Madame Bovary, Stevens, and the Transfer of Consciousness
I have been slowly reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for a Classics Book Discussion I facilitate at the library where I work. (I love leading these book discussions, and I also am grateful for the chance to read books I might otherwise be too lazy to pick up.) Although I cannot at this point read the book in the original French, (I am reading the Lydia Davis translation), I can say that, at least in Davis’s translation, there is something very (and famously) exquisite about the novel’s language, a very attuned quality, a way in which reality — both interior consciousness and the material world, or the interaction between said two — is captured with the realism Flaubert is so deservedly lauded for. As I have been reading the novel, certain questions started to rise up in my awareness, in relationship to the text, and the main one was: how do we differentiate, at certain points in the novel, between the consciousness of Flaubert and the consciousness of Emma?
I ask this because Flaubert is using what is called “free indirect style” or “free indirect discourse,” which is a way of saying that the novel is narrated in the third person, but that this third person narration sometimes (often?) dips into first person awareness, in order to give us a sense of, say, Emma Bovary’s thoughts and feelings (and even presence) as she leans against the window sill at night at La Vaubyessard and feels the wind cooling her eyelids. Learning to get a sense for when an author intends a passage, using free indirect style, to represent the first person interior consciousness of a character, versus the third person narration of the narrator, is incredibly important, but it also is difficult, subtle and tricky (and maybe even sometimes impossible or futile) to make a distinction, or at least a too neat one. (One of my favorite encounters of a writer and critic making these important distinctions in the service of a larger interpretation is Gary Saul Morson’s “Anna Karenina” In Our Time: Seeing More Wisely, where Morson points out crucial passages in Tolstoy’s second masterpiece (at least in terms of the novel) where it is absolutely essential to discern where we are witnessing or entering into Anna’s interior world, and where we are in dialogue with the narrator’s.)
I am thinking and writing about Flaubert right now, but in the back of my mind I am mulling over passages by Wallace Stevens from “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which I think has a bearing on our discussion of free indirect style in Flaubert, and the larger implications for what this technique means. What is that bearing? “The Idea of Order at Key West” is a fascinating example of the confluence of first-person plural (“we”) and third-person (“she”) narration, with a moment as well when the lyric speaker refers to the “me.” More importantly, it is a fascinating example of the way in which consciousness and presence are articulated, evoked, represented, brought forth, presented, through the orchestration of these various interacting perspectives (we, she, and me). Look at this passage, for example, near the end of the poem (the first line of the quoted stanza below should be indented, but Medium is being weird about this):
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
(Pause to honor the deep power of this poem and passage.)
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Okay, there are at least two moments in the poem that I think are especially germane to our discussion here. Both involve a kind of (for lack of a better term) conversion:
- the way in which the sea, through the singer’s song, becomes her self (one of my perennially favorite metaphors for the essence of poem-making, i.e. the very mysterious process by which we create a world through our creations — how does this happen?), and,
- the way in which the “me” and “we,” of the poem, after the song has ended, turn towards the town and experience a vision of the town, the sea, the night.
What do these conversion moments have to do with each other, and how are they related to Flaubert and Madame Bovary? In both of the instances above from Stevens, a part of the self is being augmented (borrowing a phrase from Harold Bloom) — the singer experiences something about herself via (somewhat indirectly) the sea (though the subject of the sentence beginning “And when she sang” is “the sea”) that becomes a part of her own self, and this happens through her song, her poem, her making, her creation. A new world is born, in a way, through the making of her song. And not only does the singer have her self augmented through her song, but the “we” and “me” of the poem, after hearing the singer’s song, have their own selves augmented, have their consciousness or awareness intensified and made more vivid, and then they experience a vision of “arranging, deepening, enchanting night.” (And on top of all this, the reader, reading this passage, might also experience what we could call an influx of consciousness, or an augmentation of the self.) So there is a way in which consciousness and presence itself, via the singer, via the song, via the “we,” reproduces itself as it is passed along. I think we need a term for this process: let’s call it the “transfer of consciousness.”
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Back to Flaubert. I am still in the early parts of the novel, but came across a remarkable scene that might help us resolve some of these questions and think about consciousness transfer. In the aforementioned scene, Emma, who, we learn, grew up reading and thinking about very romantic stories, and who, in her marriage to Charles, has experienced a great deal of boredom, desperation, desolation, grief, disappointment and loneliness, reconnects to her own romantic longings during the dance at La Vaubyessard, after which she walks upstairs around 4 in the morning, with Charles lagging ahead or behind. We read,
Emma put a shawl on her shoulders, opened the window, and leaned on her elbows.
The night was dark. A few drops of rain were falling. She breathed in the damp wind, which cooled her eyelids. The music of the dance was still humming in her ears, and she made an effort to stay awake in order to prolong the illusion of this luxurious life that she would soon have to leave behind.
The first light of dawn appeared. She looked at the windows of the chateau for a long time, trying to guess which were the rooms for all those people she had observed the night before. She would have liked to know what their lives were like, to enter into them, to become part of them.
But she was shaking with cold. She undressed and curled up between the sheets against Charles, who was asleep.
The two sentences from this passage that interest me the most are, “A few drops of rain were falling,” and “The first light of dawn appeared.” This is why they interest me: are we to read these as the narrator’s third person narration, or as first-person experiences on the part of Emma? Does Emma hear the few falling drops of rain, or is she so immersed in her longing that she doesn’t hear it? Along the same lines, how conscious is Emma of the “first light of dawn”? These might appear to be incidental questions, but I ask them because there is a way in which it is impossible, ultimately, to totally disentangle the narrating third-person consciousness from the character’s first-person consciousness, (Flaubert famously said something like “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” i.e. “Madame Bovary, that’s me”). Just as there is a transfer of consciousness in Stevens from singer to we to reader, there is a transfer of consciousness in Flaubert from narrator to Emma to reader. Of course, the quality of this consciousness in each instance is different — in the passages we looked at from “The Idea of Order at Key West,” we are presented with a very intense sense of presence, which reaches out towards the night and witnesses (itself, but also the night — like the song, but also the sea). In the passage from Flaubert, it is not exactly clear how conscious Emma is — she is immersed in her thoughts, her feelings, her longings, and so might not be cognizant fully of the light of dawn or the drops of rain falling — but the narrator is, the narrator is conscious of the larger scene unfolding, and this seems to impart something to both the reader and Emma, in which first-person, third-person, and even second-person (the reader?) perspectives merge and blur and interact, a kind of literary proof of how un-separate we all actually are. But not only this — the narrating consciousness, because it knows and sees more regarding the entire scene, seems to give Emma herself a deeper awareness, i.e. whether Emma is fully conscious or not of the light or the rain, there is the sense that, at some level, she is aware of these things, even if they are not in the foreground of her awareness (as her longings and, to a certain extent, the windows of the chateau, are). In Stevens, the singer, on the other hand, seems to be more fully conscious, fully aware, of her song, her perception, her vision. And yet both instances give the reader a deeper awareness, through what we are calling a transfer of consciousness.
