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Check out some of the posts Sue Rosalsky - 10:12am Sep 16, 1997 PST (#50 of 124) I'd like to go back to Erica Jong's original question: is Emma a modern character? Unlike Vargas I don't think you can define modernity by pointing to a condition of unfulfilled longing: to the break of fantasy from reality, or to the separation of the self from the surrounding world. I think instead you could define a period by the way it proposes to heal the split between what is dreamed and what is real. What makes Emma modern isn't that she's got this emptiness, bur rather that she turns to consumerist fantasies--or to fantasies rendered in consumerist form--to patch it up: the clothes, the opera, the hymns, the religion, and even adultery. That her desire is so fragmented in its expression--the same one seems to reproduce itself in so many ways--I thinkis echoed later in Sentimental Education, in Frederick Moreaus' inability to settle on a lover. (God, that novel is awful--and, yes, not about politics at all. Flaubert really should have made up his mind on what he wanted that to be about.) Erica Jong - 07:57pm Sep 16, 1997 PST (#58 of 124) All books are therapy for their authors, but unless they are also more than therapy we don't care much about them. I agree with Merwitt that Lolita is more gripping than The Gift (and Great Expectations was the novel that first made me want to be a novelist--so much did I identify with Pip). But Flaubert is a difficult case because he embraces the clinical, hardboiled approach to hide his own tendency to swoon. He is subject to strange fits of passion. Mario Vargas-Llosa in his The Perpetual Orgy makes an excellent case for Flaubert as foot-fetishist in Bovary. And that ain't all. I see him as a man battling with his own passions, trying to exorcise them through the suicide of Bovary--who dies, in part, for being sexual. Sexual women always died in novels until our own era. And even today, many think sexual women should still pay. But I don't want to force a simple-minded political correctness on Bovary which works on so many different levels. One of them is surely the author's own approach-avoidance dance with sexual passion William Reynolds - 08:04am Sep 18, 1997 PST (#78 of 124) The theme of this discussion is 'Writing as sex'. But by sex do we mean masturbation? With Madame Bovary, Flaubert updates the novel of the mysterious other: woman. Did he extrapolate from his experience when writing this book, of course. Did he look into his heart and see Emma. I don't think so. A quote from the Goncourt Journal, March 4, 1860: Men who love women write books in which they say what they have suffered through women, because we only love what makes us suffer. Perhaps Flaubert looked into his heart and saw existential pain and wrote a novel to examine the possibility that women were the author? That he had a love/hate relationship with Emma is obvious; was it self-disdain/self-esteem requires more arrogance than I can muster. I prefer to let the mystery be. As for the psychology of geniuses, Ms. Jong, I can only imagine that a genius (like the 800 lb. gorilla) is free to start anywhere he chooses. I think it demeans Flaubert to feel that my (or anyone's) experience of existence is more than rudimentarily relevant to understanding the experience of existence of a genius that was born in 1821. How does one flesh-out the skeletal unconscious of a genius? Erica Jong - 07:15am Sep 17, 1997 PST (#62 of 124) Both Ms. Canoe and Ms, Furphy are right. The author is having it both ways. He both wallows in passion and condemns passion. In a novel you can do this. Which is why the novel has possibilities for complexity uncontemplated by the (trendy today) memoir. Tolstoy once famously said "I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to know which side the author is on." Here the author is on Emma's side and not on Emma's side. His battle with Emma's impulses is also a battle with self. But while Emma burns in passion (and eventually self-annihilates), Flaubert sublimates his passion into a written masterpiece. He rations his encounters with Colet so as to WRITE. Writing is the primary erotic act for Flaubert. We are ravished reading because he was ravished writing. The energy is unmistakeable. The Muse screws.(For more paradoxes about the creative process and how it is allied with the sexual, check out my tips for writers at www.ericajong.com). I think that for most writers the act of writing is an act of passion. What Flaubert got out of his correspondance and affair with Colet was inspiration. He often deprived himself of physical consummation so as to put the fervor in his book. For Colet this didn't work so well. She wanted a flesh and blood man. He wanted inspiration for his fictional lover (and alter ego) Emma. I think he does swoon in BOVARY. He just lets his heroine do it for him. | |
