Three Years of Mostly About Stories – A Retrospective

Mostly About Stories is three years old, ish. I am a little proud of the number because I am good at giving up on things and I have not given up on this. I would be lying if I said writing a blog post had become a sort of habit to me. There have been weeks and weeks where I have done nothing, depleting old stores of posts. And there have been times when I have written many posts in one go, just because there was plenty to say. Until recently I had managed to post pretty much every week – it was a kind of unwritten rule with me that I would get one weekend off a month. And regardless of the machinery behind achieving that regularity, I am still chuffed about it.

Most good things come to an end, and I have to admit to myself that I need to change my approach to the blog to keep it running. That most terrible ghoul – one’s personal life – is beginning to get in the way.

This past year I finished my degree at Cambridge and after a few months dilly-dallying about in France and Switzerland and the US and Jordan, I finally got a job. Readers, I hope, will forgive me for the last part, because to the best of my knowledge there are not altogether many options for receiving money in regular and sizeable amounts other than these so-called “jobs”. Even murdering one’s relatives, a tried and tested method, is hampered by their ultimately limited numbers. And though I am not a gambler I am not interested in becoming one either.

Earlier this month I moved to Moscow to take up a job focusing on renewable energy and decarbonisation strategies in a Russian energy company. To a large extent, I am continuing my Cambridge degree by other means. The same cycle of reading, thinking, and reporting exists in both spaces. The only difference is that I now use PowerPoint instead of Word and my exams are all viva voce. My interest in making the planet a better place for all of us is a little less than my interest in great works of literature, but not insignificant either. Anyway, I believe that it would be a dereliction of my duty to others not to work in a way that has an impact on the world.

It is too soon to tell whether I will survive the job or explode like Thomas Buddenbrook. Either way, I have noticed already that I have considerably less time to read and write than I had previously, and this is a problem for the blog. One solution I considered long ago was simply to write about shorter things. In particular, given the blog’s name, I could simply write about short stories every time. This is a possibility. The shorter the work, the easier it is to dissect it, and probably the more interesting the blog post would ultimately be.

Another option is to do more generally thematic pieces, more considerations of a topic than anything else. The problem is that I am twenty-four years old and cripplingly aware that anything interesting on a topic has already been written and so I would rather not waste my readers’ time. Is there really much value in me selecting some obelisk-like word and riffing on it for a few pages? Montaigne could title an essay “on such-and-such” but can I? At school each weekend one had to write such essays – perhaps it’s a habit I should get back into. And, well, in truth much of what I write on this blog has been partly for myself and writing such essays would be good practice for me, after all.

Either way or indeed any of the other ways – more translations, more interludes into my own experiences (I liked the grape picking piece too) – I am not such a huge fan of the regular half-analytical half-descriptive half-homework-helpers half-entertainers that I have been putting out for these past three years, not anymore that is. I don’t want things to become routine and stale. But the terrible truth is that I have begun to notice repetitions in my own work. I don’t just mean the regular references to Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so on. I am allowed to have favourites. What I mean is, I seem to be saying the same thing over and over again. Certain observations on the meaning of life and the difficulty of communication, for example, just keep coming up. And as the job and I do battle, I am only going to get more tired and more boring.

I do not like the academic criticism I have read, which is mostly soulless and dead. But there is something to be said for the highbrow prose that lives just on the edges of the academy, in fancy magazines I rarely read. Serious essays, things that require research not to make a point at a conference but as a dish requires spices – to make them a joy to consume. I read a book and maybe the introduction and write a post. This is a function of the time constraints I live in. But it forces me to rely on things inside myself, rather than stretching myself in new directions. Another option for me would be to write much less regularly, even monthly, but each time produce a properly researched piece that actually had something interesting to say.

The truth is, my first month in Moscow has been frightening. Not because of war fears and the pleasures of being treated as a migrant, though the former at least has made me lose sleep. No, what is frightening is that although I am only supposed to work from nine till six each day (and my colleagues log on half an hour later than that anyway), suddenly I find myself almost unable to read. Exhaustion, disorganisation, one can lay the blame on whatever one wants. But the situation is the same. I pick up books and put them down. The pleasure and the attention have gone. No doubt the onrush of routine and stability – because I still haven’t had a normal week yet – will help. And indeed, this past week has seen me read a little.

But from my perspective, I need Mostly About Stories to encourage my growth and development, rather than hinder them. I need it to be a place where I can follow my interests rather than one where I just repeatedly rip the surface contents of a book out in order to say the same things I’ve been saying for three years over and over again. It should not be an echo chamber for my own unchanging self. We all agree that serious literature is good because it rewards thought. My blog posts, generally written the two days after finishing a book, rarely manage to highlight that depth as well as I would like. And writing the posts often doesn’t make me think as much as I would like either.

What form the future of the blog will take I do not know. It will still mostly be about stories. But the posts will be less regular, less predictable in content and timings (though still on Mondays/Sunday evenings). The most important thing is that I would like to write about things that interest me. I would like the motivation for a piece to be not finishing a book but the thoughts that the book has occasioned within me. Three years is a long time, and I’m proud we have made it thus far. But as I am unable to complete a merger or acquisition, and refuse to outsource (though I am extremely grateful to my girlfriend, Marcelina, for helping me with proofreading and so much more) a change of pace will have to do to keep my content from getting stale. I hope you approve.

But do have your say and leave a comment on what you would like to see in posts and approach going forward. I have been really grateful for the additional engagement in my posts this year. This past year I have even had various book recommendations come my way (e.g. Anton Reiser, Riders in the Chariot), which I do note down but cannot promise in the near future to fulfil. Anyway, thank you, readers!

The numbers, for those who like them. In 2019, I had 4635 views, in 2020 I had 17960, in 2021 I had 35570. The most popular pieces continue to be those that are most useful for students – things on Benjamin, Kafka, Gogol, etc. But I am always glad to see more niche things get even a single view.

The books I enjoyed the most last year were Robinson’s Home and Sebald’s The Emigrants.

Leo Tolstoy – The Sevastopol Sketches

Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches are an early work of the great Russian, taking us behind the Russian lines at the Siege of Sevastopol (October 1854 – September 1855) in the Crimean War. It is interesting because although that war has been much mythologised in my own country – one need only speak the name “Florence Nightingale” and a floating lamp will appear, while Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is one of the few poems whose lines probably remain burned into the British poetic public consciousness – in Russia one often has the sensation that there was no Crimean War at all. A defeat when the ruling elites were still convinced their country was undefeatable led to a series of reforms culminating in the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861.

The picture of Russia that it presents to the world and its people these days has no space for sore defeats such as this one. The only thing we need to know about Crimea is that it is Russian and always has been. Well and good.

Still, this losing war produced a piece of remarkable Russian fiction, one that has much in common with Isaac Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, written as the Soviet Union suffered a disastrous defeat against a newly independent Poland in the early 20th century. Both works attempt to engage with war – a theme so great that it bursts the hinges of anything that aims to contain it (War and Peace, of course, was really too short) – through fragmentation and novel narrative techniques. These techniques – chronological, ironic – Tolstoy would later develop further in works like Hadji Murat – but they found their beginning here. And for this, the work is interesting now, above and beyond its perspective on a war we may think we know.

Overview

“The real hero of my story, who I love with all the powers of my soul, who I have tried to bring out in all his beauty and who has always been, and will always be, sublime – is truth itself.”

In the Sevastopol Sketches Tolstoy, who was writing only a few months after serving in Crimea as an officer – in fact, the first two stories were written while the siege was ongoing – was already formulating many of the basic ideas about war which would later mark his monumental book on the topic. What are these ideas? To begin with, we learn that war is hell. We have always known this, but Tolstoy’s particular goal is to deglamourize heroism – that one thing that has nevertheless made war glorious and somehow justified for the individual soldiers without whom there could be no war. Everything in the Sevastopol Sketches serves towards the argument that war is not a place of heroism and glory, but of sadness, disappointment, and pointless violence.

Leo Tolstoy at the time of the Siege of Sevastopol

The Sketches are three in number, and each is set at a different moment in the siege. As with Babel’s treatment of the Polish war in Red Army Cavalry, this allows us to see the war effort as it goes well, stagnates, and finally is lost – but without having to fill in the gaps in between and thereby enlarge the book without necessarily making it any more compelling. Although the city of Sevastopol remains central throughout, each story gives us different characters. The first and shortest tale, “Sevastopol in December”, uses an unusual second-perspective narration. Tolstoy here plays the part of a gallant tour guide. The sounds of war are in the background, but somehow sufficiently distant. We see a city that seems carefree, relaxed:

“There you will see the defenders of Sevastopol alongside terrible and sad, great and entertaining, but always amazing, soul-raising sights.”

“Sights” is perhaps the key word here – we are a visitor, staring at exhibits in the zoo. Even after a visit to the hospital and conversations with the wounded, still, we are prey to the feelings of awe in the face of “danger, that game of life and death”. Without allowing us to follow a character or linger over a particular wounded, Tolstoy temporarily allows us to see the war in a depersonalised manner and focuses on the great patriotism of the Russians at its commencement. But in the other two stories, not only do we follow individuals, but we also see what the tour downplays or hides – death, ignorance, and hypocrisy.

Communication Failures

In the second story, “Sevastopol in May”, we begin to experience fighting first-hand. We follow an officer, Mikhailov, as he goes about his duties, before finally heading to the fortifications themselves. But these duties are not what we might have expected. An awful lot of his time is given over to considering the complete and utter vanity of the officers:

“A thousand human self-images managed to be offended, a thousand managed to be awfully pleased, to puff themselves up, and a thousand – to find their rest within the arms of death.”

Tolstoy gives us pages on the narcissism of small differences among the officers – who is ranked slightly higher, who has the nicer carriage, who is consumed by this or that petty anxiety. All dialogue is constructed by its participants to give a particular impression – it is a lie, hypocrisy. And this is particularly ridiculous given the context of a war. If we cannot communicate truthfully, how can we possibly hope to fight well, to plan and strategize effectively? At the start of the story, we laugh at the ignorance of a woman from central Russia who has written Mikhailov a letter describing how the press reports the war – battles with hundreds of foreign casualties and only a single Russian one, for example – but then we learn that the soldiers themselves are no less badly informed. One even declares the Americans will save them.

Miscommunication continues once Mikhailov’s part in the war itself begins. In War and Peace, one of the major themes is the incompetence of the commanders in contrast with the intrinsic elan of the soldiers – during a battle, the officers do not matter, and certainly not the generals. Only the individual soul facing its opponent does. And the encounter is inevitably messy. Mikhailov only knows that he has killed a Frenchman because he makes a noise – “ah Dieu” – upon being stabbed. Earlier, we read that “Mikhailov, supposing that they were asking after the company commander, came out of his pit, and thinking that Praskukhin was the leader, holding his hat in his hand, went up to him”. The emphasis is mine – it indicates that assumptions and guesswork lie behind the interactions. It indicates, above all, instincts, which can be either good or bad but which in war are perhaps all we have.

“Sevastopol in May” concludes with Mikhailov getting a light head wound. As if to tie his themes together, Tolstoy shows that Mikhailov’s main concern is whether he will look silly with it, not whether he will die. Even war cannot change vanity, it seems.

Ways of Dying

In fiction, dying often reveals the truth of the life that death ends. A good life generally has a good end, while a bad one, such as Ivan Ilyich’s, tends to end slowly and painfully. There are three significant deaths in The Sevastopol Sketches. The first is in “Sevastopol in May”, while the other two are in “Sevastopol in August 1855”. Each of these deaths has a different purpose and is approached in a different way.

In “Sevastopol in May” the death is Praskukhin’s, an officer’s. He dies fighting alongside Mikhailov. I’ve heard his death mentioned in the secondary literature as one of the earliest examples of a kind of stream of consciousness, for what strikes one about Praskukhin’s death is how his consciousness expands to envelop the whole story, and then like a black hole suddenly collapses inwards. Praskukhin’s death is first of all sad – “he was scared, listening to himself”. He seems little aware that he is dying until it is far too late. War cannot change vanity, but we find that death can. Suddenly Praskukhin is very small, weighed down by what feels like blocks of stone. Just a moment earlier he had seen Mikhailov get injured, and his first thought had been that this was a relief because Mikhailov owed him money. The stream of consciousness narration allows us to see the transformation of Praskukhin’s world from its petty concerns about money into its tragic concern about onrushing death. By connecting the two, Tolstoy seems to suggest that what we think about in war is really far from what we should think about. And this connects ultimately with the idea that if only we understood what war really was – death and destruction – nobody would ever fight again.

Or as he puts it in my favourite quote of the book:

“A disagreement that has not been solved by diplomacy will still less be solved by powder and blood”.

“Sevastopol in August 1855” takes us to the end of the siege, and to the end of the two Kozeltsov brothers. Much of the story is taken up with the younger brother’s arrival in Sevastopol, which is a completely different city to the one it was in the prior stories. Where before it appeared to function normally, with civilians and women and shops, now it is nearly deserted. The younger Kozeltsov is less occupied by vanity than the other officers – instead, he is guilty of an exaggerated love of heroism. He dreams of heroic death, even though “so little of what he saw was anything like his brilliant, joyous, great-souled dreams.”

 When he eventually meets his fellow officers, they do not tell him what to do, even though he knows next to nothing about running an artillery unit. Instead, they want to play cards and gossip. An opportunity to go to the battlements arises and Kozeltsov puts himself forward, only to be rejected by the others. Instead, they draw lots, and Kozeltsov is again chosen – a significant moment, given what comes later. It seems to suggest again that war is less about planning and more about sheer random chance. Kozeltsov gets to the battlements, and the fighting begins, but here the narrative takes us away from him suddenly.

In chapter 24, a brilliant short chapter, we see Sevastopol through the eyes of two spotters far off. They see the beginnings of a hostile assault upon the city, and then later –

“Oh God, a flag! Look, look!” Said the other, getting his breath and moving from the telescope. “A French flag is on Malakhov Redoubt!”

In Hadji Murat the hero’s death is announced before we experience it first hand when his head is brought to the Russians. In “Sevastopol in August 1855” too, death is announced before we experience it directly. The effect of this is to devalue it – we know what will ultimately happen, so any heroism or defiance is suddenly rendered pointless. It would have been better not to die at all.

Both Kozeltsov brothers die in the French attack. The elder is injured first and later succumbs from his wounds. In the confusion of the fighting, he believes he has successfully repelled his enemy. He feels “an inexpressible delight in the knowledge that he had managed a heroic act”. Yet what is this heroism really, if not a lie? He is indeed deceived by the priest in the hospital, who tells him that the enemy are in retreat. Kozeltsov elder may be able to die gladly, but the reader cannot share in his delight. There is something utterly sickening in seeing falsity so close to the grave. Perhaps I am wrong to care so much about truth, but Tolstoy does name truth the hero of his story, so I think I am right here. War cannot be even remotely good if it engenders the need for such deceit, even comforting deceit.

Heroism allows Kozeltsov elder to die gladly, assuring himself that he has protected his fatherland successfully. But Tolstoy devalues that heroism by showing it is based on a lie. Volodya, Kozeltsov younger, who is even more prone to idealise heroism than his older brother, is given an even more brutal send-off. We do not even see his death. Instead, through one of his soldiers’ eyes, we see how “something in an overcoat lay face down in the place where Volodya had just been” as the French begin their attack. There is no last stand, there is no coming to terms with the war. There is simply death. Whereas even the elder’s battle allows us to find redemption in his valour and heroic qualities, Tolstoy does not even allow Volodya a page to make his departure from the world meaningful. Depriving him of description, he deprives him of meaning.

Try as we might, we cannot find any way of saying that his death was worthwhile.

Conclusion

I visited Sevastopol in 2020. In recent years the city has once again attracted international attention. Crossing over from the North to the South parts of the city by ferry – a route taken by many of the characters of The Sevastopol Sketches – I was left awestruck by the great grey mass of Russian Black Sea Fleet, moored inside the bay past the old city harbour walls. I was not particularly interested in the Crimean War and did not seek out any of the museums related to it. Sevastopol is probably more interesting to a tourist these days on account of its pleasant waterfront promenade and its Greek heritage – the ancient city of Khersones is quite well-preserved. All told, however, the promenade at Yalta is more lovely, and the beaches along Crimea’s southern coast, such as Alupka, are better for people who would like to swim and forget their troubles.  

The Crimean War has been forgotten, at least in Russia. For the British, it remains an important part of our national identity. The last time I visited my grandmother’s she produced a diary of one of her forebear’s from the Crimean War for me to flick through. It did not make for particularly entertaining reading – for the most part, it was a list of men lost and troop movements. But to hold history in one’s hand like that is nevertheless a wonderful feeling.

The diary. Note the “Russian attack” at the bottom of the page.

To read Tolstoy’s little book is also to encounter history, and it is to encounter it from a different perspective to the one we are used to. In fact, this perspective-shift buttresses the argument of The Sevastopol Sketches. Reading our “enemy” already leaves us biased against them, so that Tolstoy’s suggestion that war is pointless and desperately sad is easier to accept. The petty vanities of the officers, dislodged from the cultural frame of reference that might let us love them, appear just as petty as they really are.

Ultimately, Tolstoy’s fullest and best critique of war is found, unsurprisingly enough, in War and Peace (or possibly Hadji Murat). But The Sevastopol Sketches are still a fun book. For one, they have in embryo many of the techniques that Tolstoy will expand upon later in his great works. More importantly, however, while few of us will ever fight in a war, Tolstoy’s work acts as an antidote to an idealised notion of it which I think may still be relatively common. And wherever war is idealised, inevitably it will burst into reality.

A Sense of Unreality: Flaubert’s Sentimental Education

The sense of dislocation, the feeling of some thin film separating oneself from the real world out in front of us – there is perhaps no more modern feeling than this. One of the many ideas that Flaubert engages with in his Sentimental Education is this one. The novel is a Bildungsroman in the sense that it describes a young man’s education, but an unusual one. This is because Frédéric Moreau’s education is one of disillusionment – in love, in life, in himself. And partly this disillusionment is delivered through the idea that between him and the world he experiences there is something that prevents him from immersing himself in the latter properly.

Flaubert’s novel is strange. At nearly five hundred pages in my edition, it is much longer than his earlier Madame Bovary, and much more diffuse. There are a huge number of characters, many of whose names and identities end up melting into each other (Deslauriers, Dambreuse, Dussardier). The plot, combining the politics of mid-century Paris with Frédéric’s love for several older women, is occasionally hard to follow. Nor is the book sustained by Frédéric himself, who is an idiot at best and a selfish ass at worst. Instead, it is sustained by a feeling of reality itself – of Paris and Parisians, politics, and passion – which strains against the novel’s boundaries.

Flaubert wrote that he was “obliged to push into the background the things which are precisely the most interesting”, due to the sheer complexity of the world he was conjuring up. But in fact, this is misleading, for the sheer complexity of the world is already an argument about how we engage with it. As characters and events speed past, and facts and figures (who has what money, what business, and so on), we find it increasingly hard to hold anything in our head. Everything is changeable, people are always coming and going, so why attempt to stop things? We “go with the flow”, which prevents us from engaging more deeply with things. Perhaps the most prominent symbol in the book related to this is the stock market. The stock market is not a place, it is an idea – fortunes can be won or lost at random and with the speed of the roulette wheel. When Frédéric loses money and gains it so quickly, so effortlessly, there’s a sense of unreality about it. The use of money and complexity distances us from the world – they suggest it’s not worth trying to understand.

This might be termed a bourgeois sensibility, and it lies at the heart of the book. But an older, Romantic, view is little better. At the novel’s beginning Frédéric is a student, sentimental and silly – when he sees Madame Arnoux, who is destined to be the central love of his life, his first thought is that “she looked like the women you read about in romantic novels”. Rather than see the woman for who she is, Frédéric immediately lays down an idea of her that covers her up. A Romantic sensibility, looking eternally for symbols, gets in the way of real things just as much as does the bourgeois sensibility above. Frédéric has read too much, thought too much – he cannot engage. When he faces the violence of the revolutionary years following 1848, he “felt as if he were watching a play”.

Frédéric is a spectator. He is a spectator on life, and in life. Politics barely engages him. Its role initially is slightly absurd – a bit of a scuffle on the streets gets in the way of Frédéric’s illicit liaisons. Later, he is supposed to stand for election, but never gets around to it. His personal fortune allows him never to have to do anything, and so he does nothing. Nothing other than chasing women around Paris, that is. He toys with various artistic ideas that go nowhere. From something of a naïve child at the novel’s beginning by the end he is an experienced womaniser, whose exploits, however uncomfortable they make us, nonetheless reflect great talents – if that is the word we would like to use.

Flaubert’s structural ingenuity also detaches us, and Frédéric, from the world. His story is one of comparisons. We visit bourgeois parties and decadent artistic ones. While etiquette means that these must be different, we realise that there is just as much moral decay and licentiousness in the former as in the latter. The social rules that govern society seem like a poor cover for people’s fundamental similarity. Even the characters, such as Frédéric, seem to float between both types of engagement without rhyme or reason.

Of course, parties are important for another reason. Or rather, they are unimportant. We may recall from the history books the importance of banqueting clubs for fomenting revolutionary feelings, but ultimately having dinner is the opposite of actually acting. People spend the novel talking, walking, but never doing. Frédéric, as mentioned, never really gets a job. The revolution passes people by, providing a reason for sleepless nights and arguments at dinner, but never anything more. Flaubert shows an age of inaction, in comparison to the regular reference point – the Revolution of 1789. Everyone disagrees with the means used, but at least Robespierre and pals did things. The comparison makes the revolution of 1848 seem more like a spectacle than a real event.

Just as the scenes that Flaubert chooses to depict reflect a world where people are not engaged, so too does the superabundance of characters. If there are a great many characters, none of them can plant themselves in our minds as particularly real. Nobody can be a hero, or even remotely heroic, when the spotlight is only ever placed on them for a few minutes at a time. A major character gets ill on one page and dies on the next. At the funeral people forget to show any real sympathy at all.

The novel also, naturally enough, says an awful lot about social structures. I mentioned the stock market earlier, with its random twists and turns. Frédéric’s life, despite the most unbelievably stupidity on his part, never seems to go wrong. The banker, Monsieur Dambreuse, has the most extraordinary tolerance for his young acquaintance’s idiocy, whether it be being seen in public with a woman of ill repute or refusing to turn up to meetings. Although Dambreuse is determined to see that Frédéric succeeds, whether financially or politically, and always helps his protégé when he has trouble, Frédéric tends to blatantly ignore his own friends’ pleas for help. Fate itself seems to be saying to the young aristocrat that the world was made for him, that he needs not to worry. A hint of the self-entitlement I know all too well in myself and my old schoolfriends is ever present in the background. And if we are entitled to the world, we never need to engage with it. Like men standing before a tree with ripe fruits, we know that we need not bother ourselves to pick them – they will fall of their own accord.

The book ends with two extraordinary chapters of complete brutality. Frédéric, the great womaniser, finds himself defeated and alone. And Flaubert skips into the future with wonderfully dead language:

“He travelled the world.

He tasted the melancholy of packet ships, the chill of waking under canvas, the boredom of landscapes and monuments, the bitterness of broken friendship.

He returned home.

He went into society, and he had affairs with other women. They were insipid beside the endless memory of his first love. And then the vehemence of desire, the keen edge of sensation itself, had left him. His intellectual ambitions were fading too. The years went by; and he resigned himself to the stagnation of his mind and the apathy that lived in his heart.”

Frédéric learns that he has done something to himself, something horrible, over the course of the novel. He has destroyed his connection with reality, and now he cannot rebuild it. Life is dead, and Frédéric has killed it. Whereas in Russian literature a figure like Pechorin (in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time) comes to us already broken, Flaubert writes the creation of the superfluous man. For that, it is a more terrible read in many ways. When Madame Arnoux, the first love, discovers him again after all these years, we feel an apprehensive shudder. And so we should:

“The lamp, standing on a console table, lit up her white hair. It was like a blow full in the chest”.

Frédéric, even now, cannot face the world. The woman who loves him now needs to be replaced by the image of the woman whom once he loved. And reality itself is left all the poorer for it. Perhaps the most beautiful line in the book comes here: “In every parting there comes a moment when the beloved is already no longer with us.” When we try to picture this sentence, we see the problem I have been trying to describe – two people, and then behind them their spirits, already floating away in different directions. There is no connection, either to each other, or the earth itself.

Flaubert’s story is one of decline, of failure. Like John Williams’ Stoner, which I reread recently, it presents a life where things do not quite go to plan. Or rather, where there is a certain mundane okay-ness about how they turn out. Flaubert does not suggest what the reason might be. When Frédéric and his friend Deslauriers meet again in the very final chapter, they both acknowledge that their respective dreams of love and power have come to nothing. But in considering the reasons, both come up short. Deslauriers says “I was too logical, and you were too sentimental”. We may agree or disagree with this, depending on what we have taken away from the rest of the book. But there is nothing didactic about it. For a novel which has “education” in its title, it doesn’t want to teach. It shows us two bad paths, but no examples of what a “right” path might be.

I venture to suggest that Frédéric’s failure stems partly from a world where a direct connection with things is impossible. This is a sufficiently “weak” concluding argument, in that we can make any suggestion we want for what success would look like or for how Frédéric could reconnect with his surroundings. Manual labour, artistic pursuits, a real love? Take your pick. Whatever we decide, it makes sense to establish the nature of the problem. A sense of dislocation from the world is a feeling that we moderns can never escape – Flaubert’s enduring dramatization of it can teach us how to see it, even if it can’t teach us how to escape it. That is only one of many reasons for reading this amazing work.