← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
721 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (The #23 Greatest Book of All Time)
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hey, folks, it's Jack. Here to promote something that's a little special. Not a thing and not a service, an opportunity for you to have an experience. The History of Literature Podcast is going on the road and you can join us. Our first stop is literary England, the land of Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen and Tolkien and C.S. lewis. Oh, and Dickens.
- [00:34]
Mike Palindrome
Oh, and Shakespeare.
- [00:36]
Jack Wilson
Perhaps you've heard of him. This isn't a trip where you march from site to site checking off boxes. Seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it. This is a week plus a little more traveling with me and Emma and a group of other fans of literature, all of us enjoying our conversations, our chance to learn and grow and be inspired by these writers and their works that we love so much. With special visits along the way from past guests of the show your favorites who will deepen our appreciation for what we're seeing. So please consider it. We would love to have you. You can learn more by going to John Shores Travel, that's S H O R S. And look for the upcoming trip to England with Jack Wilson. Or reach out to us@historyofliterature.com and we will tell you all the details. It's going to be in May of 2026, but act now to secure your spot. Space is limited, and let's all spend some quality time together enjoying literature and enjoying life.
- [01:38]
Emma
Close your eyes.
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Mike Palindrome
Exhale.
- [01:40]
Emma
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- [01:54]
Jack Wilson
Breathe.
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Emma
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [02:06]
Mike Palindrome
1-800-Contacts. Hello.
- [02:09]
Jack Wilson
The novel Madame Bovary was controversial when it first came out. In 1856 and 1857, the subject matter of a bored woman embarking upon a series of affairs was so scandalous that the author was put on trial for obscenity. Le Figaro was harsh in its assessment, declaring that Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer. The world disagreed. Today, Madame Bovary is viewed not just as pioneering, but as a pinnacle. Not just predicting a new style of novel, but perfecting it. Henry James said, madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but. But that makes it stand almost alone. It holds itself with such a supreme, unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment. End quote. High praise. And if anyone is an expert in supreme, unapproachable assurance, not to mention standing alone, it is Henry James. Today we bring you a special episode for the novel listed at number 23 on our list of greatest books of all time, Madame Bovary today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for joining me. It's a good day from Adam Bovary on the history of literature, but this list is starting to get me down. How could the Odyssey only be number 24 and Madame Bovary only number 23? These are top 10 books, in my humble opinion. But my top 10 would probably have 100 books in it, so fair enough. One has to draw lines somewhere. We'll go with the consensus of the masses. I'm glad in any case, that we get to explore Madame Bovary with you today. I've got a few things in store for us. We're going to do a quick rundown of the book, who Flaubert was, what he was doing, and so on. And then we're going to hear from Mike Palindrome, who is currently hosting a slow read of Madame Bovary as we speak, or as I speak, he is in France visiting Flaubert's house. He sent me pictures. I've asked him to to send a few notes about what this particular reading of Madame Bovary has meant to him. We'll give you that and some thoughts along with those, and then we'll play. We'll replay a very popular little vignette. I'll call it taken from my trip to Tibet. This is one of my origin stories as a literature aficionado and, I guess, podcaster, although there were no such thing at the time. This was my trip with a broken down truck on the highest road in the world. Not even a road at that point, actually. I was out there on the plains, left there to die. I thought I might die. And all I had was a handful of things which I'll talk about in this book, Madame Bovary. It's a very special memory for me, which I will reshare with you today. So Madame Bovary, the debut novel of the French writer Gustave Flaubert, published when he was 35 years old after having spent five years writing it. His next book, Salambo, took four years and the one after that, his final completed novel, Sentimental Education, took seven years. He wrote other books along the way, but none of them were easy or fast. As far as I know, he was one of the agonizers, maybe the OG prose agonizer. He was a passionate advocate of le mot just or the right word. He would spend a week writing a page, miserable the whole time. The prose does not flow out of me, he complained. It's only the product of hard work and revision. He would scrub his prose to get rid of cliches and clunkers, wanting the sound of the sentences to be powerful, rhythmic, expressive, all the images fresh and evocative. After he finished Madame Bovary, his fellow French authors realized the high bar that had just been set. Younger writers came to visit, having memorized whole pages of Madame Bovary, which they recited to him. Remember that this was a century, with Balzac and Zola and Victor Hugo, great powerhouse authors who cranked out thick novels and at a fantastic pace. It's not clear to me where exactly Flaubert got this idea. What inspired him to make prose as careful and deliberate as poetry. I'm not sure. He was born in 1821 in Rouen, Upper Normandy, the son of a successful doctor. He lived in or near Rouen for most of his life, although for a while he lived in Paris studying law, which he dropped. He didn't like Paris much, and he didn't like the law much easier either. He also traveled in the Pyrenees and Corsica, and he took a few long journeys to Carthage and Greece and Egypt and Beirut. On these adventures, he cavorted with prostitutes, both male and female. And even when he was back in France, he made several trips to England, where he appears to have had a mistress. He had venereal diseases most of his adult life. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 58. One of his longest relationships, and maybe his only serious romantic relationship, was with the poet Louise Collet, with whom he exchanged many letters. I don't want children, he told her in one such letter. I would transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
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Mike Palindrome
End quote.
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Jack Wilson
He hated the bourgeois lifestyle all his life. He found it to be unnecessarily smug in its perceived wisdom and self regard. His view of the world was that most people and things were mediocre and most human knowledge was futile. And yet he believed in the possibility of art, of novels, of prose. I want a style, he said, that would be as rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep voiced as a cello tipped with flowers, flame, a Style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface like a skiff before a good tailwind. In Bovary, we see these twin concerns or obsessions combined. He agonized over the prose, hardly ever satisfied with what he had written. And his great subject, the wife of a doctor who is seeking passion in life, leading to her ultimate destruction, is a skewering of the assumptions and attitudes of the bourgeois. It's easier to find the influences on his thinking about the bourgeois than it is to find influences on his thinking about style. It might be that he came up with the aesthetic on his own, and then he put it into action in a way that changed how later novelists.
- [09:39]
Mike Palindrome
Came to think of it.
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Jack Wilson
And if we look at the possible motivations, we can see that it's hard to see how anyone could object to Flaubert's project. I can roll out three. These are three possibilities. One is simply that it comes from a respect for his readers. Life is short. An author is asking a lot of a reader to give the author a reader's time and attention. Maybe that was Flaubert's view, that as an author you owe it to them, owe it to readers not to waste their time. Every word should be perfect. There's no room for sloppiness. Well, once Flaubert takes that position, what writer after Flaubert could take the opposite?
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Mike Palindrome
What could you say?
- [10:26]
Jack Wilson
No, I believe in wasting my reader's time? Same thing for the other possible reasons. Maybe he had a respect for the role of the author as artist, or a respect for the form of the art itself. A desire to accomplish something that. Like a painting that belongs in a museum or a sculpture. Something permanent that will outlast something worthy. What serious novelist after Flaubert could say, well, actually, I believe. I believe in cliches and wasted words, and in prose that isn't very precise or doesn't work very well. I believe that writers are all hacks and should work quickly and make a lot of mistakes. No, once Flaubert established the principles, then it makes authors like James Joyce inevitable. The right word in the right place. That was always what you said about poetry, not prose. The right word in the right place. Even if you're writing 50,000 of them. 75. 120,000 of them. 120,000 right words in the right place. Which is not to say that very good books can't or shouldn't be written quickly. It might be that some authors work best that way, and while they might not achieve perfection. Maybe their extra care and revision might make maybe if they put that kind of effort into it, maybe they would make their own books worse. Maybe some writers are not good at revision and their work agonizing over the right word will drain the life out of their books. Flaubert's is not the only way, but it is a way with a lot of appeal. It gives you a mountain to climb, and novelists who are serious about their craft have to reckon with it. There's no world in which Flaubert, in his example, do not exist. Let's take a quick break and come back with Mike's thoughts on Madame Bovary this time around. This is an ad by BetterHelp Folks, there's a lot of noise out there and information coming at you all the time, and it's hard to know where to turn. Somehow you've got to find a way to set some boundaries and cope. You want to be the best version of yourself. That's the goal. But how do you know what will work for you? Sometimes when you're overwhelmed, it can help to talk to someone. That's what BetterHelp is for. They've served over 5 million people around the world, putting them in touch with over 30,000 therapists and at the click of a button. BetterHelp has an App Store rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com literature that's BetterHelp H-E-L-P.com literature.
- [13:57]
Emma
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- [15:15]
Jack Wilson
So our old friend Mike Palindrome, the president of the Literature Supporters Club, is in Paris, and he's in. He's taking some trips outside of Paris. He's visiting Rouen, and he's also conducting one of the online reads that he orchestrates. These used to be called Twitter together, but now Twitter is X. And Mike has anyway, moved over to Blue sky, where he goes by the handle literaturesc. See, they recently started a slow read of Madame Bovary, and Mike told me that he's enjoying it immensely. I didn't want to disrupt his vacation with a call, but I did ask him to share a few thoughts, which he passed along via email. Here are three things he said he's noticing and enjoying this time around. He says, dear Jack, Here are my three points. It's been 23 years since I last read Madame Bovary. You know, Mike keeps a journal of all of his reads, of all of his books, so he can look something like that up pretty quickly. He could say, oh, I've read that four times. 23 years since he last read Madame Bovary. And we're doing a slow read of the novel On Blue sky at flaubertogether. Yes, we've heard of Flaubert's Les Mot Just. And how no word is out of place in the novel. The exquisite descriptions of food, churches, and the countryside. But what's somewhat overlooked is how risky his writing is. I'm working off the newish Lydia Davis translation. Here's Charles quote. He grew thinner, his body lengthened, and his face took on a sort of plaintive expression that made it almost interesting. End quote. That's point number one. Okay, I'm not sure I see the risk there. I have to ask Mike what he means by risk, but I do see the precision. It's the precision of a dull, quiet thud. Maybe that's the risk that it's not fireworks. It's perfect for the character of Charles. Charles Bovary, Madame Bovary's husband. Because he's dull. A laggard, as one professor of mine used to put it. A laggard. Oh, he's a laggard.
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Mike Palindrome
What a word.
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Jack Wilson
A plaintive expression that made. Interesting, almost, but not quite interesting. What kind of a face is that? Plaintiff is already a pretty dull expression. Not joyous or villainous or beautiful or charming. Not full of anything that suggests that he has a dramatic inner life. Just plaintive, sad and mournful, which is human and could be interesting. But we're told that it's not. It gets. It's almost interesting, but not quite. Not even plaintive enough to be interesting. No wonder Emma was looking elsewhere. Was she looking elsewhere because she was reading books like novels, stories about adventure and love and lovers. You remember, that was the fear in the early years of novels, that these are going to make people, women especially, turn to scandalous acts in order to find something more life. And yes, we do see this from our Emma, don't we? She spent her childhood in a convent, but she's been reading romantic novels that make her unhappy with life as she's living it. She reads the novels of Sir Walter Scott, as so many people did and hardly anyone does now. Walter Scott, we might have to do an episode on him, just because of his influence on all of these 19th century writers and characters. Flaubert gives us a vivid picture of young Emma in the convent and the power of books when they're brought to her by an outside worker. Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she. This is Emma, who will later be Madame Bovary. Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart. Being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes. At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to mend the linen, patronized by the clergy because she belonged to an ancient family of noblemen ruined by the revolution. She dined in the refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal had a bit of a chat with them before going back to her work. The girls often slipped out from the study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love songs of the last century and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away. She told stories, gave them news, went on errands in the town, and on the sly lent the big girls some novel that she always carried in the pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long chapters in the intervals of her work. They were all love lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page. Somber forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was always well dressed and weeping like fountains for six months. Then Emma, at 15 years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries through Walter Scott. Later on she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor house, like those long waisted chatelaines who in the shade of pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields.
- [21:41]
Mike Palindrome
End quote.
- [21:43]
Jack Wilson
Back to Mike's list number two, he says. Secondly, the fascinating economics underpinning the novel. Charles's mother finding for her son a bailiff's widow from Dieppe, 45 years old and an income of 1200 livres to marry. Slight spoiler alert. Later, in part one, we learn that a notary has ripped her off to the fury of Charles's mother.
- [22:05]
Mike Palindrome
End quote.
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Jack Wilson
This, of course raises the question of Flaubert's hatred of the bourgeois, the middle class that was then on the rise. Of course, he was part of that class himself, his father being a successful surgeon. Flaubert wasn't in the nobility and he wasn't part of what we might call the proletariat if we're borrowing from Marx, which is not all that appropriate, which I'll get into in any case. Flaubert had money, he didn't give it all away and he didn't advocate for social reform. His stance seems to have been one on behalf of art. One thing that we should note is that bourgeois for Flaubert is not really the way we understand the term in Marxist thinking. It doesn't really have anything to do with money per se or class in that sense. As Nabokov put it, Flaubert's bourgeois is a state of mind, not a state of pocket.
- [23:02]
Mike Palindrome
End quote.
- [23:04]
Jack Wilson
For Flaubert, the term bourgeois meant people with a low way of thinking. Philistines, we might say, self satisfied, reasonable in quotes and mediocre. Nabokov, lecturing in the 1950s, noted that nobody was more bourgeois than Soviet functionaries. The lace curtain behind the Iron Curtain, he said. He said, I shall clear up the term completely if I say that. For instance, today in Communist Russia, Soviet literature, Soviet art, Soviet music, Soviet aspirations are fundamentally and smugly bourgeois. A Soviet official, small or big, is the perfect type of bourgeois mind of a philistine.
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Mike Palindrome
End quote.
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Jack Wilson
There's a famous quote by Flaubert that goes, Be steady and well ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your Work. End quote. Hang on to that quote in your mind for a moment, because I'll come back to it. I'll repeat it. Be steady and well ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work. You've probably seen that on the Internet. Was he steady and well ordered? Flaubert himself, the novelist George sand, wrote him a letter in which she says, you're living like an anchorite. You may remember anchorites from our episode on Julian of Norwich. They're unbelievable people. They're religious fanatics who withdraw from public life, living in or near churches or monasteries, sometimes seeing no one. At times they were walled up inside a cell, mostly females. Females outnumbered the males and gerates, locking these women into cells. And sometimes they would offer advice about the world through their little windows, or write poetry and sermons to be delivered to the rest of the world. They were living a life of intense meditation and piety and separation, distance. Flaubert writes back to George sand and says, no lovely lady comes to see me. Lovely ladies have occupied my mind a good deal, but have taken up very little of my time. Applying the term anchorite to me is perhaps a juster comparison than you think. I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being, and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a single day, nor any event whatsoever. I see my mother and my niece on Sundays, and that is all. My only company consists of a band of rats in the garrett, which make an infernal racket above my head. When the water does not roar or the wind blow, the nights are black as ink and a silence surrounds me comparable to that of the desert. Sensitiveness is increased immeasurably in such a setting. I have palpitations of the heart for nothing. All that results from our charming profession. That's what he sacrifices for his art. That's how he's living. But he doesn't argue for giving up all your money. His hatred of the bourgeois doesn't push him that far, because you need money.
- [26:23]
Mike Palindrome
In order to be able to devote.
- [26:25]
Jack Wilson
Yourself to art like this. He wasn't working for a living, with some kind of profession. If he was working for a living, or if he had children to support and that kind of thing, he wouldn't have been able to do this. And in fact, that quote, that quote that I told you about a few minutes ago, be steady and well ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work, is actually a misquote. The part that gets Cut off in Internet memes is this. Here's the actual literal. Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois in order to be fierce and original in your works. Okay, that gives us a clue. It's not the money he objects to. It's the attitude. It's the complacency and the morality and the general mediocrity. I love the small town where I grew up and my parents live. I know it like the back of my hand. The streets, the little houses, the quiet nights, the stillness and simplicity. What I don't like is the nosiness, the judgments, the provincialness, the sneering dismissals of anyone who dares to be different. The certitude that one is living the best possible life and one's customs are superior to everyone else's. And the failure to see that the world outside of one's little postage stamp has a lot to offer. That's. I'm channeling Flaubert when I think those thoughts. Doesn't apply to everybody in the town, of course. Certainly not to my parents. But it's there. Number three. I forgot how this is Mike again. I forgot how funny Flaubert can be. Though I did laugh a lot last year reading his letters with Turgenev, which I highly recommend. Here is lonely, isolated Emma. She confided many secrets to her greyhound. She would have done the same to the logs in the fireplace and the pendulum of the clock. End quote. That is funny. We see humor in the quotes we've had from his letters and from Madame Bovary before, when he says to George sand, all that results from our charming profession, right? The band of rats in the garret scrabbling overhead.
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Mike Palindrome
His intense seclusion.
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Jack Wilson
Our charming profession, he says. That's humorous.
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Mike Palindrome
Or the quote that I read from Bovary.
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Jack Wilson
With horses ridden to death on every page and weeping like fountains, virtuous as no one ever was. This is giving us. He's mocking these books, right? We saw all that. Flaubert did have a strong sense of humor. It was robust and profound. He was known for among his friends for his booming laugh. But once again he. He tailored it so it would serve his art. His letters. He had that booming laugh. His letters especially are full of sharply comic observations. He loved satire and self mockery. But in the novel, when it came time to write the novel, he wasn't going for broad humor.
- [29:48]
Mike Palindrome
Which would have.
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Jack Wilson
Been out of place in such a controlled, confined setting of Flaubert's prose. His early efforts did have a character like this, one of them something he wrote when he was young, 15 or so was a story that featured the God Yuck. Who laughs at the world with what he called Homeric inextinguishable laughter. This was the teenage Flaubert seems to have. He seems to have come out of adolescence with his lifelong hatred for society's pretensions fully baked. Oh, this good civilization, he declared, this agreeable slut who invented railroads, poisons, enema pumps, custard pies, royalty and the guillotine. End quote. That's Flaubert as a teenager. By the time he matured, he went for what he called the sadly comic, the blend of pessimism and irony, the comedy that is beyond laughter. Not the comedy of young Adam Sandler or the Three Stooges, the comedy of Christopher Guest. So those are three passages from Mike. We've got a couple more things to cover before we get back into my experience with Madame Bovary. We've got one from Nabokov talking about the content of the book, and then one from James Wood talking about the style. First, Nabokov, who doesn't love every book that we consider a classic, but he does love this one. A masterpiece, he calls it. We come to another masterpiece. Here he is talking about Emma Bovary's romanticism and Charles Bovary's lack of it. And yet there's something compelling about the way that the two regard each other, the irony that that exposes and what it tells us about Flaubert and his project. I'm going to read these paragraphs for you. These are from Nabokov's Lectures on Literature. The term romantic has several meanings when discussing Madame Bovary, the book, and the lady herself. I shall use romantic in the following sense. Characterized by a dreamy, imaginative habit of mind, tending to dwell on picturesque possibilities derived mainly from literature.
- [32:14]
Mike Palindrome
End quote.
- [32:14]
Jack Wilson
Romanesque rather than romanticist. A romantic person, mentally and emotionally living in the unreal is profound or shallow, depending on the quality of his or her mind. Emma Bovary is intelligent, sensitive, comparatively well educated, but she has a shallow mind. Her charm, beauty and refinement do not preclude a fatal streak of philistinism in her. Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas, or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional. Adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional. And her passion for luxury does not prevent her from revealing once or twice what Flaubert terms a peasant hardness, a strain of rustic practicality. However, her extraordinary physical charm, her unusual grace, her bird like hummingbird, like vivacity. All this is irresistibly attractive and enchanting to three men in the her husband and her two successive lovers, both of them heels Rodolphe, who finds in her a dreamy, childish tenderness, in welcome contrast to the harlots he has been consorting with, and Leon, an ambitious mediocrity who is flattered by having a real lady for his mistress. Now, what about the husband, Charles Bovary? He is a dull, heavy, plodding fellow with no charm, no brains, no culture, and with a complete set of conventional notions and habits. He is a philistine, but he is also a pathetic human being. The two following points are of the utmost importance. What seduces him in Emma and what he finds in her is exactly what Emma herself is looking for and not finding. In her romantic daydreams, Charles dimly but deeply perceives in her personality an iridescent loveliness, luxury, a dreamy remoteness, poetry, romance. This is one point, and I shall offer some samples in a moment. The second point is that the love Charles almost unwittingly develops for Emma is a real feeling, deep and true, in absolute contrast to the brutal or frivolous emotions experienced by Rodolphe and Leon, her smug and vulgar lovers. So here is the pleasing paradox of Flaubert's fairy tale. The dullest and most inept person in the book is the only one who is redeemed by a divine something in the all powerful, forgiving and unswerving love that he bears Emma, alive or dead.
- [35:04]
Mike Palindrome
End quote.
- [35:06]
Jack Wilson
It's a very shrewd and subtle understanding of a book that is shrewder and subtler than it might first appear. Flaubert is not writing a romance. He's mocking them. And he's giving us something deeper and more human, more psychologically complex, than just.
- [35:22]
Mike Palindrome
The story of a bored woman who.
- [35:25]
Jack Wilson
Has affairs and is punished by fate. Julian Barnes wrote a review of Lydia Davis's translation of Madame Bovary. He likes the translation, but he doesn't love it. He says Lydia Davis might be the most accomplished fiction writer who's ever taken a shot at translating Madame Bovary. But it's clear that Julian Barnes finds something lacking. It's an acceptable version, he says, but one where the translator is profoundly out of sympathy with the book. And here's his evidence. Lydia Davis gave an interview in which she said, I was asked to do the Flaubert, and it was hard to say no to another great book so called.
- [36:08]
Mike Palindrome
I'm gonna pause the quote there for a moment.
- [36:11]
Jack Wilson
Julian Barnes of course, has called this the perfect novel. The perfect novel. Perfect.
- [36:18]
Mike Palindrome
And here's Lydia Davis saying, it's a.
- [36:20]
Jack Wilson
Great book, so called.
- [36:22]
Mike Palindrome
Can imagine Julian Barnes dropping his reading material, a newspaper, I think this was. You can imagine him letting the newspaper.
- [36:31]
Jack Wilson
Fall to the floor, standing up from his chair, walking around the room several times, and then staring out the window in silence before returning to his.
- [36:42]
Mike Palindrome
To the. To the interview, maybe making a stop.
- [36:46]
Jack Wilson
To sharpen his reviewer's pencil with a large knife.
- [36:51]
Mike Palindrome
But guess what? It gets better.
- [36:52]
Jack Wilson
Lydia Davis has not done it gets better or worse, maybe I should say. Back to the interview says, I was asked to do the Flaubert, and it was hard to say no to another great book so called. I didn't actually like Madame Bovary. That's in italics. It's the novel. I didn't actually like Madame Bovary, the novel. I find what Flaubert does with the language really interesting, but I wouldn't say that I warmed to it as a book. And I like a heroine who thinks and feels. Well, I don't find Emma Bovary admirable or likable, but Flaubert didn't either. I do a lot of things that people don't think a translator does. They think she loves Madame Bovary. She's read it three times in French, she's always wanted to translate it, and she's urging publishers to do another translation. And she's done all the background reading.
- [37:41]
Mike Palindrome
But none of that is true. End quote.
- [37:46]
Jack Wilson
And Barnes graciously says, well, Lydia Davis has spent three years slogging through the work of translation. Maybe some of this is her being tired, tired of the book and glad to be done. But then he says, what does Davis mean by saying that Emma Bovary doesn't think or feel? The novel is all about the perils of thinking and feeling, but wrong thinking and false feeling. Perhaps she means doesn't think or feel in a way that I approve of. As for complaining that Emma isn't admirable or likable, this sounds like the most basic book group objection.
- [38:26]
Mike Palindrome
End quote.
- [38:28]
Jack Wilson
That's what Nabokov gets and what Julian Barnes is claiming for Flaubert as well. We don't have to like Emma in the sense of her being someone we want to be or someone we love. The smart and sparky one with a lovable flaw, like she's a little too bold with her words or her judgments, or the seemingly sullen and brooding person with a heart of secret, heart of gold and a great generosity of spirit that's hidden away. Those are the characters I've just described, the characters. Elizabeth and Lizzie and Darcy from Pride.
- [39:04]
Mike Palindrome
And Prejudice, who might be the most.
- [39:06]
Jack Wilson
Beloved romantic heroine and hero of all time. Or there are main characters that were almost manipulated into loving, like the ones you might find in Dickens, hard luck cases whose courage puts us on their side. We root for them. We don't like Emma Bovary necessarily, or all the time. We don't like her choices, we don't like her responses, we don't like her actions. We don't like the narrative she constructs around her actions. We don't relate to her as a person because we don't want to relate to her. We don't like how she sees herself or what she does in response to that. But.
- [39:42]
Mike Palindrome
But. And this is everything.
- [39:43]
Jack Wilson
We're not asked to like her as a person. That's a simplistic way of reading, the.
- [39:48]
Mike Palindrome
Book club way, as.
- [39:50]
Jack Wilson
As Julian Barnes puts it, we're asked to like her as the protagonist of a novel. We're asked to like what the author is using her for, to like the project that the author has in mind for her, what the author is conveying to us through this character. And for that, for that we have the guy who hated the bourgeois, who hated conventional wisdom, who hated the people trapped in it and exhibiting its limitations, who thought that art was the redeeming lance to the bourgeois boil. And Emma grasps. She herself grasps for that, or for something. Somehow she senses the need for something different, but she's incapable of truly getting it, because Flaubert shows us there aren't happy, triumphant endings when people are stuck in this rut. The grasping, clutching hands of the bourgeois emerging from the muck and grabbing people, putting them in a stranglehold, dragging them back down into the mire, is too powerful. Reading romance novels is not enough. You'd have to write them, and through them, to expose the flaws in society and the insufficiency of a society that everyone subscribes to. And hardly anyone escapes. Nabokov's neat trick of pointing out the difference in the love that Madame Bovary aspires to and the one that Charles actually has for her goes to show how great the novel is, because it points us toward the real secret that life, our society, our culture, our way of living can be like quicksand. And the more we scramble to get out, the deeper we're pulled in. And only those who remain perfectly still can keep their head above the level of death by suffocation. That's what's relatable that's what we love about the book, and we love the style. Here, finally, is a passage by the critic James Wood talking about Madame Bovary and Flaubert's achievement. Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank Spring. It all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail, that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing, that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw like a good valet from superfluous commentary, that it judges good and bad neutrally, that it seeks out the truth even at the cost of repelling us, and that the author's fingerprints on all this are paradoxically traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austin or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert. Let's take our last break, and then we'll present my thoughts and memories of Madame Bovary from 2017. I cared deeply about this novel. It had a profound effect on me during some travels, as you will hear. It changed my life, I think it's fair to say. And even though I kind of can't believe that I was dipping into this well to deliver such a personal commentary to you all, it reminds me of just how different the podcast maybe used to be in its earliest days. We don't do episodes like this one much anymore, or at least not very often, but it's nice to have a reminder of how things were once upon a time. I hope you enjoy it.
- [43:59]
Mike Palindrome
Jack Daniels is proudly served in fine establishments, questionable joints, and everywhere in between. So no matter where you go in every bar, you'll always know someone by name.
- [44:13]
Jack Wilson
Jack Jack and Coke Shot a Jack Jack Daniels please right away. That's what makes Jack Jack please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org Jack Daniels and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks Copyright 2025 Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume 80 proof.
- [44:29]
Emma
With the Venmo debit card you can Venmo everything. Your favorite band's merch. You can Venmo this or their next show, you can Venmo that. Visit Venmo Me Debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp bank in a pursuant to license by Mastercard International Incorporated. Card may be used everywhere Mastercard is accepted. Venmo Purchase restrictions apply.
- [45:17]
Mike Palindrome
Hello? It's me, Jack. Shh. We're about to listen to a great poet, Ezra Pound, read one of his poems. Oh, here he comes.
- [45:47]
Ezra Pound
For three years, out of key with his time, he strove to resuscitate the dead art of poetry, to maintain the sublime in the old sense. Wrong from the start.
- [46:01]
Mike Palindrome
That's Ezra. We're listening to him reading his semi autobiographical poem. There's one line that we're waiting for.
- [46:23]
Ezra Pound
Giving the rock and the chopped seas held him there for that year. His true Penelope was Flo bear. He fished.
- [46:35]
Mike Palindrome
Did you hear that? Did you hear that? Let's listen to it again.
- [46:40]
Ezra Pound
His true Penelope was Flaubert.
- [46:44]
Mike Palindrome
His true Penelope was Flaubert. Hmm. Okay, let's leave Mr. Pound and the lecture hall and his audience and talk about that line is true Penelope was Flaubert. That line sent me on a journey, a deep journey into the world of literature, which coincided with an actual journey that I was taking, a physical journey, which also coincided with a life journey, and which all got all meshed up with our novel today, Madame Bovary. It's like a literary blender, literary cocktail. I have several stories to tell today, and each story has several endings. But we'll separate the strands and we'll dig into one of the world's greatest literary masterpieces along the way. Here we go with the classic French novel, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. I'm Jack Wilson, by the way. Welcome to the podcast historyofliterature.com facebook.com historyofliterature so here's a brief sketch of my own history with literature. Big reader as a kid, big reader in high school, big reader in college, but completely unformed. No direction, no focus, no context, no understanding, or barely an understanding. I understood the books, but I didn't really understand literature, if that makes sense. I didn't see patterns. I didn't see how things fit. Then at college, with Mike Palindrome and others, I started to look for influences, connections, inspirations, homage styles, schools, that kind of thing. I was fascinated by stories and narrative and how it all worked. How did art work? That fascinated me, too. Not just in literature, other disciplines as well. The story of art, the story of architecture. I loved books like that in literature. I wanted to know how it all hung together. What came first and what came after. And how did any of this happen? When a writer sat down with a pen, how did he or she know what to do? How to make general stories into art? What made one novel so much Richer than another who figured this out is enormous in this story. Maybe the most influential novelist who ever lived. But that's getting ahead of ourselves a bit. So, anyway, there I am in college, reading Away with Mike. Think of this. Think of it like bands, like music. You might love a song you hear on the radio and someone gives you an album. This was the 80s and 90s I'm talking about. So there were still albums. And then maybe you'd read some interviews, maybe some liner notes or some music criticism. You develop a few heroes. And you start to see the bands that influenced your heroes. They tell you about them in these interviews. Some of the names you might know. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, maybe. You go check them out again, see if you can detect the source of the influence and how it played out in your favorite band. And some names that you hear, some you might not know. Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols. You have to go back and check them out. Might be different for you. My roommate was really into fugazi and suddenly it was, hey, Black Flag. Or the Rolling Stones might point you toward Muddy Waters. Or if you're younger, maybe you're into Bruno Mars. Well, my young friend, let me introduce you to the Police and Prince and Michael Jackson. The point is, you fall in love with someone, so you start tracing back, looking for the source. Where did that river start flowing? Here's another one for people my age, the Band. The Band is a great example of a band that influenced everyone that came after. I was just watching the Last Waltz again. Man, is that a good movie. Martin Scorsese's documentary of the final concert given by the band. Here's why I watched it. I ran across an old story about Eric Clapton. Not sure I've ever heard this before. Eric Clapton was in Cream, a supergroup, and they were hugely successful with hit after hit after hit, sold out show after sold out show. Successful by any measure. And Eric Clapton, in the midst of all that success, heard an album by the band. It was the Music from Big Pink album, and suddenly Cream was over. That was it, one album. And Clapton knew, listening to it, that he couldn't stay in Cream anymore. Why not? Well, Cream was all about big solos. The sizzling hot solos of his own guitar playing. And Ginger Baker on drums and Jack Bruce. And that wasn't the music that Clapton wanted to make anymore. The songs by the band were not about individuals trading off solos. As technically dazzling as those solos might have been in the hands of someone like Clapton. The band was about the songs. There was room to breathe in those Songs, there was restraint and there was a spirit that wasn't coming through with Cream. And that's what Clapton wanted to do next. Locate that spirit, tap into that spirit. Well, when you read a story that's that dramatic, makes you want to listen to the band, doesn't it? To see what was missing in Cream. That's what it was like for me in those years. You'd read Fitzgerald, and then you'd hear that his great friend and rival was Hemingway. So you'd read Hemingway. Suddenly you have two very different styles to compare against one another. So you read more about the group they traveled in, and Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. And now you have all these new connections to explore, new people to read. What were they up to? How was Hemingway different from any of them? This was me for about 10 years, tracing things back. Here's Fitzgerald's great mentor in college, his contemporary, but someone whose judgment he deferred to all his life. Edmund Wilson. Interesting critic, aspiring novelist and boy. Wilson got in a feud with Vladimir Nabokov. Oh, right, the Lolita guy. So you start reading him as well. Wow. He couldn't be more different from Hemingway. Complete opposites, those two. Nabokov and Hemingway. And you read somewhere that Hemingway really traces his origins back to Flaubert. And then you read somewhere else that Nabokov really traces his origins back to Flaubert. Whoa, whoa. And then here's Pound.
- [54:10]
Ezra Pound
Tis true. Penelope was Flaubert.
- [54:14]
Mike Palindrome
What's going on here? What does that mean? Penelope is the wife that Odysseus leaves behind. She's the rock, the anchor, the one that Odysseus is trying to return to. She's courted by many would be lovers. While Odysseus is gone on his long quest, she turns them all down. She is, for Pound, the symbol of the faithful, the unwavering, the devoted. That's who Flaubert is for. All those writers who came after, the one devoted more than any other novelist to getting it right, the one devoted to perfection and to style. Dorothy Parker, in her inimitable way, put it as quote, and there was that poor sucker Flaubert, rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word, end quote. It's classic Dorothy Parker. I think it made our list of top 10 Dorothy Parker sayings. Check out that episode. But that was the symbol, the agony of Flaubert writing. That's what he stood for for so many writers. His devotion to perfection was the model for everyone who came after. I'm putting an asterisk at the End of that sentence. Actually, a double asterisk. But let's spend some time understanding Flaubert's devotion first. Madame Bovary was his second effort at a novel. His first, the temptation of St. Anthony was another labor of love. Maybe the book Flaubert cared about the most, the temptation of St. Anthony. He wrote and wrote and wrote. Then he forced two friends to listen to him read it aloud. It took four days, and Flaubert demanded that they simply listen without comment for four days as he read his manuscript. And then he finally finished reading aloud, and his friends told him that he should throw it on the fire. What a moment that must have been. I'm surprised Flaubert wasn't convicted on a double homicide after that. Literature would have been totally different had that happened. But no, Flaubert went forth. He set the temptation of St Anthony aside, which he returned to it years later when he brought it out in a different form. But Instead, at age 30, he began writing a story of a woman married to a provincial doctor. Lobert's own father was a provincial doctor, by the way. But this story was the story of an imaginative woman, a woman who reads many popular novels and who develops a taste for the finer things, but who is married to a dull, well meaning, mediocre doctor, and who, in her longing to be part of a different life, eventually enters into an affair, and then another affair. I won't spoil the ending, except to say that this is the thrust of the book. Will she find happiness in these illicit affairs? Will she escape misery, learn a kind of contentment? Or will her romantic longing prove to be her downfall? Flaubert frames her condition with a sentence so marvelous that it belongs on every writer's wall, framed. She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris. Isn't that fantastic? She wanted to die, but she also.
- [57:57]
Jack Wilson
Wanted to live in Paris.
- [58:00]
Mike Palindrome
As a statement of Emma Bovary's soul, it's simply perfection. Now I said I was going to talk about Flaubert's devotion to his craft. It's this. He crafts perfect sentences, sentences with details, perfectly chosen details that perfectly set the scene. His eye is the eye of a movie camera scanning from the flower in the buttonhole of a man sitting in a suit on a balcony, down to a cafe where the newspaper ruffles underneath a saucer. To a priest hastening across the square, late for an appointment with a woman who every year thinks she's going to die, always in the final week of February. I made those details up. They're not from Flaubert but you get the idea. Here's an actual example from he ran all the way to the Quai Voltaire. An old man in his shirt sleeves was weeping at an open window, his eyes raised towards the sky. The Seine was flowing peacefully by, the sky was blue, birds were singing in the Tuileries. Chosen detail, Chosen detail. Chosen detail. The world is painted in a sweep, and this goes on sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, brick by brick. The author tries to get out of the way. That's Flaubert's goal. Not to judge, not to emote, not to tell. Just present these details. Stay out of the way, don't leave fingerprints. And oh, how he labored to get these right.
- [59:43]
Jack Wilson
Last week, I spent five days writing one page.
- [59:47]
Mike Palindrome
He wrote in a letter, and I dropped everything else for it. I gave myself up to it entirely. In another letter, he tells of the judgments of those around him.
- [59:58]
Jack Wilson
Your mania for sentences, my mother said, has dried up your heart.
- [60:04]
Mike Palindrome
But this was paramount to him. Style, style.
- [60:08]
Jack Wilson
He wanted to write a book about.
- [60:10]
Mike Palindrome
The color gray, he said, or a book about nothing. The style itself would propel the narrative forward, but only if it's perfect. And style means perfection of language, too. The sound and the rhythms. Here's a nice quote of his from Madame Bovary. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars in Madame Bovary. He wanted his prose to melt the stars. Thank God he didn't actually write a book about nothing. That would have been his style, pushed to an extreme, a kind of Finnegan's Wake. A Flaubert's Finnegan's Wake that would be unreadable. Instead, we have this style applied to a beautiful story of a woman who wanted to die, but who also wanted to live in Paris. Madame Bovary caused a scandal. There was an obscenity trial, but readers adored it. Especially those readers who also wanted to be writers. So here's where I insert myself into the story back to me in my early 20s, trying to draw all these connections, aware of Flaubert as an influence. I'd read around Flaubert. I'd read Hemingway and Pound. I'd read some Proust, I'd read Nabokov, I'd read Julian Barnes book, Flaubert's Parrot, everyone talking about Flaubert. And I had never read Madame Bovary. It's been on my list forever, but I had never gotten to it. I'm fascinated by the idea. I can't Wait to. To dig into Flaubert someday. So there I am in Taiwan, living alone, reading novels, learning Chinese, and. I don't know, trying to figure things out, I suppose. I'm writing letters to my friends from college. No email in those days, no Internet, no cell phones. I would write a letter. Takes a week, week to get anywhere. Another week or two for my friend to get around to writing a response, and then a week for that letter to get sent back. It would be a month, round trip. I can't figure out an address for a month. I was moving around so much, especially when I started traveling.
- [62:42]
Jack Wilson
So people would send the letters to.
- [62:44]
Mike Palindrome
Poste restante that still exists. You go to the main post office in whatever city you're visiting, ask for letters in your name, and picked them up there. I feel like I'm describing the act of sketching figures with charcoal on the wall of a cave, but that's how it worked. I remember one of my students in Taiwan, an elementary school teacher named Bill. I was writing a letter to a friend of mine who was in the Peace Corps. I'll respect her privacy and not give her real name, but in the spirit of today's show, I'll call her Emma. Emma was in Northern Africa, in Morocco, and the letters that I wrote took weeks and months. Before I'd hear back, I wrote one out. I wasn't thrilled with it, so I was rewriting it, copying it over onto a new piece of stationery. My letter to Emma. And Bill saw me doing this, and he said, are you in love with her? I was shocked. No, I said, we're just friends. She has a boyfriend, in fact. And he said, you're writing a rough draft of a letter and copying it to make sure it's perfect. You're in love, Jack Wilson. I see you doing that. You're in love. I should have just said I was a Flaubert in training, but I had not yet read Flaubert. And anyway, if things weren't plain enough, Emma never wrote to me again. All those months left in Taiwan and nothing from Emma. Ah, well. C' est la vie. I had other things I had to get done anyway. Places to see and books to read. I had developed a plan to save up money in Taiwan, then travel around the world by land and sea surface only. So I set out. A flight to Hong Kong would be the last flight I would take for months and maybe years. Everything else would just be surface travel. So I get my fill of Hong Kong and take a boat to Shanghai. And the boat is Kind of like a cruise ship. Like the oldest cruise ship you've ever seen, probably built in the 20s or 30s, with a swimming pool so scummy that not even the kids will swim in it. So I head to the ship's library, and it has two books in English. A translation of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book and a translation of the Selected Poems of Chairman Mao. Bam. Suddenly forced to face what it will mean to live without easy access to books. All I have is a backpack. And weight is a concern because I'm walking everywhere and it's very hot. I can only carry a book or two at a time. And so what do you do in that situation? You start trading with other travelers, swapping books and stopping at bookstores when you can. And each selection is very precious. You have to find something sustaining. It's like the opposite of beach reads. It's not a throwaway. Must be very nourishing. You don't want your mind switched off. You need something to really absorb you when you're trying to handle the days on the ship or the 20 hour train ride to Beijing, or the days and days it takes to cross China when you're headed west. Because I was headed for Tibet and I had no idea how many books I'd be able to buy there. But I knew I would have a lot of time. I'm not talking about a couple of hours waiting in an airport. I'm talking about weeks and months. A lot of time to fill now in Tibet, a lot of it you can fill just by gazing at the world around you. Because Tibet is spectacular. You can spend a lot more time talking to Tibetans, the most wonderful people on Earth, or with other travelers who have the most incredible stories you've ever heard. But still, there comes a time when you're alone in your tent or in your room with a candle or bouncing along on the back of a truck. There comes a time when you want to pull something out, some pages, to help you get through the hours. I met a man who was reading 100 Years of Solitude. He didn't want to trade me for the volume of Proust that I had, but he did want to read Dostoevsky. So I traded him Crime and Punishment for his Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Two days later, he did trade me for the Proust. His middle march. He had run dry and he needed something new. That's what it was like. It was awesome. And then, way out in western China, just on the verge of taking the long ride to Tibet, there was no train in those days. And travel was forbidden. So I would be stowing away on the back of a bus. I found a bookstore that had about 10 books. 10 books in English. I mean, mostly Dickens. Dickens was allowed in Mao's China. I guess it was. Deng's China at that point, still carried the shadow of Mao. Dickens was allowed because he exposed capitalism in the bourgeois lifestyle. That's how I. That was my interpretation, anyway. All the poor houses, the orphanages, all that made good propaganda for the regime. And there it was, Madame Bovary. Of course, I bought it. I tucked it into my backpack. Couldn't wait to get started. As I crossed into Tibet and Lhasa, I read Great Expectations, saving Madame Bovary. And then I spent some time in Lhasa finishing up something else. Another Proust, I think. I sold that before I departed. It was a big volume. Had to lighten the load. I traveled as far as I could on the Friendship highway toward Nepal with a lot of other travelers. I wasn't yet completely alone, but I wanted to go into truly forbidden territory. The trip to the holiest mountain in Asia, Mount Kailas Way, in the remotest western, westernmost part of Tibet. Sometime I'll tell the story of my trip to Mount Kailas. It's the most incredible place you can imagine. But this story is about my journey, because I bribed my way onto the back of a truck, some kind of supply truck, and there was a driver and an assistant, and the three of us took off into the middle of nowhere with them in the cab and me riding by myself, bouncing along on the back of this truck, headed off across the barren scree of Tibet. Our altitude was something like 10 or 12,000ft there on the Tibetan plain. And in that altitude, the oxygen is light, and the sunlight does weird things as it passes through the air. You see things you would only see if you were on drugs. I saw an entire field of rainbows, columns of rainbows, crisscrossing and shooting up into the sky. In Tibet, all the colors are crisper, more distinct, brighter, more vivid. Every sensation is heightened. Every breath feels like you've jumped naked into a cold pool and reemerged newly awake. There it is, just the three of us. They're obviously something like bandits. They're willing to break the law for a few extra bucks to have me ride along. I wouldn't trust them with my wallet. I think they probably did rifle through my stuff at one point or another. But they were friendly, and we were all kind of in it together, this adventure. And we didn't see another truck for days. Because you're not really on a road. You're just pointed in a direction, driving across this vast empty plain. And then our truck broke down in the middle of nowhere. No signs of human life in any direction as far as we could see. So what are we doing? What do we do then? We wait. Just hoping that someone will travel by. Wait with our truck? That doesn't work. One point, we burned the spare tire. Cooked some instant noodles over the flame. I had some army biscuits. That sustained us for a while. We started rationing out our food. I had a jar of peaches. It wasn't much. They didn't seem to have much more. There was a point where I thought I was going to die. I wrote a long letter to my sister. I was not sure if she would ever get it. I thought I should write it anyway. And then I had to figure out how to spend my time. One could sleep, one could walk to a gorgeous small lake, wasn't too far from the truck. Walk there and just stare at the ice blue water which was entrancing in its color.
- [72:30]
Jack Wilson
Just out here, the lake.
- [72:33]
Mike Palindrome
Just sitting here. The most beautiful lake I've ever seen. Just sitting there with no one to look at it. What else could I do? I could scream at the heavens, but no one would hear. I never did that. I was completely calm. I was at peace. I wished that things had ended differently for me. But I was also not in the mood to complain. I was in Shangri La. It's a lucky thing to be there, even if you have an unlucky outcome. And I had my book, Madame Bovary. I read it. I absorbed myself in this story of this trapped beautiful spirit, Emma Bovary, millions and millions of lifetimes away from the one I was living. And I finished that beautiful book, read the last sentence and turned back to the first page and started reading again. I was in love with something. Felt like love. In love with her, maybe. Or with the prose. And with the spirit of Gustave Flaubert, who had written the prose, who had written it for the world and for me. And I was in love with the world. I was in love with life. I read the book again and again. And then after several days, when our food supply had dwindled to hardly anything, my driver finally undid some ropes and ripped off the canvas that I had been riding on and sleeping on. And I saw what cargo we were carrying. The cargo that I had been riding on for all that time without knowing what I was riding on. It turns out I had been sitting on top of crates and crates of Pabst Blue Ribbon. And we all slaked our thirst with the best tasting beer that I had ever had. And I wondered if you could survive on beer alone, the nutrients that come within beer and for how many days. And I read Madame Bovary again, and I was happy. I was content. I was locked in. I was in a kind of paradise. Time was completely suspended. Henry James says, madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone. It holds itself with such a supreme, unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment. It was the perfect book for me, there among that supreme natural beauty, up above the rest of the world, with only soaring mountains and crystalline lakes and drifting puffy clouds as my companions. My gaze would drift from the gorgeous scenery to the page and back to the gorgeous scenery, and I felt like my mind had ascended into heaven. I doubt I'll ever have a love affair with a book the way I had an affair with Madame Bovary. I feel in some ways like the book saved me. It kept me sane, kept me company, gave me everything I had. It's a strange thing to think that, but it was a strange period in my life. Eventually, another truck happened to spot us from way off in the horizon. It was like a ship on the ocean. It's like a little dot. We waved and waved, hoped that it would somehow see us. And it did. Turned toward us, and it got bigger and bigger. And I made it out alive. I did the holy pilgrimage to Kylas, did the circuit walking around the mountain, cleansing oneself. And I parted with my copy of Madame Bovary, reluctantly. Eventually, another traveler was headed across the plain, and he needed it more than I. So what do we see in Bovary? How can it spawn a headline like this essay from James, How Flaubert Changed Literature Forever? One way is the example of Flaubert himself. His monkish devotion to getting the novel right. Set a standard. No longer would it be enough to be a garrulous storyteller like Dickens, a contemporary of Flaubert's. Dickens dashing off hundreds of pages in a brief spurt of time. Well, actually, that kind of author still exists. There are plenty of John Irving's out there, and they're doing quite well. But there's a new model now. Slavish agony over getting the right word. A prose writer taking the care of a poet to perfect the prose in a novel, from Flaubert to Joyce to many who came after. Spend an hour on a word Even Raymond Carver, simple and unadorned. The language of a truck driver will tell us that he spends an afternoon taking commas out of his short story and then putting them back in. Working hard, taking care of. That's one way.
- [78:23]
Jack Wilson
But how do we get from Flaubert.
- [78:25]
Mike Palindrome
To Hemingway, so famous for his simple and direct style, and from Flaubert to Nabokov, one of the most ornate aesthetic writers we've had? Nabokov's a little easier to see. He wrote Lolita sentence by sentence on note cards. He took care. He pushed Flaubert further into deeper, pyrotechnical sentences. And some might say he pushed things too far. Now and then we could point to examples of sentences that look grandiose for their own sake rather than in service of the story. But still, he's following Flaubert's lead, building his narrative choice by choice, word by word, detail by detail, laboring to get things just right, squeezing each moment for maximum effect, thinking about the sound and the rhythm of the prose as much as the substance of it. But what about Hemingway and his short, direct sentences? Well, after Flaubert, even someone who writes in a plain style like Hemingway's is making choices too. He's choosing not to be as ornate as Flaubert. But more than that, he and so many other novelists, from high artists to thriller writers, are following Flaubert's technique of prose as a camera's eye. There is no truth, Flaubert once said. There is only perception, trying to present details without judgment. That was what Flaubert agonized over. Here's another quote of his, the famous one about the writing a book about nothing quote. What strikes me as beautiful, what I would like to create, is a book about nothing. A book without external attachments, held aloft by the internal force of its style. End quote. Hemingway wanted his fiction to be about something. Most people do. Even Flaubert himself actually did give the novel Madame Bovary, a plot and characters and themes and ideas. But that phrase, the internal force of its style, that's a very Hemingway esque view. It's a view that prose writers suddenly give an example, suddenly, given the example of Flaubert, of writing prose as sharp as poetry. It's a view that they've held from Flaubert all the way to the present. The novel can do everything. That's the view that was handed to Flaubert. And you can see it in writers of his age, like Melville. Novels can philosophize, satirize, present, depict. They can go deep. They can also stay shallow. They can portray, they can imitate life, they can go into flights of incredible fancy. There are no limits to a novel and what it can get done artistically. And here's what makes it a novel and not a long story told by a storyteller. The concision of phrases, the choices of detail that show the reader a world and by showing with an internal force of the style, can convey and convey persuasively things that the reader might not accept if the narrative was limited to just telling, to just grabbing the reader by the collar, trying to talk at him. Here's a line of Flaubert. The smoke of a moving railway engine is stretched out in a horizontal line like a gigantic ostrich feather whose lip kept blowing away. End quote. That's beautiful. A little heightened, a poetic turn. Nabokov and Updike and Martin Amos and a thousand others will seek to generate sentences like that and push them even farther. Here's another sentence from Flaubert. Listen to how the camera eye creates the at the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles. The newspapers lay unopened on the reading room tables in the laundresses workshops. The washing quivered in the warm air. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller's stall. An omnibus coming down the street and grazing the pavement made him turn round. And when he reached the Luxembourg, he retraced his steps. There are hints of this kind of style in Austin and Balzac. Even all the way back to Daniel Defoe. You can find traces of it. Flaubert makes it paramount, this withdrawal of the author. Here's a passage from Hemingway. It's from a story I chose at random called the Capital of the World. Now Hemingway, we know, wrote and rewrote to get things right. Famously he wrote the end of A farewell to arms 39 times and some now say 47. They've found 47 different drafts of the ending of A Farewell to Arms. He said he was trying to get the words right. Listen to the style of this paragraph from the Capital of the World and you'll see how Flaubert's influence carried through in more than just complete devotion to the craft and the rhythm, but in the way the details are chosen and presented in a kind of non judgmental way. Here's the the auctioneer stood on the street corner talking with friends. The tall waiter was at the anarcho syndicalist meeting, waiting for an opportunity to speak. The middle aged waiter was seated on the terrace of the Cafe Alvarez, drinking a small beer. The woman who owned the Luarca was already asleep in her bed, where she lay on her back with the bolster between her legs. Big, fat, honest, clean, easygoing, very religious, and never having ceased to miss or pray daily for her husband, dead now 20 years. In his room alone, the matador who was ill lay face down on his bed with his mouth against a handkerchief. You see that sweep? What is that getting done? These aren't characters we know. They're not important to the story. But it's details about the world of the story. It's creating a reality, a plausibility that affects us in some way, so that we're ready for the narrative when it comes. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert's masterpiece, he selects these details and conveys them with such internal force to the prose that novelists were forever in his debt and perhaps in his shadow. So that was my love affair, my great love affair with Tibetan and with Madame Bovary, the novel. And I exhausted my time in Tibet and descended into Nepal and Kathmandu to recover. And there, the Kathmandu post office. At the poster restante window, I was shocked to find a letter from her, from Emma. Emma in Morocco. She apologized for not having written before. She had been having an adventure of her own, which she told me all about in the letter. And suddenly I didn't want to be in Kathmandu. I wanted to see Emma way across the world in Morocco, where she was teaching literature at a university, talking about the Scarlet Letter to a lecture hall full of Moroccan students eager to learn. She was a vagabond spirit, just like me, in love with literature, just like me. Kathmandu was incredible, but after Tibet, everything is a bit of a comedown. Anyway, I did have a path forward, though in a different direction. I could go to Morocco and talk to Emma. I could see what she thought about Flaubert. I went into a travel agency and asked about flights to Morocco. Morocco, said the agent. Is that a city? I guess it's not going to be a direct flight, I replied. And it was another adventure, this long journey on a Russian airline, traveling through United Arab Emirates and to Moscow, down to Spain, then on a bus, on a train. Even finding her in Morocco was not easy, and it only occurred due to a kind of miracle. Emma. I cried when I finally saw her on a stairway in an apartment building in an out of the way Moroccan city. Hey, Jack, she said, completely unsurprised. As I learned later, she'd been expecting me to visit. It was just a matter of time. So I can Draw a line from Flaubert to Hemingway and from Flaubert to Nabokov. And in my own case, I can draw a line from Flaubert from reading Madame Bovary in Tibet, where I thought I might die, to a journey to Morocco to visit a friend. And how did that story end? Listener? I married her. Okay, there we go.
- [87:56]
Jack Wilson
Ah, My thanks to Mike Palindrome and of course to Gustav Flaubert and to 2017 version of Jack Wilson, host of the History of Literature podcast. Boy, was he. He took a little trip into listen to Ezra Pound. He was having fun. As you can see, literature and travel are deeply connected for me and for Emma, too. And you can meet us both and join us on our History of Literature podcast tour. If you'd like to sign up for that, head over to our partners at John Shors Travel. That's Shores S H O R S. And look for the Jack Wilson Tour. It's not too late for you to change your life. I'm hoping that this trip through Literary England in May of 2026 is going to do that for me. A trip with fellow podcast listeners. I'm hoping it will be as dramatic and invigorating and memorable as that trip to Tibet was once upon a time. It's a different stage of life for me, but I'm not looking to be alone anymore. I want the company and the community, which is where you and maybe a friend or two of yours come in. We still have spots. We would love to have you join us. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [89:42]
Courtney Act
I'm Courtney Act. Many of you may know me from RuPaul's Drag Race, celebrity Big Brother, Dancing with the Stars, or probably my hit album, Kaleidoscope.
- [89:53]
Mike Palindrome
Well, guess what?
- [89:54]
Courtney Act
I have got a brand new show called R and R with Courtney act, and I want you to check it out. You know I hate small talk. I want to go deep and I want to go quickly. And on my show, we do just that. In today's world, it feels really polarized and we're more connected than ever, but really, we can feel isolated, and I don't like that. I want the story shared here on R and R to make us realize that our similarities are greater than our differences. So join me and my fabulous guests like Nicole Byer, Tom Daily, Margaret Cho, Katia Adore Delano, Jackie Beat, and many more. If you're looking for some rest and relaxation, you've come to the wrong place, because we are peeling back the layers of superficiality and we're getting down to the real stuff. Follow R and R with Courtney act on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you're listening now.
- [90:43]
Zibby Owens
Hi, this is Zibby Owens, host of Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know. Get insider insights and connect with guests like Grammy Award winning singer Alicia Keys, critically acclaimed author Judy Bloom, and Academy Award winning screenwriter John Irving every single day. With Totally Booked, you aren't just listening, you're part of the story, so don't miss out. Follow Totally Booked with Zibby on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now.