Flaubert

Flaubert’s account of the Orient and his unfinished comic novel Bouvard et Pecuchet converge on a sustained critique of European habits of looking and knowing. He portrays the Orient as a spectacle made available to a detached European gaze, then shows how grand schemes for mastering reality collapse into the uncritical copying of texts. The movement from observation to theory to transcription makes his work an indictment of knowledge that mistakes its own representations for the world.

The Orient as spectacle

Flaubert describes the Orient as a general category capable of absorbing almost any apparent eccentricity. In the examples he records from Cairo, public sexual acts, a monkey, a supposed saint, and a naked ascetic are presented as spectacles that entertain onlookers and confirm the place’s supposedly inexhaustible strangeness. The details are not treated as evidence about particular people or circumstances. Instead, they become instances of an already prepared image of the Orient as bizarre.

The observing European remains outside the scenes. Flaubert notes that familiar comic conventions acquire what he calls a new, “fresh ... genuine and charming” meaning in the Orient, but that meaning cannot be carried home intact: it can only be enjoyed on the spot and brought back approximately. The traveler thus occupies the position of a watcher, detached from what he sees and ready to collect another example. In this account, the Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness, less a society encountered on its own terms than material for a European spectator’s experience.

That spectacle also supplies material for disciplined writing. What initially appears to defeat the expectations established by texts can be translated, decoded, and made less threatening by further texts. Yet the resulting accounts continue to reproduce the generality and eccentricity that the encounter seemed to disclose. Flaubert’s examples therefore illuminate a cycle: the European text prepares a generalized Orient, the traveler encounters and collects apparent exceptions, and writing returns those exceptions to a system of representation.

Bouvard and Pecuchet’s experiments

Flaubert died in 1880 before completing Bouvard et Pecuchet, but the novel’s central design is clear. Bouvard and Pecuchet are bourgeois clerks; after one unexpectedly inherits a handsome will, they retire from the city to a country estate, intending to do as they please. Their chosen freedom becomes an itinerant course through practical and theoretical pursuits, including agriculture, history, chemistry, education, archaeology, and literature. In each field they act as amateurs, and their enthusiasm repeatedly ends in disappointment, disaster, or failure.

The novel makes their private incompetence part of a larger diagnosis of nineteenth-century confidence. Its protagonists move from one discipline or cause to another, but hopes of gaining power through knowledge give way to disorder and sorrow. A vision of Europe regenerated by Asia appears among their schemes: Bouvard imagines civilization moving from Orient to Occident and the two forms of humanity finally being joined. The idea begins another cycle of enthusiasm and disillusionment, rather than resolving the disappointments that have driven the pair from one project to the next.

Reality interrupts this particular vision in an emphatically comic fashion. In Flaubert’s notes, gendarmes suddenly appear and accuse Bouvard of debauchery. The grand reconstruction of humanity is brought up against an immediate, unruly circumstance; the episode refuses to let a visionary formula stand in for the world it claims to explain.

From world-reconstruction to copying

Flaubert’s notes give the episode a second ending. Bouvard and Pecuchet confess that they once again want to become copyists. They have a double desk made, buy books, pencils, and erasers, and return to transcription. Their trajectory reverses the hope of learning by directly engaging with the world: after trying to apply knowledge, they settle for reproducing it from one text to another.

The Asia-regenerates-Europe vision belongs to a wider nineteenth-century faith in rebuilding the world through comprehensive schemes. Flaubert connects this impulse with utopias, scientific projects to regenerate humanity, and secular or quasi-religious systems. In the novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet take up such causes, ruin them through their experiments, and move on. Each new enthusiasm promises a renewal but becomes another demonstration of how little an abstract program can guarantee when put to work in actual life.

The Orientalist version of this project is especially revealing because it turns two vast regions into elements of a European design. Flaubert’s point is not simply that Bouvard’s prediction is optimistic. The categories of Europe and Asia, and the historical law that supposedly moves civilization between them, depend on the visionaries’ ability to render immense geographical domains manageable. They are, in this sense, Europe and Asia as imagined and represented by Europeans, not self-explanatory historical agents whose fusion is assured.

The limits of European knowledge

Flaubert’s critique reaches beyond the folly of two fictional amateurs. The proposed soldering together of humanity treats human entities as if science could anatomize and melt them like inert matter. What he mocks is an enthusiastic, even messianic European science that puts grand, bookish ideas to immediate use while failing to reckon with reality’s resistance. Bouvard assumes that science simply is what it says it is; he cannot recognize the possibility that the Orient does not wish to regenerate Europe or that the peoples supposedly to be joined are not passive material for a European design.

The failure is therefore not only a matter of bad results. The scientist or visionary does not see the will to power embedded in his own enterprise: the wish to classify, direct, and reconstruct is disguised as neutral knowledge. Flaubert’s pairing of the detached traveler with the amateur system-builder makes the relation plain. One gaze collects the Orient as a spectacle; another converts Europe and Asia into parts of a plan. In both cases, representation risks replacing the people and realities it purports to describe.

The copyists’ final retreat gives this critique its most compressed image. They no longer test ideas against experience; knowledge becomes what passes silently from text to text, without attribution or comment. Ideas survive as received formulas, repeated and echoed without being examined. Flaubert thus closes the arc from seeing to writing to copying: when a system cannot answer to reality, it can still perpetuate itself through transcription. The ending does not present copying as a new discovery, but as the residue left when the ambition to master the world has exhausted itself.