Gustave Flaubert, the greatest 19th century French novelist is credited for pioneering a
literary movement that today we call realism. Known as a master of style in literature,
and his best-known novel Madame Bovary, is considered one of the best French novels
of all time. In this video, I will briefly look at Flaubert’s life, then talk about his novels,
style of writing and life’s philosophy in 6 lessons you can learn from him.
Biography Gustave Flaubert was born in 1821, in
the same year the Russian great novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky was born. Here is another interesting
commonality between the two. Both died a year apart, Flaubert in 1880 and Dostoevsky in 1881.
Both novelists suffered from epilepsy, a very common illness among many great authors. Flaubert
grew up in the north of France in a middle class family. He went to university to study law, but
his epilepsy made it difficult so just like Leo Tolstoy he never finished his degree. While the
Russian writers, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev were fascinated by Europe and traveled to France,
Flaubert however, traveled to Greece, Turkey and Egypt which became the setting for some of his
novels, like Salambo and The Temptation of Saint Anthony both set in North Africa. Later in life,
he had to deal with the German soldiers who occupied his town and even his own home.
Speaking of Germans, Flaubert was influenced by the pessimist German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer, especially his philosophy that life is nothing but suffering.
This pessimism runs through his novels. Flaubert never married and had no children.
Perhaps it was the influence of Schopenhauer, saying he didn’t want to inflict the pain of
existence onto another person. Quote: “The idea of bringing someone into the world
fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no!
May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace
of existence.” Wow. Speaking of pessimism. Or Flaubert didn’t want to have sleepless nights
and the responsibility of raising a child. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s response to the
pessimism was religion and Russian simple life. But Flaubert was not religious so
he had to deal with the pessimism by writing. Instead of kids, he found art as his saviour.
Flaubert treated writing his novels just like raising kids. It takes years for kids to grow up
and Flaubert’s novels were no different. He spent many many years writing one novel. I think having
kids is a massive hindrance to writing. I believe the reason, gay people tend to be more creative,
is the fact that they put all their eggs in one basket. With no chance of biological legacy,
everything is on the line, so it forces you to leave an artistic legacy. Whether it is conscious
or subconscious, we all want to have a legacy. For some it is kids. But for others it’s their art,
business and a building. Flaubert wrote novels.
After the publication of Madame Bovary, the French prosecutors in 1857 took Flaubert to court
on charges of obscenity and moral corruption. Madame Bovary centres on a married woman who
has affairs with two men. But lucky for Flaubert that he was in France, in the land of egalitè,
liberte and fraternite. The case was dismissed but the publicity made the novel a best-seller.
Today Flaubert is known for his literary style and considered the founding father of realism,
a literary movement that focuses on telling the objective reality as it is without judging people.
I discussed this in my video on Ivan Turgenev, Flaubert’s close friend.
But as it happened, Flaubert also destroyed realism with his last, but unfinished novel,
Bouvard et Pécuchet, in which he showed that it’s near impossible for us to know reality.
His perfectionist style is loved by many authors.
He has also made it into the mainstream media. The children’s TV show, Sesame
Street had a character named after him, Flo Bear who was a waitress and then a writer.
Novels Flaubert’s most famous
novel is Madame Bovary, which I have dedicated a whole video to, so I will not talk about it
too much here. It was published in 1856 when Flaubert was about 35 years old. Not only it
revolutionised his own writing career, but it shook up literature. He introduced Emma Bovary,
a free spirited married woman in search of romantic adventures, shopping sprees
and ultimately self-destruction. If men could self-destruct, so could women.
After the fame of Madame Bovary, Flaubert decided to write something bigger. Salammbo,
published in 1862, is a historical novel. It was successful at the time,
mostly because of the publicity of Madame Bovary but it hasn’t aged well. I think Flaubert realised
that he had to return to his realism, so in 1869 he published his other masterpiece,
but with a really terrible title, Sentimental Education. The novel is as good as Madame Bovary
in its literary style and language, but the title is extremely generic. Unlike Bovary which was
set in the provinces, Sentimental Education is set in Paris during the 1848 revolution
and centres on a young law student, just like Flaubert himself, who fancies one woman,
then the next and finally loses them all. Just like Flaubert himself, the protagonist,
in seeking for perfection he struggles with indecisiveness. The saying that if you go
for the best, you end up with nothing. Be it a job or love. In my view, Sentimental Education
is a better-written novel than Madame Bovary but Bovary has a better story and title.
In 1877 Flaubert published a collection of three short stories, titled, Three Tales, of which
A Simple Heart, about a simple girl who judges nobody and trusts everybody, is the best known.
In Flaubert’s usual pessimism, her goodness is not reciprocated by society but what’s important is
that she is okay with that and never changes her ways. In Sentimental Education and Madame Bovary,
the protagonists’ love is conditional, but in Simple Heart it is unconditional, which only women
are capable of. Men are not. She’s the opposite of Madame Bovary. She doesn’t question things.
Flaubert’s last novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet published in 1881 is unfinished. Again,
Flaubert’s perfectionist approach meant he worked on it for decades without finishing it. Bouvard et
Pécuchet is about two mediocre or even losers who search for knowledge and want to know everything.
They even read a dictionary for pleasure. They’re jack of all trades, but masters of none. Again,
that saying, that if you chase everything, you end up with nothing. Schopenhauer’s pessimism is on
full display here. Reality is almost unknowable to humans. If Flaubert invented literary realism in
Madame Bovary, he killed it in this novel. Bouvard et Pécuchet is absurd, comic and even nihilistic.
Life Philosophy: 6 Lessons
Lesson 1: Quality over quantity:
Quote: “I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men
could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
Gustave Flaubert is the greatest example of a novelist who sacrificed quantity for quality.
Flaubert’s extremely slow writing process meant he often tortured himself over the choice of words.
Madame Bovary took him 5 years to write, Sentimental Education 7 years, and the
unfashioned novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, took 15 years that ultimately killed Flaubert as he
obsessed to write a perfect novel. It’s important to note that Flaubert grew up reading Balzac,
an improvising genius who wrote 2-3 novels a year. Emile Zola did the same,
writing like a factory. Flaubert was the opposite. He lacked the natural talent of other writers,
but his genius was in hard work. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner talks about
his own feeling of inadequacy. But learning that Flaubert, the greatest French writer,
also was a mediocre talent, he was inspired. Very few writers have the natural talent
to write great novel. It’s mostly through hard work, sacrifices, patience and self-discipline.
Whether Flaubert was a victim of perfectionism or suffered obsessive compulsive disorder,
he managed to produce some of the greatest works of literature through hard work. Quote:
“When one does something, one must do it wholly and well.” But also remember that
Flaubert couldn’t finish some of his novels, so sometimes it’s best to complete something.
Kafka never finished any of novels. Quality is always important but finishing the job is also
important. I think when you’re starting writing, instead of writing one great short story a month,
write a bad one each day. Once you have mastered the craft, then slow down to focus on the quality.
In any field, quantity first, then quality as you improve. A baby doesn’t start with
a perfect spring, but a small step. Today we are bombarded with piles of low quality
stuff online and offline, so to stand out, you have to produce something that has quality.
Lesson 2: Be precise with your Language
Quote: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap
crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
Flaubert is perhaps the closest a novelist came to a composer or an artist. He treated each word like
a musical note, looking for its sound, meaning, cadence and the overall effect within a sentence.
Flaubert was an artist of diligence and attention to details who painstakingly stroked his brush
to create the perfect effect or image in the reader’s mind. Novelists build palaces with words,
structured in a way that creates an image but most importantly a feeling. Just like an extra
note in a song can hinder the experience, Flaubert carefully chose each word to say more with less.
Madame Bovary is not a long novel, but it is so jam-packed with imagery and emotions
that not a word seems misplaced. On a deeper level, Flaubert believed language was always
inadequate to express human emotions and ideas. It’s not a window you can see through. Language
is more like opaque glass. Quote: “It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why
perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.” This is a really deep
analysis of how we all fail in communicating our feelings and thoughts perfectly because language
is an insufficient tool. This is much harder for the writer whose only tool is language.
Instead of giving up, Flaubert chose his words carefully, which was a huge struggle for him.
Quote: “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true,
but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” Unquote.
Marcel Proust imitated Flaubert in his writing to convey feelings with precise words. So use
language with a purpose. Be precise with words and concise with sentences, just like Flaubert.
Lesson 3: Beauty is created
Quote: “There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”
In 1845 Flaubert visited Italy and was fascinated by a painting,
so much so that he sat down for four years to wrote a novel about it: The Temptation
of Saint Anthony. In 1849 Flaubert gathered two of his friends and sat down to read the
entire novel in the course of 4 days. Once he had finished, his friends told him it’s too vague,
too unrealistic so throw it into the fire. They advised him to look on earth
to find beauty in the ordinary, instead of searching for unicorns in the heavens.
Flaubert listened to his friends. He started writing Madame Bovary, a story set in the mundane
provincial France, a kind of story you might read in a newspaper. In fact Flaubert got the idea for
his novel from a newspaper article about a woman who had had affairs, got addicted to shopping and
got herself into a massive debt and then committed suicide. By writing this novel about the everyday,
Flaubert invented a new literary movement, realism. Nothing fanciful, but commonplace. But
Flaubert, the perfectionist, turned this simple tale into an amazing work of art through hard work
and five years of toiling with his words. Instead of searching for beauty in a vague painting,
he created it himself. Flaubert, the wordsmith or the literary alchemist turned base metal
into gold. So great writers turn an ordinary story into an extraordinary piece of literature. Quote:
“You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.”
Lesson 4: Artists do not judge
Quote: “Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.”
One of the most unique features of Madame Bovary was its realism,
but what is even more important was that Flaubert didn’t judge Emma for her transgressions.
Just remember that this was the 1850s, 170 years ago. A woman while pursuing romance
sleeping with different men wasn’t acceptable at the time. And that was the reason Flaubert
was taken to court for teaching immorality. Throughout the novel, Flaubert lets Emma make
her own decisions based on the fantasies she has read about in romantic novels.
Emma’s imagination is rife with romantic tales, so Flaubert is like a sympathetic parent who
likes his kids in equal measure despite their bad choices in life. That level of objectivity
was new in literature, something even pure scientists couldn’t practice. As I discussed
in my video on Flaubert’s close friend, Ivan Turgenev, in order to discover the truth,
artists must not judge. Quote: “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
So have an open mind about the good, the ugly, the sublime and the terrible.
Lesson 5: Fiction changes reality
Quote: “There is no truth. There is only perception.”
If one has to characterise the entire body of Flaubert’s works,
it’s about the question of what's reality and how much can we know it.
Flaubert is the pioneer of realism but also the destroyer of realism towards the end of
his career, especially in his last unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. As I said earlier
he was influenced by Schopenhauer, just like Tolstoy was. Schopenhauer argued that we can
never understand reality as it is, but we only know a representation of that reality.
In Madame Bovary, Emma’s life choices are influenced by the fantasy and romance
novels she read as a young woman. She cannot understand reality because her mind is full of
lies and fantasies. Emma later reflects on her life and says: “everything was a lie.”
This also reflects Flaubert’s own view. In Bouvard et Pécuchet,
Flaubert undermines his own realism by saying that reality cannot be known. Two men embark
on a journey to know everything and record everything but fail miserably in every quest.
Mass media, social media and advertising are like works of fiction, giving false hopes,
exaggerating things, and amplifying reality to the point that the more we consume,
the less we understand reality. Emma Bovary read a lot of bad fiction to the point that she
believed in unicorns. Flaubert preferred quality over quantity. It’s not about how much you read,
but what you read. Do you know who likes quantity? Capitalists do. The more they publish,
the more money they make. So information clarifies reality but it also obscures it,
giving you inflated dreams. Quote: “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself,
or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
In other words, don’t consume mass media, instead read great works of literature.
Lesson 6: Reality always wins One of Flaubert’s most unique
techniques is juxtaposition, which is incredibly cinematic. In Madame Bovary, the scene of Emma and
her lover having one of the most beautiful moments is juxtaposed with people at a country fair
listening to a boring speech by the local politician talking in monotone,
like all politicians do. In Sentimental Education, too, a beautiful moment of romantic whispers is
juxtaposed with people demonstrating and shouting on the streets outside. Flaubert contrasts the
inner calm with the outside storm and outside calm with inner storm. In his novels he plays
with the emotional drama of the individual with the social drama of revolutionary upheavals.
Throughout his works, Flaubert contrasts the perfection of a dream with the imperfection of
reality. His characters always find it difficult to bridge the two, so they remain suspended in
this really uncomfortable situation. When they act on their imagined dreams, the consequences are
bad, like in Madame Bovary. When they do not act, as is the case in Sentimental Education,
you are left with nothing. So in essence, Flaubert thinks reality always wins, whether you act upon
your dreams or not. So be purposeful with the way you live. But most importantly, be realistic.
To sum up Flaubert’s fiction, his characters experience young idealism, which is replaced
by terrible realism later in life. For some of his characters, the realisation comes too late,
for example in Emma Bovary’s case. For Fredric, his protagonist in Sentimental Education,
however, he is still alive to ponder over his naivety in love and success.
For Flaubert childhood is an idealised world, almost a bubble, but adulthood is like nature,
raw, animalistic reality. I will leave with this quote: “As you get older,
the heart sheds its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears
away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go.
And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.”
Thank you for watching.