Cen'est pas une petite affaire que d'être simple.”

—Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 20 Sept, 1851

It has become commonplace in modern readings of Flaubert to observe that the protagonists of his texts are themselves readers, represented as interpreters of the world of the fiction and that the realization of their desires depends upon the ability to understand and manipulate the codes that constitute the intelligible world. From Emma Bovary, whose sensibility and understanding have been formed by the stereotypes of Romantic literature, to the minor characters of L'Education sentimentale, whose intelligence is represented as a Babel of borrowed nineteenth century aesthetic and political theories, to the mythic figures of Salammbô and Mathô, who struggle to interpret an opaque world in terms of only partially intelligible religious systems, the protagonist's consciousness is defined in relation to interpretive discourses brought to bear on the world represented by the text. Since knowledge and desire for Flaubert's protagonists are set forth in terms of the already said or the already experienced, their relation to the world is profoundly mystified and a constant source of irony. While irony demystifies the protagonist's efforts at interpretation by revealing the gap that separates desire and knowledge from the language available to the subject, Flaubert's irony does not allow the reader to establish a stable, secure interpretive vantage point, itself exempt from the mystifications that inevitably befall the protagonists. In short, Flaubert's irony implicates our own interpretations of the interpretive failures of the protagonists in the fiction. Our reading of the character's attempts to make sense of their world constantly calls into question the validity of our own efforts to make sense of the texts, as I have shown elsewhere in a discussion of Madame Bovary; irony leads not to a stable and authoritative decoding, but to a continual process of interpretation.¹

If this mirror play of interpretation is a constant in Flaubert's texts, and I believe it is, should our reading be given over entirely to tracing the shifting supplementarity of meanings, allegorizing our interpretations, locating figure upon figure of figuration? While neither language nor “experience” can ever be understood simply, available to proper and unmediated expression, there are telling moments in Flaubert's texts that might be called moments of simplicity.² These instances, all the more powerful for their rarity, are not transcendent moments of synthesis beyond difference, but rather instances of effective communication within an ironic relationship to language. In the passages that I am thinking about, the resources of language are said to be strained to excess and to yield a fleeting moment that is represented as the possibility of shared emotion or truth. The very commonplace experience of the limits of language and the disjunction between expressive intention and its result yield … a common-place, a locus of communality of language and subject.³ The famous passage in Madame Bovary about the stars, cracked cooking pots, dancing bears and the language of love is an obvious example. Rodolphe, Emma's first lover, cannot respond without irony to her passionate declarations of love, since he has heard so often the same expressions in the service of the same desires from many different lips.

Il s'était tant de fois entendu dire ces choses, qu'elles n'avaient point pour lui rien d'original. Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses; et le charme de la nouveauté peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l'éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage. Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres; comme si la plénitude de l'âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l'exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.⁴

As a naive ironist, Rodolphe has completely missed the point, which is, I believe, that while there is no such thing as a proper language equal to desire and knowledge, there is nonetheless within the alienating figures of discourse (“comme si …”) the possibility of a common place, an excess of language, which runs over, spills (“déborder”) beyond the limits of received ideas and cliché.

A passage remarkably similar to this one occurs in “Un Coeur simple,” when Félicité, who has become deaf, engages in tender dialogues with Loulou, her parrot: “Ils avaient des dialogues, lui, débitant à satiété les trois phrases de son répertoire, et elle, y repondant par des mots sans plus de suite, mais où son coeur s'épanchait. Loulou, dans son isolement, était presque un fils, un amoureux.”⁵

Once again, this passage must be read for its simplicity, beyond, though not outside irony. The objective absurdity of the situation is hardly difficult to discern. The language that provokes Félicité's passionate responses is mechanical, quite literally alien to its “speaker,” a bird; Félicité herself, being deaf, is incapable of receiving and interpreting it. Like the overflowing of meaning and sentiment beyond the ordinary limits of discourse that remains inaccessible to a naive ironist, like Rodolphe, or a naive reader of “Un Coeur simple,” for that matter, this passage suggests the fleeting possibility of a place in language for “the heart.” The same excess as that alluded to in Madame Bovary is said to occur, simply, without syntax “les mots sans plus de suite, mais où son coeur s'épanchait.”

The simplicity of this meaningful excess is akin to the ageless and impossible ideal of a pure, proper expression in which emotion and truth could be transmitted directly, without mediation or figural translation, as though there were recourse to the imperfection of which Mallarmé speaks: “Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque le suprême: penser étant écrire sans accessoires, ni chuchotement, mais tacite encore l'immortelle parole, …”⁶ The relation to simplicity in Flaubert is not outside the “incidental” properties of language, outside of difference and repetition, but, rather, lodged unequivocally in figuration, yet accidentally, unexpectedly it produces an excess (“déborder,” “épancher”).

This fortuitous inconsistency is succinctly asserted in the title of Flaubert's famous short tale: “Un Coeur simple.” In a letter of June 19, 1876, Flaubert described the subject of the story:

L'Histoire d'un coeur simple est tout bonnement le récit d'une vie obscure, celle d'une pauvre fille de campagne, dévote mais mystique, devouée sans exaltation et tendre comme du pain frais. Elle aime successivement un homme, les enfants de sa maîtresse, un neveu, un vieillard qu'elle soigne, puis son perroquet; quand le perroquet est mort, elle le fait empailler et, en mourant à son tour, elle confond le perroquet avec le Saint-Esprit. Cela n'est nullement ironique comme vous le supposez, mais au contraire très sérieux et très triste. Je veux apitoyer, faire pleurer les âmes sensibles, en étant une moimême.⁷

The passage insists upon the tacit understanding between the narrator of the tale and the reader that produces an emotional effect upon the reader, “a performative program (“Cela n'est nullement ironique …”) implying illocutory understanding between the destinaires (“apitoyer, faire pleurer les âmes sensibles”) and destinateur (“en étant une moimême”),” as Ross Chambers notes in his Story and Situation.⁸ The effect that results is outside of conventional irony: “Cela n'est nullement ironique, comme vous le supposez, mais au contraire très serieux et très triste.” Chambers maintains that the emphasis here on the effects of the narration is accompanied in the text itself by an effacement of the grammatical apparatus of narration; the suppression from the title of the word histoire eliminates generic self-reference, and in the body of the text the writing strives to conceal indices that might point too clearly to the act of narration. The story appears to be telling itself. Chambers' remarks are pertinent, I believe, but they do not account for the features of narrative logic and, more generally, of the central protagonist's understanding of the symbolic that produce the effect of simplicity; in what follows, I examine those features and their profound importance to an understanding of the characterization of Félicité. What, then, is the rhetoric of narative simplicity?

The title itself, with the term histoire eliminated, provides some useful indications; it produces that particular relation to figuration that does not blindly dismiss difference in favor of a mythical proper meaning, but inscribes the possibility of the “simple” within the figural. The title asserts a “simple,” and also banal, figure of language: the heart, quite commonly, is a figure for the entire person, and more precisely for the emotions. Specifically, coeur functions as a synecdoche, a form of metonymy, or association of terms according to the contiguity of their signifieds (from the Greek metonymia, meaning a transfer of a name), here the part, coeur, for the whole, “une pauvre fille de campagne.” The term simple suggests naivete, frankness, innocence, spontaneity, modesty, even a profound mysticism going beyond ordinary religious experience, yet it also suggests credulity or even simple-mindedness. As a figural expression, even though commonplace, the title is anything but uncomplex. Simple is opposed to complex, in other words, to the sorts of transfers, derivations, and differences which are the very stuff of figuration.⁹ The protagonist of the story, consequently, can be interpreted not only as signifying a naive emotional relation to the world but as representing a particular relation to language. Impossibly, this relation is represented as both figural and uncomplex, metonymic and simple. The name of the servant, Félicité, as has been often noted, is derived from Latin felicitas, from felix, happy, and is associated not just with contentment but with religious beatitude. Felicity, then, enjoys a particular relation to meaning, that is both banal, simple, and, in Flaubert's and our desacralized world, virtually inconceivable. We needn't take recourse in a “neo-Wordsworthian celebration of imbecility and nonconsciousness” to explain this character, as Jameson contends in an essay on Trois contes.¹⁰ Things are not that simple, since the reader must be available to understanding in ways that are not circumscribed by the antinomy, naive/ironic, and this is “nullement ironique comme vous le supposez …”

Considerable effect is derived in the story from metonymy. This trope is linked from the outset to simplicity, to immediacy of emotion, and to the absence of abstract reflection; it figures the immediacy of the protagonist's relationship to the world of the fiction and to language in general. I certainly do not want to suggest here that there is any interest in reviving the well-known typology proposed by Roman Jakobson, that identifies the master trope of realist fiction as metonymy, and that of symbolism as metaphor. When pressed by readings as subtle, for example, as those of de Man on Proust it is clear that the two figures upon which the typology is based merge and interact.¹¹ It is doubtful at best whether the trope of metonymy is better suited than metaphor to mimetic, realist writing. In a certain sense, of course, as many critics have noted, “Un Coeur simple” is an ongoing reflection and implicit critique of the realist project. Félicité's relation to signs and objects appears to allow for no difference whatsoever, thus actualizing the realist's desire for the mot juste, the perfect representation. Loulou, furthermore, can be read as representing the collapse between signifier and signified, between visual sensual signifiers and textual, linguistic signifiers. Félicité, especially in her association with Loulou, can thus be interpreted as a figure of a certain logic of literary representation according to which words are not distinct from the experience of a fictive, sensual reality. While this reading is not without validity, I think that we must look as well for other effects of metonymy. Flaubert's tale systematically uses that figure to characterize Felicité's sentimental and cognitive relations to the world and this is invariably presented as a most uncomplex way of relating to things. I would like to consider two aspects of this metonymic relationship to the world represented in the story. The first has to do with the way in which Félicité understands the sequence of events in her life, that is, how the protagonist interprets narrative. The second concerns how Félicité makes associative connections, how she relates to people and objects, to a parrot and to the Holy Ghost.

Félicité's relation to narratives of desire and social order, referred to as histoire, is established in the beginning of chapter two in which the story of her first and only love affair is recounted. The story serves as a paradigm of all of Félicité's subsequent sentimental attachments; it is the narrative of separation and loss and it thematizes Félicité's subordination and her alienation from social order. “Her own” story of desire is a pure repetition of other narratives of disappointments in love: “Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d'amour …” The story, of course, is about misplaced faith, deception and betrayal. From the outset of the tale there is no active role for her in narratives of socially effective action, of histoire, considered in the broad senses of the term, as knowing how or being able to do (“savoir” or “pouvoir faire”) in any arena other than that of domestic time and space.

A remarkable thing about Félicité's awareness of the world of others is that she understands various events only as they have an immediate impact upon her, not as linked to any overriding past or future pattern integrating the personal and the social. This indifference to history, social and moral, is exemplified by a second passage in chapter 2. She accompanies Madame Aubain and her children on a trip to the seashore, driven by M. Liébard in his cart. Liébard recounts the lives of the people who own the properties adjacent to the road: “La jument de Liébard, à de certains endroits s'arrêtait tout à coup. Il attendait patiemment qu'elle se remit en marche; et il parlait des personnes dont les propriétiés bordaient la route, ajoutant à leur histoire des réflexions morales. Ainsi, au milieu de Touques, comme on passait sous des fenêtres entourées de capucine, il dit, avec un haussement d'épaules: ‘En voilà une Mme Lehoussais, qui au lieu de prendre un jeune homme …’ Félicité n'entendit pas le reste; …” (28-9). Because Félicité assumes no place in social and moral anecdotes, and implicitly, in the narrative order in which they are recounted these stories hold no interest for her at all. This indifference prevails even in a context that recalls her former love, for the Mme Lehoussais alluded to here is the rich widow whom Théodore had married after his brief encounter with Félicité. Her logic of narrative, in the words of one passage, is “naturel”: after her mistress dies of pneumonia, Félicité too is diagnosed as having the disease: “‘Ah! comme Madame,’ trouvant naturel de suivre sa maîtresse” (57). Earlier in the story, Mme Aubain's excessive grief at the absence of her daughter seems to Félicité as tout simple. (39). Simple and naturel signify the same ignorance of complexity and lack of interpretive distance on events. Similarly, the episode in which Félicité saves the children and her mistress from an enraged bull, whom they surprise in a pasture as they return from an outing, is never associated in Félicité's mind with any transcendent significance; her action does not take its place metaphorically in a general scheme of social values: “Cet événement, pendant bien des années, fut un sujet de conversation à Pont-l'Evêque. Félicité n'en tira aucun orgueil, ne se doutant même pas qu'elle eut rien fait d'héroique” (28). An event impresses itself upon the protagonist because of the intensity of its emotive impact upon her, and, by and large, events remain unassimilated by any more complex interpretation. While this logic is implicit throughout the story, it is most clearly suggested in this passage that serves the technical function of a narrative “summary:”

Puis des années s'écoulèrent, toutes pareilles et sans autres épisodes que le retour des grandes fetes: Pâques, l'Assomption, la Toussaint. Des événements intérieurs faisaient une date, où l'on se reportait plus tard. Ainsi, en 1825, deux vitriers badigeonnèrent le vestibule; en 1827, une portion du toit, tombant dans la cour, faillit tuer un homme, L'été de 1828, ce fut à Madame d'offrir le pain bénit; Bourais, vers cette époque s'absenta mystérieusement; et les anciennes connaissances peu à peu s'en allèrent: Guyot, Liébard, Mme Lechaptois, Robelin, l'oncle Gremanville, paralysé depuis longtemps.

(45)

What is missing in this passage, of course, is a summation from Félicité's point of view of the meaning of events or the representation of such a point of view by a narrator. Narrative meaning for Félicité is not arrived at through metaphoric synthesis, in which the protagonist groups like events according to their similarities at a higher level of significance.¹² Félicité's relationship to history remains within the uncomplex schema of the chronicle; there is no evaluation of the relative importance of events and there is no representation from her point of view of a general social context, forming the background against which the specific occurrence is assessed.¹³ The logic of narrative connectives is reduced to its most elementary form; it is the logic of the list. Rather than sequence and causality merging, as they do in traditional narrative, with prior events assuming the logical role of motivating subsequent actions simply because they occur earlier in the story, as Barthes and others have remarked, sequence remains in Félicité's mind strictly temporal. Narrative sequence is divided into discrete episodes in which the overriding significance of events is never theorized as part of the narration itself. For Felicité the personal is not distinct from the universal for the simple reason that she does not perceive the difference; the meaningful event is naturel or tout simple.

There is one moment in the story in which Félicité does reflect upon the important events of her past and links them according to the feelings of sadness and loss that they have inspired in her. After the death of her parrot she takes the bird's remains to Honfleur where she will have Loulou stuffed. Being deaf, as she approaches Honfleur she fails to hear a coach that overtakes her rapidly from behind and she is thrown into a ditch by a lash of the angry coachman's whip. As she takes up her journey again, she sees the town from above and pauses: “Arrivée au sommet d'Ecquemauville, elle aperçut les lumières de Honfleur qui scintillaient dans la nuit comme une quantité d'étoiles; la mer, plus loin, s'étalait confusément. Alors une faiblesse l'arrêta; et la misère de son enfance, la déception du premier amour, le départ de son neveu, la mort de Virginie, comme les flots d'une marée, revinrent à la fois, et, lui montant à la gorge, l'étouffaient” (52). Misère, déception, départ, mort, all indicate separation and loss, and although the emotions arise in a moment of retrospection, that moment is uncomplicated by any meditation on causality or ultimate purpose.

Just as the past for Félicité merges seamlessly with the present, she has absolutely no conception of the future. The obsession with predictive narratives that characterizes the restless desires of so many of Flaubert's characters, notably an Emma Bovary, or Frédéric Moreau, and in a quirky way, Bouvard and Pécuchet, is absolutely lacking in Félicité; she is unable to project the future according to any interpretive schema based on an understanding of a narrative pattern derived from past events.

Félicité's understanding of the world, her interpretations of places, things and signs, is given over almost exclusively to metonymic relations, presented by the text in the simplest forms. When told that the ship on which her nephew, Victor, set sail has arrived in Havana, Félicité wishes to know what the place is like; she imagines only that the city is filled with cigar smoke: “A cause des cigares, elle imaginait la Havane un pays où l'on ne fait pas autre chose que de fumer, et Victor circulait parmi les nègres dans un nuage de tabac.”

She asks M. Bourais, the pharmacist who represents the voice of science, for further information:

Il atteignit son atlas, puis commença des explications sur les longitudes; et il avait un beau sourire de cuistre devant l'ahurissement de Félicité. Enfin, avec son porte-crayon, il indiqua dans les découpures d'une tache ovale un point noir, imperceptible, en ajoutant: “Voici.” Elle se pencha sur la carte; ce réseau de lignes coloriées fatiguait sa vue, sans lui rien apprendre; et Bourais l'invitant à dire ce qu l'embarrassait, elle le pria de lui montrer la maison où demeurait Victor. Bourais leva les bras, il éternua, rit énormément; une candeur pareille excitait sa joie; et Félicité n'en comprenait pas le motif,—elle qui s'attendait peut-etre à voir jusqu'au portrait de son neveu, tant son intelligence était bornée.

(40)

For Félicité, word and thing must show an immediate and necessary relationship; since cigars come from Havana, the city is heavy with cigar smoke. The abstractions of a map mean nothing to her unless there is a possible visual similarity, what semioticians call an iconic relation, between the representation and the object it signifies, hence her concern for the location of Victor's house. In a more general sense, she is represented as having a unique capacity to experience the similarity of related objects as though without difference. At the funeral of Virginie, she imagines that her nephew is being buried at the same time: “Elle songeait à son neveu, et, n'ayant pu lui rendre ces honneurs, avait un surcroît de tristesse, comme si on l'eût enterré avec l'autre” (44). It is important to stress the general significance and prevalence of metonymy in Félicité's simplified associative system. The extensive passages in which this figure comes into play, those concerning the Holy Ghost and the parrot, should not be seen as somehow different in kind from others in which there is doubtless less at stake than there is in Félicité's visions of the Holy Spirit. The conflation of the parrot and the Holy Ghost is not a singular occurrence, an example of the stunning immediacy of the sacred, or of a dotty hallucination; it partakes of the simplicity that is inscribed throughout the tale.

The confusion between the Holy Ghost and the parrot occurs in chapter 4, but it is prepared by the patterns that I have discussed, disseminated throughout the text and more immediately by a passage in chapter 3 in which Félicité listens to stories of the Bible and transposes them “literally” into daily events of her own existence. The suppression of the difference between the everyday and the sacred in her interpretation of the story is made possible by her associations with the material objects and events spoken of in the story with those present in her own life. “Les semailles, les moissons, les pressoirs, toutes ces choses familières dont parle l'Evangile, se trouvaient dans sa vie; le passage de Dieu les avait sanctifiées; et elle aima plus tendrement les agneaux par amour de l'Agneau, les colombes à cause de Saint-Esprit.” In this passage, the abstraction required to imagine the Holy Ghost, at once bird, fire and breath, puts this figure provisionally beyond her. She can only make conjectural associations with her immediate and material world: “C'est peut-être sa lumière qui voltige la nuit aux bords des marécages, son haleine qui pousse les nuées, sa voix qui rend les cloches harmonieuses …” (34). The priest's interpretive narratives of the holy stories are a matter of profound indifference to her: “Quant aux dogmes, elle n'y comprenait rien, ne tacha même pas de comprendre.” As noted before, Félicité lacks the capacity to process narratives metaphorically. The ability to imagine the holy Ghost will await the fortuitous arrival of the parrot Loulou, who furnishes the material component that will eventually enable her to assimilate the divine as real.

In a passage immediately preceding that in which Félicité conflates the Holy Ghost with Loulou, there is a description of a bizarre collection of objects that she assembles in her room to preserve the past: in this strange collection, the profane and the sacred intermix and merge so that the distinction between them loses all value. The objects represent perfectly for her the person with whom they are associated, linked for her in an unmediated relation. Unlike the fetishist, who acknowledges that his favored object is a substitute, Félicité makes no such derived associations. The negative component of the fetish, which as Freud has noted, is both a denial as well as an affirmation of the presence of the lost object, falls away; the object for Félicité is pure affirmation, an impossibly literal figure.

Cet endroit, où elle admettait peu de monde, avait l'air tout à la fois d'une chapelle et d'un bazar, tant il contenait d'objets religieux et de choses hétéroclites.

Une grande armoire gênait pour ouvrir la porte. En face de la fenêtre surplombant le jardin, un oeil-de-boeuf regardait la cour; une table, près du lit de sangle, supportait un pot à l'eau, deux peignes, et un cube de savon bleu dans une assiette ébréchée. On voyait contre les murs: des chapelets, des médailles, plusieurs bonnes Vierges, un bénitier en noix de coco; sur la commode, couverte d'un drap comme un autel, la boite en coquillages que lui avait donnée Victor; puis un arrosoir et un ballon, des cahiers d'écriture, la géographie en estampes, une paire de bottines; et au clou du miroir, accroché par ses rubans, le petit chapeau de peluche! Félicité poussait même ce genre de respect si loin, qu'elle conservait une des redingotes de Monsieur …

(53)

The archeological museum in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, which this collection resembles in condensed form, has been studied by Eugenio Donato.¹⁴ The museum is based on certain epistemological assumptions, the most important of which is that the display of artifacts can be ordered as a representation of human reality and history. This display presumes that each object can be linked to an integral object and that all be included in a narrative reconstruction of history. Félicité, however, short circuits the process of abstraction, to arrive at the presence of the past in the fragment itself; her relation to the objects in the collection is fundamentally a-historical. As in the case of her relation to narrative, she does not translate discrete components into a metaphoric schema.

The stuffed parrot assumes a prominent place in this collection: “Au moyen d'une planchette, Loulou fut établi sur un corps de cheminée qui avançait dans l'appartement. Chaque matin, en s'éveillant, elle l'apercevait à la clarté de l'aube, et se rappelait alors les jours disparus, et d'insignifiantes actions jusqu'en leurs moindres détails, sans douleur, pleine de tranquillité” (53-4).

The passage in which Félicité assimilates the Holy Ghost to her parrot is unusual in the story: it describes in detail Félicité's translation of meaning from one object to another; the process passes through the abstractions that metaphorically link representations perceived as different, and arrives finally at the metonymic assimilation of each component. She first sees the stained glass window representing the Holy Ghost, notes a resemblance to Loulou, which is later reinforced by her viewing a naive engraving of the Spirit, an “image d'Epinal,” that she recognizes as an “authentic” portrait of Loulou. “A l'église, elle contemplait toujours le Saint-Esprit, et observa qu'il avait quelquechose du perroquet. Sa ressemblance lui parut encore plus manifeste sur une image d'Epinal, représentant le baptême de Notre-Seigneur. Avec ses ailes de pourpre et son corps d'émeraude, c'était vraiment le portrait de Loulou” (54).

Quite exceptionally, the passage remains within the logic of representation, in which the similarity between terms is perceived as a likeness within difference. It is not until Félicité buys the “image d'Epinal” and places it adjacent to Loulou that parrot and spirit are assimilated, and then, seeing them together: “Ils s'associèrent dans sa pensée, le perroquet se trouvant sanctifié par ce rapport avec le Saint-Esprit, qui devenait plus vivant à ses yeux et intelligible. Le Père, pour s'énoncer, n'avait pu choisir une colombe, puisque ces bêtes-là n'ont pas de voix, mais plutôt un des ancêtres de Loulou. Et Félicité priait en regardant l'image, mais de temps à autre se tournait un peu vers l'oiseau.”

The representation of Félicité's action “literalizes” the metonymic process; contiguity of association is accompanied by literal contiguity of the objects, as the engraving of the Holy Ghost is placed next to Loulou. While there remains something incomplete in her mind about metaphoric likeness (“il avait quelque chose du perroquet …”), incomplete and imbued with figural difference, the assimilation of the representation and the object becomes possible when the two are placed next to one another. Two pages later in the same chapter, following the death of her mistress and the announcement that the house is to be sold at auction, there is no longer any trace of figural difference in Félicité's perception of the parrot-Holy Ghost: “Ce qui la désolait principalement, c'était d'abandonner sa chambre,—si commode pour le pauvre Loulou. En l'enveloppant d'un regard d'angoisse, elle implorait le Saint-Esprit, et contracta l'habitude idolâtre de dire ses oraisons agenouillée devant le perroquet. Quelquefois, le soleil entrant par la lucarne frappait son oeil de verre, et en faisait jaillir un grand rayon lumineux qui la mettait en extase” (56).

In the final chapter of the tale just before her death, Félicité is taken by delirium and, in the end hallucinates. She has given the parrot to the celebration of the Fête Dieu, Corpus christi, the festival of the Eucharist, to be placed on the altar in the procession. As she dies she believes she sees a giant parrot in the heavens: “et, quand elle exhala son dernier souffle, elle crut voir, dans les cieux entrouverts, un perroquet gigantesque, planant au-dessus de sa tête” (61).

The ending makes possible an entirely superfluous rational interpretation of Félicité's vision; it could be said to be the effect of her hallucination. This is of course true, but utterly beside the point, since Félicité has made such associations throughout the text on a daily basis; for her the supernatural is “tout simple.” Representing the death of the protagonist, the ending of “Un Coeur simple” is quite traditional, but it does not provide the reader with a secure understanding of how to interpret the event. The final episode is both an exalted moment of religious ecstasy and the last delirium of a blind, deaf and dotty old woman. We must read simultaneously in the register of irony, with an acute awareness of both the aptness and the incongruities of the word made parrot, and beyond irony, accepting the possibility of both complex and simplified interpretation … “nullement ironique comme vous le supposez.” The reading of “Un Coeur simple” that I have proposed here would accommodate ironic doubleness of meaning, yet make a place for the possibility of the simple. If Félicité represents the inevitable failures of certain aspects of the realist project, that interpretation of the tale is complicated by the necessity of reading figures simply. This is a complex interpretation that does not deny ironic duplicities and the workings of discursive mediation, but also, and paradoxically, makes a place for simplicity, a figure that we know to be an impossible immediacy. While we remain wary of the aporia of language and of the duplicities specific to realist representation, we need also to acquiesce to instances of immediacy, of felicity, which are produced throughout Flaubert's text.

Notes

1. N. Wing, “Emma's Stories: Narrative, Repetition, and Desire in Madame Bovary,” in The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 41-77.

2. See Gérard Genette, “Silences de Flaubert,” in Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966) 223-243. Genette discusses the interruption of narrative by silence, quietness that overcomes the protagonists and a pause in action, in moments represented as intense subjective experiences. This is clearly one way that the text subverts its own ironic duplicities. See also, Marc Bertrand, “Parole et silence dans les Trois contes de Flaubert,” Stanford French Review 1.2 (Fall, 1977):191-204.

3. This commonplace, as I will show, is radically different from the effects produced by cliché in Flaubertian bêtise, the unconscious citation, in which a protagonist unwittingly reproduces as his/her own a discourse belonging to the doxa, parroting as individual what is recognizably in general circulation. For a recent and excellent discussion of cliché and stupidity in Flaubert, see Christopher Prendergast, “Flaubert: The Stupidity of Mimesis,” in The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 180-211. See also Jefferson Humphries, “Aphorism and Criticism: Deconstruction and the Commonplace Tradition,” in The Puritan and the Cynic: The Literary Moralist in America and France. (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 56-74.

4. Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Garnier, 1961) 178-9.

5. Flaubert, “Un Coeur simple,” Trois contes (Paris, Gallimard, “Folio,” 1966) 51. All references to “Un Coeur simple” are to this edition.

6. S. Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, “Editions de la Pléïade,” 1945) 363-4.

7. Quoted in Préface à la vie d'écrivain: Extraits de la correspondance de Gustave Flaubert. G. Bollème, ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1963) 272-3.

8. Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 127.

9. We can assume that Flaubert was well aware of the resonances of the term simple in classical and medieval rhetoric and in medieval theology. Simplicitas is both a figure of rhetoric, the artful use of common speech, and a religious practice whereby the imitation of Christ's rectitude facilitates salvation. In rhetoric, simplicitas is an artifice designed to imitate simplicity, calculated to convince the listener by imitation of common, everyday speech. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. H. Butler (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1976) 81, 521, on the “felicissimus sermo,” the happiest use of ordinary language. E. Gilson, La Philosophie au moyen-âge (Paris: Payot, 1963) discusses Saint Pierre Damien's De sancta simplicitate and the critique of philosophical discourse and reasoning as a means of access to salvation and the privileging of the exemplary lives of the simple. Clearly one must distinguish between the protagonist Félicité's unironic relation to the world of signs, in which the naive, the un-rational and the mystical merge, and Flaubert's rhetorical use of the figure of simplicity. The language of Flaubert's text, however, does not artfully feign an immediate relation to the simple, and this is the crucial issue, since the reader is drawn into a language that must be read as both “literal” and figurative, the literal being derived as supplementary to the figural. I wish to thank my colleague, Alexandre Leupin, for pointing out to me precise textual references to the figure simplicitas.

10. See F. Jameson, “Flaubert's Libidinal Historicism,” in Flaubert and Postmodernism, N. Schor and H. Majewski, ed., (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) 82.

11. See P. de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) 3-19.

12. Chambers, Story and Situation, notes the absence of hierarchy in narrative in this story, 127.

13. See H. White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in On Narrative, W. J. T. Mitchell, ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 1-24.

14. E. Donato, “The Museum's Furnace: Note Toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard et Pécuchet,” in Textual Strategies, J. Harari, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) 213-238. See also my “Detail and Narrative Dalliance in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet,” in French Forum 13.1 (1988): 47-56.