FAUST: I've studied now, ach! philosophy
Jurisprudence, medicine,
And even, alas! theology!
From end to end, with labour keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before…
Knowing now that nothing can be known,
That knowledge cuts me to the bone.
—Goethe, Faust, Part One, Scene One, 1808 (apologies to Bayard Taylor)
1.
Last week I wrote to you, dear readers, about Gustave Flaubert’s giant, unfinished, posthumously published novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, which, like David Foster Wallace’s giant, unfinished, posthumously published novel The Pale King, killed its author.
The similarities between the two terminating tomes end there. The Pale King reductively funnels all human experience through a single document — the Illinois tax code — and its bearing on the hearts and souls of a roomful of Internal Revenue Service employees in Peoria, Illinois in 1985. It is elegiacally boring. Bouvard et Pécuchet expansively funnels pretty much every book in existence, including all 60 volumes of the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (C.-L.-F. Panckoucke, 1812-1822), through the minds and bodies of two boring nitwits on a farm in Normandy, sometime between 1838 and the end of time. It will make your head explode. As it did Flaubert’s.
At Wallace’s end, The Pale King was only one-third finished. I have tried to read all of its published pages — it contains masterpieces —and have failed. It is, to paraphrase Johnson, who is much in my mind as I head to the Hebrides tomorrow, a book that most readers will put down and forget to pick up again. “None ever wished it longer than it is.”
This is the last sentence I will ever devote to it.
Flaubert’s, on the other hand.
I can’t seem to shut up about.
2.
If you didn’t read last week’s introduction to Bouvard et Pécuchet, you can pop over there now. Take your time, we’re not going anywhere.
While the rest of us wait, have you seen this?
Ok. So, the story — I’m going to run through it quickly, no spoiler alerts — begins on a Sunday afternoon in Paris much like today’s — a stultifying 33 degrees Celsius (91.4°F) — with the two main characters, both almost fifty, both copyists, both wearing hats with their names pencilled inside the brims, one strolling down from Bastille, the other strolling up from the Jardin des Plantes, simultaneously reaching a shaded bench on the Canal Saint-Martin, sitting down, and giving each other the once-over.
They like what they see. A friendship ensues. An inheritance follows — from Bouvard’s bourgeois uncle, who turns out to be his father. They resign their posts, move to a 38-hectare property in Normandy, and enthusiastically give themselves over to gardening. Which, they are distressed to discover, despite their blue blouses, wide-brimmed hats, and knee-length gaiters, they totally suck at it. Instead of quitting, however — the sensible course of action — they double down by ordering every book available on animal rearing, plant physiology, meteorology, and soil science. The results are worse. They move on to arboriculture, canning, and distilling. Disaster, disaster, and disaster. Everything they put their hand to dies or fails. Or blows up:
Suddenly, with a noise like a bombshell, the still burst into twenty pieces, which leapt to the ceiling, smashing the pots, flattening the skimmers, and smashing the glasses; the coal scattered, the furnace was demolished—and the next day, Germaine found a spatula in the courtyard.
Pécuchet immediately crouched down behind the vat, and Bouvard collapsed on a stool. For ten minutes they remained in this position, not daring to make a single movement, pale with terror, amidst the shards of broken glass. When they could speak again, they wondered what had caused so many misfortunes, especially this last one. And they understood nothing, except that they had almost perished. Pécuchet ended with these words:
“Perhaps we don't know chemistry!”
“And the next day, Germaine found a spatula in the courtyard.” My new favourite sentence of all time.
So, chemistry. They conduct experiments. More carnage. They move on to medicine. They read in one of the volumes of the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales1 about cases of extraordinary constipation. “Would that they had known Dr Beaumont’s famous fistulated Canadian, the polyphages Tarare and Bijoux, the hydropic woman from the department of Eure, the Piedmontese who went to the toilet once every twenty days, Simorre de Mirepoix who died of ossification, and the former mayor of Angoulême, whose nose weighed three pounds!”
Digestion strikes them as the greatest of creation’s mysteries.
To get a better grasp of its functions, they regretted not having the faculty of ruminating, as Montègre, M. Gosse and Bérard's brother had; — and they masticated slowly, triturating and insalivating while thinking attentively of the rounded bolus of chewed food in their entrails, and following it with methodical scrupulousness, of an almost religious attention, to its final consequence.
They then try to produce digestion artificially, by filling a bottle with meat and carrying it under their armpits for a fortnight, “without any other result save making them stink horribly.”
Following Sanctorius, “who spent half a century weighing his food every day together with his excretions”, they set out to prove that a man’s body can be kept in perfect equilibrium by putting into its mouth the exact amount expelled through its lower portals. This proves too onerous for our two Fausts. As does the practice of medicine, after threats of prosecution from the mayor — the aloe vera pills they gave him to get rid of the worms they insisted he had —
All diseases proceed from worms. They spoil the teeth, hollow out the lungs, enlarge the liver, ravage the intestines, and cause noises therein.
— only managed to give him chronic, uncurable hemorrhoids.
Medicine, they decide (like their creator, whose father, head surgeon at the hospital in Rouen, was contemptuous of literary types and didn’t read his son’s books) is humbug. “The springs of life are hidden from us, the ailments too numerous, the remedies problematical. No reasonable definitions are to be found in the authors of health, disease, diathesis, or even pus.”
But filling their heads with all this reading has by now “disturbed their brains.”
When Bouvard had a cold, he thought his lungs were inflamed. When leeches did not lessen the soreness, he resorted to a blister, which affected the kidneys. Then he thought he was passing a stone.
Pécuchet got an ache while pruning a hedge and vomited after his dinner, which frightened him immensely. Then, observing that his complexion was a little yellow, he suspected liver disease, and asked himself: "Do I have pains? and ended up having them.
Distressed by each other’s symptoms, they examined their tongues, felt their pulses, changed their mineral water, purged themselves — and feared the cold, the heat, the wind, the rain, the flies, and especially, the courants d’air.
(Note: The French are by far the most medicated people on earth, but most of them still believe that a courant d’air — a draught, principally caused by — sacrebleu! — an open window — remains the country’s number-one health hazard.)
To counter their physical deterioration, they stop smoking and drinking and prohibit the cook from preparing their favourite dishes.
All meats have their shortcomings. Black pudding and cold meats, herring, lobster, and game are “unmanageable”. The larger the fish, the more gelatine it contains, and therefore the heavier it is. Vegetables cause heartburn; macaroni gives you dreams; cheeses “generally considered, are difficult to digest”; a glass of water in the morning is “dangerous”. Each drink or comestible should come with a similar warning, or else with these words: “bad! — beware of abuse! — not suitable for everyone”. — Why bad? Where is the abuse? How do you know if something is not suitable for you?
And what a problem breakfast is! They gave up on café au lait, on account of its detestable reputation, and then chocolate, because it is “a mass of indigestible substances”. That left tea. But “nervous people should avoid it altogether”. However, in the seventeenth century, Decker prescribed two hundred litres a day to cleanse the swamps of the pancreas.
Tetched and tetchy, they switch treatises and are delighted to learn that pork is in itself “a good aliment,” tobacco “perfectly harmless in its character,” and coffee “indispensable to military men.”
Until then, they had believed that damp places were unhealthy. Not so! Casper declares them less deadly than the others. You don't swim in the sea without refreshing your skin. Bégin wants you to throw yourself in while you're sweating. Undiluted wine after soup is considered excellent for the stomach.
So that night they tuck into a bottle of Burgundy, a plate of oysters, a duck, a pork and cabbage stew with cream, and a Pont l'Evêque cheese.
It was a liberation, almost a revenge — and they laughed at Cornaro! What a fool he must have been to tyrannise himself like that! What a low thing to think always of prolonging one's existence! Life is only good if you enjoy it.
“Another piece?”
“Don’t mind if I do!”
“And I will too!”
“To your health!”
“And to yours!”
“And let the rest of the world go to hell!”
3.
Okay, basta. I’m enjoying translating bits and bobs of Flaubert’s perfectionist prose—and giving examples of how, 202 years after he flopped dead while trying to finish the damn thing, his book’s skewering of the crackpot ideas of its day remains as on-point as ever. But at the rate I’m going, we’ll be here forever; I’ve only covered the first third of the book.
So, bref, here, nutshelled, are the next two-thirds: following the above setbacks the two imbéciles try their hands at not just the cracked pots but also the intact ones: everything from astronomy to zoology. They turn their house into an archaeology museum and fill their garden with rocks and immortelles, “sacrificing the asparagus in order to build on the spot an Etruscan tomb, that is to say, a quadrilateral figure in dark plaster, six feet in height, and looking like a dog-hole”.
They then take on philosophy and history, grammar and aesthetics. “Their heads grew bigger. They were proud to reflect on such large objects.” Then religion, then spiritualism, then mesmerism, magnetism, and phrenology. They dive into progressive politics, before deciding: “Eh, progress, what a joke! And politics, what a load of rubbish!” They gorge on geology, antiquities, urban planning, history, biography, theatre, literary criticism, education, drawing, natural history, and music. Each subject leaves them more puzzled than before.
In short, having consumed all existing knowledge, they learn nothing. Except, like Faust, that nothing can be known.
All of this takes an unknowable eternity to unfold. Twenty years? Thirty? Forty? According to the calculations of René Descharmes (Autour de Bouvard et Pécuchet : Études documentaires et critiques, Paris, 1921), they threw themselves into gymnastics at the age of seventy-eight, the same year Pécuchet focused his book learning on love, lost his virginity, and got the clap.
“The book is full of events,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in “In Defense of Bouvard et Pécuchet” (1994), “yet time stands still.” Every book in Borges’ “total library” contains infinite labyrinths — and labyrinthian infinites. But Bouvard et Pécuchet, especially.
4.
Finally, disenchanted with the lot, Bouvard and Pécuchet try to top themselves, but, surprise, surprise, they fuck this up too. So, defeated, emptied, exhausted, they hire a carpenter to customise a double writing stand, and, seated together for all eternity, they return, joylessly, but with great and blessed relief, to the only thing that they know will get them through the day unscathed. Their original metier. Copying. Duplicating words — just their physical form, without having to actually read or think about them — for a Sottisier, “a collection of nonsense.”
That’s it, the whole story. With, again, no spoiler alert — because Bouvard et Pécuchet cannot be spoiled. Because, despite the continuous, connected chains of chaos and slapstick, nothing about our interchangeable Quixotes ever changes. Because nothing really happens.
Because, like that show George pitched and the nine-season series Jerry and Larry created, Bouvard et Pécuchet is about nothing:
What seems beautiful to me, what I would like to do, is a book about nothing. A book with no external attachments, which would stand on its own by the internal force of its style, like the earth without being supported stands in the air, a book which would have almost no subject or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible… This is why there are no beautiful or ugly subjects, and why it could almost be established as an axiom from the point of view of pure art, that there are none, style being in itself an absolute way of seeing things. I'd need a whole book to explain what I mean. I'll write about all that in my old age, when I have nothing better to dabble in. — G.F. in a letter to Louise Colet, 16 January 1852.
This was written thirty-eight years before Flaubert “finished” Bouvard et Pécuchet, or rather before Bouvard et Pécuchet finished Flaubert.
5.
Here is a principle of aesthetics (you can see that I am bringing everything back to my profession), a rule, I would say, for artists: be regulated in your life and ordinary like a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your works. — G.F. in a letter to Gertrude Tennant, 25 December 1876
Did Flaubert follow his own advice? Hard to say. We barely know the man, despite our having free access to 4,450 of his letters. Ten new letters are discovered each year. Around a thousand are still missing, and many more are forever lost, including the hundreds his best friend Louis Bouilhet burned because of Flaubert’s “crude language” and the hundreds Flaubert burned from his lover and muse Louise Colet.
What we don’t know and never will know about Flaubert swamps what we do. Not just the biographical stuff—Was he left-handed or right-handed? Did he ever actually say, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”? Did he have sex with the 26-year-old, twice-divorced Élisa Schlesinger in Trouville when he was 15? — but what he thought and felt about just about everything.
“The author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” Flaubert was famous for this “principle of impersonality”, for not feeling anything for his characters and thus ensuring that his readers don’t care anything for them, either.
We must be as soulless as possible, and it is through this detachment that the immense sympathy of things and beings will reach us in greater abundance. — G.F. Pensées (posthumous collection),1915
But by the end of his life, having devoted years to plumbing infinitely vast depths of stupidity, and living night and day with two pratfalling morons caterwauling about in his head, did he not become them? Was he not now just as stupid as they were? Borges again: “The fact is that five years of coexistence transformed Flaubert into Pécuchet and Bouvard, or (more accurately) transformed Pécuchet and Bouvard into Flaubert.”
6.
The most-quoted line from the Borges essay is his description of Flaubert as “the man who, with Madame Bovary, forged the realist novel, [and with Bouvard et Pécuchet] was also the first to shatter it.” This seems right to me. Joyce went on two Flaubertian pilgrimages to Normandy and could recite huge swathes of Madame Bovary by heart. Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, according to the usual suspects — Hugh Kenner, Cyril Connally et al — borrowed heavily from Bouvard et Pécuchet. “Joyce,” quipped Pound, “went straight back to Papa Flaubert” and “produced the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we now have in English.”
Bouvard is unfinished, Ulysses is gigantically complete, and the latter parts of Ulysses, notably Bloom’s conversational outburst, give one excellent ground for comparison. He has emitted what appear to be all the clichés of the English language in a single volcanic eruption. — Ezra Pound, The Dial, 1922
The line continues unbroken all the way up to The Pale King and beyond.
I’m particularly fond of the next paragraph in the Borges (and his “two-headed Faust” line, which I stole for my title), which I’ll use in lieu of an ending:
The two characters are initially two idiots, scorned and abused by the author, but in the eighth chapter, the famous words occur: “Then a lamentable faculty arose in their spirits, that of seeing stupidity and no longer being able to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, the profile of a bourgeois, a silly reflection overheard by chance.” Flaubert, at this point, reconciles himself with Bouvard and Pecuchet, God with his creatures. This may happen in every long, or simply living, work (Socrates becomes Plato, Peer Gynt, Ibsen), but here we surprise the moment in which the dreamer, to use a kindred metaphor, notes that he is dreaming, and that the forms of his dream are himself.
7.
I still haven’t gotten around to discussing France’s annual hunt for literary fiction, a unique blood sport not practiced elsewhere. Of the livres released into the wild between September 6 and the beginning of November, when the country’s big literary trophies are handed out, only a handful will survive.
This year’s drove is much diminished: 321 new French novels, including 74 first novels and 145 novels in translation, for a total of 466, to which must be added a few hundred crime, science fiction, and fantasy novels, and a smattering of rediscovered or retranslated classics. Still, it is by far the lowest number this century. Last year there were 490. The year before, 521. A decade before that, 667. In 2010, 701.
“The decline in the number of publications continues”, bemoans the specialist magazine, Livre Hebdo. Booksellers usually make almost a third of their yearly sales during this period…
But that’s all I can write for now. I’m in Glasgow, Hebrides tomorrow, back in Paris in nine days, then down to the Vaucluse the day after that, and swamped with Illinois-tax-code-level-boring writing obligations for the next three weeks straight. Would that I weren’t! Would that I could stay Flaubertian-focused on my own weird shit! Would that, for three or four nickles a day, or €0.16, or 25 ¥, or 14p, or a hipster cuppa joe a month, you could keep me here, virtually strapped to my writing table, Hexagonalling like a Pécuchet possessed. To welcome O life! and to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Or, failing that, at least have a bit of fun, and make a bit of dosh.
Thanks for reading. I can’t express how much your support means to me. Other people follow your lead: by hunting down the “like”, “comment”, and “share” and mashing them with a forefinger, you will help me attract new readers and subscribers. You can also help Hexagon by downloading the nifty Substack app, where every day you’ll get hot tasty treats from the likes of George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie, plus lots of piquant takes on philosophy, economics, history, politics, poetry, and science, and no shortage of bilious dreck from cranks and creeps — which, fortunately, you can and should ignore. Drop me a line and I’ll send you recommendations. Final point: reading these on the app — or in your browser — is a much better experience than reading these as emails. Because, invariably, writers go back and tweak their texts — remove typos, fix dumb passages, add better ones, etcetera.
That’s it! I’m out! Slàinte mhath! Haste Ye Back! Lang may yer lum reek!
As mentioned last week, before writing Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flaubert spent years doing preparatory research, during which he read around 1,500 books. The 16-page medical section (chapter III) was finished in mid-July 1877, after a two-year break during which he wrote Three Tales. For it, Flaubert took 233 pages of reading notes from around 100 books and doctoral theses on clinical medicine, anatomy, pathology, physiology, medical philosophy, hygiene, and women.
Also laughed out loud with the spatula discovery.
Does Flaubert in some way acknowledge the goodness of B & P's friendship?
You're coming to the Vaucluse?
Now I'm going to have to write a cookbook and call it: Macaroni Causes Dreams...