[In the following essay, Rice posits that not only is Flaubert's view of modern life as a reflection of history evident in Salammbô, but the novel contains several internal relationships which mirror one another.]

In 1864, two years after the publication of Salammbô, Flaubert wrote in a letter, “… history is nothing but the reflection of the present on the past, and that is why it is always to be remade [à refaire].”¹Salammbô is Flaubert's own version or remake of the story of the mercenaries' revolt that occurred in Carthage between the first and second Punic wars, and while the novel was just as carefully researched as Madame Bovary before it and The Sentimental Education thereafter, because of its distant time period the novelist's methodology was necessarily different. Flaubert's main source was the Latin historian Polybius, so that Flaubert's only truly historical—rather than contemporary—novel represents a remake of this earlier text.

From its publication, the second novel from the author of the notorious Madame Bovary was a best-seller, but it also drew the attacks of critics, chief among them Sainte-Beuve, who wrote of the work:

How do you want me to be interested in this lost war, buried in the defiles and sands of Africa … ? What is this to me, the duel between Tunis and Carthage? Speak to me rather of the duel between Carthage and Rome! I am attentive to it, I am involved in it. Between Rome and Carthage, in their fierce quarrel, all of future civilization is already in play. …²

Sainte-Beuve would obviously prefer an episode that affected the whole course of world history, a story connected to the present by a causal sequence of events, a period that had profound repercussions for future generations, including his own. I would term this type of historical discourse metonymic, as does Hayden White,³ for it is informed by the rhetorical trope of connection, metonymy, which links terms already found in contiguous relationship to one another. (Thus the phrase, “hit the lights,” is an example of metonymy since it substitutes one part of a system, the lights, for another separate term, the switch which is connected to, but not a part of the light source in question.)

Flaubert, on the other hand, has not only chosen an obscure subject and setting, his version of the mercenaries' revolt and subsequent war is indeed a reflection of the present on the past as both a rethinking of the past and as a reflection in the visual sense of the word, for the novel acts as a reflective surface in which nineteenth-century France confronts its mirror image. In her extensive study of Salammbô entitled Flaubert and the Historical Novel,⁴ Anne Green has detailed the parallel between the French bourgeoisie and the Carthaginians, a merchant oligarchy with preoccupations similar to those of the moneyed French: their finances, their material goods, their conservative religion and their deliberately weakened political system, to name the most important. At the same time, the mercenaries' rebellion, their gradual disillusionment as more and more of their allies turn against them and go over to the enemy, and their final crushing defeat, all recall the pattern of the French democratic revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1871, conflicts in which the bourgeoisies succeeded in maintaining their power despite the revolt of the lower classes, whom Flaubert himself often termed “barbarians” just as the Carthaginians term the mercenaries, it should be noted. Moreover, the Roman menace that threatens Carthage from abroad furthers the parallel, resembling that threat that Prussia posed for France.

Salammbô is thus grounded in resemblance to the present rather than any causal relationship with it, and as history, the novel is informed by metaphor, the trope in which one term stands for another completely separate term by virtue of an analogy between the two. (The phrase, “that person is a lamb,” is a metaphor because the person and the animal, although very different, share a common quality such as a gentle nature.) The two elements of metaphor therefore exist in the tension between their difference and their resemblance.

In another of Flaubert's works, The Legend of Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, the face of the present appears in the form of the past in a like movement when Julien, who reaches a crisis point and resolves to commit suicide, gazes into the still waters of a fountain in order to see if it is deep enough for his purpose. Instead he sees the face of the father he killed. The mirror image in the pool clearly belongs to the now aged Julien, yet he recognizes only the other, although he does identify with the figure in the fountain who, like himself, is crying. The play of reflection in the pool, grounded in resemblance rather than identity, reveals the importance of difference—a difference that lies at the heart of metaphor.

In its extreme form, this alienation—a moment of non-identity which also appears in Lacan's mirror stage⁵—underlies the many perspicuous binary oppositions that pervade Salammbô: oppositions between mercenaries and Carthaginians, the earth and the moon, male and female, the very face to face confrontations over distance noted by Jean Rousset.⁶ Yet in Salammbô, binary oppositions like these tend to collapse as difference is subsumed in resemblance. Thus, when the Carthaginians face the mercenaries in battle their own cruelty mirrors that of the army they call “barbarian.” Likewise, exotic dress and customs—men in earrings, for instance—undermine the distinction between male and female, as does the presence of numerous eunuchs. When Salammbô herself addresses the moon as a goddess, she too underscores the mix of difference and resemblance. Although she notes the earth's immobility in contrast to the moon's race across the sky, the two are like bodies nonetheless, for she says in the same prayer, “the world with its oceans and mountains, as in a mirror, sees itself in your face.”⁷

Metaphor is problematized in this novel precisely when the trope's two terms merge, their difference obscured in this “land where metaphors come true.”⁸ In this setting there is little distinction between the palace decor, made of precious metals and stones, and Flaubert's descriptions of its gardens with seemingly bronzed, emerald or pearl foliage; it is a world where living human beings often stand as immobile as statues.

When this preponderance of plastic imagery is coupled with overt sexual symbolism—mountains that look like breasts, a temple of fertility filled not only with steles and other phallic symbols, but also with realistic representations of the male organ—the result is an even more dreamlike landscape. As Mâtho ascends the staircase leading to Salammbô's apartments—which for Freud became another obvious sexual image well after Flaubert wrote this passage—the barbarian leader feels “the strange ease one feels in dreams.”⁹ Moreover, the dream quality applies equally to the fulminating scenes of excessive violence that abound in Salammbô, including the Carthaginians savage attack on Mâtho in the novel's final pages. The overall effect is to reduce individual human and animal bodies to a mass of part-objects like those of Lacan's Imaginary Order. In this way, Salammbô's imagery may indicate an attempt to circumvent the nefarious effects of language, seen in particular in the ex-slave Spendius; the metaphoric images instead substitute a pre-linguistic register of silent, visual signs.

The play of language and silence in the novel is too rich a question to be treated adequately here, but it should be noted that Salammbô herself underscores the essentially non-linguistic nature of dreams with her own reticence when asked about the crucial episode in which she offers herself to Mâtho in his tent in order to recover the sacred veil he has stolen and to restore it to the temple in Carthage.

Salammbô did not tell any more, perhaps out of shame, or even out of an excess of candor that made her attach little importance to the embraces of the soldier. All of this, besides, floated in her head, melancholy and unclear like the memory of an overwhelming dream; and she would not have known in what manner, by what discourse to express it.¹⁰

While the dream-like silence provides a powerful means of expression beyond the bounds of the spoken word, it is also a safer one. Salammbô's confusion suggests that her withdrawal into this non-verbal register signals the denial of an active position in favor of a more passive stance. She well recognizes the danger in the effective power of words and refuses to tell Hamilcar about his friend and general, Giscon, a captive in the enemy camp, because she fears her tale will turn against the prisoner and bring him further harm. It is also Hamilcar's daughter who curses Mâtho as he steals the sacred veil—a curse which is ultimately and inevitably fulfilled.

Despite this turn in favor of the passive, Flaubert's text often serves to justify revolution nonetheless. Nowhere is this more clear than when Hamilcar substitutes a slave child for Hannibal, the eldest son destined as a sacrifice to appease the city's gods. When the slave boy's father attempts, like Hamilcar, to save his own son's life, the master cannot see his own actions mirrored in those of the other father: “He had never thought—so immense was the abyss that separated him from the other—that there could be anything in common between them.”¹¹ There is an obvious injustice at work here, revealed in the resemblance that Hamilcar cannot or will not acknowledge.

In the same vein, if we read Salammbô as a reflection of the political and social realities of Flaubert's France, including the reflection apparent in the Carthaginian leader Hamilcar's more modern French counterpart, Louis-Napoleon, then the work becomes an acerbic commentary on the injustices of the emperor's reign as well as the questionable stability of his regime. Nevertheless, Flaubert's fiction also remains a critique of revolutionary action, above all because the mercenaries fail horribly.

The parallel between ancient Carthage and nineteenth-century France in Salammbô led the Marxist critic Georges Lukacs to the accusation that Flaubert had wrongfully modernized the history of the ancient city and therefore failed to represent it realistically. This is, for Lukacs, “the most radical form of historical solipsism”¹² wherein the present can only know itself while the past remains inaccessible. A history grounded in metaphor, on the other hand, implies a likeness between historical periods rather than an identity; as we have noted, it is the other who is recognized in the mirror image. At the same time, however, Flaubert's only truly “historical” novel must at some level be profoundly ahistorical, asserting the sameness of all historical periods and the essential futility of any attempt at revolution, any attempt to change. Unlike the Marxist moment of synthesis in the dialectic, when metaphor brings two terms together, neither is substantially altered. Indeed, a metaphoric vision of history, especially one in which metaphors tend to collapse into simple identity, suggests that the ultimate result of difference and change is stasis, an immobility much like that of so much of Flaubert's plastic imagery. Certainly, this metaphoric perspective can be disturbingly pessimistic, denying all hope for progress. History is always “à refaire,” that is, to be remade or redone. It is not only to be rewritten, but also to be repeated in the form of events, relived over and over again. Even so, Flaubert's metaphoric history offers us a rich insight into the past and perhaps the present.

Notes

1. “… l'histoire n'est que la réflexion du présent sur le passé, et voilà pourquoi elle est toujours à refaire,” Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance supplément (1864-71), Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Conard, 1954), II, p. 19. All translations are my own.

2. “Comment voulez-vous que j'aille m'intéresser à cette guerre perdue, enterrée dans les défilés ou les sables de l'Afrique … ? Que me fait, à moi, le duel de Tunis et de Carthage? Parlez-moi du duel de Carthage et de Rome, à la bonne heure! J'y suis attentif, j'y suis engagé. Entre Rome et Carthage, dans leur querelle acharnée, toute la civilisation future est en jeu déjà …” Articles de Sainte-Beuve sur Salammbô, Appendix, Salammbô, Oeuvres Complètes de Gustave Flaubert, 16 vols. (Paris: Club de l'Honnête Homme, 1971), II, p. 437.

3. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

4. Anne Green, Flaubert and the Historical Novel: Salammbô Reassessed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

5. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits and Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, vol. I, Les Ecrits Tecniques de Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

6. Jean Rousset, “Positions, perspectives et distances dans Salammbô, Poétique, 6 (1971), pp. 145-54.

7. “… le monde avec ses océans et ses montagnes, comme en un miroir, se regarde dans ta figure,” Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô, Oeuvres Complètes, L'Intégrale, 2 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1964), I, p. 708. All references are to this edition of the novel.

8. Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 277.

9. “… l'étrange facilité que l'on éprouve dans les rêves,” Flaubert, Salammbô, 719.

10. “Salammbô n'en racontait pas davantage, par honte peut-être, ou bien par un excès de candeur faisant qu'elle n'attachait guère d'importance aux baisers du soldat. Tout cela, du reste, flottait dans sa tête, mélancolique et brumeux comme le souvenir d'un rêve accablant; elle n'aurait pas su de quelle manière, par quels discours l'exprimer,” Flaubert, Salammbô, pp. 772-73.

11. “Il n'avait jamais pensé—tant l'abîme les séparant l'un de l'autre se trouvait immense—qu'il pût y avoir entre eux rien de commun,” Flaubert, Salammbô, p. 778.

12. Georges Lukacs, “The Crisis of Bourgeois Realism,” The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 180.