Continuing with the books receiving treatment in In the Hotel de la Mole, I sped through Goriot over the course of Memorial Day. It feels both like a book that’s meant to be read quickly and like it was written at an even more furious pace. Balzac drags the characters behind him as he sprints through the streets of Paris, bouncing them about this way and that. The commotion around them being what it is, the characters seem unable to feel anything but the strongest of emotions: the highest of highs or the lowest of lows. The lack of intermediary gradations in feeling lends a certain irreality to the reactions and machinations of the personages in the book. For instance, as Goriot lays ill in his bed:
Did you see my daughters? They’ll soon be coming to see me. They’ll hurry here as soon as they hear I’m ill. They looked after me so well in the rue de la Jussienne! Goodness me! I wish my room were fit to receive them.
They are busy, they are sleeping, they won’t come. I knew it. You have to be dying to learn what children are. Ah! my friend, don’t get married, don’t have children! You give them life, and they give you death! No, they won’t come!
Back and forth he vacillates, torn between his paternal devotions and disappointments. Here, confronted with death, he’s unable to resolve the two to his very last. Many of the characters of the book likewise have some irreconcilable internal tension between extremes. I’d sometimes find myself thinking that I missed some inciting action that caused Rastignac to about-face on a given issue, flipping back through the last few pages searching for an explanation, finding none: he is just both a romantic and a social climber, and in one instant fully the former, in another, fully the later.
All in all, less stylish, insightful, and subtle than Bovary, but a fine read none-the-less. Funny and engaging throughout. Definitely interested in reading other books from La Comédie humaine, especially to continue with Rastignac’s development on the Parisian social scene. À nous deux maintenant!. Going to skip the other book dealt with by Auerbach (Stendhal’s The Red and the Black) for now to switch things up. 150 pages into At Lady Molly’s and so happy to be back in bohemian interwar London with Nicholas Jenkins.
Selective Writers
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.
— Erich Auerbach, In the Hotel de la Mole
The selection of events, the description of the surroundings, the pacing of paragraphs; the structure of Madame Bovary is fundamentally psycho-logical (that is, having the logic of mental processes and emotions). It marshals the many modes of realist literary depiction in service of communicating the inner conflicts of its cast. And make no mistake, the characters are modern, emblematic, contemporary for Flaubert, but description (diagnosis?) of contemporaneity is a second order result of an intense dedication to this affective language and scenography.
Obviously, a writer cannot write at all without first selecting a subject. But this idea of selection being in contention with description or narrativization finds resonance also with Ben Lerner’s recent Transcription. In one sense we’re being confronted with a narrator overeager to explain his own selection of events, so eager that the proliferating explanations themselves become the very content of the book. From this cyclical process—selection, explanation, absorption—some vision of subjectivity emerges. A way of thinking about Lerner’s autofiction is that we are being made privy to the narrator’s construction of a fictionalized self via his selection and languaging of fragments of reality.
I find this meta-fictional mode of selection most interesting when the narrator’s ability to self-reflect is problematized in some significant way, like for the young Adam in Atocha Station, riddled with drug-induced paranoias and anxieties. The middle-aged narrator in Transcription, instead, seems to be rid of these impurities of perception. Without that tension the end result loses the connection it had with Bovary; acts of selection become top-down manifestations of the author’s grand ideas about contemporary life.
Officier de santé
Finished Madame Bovary (And indeed, Madame Bovary is finished). The rain continues, a wet Memorial Day weekend.
Charles isn’t even a real doctor—impotent when faced with any real conditions of illness. We don’t see him successfully treat a single patient excepting Monsieur Rouault, a treatment consisting solely of rest and recuperation. As a result Homais, clueless as he is, is able to vacuum up much of the Yonvillian business that may have instead enriched the Bovary family. But even those doctors who command multiples more respect, considered competent in the extreme, they also falter in the face of Emma’s descent into sickness. There's no helping a patient who differs in their conception of good health. There’s no loving a wife who differs in her conception of true love.