CLASSICS REVISITED
Political satire at its best
RAVI VYAS
Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert, Penguin Classics, 2004 edition, Special Indian Price, £6.30. Other editions are also available.
Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one.
John Berger
YOU can describe/ analyse a novel in different ways depending on your point of view. Gustave Flaubert's 19th-century classic Sentimental Education can be seen in at least three different ways.
First, as a love story. But this is modern love that creates a world of yearning and frustration, blighted as the modern world by a selfish habit of calculation. It is a functional love or a partnership of convenience. Flaubert himself described his novel "as a book about love, about passion; but passion in the form it is allowed to take these days, that is to say, the inactive kind".
The larger issues
Second, the love story meshes with the larger history of the time. To do this, Flaubert explores the larger political ideas, and the events, that added up to the revolution of 1848 and its implications for the future. Finally, the two elements raise the much bigger question of the nature of bourgeois romanticism, the conflict between religion and science, art and money that ultimately led to the triumph of the bourgeoisie forever over the romantic. Sentimental Education was written to show the world how this had come about. Flaubert said the book was to be "the moral history of the men of my generation", how the romantic was seduced into the way of all flesh of modernity. Like the typically French novel, it is a philosophy expressed in images of meticulous detail. So, what we have is a big novel that meditates on theories, on the nature of love, modernity, art and culture and the games that bourgeois politicians play with "words, words, words".
The story begins in 1836 when a generation of young intellectuals was in revolt against their environment. Louis Philippe had been swept to power on a wave of popular enthusiasm but, by the mid-1830s, there were no signs of the promises of reform. France was once again in the grip of bourgeois reaction. Philistinism, under a grip of elderly mediocrities, had taken over and young men felt snubbed, ignored and frustrated. Around this time, Frédéric Moreau, the hero, is smitten by an adolescent passion for an unobtainable older woman, Mme. Arnoux. She is an opulent beauty — "large eyes, full lips, big breasts, plumply maternal..." Moreau is smitten by this image. The novel is built around this visionary beginning. Everything flows from the hero's perpetual adoration of this image. Noble or foolish, he sacrifices every other real possibility of happiness.
Moreau befriends her husband, old enough to be her father, who is also a fascinating character. He is a successful Parisian businessman who combines building hotels with intellectual pursuits like editing Gazette Musicale, a prestigious contemporary journal. He knows all the intellectual big shots — Berlioz, Wagner and Balzac; he has, in other words, a finger in every intellectual pie. But he is a philanderer who boasts of his sexual conquests.
Love's trajectory
Moreau's obstinate idealisation raises the question whether the most reliable form of pleasure is not the pleasure of anticipation. Through the eyes of Moreau we see love's painful trajectory. The passion explored but unfulfilled rapidly turns into boredom and mutual irritation. The triangle of husband, wife and lover to begin with seems exciting but it finally amounts to nothing more than smoke and wind. All three know their position but don't dare say anything. Is it because conscience makes cowards of us all? So, the feeling dies of its own accord. The sub-text of the disintegrating relationship seems to say that, like fear, love is difficult to explain after it has subsided because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.
No heroes
Unlike Madame Bovary, which also dealt with the brittleness of love and passion, Flaubert seeks to find answers to the riddle in the contemporary politics of the 1860s. Through a series of coincidences, political events are woven into the hero's private life. This happens with all historical novels — Tolstoy's War and Peace or Victor Hugo's Les Misérables are shining examples — but the great difference between his predecessors and Flaubert is that he believes in satire, in comic skepticism. There are no heroes with Flaubert.
The message is loud and clear: politics is a con game. All political discourse, bourgeois or radical — there are huge monologues, characters talking at each other — are just vapours of human egoism. And leading the pack of politicians are the intellectuals, the ideas-men, who have the ability to turn a concrete situation into an abstraction, and thereby betray the authentic impulse of the revolution. When you are unable to provide a rational explanation for the turn that events take — whether in love or politics — bad taste becomes the last resort of common sense. With Flaubert this means satire at its best.
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