FLAUBERT, Gustave

Nationality: French. Born: Rouen, 12 December 1821. Education: Collège Royal de Rouen, 1831-39 (expelled); baccalauréat, 1840; studied law at École de Droit, Paris, 1841-45. Career: Suffered a seizure in 1844 that left him in poor health. Lived with his family at Croisset, near Rouen after 1845 until his death (spent winters in Paris after 1856). Visited Egypt and the Near East, 1849-51. Publication of Madame Bovary in 1857 led to unsuccessful prosecution for indecency. Returned to North Africa, 1858; state pension, 1879. Award: Chevalier, Legion of Honor, 1866. Died: 8 May 1880.

Publications

Collections

Oeuvres complètes (includes correspondence). 35 vols., 1926-54.

Complete Works. 10 vols., 1926.

Oeuvres, edited by A. Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil. 2 vols., 1946-48.

Oeuvres complètes, edited by Bernard Masson. 1964.

Oeuvres complètes, edited by M. Bardèche. 16 vols., 1971-76.

Short Stories

Trois contes (includes "Un coeur simple", "La Légend de Saint Julien l'hospitalier", "Hérodias"). 1877; edited by S. de Sasy, 1973; as Three Tales (includes "A Simple Heart", "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller," and "Herodias"), 1903.

Novels

Madame Bovary. 1857; translated as Madame Bovary, 1881; numerous subsequent translations.

Salammbô. 1862; edited by P. Moreau, 1970; translated as Salammbô, 1886; numerous subsequent translations.

L'Education sentimentale. 1869; edited by C. Gothot-Mersch, 1985; as Sentimental Education, 1896; numerous subsequent translations.

La Tentation de Saint Antoine. 1874; edited by C. Gothot-Mersch, 1983; as The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1895; numerous subsequent translations.

Bouvard et Pécuchet. 1881; edited by Alberto Cento, 1964; and by C. Gothot-Mersch, 1979; as Bouvard and Pecuchet, 1896; reprinted in part as Dictionnaire des idées reçues, edited by Lea Caminiti, 1966; as A Dictionary of Platitudes, edited by E.J. Fluck, 1954; as The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, 1954.

Le première Education sentimentale. 1963; as The First Sentimental Education, 1972.

Plays

Le Candidat (produced 1874). 1874.

Le Château des coeurs, with Louis Bouilhet and Charles d'Osmoy (produced 1874). In Oeuvres complètes, 1910.

Other

Par les champs et par les grèves. 1886.

Mémoires d'un fou. 1901.

Souvenirs, notes, et pensées intimes, edited by L. Chevally-Sabatier. 1965; and by J.P. Germain, 1987; as Intimate Notebook 1840-1841, edited by Francis Steegmuller, 1967.

November, edited by Francis Steegmuller. 1966.

Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, edited by FrancisSteegmuller. 1972; as Voyage en Egypte: octobre 1849-juillet 1850, edited by Catherine Meyer, 1986.

Correspondance, edited by Jean Bruneau. 3 vols., 1973-91.

Letters, edited by Francis Steegmuller. 2 vols., 1980-82.

Correspondance, with George Sand, edited by Alphonse Jacobs.1981; as Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence, 1993.

Flaubert and Turgenev: A Friendship in Letters: The Complete Correspondence, edited by Barbara Beaumont. 1985.

Carnets de travail, edited by Pierre-Marc de Biasi. 1988.

Flaubert-Ivan Turgenev: Correspondance, edited by AlexandreZviguilsky, 1989.

Cahier intime de jeunesse: souvenirs, notes et pensees intimes, edited by J.P. Germain. 1987.

Early Writings, edited by Robert Berry Griffin. 1992.

Editor, Dernières chansons, by Louis Bouilhet. 1872.

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Critical Studies:

Flaubert and Madame Bovary by Francis Steegmuller, 1947; Flaubert and the Art of Realism by Anthony Thorlby, 1956; On Reading Flaubert by Margaret G. Tillett, 1961; Flaubert: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Raymond D. Giraud, 1964; The Novels of Flaubert by Victor Brombert, 1966; Madame Bovary and the Critics edited by Benjamin F. Bart, 1966, Flaubert, 1967, and The Legendary Sources of Flaubert's Saint Julian, 1977, both by Bart; Flaubert by Stratton Buck, 1966; Flaubert by Enid Starkie, 2 vols., 1967-71; The Greatness of Flaubert by Maurice Nadeau, 1972; The Dossier of Flaubert's Un coeur simple by George A. Willenbrink, 1976; Flaubert and Henry James: A Study in Contrasts by David Gervais, 1978; A Concordance to Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet by Charles Carlut, 1980; Sartre and Flaubert by Hazel E. Barnes, 1981; The Family Idiot: Flaubert 1821-1857 by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Carol Cosman, 1981—; Flaubert and the Historical Novel by Anne Green, 1982; Saint/Oedipus: Psychocritical Approaches to Flaubert's Art by William J. Berg, 1982; Towards the Real Flaubert: A Study of Madame Bovary by Margaret Lowe, 1984; Flaubert and the Gift of Speech: Dialogue and Drama in Four Modern Novels, 1986, and The Madame Bovary Blues: The Pursuit of Illusion in Nineteenth Century French Fiction, 1987, both by Stirling Haig; The Hidden Life at Its Source: A Study of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale by D.A. Williams, 1988; Flaubert: A Biography by Herbert Lottman, 1989; Flaubert by David Roe, 1989; Madame Bovary by Rosemary Lloyd, 1989; Flaubert, Trois contes by A.W. Raitt, 1991; Flaubert's Straight and Suspect Saints: The Unity of Trios Contes by Aimée Israel-Pelletier, 1991; Madame Bovary by Stephen Heath, 1992; Flaubert by Henri Troyat, translated by Joan Pinkham, 1992; The Script of Decadence: Essays on the Fictions of Flaubert and the Poetics of Romanticism by Eugenio Donato, 1993; The Script of Decadence: Essays on the Fictions of Flaubert and the Poetics of Romanticism by Eugenio Donato, 1993; The Dream Machine: Avian Imagery in Madame Bovary by Paul Andrew Tipper, 1994; Where Flaubert Lies: Chronology, Mythology and History by Claire Addison, 1996; Culture and the Literary Text: The Case of Flaubert's Madame Bovary by Anna V. Lambros, 1996; Description and Meaning in Three Novels by Gustave Flaubert by Carrada Biazzo Curry, 1997; Searching for Emma: Gustave Flaubert and Madame Bovary by Dacia Maraini, 1998; The King and the Adultress: A Psychoanalytical and Literary Reinterpretation of Madame Bovary and King Lear by Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca, 1998.

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Gustave Flaubert is often, and with good reason, called "the founder of the modern novel," in recognition of his development of a whole new aesthetic of prose fiction, widely accepted by his successors, to the elaboration of which he seems to have single-mindedly devoted his entire career. One does not, therefore, easily or often think of Flaubert as a significant contributor to the evolution of the modern short story. After all, he published only one thin volume of three short stories, seemingly a temporary respite in a career so insistently devoted to the novel. To the literary historian, Flaubert is primarily, and quite properly, a novelist and a theorist of the novel.

Interestingly enough, in all Flaubert's writing about the theory of fiction—most of which is in his voluminous correspondence—he never once says anything to differentiate the novel from the short story. Even while he was composing the three tales that made up the thin volume he published in 1877, under the title Trois contes (Three Tales), he freely discusses, with his various correspondents, the difficulties he was experiencing with these compositions, but nowhere does he attribute these difficulties to the particular form he was using. One might legitimately conclude, indeed, that Flaubert was not conscious of any difference between the novel and the short story, or did not believe in any such difference. His own words suggest that, in his mind, the theory of fiction is applicable to all narrative prose, regardless of length.

Nevertheless, it is hard to sustain the argument that Flaubert did not distinguish, in practice at least, between a novel and a short story. He made a conscious choice of the form, after all, when he started to write "The Legend of Saint Julian, Hospitaller," the first of his Three Tales, in the autumn of 1875, and even the most superficial of analyses will reveal that, in the writing, he made frequent—and surely conscious—concessions to the need for brevity and compression. An indicative detail is the frequency with which he uses the dramatic device of the pungent, isolated, one-sentence paragraph throughout these three stories, compared to their relative rarity in the novels, where they are reserved for the pithy summation of only the most significant developments. An additional observation one might make is that there are very few, if any, really long paragraphs (running more than one full page, for example) in the short stories, whereas they are plentiful in the novels. There are ample signs, in short, that a principle of economy is operative in the short stories, but not in the novels. Flaubert may not have theorized about such matters, but, perhaps as a matter of artistic instinct, he certainly did not write a short story in exactly the same way as he did a novel.

It is certainly true that Flaubert invented no new techniques for the short story, and developed no new concept of what a short story should be; but he fully respected what his predecessors in the short story had achieved (he was not only aware of the work of Mérimée and Balzac, but also of that of the greatest Russians, thanks to this close friend, Turgenev), and that enabled him to give to his Three Tales a kind of classic perfection that made them an influential landmark in the history of the short story, even though they were in no obvious way innovative. All three stories, for example, strictly observe the short story principles first illustrated by Mérimée a half-century earlier, that an artistic tale must have a strong unity of focus, and a firmly disciplined, digression-free narrative style. Other signs of Flaubert's tight artistic control are: the sharply limited cast of characters in each story, the intense focus on a single individual at the story's center, and a powerfully concentrated and concise ending that encapsulates the full meaning the story is meant to convey. More specifically Flaubertian traits, rather than requirements of short story tradition, are the deliberate absence of overt narratorial interventions, the pronounced rhythm and euphoniousness of the sentences, and the detailed accuracy and vividness of all physical descriptions, making the prose exceptionally visual and even pictorial for the reader.

Many critics have been pleased to find a coherent unity in Three Tales, such as one rarely sees in a collection of separate stories, and especially in a collection where each tale is set in a different time and in a different cultural environment, as is the case with Flaubert's little volume. The dominant unity the critics find in Three Tales is the theme of sainthood: a Biblical saint in the form of the menacingly prophetic John the Baptist, a medieval saint in the form of the deeply troubled Hospitaller, St. Julian, and a modern saint in the improbable form of the simple, but utterly selfless, servant Félicité. This portrait gallery of saints makes the whole volume, Three Tales, as much a work of art as is each tale taken separately, and constitutes one more reason for the wide influence this slender volume has had, as a model of excellence, on the evolution of the modern short story.

It remains a puzzle to this day why Flaubert, the dedicated novelist, should suddenly have interrupted a novel in progress late in his life and written three short stories for publication, between 1875 and 1877. The full motivation can only be guessed at; we do know, however, that Three Tales was not his first composition in that form, and that the subject matter of all three stories was not new to him either, by any means, but had been worked on by Flaubert at least 30 years earlier, in each case.

Flaubert began writing when he was ten years old, and the great majority of the approximately 40 pieces he composed in his youth were what must be called short stories, though they were highly varied in form and content. Flaubert saved all his youthful work, but refused to publish it. The pieces were published after his death, and some of them are impressively skillful, though obviously immature. They are worth reading, if only to understand better how Flaubert eventually became a great literary artist. It is evident that he learned his craft of fiction by writing short stories for a dozen years. As for Three Tales, the least we can say is that, when he wrote the stories, he was not making a departure from his career, but rather, a pious return to his literary roots. In one sense, at least, it is plausible to argue that Flaubert was a short story writer all his life, and his very last publication, Three Tales, is the magnificent proof of that.

—Murray Sachs

See the essay on "A Simple Heart."