Charles Bovary’s cap

Last time  I mentioned a few things that seemed to suggest that Flaubert was a pretty sloppy writer. They were things that others had mentioned in articles in learned journals and so on but writing about them in a blog frees me from the need to be circumspect and lets me just respond as a normal reader. That’s true as well of the passage near the beginning which I mentioned. It’s a well-known piece and there have been plenty of commentaries on it but let’s just read it, without any academic or historical baggage and see how we react.

The whole opening sequence seems designed to establish Charles as an awkward, oafish individual with very little going for him – altogether the last sort of person the romantic Emma should be getting hooked up with. In fact, his clumsy actions lead to the teacher telling him to write out twenty times ‘ridiculus sum’.

At the centre of those actions is Charles fussing about with his cap and the passage I mentioned is the description of that object. The other boys have the habit of throwing theirs towards the hooks in the classroom as they come in and sit down, but Charles is a new boy. He’s brought in by the headmaster and just sits with it on his knee. Here’s my own loose translation of Flaubert’s description:

It was one of those composite hats, where you find traces of the bearskin, shako, derby, sealskin cap, and cotton nightcap; in short, one of those wretched things whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression like an imbecile’s face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round lumps; then alternating lozenge-shaped patches of velvet and rabbit skin separated by a red band; after that came a sort of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long thin cord, small twisted gold threads in the form of a tassel. The cap was new; its peak shone.

OK, be honest, have you any idea what it looks like?

No such thing could possibly exist. How the hell do all the various bits fit together? And, as well as that, it’s ‘dumb’ and yet it has ‘depths of expression’. Just look at the first couple of lines: It was one of those composite hats, where you find traces of the bearskin, shako, derby, sealskin cap, and cotton nightcap. What? How many hats have you seen like that? And yet there must be umpteen of them about the place because it’s ‘one of those hats where…’ That’s like introducing a character by saying ‘She was one of those women who always wear stilettos’. You do that and the reader thinks ‘Ah yes, I know the type’. But then the middle bit of the description takes it even further, conjuring up a grotesque parody of an impossible hat. How on earth could something so impossible be ‘one of those caps which…’ – an expression which suggests the world is full of them?

The short, third sentence, too, is typical of Flaubert. He frequently uses bathos to undermine his own narrative, writing long, deliberately ornate build-ups and tailing off into absurdity. After the long accumulation of excrescences on the headpiece, he ends with the banality of ‘The cap was new; its peak shone’.

This seems to be writing which asks questions. Yes it’s contributing to the idea that Charles is awkward and definitely not romantic, but it’s also challenging readers to make sense of nonsense, it’s collecting and grouping words to mean nothing. With Flaubert, you get great stories, laughs, memorable characters, but you also get intimations that the world isn’t the comprehensible, structured place we want books to bring us. Passages like this one show us that Flaubert’s doing something very different with his words. This is more than fiction..

Flaubert was rubbish

I can’t resist this. If you’ve read more than one of these blogs, you’ll know that I often mention Flaubert. Well, I recently read Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale. It’s a fascinating read about adulterous goings-on (or maybe not) in Victorian England. I was reading it on my Kindle and seemed to be getting to the end but was a bit puzzled to see that the percentage showed that I was barely half way through it. (I wish they had a way of doing pages instead.) Anyway, the reason for this was that the second half of the book is a reproduction of the famous translation of Madame Bovary by Eleanor Aveling-Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl. The reason for including it was that Emma Bovary was also an adulterous Victorian wife. But then, so was Eleanor.

Anyway, I read a few passages of the text and the translation’s not great. This is no surprise because it’s very, very difficult to convey the complexity of Flaubert’s style. In fact, Eleanor herself wrote: ‘Certainly no critic can be more painfully aware than I am of the weaknesses, the failures, the shortcomings of my work’. But a passage very near the beginning reminded me of just how much more you get out of the text than the story. There’s all sorts of stuff going on.

When the book starts, for example, the narrator is a classmate of Charles Bovary. ‘We were in class, studying,’ writes Flaubert, ‘when the headmaster came in, followed by a “new fellow”’. That’s the opening sentence, the ‘new fellow’ is Bovary, so right away, there’s a challenge for the reader. The narrator’s also a character in the story. He then goes into minute detail of what Charles looked like, what he did, how his father and mother met, what their marriage was like, and yet, after a few pages of this, he writes ‘It would be impossible now for any of us to remember anything about him’.

What? After all that detail? And with a few hundred pages more to come about the intimacies of Emma’s life, with all her adventures, thoughts, dreams and shattered illusions? And all this from one of the boys in Charles’s class?

Clearly, Flaubert was a rubbish writer. He obviously hadn’t been to any creative writing classes and learned about narrative arcs, head-hopping and all those other essentials you need to understand in order to write. And yet he’d taken five years to write the book, walking up and down his ‘shoutery’ in the garden reading the words out loud to get the rhythms exactly right, and spending days agonising over punctuation and searching for ‘le mot juste’. He’s the guy who, later in the book, writes ‘human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars’ which, when you read it aloud in the original French, is itself like a piece of music.

No, he obviously knew what he was doing, so why did he make such obvious ‘mistakes’? He’s supposed to be a stylist par excellence so where does that linguistic clumsiness come from? Well, the passage near the beginning I mentioned helps to show what was going on. But this blog’s already long enough, so I’ll put that in another one..

The Next Big Thing but rather later than most

I’ve been tagged in The Next Big Thing by fellow writer Heikki Hietala, author of the excellent, many-layered Tulagi Hotel and so I have to tell you all about my next book by answering these questions and then tagging five other authors about their Next Big Thing. So …

What is the working title of your next book?
Hmmm, first problem. The book could be one of three and I never have even a working title until I finish. It’s always the narrative that suggests the titles to me.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
OK, I said there were three; two are sequels (to The Figurehead and The Sparrow Conundrum) and the third is the final one in my Jack Carston series.

What genre does your book fall under?
History, Humour and Crime, in that order.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
This could get complicated so let’s stick with Carston. He’s middle-aged, attractive but getting a bit grumpy, so Alan Rickman, and for his wife, self-assured, GSOH, the brilliant Olivia Colman.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
His compassion for people and his awareness of the limits of his role as a cop lead to drastic actions and his leaving the police service.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Self-published. The industry is changing ever faster.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I haven’t started it yet, but the average is about 4-6 months for the first draft, then the same for the subsequent editing.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Crime is so disparate that there are plenty in the range of sympathetic, atypical detectives. I don’t think my books follow a traditional pattern and in this case, Carston will certainly overstep the bounds of his remit, so I have to pass.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?
I don’t like the word ‘inspire’ much but I’ll play along. It was the character himself and the natural progression he’s followed through the five previous books. (By the way, the same is true of the two sequels I mentioned. It’s always the characters who dictate what needs to happen, who insist on being given more room.)

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
A liking for Carston the character from reading one or more of the other books in the series. The fact that this is where the journey through them has led him. Or maybe the thought that the darker bits will always be counterbalanced by humour.

And now, just to show how cutting edge I’m not, I have no other writers to recommend to you yet because most of my friends seem to have been tagged already, some of them ages ago..