A Spectator at the Perpetual Orgy

The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary by Mario Vargas Llosa (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975) 240 pages

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. Gustave Flaubert, 1858

When I recently read Llosa's The Bad Girl, I was very disappointed and could not glean why this writer had received such effusive praise from critics and readers alike. Here, in this book length essay on Flaubert and his most famous book Madame Bovary, I finally see the roots of this enthusiasm. He has encapsulated for me why I love Madame Bovary so much, why I am so affected by Emma Bovary the main character and by Flaubert's writing. This is a meticulous chronicle of Llosa's life long passion for Emma. He helped me understand why the book works as a piece of literature, why it is so affecting, why it is so pertinent to modern times.

A Right to Passion
Mario Vargas Llosa states that the story of Emma is that of "a blind, stubborn desperate rebellion against the social violence that stifles [her] right." The right to what? To pleasure, to love, to live passionately, to subvert the rules and the constrictions of her narrow, unhappy life. Is that why it is difficult to hate Emma, despite her wickedness, shallow nature, missteps, catastrophic decisions? Llosa feels that repression of passion has caused as great unhappiness as "economic exploitation, religious sectarianism or the thirst for conquest" and he is likely right.

Emma yearns for beauty as does Llosa. Llosa shares with Emma the qualities of "our incurable materialism, our greater predilection for pleasures of the body rather than the soul, our respect for the senses and instinct, our preference for this earthly life ..."

The commingling of the ugly and the beautiful
Flaubert stated that "It is easier in fact to draw an angel than a woman: the wings hide the hunched back." Llosa says of Flaubert that "the mean and the vulgar impress him because they are true". He has also defined for me why the then modern, realistic and the sometimes shocking style of the book, as it was considered to be then, has created a framework for my own work. Despite his future legal tribulations (after publishing the book, Flaubert and the editors of the Revue de Paris were put on trial because it was considered to be immoral), Flaubert remained convinced that he had chosen a new and revolutionary path. He was writing of the fate of an ordinary woman with astonishing beauty and insight.

Considered "mean and vulgar" by some readers, other artists would soon follow suit in establishing a more realistic style in other disciplines in the latter part of the 19th c.: composers Puccini and Verdi in opera, writers Ibsen and Chekhov in theatre, painter John Singer Sargent in painting. They moved away from stories and plots about gods, aristocrats and mythical beings to the tragedies and struggles of ordinary people, to realistic depictions of common people and to realistic depictions of desire.

There is beauty in strife, in suffering. Perhaps beauty is the wrong word; it is worthy of our examination as writers even if people or things are considered to be "ugly" and "sordid".

A Philosophy of Sex in Fiction
On a related note, Llosa argues for a more frank depiction of sex in fiction saying that "no novel arouses my fervent enthusiasm, holds me spellbound, fulfills me, unless it acts, if only to a slight degree as an erotic stimulant". This issue has intrigued me too: how to write about sex convincingly and not in a titillating fashion but in a realistic fashion? I think that Llosa fails in The Bad Girl but I admire the effort.

Flaubert, inhibited somewhat by the restrictions of the times regarding the depiction of sex, still manages to convey a highly charged erotic environment throughout the book, most notably in the ride that Emma takes with Leon in a fiacre when she tries to break with him in Part III of the novel. It's not graphic in any way but very erotic as the reader sees only the outside of the fiacre as it travels on and on, rocking and never stopping, and we see only Emma's hand as she throws out of the window pieces of a letter she wrote after she tries to breaks with Leon.

Consumption as a substitution for life
For Emma "erotic passion is inextricably bound up with a passion to possess, with a drive to own more and more things. In the novel there is an intimate relationship between love and money." Her illicit activities excite these spending sprees. Or are they merely another means, like her affairs, to disguise her boredom, her dissatisfaction with life? Her "consumption becomes an outlet for anxiety, the attempt to people with objects the emptiness that modern life has made a permanent feature of the existence of the individual". Flaubert captures the malaise of modern capitalist life especially for women of a certain class.

Emma is a "presage of that extraordinary phenomenon of the modern world whereby things, once the servants and instruments of mankind, becomes its masters and destroyers". And Emma is destroyed by her materialistic desires not only her sexual desires; it leads her to debt, the financial ruin of the family and hence her suicide when she is unable to extricate herself from her difficulties.

The alchemy of fact into fiction
Llosa captures for me the process of creating fiction and how one utilizes the personal, the historical, and transforms it into fiction. "Personal experience is a point of departure (the process of gestation); the point of arrival (the finished work) is reached through transmutation of the material". The material is changed no matter how how one attempts to catalogue a "real" event.

The Birth of the Anti-Hero
Emma represents for me a template for rebellion (largely misguided unfortunately) for the modern woman. Emma, influenced by romantic literature and music, wants to "surround her life with pleasing and superfluous things, elegance, refinement, to give concrete form by way of objects to that appetite for beauty that her imagination, her sensibility and reading have aroused in her. Emma wants to know other worlds, other people; she refuses to reconcile herself to the prospect of spending the rest of her days hemmed in by the narrow horizons of Yonville ... Emma's rebellion is born of one conviction, the root of all her acts: I am not resigned to my lot, the dubious compensation of the beyond doesn't matter to me, I want my life to be wholly and completely fulfilled here and now."

Where we part ways
The only place where I differ with Llosa is his assertion that Emma wants to be a man. He cites the many examples (unnoticed by me in my reading of the novel) of her donning male attire or certain male paraphernalia like a pince nez, her "mannishness". Llosa may perhaps be excused for this theory which he expounded more than 30 years ago. This theory, which I have heard many times about certain "wayward" women always puzzles me ... to me, it seems evident that what women want are the privileges and the rights of men, not to physically embody a male body.

Don't we all?