Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales
With Gustave Flaubert, we are not short of wonders to explore.
There is the immediacy and vibrancy of Madame Bovary (1857) and the astonishing intensity of its sights, smells and sensations, the exquisite detail in its rendering of the material and everyday world (and our desire to escape from them both, into the realm of the rare). There is the sumptuous historical animation of Sentimental Education (1869), so precious in its textures and ambitions, a chronicle of contemporary life meticulous in its literary execution of a specific time and place. There is the indefinable, unutterable, ineffable magic of Salammbô (1862), another historical reconstruction, but here an antique fantasy: exotic, exhilarating, extreme. There are the Letters, witty, profane, profound, a glorious assortment of personality and perception – into life, art and everything in between. There is the unfinished cosmic brochure of stupidity, Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), following the hapless enterprises of two retired Parisian copy clerks (which obsessed its author, who claimed to have read 1,500 books in preparation, but who died before he could complete it).
Amid all this commotion of satire and romance, history and modernity, lies another – very slim – volume, barely there on the bookshelf but bursting with insight and intrigue, attraction and distraction. It is, of course, the Three Tales (1877), a triumphant triumvirate of short stories that form the final (fulfilled) masterpiece from Flaubert’s quill. They are a rich, ripe trinity of delectable liqueurs to be served either after the hearty main courses of Madame B. and Sentimental E. or, perhaps, as appetizers to those lavish spreads.
‘A Simple Heart’ is miraculously bereft of irony, and to read Flaubert with his humorous hat left at the doorway is an enchanting encounter. We trail the life and death of that simple heart – a modest, unassuming country girl – with a mixture of sadness and surprise, sincerely following her straightforward existence and her uncomplicated, almost primitive, experiences of love, work, language, faith and nature. It is an incredible novella, a marvel of restraint and gentle curiosity.
To which there follows its opposite, ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitator’, a prose orgy of conspicuous consumption and wanton destruction. An impulsive, sadistic riot of extravagant adventure, lust and ferocity, it chases away the provincial humility of ‘A Simple Heart’ with a licentious medieval magnificence, not stopping until it has sated its thirst for violence. The tale is told in trouble-free terms, but in a gradually dreamlike state as we contend with an embarrassment of birds and beasts, hunting and hounding, murder and mayhem. It is marvellously disgusting – and with a shattering of the literary frame at the end that leaves you stunned, wide-eyed, leaping a liberal inch from terra firma.
Finally, there is ‘Hérodias’, a fairy-tale retelling of the story of Salome and John the Baptist (sans tête), a memorably bloody and bizarre biblical yarn refracted through the sharp, unforgiving eyes of the nineteenth century, intentionally bewildering us with its cryptic and enigmatic narrative.
Each of the three tales is a flawless gem, a kaleidoscope of colours taking in a mixture of energetic storytelling, scathing diversion and schmaltzy magnetism. Yet for all their diversity, for all the various gaudy garments Flaubert dresses them in, their patterns and trajectories are peculiarly alike, each travelling headlong in the direction of madness and each ending with a vision of death. Each is a curious re-embodiment of the other, the souls of the protagonists weirdly transmigrating across the three texts.
Almost variations on a theme, each of the stories also toys with layers and hidden depths. There is a surface tension to Flaubert’s textures that teases us, tempting us to read things into things, to ponder at murky complexities. Is ‘A Simple Heart’ really as simple as all that – or is it a devious ploy, a caustic sport only playing the possum of sincerity? What gloomy Freudian shadows lie behind Julian’s brazen, murderous behaviour and the jumble of impudence, guilt and parental confrontation? What does the immeasurable menagerie of all those animals, both the hunters and the hunted, represent? And surely our author didn’t intend us to take a story from the Bible with anything less than several fistfuls of satirical salt. It is so obviously a fable and a game – only we haven’t been given a copy of the rules.
Gustave Flaubert: always exploiting his weaknesses and our own. Is irony a bad habit, even an addiction, a fixation – or a vital tool? Are details the glue of a narrative – or ornaments? Or dead weights? Are genres prisons – or palaces? By refusing to let us know the laws of his fiction, or at least by changing them without warning overnight, Flaubert gives us both a curious freedom and the agreeable thrill of uncertainty. Yet there is never anything sinister to all this, merely the benign chuckles of a sardonic policeman.
Flaubert’s art is magnificently unstable, offering gratifying ambiguity, and nowhere is this more wonderfully on display than in the flux and flummox of the Three Tales, where nothing is what it seems and everything is what we want it to be.
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2026.