But an analysis that has emphasized the dependence of the literary world must simultaneously stress one of the major effects of the operation of the literary world as a field, namely, the fact that all those who claimed full membership in this world, and especially those v;ho claimed excellence, had to demonstrate their independence vis-à-vis economic and political power. The indifference with respect to government authorities and the rewards they dispensed, the distance from those in power and their values, tended to be asserted as the practical principle of legitimate behavior. Most of the time these obligations did not even have to be explicit. Negative sanctions, beginning with the worst--falling into disrepute (the functional equivalent to bankruptcy)--were produced automatically by the competition that set the most prestigious authors against each other.
But the effectiveness of these calls to order or injunctions, which were in some sense inscribed in the logic of the field itself, were never more obvious than in the fact that those authors apparently the most directly subject to external exigencies, in their work as in their behavior, felt obliged to manifest a certain distance from dominant values. And we discover, to our surprise if we know them only through the sarcastic comments of Flaubert or Baudelaire, that the most typical representatives of the bourgeois theater go beyond unequivocal praise of bourgeois life and values to satirize the very bases of bourgeois existence as well as the "decline in morals" imputed to the court and the upper bourgeoisie. These concessions to antibourgeois values on the part of these model bourgeois authors confirm the patent impossibility of overlooking the fundarnental law of the field since writers apparently the farthest removed from art for art's sake acknowledged that law, if only in the somewhat shamefaced or ostentatiously aggressive mode of their transgressions. Condemned for this substandard success, these writers have purely and simply been written out of literary history. But they were full members of the nineteenth-century art world, not only because they themselves were marked by their participation in the literary field but also because their very existence modified the functioning of that field.
The analyst who endorses these vetoes without even being aware of it, since he knows only those authors from the past recognized by literary history as worthy of recognition, is destined to an intrinsically vicious circular form of explanation and understanding. He can only register, unawares, the effects of these authors he does not know on the authors that he claims to analyze and whose refusals he takes up on his own account. He thus precludes any grasp of what, in their very works, is the indirect product of these refusals. This is never clearer than in the case of a writer like Flaubert who was defined by a whole series of refusals or, more precisely, by an ensemble of double negations that opposed antagonistic doubles of styles or authors: thus his refusal of romanticism and realism, of Lamartine no less than Champfieury. [221]
A preliminary mapping of the field that was gradually fixed between 1840 and 1860 distinguishes three leading positions, namely, to use contemporary labels, "social art," "art for art's sake," and "bourgeois art." These categories are of course highly debatable, given the status of the intellectual field as a major battlefield over taxonomy. They nevertheless have the incontestable virtue of recalling that, in a field still in the process of institution, the internal positions must first be understood as so many specifications of the generic position of writers (or of the literary field within the political field). Or, if one prefers, as so many forms of the objective relationship to temporal power. Although writers as such belonged within the dominated fraction of the dominant social group, there was considerable tension among writers, between. those who tended toward the dominant pole of the literary field, those located at the dominated pole, and those in between.
At the dominated pole of the literary field, the advocates of social art had their hour of gloryjust before and after February 1848. Republicans, Democrats, or Socialists, like Proudhon and also, though less markedly, George Sand, or again liberal Catholics like Lamennais, all denounced the "egotistical" art of art for art's sake, and demanded that literature fulfill a social or political function. These writers were structurally very close to the "second bohemia" of Murger and company, or at least close to the "realist" tendency that began to characterize that part of bohemia in the 1850s for which Champfleury became the theoretician. Other writers can be tied to this position, like the "worker-poets" sponsored by George Sand. Their inferior position in the field fostered a relationship of circular causality with their solidarity with respect to the dominant social milieux. In effect, this attitude can be linked to their provincial and/or working-class background, not only directly, as they themselves wanted to believe and have everyone else believe, through the solidarity and fidelity of the group, but also indirectly, through their dominated position within the field of production to which they were assigned by their background.
At the opposite pole of the literary field, the representatives of "bourgeois art," who wrote in the main for the theater, were closely and directly tied to the dominant social milieux as much by their background as by their life-style and values. This affinity was the very principle of their success in a genre that presupposed immediate communication between author and public and assured these writers not only significant material benefits (the theater was by far the most remunerative literary activity), but also all the tokens of success in the bourgeois world, and notably, the Académie française. These writers presented their bourgeois public a bowdlerized form of romanticism, a revival of "healthy and honest" art which subordinated the zany aspects of romanticism to bour-[222]
The writers located outside these two opposing positions gradually invented what was called "art for art's sake." Rather than a position ready for the taking, it was a position to make. Although it existed potentially within the space of the existing positions, its occupants had to invent, against the established positions and against their occupants, everything that distinguished this position from all the others. They had to invent that social personage without precedent--the modern artist, full-time professional, dedicated to his work, indifferent to the exigencies of politics as to the injunctions of morality, and recognizing no jurisdiction other than the specific norm of art. Through this they invented too-pure aesthetics, a point of view with universal applicability, with no otherjustification than that which it finds in itself. The occupants of this central yet contradictory position were destined to oppose the established positions and thereby to attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. Against bourgeois art, they wanted ethical freedom, even transgression, and above all distance from every institution, the state, the Académie, journalism. But this desire for freedom did not mean that they accepted either the careless abandon of the bohemians who invoked this same freedom in order to legitimate transgressions devoid of properly aesthetic consequences or simple regression into what they denounced as "vulgar." In their concern to situate themselves above ordinary alternatives, these advocates of pure art deliberately imposed on themselves an extraordinary discipline that opposed the easy way out taken by all their adversaries. Their independence consisted in the freely chosen but total obedience to the new laws which they invented and to which they proposed to subject the Republic of Letters.
Baudelaire's own aesthetic principle resided in the double breach on which he based his position but at the price of an extraordinary strain, manifest notably in the paradoxical display of singularity in his daily life. His hatred of debased forms of romanticism had a lot to do with his denunciation of improvisation and Iyricism in favor of work and study. At the same time, Baudelaire's refusal of facile breaches of decorum was behind his determination to be both contentious and methodical even [223]
Flaubert was also situated in this geometric locus of contraries, along with a number of others who were all different from each other and who never formed a real group: Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Barbey d'Aurevilly, to name the best known. I shall cite only one exemplary expression of these double refusals, which, in their general form, could be formulated as follows: "I loathe X (writer, style, theory, school), but I loathe just as much the opposite of X." Whence the discord among all those who rejected romanticism that Flaubert put so succinctly: "Everyone thinks that I am in love with realism, whereas I execrate it. For I started on this novel [Madame Bovary] out of hatred of realism. But I loathe just as much false idealism, which has us hoaxed these days."10
The key formula, which simply translates the contradictory properties of the position in the field, allows us to comprehend the principle behind divers particularities in the behavior of those who occupy this position. First of all, their political neutrality, associated with the refusal of any kind of commitment or any kind of preaching, whether glorifying bourgeois values or instructing the masses in republican or socialist principles: their horror of "the bourgeois," in which they included, according to Flaubert, "the bourgeois in overalls and the bourgeois in a frock coat"11 was sustained, within the field, by the execration of the "bourgeois artist," who secured guaranteed his own short-term success and bourgeois honors by denying himself as a writer. "There is one thing a thousand times more dangerous than the bourgeois," Baudelaire noted in Les Curiosités esthétiques, "and that is the bourgeois artist, who was created to come between the artists and the genius, who hides each from the other." But their scorn as professionals for the literary proletariat prompted by their very exacting conception of artistic work no doubt lay at the heart of the representation they made of the "populace."
This concern to keep distant from all social sites implied the refusal to be guided by the public's expectations. Thus Flaubert, who pushed this indifference further than anyone else, reproached Edmond de Goncourt for having addressed the public directly in the preface to his novel, Les Freères Zemganno, to explain the aesthetic intentions of the work: "Why do you need to talk directly to the public? It is not worthy of our secrets" (CC, 8:263). And he wrote to Ernest Renan about his Prière sur l'Acropole: "I don't know if there exists in French a more beautiful page of prose.... It's splendid and I'm sure that the bourgeois won't understand a word [224]
This temporal gap between supply and demand tended to become a structural characteristic of the field of limited production. In this antieconomic economy fixed at the pole that was economically dominated but symbolically dominant--with Baudelaire and the Parnassians for poetry, with Flaubert for the novel--producers could end up, at least in the short term, with only their competitors for customers. "Bourgeois artists" were assured of an immediate clientele. The producers of commercial literature who worked on commission, like the authors of vaudeville entertainments or popular novels, could live well off their earnings and at the same time earn a secure reputation as socially concerned or even as socialists (like Eugène Sue). Quite to the contrary, the tenants of pure art were destined to deferred gratification. Some, like Leconte de Lisle, went so far as to see in immediate success "the mark of intellectual inferiority" while the Christly mystique of the "accursed artist" ("I'artiste maudit"), sacrificed in this world and consecrated in the next, was undoubtedly the idealized or professionalized retranscription of the specific contradiction of the mode of production that the pure artist aimed to establish. It was in effect an upside-down economy where the artist could win in the symbolical arena only by losing in the economic one (at least in the short term) and vice versa.
In a very paradoxical manner this paradoxical economy gave full weight to inherited economic properties and in particular to private income. In more general terms, the state of the field of production determined the probable effects of the properties of individual actors either objectively, as with economic capital and private income, or subjectively, as in the habitus. In other words, the same predispositions engender very different, even antagonistic, positions, according to the state of the field. In brief, it was still (inherited) money that assured freedom from money. A private fortune also conferred objective freedom with respect to the authorities and those in power, which was often the condition of subjective freedom, thereby enabling "pure" writers to avoid the compromises to which they were particularly exposed.
Thus only after characterizing the different positions within the literary field is the analyst to confront the individual actors and the [225]
To account more fully for the particular affinity that tied writers from this background of "men of talent" ("capacités") as they used to say in Flaubert's time, to pure art, we can invoke the fact that the occupants of these central positions within the political field who, endowed with just about equal amounts of economic and cultural capital, wavered (like Frédéric in Sentimental Education) between the two poles of business and art and were therefore predisposed to occupy a homologous position in the literary field. Thus the dual orientation of Flaubert's father, who invested in the education of his children and in real estate, corresponded to the indetermination of the young Flaubert, faced with various equally probable futures.
But this is not all. At the risk of seeming to push the search for an explanation a bit far, it is possible, starting from Sartre's analysis, to point out the homology between the objective relationship that tied the artist as "poor relation" to the "bourgeois" or "bourgeois artist" and the relationship that tied Flaubert, as the "family idiot," to his older brother, and through him--the clear objectification of the most probable career for their category--to his class of origin and to the objective future implied by that class. We would therefore have an extraordinary superposition of redundant determinations. Everything happened as if his position in his family and the position of this family in the political field predisposed Flaubert to experience at their strongest the force of the contradictions inscribed in the position of the writer and in the position of the pure artist where these contradictions attained their highest degree of intensity.
3. Flaubert's Point of View
So far, having grasped very partially the specificity of Flaubert, the analysis has remained generic. It has not engaged the logic specific to the work. We can almost hear Flaubert object: "Where do you know a critic who worries about the work in itself? There are all kinds of analyses of the milieu where the work was produced and the causes that brought it about; but unknowing poetics [poétique insciente]? where does it come [226]
When Flaubert undertook to write Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education, he situated himself actively within the space of possibilities offered by the field. To understand these choices is to understand the differential significance that characterized them within the universe of possible choices. In choosing to write these novels, Flaubert risked the inferior status associated with a minor genre. Above all, he condemned himself to take a place within a space that was already staked out with names of authors, names of subgenres (the historical novel, the serial, and so on), and names of movements or schools (realism). Despite Balzac's prestige, the novel was indeed perceived as an inferior genre. The Académie française was so suspicious of the novel that it waited until 1863 to welcome a novelist as such, and when it finally did so, it chose Octave Feuillet, the author of novels full of aristocratic characters and elevated sentiments. In the manifesto of realism that was their preface to Germinie Lacerteux (1865), the Goncourts felt obliged to claim for "the Novel" (a necessary capital letter) the status of a "great, serious form."12 But the genre already had its history and its founding fathers. There were those claimed by Flaubert himself, like Cervantes, and also those in every educated mind, like Balzac, Musset, or Lamartine. When Flaubert started to write Madame Bovary there was no novelist "in view," and one found in the same grab bag Feuillet, Murger, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Champfleury, and a good many others, second-raters who are completely forgotten today but who were best-sellers at the time. In this mixed-up world Flaubert knew how to recognize his own. He reacted vehemently to everything that could be termed "genre literature"Ñhis own analogy with genre paintingÑthat is, vaudeville, Dumas-type historical novels, comic opera, and other works that flattered the public by tossing back its own image in the form of a hero psychologically rooted in the daily life of the petty bourgeoisie (CP, 2:358). He reacted just as fiercely to the idealistic platitudes and sentimental effusions in novels like those of the eminently successful Feuillet.
But these reactions did not put Flaubert in the realist camp, who like him contested the first group but who defined themselves against [227]
The space of positions adopted by the writer that the analyst must reconstitute does not appear as such to the writer himself. Otherwise these choices would have to be interpreted as conscious strategies of distinction. The space appears from time to time, and in a fragmentary state, in the moments of doubt concerning the reality of the difference that the writer claims, in his work, and beyond any explicit search for originality. But the threat to artistic identity is never as strong as when alterity assumes the guise of an encounter with an author who occupies an apparently nearby position in the field. This indeed happened when Flaubert's good friend Louis Bouilhet drew his attention to a novel by Champfleury then appearing as a serial and whose subjectÑadultery in the provincesÑwas very close to that of Madame Bovary (CP, 2:562-63). There Flaubert undoubtedly found an opportunity to assert his difference and to become aware of the principle of that difference, that is, the style, or more exactly, in his tone a certain inimitable relationship between the refinement of the style and the extreme platitude of the subject, which he shared with the realists or with the romantics or with the authors of vaudeville entertainments, or, in certain cases, with all three at once.
"Write well about mediocrity" (CP, 2:429). This oxymoron condenses Flaubert's whole aesthetic program and tells a good deal about the impossible situation in which he put himself in trying to reconcile opposites, that is, exigencies and experiences that were ordinarily associated with opposite areas of social space and of the literary field, hence socio-logically incompatible. In fact, on the lowest and most trivial forms of a genre held to be inferior Flaubert imposed the most exacting demands that had ever been advanced for the noblest genre--poetry. The very enterprise challenged the established mode of thought that set prose against poetry, lyricism against vulgarity, and it did so by banning that sacrilege represented by the mixture of genres. At the time the enterprise seemed like folly:
To want to give to prose the rhythm of verse (but keeping it very much prose), and to want to write about ordinary life as one writes history or the epic (without denaturing the subject) is perhaps an absurdity. That's what I wonder sometimes. But perhaps it's also a grand undertaking and very original! [CP, 2:287]
He was indeed putting himself in an impossible situation, and in fact, the whole time he was working on Madame Bovary, Flaubert never [228]
In fact, this mode of thinking cannot expect that minds which are structured according to those very categories that it questions, think the unthinkable. It is striking how the judgments of critics, applying to works the principles of division that those works have demolished, invariably undid the inconceivable combination of opposites by reducing it to one or the other of the opposite terms: thus, the critic of Madame Bovary who deduced the vulgarity of the style from the vulgarity of the objects. Others stressed content, related Madame Bovary to Champfleury's novel on the same subject, and put Flaubert and Dumas fils in the same boat. Then there were those who, more attentive to tone and style, placed Flaubert in the line of formalist poets.
What made Flaubert so radically original, and what confers on his work an incomparable value, is his relationship, at least negative, with the whole literary world in which he acted and whose contradictions and problems he assumed absolutely. So that the only chance of grasping and accounting for the singularity of his creative project is to proceed in exactly the reverse direction of those who sing the litany of Uniqueness. By historicizing him we can understand how he tore himself away from the strict historicity of less heroic fates. The originality of the enterprise only emerges if, instead of annexing him consciously or unconsciously to one or another prestigious position in today's literary field (like the nouveau roman) and to make him an inspired (if unfinished) precursor, this project is reinserted as completely as possible in the historically constituted space within which it was constructed. In other words, taking the point of view of a Flaubert who had not become Flaubert, we try to discover what he had to do and wanted to do in a world that was not yet transformed by what he in fact did, which is to say, the world to which we refer him by treating him as a "precursor." In effect, the familiar world keeps us from understanding, among other things, the extraordinary effort that he had to make, the exceptional resistances that he had to [229]
9. Alexandre Dumas, preface to Le Fils naturel (Paris, 1894), p. 31.
10. Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau, 2 vols. (Paris, 1980), 2: 643-44; further references to this work, abbreviated CP, will be included in the text.
11. Oeuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert: Correspondance, nouvelle edition augmentée, 14 vols. (Paris, 1926-54), 5:300; further references to this work, abbreviated CC, will be included in the text.
12. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, preface to Germinie Lacerteux (Naples, 1968), p. 2.