The Necessity of Precision

Issue 165

Paris 2018

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Here’s a tedious, wordy, and banal description of a familiar situation:

The guests left the wedding ceremony in the town and headed to the farm in a single line. They walked along a narrow, circuitous path and went into the countryside. Bunched together at first, they eventually split into various groups, with some walking faster and others lingering in conversation.

Some people walk slow, some people walk fast, groups begin to coalesce. And readers can recognize the sensation of falling just a little behind or getting just a little ahead, though there’s not much else to the passage. You’d put this novel down after a few pages of similar narrative. There’s no vitality, nor any buoyancy to the sentences—you can’t feel a human voice underneath the words. Now here’s the same situation in Lydia Davis’ translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:

The procession, at first united like a single colorful scarf, undulating over the countryside, along the narrow path winding between the green wheat fields, soon lengthened out and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk.

Even after more than a century and a half, there’s still countless essays to write about Madame Bovary. About the nuances of desire in the novel. About how Flaubert distorts time. About how no character, in fact, understands another character. About how the chapters seem to echo and reverberate and redound. About how it is a thriller disguised as a literary masterpiece. About how its narrative voice is, by contemporary standards, somehow postmodern. About how the novel is hilarious. About how the novel is tragic. When I returned to the novel recently, however, I couldn’t help but notice the impressiveness and the thrust in even the most prosaic scenes. There’s a precision to the paragraphs that few writers attempt. Even the most trite of descriptions come with verve and reveal aspects of the story.

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Regardless of whether you’ve ever asked clergy about a delicate problem, for instance, you can experience this moment as vertiginous:

“How are you faring,” he added.

“Not well,” answered Emma; “I’m in pain.”

“Why, so am I,” replied the clergyman. “These first warm days weaken one terribly, don’t they? Well, there’s nothing to be done. We’re born to suffer, as Saint Paul says. But, now, what does Monsieur Bovary think about this?”

“Oh, him,” she said with a gesture of disdain.

In these few lines, we have subtle distinctions of class, education, sex, and that ever-human sensation of having your pain overlooked. The latter point is where Flaubert performs his best tricks—he excels at taking the most universal passions and injecting them into specific characters.

Contemporary readers won’t have much that connects them to 19th Century rural France, though that distance makes it especially interesting to ask why the novel feels so alive. Because it certainly feels more alive than most novels—despite its anachronisms, despite the dated conversational norms of its characters, despite the everyday behaviors that seem baffling. There’s something welcoming and expansive and universal about this novel that has intrigued people for nearly two centuries—this simple story of Emma Bovary, with her stale marriage to Charles Bovary, her desire for escape, and her eventual downfall.

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Every novel, of course, has a few cracks. A novel is too long to contain perfection—there will always be asymmetries, slight inconsistencies, spots that could be improved. If all those edges were massaged, in fact, most novels probably wouldn’t be novels. For the same reason that a photorealistic painting can appear cold or soulless or forgettable, a novel shouldn’t cover all of its blemishes. Madame Bovary isn’t an exception, as it does have flaws, but those flaws draw you closer, they’re somehow endearing, lifelike, and part of the novel’s allure. Although its flaw of giving the name Charles to a banal, witless character does seem unforgivable.

What exasperated her was that Charles seemed unaware of her suffering. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed an idiotic insult, and his certainty of this, ingratitude. For whom, then, was she being so good?

When a novel does persist for so long, an ideal cocktail has come together, though, with quality, timing, and chance the most notable ingredients, without any single component sufficient for success. Of course quality is paramount. And of course the timing must be ideal. The novel must fit both the literary and cultural moment. And of course chance—in publishing, in prominent backers, in reviews—isn’t incidental. Madame Bovary somehow prevailed with each of these variables—it was a hit from the very beginning, a notorious, scandalous, must-read novel, and it has retained its status.

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So Flaubert wrote with a voice and captured an atmosphere that was right for his time, which did ensure that his novel was an immediate seller, but its precision, its faithfulness to the minute sensation, is what caught my attention when I looked at the novel again. And this is perhaps a key reason why this fairly basic, commonplace story of infidelity continues to fascinate. Notice that Madame Bovary—utterly French, utterly 19th Century, utterly rural—still feels intimate to contemporary readers. It touches us more than nearly all the bland and anodyne storylines that come from contemporary sources, which are closer in time, supposedly more relevant, yet that still feel more distant.

The sorcery isn’t exactly a mystery: the precision of a specific time, the precision of a character, the precision of sensations on a page, doesn’t push us away because we’ve never lived in a 19th Century French village, it pulls us closer because literature is fundamentally about inhabiting a mind. And Flaubert inserts us into Emma’s mind with such fidelity that her prison of a life becomes our sensations. Language, century, even sex, appear as mere incidental attributes, once they’re compared to the raw, human emotion that she experiences, feelings that can travel far into the future and still touch a contemporary reader. Regardless of how distant a character is from the reader in experience, what’s human is what emerges when the writer captures a life with such precision.

Pick the most obscure, unusual character, far away from anything the reader has ever known, but describe that character with nuance and texture and emotion—until the reader transforms into an actor. They will absorb and inhabit the role because closeness to the individual, in literature, at its best, offers more empathy than any other art. There aren’t any questions about relatability, or relevance, if the sensations are real. Precision—or verisimilitude, if you need a word for a class—has the peculiar effect of making all the superficial attributes drop away, with only the essential, the human, the universal, left in the reader’s mind, which is the connection that lasts.