A tale of two nobodies

Christopher Hitchens reviews a new translation of Flaubert's last, unfinished work. This novel was intended to show its author's deep contempt, comedically expressed, for all grand schemes, most especially the Rousseauean ones, to improve the human lot

Bouvard and Pécuchet

By Gustave Flaubert

Translated by Mark Polizzotti

Dalkey Archive Press €13.95

The devotee of Gustave Flaubert may feel some of the same inhibition, in deciding whether to embark upon Bouvard and Pécuchet, as the admirer of Dickens or Schubert in contemplating Edwin Drood, or that famously incomplete symphony.

If their originators couldn't manage to finish them, then why should we? And in the case of Flaubert's last novel - initially reconstructed by his niece from some 4,000 manuscript pages after his sudden death in 1880 – the word "finish" carries not just the meaning of completion but that crucial element of polish and rounding-off, so essential in the case of the man who fretted endlessly over le mot juste.

Economy and perfectionism in point of words would have been the last concern of the two losers featured here, whose working lives were spent as copy clerks and to whom words were mere objects or things. Drawn to each other by a common mediocrity (Flaubert's original title was The Tale of Two Nobodies), Bouvard and Pécuchet are liberated by an unexpected legacy to embark on a career of unfettered fatuity. Many fictions and scenarios have depended upon a male double act, usually enriched by contrast as in the case of Holmes and Watson or Bertie and Jeeves, or of course the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and his rotund and pragmatic squire. More recently, each half of the sketch has been equally hapless and pitiful, as with Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Vladimir and Estragon or Withnail and I. If you stir in the rural setting, plus a shallow addiction to the mysteries of technique and innovation, you find that Flaubert's pairing has also anticipated Dumb and Dumber. It's often necessary to mark off two fools or jerks by discrepant heights: Bouvard is tall but pot-bellied while Pécuchet is short. A mnemonic here might be Schwarzenegger and DeVito in Twins.

An early disappointment for the reader of this deft and elegant new translation by Mark Polizzotti, therefore, is the way in which Flaubert's first draft so often reduces this field of alternation by telling us merely what "they" got up to. It is as if we had two Quixotes or two Sanchos. Two Quixotes would be nearer the mark, since this undynamic duo is at least fixated upon grand schemes of discovery and improvement. Together, they set out to illustrate and underline the Popean maxim that a little learning is a dangerous thing.

Flaubert is pitiless with his wretched creations, allowing them no moment of joy, or even ease. It is enough for them to turn their hands to a project for it to expire in chaos and slapstick, and after a while this, too, shows the shortcomings of the unpolished, because we can hear the sound of collapsing scenery before the stage has even been set. True bathos requires a slight interval between the sublime and the ridiculous, but no sooner have our clowns embarked on a project than we see the bucket of whitewash or the banana skin. The story is set in motion by their rash decision to quit Paris for the Norman countryside: it was a rule of fiction before Flaubert that city clerks attempting agricultural improvements would end up with smellier sewage, thinner crops, sicker animals and more combustible hayricks than even the dullest peasant. A hinge event in Flaubert's writing is the revolution of 1848. If he ever read Marx and Engels's manifesto of that year, with its remark about "the idiocy of rural life," he evidently decided to go it one better. In his bucolic scheme, every official is a dolt, every priest a fool or knave, every milkmaid diseased and unchaste, every villager either a boozer or a chiseler. (I am influenced here, perhaps, by Pollizzotti's use of American idioms like "Are you putting me on?")

If only Bouvard and Pécuchet would restrict themselves to excavating bogus fossils or to collecting unsorted specimens of archaeology, Flaubert's unforgiving attitude might appear unkind. But they insist upon inflicting themselves, as advisers and even as physicians, upon others. Impatient with the counsel of Dr Vaucorbeil, "they began visiting patients on their own, entering people's homes on the pretext of philanthropy." Their quackery does less harm than one might expect, but then they weary of it in favour of marvelling at what we might call intelligent design: "Harmonies vegetal and terrestrial, as well as aerial, aquatic, human, fraternal and even conjugal: all of these were included... They were astounded that fish had fins, birds wings, seeds a skin – and they subscribed to the philosophy that ascribes virtuous intentions to Nature and considers it a kind of St Vincent de Paul perpetually occupied with spreading its munificence."

Alternately eclectic and omnivorous, our heroes are like cushions that bear the impression of whoever last sat upon them. Before they are through, they have tried mesmerism and magnetism, phrenology and the spiritualist séance, as well as some experiments in cross-breeding that might have made Lysenko blush. No fad or pseudoscience is beyond their hectic enthusiasm, and Flaubert's own ruthless scepticism about the idea of "progress" is evinced, I think, in the occasional cruelty that results from seeing human and other creatures as potential subjects for experiment. The examples are given more or less deadpan: Dr Vaucorbeil's office has "a picture of a man flayed alive"; kittens are found to die after five minutes under water; and a cat is boiled in a cauldron by one of the children the hopeless couple adopt before they become bored with the idea. Callousness itself is a child of stupidity. In Sentimental Education the revolution of 1848 is a Parisian fiasco with some grandeur, but in these pages it appears as a provincial circus that is all farce and no tragedy.

This novel was plainly intended to show its author's deep contempt, however comedically expressed, for all grand schemes, most especially the Rousseauean ones, to improve the human lot. Such schemes founder because the human material is simply too base to be transmuted. Even Bouvard and Pécuchet receive a glimpse of this, if only through their own solipsism: "Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, a burgher's profile, an inane comment overheard by chance... They felt upon their shoulders the weight of the entire world." This anomie is the preface to a suicide pact (and they can't even get that right) and is then succeeded by a Christmas Eve reconciliation with Holy Mother Church that makes It's a Wonderful Life seem like an education in unsentimentality.

Jorge Luis Borges was of the opinion that Flaubert, the craftsman of the first truly realist novel with Madame Bovary, was also, with Bouvard and Pécuchet, the saboteur of his own project. And it is not difficult to trace the influence of these two men without qualities on the work of Joyce and Musil and Beckett, and on the 20th century's evolution of the anti-hero. What is amazing is the industry with which Flaubert assimilated so many books on arcane subjects (some 1,500, according to Polizzotti), all of this knowledge acquired just so that a brace of nobodies could manage to get things not just wrong, but exactly wrong.

In one or two places in the story, most notably with his discussion of suicide and of syphilis, Flaubert makes indirect allusion to his celebrated Dictionary of Received Ideas (or Accepted Ideas). He had begun it as early as 1850, but he plainly intended to update it as a coda to Bouvard and Pécuchet, along with a Catalogue of Fashionable Ideas, which Polizzotti also includes. Flaubert's taxonomy is in fact one of expressions rather than opinions: it forms a collection of ready-made clichés for the use of the conformist or the unimaginative. Some of these make one blush ("LAURELS: Keep one from resting") because one has used them oneself. Others are too self-evident ("FLAGRANTEDELICTO: Use in Latin. Is applied only to cases of adultery"). Some are outmoded ("SYPHILIS: Pretty much everyone has it"), or apply chiefly to Flaubert himself, who contracted syphilis enough times to cancel out many other people.

Still, it is a trope to rival that of Proust's Mme Verdurin, who loved nothing better than "to frolic in her billow of stock expressions". At the close, as we know from the notes that Flaubert left behind, the two clerks would have been back at a common desk, once again copying out whatever was put in front of them. The "Dictionary" would have been part of the leaden chain that bound them to that desk.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School. His most recent book is "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America."

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