Just finished reading madame Bovary (I'm French). First thing I'm reading seriously since I decided to dive into novels...

just finished reading madame Bovary (I'm French). First thing I'm reading seriously since I decided to dive into novels. I'm not sure what to make of it. Some general wisdom, some beautiful sentences. Also Flaubert has a passion for the word space, as do I, so that's neat. However I was never shaken, never felt intense emotions the likes of which I get with really good music, poetry, painting. There were the seemingly inevitable moments of quasi boredom. However even if i am to restrict myself to art that takes a long time to experience, for instance reading theater, or really great movies, I never get the authentic heights that I got for instance in the end of Cyrano. Killed by the prose, the length, the lack of interruption between the highs and the lows. I do not think the problem stems from lack of understanding.


What do you guys make of it? Are novels just not suited for the 'heights' and are more intellectual, (as in: the pleasure comes from having read all of Flaubert and seeing the subtle connections, the hidden meanings, rather than the raw act of reading)? Should I reread the moments I found great as long as I don't get the feelz?

need advices here

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You should keep two things in mind: (1) Authors are only human beings, and (2) one book doesn't equal one tidy emotional climax, or monolithic point of it all.

On (1), for various reasons our culture takes literature as a cult of heroic genius. Every famous author, every "canonical" name, isn't taken in historical context as a human being with a unique mind full of unique elements and motivations, but a Genius who is supposed to produce Works of Genius. The truth is, great authors wrote shitty or mediocre books, authors can be famous for strange reasons, or not be famous until years after their deaths, and authors can have redundant and rambling literary styles. A good example is Les Miserables, which was considered saccharine and disappointing by many contemporaries. Zola is considered by many to be a genius, but Lukacs considered him a second-rate talent; Lukacs considers Flaubert to be a genius for certain reasons, but many consider Flaubert mediocre.

When you read, you should not be trying to access the singular Genius Essence at the gooey centre of the book. Just treat it as something written by a purportedly very smart guy. It can be redundant, it can be genius but have shitty redundant parts, it can be genius but flawed, etc.

On (2) more specifically, you should allow for the possibility that your mind has been trained to expect easy and predictable gratification. Movies and other modern narrative forms are extremely simplified and can be almost childlike. It's similar to what has happened to modern music, where the innovations of the classical tradition reached a point where they required cultivation to appreciate, and then capitalism moved in, crudely extracted the "sweet spots" that are easy for anybody to enjoy, refined them to the point that they could be reproduced easily, and then bombarded people with them from birth until expectations were permanently lowered.

A book is the horizon of another world, a point of contact that opens up a space where you can think of something other than that is already in your head. A movie, by contrast, is designed to meld with your already existing space of expectations, and entertain you for an hour. You should be more scared of ready-made and easily induced "heights" than of boredom. Boredom is at least forcing you to think and opening up the possibility of learning something completely new.

Also, after you read enough, the spaces opened up in your mind by books will start to fuse with each other and with your historical knowledge of the context in which they were written, and even the boring parts of Flaubert or Moby Dick can start to be a bridge to insights whose possibility you hadn't realised before. You start to inhabit the same space as Flaubert did when he wrote, or as his contemporaries did when they read him, and you'll start to see surprising things.

Flaubert is not really an author of emotions or dramatic exuberances (see his theory of impersonality).

>There were the seemingly inevitable moments of quasi boredom
Madame Bovary is, ultimately, a novel about boredom

Great post, man

I found this a perfect novel, one of the best I ever read and definitely worthy of its admiration. You may just be too cynical and not emotional enough. It's supposed to have a cumulative effect where Flaubert basically criticizes all the banality, all the boredom, all the trite social norms, even all the supposed "rebelliousness" of the day with the "free-thinking", heavily satirized (although still somewhat fondly depicted) Monsieur Homais, but also tragically admits that, for better or worse, we have to live with it. The characters are real and breathe. Emma excites your contempt (also is incidentally based on Don Quixote -- the book is basically a more modern Don Quixote) but in the end, if you have a heart, you're still sad at her fate. And in an incredibly interesting and beautiful exclamation of humility, Flaubert famously said that Madame Bovary wasn't based on any real-life woman, but in fact was him. Madame Bovary represents all idealism (even if saccharine, impractical and feminine), all desire for fun and passion, and gets brutally destroyed by modern life.

Charles also excites your pity, because Flaubert isn't just looking at this one-sidedly. A beautiful part of the book is how "whole", how "round" it is -- there are parts that are hilarious, parts that are sad, parts that are serious, and parts that are just beautiful, and it also looks at things from many angles. It's well-rounded in the sense that Flaubert doesn't just narrow-mindedly extol a sort of Emersonian individualism where the person who goes against social norms is instantly a great hero (again, Emma is somewhat contemptible and stupid) and people who follow social norms are completely contemptible; Charles is the ultimate conformist, but also a touchingly sincere and compassionate man, and we feel he doesn't deserve Emma's contempt just for trying to be a good man and conforming to the society around him. So Flaubert isn't just a one-sided ideologue, but portraying an eternal facet of life beyond a certain level of civilization/settlement (the desire for more excitement, the feeling that modern civilization is removed of all passions and overly conformist) with multiple sides.

Finally, the prose is gorgeous, and the devotion to minutiae and realism pretty much created what we think of as the modern realistic novel.

is also true, as is even more so.

It's not the novel I would recommend to start the canon of literature. See

Consider life as it is actually lived, user. Then once again consider just what it is Flaubert is trying to do. Melville, for instance, QUALIFIES Ahab's obsession with whales, and with Moby Dick in particular, with a veritable ENCYCLOPEDIA of cetology within the confines of the novel. If (you) understand this, the 'obsession' (on both ends) not only makes perfect sense, but becomes weirdly enjoyable. Flaubert pulls no punches with respect to the mid 19th c. French bourgeoisie. That boredom (YOU) feel in the midst of beautiful sentences and lovely turns of phrase should doubly serve as a qualification of Emma's condition, and therefore of her predicament. As for Melville, such a working is a major aspect of Flaubert's art.

Charles truly is a pitiable character.

>Flaubert famously said that Madame Bovary wasn't based on any real-life woman, but in fact was him
Isn't "Bovary c'est moi" apocryphal?

>realism
Prose-wise, it is still very lyrical (of course lyricism and realism are not antithetical, but still).
Also, I have trouble to estimate how "real" was Homais, on the one hand it seems grossly exaggerated, but on the other hand a lot of XIXth literature have this archetypical 'bourgeois' character (see for example Verlaine's 'Monsieur Prudhomme').

Flaubert does not bring the kind of experience you're seeking. His slow, dense, self-controlled, polished style provides another kind of experience. You've got to appreciate it for what it is, because literature has a range that's wider than your expectations. You could enjoy the fact you're looking for something, and find something else instead.

Not all French novelists are like Flaubert though. Dumas, Balzac, Proust, Stendhal, Prévost, Céline, Sade, Voltaire, all of them will give you something entirely different.

>many consider Flaubert mediocre
[Citation needed]

OP here, thanks for your answers

great post.

I don't see why boredom as a subject matter would induce boredom in the reader

>you may just no be emotional enough
that's quite insulting m8. I asked for insights on wether the lack of impact novels had on me was abnormal. Or rather, compared to, at the risk of sounding pedantic, some Bach or Baudelaire or Titian, because I still loved the book.

what are your recommendations (french lit)

Bored is a strong word, but if I ever was bored it was not by the beautiful phrases which I appreciated very much, but by the in-betweens
One question only: have you guys attained levels of stimulation reading novels comparable to that can be had either through other forms of literature or other forms of art?

I'm talking chills, tears, feeling weak

>Verlaine's 'Monsieur Prudhomme'
The character was not invented by Verlaine though. Look it up.

well 2bqh I imagine all art as aiming for that; maybe I'm wrong. I agree with Céline, but man if we're speaking boredom Balzac is really actully fucking boring. You've never had to skim through third-rate Balzac for school....

great point though I'll think about it

Homais-type people (by that I mean people who act as ridiculously as he does, not necessarily anti-church people) are everywhere. Everywhere. It's just that you don't have access to their motives and though judged by Flaubert. Just look up the list of recipients of the legion d'honneur

>literature should be about pleasure and instant gratification
Have you thought about killing yourself? Just stop reading. You approach the medium with such a vulgar and plebeian mindset, there is no way you can penetrate what the author is trying to do. You are everything this novel --- and most of what Flaubert wrote --- is a satire of ; the petit bourgeois, his petty soul and his petty opinions, with his grand expectations towards literature and life.

>One question only: have you guys attained levels of stimulation reading novels comparable to that can be had either through other forms of literature or other forms of art?
It happens sometimes, yes, although not as powerfully as poetry or music, but I believe it's merely a matter of taste.

>I don't see why boredom as a subject matter would induce boredom in the reader
If the author wants you to 'feel' something, mimesis is the easiest and probably the most efficient technique.

>that's quite insulting m8. I asked for insights on wether the lack of impact novels had on me was abnormal. Or rather, compared to, at the risk of sounding pedantic, some Bach or Baudelaire or Titian, because I still loved the book.
Sorry, maybe shouldn't have started so strong. I'm also somewhat callous/retarded irl at times without noticing it so please forgive me, I didn't intend to offend. But I was powerfully emotionally affected by the book, so maybe you're just not emotional enough in this respect, at least. No one can make you feel something you're not predisposed to feel. Also, as other people have mentioned, Flaubert isn't about constant emotional punches and hysteria, he has an eye for detail and cumulative effect. It's more of a lush, slow, baroque effect. In fact, I too was bored by a lot of the novel, especially the first third or so, and read it pretty slowly, stopping and coming back to it over a month. But by the end I was floored by it.

>Isn't "Bovary c'est moi" apocryphal?
Guess it may have probably been, damn. Disregard that part, then. Also I don't really know how realistic Homais may be, but I see nothing too far-fetched in it, he's a type that's always existed: he's basically 19th-century Redditor.

>One question only: have you guys attained levels of stimulation reading novels comparable to that can be had either through other forms of literature or other forms of art?
>I'm talking chills, tears, feeling weak
This is a subjective thing, but I personally have. Again, it's subjective. Veeky Forums can be pretty pretentious at times but I see no reason why everyone should be forced to have the same reactions to literature. But yes, if you keep reading good books, you'll probably eventually find stuff that gives you this level of feeling. You should also consider that not all literature can or in fact even SHOULD (if it could) be like that, because such repeated emotional stimulus would paradoxically probably eventually make you more used to such great heights of emotions, and thus callous, bored, etc., and you'd begin to view it as commonplace.

Moreover, an accumulation of detail, occasionally boring, may be necessary to build up to an intense emotional pitch. It's hard for the first paragraph or page of a story to have an immediate huge emotional effect on you, because you're not yet attached to the characters and don't yet know what to expect; but by building up over time, you can get attached to the characters, drawn into the story, then eventually reach a climax.

I guess you're quite young, so you're looking for an intense experience. But your tastes will change with age, as experience (as a reader and as a man) will let you appreciate more subdued things, or things that left you cold before.

Another benefit of age is that you can confidently say: "That book has merits, it's good, but I really don't care about it", without feeling you're missing something.

Having to endure Balzac through high school was terrible, but it's not the same when you read it by yourself. I thought "Manon Lescaut" was a chore to read when I was 15, but it struck me as a masterpiece when I read it again at 30.

>literature shouldn't be about pleasure
>how dare you enjoy anything, you pleb!!!

>"That book has merits, it's good, but I really don't care about it", without feeling you're missing something.
I wish more people would be willing to be this honest with themselves.

>he's a type that's always existed: he's basically 19th-century Redditor.
That's what I wanted to know.

>Moreover, an accumulation of detail, occasionally boring, may be necessary to build up to an intense emotional pitch
It's obvious but always worthy to point out. Sometimes things, boring as they are, should be told for the good of the story/atmosphere.

>I thought "Manon Lescaut" was a chore to read when I was 15, but it struck me as a masterpiece when I read it again at 30.
Manon Lescaut is, in term of structure, a marvel (plus the prose is very sweet).

If you had the slightest inkling of sensibility in you, if you had even one bit of you untouched by mediocrity, you would have experienced by now the state of loftiness, ecstasy personal height I - arguably clumsily - described in the OP. You could easily have filled in the void here and there in my prose, because 'you know the feeling', you'd know what I was talking about. Yet the pathetic emotional midget that you are did not grasp what the adults talked about, so he must have his way throwing dirt. Fuck you. This is not about pleasure, and certainly not about instant gratification. You are a miserable individual for having immediately thought of pleasure, at the first ocassion.
Also no need to get aggresive you piece of shit, go and get a girl; do something.

You are despicable. fuck you

Dude you're like 16

How often do you use the word "sublime" while talking about things?
You sound like you just read your first Musset and you're having trouble digesting it

I don't because it sounds pretentious. why?

nice, thanks

I probably write English like I'm 16, but what I'm trying to convey isn't childish. quit being cynical about passion

we're not sure it's apocryphal, it is badly sourced though. first mention of it comes from 1909, two sources removed. but in an academic setting so who knows.

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