[In the following excerpt, first published in 1974, Culler asserts that bewilderment is experienced by both the characters in the unreal setting of Carthage and the readers of the novel itself. The critic theorizes that the characters' gradual attachment to the divine as a source of meaning and structure is portrayed so that the role of the sacred in human society is laid bare for the reader to dissect.]

This is one of the basic problems confronting the reader of Flaubert: how is he to make sense of novels which thematize the difficulties of making sense and especially ridicule attempts to read life as if it were a novel, in accordance with those very operations which the reader is engaged in performing? In works like Madame Bovary and L'Education sentimentale our knowledge of the world provides some guidance, assuring us that Emma and Frédéric are foolish and that we may therefore feel safe. But in Salammbô the problem is especially acute because the characters, who do not seem to be mediocre or foolish, are engaged in a desperate attempt to understand their relation to their situation, and our lack of knowledge of the setting, not even Greece or Rome but Carthage, deprives us of any external standards which might permit confident judgment of their interpretations. Here, more than in any other of Flaubert's works, the reader finds in the activity and bewilderment of the characters a metaphor for his own process of reading.¹ The characters, that is to say, are trying to understand themselves and their world just as the reader is; they are not committed to language but are trying to find a language, and the rebuffs they encounter or solutions they discover offer an explicit thematization of the problems of reading.

That the book defies comprehension has become a critical commonplace. Sainte-Beuve wondered what was the point and why it had been undertaken. Jean Rousset finds it ‘an enigmatic book’; Dennis Porter sees it as ‘un livre sur rien’, without meaning except as a manifesto of aestheticism.² Lukács asks ‘what can a world thus re-awakened mean to us?’, finds a ‘lack of relation between the human tragedy … and the political action’, and speaks of a plot that is ‘lifeless, not only because it is cluttered up with the descriptions of inessential objects, but because it has no discernible connection with any concrete form of popular life that we may experience.’³ Thibaudet, calling it a novel ‘so unusual in appearance and so detached from life’, comes closer than the others to defining its mysterious attraction:

Flaubert wanted to write a gratuitous work which would support itself purely by the force of its style, and which, instead of bringing history towards us, would drag it violently away, to the edge of a desert, so as to make this portion of humanity into a block of pure past, a dead star like the moon, under whose influence Salammbô comes. And it is precisely this hallucinatory effect of a dead thing which has helped to give Salammbô its symbolic hold on the imagination.’⁴

Distanced from us, as the gratuitous reconstruction of a world not our own nor even part of our past, the work seems deliberately to aspire towards what Lukács calls the ‘psuedo-monumentality’ of objects alienated from the inner life of characters and readers. The world of the novel, like the novel itself, is strange and monstrous, cruel and immobile, suffused, as Brombert says, with a ‘combination of violence and tedium.’⁵

The readers, consequently, have the same problem as the characters: how are they to organize and relate to this strange world? what sort of connection can be made between the inner and outer, between the psychological drama and the historical and political circumstances?

The characters certainly feel this strangeness and estrangement: they stand, gaping and bewildered, ébahis and béants, looking at one another and at the scenes before them. The Mercenaries watch the Carthaginians sacrificing their own children, ‘béants d'horreur’, trying to fathom the meaning of this barbarous behaviour. When Mâtho steals the sacred veil of Carthage and brings it to Salammbô's room, the two of them—enemy leader and daughter of the Carthaginian general—‘restèrent béants à se regarder’, wondering what each represents to the other and what their encounter means. Vision involves a recognition of strangeness and a desire to find ways of overcoming it.⁶

The opening scene of the novel is an elegantly proleptic dramatization both of the problem of understanding and of the principal modes of response which the novel will develop. The spectacle of the Mercenaries feasting in Hamilcar's gardens is an orgy of gluttony, drunkenness, and general destructiveness which affords little meaning until two interpreters appear. The first, Spendius, a slave whom the soldiers have freed, immediately grasps the possible political significance of the events and offers a reading of it: reminding them of their strength, he suggests that they should be drinking from the cups of the Sacred Legion and thus brings to the fore the underlying political tension between a wealthy and snobbish Carthage and the Mercenaries who have been hired to do their fighting but are as yet unpaid. This mode of interpretation continues when he accompanies Mâtho on a tour of the grounds: ‘I can show you a room where there is a gold bar beneath each tile’, there for the taking. And after Mâtho's rejection of this suggestion he assumes that his goal was rather the pillage of Carthage, but he has to take the uncomprehending Mâtho by the arm and point out the wealthy city, defenceless before them, and the band of Mercenaries whose hatred was now aroused. ‘Do you understand me, soldier?’ he continues to a mute Mâtho. ‘We shall walk draped in purple, bathe in perfume surrounded by slaves.’ Remember the hardships you have undergone in the service of Carthage. Think of the wealth and happiness that can be yours. We are strong; they are weak and divided. Command and you will be obeyed. Carthage is ours for the taking (I, 699). [Oeuvres complètes]

Spendius' interpretive discourse is based on an understanding of the realities of power and an assumption of their over-riding importance. His speech is related to action and is a mode of duplicity and intrigue, but he acquires a certain ascendancy by virtue of his ‘understanding’ of the world.

The other interpreter, and indeed the cause of Mâtho's inattention to Spendius' reasoning, is of course Salammbô, who appears on the steps of the palace, high above the feasting soldiers, as a mysterious and unknown power—‘Personne encore ne la connaissait.’ Coming down the steps towards them, she stops: ‘Immobile et la tête basse, elle regardait les soldats.’ When she descends among them they draw back, sensing ‘quelque chose des Dieux’ which envelops her, and she herself, seeking understanding, seems to ‘regarder tout au loin au delà des espaces terrestres.’ When she first speaks it is not to the soldiers but invoking the sacred fish which they have killed. They do not understand, of course, but

Ils s'ébahissaient de sa parure; mais elle promena sur eux tous un long regard épouvanté, puis s'enfonçant la tête dans les épaules en écartant les bras, elle répéta plusieurs fois: ‘Qu'avez-vous fait! qu'avez-vous fait.’

(I, 697)⁷

The Mercenaries do not know, for their relationship to the sacred is as confused as is the readers'. What does killing and eating the sacred fish mean? By way of an answer Salammbô invokes a religious hierarchy and begins to chant sacred tales. The Mercenaries, of course, do not understand, but they sense something of the potency of the sacred, and open-mouthed, held by her, ‘ils tâchaient de saisir ces vagues histoires qui se balançaient devant leur imagination, à travers l'obscurité des théogonies, comme des fantômes dans des nuages’ (I, 698).⁸

These are the two principal modes of ordering that the book offers: a language of politics which accepts religion as a persuasive device but denies it any status as an interpretive system, and a language of ritual and religious symbols whose relation to action is more problematic but which seems to the major characters, Salammbô and Mâtho, a way of coming to understand their experience. Mâtho, trying to explain what has happened to him in his encounter with Salammbô, wondering what force has overtaken him and come to govern his activities, reads himself as cursed and takes Salammbô as the embodiment of the Goddess. Salammbô, whose life has so far been ordered by her role as servant of the Goddess, participates in a similar sacramental reading of experience and casts Mâtho in the appropriate sacred role.

The terms in which these characters come to see one another can be adopted, almost without alteration, as a critical reading of the novel, which confirms the close relationship between the characters and the readers as interpreters. Jean Rousset, for example, stressing that ‘the book should be read on the plane of myth’, writes:

Salammbô, the human star, has sworn herself to Tanit, the moon, whom she worships at night on the upper terrace, while Mâtho, siderial god, diurnal hero, is associated with Moloch, the god of the sun. This symbolism determines their behaviour: … they attract and repel one another, linked each to each by a blind will which they obey without understanding … Set above and apart from the groups that they dominate, they live alone between heaven and earth.⁹

But the reader accustomed to Flaubertian irony may well wonder whether he should be so quick to accept the language in which characters choose to view themselves. If we do not allow Emma Bovary with impunity to identify herself with novelistic heroines, should we not be a little more sceptical of the language which characters use to identify themselves with heavenly bodies or gods? Certainly there is much which suggests the necessity of an ironic view of religious discourse: when the Carthaginians crucify captured Mercenaries we are told, ‘the sanction of the gods was not lacking, for on all sides crows swooped down from the heavens’ (I, 747). The conjunction, as so often in Flaubert, seems to turn irony against individual or communal attempts at thinking, and we are inclined to discover irony here because of our reluctance to admit such savagery as something sacred. Similarly, when the Carthaginians are slaughtering their own children and we are told that ‘the God's appetite, however, was not sated. He wanted more’ (I, 781), we are likely to want to distance ourselves from that language.

Even in the opening scene the attempts at a sacramental reading are put to the test of irony by a narrative voice which implies the possibility of a purely sexual interpretation. After speaking to the Mercenaries, Salammbô drops her lyre and is silent,

et, pressant son coeur à deux mains, elle resta quelques minutes les paupières closes à savourer l'agitation de tous ces hommes.

Mâtho le Libyen se penchait vers elle. Involontairement elle s'en approcha, et, poussée par la reconnaissance de son orgueil, elle lui versa dans une coupe d'or un long jet de vin pour se reconcilier avec l'armée.

(I, 698)¹⁰

A soldier provides the interpretation: ‘in our country when a woman gives a soldier a drink she is inviting him to share her bed.’ And with that a fight breaks out, provoked by a Numidian chief's sexual jealousy.

Indeed, one common critical approach assumes the priority of the sexual adventure and reads all else as illusion to be ironically deflated. Lukács speaks of Salammbô herself as ‘a heightened image, a decorative symbol, of the hysterical longings and torments of middle-class girls in large cities’, and finds the historical and mythical elements ‘no more than a pictorial frame within which a purely modern story is unfolded.’¹¹ Salammbô's language is pure delusion; her problem is one of romantic longing and sexual frustration. Sherrington, taking this position to its extreme, argues that there is nothing in the novel ‘to suggest that Salammbô and her contemporaries were any less likely than Emma to be mistaken about their role in life simply because they lived in more exotic surroundings.’¹² The critic's task in interpreting the book is to find ‘the reality under the illusion’, and he has no doubt about what that reality is: Salammbô's desires are ‘clearly sexually based, and exacerbated by surrounding physical conditions, such as strong perfumes, fasting, and other religious rites.’¹³ In our superior knowledge and freedom from superstition we can see that ‘every “supernatural” event … has an ordinary physiological or psychological explanation’, and Flaubert's narrative strategies, as vehicles of his most profound intention, are devoted to showing ‘people confused because they are unwilling or unable to look at facts.’¹⁴

Such a simplistic purpose would do Flaubert little credit, and one might well wonder why he should have bothered to resuscitate Carthage if it was only to show that Carthaginians were prey to religious delusion and refused to face facts. If the novel is read in this reductive way it becomes fundamentally uninteresting, and nothing illustrates the novel's complexity better than the two-faced role which Sherrington is forced to adopt in order to discuss it intelligently. With respect to the characters he plays Gradgrind—‘in this life we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’—and sneers at their attempts to order their lives in symbolic terms, but he is quite willing to use precisely these terms in his own symbolic reading of the novel. Thus, while the characters are deluded when they identify themselves or one another with the solar and lunar deities, the critic can write that ‘the sunrise passage is, indeed, quite remarkable in its symbolism’, that ‘the sun sets on Mâtho's death, as it is now rising on his strength and vigour … in a long series of parallels between Mâtho and Moloch’, that the Mercenary army leaves Carthage ‘marching by moonlight (i.e. Tanit—gentleness, in contrast with the last scene).’¹⁵ Mâtho is deluded in identifying Salammbô with Tanit,¹⁶ but the critic may see Salammbô's pallor as ‘a symbol of the moral leprosy of Carthage.’¹⁷ The mythical terms into which Salammbô and Mâtho translate the mystery they sense in each other's presence is but an ‘elaborate superstructure’, but the critic is allowed to discover, in a scene which ‘at bottom’ represents ‘an enflamed male paying an illicit nocturnal visit to a lady's bedroom’, an elaborate symbolic pattern: ‘the blue net, the bed suspended from the roof, the white clothing, all place an almost embarrassing emphasis on the Salammbô—Tanit parallel’, and Mâtho's appearance in a flash of fire and mention of the sunrise give ‘more than adequate prominence to the other half of the symbolism.’¹⁸

In order to make sense of the novel Sherrington must use the language and imagery which he treats as illusion when the characters use it, and this illustrates not merely the blindness of a critical discourse which fails to reflect on the implications of its own interpretive methods, but the dangers of trying to simplify Flaubert's irony. For if the novel is to have any value, the judgments one passes on characters' attempts to make sense of things will come to apply also to one's own attempts to make sense of the book. Critical discourse cannot therefore allow itself to remain blind to the relationship between its own interpretive procedures and those displayed or exercised within the novel itself. As Sherrington implicitly recognizes, the novel does present us with all the material for mythic and symbolic reading, and we cannot sneer at the characters' attempts to interpret their lives in these terms without sneering at ourselves by implication. ‘If such attempts are regarded by the reader as metaphors for his own activity they cannot be treated entirely ironically’,¹⁹ for he too, as critics' remarks on the enigmatic character of the book show, possesses no certain principles of intelligibility. The novel subjects religious discourse to multiple ironies, but we cannot reject that discourse entirely without leaving too much in the novel unexplained:

The reader is in no better position than the characters to discover the ‘reality’ behind their situations. Or rather, he is only quantitatively better off, in that he has access to all situations and all points of view; but this does not provide him with an overall principle for making the situations intelligible. The only reality behind the chaotic appearances of the novel is the reality of the activity of reading it. Hence the pattern which takes most account of the resemblance between the situation of the reader and that of the characters seems the nearest approach to what is really happening in the novel.²⁰

If one attempts to create a pattern which takes account of the resemblance one will find that all modes of understanding have their limitations but that some are more limited than others in their failure to deal successfully with the more important aspects of characters' experience. Spendius, who is a surrogate for the critic determined to view religious and symbolic discourse with irony and to get behind it to the political and psychological reality, does not succeed in understanding the extraordinary power of Mâtho and Salammbô or the nature of their relationship. When Mâtho is suffering in his tent, convinced that a curse has been laid upon him and unable to escape the dominating thought of Salammbô (‘Her eyes burn me, she envelopes me, she pierces me’), Spendius tries to find cures in his modes of understanding: ‘Come on, you're weeping like a coward! Aren't you ashamed to let a woman make you suffer so!’ But he is clearly wrong to compare Mâtho, as he does, to the young men who anxiously sought his help in the days when he was a pimp. Don't be silly, comes the reply. ‘Do you think I'm a child?’ I've had hundreds of women, ‘but this one …’ (I, 703-4). Spendius again misinterprets, thinking in the language of politics and taking Salammbô's position as daughter of the enemy general to be the ‘reality’: ‘If she weren't the daughter of Hamilcar …’ ‘No!’ cries Mâtho, ‘she is not like the other daughters of men’; when she appeared the torches waned; there emanated from her whole being something sweeter than wine and more terrible than death. ‘Elle marchait cependant, et puis elle s'est arrêtée.’ If we accept Spendius's mode of understanding we are unable to read any of the wonder of this last sentence, nor are we able later to account for Mâtho's power and effectiveness as a leader when ‘the power of Moloch flowed through him.’ Whatever plots Spendius may form on the basis of his fallen understanding, he cannot act without Mâtho, and the mysterious power which his speech cannot explain determines, in fact, the ‘reality’ of Spendius's position.

Another reductive reading which, like Sherrington's, identifies Salammbô's desire as purely sexual, is offered by old Giscon who, as a prisoner in the Mercenary camp, heard the scene in Mâtho's tent when Salammbô recovered the sacred veil: ‘I heard you gasping with love like a harlot’; I wish I could cry out to your father, ‘Come see your daughter in the Barbarian's arms! To please him she has put on the garment of the Goddess, and in yielding her body to him she has abandoned, along with the glory of your name, the honour of the Gods, the vengeance of the nation, and the very safety of Carthage!’ (I, 761). We know this to be an imperfect understanding: whatever her sexual motives Salammbô has come to recover the veil and without that sacred errand would have had neither the will nor the courage to venture into the Mercenary camp.

Indeed, one must remember that Salammbô's expedition to the tent was part of a plan conceived by the priest Schahabarim and which he hoped would save both his country and his faith (I, 753). The most learned man in Carthage, he approaches the sacred in much the same way as the reader, with a kind of curious detachment born of scepticism and a desire for secure belief which would make things intelligible: ‘the more he doubted Tanit the more he wished to believe in her.’ And though he does, in presenting the plan to Salammbô, translate into sacred terms what he expects will be a sexual adventure, hesitating and seeking circumlocutions when Salammbô asks how exactly she is to get Mâtho to give her the veil, the success of the venture is ironic proof of the efficacy of the sacred. Schahabarim's ‘tu seras humble et soumise à son désir qui est l'ordre du ciel’, and ‘the Gods will dispose’ are meant as ironic statements concealing a sexual bargain; but in fact the encounter does take place at a mythic level, though myth be severely tested by the habitual techniques of Flaubert's irony.

This scene in Mâtho's tent is the central episode of the book in that for a moment the political and psychological dramas are fused; it is crucial also to our determination of the status of religious symbols and hence of the relationship between the sexual and the sacred. The setting itself—an enemy camp on the eve of a battle—contributes something to the dramatic intensity, which here reaches a level that Flaubert rarely allowed himself to achieve, but more is due to the protagonists' sense of wonder and power. When Salammbô rips off her veil and allows Mâtho to recognize her,

Il se recula, les coudes en arrière, béant, presque terrifié.

Elle se sentait comme appuyée sur la force des Dieux; et, le regardant face à face, elle lui demanda le Zaïmph; elle le réclamait en paroles abondantes et superbes.

Mâtho n'entendait pas; il la contemplait, et les vêtements, pour lui, se confondaient avec le corps.

(I, 758)²¹

There follows a sacramental description fusing garment and body which ends with her ear-rings made of hollowed pearls and from which, through a small hole in the bottom, from time to time, a drop of perfume falls onto her bare shoulder. ‘Mâtho la regardait tomber.’ The fascination, the absorption is heightened by a wondrous sentence in which Flaubert's mastery of deferment brings irony into the service of delicacy:

Une curiosité indomptable l'entraîna; et, comme un enfant qui porte la main sur un fruit inconnu, tout en tremblant, du bout de son doigt, il la toucha légèrement sur le haut de sa poitrine; la chair un peu froide céda avec une résistance élastique.

(I, 758)²²

The nature of the spell soon changes, however, and the scene moves from adoration through anger and pride and back to unbounded adoration in which he takes her for the Goddess herself. But such intensity is fragile, and Flaubert does not hesitate to test it by offering possible ironies. ‘Ils ne parlaient plus. Le tonnerre au loin roulait. Des moutons bêlaient, effrayés par l'orage’ (I, 759). Here we have a hint of the Comices agricoles, or a suggestion that we test our attitude towards Salammbô by juxtaposing her with sheep. We find also the suggestions that the experience might be purely sexual: ‘Salammbô, accustomed to eunuchs, yielded to her astonishment at this man's power’ (I, 759). The way is thus open for an ironic reading of the sentence which reports her submission: ‘Salammbô était envahie par une mollesse où elle perdait toute conscience d'elle-même. Quelque chose à la fois d'intime et de supérieur, un ordre des Dieux la forçait à s'y abandonner.’²³

Ironic possibilities are offered, as if a non-ironic reading were of no value unless it had successfully passed through the crucible of irony. It is no doubt because the text continually threatens to treat Salammbô as an antique Emma Bovary that we are forced to make distinctions, forced to recognize that Salammbô and Mâtho succeed in living their myths to an extent that Emma never does and that they do so partly because their world, unlike Emma's, is unintelligible unless structured by these myths. To say, with Sherrington, that Salammbô is ‘mistaken about her role’ seems silly, since we, like the character herself, are engaged in trying to discover what that role is. If the role cannot be named except by metaphors, that is precisely because it is successfully presented as ‘quelque chose à la fois d'intime et de supérieur’, a momentary fusion of the personal and the transcendental, of the sexual and the sacred.

The synthesis which the scene momentarily enacts cannot, of course, last. The self-consciousness that follows threatens the identification of the sexual and the sacred. Mâtho sheds the mantle of the sun-god and becomes a sentimental lover, and Salammbô wonders, ‘So this is the man who makes all Carthage tremble?’ When she secures the sacred veil she is, in best Bovaresque fashion, ‘surprise de ne pas avoir ce bonheur qu'elle s'imaginait autrefois. Elle restait mélancolique dans son rêve accompli’ (I, 760).²⁴ But whereas in Madame Bovary and L'Education sentimentale such phrases indicate the futility of particular desires and the relative inadequacy of experience, here we find an irony which tests but does not undermine the reality and power of what has happened; and the final scene of the novel, when Mâtho, who is being whipped through the streets of Carthage, encounters Salammbô again, is ample testimony to the power of the symbolic bond between them:

Mâtho regarda autour de lui, et ses yeux recontrèrent Salammbô.

Dès le premier pas qu'il avait fait, elle s'était levée; puis, involontairement, à mesure qu'il se rapprochait, elle s'était avancée peu à peu jusqu'au bord de la terrasse; et bientôt, toutes les choses extérieures s'effaçant, elle n'avait aperçu que Mâtho. Un silence s'était fait dans son âme, un de ces abîmes où le monde entier disparaît sous la pression d'une pensée unique, d'un souvenir, d'un regard. Cet homme, qui marchait vers elle, l'attirait.

(I, 796)²⁵

The pluperfect provides a modicum of distance—holding the scene off and testing it, but the non-restrictive relative clause of the last sentence restores some of the intensity, granting it the rights it has earned. The power of Salammbô's experience, as it acts upon her, cannot be doubted, and in order to read the scene properly we must grant the validity of the sacred metaphors as a mode of understanding. Otherwise the silence and the abyss would be novelistic impertinences. Indeed, the primacy of this unlivable symbolic order is confirmed in the only way it can be in Flaubert: by a death resulting from no external cause. The difference between Salammbô and Emma, one might say, is that Emma had to take poison in order to die whereas Salammbô, like Charles and like the youthful narrator of Novembre, dies by a mental negation of life, thus asserting the priority of her ordering of experience over any which the world itself or the body might attempt to impose.

Such a death may, as the ending of Novembre suggests, seem strange to those who have suffered but must be accepted in a novel, ‘par amour du merveilleux.’ And now, perhaps, we know how to read that ending. Such a death must be accepted as the affirmation of a sacred order, and the sacred is a formal concept which permits an ordering of experience and confers value on it but which lacks a precise content which would make it a satisfactory determinant of practical affairs. Like the Zaïmph itself, transparent gauze which offers only a bluish tint to the sight, the sacred is pure form, a device of order, and Salammbô, as the concluding sentence tells us, dies because she had touched the Goddess's veil. She has tried to fill up the empty form of the sacred, to become herself a Goddess, and though she may in one sense have succeeded, such success is clearly not for this world.

‘Ainsi mourut la fille d'Hamilcar pour avoir touché au manteau de Tanit’ could, of course, be the ironic report of a collective superstition, but Flaubert's ironies cut both ways and we cannot take that position with any confidence because ‘we do not know what it means to have touched the veil of the goddess. The Zaïmph remains a symbol for a possible narrative integration which the text denies us. To this extent the reader shares the characters' awe in the face of sacred power.’²⁶ The notion of the sacred becomes a formal requirement of the novel, an image of coherence and completion which the reader holds before him in the hope that he may be able to attain it.

Whether or not he actually attains it is uncertain. One might say that sacred order can be neither stated nor acted and that therein lies the ultimate correspondence between the situation of the characters and of the reader. Statements or fulfillments of the sacred tend, especially in a positivistic age, to become the merely sentimental. Or, to put it another way, the sacred as a mode of discourse is always in danger of being undermined by our empirical assumptions about reality as soon as it is connected with reality.

That problem is adumbrated in Salammbô's quest for knowledge of the sacred within the novel. She learns all the names of the Goddess and would very much like to see the veil, ‘for the idea of a god cannot be clearly separated from its representation’ (I, 709); and when the priest speaks of the various ‘gates’ for souls in the heavens, she ‘strove to perceive them, for she took these conceptions for realities; she accepted as true in themselves pure symbols or even turns of phrase, a distinction which was not always quite clear to the priest either’ (I, 753).

Can such a distinction ever be made clear? Can we ever reach a point where we would be able to judge just how much truth symbols carry or just how much distance separates language from experience? The symbol, which since the Romantic movement has been taken as the privileged mode and crowning achievement of literary activity, is supposed to display the fusion of language and experience, the transmutation of individual experience into general truth, the identity of life and form, and therein lies its attractions for both characters and readers. But the symbol is a fragile construct, especially in the novel, whose temporal structure leads it almost invariably to undermine the atemporal synthesis, in which all time is eternally present, to which the symbol aspires. The lyric can stop on a moment of epiphany; the novel leads up to it and beyond, making time its principle of continuity and thus providing, by its very structure, a threat to intimations of order and transcendence. The fate of the sacred in the novel is to be profaned; but it may be that our ability to understand profanation as such becomes the source of our sense of the sacred. Salammbô's and Mâtho's metaphors are made more valid by the fact that after having lived them for a moment they cannot go on and that the reader is aware of that difference. Frédéric's last scene with Mme Arnoux is the more sacred because it is threatened at every moment with profanation. The sacred is perceived only through its vulnerability.

If this is so then one might say that in Flaubert the value of symbols depends on their place in an allegory of interpretation. The sacred character of the Zaïmph comes not from its ‘connection’ with the goddess, which is easily deflated by irony, but from the fact that it figures in the book as a representation of that aspiration towards unity and meaning which governs both the reader's and the characters' behaviour. As a symbol it is fragile, but that fragility gives it a solid and worthy place in the temporal drama of the quest for fusion which takes place both at the level of action and at the level of interpretation.

In order to prevent this suggestion from remaining wholly abstract, we should turn back to symbolic objects in other novels, especially those which sit uncomfortably on the line dividing the sentimental from the sacred. The object foolishly venerated is one of the easiest targets for the analyst, but Flaubert understood very clearly its value as an objective correlative for emotions which are not the less worthy for their application to trivial objects: ‘one feels profoundly the melancholy of matter, which is but that of our souls projected onto objects’ (iv, 313). The marriage bouquet and cigar case in Madame Bovary, Mme Arnoux's box or her lock of hair in L'Education sentimentale, Félicité's parrot, are all sacred to the protagonists. As objects deprived of their original function and made emblematic, they are gazed on with that kind of stupidity which seeks stimuli for reverie. The objects of Madame Bovary are treated with more irony than the others, primarily because the reverie expresses itself more precisely and in that way bears a closer relationship to action. But all are highly vulnerable and come thereby to represent the strength of the characters' aspiration towards some kind of sacramental fulfilment which would confer meaning on their lives.

Indeed, it is noteworthy that those which seem the most sacred are those which as signs are the most arbitrary: the parrot, whose association with the Holy Ghost is purely contingent, and the Zaïmph, which the religious code has simply decreed to be sacred. Emma's elaborate suppositions about the cigar case, her desire to reconstruct its history, are attempts to make it a motivated sign which in fact reduce its sacred character—though not, of course, for her. Frédéric's worship of the flat in which he thinks Mme Arnoux lives is highly motivated, and it depends so much on that motivation that it becomes ridiculous when he discovers that she does not live there after all; whereas, for example, a picture of the Holy Ghost which did not look in the least like a parrot would not be a decisive blow against the parrot, since it is an arbitrary sign. The more arbitrary the sign, the purer the faith, since it does not rely on external justifications. In Salammbô we are told that the Mercenaries have become very confused about religion because of the diversity of beliefs and practices to which they have been exposed, and that their floating anxiety and sense of veneration has come to fasten itself upon chance objects: ‘une amulette inconnue, trouvée par hasard dans un péril, devenait une divinité; ou bien c'était un nom, rien qu'un nom, et que l'on répétait sans même chercher à comprendre ce qu'il pouvait dire’ (I, 725).²⁷

That sort of faith avoids the stupidity of attempts to motivate signs, which is a mark both of the symbolic and the sentimental. One avoids it either by the supreme innocence of Félicité or by the self-consciousness and awareness of fragility that we find in the penultimate chapter of L'Education sentimentale, when Frédéric and Mme Arnoux succeed in severing their romantic discourse from the world of experience and so give the clichés, which are sullied by any attempt to live them, a sacramental purity. That their procedure is fundamentally allegorical should by now be sufficiently clear: allegory is that mode which recognizes the impossibility of fusing the empirical and the eternal and thus demystifies the symbolic relation by stressing the separateness of the two levels, the impossibility of their remaining linked in time, and the importance of protecting each level and the link between them by making it arbitrary. The corrosive irony applied to sentimentality, which shows that attempts at fusion can always be viewed differently and thus be made to fail, contributes to the allegorical mode by evoking, as the positive face that its negative procedure implies, the desire for connection which only allegory can make in a self-conscious and demystified way.

The sacred, one might say, is the sentimental purified by irony, emptied of its content, so that it may come to represent in the allegory of interpretation the formal desire for connection and meaning which governs the activity of readers and characters. In that sense, some notion of the sacred, however ill-defined, hovers over the novels as the teleological force which enables them to be read as warnings against the tawdry and premature ways of investing things with meaning. One of the functions of Salammbô and Trois Contes is to give us the sacred in more tangible form, so that its role may become clearer; but it is noteworthy that to do that Flaubert had to leave his contemporary environment for the quasi-feudal world of ‘Un Coeur simple’ or the more exotic worlds of ‘Hérodias,’ ‘La Légende de Saint Julien Hospitalier,’ and Salammbô. The sacred emerges in Salammbô as the necessary correlate of our desire to unify and make sense of the book; in ‘Hérodias’ our fore-knowledge of the Christian tradition enables us to read Herod's ill-defined awe of John the Baptist as perfectly proper, thus protecting him from possible ironies and, by the same token, committing us to the sacred as a functional concept; and finally, in ‘Saint Julien’ the result announced by the title and the distancing performed by the claim that the text recounts the story as represented in a stained-glass window allow us to structure the story as progress towards sainthood, although Julien does not effectively and empirically become a saint—the attribution of sainthood is not, in that sense, motivated—for that would require an interiority and psychological investigation which Flaubert deliberately eschews. Indeed, this last tale is perhaps the best example of the need to make the sacred something arbitrary, established by fiat. But in all three cases, as in ‘Un Coeur simple,’ the notion of a sacred order emerges as the necessary correlate of our desire to order experience in ways that escape delusion and destructive irony.

In the modern world, however, the sacred has become practically submerged by the sentimental. The operative codes by which things are given meaning have none of the arbitrariness and redeeming distance of religions; they are either novelistic modes which promise fulfilment that they cannot deliver or else purely practical codes which reflect all the limitations and active engagement of life in a particular and contingent society. Precisely because of their motivated relationship to ordinary life, the ways of reading experience which such codes promote are highly vulnerable to a vision which can regard them with sufficient distance to expose their pretensions to ‘natural’ meaning. The stupidity which refuses to comprehend objects in accordance with received modes of understanding but prefers to seek freedom and enrichment in reverie, the irony which explores alternative views both as polemical activity and as a way of enlarging horizons, are both attempts to enact, in the novels, the allegory of mind striving to avoid the limitations of particular social modes of understanding and to win through to something of the purity and inviolacy of the sacred, which one may define as arbitrary meanings guaranteed not by man but by God.

Anthropologists tell us that the sacred is not a class of special things but a special class of things, and therein lies, perhaps, the fundamental difference between the sentimental and the sacred. The former, attempting to make their ‘specialness’ an intrinsic and motivated quality, are exposed by this pretension, whereas the latter, defined arbitrarily by some version of the absolute, are invulnerable. Flaubert's novels make some such notion of the sacred a necessary fiction: the positive which enables all his negatives to have a meaning. If he was tempted to call his version of the absolute ‘style’—‘une manière absolue de voir les choses’—which would test, negate, and occasionally purify whatever it touched, we can answer that to destroy is always to destroy in the name of something and can apply the formal name of ‘the sacred’ to what is finally, insofar as we succeed in reading the novels as allegories of the adventures of meaning, our aspiration towards a secure and fully self-conscious understanding.

Notes

1. For further exploration of this theme, see Veronica Forrest-Thomson, ‘The Ritual of Reading Salammbô’, Modern Language Review 67:4 (Oct, 1972), to which the following discussion is greatly indebted.

2. Jean Rousset, ‘Positions, distances, perspectives dans Salammbô’, Poétique 6 (1971), p. 154. Dennis Porter, ‘Aestheticism versus the Novel: The Example of Salammbô’, Novel 4:2 (Winter 1971), pp. 102 and 105.

3. The Historical Novel (Beacon Press, Boston, 1963), pp. 187 and 190.

4. Gustave Flaubert, p. 145.

5. The Novels of Flaubert, p. 108.

6. Cf. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, ‘The Ritual of Reading Salammbô’, pp. 787-94.

7. ‘They marvelled at her attire; but she cast over them a long horrified gaze; then, letting her head sink between her shoulders and spreading wide her arms, she cried several times: “What have you done! What have you done!”’

8. ‘they tried to grasp these vague legends which played before their imagination, through the mists of theogonies, like phantoms in clouds.’

9. ‘Positions, distances, perspectives dans Salammbô’, p. 154.

10. ‘and, pressing her hands to her heart, she remained for several minutes with her eyes closed, savouring the agitation of all these men.

    ‘Mâtho the Libyan leaned towards her. Involuntarily she approached him, and, drawn by her recognition of his pride, she poured him a long stream of wine into a golden cup in order to make her peace with the army.’

11. The Historical Novel, p. 189.

12. Three Novels by Flaubert, p. 155.

13. Ibid., p. 223.

14. Ibid., pp. 229-30.

15. Ibid., pp. 187-8.

16. Ibid., p. 222.

17. Ibid., p. 205 n.

18. Ibid., p. 206.

19. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, ‘The Ritual of Reading Salammbô’, p. 788.

20. Ibid.

21. ‘He drew back, elbows behind him, gaping, nearly terrified. She felt as if supported by the power of the Gods; and looking him straight in the eye she asked for the Zaïmph, she demanded it with proud and fluent words, Mâtho did not hear; he was gazing at her, and for him her garments blended with her body.’

22. ‘An irresistible curiosity drew him on, and, like a child who reaches out his hand to an unknown fruit, trembling all the while, with the tip of his finger, he touched her lightly on her breast; the rather cool skin yielded with an elastic resistance.’

23. ‘They had stopped speaking. Far away the thunder rolled. Sheep bleated, frightened by the storm.’

    ‘Salammbô was overcome by a lassitude in which she lost all consciousness of herself. Something both very intimate and yet impersonal, the will of the Gods, made her abandon herself to it.’

24. ‘surprised not to feel the happiness she had previously imagined. She remained melancholy in her fulfilled dream.’

25. ‘Mâtho gazed about him and his eyes fell on Salammbô. With the first step he had taken she had risen; then, unconsciously, as he drew near she had moved forward, little by little, to the edge of the terrace; and soon, as all things external were blotted out, she had seen only Mâtho. A silence had descended on her soul, one of those abysses in which the whole world disappears beneath the weight of a single thought, a memory, a look. This man, who was coming towards her, drew her.’

26. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, ‘The Ritual of Reading Salammbô’, p. 792. Cf. Manurice Schroder, ‘On Reading Salammbô’, L'Esprit créateur 10:1 (Spring, 1970), p. 28.

27. ‘an unknown amulet, found by chance in dangerous circumstances, became a god; or again it might be a name, merely a name, that was repeated with no attempt to grasp what it might mean.’

Bibliography

Texts

Flaubert, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Masson (Seuil, Paris, 1964), 2 vols.

Flaubert, Correspondance (Conard, Paris, 1926-33), 9 vols, and Supplément (Conard, Paris, 1954), 4 vols. The forthcoming edition in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade will supersede the Conard.

Critical Works

The best general studies of Flaubert are the longest and the shortest: Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille (Gallimard, Paris, 1971-2), 3 vols, and Anthony Thorlby, Gustave Flaubert and the Art of Realism (Bowes and Bowes, London, 1956). Two other general studies which may be consulted with profit are Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert (Gallimard, Paris, 1935), and Victor Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert (Princeton University Press, 1966). A number of excellent articles will be found in the issue of Europe devoted to Flaubert, 485-7 (Sept-Nov, 1969).

More specialized studies of particular interest:

Peter Cortland, The Sentimental Adventure (Mouton, The Hague, 1967).

Marie-Jeanne Durry, Flaubert et ses projets inédits (Nizet, Paris, 1950).

Alison Fairlie, ‘Flaubert et la conscience du réel’, Essays in French Literature 4 (Nov 1967).

———. ‘Some Patterns of Suggestion in L'Education sentimentale’, Australian Journal of French Studies 6: 2-3 (1969).

Veronica Forrest-Thomson, ‘The Ritual of Reading Salammbô’, Modern Language Review 67: 4 (1972).

Michel Foucault, ‘La Bibliothèque fantastique’, in Flaubert, ed. Raymonde Debraye-Genette (Didier, Paris, 1970).

Gérard Genette, ‘Silences de Flaubert’, Figures (Seuil, Paris, 1966).

Claudine Gothot-Mersch, ‘Introduction’, Madame Bovary (Garnier, Paris, 1971).

J. Pommier and G. Leleu, Madame Bovary—Nouvelle Version (Corti, Paris, 1949).

Marcel Proust, ‘A propos du “style” de Flaubert’, Chroniques (Gallimard, Paris, 1927).

Jean-Pierre Richard, ‘La Création de la forme chez Flaubert’, Littérature et sensation (Seuil, Paris, 1954).

R. J. Sherrington, Three Novels by Flaubert (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970).

Stephen Ullmann, Style in the French Novel (Blackwell, Oxford, 1960).

General works relevant to the approach adopted herein:

Roland Barthes, S/Z (Seuil, Paris, 1970).

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Routledge, London, 1974).

Veronica Forrest-Thomson, ‘Levels in Poetic Convention’, Journal of European Studies 2 (1971).

Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1970).

Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971).

Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles Singleton (Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1969).