry Searches The Human Heart To Find Laws Of Moral Existence
So pure poetry, and the other forms of great literature, search the human heart to find in it the laws of moral existence, distinguishing man from beast. Or so it was until almost the end of the eighteenth century. Since then, the egoism of one school of the Romantics has obscured the primary purpose of humane letters. And many of the Realists have written of man as if he were brutal only — or brutalized by institutions, at best.

So arose Ambrose Bierce’s definition in The Devil’s Dictionary (1906): “Realism, n. An accurate representation of human nature, as seen by toads.” In our time, and particularly in America, we have seen the rise to popularity of a school of writers more nihilistic than ever were the Russian nihilists: the literature of disgust and denunciation, sufficiently described in Edmund Fuller’s Man in Modern Fiction (1958).

To members of this school, the writer is no defender or expositor of standards, for there are no values to explain or defend; a writer merely registers, unreservedly, his disgust with humanity and himself. This is a world away from Dean Swift — who, despite his loathing of most human beings, detested them only because they fell short of what they were meant to be.

Yet the names of our twentieth-century nihilistic authors will be forgotten in less than a generation (How True!!!!), I suspect, while there will endure from our age the works of a few men of letters whose appeal is to the enduring things, and therefore to posterity. I think, for instance of Gironella’s novel The Cypresses Believe in God (1951) (You missed that one, Russell).

The gentle novice who trims the hair and washes the bodies of the poorest of the poor in old Gerona, though he dies by Communist bullets, will live a great span in the realm of letters; while the scantily-disguised personalities of our nihilistic authors, swaggering nastily as characters in best sellers, will be extinguished the moment when the public’s fancy veers to some newer sensation. For as the normative consciousness breathes life into the soul and the social order, so the normative understanding gives an author lasting fame.

Real Love And Real Hatred Are Absent From Modern Novels
Malcolm Cowley, writing a few years ago in Horizon of the recent crop of first novelists, observed that the several writers he discussed scarcely had heard of the Seven Cardinal Virtues or of the Seven Deadly Sins. Crimes and sins are only mischances to these young novelists; real love and real hatred are absent from their books. To this rising generation of writers, the world seems purposeless, and human actions meaningless. They seek to express nothing but a vagrant ego. Jacques Barzun, in The House of Intellect [1959], has some shrewd things to say about the unjustified pride of the decade’s array of aspiring writers.

And Mr. Cowley suggests that these young men and women, introduced to no norms in childhood and youth except the vague attitude that one is entitled to do as one likes, so long as it doesn’t injure someone else, are devoid of spiritual and intellectual discipline empty, indeed, of real desire for anything.

This sort of aimless and unhappy writer is the product of a time in which the normative function of letters has been greatly neglected. Ignorant of his own mission, such a writer tends to think of his occupation as a mere skill, possibly lucrative, sometimes satisfying to one’s sanity, but dedicated to no end. Even the “proletarian” writing of the twenties and thirties acknowledged some end; but that has died of disillusion and inanition.

If writers are in this plight, in consequence of the prevailing “permissive” climate of opinion, what of their readers? Comparatively few book-readers nowadays, I suspect, seek normative knowledge. They are after amusement, sometimes of a vicariously gross character, or else pursue a vague “awareness” of current affairs and intellectual currents, suitable for cocktail-party conversation.

The young novelists described by Mr. Cowley are of the number of Eliot’s “Hollow Men.” Nature abhors a vacuum; into minds that are vacant of norms must come some new force; and often that new force has a diabolical character.

The Person Who Reads Bad Books Instead Of Good May Be Subtly Corrupted; The Person Who Reads Nothing At All Maybe Forever Adrift In Life
A perceptive critic, Mr. Albert Fowler, writing in Modern Age, asks the question, “Can Literature Corrupt?” — and answers in the affirmative. So literature can; and also it is possible to be corrupted by an ignorance of humane letters, much of our normative knowledge necessarily being derived from our reading. The person who reads bad books instead of good may be subtly corrupted; the person who reads nothing at all maybe forever adrift in life unless he lives in a community still powerfully influenced by what Gustave Thibon calls “moral habits” and by oral tradition. And absolute abstinence from printed matter has become rare. If a small boy does not read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), the odds are that he will read Mad Ghoul Comics.

So I think it is worthwhile to suggest the outlines of the literary discipline which induces some understanding of enduring values. For centuries, such a program of reading though never called a program — existed in Western nations. It powerfully influenced the minds and actions of the leaders of the infant American Republic, for instance. If one pokes into what books were read by the leaders of the Revolution, the framers of the Constitution and the principal men of America before 1800, one finds that nearly all of them were acquainted with a few important books: the King James version of the Bible, Plutarch’s Lives, Shakespeare, something of Cicero, something of Vergil.

This was a body of literature highly normative. The founders of the Republic thought of their new commonwealth as a blending of the Roman Republic with prescriptive English institutions; and they took for their models in leadership the prophets and kings and apostles of the Bible, and the noble Greeks and Romans of Plutarch. Cato’s stubborn virtue, Demosthenes’ eloquent vaticinations, Cleomenes’ rash reforming impulse — these were in their minds’ eyes; and they tempered their conduct accordingly. “But nowadays,” as Chateaubriand wrote more than a century ago, “statesmen understand only the stock market — and that badly.”

Sheer Experience, As Franklin Suggested, Is The Teacher Of Born Fools.
Of course it was not by books alone that the normative understanding of the framers of the Constitution, for instance, was formed. Their apprehension of norms was acquired also in family, church, and school, and in the business of ordinary life. But that portion of their normative understanding which was got from books did loom large. For we cannot attain very well to enduring standards if we rely simply on actual personal experience as a normative mentor. Sheer experience, as Franklin suggested, is the teacher of born fools.

Our lives are too brief and confused for most men to develop any normative pattern from their private experience; and as Newman wrote, “Life is for action.” Therefore we turn to the bank and capital of the ages, the normative knowledge found in revelation, authority, and historical experience, if we seek guidance in morals, taste, and politics. Ever since the invention of printing, this normative understanding has been expressed, increasingly in books, so that nowadays most people form their opinions, in considerable part, from the printed page. This may be regrettable sometimes; it may be what D. H. Lawrence called “chewing the newspapers”; but it is a fact. Deny a fact, and that fact will be your master.

Another fact is that for some thirty years we have been failing, here in America, to develop a normative consciousness in young people through a careful program of reading great literature. We have talked about “education for life” and “training for life adjustment”; but many of us seem to have forgotten that literary disciplines are a principal means for learning to adjust to the necessities of life. Moreover, unless the life to which we are urged to adjust ourselves is governed by norms, it may be a very bad life for everyone.

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Flaubert and the Sin Against the Holy Ghost by Rodney Delasanta

November 14, 2011

Madame Bovary is a sumptuously produced film, expertly directed by Vincente Minnelli, and still looks good today. The sets, photography and costumes (by Walter Plunkett) all contributed to a technically flawless production. There are many scenes that remain vividly etched in the viewer's memory long after the film has ended. The Vaubyessard ball scene was hailed by critics for its brilliant execution. Throughout the film, Emma often looks at herself in mirrors and the scene at the ball when she sees herself in the mirror surrounded by suitors is a classic moment. Other notable scenes include the one where Emma is to elope with Rodolphe to France. It is the middle of the night and Emma, dressed in a flowing cape, is pacing the deserted windswept streets waiting for her lover's carriage to arrive. And Emma's deathbed scene is one of Jennifer Jone's best,

Dr. Rodney Delasanta was Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island for some 46 years. He passed away in 2007. This article was originally printed in First Things almost ten years ago. Still the best Christian reading of Flaubert’s masterpiece I’ve come across.

Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote. Had she composed a longer poem or lived a longer life, would she have come to agree with Gerard Manley Hopkins, in “God’s Grandeur,” that “the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”? Or would she have concurred with Flaubert, in Un Coeur Simple, that the Holy Ghost is really a stuffed parrot to whom simpletons, like his mockingly named heroine, Felicité, pray in their lunacy? From a poet who could lament in her last years that God’s right hand “is amputated now / And God cannot be found,” one cannot dismiss the latter likelihood.

Despair we have always had with us. Jesus warned against it in Luke’s mysterious passage: “And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him, but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven” (12:10). St. Benedict sought to deflect it from the prayer life of his monks by enjoining them, in the seventy-second (and final) precept of his Rule, “never to despair of the mercy of God.” And when St. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between presumption (the sin against hope by excess) and despair (the sin against hope by defect), he tagged only the latter as unforgivable.

Rarely in the history of Western literature — until the mid-nineteenth century, that is — has the virtue of hope been sinned against in any final and irretrievable way. This or that devastated character falling into despair, yes, like Lear on the heath, railing at the storm when turned out of doors by his daughters, or Gulliver preferring to sleep with his horses when returned to his Yahoo family; but in each case the despairer is an aberrant measured against exemplars of hope: Cordelia and Kent in the former, and Captain Pedro de Mendez, the spurned Good Samaritan of Gulliver’s fourth voyage, in the latter. Even Ishmael, in Melville’s darkest novel, is saved from the vortex of the doomed Pequod by Queequeg’s coffin and by the whaler Rachel in “search after her missing children.” How distressing to realize, then, that a deliberate and irrevocable violation of hope should have constituted the clear intention of the premier practitioner of the realistic novel, Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880).

By Flaubert’s time, of course, hope, coming after faith and before charity in the lineup of the three theological virtues, had undergone serious secular transformation. Certainly the Enlightenment had severed it from all eschatological promise; the provenance of hope to a Deist like Benjamin Franklin extended largely to the civitas terrenis, his kite and key the heavenly host, his street-swept Philadelphia the New Jerusalem.

Later, the Romantics had tried to find hope in the countryside, but they presumed in the beneficence of Nature and in the innocence of the self. Pace Wordsworth, could any impulse from a vernal wood really teach “more of man, / Of moral evil and of good” than all the sages? And could anyone have been vain enough to obey the Emersonian injunction to “obey thyself,” expecting thereby to touch the hem of the Transcendent? Flaubert thought not and said so with withering satire in Madame Bovary, his masterpiece.

For those who suspect that the catastrophes emanating from the Enlightenment have, over the slow pace of history, outdistanced its achievements, Flaubert’s censure of the movement, via his mashing of the pharmacist Homais, seems just. Appropriately named, Homais is man — man alone — supremely confident in his own accomplishments and scornful of those superstitions, like primal falls and redemptions, that would compromise his newfound stature. Pompously self-reliant, he would cure the ills of the world by empirical fiat.

It is from his apothecary’s shop that the miracles of science issue and from his Comtean sagacity that uninvited dollops of the new morality are apportioned. His letters to the editor in the Fanal de Rouen dogmatize upon every conceivable subject: “There was no longer a dog run over, a barn burnt down, a woman beaten in the parish, of which he did not immediately inform the public, guided always by the love of progress and the hate of priests.” He has named his sons Franklin and Napoleon.

His poison helps to undo Emma Bovary long before she literally partakes of it from his laboratory, mockingly called Cafarnaum. He will outlast three doctors after Charles Bovary, “so effectively did he hasten to eradicate them.” And for all this he will earn, as reward for his appalling career, the cross of the Legion of Honor. Hatred was the great spur to Flaubert’s genius, and it is for the “enlightened” Homais that Flaubert reserves his singular contempt. Abandon all hope, ye who have presumptuously entered there.

Abandon all hope, also, ye who have succumbed to the siren call of Romanticism. By his own admission, Flaubert was in his youth addicted to the “disease” of Romanticism, and he wrote Madame Bovary as an act of self-exorcism. (He was supposed to have said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”) In the 1840s he wrote in a letter to his mistress, Louise Colet: “I am bored with great passions, exalted feelings, wild love affairs… I prize common sense above everything else, perhaps because I so lack it.” In another letter in which he complained about the sentimentality of Romanticism, he wrote: “I refuse to consider Art a drain pipe for passion. . . . No, no! Genuine poetry is not the scum of the heart,” a metaphor that seems to mock Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

In its place, Flaubert sought, in his own words, “to render ignoble reality artistically.” The “ignoble reality” he tried to render was the hollow and sordid society of his time, half of which he thought was sick with romantic self-indulgence (the inanity of the French nation returning another Napoleon to a recreated emperor’s throne in 1852 is a case in point) and the other half with bourgeois acquisitiveness. Emma Bovary is the most pitiful victim of the illusions of Romanticism, and of acquisitiveness (although Frederic Moreau of A Sentimental Education would come in a close second), and the tragedy that issues from those illusions-perhaps pathos would be a better word-is the subject of Flaubert’s great novel.

First among the Romantic “virtues” that Flaubert dissolves with his acidic realism, is feeling, Romanticism’s vaunted mode of penetrating into the heart of reality: “I felt before I thought” was Rousseau’s anti-Cartesian manifesto from his Confessions, just as in “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth exalted the role of feeling into mystical intuition. In Emma Bovary, Flaubert diagnoses feeling not as the salubrious power that Rousseau and Wordsworth extolled, but as a neurosis. Later in the novel, Emma’s feeling degenerates into psychosis and arsenic-induced suicide.

Nature too was high on the list of Romantic ideals. Wordsworth might claim her as

“the anchor of [his] purest thoughts, the nurse,  
The guide, the guardian of [his] heart, and soul  
Of all [his] moral being”…

but Flaubert, writing his novel shortly after Wordsworth’s death, could see in the landscape of his native Normandy only “a mongrel land. . . without accent or character.” Sainte-Beuve, the great critic of French literature, said that Flaubert saw in the rural countryside only “pettiness, poverty, conceit, stupidity, routine, monotony, and boredom,” a far cry from the quasi-pantheistic celebration of nature in “Tintern Abbey” or in Thoreau’s Walden.

Sincerity was another Romantic “good,” much praised by its greatest writers. But Flaubert in Madame Bovary is utterly scornful of its vaunted efficacy. He memorably belittles the sincerity of romantic love in the description of the agricultural fair when Rodolphe’s protestations of love to Emma intermingle with the announcements of prizes for the best manure and the best hogs. No less contemptuous of Romantic sincerity is Flaubert’s rendering of the scene, in the last moments of their affair, in which a love-weary Rodolphe squirts a few drops of water on his goodbye letter to Emma in order to simulate tears.

Like the Romantics who died young with decidedly outré ideas about sex — Byron and Shelley in particular come to mind — Flaubert in his youth could lyricize about “the most beautiful of human words — adultery, [which is] vaguely enveloped with an exquisite sweetness.” But by the time he wrote his masterpiece that “exquisite sweetness” had soured into disgust. Emma’s tawdry adultery in the bumpy back seat of a hackney cab, with curtains drawn, making the rounds of Rouen in the middle of the day, was not what the Romantics had in mind.

If Flaubert could so vivisect Enlightenment and Romantic hope, he was even more pitiless in anatomizing the species of hope traditional to Christianity. Admittedly, he seemed to prefer the peasant virtues of the abbé Bournisien, who is not above laboring in the fields with his parishioners, to the intellectual posturing of Homais. However, when it comes time for the priest to offer the balm of Christian hope to a frantic Emma, totally disillusioned with her marriage to Charles, he too fails.

Stirred to momentary piety by the Angelus, Emma seeks out consolation from Bournisien, who is about to teach the catechism to a group of recalcitrant boys. To Emma’s complaint that “she is suffering,” the priest can only respond with a tired formula fromSt. Paulwhich says that we are all born to suffer. Incapable of imagining any suffering in Emma beyond the gynecological, he wonders why her doctor husband hasn’t prescribed an appropriate medicine.

Meanwhile, the unruly boys waiting for the lessons to begin get more of the priest’s attention, and he deflects Emma’s signals of despair: “I’ve known housewives who didn’t even have bread to eat,” he says. To Emma’s rejoinder that “there are women who have bread but no…” Bournisien interrupts by obtusely finishing her sentence with “fire in the winter.” Further spiritual sparring yields no relief; the scene ends with the priest excusing himself in order to return to the catechism and Emma departing with the voices of Bournisien and his charges fruitlessly, mockingly, echoing in her ears: “Are you a Christian?” “Yes, I am a Christian.” “What is a Christian?” “He who, being baptized…baptized…baptized…” From such a ham-fisted sower of Christian seed, even the good ground would have sprouted thorns. What eventually follows is Emma’s first adultery with Rodolphe.

Later in the novel, the assignation that Emma arranges with Léon in the Rouen Cathedral presents Flaubert with still another opportunity to disenfranchise Christian hope. For Léon, the cathedral’s six centuries of architectural and iconic witness to the glories of Christianity serve only to frame Emma in a “a huge boudoir, the arches bending down to shelter in their darkness the avowal of her love.” The intrusion of the verger, who stupidly assumes that the couple are tourists ripe for his packaged kerygma, briefly frustrates Léon’s amorous strategies and briefly compromises Emma’s initial resolve not to yield to them.

The lovers’ escape from his pedantic badgering is not made, however, without the verger’s ludicrous, but ominous, insistence that on their way out they at least notice the sculptures of the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the damned consigned to the flames. For an aroused Léon and Emma, this is hardly the moment to dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell; the couple flee Notre Dame de Rouen-the church of the Virgin, with its futile panoply of holy goads to virtue-and hail a hackney cab that will presently serve as their mobile cloister.

If Flaubert had ever read Alexander Pope’s line that “hope springs eternal in the human breast,” he summoned up all his narrative genius-in his description of Emma’s death, wake, and funeral-to excise any remnant of it from Madame Bovary. The manner of her death is well known. In despair over her lovers’ abandonment and hopelessly in debt, she commits suicide by devouring arsenic filched from Homais’ Cafarnaum. At the vigil of her funeral, three characters, who represent the competing weltanschauungen in Flaubert’s day (as the Karamazov brothers do in Dostoevsky’s), engage in competition for the last word.

Chief among them is Emma herself, around whom, even in death, the Romantic aura lingers. Despite early signs of putrefaction, the grief-stricken Charles can still gaze at her veiled form on the deathbed and romantically venerate “the watered satin of her gown shimmering white as moonlight…It seemed to him that, spreading beyond her own self, she blended confusedly with everything around her-the silence, the night, the passing wind, the damp odors rising from the ground.”

But when, desperate to blend once more with her himself, Charles performs the ultimate romantic act of lifting her veil, “He uttered a cry of horror that awoke the other two.” The other two are Homais and Bournisien, who have spent most of the vigil in fruitless polemic. Voltaire, d’Holbach, the Encyclopédie, priestly celibacy, confession, the Jesuits-all become topics of wrangling between them.

Yet the most telling moment comes wordlessly when, after “time and again falling asleep — something of which they accused each other whenever they awoke — Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled the room with holy water and Homais threw a little chlorine on the floor.” Here, dark realism surrenders to even darker symbolism, for Flaubert renders the hopelessness of the human condition by an opaque epiphany: against the irrevocability of death neither Romantic dreams nor the pitiful talismans of religion and science can hold sway.

This may well be narrative art at its dazzling best, but the discomfited reader hesitates all the same to concede Flaubert his carrion-comfort despair. Some critics have read Madame Bovary as a moral, even didactic, novel because it demolishes the sordidness of a corrupt civilization. Yet because Flaubert’s brilliant diagnosis of his sick society is unaccompanied by even the most modest prognosis for amelioration (“Ah, love, let us be true to one another,” Matthew Arnold could plead in his moment of contemporary despair), it has also been read as an artful exercise in nihilism.

For Flaubert closes his great opus, in the words of one critic, with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with a snarl. What he tells us is not only that the vicious prosper while the innocent suffer — no surprise there — but also that this Manichean rule brooks no exceptions. The meek clearly do not inherit Flaubert’s scorched earth.

We know, of course, that Flaubert defended his art by appealing to its strict objectivity: “Nowhere in my book,” he wrote, “must the author express his emotions or his opinions.” Rather, he must remain detached and utterly impersonal, telling things as they really are and not as tender feelings would prefer them to be. But do his fictional chronicles of Toste and Yonville and Rouenin the 1840s tell things the way they really were?

Flaubert’s brilliant but self-serving line, now become a cliché, was that at this very hour his poor Bovary was suffering and weeping in twenty villages across France-to which the rejoinder might well be: Why does misery alone enjoy this privilege of universality? Should not its antinomies ask for equal time? Another village or two, somewhere, with a faithful Emma, a clever Charles, and an understanding curé? When reading Flaubert, should we not remind ourselves that at the other end of France, a year after the publication of Madame Bovary, Marie Bernarde Soubirous saw her astonishing visions atLourdes? Did Flaubert, notwithstanding his genius, deliberately withhold some truths about the human condition?

Indeed, at those rare moments in the novel when Flaubert seems to relent and to crack open, ever so slightly, a Dutch door to hope, he quickly closes it again. Justin, Homais’ adolescent helper who loves Emma from afar and whom she tricks into gaining access to the arsenic, is usually adduced as the best example of Flaubert’s compassion. Yet his narrative carefully restricts Justin’s love from connecting to anyone; it remains encaged, like the fenced unicorn. Only once is it noticed and even then it is cynically misunderstood: the grave digger Lestibudois, who secretly plants potatoes among his burial plots, spots Justin scaling the cemetery wall the night after Emma’s funeral and decides that he has found the thief who has been stealing from his crop. Flaubert’s mashing of the greedy grave digger in this scene trumps his compassion for the boy, whose love is sacrificed to the more compelling cause of high dudgeon.

One is moved to wonder: could not the author have sheathed his ironies this once and allowed Lestibudois to peek at Justin weeping over Emma’s grave an instant before he scaled the wall? Similarly, after Charles dies and the remnant of his property is sold, was it not overkill to set the escrow at twelve francs, seventy-five centimes so as to guarantee that the impoverished orphaned daughter, Berthe, would be sent to work in a cotton mill?

And how deeply would Flaubert’s ironies have been compromised had he found a less wounding name than Hippolyte for the limping innocent who, through others’ ambitions, suffered the amputation even of his clubfoot? Was it not gratuitously cruel to attach the name Felicité to the unhappy maid both of this novel and of Un Coeur Simple? Did narrative compulsion require that Charles’ first wife, the widow Dubuc, “ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds,” be named Heloise?

In an early short story, Pigeon Feathers, John Updike describes the adolescent fears of an innocent named David, who is precociously troubled by the inevitability and finality of death. At Lutheran catechism class, which he had valued as a Christian buffer to his dark thoughts, David is upset by his teacher, a young liberal pastor, who finesses the meaning of the Resurrection so as to deny its literal reality. He is further upset by his mother, who after admitting that she, too, in so many circumspect words, denied the Resurrection, casually asks him to take his new .22 rifle and rid the barn of pigeons that have rooked there. David reluctantly obeys his mother and shoots six pigeons, only dimly aware that by this act he too is somehow complicit in that killing of hope, the thing with feathers. It is a Flaubertian moment.

The story could have ended with this objective correlative unamended, and it would have if Flaubert had written it, but Updike-inspired perhaps by more orthodox Lutheran catechetics-recovers from this blasphemy against the Holy Ghost by allowing David the epiphany of examining one of the fallen birds before burying it:

“He had never seen a bird this close before. The feathers were more wonderful than dog’s hair, for each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the bird’s body. . . . And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike-designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him.”

Flaubert was incapable of such recovery. Four years before his death, and twenty after writing Madame Bovary, in ill health and beset by financial problems, he wrote Un Coeur Simple, a story in which he retrieved the name Felicité from his earlier novel and permitted himself a second chance to display his scorn.

The story is a masterpiece, unquestionably, but Flaubert’s scorched-earth strategies continue unabated. A simple-minded maid to Mme. Aubain, Felicité suffers a string of crushing losses throughout her life: an unfaithful lover, the death of her beloved sailor nephew, the death of her beloved young charge, Virginie, the onset of total deafness, the death of her beloved mistress, and-grotesquely climactic-the death of her beloved parrot. To cling to any vestige of hope, she has the bird stuffed and installs it on her shelf: “She enveloped him with a look of anguish when she was imploring the Holy Ghost and formed the idolatrous habit of kneeling in front of the parrot to say her prayers. Sometimes the sun shone in at the attic window and caught his glass eye, and a great luminous ray shot out of it and put her in an ecstasy.”

Cruelty triumphs over compassion in this rendering of St. Teresa manquée. The story could only have been conceived and executed by a man who could write about himself thus: “I lead a bitter life, devoid of all external joy and in which I have nothing to keep me going but a sort of permanent rage, which weeps at times from impotence, but which is constant.” The only relief Flaubert testified to was his art, his personal stay against confusion, but because he required it to bear the burden of his permanent rage it is variously antipathetic, unforgiving, vindictive, even vengeful against those who, like Felicité, would presume to hope.

No less a critic than Jean-Paul Sartre called Flaubert’s realism spiteful, and I am inclined to agree with an author who knew enough of spite-and of hopelessness. Sartre would never have phrased it thus, of course, but his is another way of saying that, materially if not formally, Flaubert sinned against the Holy Ghost.

In the last moments of Un Coeur Simple, that blasphemy crests. Felicité lies near death in the room above the courtyard where theCorpus Christi festival is being celebrated. The priest places the gold monstrance, containing the consecrated host, on the altar while the censers are “gliding to and fro on the full swing of their chains.”

An azure vapor rose up into Felicité’s room. Her nostrils met it; she inhaled it sensuously, mystically, and then closed her eyes. Her lips smiled. The beats of her heart lessened one by one, vaguer each time and softer, as a fountain sinks, an echo disappears; and when she sighed her last breath she thought she saw an opening in the heavens, and a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.

One does not often encounter so exquisite an expression of unpitying contempt.

 

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