Abstract
To say that the popular and critical reception of Flaubert’s La tentation de saint Antoine (1874) was mixed, as its appreciation continues to be, is to be generous. One has to wonder about the real stature of Flaubert, if, as many have believed, this novel resulting from a lifetime of work by a great writer is a failure, “a nineteenth-century literary curiosity,”1 a mere collection of disorganized notes remaining from an amateur historian’s interest in the third and fourth centuries. It is particularly hard to imagine a failure of such magnitude when we recall Flaubert as the artist who with Madame Bovary forever established the novel as an art form rather than a pastime for idlers. Flaubert was a technical innovator of great importance. Among other devices, he is thought to be the first to master and to use free indirect discourse consciously. Without question, he was one of the finest novelists of the nineteenth century. Indeed, few writers do anything as successful as any one of Flaubert’s other completed novels and short stories, even without considering Madame Bovary. Nonetheless, La tentation raises troubling issues. Judging from the secondary literature that focuses on La tentation de saint Antoine, Flaubert simply could not get the novel right, despite a quarter century of effort. Perhaps even more important than the very negative judgments, it is positively amazing to note the number of general studies of Flaubert that, somehow, pass by La tentation with minimal or no commentary.
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Notes
Paul Valéry, “La tentation de (saint) Flaubert,” Variété, Œuvres, ed. by Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1957, 1960) 1.613, 619
Margaret G. Tillett, On Reading Flaubert (London: Oxford UP, 1961) 85.
More recently, Jonathan Culler asserts that it is a “blatantly stupid … work”— Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1974) 180.
Albert Sonnenfeld says simply that it is a “failure”—“La tentation de Flaubert,” Cahiers de L’Association Internationale des Études Françaises 23 (1971): 311–12.
Henri Mazel, however, offers unmitigated praise—“a work of art of absolute perfection in its last form”—“Les trois tentations de saint Antoine,” Mercure de France 152.564 (December 15, 1921): 643.
For sources, see, especially, Jean Seznec’s important book-length studies, Les sources de L’épisode des dieux dans La tentation de saint Antoine (Première version, 1849) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1940), and Nouvelles études sur La tentation de saint Antoine (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1949), though several of his articles go further and posit certain structures, particularly of source but in a larger sense in providing an accurate reflection of the decadent aesthetic of the day: “Flaubert historien des hérésies dans la Tentation,” Romanic Review 36 (1945): 200–21, 314–28, and “Les monstres,” Nouvelles études 58–85. See, also, Francis J. Carmody, “Further Sources of La tentation de saint Antoine,” Romanic Review 49 (1958): 278–92. Many scholars have considered the novel’s genesis.
See, e.g., René Dumesnil and René Descharmes, eds., Autour de Flaubert: Études historiques et documentaires: Suivies d’une bibliographie chronologique, d’un essai bibliographique des ouvrages et articles relatifs à Flaubert et d’un index des noms cités, 2 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine, 2002) 219–93
Michal Peled Ginsburg, Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986) 46–81; and the works cited in nll below. In addition, I am significantly in the debt of those scholars who have made Flaubert’s notes, drafts, and letters available. Several are mentioned above.
Michel Butor, “La spirale des sept péchés,” Critique 36 (1970): 387–412. Michal Peled Ginsburg, Flaubert Writing, expands on Butor’s argument with little more precision. As the following pages will demonstrate, I disagree with her assertion that none of the versions have closure. When Flaubert finally found a “plan” he was able to give closure to his last, published version.
Robert Griffin, “The Transfiguration of Matter,” French Studies 44 (1990): 18.
Dominique Cardin, “Le principe des métamorphoses: Essai sur la dernière version de La tentation de saint Antoine de Flaubert,” Dalhousie French Studies 28 (1994): 101–05.
Mary Orr, Flaubert Writing the Masculine (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 136–37. Her thought is further refined in her excellent study: Flaubert’s Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). With particular regard to Flaubert’s critique of Christianity, see, Orr, “East or West? Flaubert’s La tentation de saint Antoine, or the Question of Orthodoxy,” (Un)faithful Texts? Religion in French and Francophone Literature from the 1780s to the 1980s, ed. by Paul Cooke and Jane Lee (New Orleans: UP of the South, 2000) 79–91.
Orr, “Stasis and Ecstasy: La tentation de saint Antoine or the Texte Bouleversant,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 34 (1998): 339.
Laurence M. Porter, “A Fourth Version of Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine (1869),” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 4 (1975–76): 53–66.
In regard to comparisons of the three versions, see, e.g., Mazel, “Les trois tentations” 626–43; Jacques Madeleine, “Les différents ‘états’ de la Tentation de saint Antoine,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 15 (1908): 620–41; Jeanne Bem, Désir et savoir; and Gisèle Séginger, Naissance et métamorphoses.
Charles Baudelaire, “Théophile Gautier,” Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1962) 691.
Marshall C. Olds—Au pays des perroquets: Féerie théâtrale et narration chez Flaubert (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001) 68–86—perspicaciously analyses the theatrical nature of the work.
Jean Chevalier, Alain Gheerbrant, eds., Dictionnaire des symboles: Mythes, rêves, coutumes, gestes, formes, figures, couleurs, nombres (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1969) 165.
I could say “Spinoza’s idea,” since his influence is evident and has been widely studied, Cf., Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Gallimard, 1935) 166–67, 172–73
Porter, “A Fourth Version” 65–66; Victor Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert, A Study of Themes and Techniques (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966) 201–02
Andrew Brown, “‘Un assez vague Spinozisme,’ Flaubert and Spinoza,” Modern Language Review 91.4 (1996): 848–65
Timothy Unwin, “Flaubert and Pantheism,” French Studies 35 (1981): 394–406. Though the philosopher is important to Flaubert’s preparation for La tentation (see, e.g., “I am reviewing my Spinoza”—letter to George Sand of February 19, 1872) and, in particular, for part vi, I have made little of him, since it seems to me both that one need not refer to his ideas to explicate Flaubert’s novel and that an emphasis on Spinoza is ultimately confusing, since the conclusion of La tentation differs significantly from the philosopher’s thought.
Kitty Mrosovsky, ed. and trans., “Introduction,” The Temptation of Saint Antony, by Gustave Flaubert (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981) 47.
E.g., Séginger, Naissance 380–81; Jean Seznec, Nouvelles études sur La tentation de saint Antoine (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1949) 80; Ginsburg, Writing 50–54.
J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962) 227.
Antoine’s desire to be matter has been important to the confusion inspired by the ending. Edouard Maynial believes that the conclusion “seems tacked on, and has but little to do with what precedes”—Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province. Suivie des réquisitoire, plaidoirie, et jugement du procès intenté à l’auteur (Paris: Garnier, 1951) 312n553. Séginger considers Antoine’s adherence to matter a narcissistic commitment to the eternal transformation of forms and a refusal to conclude, thus leaving the conclusion ambiguous—Le mysticisme dans La tentation de saint Antoine: La relation sujet-objet, Archives des Lettres Modernes (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1984) 63–68. Like Alfred Lombard, Flaubert et saint Antoine (Paris: Victor Attinger, 1934) 56, Marie J. Diamond finds “Antoine’s capitulation to the primacy of matter to be his ultimate temptation and his greatest error” (117). To support her position, she cites a manuscript note for an earlier version: “1. trailing past/2. whirlwind of action/Antoine/temptation—wants to be matter the devil/(carries him off)” (N.A.F. 23670, fol. 14)—quoted from Diamond, Problem of Aesthetic Discontinuity 117. If this desire signals his submission to the devil—Diamond 117–18; Charles Bernheimer “‘Être la matière!’: Origin and Difference in Flaubert’s La tentation de saint Antoine,” Novel 10.1 (1976): 65–78, 72; Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert 201–02—as was the case in the conclusions of the first two versions, there is no explanation for the terminal vision that, as Mary Orr argues convincingly (Writing the Masculine 138), rewards his submission. In the final version, there seems little question that Antoine’s “defeat” is in relation to God. He has rejected the devil, bowed his neck to God, and recommences his prayers. Flaubert reiterated as his work on the final version neared completion, “I am redoing the outline… I hope to succeed in finding a logical connection (and hence dramatic interest) between the saint’s diffèrent hallucinations” (N.A.F. 23670, fol. 41v, quoted from Diamond 120; see n2, above). In the final version, Antoine’s entire situation has changed. Now, by wishing to be matter, Antoine embraces creation, God’s creation, and rejects the devil.
Robert Griffin, Rape of the Lock: Flaubert’s Mythic Realism (Lexington: French Forum, 1988) 287.
Tertullian, Apology: De spectaculis (A.D. 197; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931), paragraph 21, ll. 11–12. I use Everett Ferguson’s translation.
Allan H. Pasco, “Ironic Interference and Allusion: ‘Un cœur simple,’” Allusion: A Literary Graft (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994) 22–38.
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Pasco, A.H. (2010). Trinitarian Unity. In: Inner Workings of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117433_4
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