I am not reading Proust. Actually, I read one page this morning—a beautiful page to put me in the mood for writing. But that's about it for the last few weeks. I don't have time for books I want to read because I'm too busy with books I have to read.
One of the books I have to read these days is Madame Bovary. I'll be team-teaching the novel in the spring, and I haven't read it since I was in high school. Until I picked up the book some days ago, I remembered (accurately or falsely) very little: Madame Bovary read romantic novels; she fooled around with a slick rich guy who dumped her; her husband was dull as an ox (the words "Bovary" and "bovine" are linked in my mind); Madame Bovary took arsenic or rat poison; she died a painful death.
In high school, I also read The Sorrows of Young Werther, which featured, as I recall, a dramatic suicide. I don't remember whether Werther read romantic novels, but Goethe's romantic novel left me depressed for several days. I contemplated suicide. When my English teacher, Mrs. Orris, told me she didn't like it when students read The Sorrows because they often became depressed, I felt so unoriginal that I soon snapped out of it. I was a genius then, and geniuses don't experience unoriginal things.
Is the conventional wisdom that Madame Bovary is an unoriginal character originally conceived by Flaubert? I don't know how to address this question because I'm only a fifth of the way through the book, but I do recognize Madame Bovary as solidly within the literary tradition of bad readers. Indeed, one could argue that the form of the novel itself began with a famously bad reader—Don Quixote. However, when Flaubert describes an evening get-together in which Charles and M. Homais fall asleep at the fire and Léon and Emma are drawn into a tête-à-tête, I suspect Flaubert's literary sources go back further than Cervantes. Here is the scene in Lowell Bair's translation:
By now the fire had died down and the teapot was empty; Léon continued to read and Emma listened to him, absent-mindedly turning the lampshade decorated with paintings of pierrots in carriages and tightrope dancers with their balancing poles. Léon would stop and make a gesture calling her attention to his sleeping audience; then they would talk to each other in low voices, and their conversation seemed sweeter to them because no one else could hear it.
Thus a bond was established between them, a continual exchange of books and songs; Monsieur Bovary, little inclined to jealousy, took it as a matter of course.
I'm thinking of Dante's account of Paolo and Francesca in Canto V of The Inferno. Canto V is set in the realm of the lustful, where, like hapless birds, the damned are buffeted by tormenting winds. The symbolism is obvious: the lustful are overcome by punishing winds in death because they allowed themselves to be overcome by their sinful passions in life. Dante initially serves us up with a series of cameos by the literary lustful, including Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris, and Tristan. Virgil apparently names another thousand souls—how patient Dante is—but the two eventually come upon those historical figures now made literary by Dante. The passage begins with Francesca's famous line:
. . . "Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseria . . ."
Or in my translation:
. . . "There is no greater pain
than to remember times of happiness
when in misery . . . "
Francesca then goes on to describe how she and Paolo were seduced by reading the romances of Lancelot:
". . . One day, for pleasure,
We read of Lancelot, by love constrained:
Alone, suspecting nothing, at our leisure.
Sometimes at what we read our glances joined,
Looking from the book each to the other's eyes,
And then the color in our faces drained.
But one particular moment alone it was
Defeated us: the longed-for smile, it said,
Was kissed by that most noble lover: at this,
This one, who now will never leave my side,
Kissed my mouth, trembling. . . ." [Robert Pinsky's translation]
The passage ends with this:
". . . Galeottto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante."
Or in my translation:
". . . That book was a Galeotto and he who wrote it:
that day we read no further."
I quoted the final two lines in Italian because the use of the name Galeotto is important. Galeotto is Italian for Gallehault, who acted as a go-between for Lancelot and Guinevere. The influence of Dante's Tuscan dialect on what we now call Italian is apparent in the meaning of the modern galeotto: a panderer. In effect, Dante is saying that in bad reading, the book serves as a kind of pimp between the reader and her sinful acts of passion.
I stand in awe of Dante as a poet; as a theologian he appalls me. Yet, his belief in the justness of eternal torture is merely conventional for his time. As long as pride against God was seen as the first and fundamental sin, the use of torture was a justifiable corrective to bring about a restoration of humility before God. As Judith N. Shklar has pointed out in Ordinary Vices, Montaigne moved outside the Christian theologian framework when he made man the measure of all things and judged cruelty as the worst thing we do to each other. As Montaigne famously said in "Of Cannibals":
But there never was any opinion so disordered as to excuse treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty, which are our ordinary vices. [Donald Frame translation]
If Christians are a bit less cruel than they were in Dante's time, it's because their Christianity has been humanized by our first and greatest essayist and humanist, Montaigne. Avishai Margalit—skeptical as he is that John Rawls' idea of social justice can be pragmatically realized—has posited the decent society as one that refrains from institutionalizing cruelty and humiliation. In this sense, Margalit is working within the humanistic strain of Judaism, which is as much heir to Montaigne's humanism as liberal Christianity.
A couple years ago, when my wife and I visited the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padova, I was struck by the resemblance of the stacks of tormented naked bodies in Giotto's Inferno to some of the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib. I wouldn't call it so much an instance of life imitating art as conceptual structures reverberating through time. As I understand it, Flaubert saw himself as objectively, almost scientifically, portraying his characters in precise evidential detail. One should not take his intention, however, as indicative of an art free of art, any more than we should expect, say, documentaries to be free of the art of filmmaking. Flaubert, whatever he may have thought he was doing, was working within ineluctable literary structures whose sources, though at odds with his philosophical outlook, compelled him through time with their aesthetic power.
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