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From: Madame Bovary: PROVINCIAL LIVES (1857), by Gustave FLAUBERT. Translated for Penguin Classics (1992) with an Introduction and Notes by Geoffrey Wall:
“A Note On The Translation
Translating afresh the already translated classic text, the translator is drawn into dialogue with his or her precursors. Though I was working on different principles, and though I found that I eventually disagreed with some of their most cherished effects, I have profited from the posthumous conversation of three previous translators of Madame Bovary: Eleanor Marx, Alan Russell and Gerard Hopkins.
I have used Claudine Gothot-Mersch’s edition of Madame Bovary, published by Garnier in 1971. I have preserved Flaubert’s distinctive habits of punctuation, italicization and paragraphing. He persistently uses commas to segment his sentences in a way that is intended to be mildly disconcerting. Flaubert’s italics are deployed to foreground certain phrases for our special scrutiny. We are invited to enjoy these phrases as prime specimens of cliché, pinned to the page. Flaubert used very short paragraphs to emphasize certain sentences, lifting them out of the visual flow of the printed page. It is a form of typographic slow-motion. These three devices fill some of the space left empty by the notorious elimination of the storyteller from the text called Madame Bovary.”
“Reading and Writing
As a young man, Flaubert had surreptitiously refused to become a lawyer. The thought of being useful was quite odious to him, True to the defiant, mischievous ethos of its maker, there is not much evidence of socially productive labour in Madame Bovary.
There is only the pharmacist Homais, secudded in the little room he calls the Capharnaum, his holy of holies, where he mixes and labels his medicines; only the village tax-collector Binet, working alone up in his attic, turning wooden serviette rings on his lathe. These two striking parallel images of passionate, solitary and gratuitous labour may also bring to mind a picture of Flaubert sitting at his desk, struggling with the rhythm of every phrase. Homais, Binet and Flaubert create around themselves a special enclosed space, a protected solitude. Each has a dignified alibi for his pursuit of the rapturous masculine fantasy of totally self-sufficient activity.
Flaubert worked at his writing, in his own terms. But his writing was not work, in social terms. While writing this book he was not yet the famous author of Madame Bovary. He was merely a man of modest private means in his early thirties who spent most of his time producing voluminous manuscripts of uncertain value. His first sustained composition, the work of his mid twenties, The Temptation of Saint Antony, had been abandoned, rather ominously, on the advice of his friends. The image of Binet at his lathe was perhaps a defensively joking self-caricature.
I have already mentioned Flaubert’s idiosyncratic but exact sense of cultural formation. He demonstrated with poignant clarity the shaping social power of written language upon the inner lives of his main characters. But he had an even larger ambition than this. He grasped, ahead of his time, the pervasive quality of the modern. In the month before he began writing Madame Bovary he had visited the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition in London. There he would have seen displayed, in a ritual of world-historical self-congratulation, the global triumph of capitalism. It took the material form of a spectacular network of commodities.
Unobtrusively, Flaubert endeavoured to document in unprecedented detail the everyday cultural artefacts of his age. He attended with great imaginative precision not simply to the external contours of such objects, inert in themselves, but also to the vagaries of their actual use. He often evokes individual acts of reading, writing and looking. We behold, for example, a set of ancestral portraits, a fashion-plate, a map of Paris, a variety of legal documents, a medical journal, a women’s magazine, an almanac, a list of medical lectures, the engravings in a keepsake album, a picture torn from a perfumier’s catalogue, a daguerreotype portrait, a treatise on cider, an operatic performance, a work of medical pornography, a forged receipt for piano lessons, the ledger in a draper’s shop, a bailiff’s inventory of property for auction. The list is not at all systematic, but it confirms how habitually observant Flaubert was in such matters.
Such documentary exactness has a purpose that reaches beyond the satiric mimicry which inspired The Dictionary of Received Ideas. Flaubert’s transcriptions are designed to foreground, comprehensively, the cultural processes of reading and writing. These transcriptions are a vital and neglected feature of his style. His narrative method, so disconcertingly impersonal, is not mere fastidiousness. Flaubert, ever the clandestine anti-bourgeois, judiciously abstains from the habitual forms of persuasion.
Writing such as this invites us, delectably, to reinvent our reading.”
Julia Upton 