Criticism with a Passion
WOODCOCK, GEORGE
Criticism with a Passion The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary By Mario Vargas Llosa Translated by Helen Lane Farrar Straus Giroux. 240 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by George Woodcock In...
...I would still need to embroider it...
...When a work of art includes, in addition to other aspects (which are its opposites) and intermingled with them, this vulgar, pathetic, parodic, base, alienated and stupid side, and does so without taking an ironic distance from it, without establishing a tone of intellectu-alormoralsuperioritv...
...The Perpetual Orgy is a careful exposition, full of empathetic insight...
...the melodramatic element moves me because melodrama is closer to the real than drama, as tragicomedy is closer to the real than either pure comedy or pure tragedy...
...the second part, "The PenMan," is concerned with the way Flaubert went about assembling his material...
...Madame Bovary has in recent years dropped somewhat out of fashion...
...Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist of growing repute whose works include The Time of the Hero and Conversation in the Cathedral, The War of the End of the World and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta...
...Mario Vargas Llosa's The Perpetual Orgy is a remarkable example of this kind of criticism, which I suspect is more often found among writers in the Latin languages than in the Germanic...
...The result is one of the best books on Flaubert that I have read...
...He produced studies of Sartre, Camus and, in 1974, the present volume on Flaubert...
...Vargas Llosa comments: "The novelist adds something to the reality that he has turned into work material, and this added element constitutes the originality of his work, that which gives autonomy to the fictional reality, that which distinguishes it from the real...
...As he remarked inaletter quoted in The Perpetual Orgy, "I am devoured now by a need for metamorphoses...
...But Flaubert was no mere naturalist, seeking only to present life with verisimilitude...
...And so it is with most academic critics, often to such an extent that they confine their attention to dead writers who can be fitted unprotestingly into an abstract structure of critical concepts...
...I feel precisely the same emotion as that aroused in me by the literary representation of rebellion and violence...
...I would like to write everything I see, not just as it is, but transfigured...
...Can such an apparently uncritical rapture coexist with a truly critical attitude...
...And, in fact, Vargas Llosa admits the melodrama in Madame Bovary was one of the ingredients that most impressed him, though he rather unexpectedly relates this to his "basic realist fixation...
...But Flaubert has remained at the center of his devotion, Madame Bovary being for him the supreme exemplar of fiction writing and the first modern novel...
...There is hardly a place or a character whose antecedents cannot be traced to a carefully observed original...
...He left Peru in 1958 on a scholarship that took him to Madrid, and then went on to Paris, where he lived for most of the period until his return to Peru on the eve of the restoration of democratic rule in 1980...
...I suspect it is because Vargas Llosa is himself a novelist of considerable power and originality that his criticism does not become simply devotional...
...One imagines the writer in a state of mind similar to that of the half-educated women who spend their days immersed in the spurious melodrama of Harlequin romances...
...Indeed, one might say that it is his Bible-he writes of his experience with the book in the tones of the impassioned convert...
...It places the author among the important writers on Flaubert and in the line of creator-critics—like Arnold, James and Baudelaire—who have shown that academic criticism, even at its most brilliant, is no substitute for the fervid understanding that arises when writers encounter each other through their works...
...As the afternoon wore on, as night fell, as dawn began to break, the magic decantation, the substitution of the fictional world for the real one, held me spellbound...
...An exact account of the most magnificent real fact would be impossible for me...
...The first part, "An Unrequited Passion," describes in depth the critic's personal response to the novel...
...Reading this passage engenders skepticism...
...In setting out to discover how and why Flaubert had cast a spell over him, he uses his own experience with transforming reality to guide his study of the literary tactics that went into the composition of Madame Bovary...
...Vargas Llosa bought a copy of Madame Bovary upon his arrival in Paris in 1959...
...His interest in French literature as an evolving entity has continued, and he has written engagingly on the Nouvelle Vague generation...
...During his long years in France, Vargas Llosa immersed himself in the literature of the country...
...The Perpetual Orgy should send readers back to it with awakened curiosity and interest...
...He took it to the little Latin Quarter hotel where he was staying and began to read it that afternoon: "From the very first lines, the book's power of persuasion was like an extremely potent magic spell...
...There is, fortunately, another type of criticism that begins with a personal reaction to a book or author, and proceeds from passionate identification to illuminating analysis...
...Reviewed by George Woodcock In theory, criticism should be dispassionate...
...It has been many years since any novel has vampirized my attention so quickly, blotted out my physical surroundings so completely, plunged me so deeply into the story it told...
...From this point the critic sets about uncovering how Flaubert did, truly, transfigure reality...
...As is the case with many Latin writers, he found himself in a state of almost continual political opposition to the government of his country (though he has been attached to no orthodoxy of the Left), and this rejection of tyrannical regimes led him to spend long periods abroad...
Vol. 69 • December 1986 • No. 18
