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However you feel about Flaubert (I love him and hate him in equal measure), novelists should thank him the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author’s fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.
Take the following passage, in which Fré dé ric Moreau, the hero of Sentimental Education , wanders through the Latin Quarter, alive to the sights and sounds of Paris:
He sauntered idly up the Latin Quarter, usually bustling with life but now deserted, for the students had all gone home. The great walls of the colleges looked grimmer than ever, as if the silence had made them longer; all sorts of peaceful sounds could be heard, the fluttering of wings in bird-cages, the whirring of a lathe, a cobbler’s hammer; and the old-clothes men, in the middle of the street, looking hopefully but in vain at every window. At the back of the deserted café s, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses’ workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller’s stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps.
This was published in 1869, but might have appeared in 1969; many novelists still sound essentially the same. Flaubert seems to scan the streets indifferently, like a camera. Just as when we watch a film we no longer notice what has been excluded, what is just outside the edges of the camera frame, so we no longer notice what Flaubert chooses not to notice. And we no longer notice that what he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness. How superb and magnificently isolate these details are—the women yawning, the unopened newspapers, the washing quivering in the warm air.
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The reason that we don’t, at first, notice how carefully Flaubert is selecting his details is because Flaubert is working very hard to obscure this labor from us, and is keen to hide the question of who is doing all this noticing: Flaubert or Fré dé ric? Flaubert was explicit about this. He wanted the reader to be faced with what he called a smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose, the details simply amassing themselves like life. “An author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere,” he famously wrote in one of his letters, in 1852. “Art being a second nature, the creator of that nature must operate with analogous procedures: let there be felt in every atom, every aspect, a hidden, infinite impassivity. The effect on the spectator must be a kind of amazement. How did it all come about!”
To this end, Flaubert perfected a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, in that Paris street, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the tables. Flaubert’s details belong to different time signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously.
The effect is lifelike—in a beautifully artificial way. Flaubert manages to suggest that these details are somehow at once important and unimportant: important because they have been noticed by him and put down on paper, and unimportant because they are all jumbled together, seen as if out of the corner of the eye; they seem to come at us “like life.” From this flows a great deal of modern storytelling, such as war reportage. The crime writer and war reporter merely increase the extremity of this contrast between important and unimportant detail, converting it into a tension between the awful and the regular: a soldier dies while nearby a little boy goes to school.
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Different time signatures were not Flaubert’s invention, of course. There have always been characters doing something while something else is going on. In Book 22 of The Iliad , Hector’s wife is at home warming his bath though he has in fact died moments before; Auden praised Breughel, in “Musé e des Beaux Arts,” for noticing that, while Icarus fell, a ship was calmly moving on through the waves, unnoticing. In the Dunkirk section of Ian McEwan’s Atonement , the protagonist, a British soldier retreating through chaos and death toward Dunkirk, sees a barge going by. “Behind him, ten miles away, Dunkirk burned. Ahead, in the prow, two boys were bending over an upturned bike, mending a puncture perhaps.”
Flaubert differs a bit from those examples in the way he insists on driving together short-term and long-term occurrences. Breughel and McEwan are describing two very different things happening at the same time; but Flaubert is asserting a temporal impossibility: that the eye—his eye, or Fré dé ric’s eye—can witness, in one visual gulp as it were, sensations and occurrences that must be happening at different speeds and at different times. In Sentimental Education , when the 1848 revolution comes to Paris and the soldiers are firing on everyone and all is mayhem: “He ran all the way to the Quai Voltaire. An old man in his shirt sleeves was weeping at an open window, his eyes raised towards the sky. The Seine was flowing peacefully by. The sky was blue; birds were singing in the Tuileries.” Again, the one-off occurrence of the old man at the window is dropped into the longer-term occurrences, as if they all belonged together.
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From here, it is a small leap to the insistence, familiar in modern war reporting, that the awful and the regular will be noticed at the same time—by the fictional hero, and/or by the writer—and that in some way there is no important difference between the two experiences : all detail is somewhat numbing, and strikes the traumatized voyeur in the same way. Here, again, is Sentimental Education :
There was firing from every window overlooking the square; bullets whistled through the air; the fountain had been pierced, and the water, mingling with blood, spread in puddles on the ground. People slipped in the mud on clothes, shakos, and weapons; Fré dé ric felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey overcoat who was lying face down in the gutter. Fresh groups of workers kept coming up, driving the fighters towards the guard-house. The firing became more rapid. The wine-merchants’ shops were open, and every now and then somebody would go in to smoke a pipe or drink a glass of beer, before returning to the fight. A stray dog started howling. This raised a laugh.
The moment that strikes us as decisively modern in that passage is “Fré dé ric felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey overcoat.” First the calm, terrible anticipation (“something soft”), and then the calm, terrible validation (“it was the hand of a sergeant”), the writing refusing to become involved in the emotion of the material. Ian McEwan systematically uses the same technique in his Dunkirk section, and so does Stephen Crane—who read Sentimental Education —in The Red Badge of Courage :
He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip.
This is even more “cinematic” than Flaubert (and film, of course, borrows this technique from the novel). There is the calm horror (“the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish”). There is the zoomlike action of the lens, as it gets closer and closer to the corpse. But the reader is getting closer and closer to the horror, while the prose is simultaneously moving further and further back, insisting on its anti-sentimentality. There is the modern commitment to detail itself: the protagonist seems to be noticing so much, recording everything! (“One was trundling some sort of bundle along the upper lip.” Would any of us actually see as much?) And there are the different time signatures: the corpse will be dead forever, but on his face, life goes on; the ants are busily indifferent to human mortality. 1