Sentimental Education

 My life as a reader proceeds through a series of predictable crises, each leading to the next and then back round again to the start, in a cycle that takes approximately one week to complete. To begin an account of this loop at a necessarily arbitrary point, let us say I am currently reading a book. I may be enjoying it immensely; I may regard it as a fine work of art; but even then, part of my brain will already be thinking about the next book I want to read, and so will start to feel burdened and detained by the one I am reading presently. 

And so, before I have even finished the book at hand, I eclipse my available desk space with a pile of new books to read, as soon as I am done with it. Finally, the glorious day comes. I've finished the current book at a sprint. Now, I am free! I can turn to the next book in the pile! But then, no less suddenly, I am stumped. Where to begin? The impulse that had seemed so irresistible and obvious while I was still finishing the previous book has died. My visions lie in ruins before me. The pile appears immense. All the books need to be read; but none more so than any other, and so I am paralyzed. As Rilke's alter ego Malte Brigge puts it, in the novel that bears his name: "Somehow I had a premonition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have a right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all." (Hulse trans.)

After a racking period of indecision and torment, however, staring at the pile and pacing around for an afternoon or so, the solution always arrives. Somehow, through whatever subconscious or providential process, the next book to read—the book that I must read at just this moment; the one that was waiting for me, and which convinces me as soon as I open it that there could have been no other—comes into my hand. This week, it was Flaubert's Sentimental Education that worked this saving miracle. 

The book only happened to be on my shelf in the first place thanks to a minor hunch. I have an abiding interest in Flaubert, to be sure, and an eventual desire to read all his works (now that I've finished the Sentimental Education, I will have read nearly the whole oeuvre in English translation, with the exception of the Temptation of Saint Anthony and the letters). But the only reason why the Sentimental Education suddenly rose to the top—putting itself above all the other books that, as Rilke describes above, I feel I am engaged to read at some point in my life—is that it has something to do with a law student. I'm a law student. Maybe it would have some meaning for me. 

And lo, it proved indeed to be exactly the book I needed in this moment of my life: the ideal book to read as a law student in one's mid-thirties, in the midst of exam period, waiting the results of one's previous tests and procrastinating between bouts of studying for one's last exam of the semester. This is so not only for the simple reason that law students figure among the central characters of the novel, but also because the book is a study of failure; and not of failure all at once on a grand scale, but rather of the gradual descent into mediocrity; and not the ennobling failure due to the tragic flaw of classical drama that invites the curses of fate, but rather failure of an almost cozy and comfortable kind, brought about by laziness, inaction, dilettantism, and procrastination—the sort of failure that is very familiar, that is to say, to a first year law student. 

These are all possible life outcomes that confront one as very live ones, after all, when one is studying for a law degree at age thirty-three, when one has just done a passable (one hopes) but hardly stellar job on a series of law exams, and one is, in all respects, plainly reaching that plateau in one's early-to-mid career in which one begins to realize that the future could very well end up containing neither the glories one expected nor the disasters one feared, but something very much in the unremarkable middle. 

Flaubert's protagonist, after all, while he may be (briefly) a law student, at the start of his professional and sentimental career in Paris, is a thoroughly undistinguished one. Described by his creator at one point as a man of "innumerable weaknesses" (Helen Constantine trans.), Frédéric Moreau flubs his first round of oral exams, then has to write a humiliating letter home to urge his mother to forward the tuition for another round of instruction, so he can sit for the exam again the following November. In writing to her, he attempts to spin the dross of failure into gold, telling his mother of all the famous lawyers who failed their exams the first time around. (And weren't we all there after 1L Contracts—might I not be there in a few weeks' time, after my Civil Procedure exam results come back? And, by the way, was it not the Procedure oral exam specifically that proved Frédéric's undoing?). But after his mother sends the tuition payment, Frédéric turns around and spends it on gifts for a would-be mistress. 

Frédéric's best friend from school, Deslauriers, fares only a little better before the bench of his examiners. While he eventually passes his exams and secures the coveted title of doctor of law (seizing the opportunity shortly thereafter to confuse people as to whether or not he might be a medical doctor), he nearly defeats his own chances by pontificating at length to his examiners about his proposals to reform the laws of property and wills, instead of simply repeating his course learning in order to show he has mastered the doctrine. (This weakness is one even more after my own heart—how many times have I complained to my friends that my law school instructors seem bafflingly uninterested in my opinions, and instead keep insisting I learn the rules and regurgitate them before setting out to criticize them!) From there, Deslauriers goes on to have a shambolic career in fields tangential at best to the law. 

To the extent Frédéric is able to work himself up at all to a legal career, it is only by fitful fantasizing: filling his head with romantic visions of himself as an heroic courtroom orator or political leader in the chamber of deputies, haranguing the people. As they do with so many of us, these romantic fantasies operate as fumes in the gas tank, rather than the liquid fuel one needs to actually sustain one's focus and work ethic long term in law school. In the end, Frédéric never does finish his law degree, and in the brief period when he lives at home and serves as a clerk in a law office, Flaubert tells us that he disappoints everyone. The young man to whom everyone had attached their hopes for a brilliant legal career proves to be a dud. (And as I prepare for a summer 1L internship, do I not fear the same might be awaiting me?)

Such episodes about the characters' abortive legal careers are minor ones in Sentimental Education, which is a novel of astounding scope, covering a quarter-century of French history and immense vicissitudes in the private lives of its characters, most of them having nothing to do with their vocations. And yet, Frédéric's indifference and inability to focus in his career presages in some tragic (yet hilarious) way the overall course of his life. 

Looking back on their lives in the novel's final chapter, both the protagonist and his friend Deslauriers judge themselves to have failed in all of their boyhood ambitions, and one feels that Flaubert is identifying a theme both of his epic novel and of his own life. We should recall that Flaubert—for all he became a world-historical novelist still in print in many languages today—was judged a failure by the standards of his parents and siblings. He was the sickly youth who seized upon an incurable illness to abandon a conventional law career before it had even started (he too studied law in Paris and failed a second round of exams, then dropped out of the profession, blaming his epilepsy); the son who failed to follow in the footsteps of his immensely successful physician father; the "family idiot," in short, as Sartre would one day christen him. Yet, through this emotionally devastating, profoundly witty and irony-drenched novel, Flaubert manages to make Frédéric's story not one of private failure, but of universal human fate. If Moreau and Deslauriers manage to feel, at the end of the novel, less than distraught as they contemplate the ruin of their hopes and the failure of their aspirations, one senses it is because they recognize—and their author recognizes—there is, in some profound sense, no other way for human life to end, no matter what glories it appears to contain. 

What Sartre appears to have detested in this attitude of Flaubert's—this pinnacle of ironic detachment—(and let me confess here I know Sartre's multivolume work on Flaubert only by reputation; it being firmly consigned to the overwhelming mental pile of "to-be-read-one-day" books mentioned at the outset)—is that it was utterly unsuited to political action. And indeed, Flaubert's account of the human condition and of the previous twenty-five years of French history in this novel could not be seen as an endorsement of any scheme for social change. To be sure, Flaubert pillories the selfishness and opportunism of the wealthy bourgeoisie and the vindictive cruelty of the reactionaries who crushed the workers' uprising of 1848. But he also portrays the democrats and socialists of his protagonist's milieu as so many pedants and hypocrites, lusting for power and tyranny so long as they can clutch the whip in their own hands. (One of Flaubert's greatest comic creations—Sénécal—a kindred spirit to the immeasurably pompous apothecary Homais in Madame Bovary—spends the whole novel denouncing all the other characters for their lack of commitment to the popular cause, but then proceeds to become himself a brutal taskmaster in a factory, and later appears as a cavalry officer wielding the sword of repression against his erstwhile comrades.)

In all of these regards, the Sentimental Education fits within the genre that Northrop Frye dubs the "satire of the low norm," and Flaubert in this novel is a consummate satirist. And it is precisely this as well that renders him contemptible and useless to the revolutionary. 

Of course, satire is in some sense intrinsically subversive of established order and hierarchies (much like revolution)—it is, after all, a critique of the hypocrisy and vulgarity of those in power. This is why dictators and kings are forever trying to ban satire and execute satirists. Yet, at the same time, satirists are also profoundly untrustworthy as followers of any reformist cause or comrades of any political movement. This is because they cannot help but see the humor not only in the powerful, but in the dogmatic certainties of the revolutionaries who want to overthrow them as well. Milan Kundera, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting, speaks of a devil's laughter—throaty, unstoppable, putting all ideologies and pieties at its mercy—that is utterly different from the insincere tinkle of the angels. Yet the latter is the only kind that movements and politicians and advertisements can accept. This Kundera-esque devil's laughter is the sort of laughter that runs through Flaubert's great novel. 

Of course, revolutionaries would like to make use of the satirist. They appreciate him so long as he can be used to ridicule and demolish the pretensions of the current authorities. They just want to make sure he targets them and only them. As Chairman Mao puts it—speaking for the aspirations of revolutionaries everywhere vis-a-vis the satirist, in a fictitious yet-plausible-sounding interview in Frederic Tuten's postmodern collage novel, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March: "Satire must never be directed against the class whose aspirations you share—only against the enemy." 

But the revolutionaries generally fail to keep the satirist pointed in this way, like a rifle, at only these approved targets. The satirist instead is a bomb that explodes in all directions simultaneously. Why? Because, Northrop Frye writes, the very definition of the satirist is that he is one who concerns himself with the entirety of human affairs, leaving nothing out. Yet it is the very essence of a political ideology to want to exclude certain truths from anyone's attention and awareness. Those currently in power want to ignore their compromises; the extent to which they depart from the stated ideals and promises of their program—and these, Flaubert certainly points out. Yet, progressives and revolutionaries, who plan for a universal reign of justice, have to exclude a very great deal from our awareness of the past and present of human motives and experience as well, in order to make their vision seem plausible. And it is the satirist's nature to pull these hidden and disreputable truths out of the shadows and place them into the light. 

The result of this is that the satirist often ends up seeming the opposite of the revolutionary. Since he cannot prove compatible with partisanship of any kind, he is bound to be loathed and hounded by the partisans, as much as by the reactionaries and the monarchs. Precisely because the satirist cannot bring himself to endorse any "system," Frye argues—since every system has its set of inconvenient facts of human experience that it wishes to shunt to the side; precisely because the satirist always laughs with the devil's laughter rather than the pre-approved chuckles of the angels, in Kundera's terminology—the satirist cannot be a loyal or consistent comrade of any great cause. To the extent he advocates anything at all, then, he advocates epistemic caution and common sense—the provisional acceptance of the conventional path. This is why Flaubert—at the very same time as he is exercising his devastating wit and irony against the very foundations of French society—also provokes the skepticism and distrust of the political radicals—e.g., the Sartres of the world. 

This is the (a)political attitude that Frye dubs the "low norm," and defines further as a "flexible pragmatism" that provisionally accepts social conventions simply because they are at least grounded in real life and experience. Frye cites an example of it in Samuel Butler's Erewhon, but what came to mind for me is the end of Butler's other chef-d'oeuvre, The Way of All Flesh. Here, much as in Flaubert's novel, Butler has just given us one of the most devastating send-ups of his own society ever penned. And yet, when it comes time for a summing up, he does not call for a radical overthrow of the society he has just skewered. To the contrary, he calls for a return to its most ordinary conventions—the "low norm," in short. He recommends proceeding, specifically, on the old-fashioned canons of the "gentleman" in English society—that inchoate ideal that appeals to Butler precisely because it is a rough-and-ready rule-of-thumb, rather than an all-encompassing system of ethics.

Flaubert too is not advocating change. His characters fail, but not because they chose the wrong course, but simply because they are human beings. His satire is not therefore an indictment of any party, social class, or ideology, but of the human condition. As Ezra Pound pointed out, in the ABC of Reading—in comparing a passage from George Crabbe to that of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, what makes the latter more truly satiric—closer to the fundamental form of satire—is that he is not engaging specifically in social criticism, or the criticism of a particular society. "Rochester is free of specific social urge," writes Pound, "and his eye lights on the eternal silliness." It is that same keen eye for the "eternal silliness"—and that same freedom from political or social special pleading—that marks Flaubert's novel as the work of a true satirist. 

Such lack of ideological purpose—such laughter of the devils—is bound to be infuriating to the Sartres and the Maos of the world, because it is so unhelpful to any all-consuming cause. That is why the angels, in Kundera's telling, always join forces to suppress it. But it may also be, at last, the orientation to the world that is least compatible with cruelty—which is itself a mainstay of ideologists and angels—because it accepts all the facts of human life, as Frye writes—and in so doing forgives all. And that, more than anything, is the tone one is left with at the end of Sentimental Education. Flaubert sees through himself and his protagonist—he sees straight through to the heart of the "eternal silliness," the vanity and selfishness, of human affairs. But he forgives it too, at the very same time—in Frédéric, in himself—and ultimately, in us. 

And so the law student, picking up this grand and glorious novel of irony and defeat as he dawdles his time away in the final week of first year exams, may find in its pages not only matter for mirth at his own expense—but also grounds for self-exoneration.