Bouvard et Pécuchet

Bouvard et Pécuchet is a savagely satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880.

Although conceived of in 1863 as Les Deux Cloportes (The Two Woodlice), and partially inspired by Barthelemy Maurice's short story "The Two Court Clerks" in 1858, Flaubert did not begin the work in earnest until 1872, after the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Over time, the work obsessed him to the degree that he claimed to have read over 300 books in preparation for writing it—he intended it to be his masterpiece, surpassing all of his other works. He only took a minor break from writing it, in order to compose Three Tales in 1875–76.

The work received lukewarm reviews: critics failed to appreciate both its message and its structural devices.

Plot

<spoiler> Bouvard et Pécuchet details the adventures of two Parisian copy-clerks, François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet, of the same age and nearly identical temperment. They meet one hot summer day by the canal Saint-Martin and form an instant, symbiotic friendship, exchanging the commonest and the most banal platitudes. When Bouvard inherits a sizable fortune, the two decide to move to the countryside to the town of Chavignolles in the Norman countryside, 100 miles west of Rouen, to live in quiet contemplation. What ensues is their search to find intellectual preoccupation fitting for their narrow minds as they rapidly cycle through almost every intellectual discpline known to man.

In the course of their odyssey, Flaubert skewers his contemporaries by exposing the weaknesses and frailty of everything Bouvard and Pécuchet set their minds on. Their adventures are interspersed with the story of their deteriorating relations with the local villagers, and a deeply pessimistic account of the Revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire. The manuscript breaks off near the end of the novel. According to one set of Flaubert's notes, the townsfolk, enraged with Bouvard and Pécuchet's antics, confront the two of them at their house. Thus threatened, Bouvard and Pécuchet then decide to "return to copying as before", giving up their intellectual boundering. The work ends with their eager preparations to construct a double desk on which to write.

Some scholars assert that Flaubert intended that Bouvard and Pécuchet gain transcendent insight into the nature of human knowledge, and set about writing the also unpublished Dictionary of Received Ideas to mock their contemporaries. As the work is unfinished, this will never be anything more than an assertion).

Structure

Structurally, the work resembles the earlier Sentimental Education: the plot structure is episodic, lending the work the structure of a classical epic rather than a novel. Because Bouvard and Pécuchet never really learn anything, they repeat the same situations over and over again: their lack of mental progress and the constant forward movement through time (as shown through the rapid political changes from 1848 to 1851) create a strong sense of tension in the work.

Themes

Nowhere do Flaubert's explorations of the relation of signs to the objects they signify reach a more thorough study than in this work. Bouvard and Pécuchet systematically confuse signs and symbols with reality, an assumption that causes them much suffering, as it does for Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau. Yet here, due to the explicit focus on books and knowledge, Flaubert's ideas reach their climax. Consequently, the book is widely read as a precursor to modern theories on semiotics and postmodernism. The modern themes addressed in the work suggest a reason why critics at the time failed to appreciate its genius.

The relentless failure of Bouvard and Pécuchet to learn anything from their adventures raises the question whether anything at all is worth knowing. Whenever they achieve some small measure of success (a rare occurrence), it is the result of unknown external forces beyond their comprehension. In this sense, they strongly resemble Antony in The Temptation of St. Antony, which addresses similar epistemological themes as they relate to classical literature. Lionel Trilling wrote that the novel expresses a belief in the alienation of human thought from human experience. The worldview that emerges from the work, one of human beings proceeding relentlessly forward without comprehending the results of their actions or the processes of the world around them, is not an optimistic one, though such misanthropy and pessimism are not uncommon in the works of Flaubert. If, indeed, he intended Bouvard and Pécuchet to gain comprehension of humanity's ignorant state (as evidenced by their composition of the Dictionary of Received Ideas), it could be argued that Flaubert showed some optimism as to the possibility of enlightment, as in his "A Simple Soul".

Clearly, Flaubert intended there to be strong resemblances between himself and his characters, as he had in his other works. Like Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet live in a farmhouse in Normandy, surrounded by insipid locals, and pass the time in research. Flaubert is most self-parodying in Chapter 5, when the two set to writing a fiction of their own (this chapter also contains good-natured digs at the author's friend and colleague, George Sand).

From his writings, it is clear that the writing of this work clearly distressed Flaubert emotionally. In October 1872, he wrote, "I am planning a thing in which I give vent to my anger... I shall vomit over my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me... It will be big and violent". It is likely that this stress contributed directly to his death as he was drawing near to the close of the novel. Indeed, in 1874, he confessed to George Sand "is leading me very quietly, or rather relentlessly, to the abode of the shades. It will be the death of me!"

Criticism

Ezra Pound wrote "Flaubert having recorded provincial customs in [ Madame Bovary ] and city habits in the [ Sentimental Education ], set out to complete his record of nineteenth century life by presenting all sorts of things that the average man of the period would have had in his head".

Gore Vidal has asserted that the American writer Terry Southern's work The Magic Christian "surpasses Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, a work similarly inspired by conventional wisdom's serene idiocy."

References

Source of all quotes cited in this article: http://www.robotwisdom.com/flaubert/bouvard/

etext (in French) http://www.univ-rouen.fr/flaubert/01oeuv/bouvard.htm