The Lure of Words

...The Queen of Sheba with her fabulous retinue comes to woo him, he is exposed to countless Church fathers and Christian heretics who solicit him with their doctrines Thus he meets such awesome figures as Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana Next come Christian martyrs and orgies, pagan sages and rites Antony's guide on these excursions is Hilanon, a former disciple, who keeps changing his appearance and growing in stature until he is revealed as Satan in all his immensity In the course of his adventures, Antony also encounters the gods of the old Eastern and Western pantheons, who make their moribund pitches and vanish, similarly an infinite variety of mythical beings and monsters, all of them speaking their pieces and disappearing The Christian God, doomed like the rest, puts in his appearance, ironically, just after Crepitus, the apocryphal god of farting Originally, Jesus too showed up, only to be reviled and rejected by the multitudes, but Flaubert decided against publishing this passage (Unwisely, Mrosovsky does not offer it to us in an appendix) Satan argues for (he mterchangeabil-ity and futility of all these beliefs, heresies, religions, even while, on his mights pinions, he is giving Antony a ride through a seemingly bleak uni\ erse Severely shaken by doubt, the Saint still persists in his faith, and at lasl embraces the soil in search of the minuscule creatures that may be the sources of being, ot matter transforming itself into lite There is a concluding parade ot grotesque monstrosmes ol the kind Flaubert specialized in following <-lose upon the penultimate temptations b\ Lust and Death, who end up Uised into a single figure, and by the Sphinx and the Chimera, who end up having at each other instead of at Antony The Saint, prostrate on the ground, imagines himself ecstatically penetrating each atom, becoming one with matter At this point the sun rises, with Christ's face radiating from its disc Antony crosses himself, returns to his prayers, and is presumably saved The work is a quasi-theatrical allegory of the world, recalling Calderon's El gran teatro del mundo (of which, as far as 1 know, Flaubert the freethinker was quite unaware) But the cast of characters is far grander—more historical, philosophical, cosmic—albeit the aim, despite that puzzhngly Christian-seeming ending, is not to exalt the glory of God Mrosovsky has no convincing explanation of the conclusion, but neither has anyone else In the Introduction, she suggests that Flaubert wrote the work "because he knew about psychic disturbance, because he was interested in religions and religious feelings, and because the desert Saint's demonic illuminations could figure the and tedium of life and the dangerously empty power of words Unfortunately, she does not demonstrate the first proposition compelling-ly, contenting herself with a parallel between Flaubert's epileptic fits and some of the Saint's visions She does better with the second one, summarizing Flaubert's readings in various histories of religion, but not making sufficiently clear where Flaubert himself stood on religious issues She does least with her third and most interesting contention, that Antony's problems reflect Flau-bert'sown, though, unlike Enid Star kie in the standard English Flaubert biography, she does perceive the connection between the many sadomasochistic elements in the book and Flaubert's psyche and life Still, there is absolutely nothing about "the dangerously empty power of words " Of course, trie third version is harder to relate to autobiography than the first, considered by the eminent literary historian and Flaubert scholar Albert Thibaudet "much superior in interest to the amended extract," as he disparagingly labeled the final recension But there are greater difficulties here that Paul Valery put his finger on in his valuable little essay, "The Temptation of (Saint) Flaubert " He points out the missed opportunity to make the protagonist more interesting, to body forth "the physiology of temptation " The devil, for Valery, is nature itself, and temptation "the most evident, most constant, most ineluctable condition of every life " Flaubert, he argues, got carried away with spewing up the products of his erudition, leaving the reader with "a growing sensation of being the prey of a suddenly and vertiginously unleashed library, all of whose volumes are simultaneously blaring out their millions of words " I myself experienced this feeling upon rereading the book, though I wouldn't go so far as to agree with Bar-bey d'Aurevilly's attack that particularly hurt Flaubert (quoted with evident disgust by Rene Dumesml in his Introduction to the Pleiade edition) Barbey accused the novelist of having "swallowed this dangerous erudition, which killed in him every idea, every sentiment, every initiative, and which is the only thing one finds in this book There are magnificent passages scattered throughout along with dry-as-dust ones, as Valery noted, "The work remains a diversity of moments and pieces, but there are those that are written for the ages " The lengthy Introduction by Mrosovsky contains much useful information, in particular statements by Flaubert himself about this "metaphysical howl" of his There is a good discussion, too, of Flaubert's interest in Gnosticism, of his affinity for "brutish behavior," his alternating glorification and condemnation of the flesh, his belief in thesupreme reality of illusion ("As soon as one abandons one's chimei a, one dies of sadness"), and of the book's resistance to becoming obsolete Mrosovsky takes persuasive issue with Ezra Pound's remark that the conflicts involved are "now dead as mutton' , she does not, however, quote or address herself to James Joyce's objection adduced by Pound "We might believe in it if Flaubert had first shown us St Antoine in Alexandria looking at women and jewellers' windows Regrettably, Mrosovsky wastes much space on summarizing drearily excogitated, smart-alecky interpretations by trendy writers such as Foucault, Bu-tor, Jonathan Culler, and others, not to mention Sartre's enormous study of Flaubert that suffers in equal measure from gigantism and dogged wrong-headedness But some may find such an overview desirable, what is surely unnecessary is her own descent into modish semiotics and the like, as we read "In terms of their dates of composition, the source-texts are in a superficially definable diachronic relation to the author's work But the diachronic perspective peculiar to the work is that formed by the author's reading of the source-texts, and given that the notion of synchronism implies a state of relative interdependence of meanings rather than any rigorously simultaneous production, a source-text may alternatively be regarded as being brought at the period of composition into synchronic relation to the author's work " In due time, this bit of structuralist doubletalk leads into a grand semi-otic conclusion "The work must be a taut trampoline of sigmfiers on which meanings can bounce " And if they get good, I dare say, perform double and triple somersaults But not so Mrosovsky continues "And indeed, once one begins to locate the textual hooks and eyes of Saint Antony—its sources and its affiliations to more modern texts?the meanings start to sparkle, swing, coagulate and drop free " That's some trampoline that enables its users to coagulate...

...and it is less of a stylized autobiography There is no story in the literal sense St Anthony—or Antony—is alone in his hermitage in the Thebaid It is night, he is hungry, and his temptations begin First, demons present him with a lavish banquet When he refuses this, he is transported to Alexandria in the midst of the Anan persecutions, then to the Emperor's throne room in Constantinople, thence to a feast of Nebuchadnezzar's...

...Humer, to be sure, is tough to translate, it is "to suck" or "breathe in," and I think something like "inhale my breasts" or "inhale the aroma of my breasts" would be preferable to the wordy, near-redundant, and platitudinous "scent" and "sweet-smelling," neither of which is in the text From time to time Mrosovsky indulges in uncalled-for, disruptive modernization So "innumerable" becomes "unquantified," "foolishness" is "idiotic," "prodigiously" is "quite fantastically," and "a hoarder" emerges as "a racketeer " Sometimes her English is at fault Flaubert would never have written " the same as him," or " in quite terrible quantity" for terribles par la quantite, "frightening in (our) numbers " Nor would he have consistently misspelled impostor as "imposter," or allowed the umcorn, male or neuter in English, to become, as in French, a "she " Least of all would Flaubert, writing in English, have fallen to jingling, as in "I spy with my flaming eye those who try " All this notwithstanding, the translation is generally intelligent and conscientious, though it tends to miss the poetry To sum up, Lust's "J'ai des sueursd'agonisant et des aspects de ca-davre" loses everything but its meaning when rendered as "I sweat like the dying and I look like a corpse " To equal that marvelous but untranslatable plural, some liberty must be taken, perhaps "At times, the sweat of the dying covers my corpse-like face," but that too falls sadly short Is there a poet in the house7 Finally, the book could have used better copy-editing There is no excuse for the transposed lines at the top of page 70, for the dropped-in than of "I outsoar than the sparrowhawk," and for the Aetius that turns Aecius a few lines later On the other hand, Kitty Mrosovsky is to be congratulated on giving us the fine and useful illustrations (even if the American publisher has finessed the jacket picture on the back of the British edition), and on her first-rate notes exactly right in quantity and length As I look at La Tenlation de saint A ntome again, it occurs to me that w hat Flaubert has written hereisascreenplav avant la lettre We can almost see the dissolves, cuts and camera mov ements...

...and clearly sense the rhythm of close-ups and long shots that seems built mto the writing But it would make a prohibitively expensive movie, and one that, for all its beauties of dialogue and voiceover narration, would prove short on character development and dramatic conflict...

...Already the first clause does not sing as it does in the French " Toutes celles que tu as rencontres" profits from the long last word, why not translate "have encountered'"' Although fille in this context means "harlot," not "girl," at least the English has the hit of the French quasi-Alexandrine, "La fille des carre-fours chantant sous sa lanlerne " But now the parallel yet antithetical construction gets lost, for "la patncienne effeudlant des roses du haut de sa liti-ere" we need something like "to the patrician plucking off rose petals high up on her litter " Entrevues is not the unclear "half seen," it is "glimpsed," in opposition to and complementing "imagined", thus all women are covered those espied but unpossessed, and those merely dreamt of "Je ne suis pas une femme.jesuisunmonde" gainsstrength from the repeated verb "lam not a woman, I am a world " "Fall away" is nice for tomber, but "one continuous mystery" misses the point of " une succession de mysteres"?a succession of mysteries," ever changing, ever new In the next paragraph, Sheba declares " mesbaisersonllegoutd'un fruit qui se fondrait dans ton coeur' Ah' comme tu vas teperdresous mes cheveux, humermapoitrine "Mrosovsky translates "My kisses taste like fruit ready to melt into your heart' Ah' how you'll lose yourself in my hair, breathing the scent of my sweet-smelling breasts " The fruit in question would melt "inside" your heart, but the French coeur means more than heart, it is also mind, soul, inner being, and sometimes, specifically, stomach So perhaps these fruity kisses "would dissolve throughout your being" or "suffuse your very soul " " In my hair" is a sensible avoidance of the literal "under my hair," but what follows is less felicitous...

...Seznec, Jean Bruneau and the other fine Flaubertians on whom Mrosovsky heavily relies, eschew such nonsense Equally useless, to my mind, is Mrosovsky's elaborate closing attempt to establish significant parallels between The Temptation and the works of Levi-Strauss More to the point, what of the translation itself Take this passage from the Queen of Sheba's wooing of Antony "All the women you ever met, from the girl at the crossroads singing under her lantern to the patrician high on her litter, plucking rose petals, all the shapes half seen or imagined by your desire, ask for them every one' I am not a woman, but a world My clothes need only fall away for you to discover in my person one continuous mystery...

...Paltry nullity" is redundant, but Mrosovsky's style is less than Flaubertian ) There were contemporary influences on The Temptation high, Goethe's Faust, lower, Byron's Cam, lower yet, Edgar Quinet's Ahasve'rus And there was the sadly premature death of Flaubert's best friend, Alfred Le Poittevin, toward the end, as Gustave sat up with him, the moribund young man would read Spinoza till late into the night?Spinoza, whose pantheism deeply affected the first version of La Tentation desamt Antome...

...No other book by this great romantic realist (or realistic romanticist) provides such opportunities for tracking down his sources, tracing his magmficently compulsive erudition, and pronouncing on the ways in which—occasionally erring and now and again taking deliberate liberties—he wove all his gleanings into an imposing, if not exactly seamless, tapestry The first version of the novel—or closet drama or prose poem or whatever its exact genre may be—was inspired partly by Flaubert's encountering in Genoa's Palazzo Balbi "The Temptation of Saint Anthony, "a painting then ascribed to "Hell" Bruegel, and partly by the puppet theater of Pere Legrain at Rouen's Saint-Romain fair, where as both child and adult Flaubert happily frequented a gleefully performed farcical playlet about the Saint and the tempting demons But our author had been thinking and writing along related lines since he was 14, several of his juvenilia concern heroes tempted by the devil with not only material blandishments but also philosophical ones—revelations, as Mrosovsky puts it, "of the vacuity of the cosmos and the paltry nullity of human life...

...This long work, finished in 1849 when the author was 27, was read aloud by him to his friends and literary counselors, Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp, who, to his horror, advised him to burn it He didn't, it was his favorite book, and he just kept putting it aside and reworking it The second version, essentially a mere abridgment of the first, received only partial publication in 1857 The third and final one of 1872 (published in 1874) is here translated, shorter by two-thirds than the original one, it is much less romantic, pantheistic, unbridled in its fantasy...

...The Lure of Wfords The Temptation of Saint Antony By Gustave Flaubert Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Kitty Mrosovksy Cornell 288 pp $17 50 Reviewed by John Simon In the late 1940s, as a graduate student at Harvard, I was privileged to take a Flaubert seminar with the eminent Jean Seznec, just before he moved on to Oxford Employing the marvelous French discipline of textual explication, the seminar concentrated on one work of Flaubert's (though the others were read collaterally), The Temptation of Saint Anthony And even of that book, one small section preempted our scrutiny the episode of the Queen of Sheba, taking up a mere six and a half pages in this rendition by Kitty Mrosov-sky Yet so rich is Flaubert's sty le here?so opulent of vocabulary, dense with allusions, layered with borrowings ingeniously combined and transmuted—that it was easy to spend weeks tracking down the derivations, studying the transpositions and evaluating the master's original contributions Much of my enjoyment of that seminar came back to me along with the many references to, and quotations from, Seznec's magisterial studies on the sources of The Temptation of Saint Antony (Mrosovsky drops the "h" from the Saint's name) throughout the Introduction and Notes to the present translation, the first new one in 50 years Rereading the work, I found I was not so thrilled by it no w as 1 was then, but I can still see why Flaubertians relish it...