No More French than Chinese
July 17th, 2008 by adminFlaubert Gustave is a French novelist. “Madame Bovary” is his most widely acclaimed work. His life story has been captured in Alain De Botton’s The Art of Travel. Here is an excerpt of the article.
“From his adolescence onwards, Flaubert insisted that he was not French. His hatred of his nation and its people ws so profound as to make a mockery of his civil status. Hence he proposed a new method for ascribing nationality: not according to the country of a person’s birth or ancestral origins, but instead according ot the places to which he or she was attracted…’ I want to buy myself a beautiful bear—a painting of one, that is — frame it and hang it in my bedroom, with Portrait of Gustave Flaubert written beneath it, to suggest my moral disposition and social habits.’ He said.
In Flabuert’s mind, the word happiness became interchangeable with the word Orient. In a moment of despair, he wrote to his friend, ‘My life, which in my dreams is so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love, will turn out to be like everyone else’s: monotonous, sensible, stupid. I’ll attend law school, be admitted to the bar and end up as a respectable assistant district attorney in a small provincial town…Poor madman, who dreamt of glory, love , laurels, journeys and the Orient.’ The people who lived along the coasts of North Africa, Saudi Arabia , Egypt, Palatestine and Syria might have been surprised to learn that their lands had been grouped by a young Frenchman into vague synonym for all that was good.
‘I think I must have been transplanted by the winds to this land of mud; surely I was born elsewhere.” For Flaubert, the French bourgeoisie was a repository of the most extreme prudery, snobbery, smugness, racism and pomposity. The order of the French bourgeoisie world disgusted him. Central to Flaubert’s philosophy was the belief that humans were not simply spiritual creatures but also pissing and shitting ones, and that we should integrate the ramifications of this blunt idea into our view of the world. In Madame Bovary, the pharmacist Homais said:” At the end of the day, shit. With that mighty word, you can console yourself for all human miseries, so I enjoy repeating it: shit, shit.’
On his return from Egypt, Flaubert attempted to explain his theory of national identity:’As to the idea of native country, that is to say a certain bit of ground traced out on a map and separated from other bits by a red or blue line: no. For me, my native country is the country I love, meaning the one that makes me dream, that makes me feel well. I aid as much Chinese as I’m French, and I cannot rejoice about our victories over the Arabs because I am saddened by their defeats. I love those harsh , enduring, hardy people, the last of the primitives, who at midday lie down in the shade under the bellies of their camels and, while smoking their chibouks, pole fun at our good civilization, which quivers with rage over it.”
‘I’m no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country—that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black—has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that livesm to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.’