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Flaubert: Trois Contes and the Figure of the Double Cone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

John R. O'Connor
John R. O'Connor*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Abstract

In A Vision, W. B. Yeats describes the principal symbol of his work as the figure of a double cone formed by tracing a line along the outer edges of two intersecting gyres, or vortices, the apex of each vortex in the middle of the other's base. He then asserts that the only writer outside speculative philosophy to have used the symbol was Flaubert, who had planned to write a story called “La Spirale.” Though it is impossible completely to credit Yeats's reading of “La Spirale,” his general assertion is nevertheless correct, extraordinarily, as a description of the Trois Contes, where the double cone appears both as a narrative structure and a theme, symbolizing the creative passage from material to spiritual life.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 5 , October 1980 , pp. 812 - 826
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 70.

2 Eduard-Wilhelm Fischer, Etudes sur Flaubert inédit (Leipzig: J. Zeitler, 1908). Unfortunately, the original manuscript of “La Spirale” has been lost, and it is therefore the text published by Fischer that is reproduced in Volume xii of the Œuvres complètes (Paris: Club de l'Honnête Homme, 1974), pp. 229–32; references to “La Spirale” are to this edition (abbreviated OC) and are given parenthetically in the text. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

3 Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953), p. 123.

4 Some constituent element of a work of art may refuse to accept the impress of the governing form, but this refusal may itself be intended or interpreted as a significant commentary on the limits of form and of perception. The production of meaning is inexorable.

5 Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes (Paris: Gamier, 1961), p. 3. All page references to the Trois Contes are to this text and are hereafter given parenthetically in the body of the essay. Robert Baldick, trans., Three Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Inc., 1969), p. 17, translates “her maidservant Félicité,” which is rhythmically interesting, structurally coherent, and restores to the sentence some of the thematic density lost by the inability of English to render all the nuances of the French “bourgeoises.”

6 Michel Butor, “La Spirale des Sept Péchés,” Critique (May 1970), pp. 387–412. The reference to a “progression en spirale” is to be found on p. 395.

7 Poulet, “La Pensée circulaire de Flaubert,” Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 31 (1955), pp. 30–52. For a relation between the form of shrinkage and the vicissitudes of Flaubert's later years, see Murray Sachs, “Flaubert's Trois Contes: The Reconquest of Art,” L'Esprit Créateur, 10 (1970), 62–74. Also of interest are Frederic J. Shepler, “La Mort et la rédemption dans les Trois Contes de Flaubert,” Neophilologus, No. 56 (1972), pp. 407–16; Harold L. Smith, Jr., “Echec et illusion dans Un Cœur simple,” French Review, No. 39 (1965), pp. 36–48; and Michael Issacharoff, L'Espace et la nouvelle (Paris: Corti, 1976).

8 “ … l'image suggérée ici est celle de la pierre jetée dans un étang” ‘ … the image suggested here is that made by a stone thrown into a pond’ (Poulet, p. 39).

9 Smith has called this “… l'ultime étape dans la création de la forme entreprise par elle depuis longtemps” ‘the last stage of a formally creative process undertaken by her a long time back’ (p. 46).

10 “ … se tenir toujours au niveau où l'intériorisation de l'extérieur se transforme en extériorisation de l'intérieur.” J.-P. Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) n, 1787.

11 Correspondance (Paris: Conard, 1930), m, 306. For further examination of the theme of sacrifice, see Jane Bancroft, “Flaubert's Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier: The Duality of the Artist-Saint,” in L'Esprit Créateur, 10 (1970), 75–84; Murray Sachs, “Flaubert's Trois Contes: The Reconquest of Art,” L'Esprit Créateur, 10 (1970), 66–74; and, in more theoretical and provocative terms, Gérard Genette, “Le Travail de Flaubert,” Tel Quel, No. 14 (1963), pp. 51–57. Tangential to the theme is Roland Barthes, “Flaubert et la phrase,” Word, No. 24 (1968), pp. 40–54.

12 Sartre, I, 679, esp. the section entitled “Le Miroir et le fétiche.”

13 These facts have been widely commented on. See, for example, Edouard Maynial's introduction to the Gamier edition of the Trois Contes, pp. iv and v. For a complete discussion of the sources of “La Légende,” see Benjamin Bart and Robert Francis Cook, The Legendary Sources of Flaubert's “Saint Julien” (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977). Bart and Cook dispute the importance of the windows as a source; they claim instead that a written description of the windows, composed by a family friend, was a source. Whether the windows themselves were a source in no way alters their function as a motif in the text.

14 Poulet, “Criticism and the Experience of Inferiority,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), p. 72.

15 The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 922.