Dominick LaCapra - Madame Bovary on Trial

For then I go blind, blood veils my eyes and I hear what the great Gustave heard, the benches cracking in the court of assizes.

Samuel Beckett, Molloy

In recent years much attention has been focused on the reception or reading of texts as a way of renewing our understanding of literary history. This focus indicates an obvious point where intellectual history and literary history converge, for intellectual history is profoundly concerned with the interaction between texts and their various contexts. One particularly fruitful approach to the study of reception is to examine the reading or interpretation texts receive at trials. For a trial is a locus of social reading that brings out conventions of interpretation in a key institutionthe judicial systemand the way a text is read at a trial has decisive significance for the literary and the ordinary life of the writer. At times the trials of important writers provide special insight into the complex way literature is a contestatory force in modern culturea force that may even have political implications.

In light of these considerations, it is surprising that so little has been written about the famous trial of Flaubert in 1857 for outrage to public morality and religion. The trial posed a mystery at the time of its occurrencewhat were its real grounds?and it has continued to do so ever since. In this book I argue that the trial processed as ordinary crime what was, in significant and special ways, ideological or political crime. Madame Bovary was ideologically criminal in that it placed in question the very grounds of the trial by rendering radically problematic its founding assumptions: the validity, in the context common to the novel and the trial, of norms relating to the family and religion, as well as the tenability of a belief in the central identity of the subject of narration and judgment. Thus, while the trial was reading the novel in one way, the novel may be argued to have read the trial in a rather different way.

To elucidate how the novel confronted the trial, I turn to a discussion of Flauberts projects in writing as he enunciated them in his letters. I argue that the project of art for arts sake, emphasized in Jean-Paul Sartres interpretation, is supplemented by another crucial projectcarnivalization of literary traditions and of contemporary social realityand, further, that the two projects interact in complex fashion in Madame Bovary as a text. Far from being a straightforward exemplification of the ideology of pure art, Madame Bovary, as ideological crime, is at the intersection of the traditional and the modern novel in that it simultaneously invokes conventional expectations (such as those operative at the trial) and places them in subversive, possibly regenerative, question. Indeed, to the extent that the novel, or any mode of discourse, breaks contact with conventional expectations, it threatens to lose its role as an ideological challenge and to fall into the realm of formal or technical experimentation. Madame Bovary s very threshold position between the traditional and the modern, I believe, gives it a conjoined ideological and formal significance, a status and function to which the trial paid indirect homage.

In the later sections of this book, I inquire into the precise ways the novel might be said to read the trial, notably with reference to the key issue of the roles of the family, religion, and the narrative subject in the modern context. Here a particularly intricate problem is that of how Flauberts multiplication of the positions of the narrative subject situates his so-called free indirect style and brings out the limitations of conceptions of his writing in terms of unity of point of view. My effort stems from the conviction that only a detailed analysis of the structure and functioning of the novel can substantiate my contention about the nature of the reading at the trial, for only it can disclose the specific manner in which the novel constituted a variant of ideological crime.

My approach, moreover, rests on the larger claim that the study of a texts reception should be combined with an attempted critical reading of the text that provides intellectual and historical perspective on processes of reception. This claim does not assume that the intellectual historian is in a position to provide a definitive interpretation of a text, stilling all controversy and disagreement. On the contrary, it questions the plausibility and even the desirability of this goal. And it takes its distance from the kind of neopositivistic formalism that attempts to detach inquiry from substantive argument and to confine it to the empirical delineation of actual processes of reception, the systematic elucidation of conventions or codes that control the production and reception of texts, and a general semiology that integrates these endeavors in a comprehensive program of research. The project for a general semiology is an important one, and it has significant consequences for the reconstruction of intellectual history. In elaborating the conditions of possibility that prefigure a given range of interpretations, it specifies the shared assumptions that may underlie divergent conclusions or emphases. But it should, I think, be supplemented and contested by attempts at critical reading that actively enter the lists of interpretative argument with all the risks and the political implications this mode of argument entails. The danger of semiotics is the confinement of critical inquiry to metacriticism that politically and socially neutralizes itself by placing the analyst in a deceptive position above the conflict of interpretations. Yet it is only by entering this conflict in a critical and self-critical way that we can revise our idea of what constitutes a valid or at least a valuable interpretationone that extends empirical and systematic research to allow for debate that is committed without being fanatical or dogmatic. Indeed, insofar as one rejects both a rigid dualism between convention and usage and the belief that convention simply determines usage (with variations having the status of mere subjective epiphenomena), then acts of interpretation become necessary modes of enacting and testing the conventions that inform ones own readings in critical dialogue with other possible readings.

I have tried elsewhere to articulate the ways in which contemporary theorizing in literary criticism and philosophy is relevant to historical understandingindeed to an attempt to rethink our very conception of intellectual history. to reformulate R. G. Collingwoods famous dictum and assert that there is either intellectual or anti-intellectual historyeither history that makes some attempt to reexamine its own assumptions or history that remains securely, perhaps complacently, tied to the traditional procedures of the craft. Here the historian may have something of value to learn from Flaubert himself. As the study of Flaubert should demonstrate, however, the relation between tradition and its critical reworking cannot be comprehended in terms of a categorical either-or choice. Flaubert became a patron saint of modernists. But the modernist myth of a total rupture with tradition finds relatively little in his work to sustain it. The goal of a postmodern reading of Flaubert may be precisely to undo the deadly dichotomy between tradition and its critique and, in the process, to reopen the question of the relation between continuity and discontinuity over time.

No study of Flaubert written today can avoid coming to terms with Jean-Paul Sartres massive LIdiot de la famille. In the work that follows, Sartreor his memoryis often a principal interlocutory voice. This book is a supplement to L Idiot in that Sartre himself provides neither a discussion of Flauberts trial nor anything approximating a reading of Madame Bovary. In other ways, it is an argument with Sartres approach that I hope is well mannered enough to qualify as a tribute to his memory, for it is in part addressed to the question of what is alive and what is dead in L Idiot de la famille . It should also go without saying that this book will raise many more questions than it can hope to answer, a fact that may be taken as another indirect tribute to Sartre and to the mode of interrogation that is perhaps his greatest legacy. For the point of an interchange with Sartre is not to agree with his conclusions but to experience the urgency of his way of questioning even when one disagrees with him.