2 - The merits of inarticulacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2011
Summary
Although his ‘weak vessels’ have often attracted critical disapproval, Flaubert himself suggests an important connection between moral and aesthetic values in so-called ‘simple’ characters:
Les mots sublimes (que l'on rapporte dans les histoires) ont été dits souvent par des simples. Ce qui n'est nullement un argument contre l'Art, au contraire, car ils avaient ce qui fait l'Art même, à savoir la pensée concrétée, un sentiment quelconque, violent, et arrivé à son dernier état d'idéal. ‘Si vous aviez la foi, vous remuerez des montagnes’ est aussi le principe du Beau.
(Corr. (B) II, p. 785 (1957))Flaubert writes into his works an almost explicit argument on behalf of such characters, whose simplicity invariably takes the form of an extreme linguistic disadvantage. If language itself is sometimes blamed for difficulties of self-expression, inarticulate characters are more usually seen to have a personal problem. It is not that the right words do not exist, but that they do not have access to them. They are not good at translating their experience of the world into speech, and are especially unable to use language to communicate with other people. Nor is this because their thoughts are too profound for expression – the same characters clearly lack intellectual capacity as well. Yet Flaubert uses them to incarnate positive values such as single-mindedness, silence, immobility and imaginative sympathy. These values seem, in Flaubert, to possess a traditional moral sense, but all also have aesthetic connotations.
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- Flaubert's CharactersThe Language of Illusion, pp. 25 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985