The Spirit of Comedy Without Humor

Harold Kaplan entitled his essay on Madame Bovary ‘the seriousness of comedy’. In his view, and that of other literary critics cited by him, this work is a ‘special form of dry comedy’ in that it stresses the conflict between feeling agent and unfeeling object. Its effect is the spirit of comedy without humor.

Kaplan argues that this split point of view is what makes Gustave Flaubert’s work a modern novel. This spirit transforms motives that would normally be understandable or relatable into motives that are unintelligible and unresponsive.

A. The Literary Critic as the Expositor of Holy or Magnified Texts

1. We know major works of literature by their survival. We return to those works that speak to us strongly. They have become our existing cultural wisdom.

2. Their judgements have penetrated our minds as well as reflected them. They have shaped our actions and expressed the shape of them.

3. ‘We’ (literary critics) think of the task of commentary in terms of a scriptural text or basic myth in order to illustrate the demands made on our understanding (pp.3-4).

B. The Key to Madame Bovary and its Effects in three Parts

1. Emma Bovary is an individual consciousness. She is dramatically isolated and surrounded by a world that resists her will and her understanding.

2. She is seen (by the reader and the author) objectively or clinically. They know Emma as a scientist knows her, as a sick, mad, or otherwise self-absorbed person. And she cannot return communication.

3. This is typical of a naturalistic drama in the way it splits the point of view between the one who acts in life and the one who knows life. To know life is to be the spectator of it. Because she is the one who acts, Emma’s consciousness cannot deal equally with the consciousness of the reader.

C. Emma’s Antagonist

1. Emma is not defeated by a personality. She is defeated by the premises of the conflict. Premises do not respond, but merely exist in her perception of time, matter and the circumstances set against her. A premise is an abstract and blind principle of resistance.

2. This objectivity is mirrored in the objectivity of the narrator. He is like a spectator god who refuses to intervene. He will not allow Emma’s dramatic loneliness to be comforted. Her life will never receive anything from a world of substantial meaning. In the end, her illusions will not help her escape extinction.

D. Madame Bovary: Realism at its Philosophical Extreme

1. Like any protagonist, Emma is an agent of the human imagination. Because this creation of Flaubert’s imagination has become the object of neutral study, she is patronized by the intelligence. Emma’s assent or denial is irrelevant. Where there would normally be a dialogue between the reader and the protagonist, there is silence.

2. There is a quality of pathos in naturalistic writing. In Flaubert’s case it has been transformed into the spirit of irony. The center for ironic treatment is not the world. It is the human consciousness itself. When Flaubert abstains from value judgments, he allows the values of his protagonist, who doesn’t see things as they are but as they might be, to contend with a cold reality.

3. Emma’s consciousness is isolated from productive correspondence with her environment and also from a consensus of values. Kaplan argues that her isolation from world, audience, and author is the dominant tradition of naturalistic writing which grew from Flaubert’s novel.

II. The following quotations take place after Emma has become bored in her marriage. The first quotation is an example of her early dreaming.

“Didn’t love, like Indian plants, require rich soils, special temperatures? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, hands bathed in lover’s tears–the fevers of the flesh and the languors of love–were inseparable from the balconies of great idle-housed castles, from a silk-curtained, thick-carpeted, be-flowered boudoir with its bed on a dais, from the sparkle of precious stones and the swank of liveries.”¹

Kaplan contrasts this with Flaubert’s portrayal of reality, the sound of the hired boy’s shoes in the hallway.

“The hired boy at the relay post across the road, who came in every morning to rubdown the mare, walked through the hall in his heavy wooden shoes; his smock was in holes, his feet were innocent of stockings.”

According to Kaplan, the hired boy, his heavy wooden shoes echoing outside of Emma’s dreams, illustrate the characteristic tension of Flaubert’s writing. He calls the next excerpt a brilliantly concise objective scene. Charles was Emmas ‘reality trap’.

“Charles jogged back and forth across the countryside under snow and rain. He ate omelettes at farmhouse tables, thrust his arm into damp beds, had his fact spattered with jets of warm blood at bleedings; he listened to death rattles, examined the contents of basins, handled a lot of soiled underclothing.”

With his description of the hired boy and Charles, Flaubert defines ‘a reality’ to press against Emma’s luxurious imagination.

“[Emma’s images] lived on a higher plane than other people, somewhere sublime between heaven and earth, up among the storm clouds. As for the rest of the world, it was in some indeterminate place beyond the pale; it could scarcely be said to exist. Indeed the closer to her things were, the further away from them her thoughts turned.”

A. Emma’s Consciousness Has a Fictional Basis

1. Flaubert presents aspects of Emma’s society as invented or transcendental worlds. They include romantic novels, the theatre, and the church. In the theatre, as in life, Emma identifies with the woman on stage. There is a continuity in her fantasies. When a male acquaintance, Leon, appears she immediately forgets the opera to focus on him. This is the beginning of her second love affair.

2. But the theatre is not the most important influence in her fantasies. Religion is shown as a more powerful source for subjective experience. She meets Leon in a church. To him the church was like a gigantic boudoir suffused with her image. In Kaplan’s opinion, Flaubert seems to think religion is the greatest human fallacy.

B. The Contest With Reality Continues at Emma’s Death Bed

1. The jarring incongruence continues between Charles’ work as a physician, Emma’s seduction, the intrusion of the blind beggar, and the medical men who sit and talk to each other at her deathbed.

Flaubert lingers over the details of Emma’s death, and the blind beggar with his shredded flesh and open wounds comes to her as the messenger of fate. The irrelevance of nature’s answer to her questions is represented by the ‘scientific’ discussion among the medical men as they eat lunch at Homais’ house and Emma lays dying. They chat about the progression of her symptoms: “First we had a sensation of siceity in the pharynx, then intolerable pain in the epigastrium, superpurgation, coma.”

2. Kaplan calls this the ‘hammering emotionless tone of fact, idiotic in its factualness’. The language of the scientific report is not understood by the subjective life at its extreme. The terms of pain, grief and fear have lost their reference because the only one who knew these terms has herself become extinct. After her death, the priest and Homais sit by her body and argue over religion and liberal science. There is only silence from their audience, the dead body. They finally fall asleep.

C. Christianity Betrayed

Kaplan argues that Christianity is betrayed by the object Emma has become. She no longer exists in the world in which it speaks.

“The truth the novel has to tell is that Emma, the sentient, subjective being, is alone, and very few have pursued this isight with as much clarity and courageous finality as Flaubert. Emma chooses her death when the people in her life, one might say, have all become bill collectors, when they refuse her what she wants, when they ask for payment.”

III. Shakespeare: Kaplan’s Life Raft

“Flaubert follows the stages of disintegration to the end, for he knows that it is the ruin of the great theatre of meaning itself, the theatre of the consciousness.”

There is more misery to follow. We are at the mercy of Flaubert’s unrelenting attention to Emma’s disintegration followed by the dissolution and death of Charles. Mercy is withheld from everyone, including the reader. The spirit of comedy without humor is a good description of this style.

But what is the point of defining the course of modern literature if there’s no relief? Thankfully, Kaplan’s quotes from Shakespeare are a life raft in this sea of misery. They perfectly illustrate his claims about what is missing in modern literature. The first quote is from Othello (Kaplan p. 37). The second one is from King Lear (Kaplan p. 38)

But first, we need a transition from Flaubert to Shakespeare.

A. The Classical Resolution of Conflict versus the Esthetics of Objectivity: Kaplan’s Main Concern in this Essay

1. The classical resolution of conflict calls for the intervention of a unifying insight. It intervenes on behalf of a character who is at odds with his life’s offering or his destiny. The human instinct is to expect this insight to be teleological. We don’t expect the gods to appear and give judgement, but we instinctively expect the antagonists to be driven by the conflict to communicate with one another.

2. The classical resolution of conflict requires men’s faith in their ability to control or understand destiny. Unfortunately, the values of modern fiction lead to an impasse in the search for a teleological metaphysics. Because the way to substantive discoveries is blocked, modern literature directs the reader to focus on the nature of the struggle.

3. Emma intends to find fulfillment for her interests. She struggles to understand her fate on her terms, but the reader expects nothing of the sort. The reader and the protagonist cannot relate to each other.

4. The three preceding qualifications sum up Kaplan’s main concern in this essay: Modern fiction runs into an impasse in the search for a teleological resolution. He says this is a characteristic of the esthetics of objectivity.

B. Traditional Tragedy Versus Modern Literature’s Sense of Ultimate Pointlessness

As Kaplan argues on page 7 of The Passive Voice that the presiding spirit of the novel goes back to Cervantes (1547-1616). But apparently, Shakespeare (1564-1616) remained true to the tragic point of view.

1. Othello Speaking Just Before His Death

I have done the state some service, and they know it; 
No more of that:--I pray you, in your letters, 
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, 
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, 
Nor set down aught in malice; then must you speak 
Of one, that lov'd not wisely, but too well; 
Of one, not easily jealous, but, being wrought, 
Perplexed in the extreme; of one, whose hand, 
Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away, 
Richer than all his tribe; of one, whose subdued eyes, 
Albeit unused to the melting mood, 
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees 
Their medicinal gums: Set you down this: 
And say, besides,--that in Aleppo once, 
Where a malignant and turban'd Turk Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state, 
I took by the throat the circumcised dog, 
And smote him--thus.

Kaplan: This is Othello united with his own experience.

2. King Lear Moving From Incoherence To Sanity

Pray, do not mock me:
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore, and upwards, and, to deal plainly,
I fear, I am not in my perfect mind. 
Methinks, I should know you, and know this man;
Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is; and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night: Do not laugh at me:
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.

Kaplan: Lear receives a communication from his real condition and from Cordelia. Further events cannot deflect the positive effect. Emma Bovary on the other hand descends to a true mental chaos. It is the consequence of isolation and is not to be reversed.

1. Quotations are from the translation of Madame Bovary by Francis Steegmuller, The Modern Library, New York. ↩︎

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