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 fermenting 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.