Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
Every once in a while a certain quote by Flaubert comes to mind. It's part of an epigraph to a luminous essay, "Liberalism's Moloch: An Interpretation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Salammbo," by Harry Neumann from his book Liberalism (a "must-read" book, as John Grant quite rightly points out).
Its quality of bluntness and pessimism I've always found somehow wonderfully droll -- or, insofar as it's prophetically accurate, perhaps not so droll. Nonetheless, given current regnant idiocies and moral dissolution, it does take on a certain new resonance.
The world of today and existence in general weigh heavily and horribly on my shoulders. I am so disgusted with everything . . . It is a world in itself, the world as it exists in the dreams of liberal democrats, and as I shall never live to see it, thank God. The things that will hold the center of the stage during the next two or three hundred years are enough to make a man of taste vomit. It is time for me to disappear.
--The Selected Letters of Flaubert, translated & edited by F. Steegmuller (New York, 1953) pp.245-8.
And, yes, I am fun at cocktail parties.
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Re: Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
I'm torn between appreciating that and noticing the way the Bosphorus is glittering and my cats are sleeping calmly.
Re: Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
Alas, out of print.
Feb '11
Re: Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
The perfect formula for irrelevancy.
Jun '10
Re: Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
Yes, liberal democracy does bear some resemblance to sausage making. It is an unseemly affair. But necessary.
Nov '10
Re: Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
I;m always amused by the world weary sighing for some nobler reality when it is carried out by notable perverts like Flaubert. Great writer, but a human farce.
Aug '10
Re: Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
Robert Lux:
And, yes, I am fun at cocktail parties. ·
They still have those?
Re: Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
The liberal democrats Flaubert is talking about are the good guys, broadly construed, though the Revolution convinced a lot of the French that those were bad ideas. He was a nihilist élitist in politics, like a lot of artists then and now.
Nov '10
Re: Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
I don't think that really applies to artists then (though it certainly does to artists now). French artists in the 19thC were broadly spread across the political spectrum, from Prudhonnian socialists like Courbet to Moral Order types like Cabanel. They may have had quite varied political beliefs, but very few suffered from lack of belief in anything at all. Unlike literature and philosophy, in fine art, that nihilism didn't become popular until much later.
I personally think that the primary reason for this is that at the time, artists were still constrained by having to work from reality, in one form or another. They had to look at the world, and interpret what they saw. There wasn't a lot of room for the self-indulgence of letting one's imagination run wild.
And unlike more literary pursuits, it's almost impossible to work representationally drunk, stoned, or badly hungover. Blurry vision and trembling hands only work for abstract artists.
Re: Flaubert, beyond Derbyshire and Dalrymple
I’m calling Flaubert a nihilist because he wrote stuff like this (to George Sand):
“What shall we believe in, then? In nothing! That is the beginning of wisdom.”
And an élitist because he followed up with:
“The only reasonable thing…is a government by mandarins, provided the mandarins know something and even that they know many things. The people is an eternal infant, and it will be (in the hierarchy of social elements) always in the last row, since it is number, mass, the unlimited. It is of little matter whether many peasants know how to read and listen no longer to their cure, but it is of great matter that many men like Renan or Littre should be able to live and be listened to! Our safety is now only in a LEGITIMATE ARISTOCRACY, I mean by that, a majority that is composed of more than mere numbers.”
That's not to say this he had anything close to a coherent, well-though-out political philosophy. He just had a hatred for anything that had come before and believed that only people like him should run things. Nihilist. Élitist.