Book Recommendation: Flaubert's "Bouvard and Pécuchet"

I have recently begun to reread the works of nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the celebrated author of Madame Bovary, a novel so scandalous that he was tried for “attacks on public morals” when it was first serialized in 1856. The “scandal” is no longer scandalous, of course; our sensibilities are now unfazed by narratives of adultery. And though Madame Bovary is arguably his most famous work, it is his lesser known (at least among wider audiences) unfinished last novel Bouvard and Pécuchet that pushes nineteenth-century novelistic paradigms to – not to say beyond – the limits.

The plot follows the copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet, two perfect imbeciles, who move from Paris to the Norman countryside to put knowledge to the test: they go over all the major nineteenth-century scientific disciplines, reading books and then attempting either to put the knowledge they have gained into practice or to identify inconsistencies, controversies, and lack of consensus. At the end of the novel, disillusioned and cynical, they go back to copying. The unfinished second volume of the novel would actually be their copy (and would include the infamous Dictionary of Received Ideas). Flaubert envisaged subtitling the novel “On the failure of method in the sciences;” his goal was to present a piercingly critical and farcical “review of all modern ideas.” As a matter of fact, he qualified the text as a “farcical critical encyclopedia.” Chapter 1 introduces the characters; Chapter 2 deals with agriculture; Chapter 3, chemistry, biology, medicine, geology, and paleontology; Chapter 4, archeology and history; Chapter 5, literature and aesthetics; Chapter 6, politics; Chapter 8, gymnastics, spiritualism, psychology, and philosophy; Chapter 9, religion; and Chapter 10, phrenology and pedagogy. In his notes, Flaubert states that Chapter 11 would be their copy – “they would copy… everything they could get in their hands” – and Chapter 12 would end with “the sight of the two bonshommes leaning over their desk, copying.” The repetitive, cyclical nature of the novel led many commentators (and Flaubert himself, who doubted the work could be qualified as a novel) to see it as an anti-novel.

Bouvard and Pécuchet is a hilarious work. It is difficult to choose from a plethora of profoundly amusing passages, but the following scene, which I find particularly humorous, should illustrate Flaubert’s brilliant command of his craft. In Chapter III, as Bouvard and Pécuchet are studying physiology and trying to replicate experiments in their lab, they learn that “experts claim that, in animals, heat develops by means of muscular contractions, and that it is possible to raise the temperature of lukewarm bath water” by shaking one’s body. They fill a bathtub, and Bouvard gets in with a thermometer:

“Move your limbs!” Pécuchet said.
He moved them, but the thermometer did not indicate a change in temperature.
[...]
Bouvard would spread out his thighs, contort his flanks, shake his belly, exhaling like a whale; he would then look at the thermometer, but the temperature would consistently go down. “I do not understand it! But I am moving!”
“Not enough!”
And he would then resume his gymnastics.

After three hours of exercise, Bouvard, cold and frustrated, decides to abandon the experiment.

Flaubert’s ferocious novel is an attack on everything he despised about nineteenth-century France, such as the stupidity of the bourgeoisie and the positivistic understanding of knowledge (he refers to Auguste Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy as “stunningly stupid”). Flaubert once said that Bouvard and Pécuchet was the book in which he would “express [his] rage [...] [and] vomit on [his] contemporaries the distaste they inspire [him].”

There are multiple translations of Bouvard and Pécuchet. The most recent one, which received a lot of praise, is by Mark Polizzotti.