Why Flaubert Is Worth Your Time
(1) The Idea: Why Descriptions Matter In Fiction or, Why Flaubert Is Worth Your Time
When I was in Oxford, I sat down with the legendary Ruby Granger over a podcast episode (listen here) and after a truckload of literary trivia, we ended up discussing how to read books with scary titles.
The example of Crime and Punishment comes to mind. Ruby said in the episode that what was once an impenetrable brick of words slowly turned into the “most unhinged” story she’s ever read as she developed her reading skills. I also supplied some examples from my reading: Great Expectations, Thoreau’s Walden and In Search of Lost Time just to name a few.
In short, Ruby and I concluded that no novel is inherently stuffy or boring to read. Novels exist to delight, provoke and leave us in awe, so if there’s ever a boring book there are two reasons for it.
1: It’s not the right time for us to read the book
2: We lack the comprehension skills to understand the significance of the work
Point 1 is quite easy to solve. We have to put aside the pride of finishing books in favour of a more revelatory experience by patiently waiting for the right moment. People rarely buy an expensive bottle of wine to drink that day, so why should we race to finish the book we just bought? Buy it, store it and trust that one day the right moment will present itself.
Point 2 is what I want to discuss for the rest of this issue. Though I’d like to believe that anyone can pick up any book and have a great time, my experience says otherwise.
Take Flaubert for example. I dreaded Flaubert because back in my second year of university, my French professor assigned Madame Bovary in the original and set up a dissertation en classe (a three-hour handwritten exam that has traumatised many a French student) on the book.
Naturally, all the literary past tenses sandwiched between attempts to remember the gender of window blinds led me to believe that Flaubert is yet another stuffy novelist who wrote for Bourgeois snobs. So after walking out of that exam with hand cramps and a deep disdain for French realism, I swore off Flaubert forever.
Fast forward to two weeks before leaving for London, I realised that if I wanted to avoid “raw dogging” the entire 22 hours, I needed a long and sustained novel. Right around this time, I also picked up a book that has completely changed how I read novels titled: How Fiction Works by James Wood. These factors eventually convinced me to give Flaubert another crack. I bought Sentimental Education a few days before flying out and fell completely in love with it.
So what was the missing link? I realised that to enjoy Flaubert, I needed to understand what made his work so significant.
According to Wood, Flaubert’s work has singlehandedly modernised realist fiction. If you flick open a random novel by him, you’ll quickly clock that the language sounds so modern that it could be written today. Here’s an example from Sentimental Education:
‘I haven’t any money,” said Frédéric.
‘We certainly haven’t,’ said Deslauriers, folding his arms.
Frédéric, offended by this gesture, retorted:
‘Is that my fault?’
‘Oh, I see!’ Some people have got logs in their fireplace, truffles on their table, a comfortable bed, a library, a carriage, every luxury. If somebody else has to shiver in a garret, dine for a franc… and flounder in poverty - is that their fault?’
And he repeated: ‘Is that their fault?’ with a Ciceronian sarcasm which smacked of the law-court.
Amazing, right? Another aspect of Flaubert’s realism is his treatment of descriptions. Take this passage for example from an earlier part of the novel:
At the back of the deserted cafés, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading room tables; in the laundresses’ workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts.
What initially reads like a jumbled sack of trivial details is key to unlocking Flaubert’s fiction. Though these descriptions sound random at first, they are in fact carefully curated by the author. The goal is to create what Flaubert called a “smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose” with the details “amassing themselves like life”. In other words, by lavishing description on a few selected details, Flaubert created a lifelike scene similar to how we treat details in our lives: they are at once important and unimportant:
“Important because they have been noticed by [us] and unimportant because they are all jumbled together, seen as if out of the corner of the eye; they seem to come at us ‘like life’. From this flows a great deal of modern story-telling.” (Wood in How Fiction Works, p. 43)
And after I learned this technique of description from Flaubert, I couldn’t stop noticing it in his writing. For yet another example (I promise, it’ll be the last), here’s how Flaubert described the character Ronsanette eating cream tarts when she was with Fédéric:
Rosanette devoured two cream tarts. The caster sugar made a moustache at the corners of her mouth. Every now and then she pulled a handkerchief out of her muff to wipe it off; and her face, under the green silk hood, looked like a rose in full bloom among its leaves.
Again, what initially sounds like a neutral description of trivial details painted a lively and realistic scene of someone consuming cream tarts. This is the missing ingredient that makes some writing flat while energising others with a unique liveliness.
Now you might be wondering: I’m sure Flaubert is great, but descriptions like what Flaubert wrote bore me to death! I don’t think I’m missing much by not tuning into realist fiction.
Look, what you read is your business, not mine. But be open-minded and let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s just say all your English teachers are stupid and you decide to live your life without ever reading a page of fictional descriptions. Now try to write a letter to a friend to describe what’s been happening.
What’s that? You can’t?
Don’t worry, most people struggle too, including me. What might start as a great memory will simply turn into something stupid like “hmm, I guess it was a vibe and I really enjoyed it” when someone presses us to recount it.
This is because life is continuous and it consistently bombards us with details, but “rarely directs us towards them”. And the most efficient thing for us to do is to tune most of it out and only focus on what’s useful. But literature, on the other hand, teaches us the art of noticing.
It teaches us to pick up on the poetry of the mundane so that whenever we have a second, we can once again notice how Dom likes to repeat the last word of a sentence twice, how John taps your elbow twice to get your attention and how that kid back in the fourth grade with the strange glasses always seem to have a creased nose bridge, a locked radix and a string of snot he could never wipe clean.
Hence, when we pick up a novel by Flaubert or another author in the realism tradition, we are not really in the business of seeking an exhilarating story. Quite the contrary, excellent realist fiction teaches us to lavish attention so that we’ll stop to smell the roses more, or, at the very least, tell a captivating story to an attractive stranger at a bar.
(2) The Prompts:
1: What are some of the books I’ve dismissed simply because I thought they were stuffy to read? Can I overcome that initial rejection and learn to enjoy it? Sometimes, we’re quick to dismiss a book because we think we’re too stupid or too smart to enjoy it. Set aside that prejudice, return to a book you’ve rejected, and see if you can find supplementary material to help you grasp its significance (like I’ve done with Flaubert).
2: How can I employ techniques of realist descriptions to tell a more captivating story? (to a friend, a stranger or just in your journal). Try to recount a day, an event or a date with as much detail as possible. Can you do it? How does your writing differ from the prose of Flaubert and do you see the value of exposing yourself to more descriptive works of literature to train yourself into a better storyteller?
