Reviews for The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 4

The average rating for The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 4 based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-09 00:00:00 Charles Pipkin Have you ever had a cataclysmic, life-changing experience? Gustave Flaubert has been there and done that. The great author of the immortal Madame Bovary, while travelling as a youth in his horse-drawn buggy over a bridge near a small, provincial French town, was suddenly thunderstruck, thrown off his seat as if lightning had struck him. He would never be the same again. So what happened? Flaubert maintained his reticence about the event throughout his life of fame, and in fact the experience was to be stifled, stillborn. Those who knew him well believed that at that fateful moment he had seen into the very heart of the world's corruption. If this Pauline epiphany on the Pont l'Éveque was his Road to Damascus, he simply ignored it, obeyed his doctor's orders and nervously and inconclusively dropped out of life for a long spell. The long rest did him good, though it was to be a mixed blessing. For Sartre says his trauma was "scotomized." What's that MEAN? Well, scotomization in psychoanalytic theory refers to the brain's natural ability to "heal" Trauma over time. That was the theory among doctors, at any rate BEFORE the Freudian Revolution. Then we see an opposite point of view emerging... For Freud said to be REALLY healed we must undergo analysis: THEN we'll see Real Healing. Flaubert, you see, was never Healed - he Forgot. And that scotomization was the goad to his neurotic imaginative powers - AND all his Bizarre Masterpieces. He couldn't sit still, bless him, and lesser paroxysms would plague him perpetually for the rest of his days - created, you see, by his eternally-restless subconscious, which had Never been put to rest. So Freud was Right. We Must ALL lay our Ghosts to Rest! Though any religious aspects of the experience he would henceforth vigorously repress, it is fairly clear that he gradually came to envision personal salvation as only feasible through Art - because, you see, he had found only Partial salvation. By unflinchingly holding up his Mirror to Fallen Nature, he would endure the prolonged martyrdom of his writing, and thence achieve a fallen type of literary glory. Jean-Paul Sartre is right to presume that, aside from his masterpieces, the only tangible result of this event in Flaubert's life was his Bizarre imagination. And so he wrote: and the writing was thus Perfection, but he never found Peace. Look at the final works, for they're now obsessed with the irretrievability of Peace - witness his Tentation de Saint Antoine, or his Trois Contes. Perhaps, though, subconsciously he thought the price of Heaven with such a grim neurosis was literary martyrdom... For he had introjected his father's bitter irony towards all things fanciful, religious and mystical, and in these later works it shows. He should have begun with the martyrdom of his literary superstar persona. For he had inherited the wind at the cost of himself. But would renewed Faith by itself have been a help? Yes - if he, like all of the faithful, had let it do its work in us - by sacrificing his overextended pride on the altar of fiery self-examination. In life there is no progress. There is only the continued self-awareness of our Insufficiency before a Forgiving Absolute. That's a far better choice indeed, if it's real, because the peace that issues from out of the process will be evidence of our former grief and isolation becoming true kernels of wholesome wheat, emerging from the endless threshing of the mill. And make our little lives much more bearable - And give the unending labour of our lives true purpose. Carol Cosman is to be heartily commended for translating Sartre's complex meanderings into English so impeccably. It is a work of Sartre's final infirm years, and such an act of self-revelation on his part! And is a valiant attempt at self-examination in the midst of the series of strokes that led up to his death. For hitherto - like Flaubert - he had seen the only salvation possible was to be a result of writing. Another unquiet respite from the Storm... If you have ever longed to find more of the REAL Jean-Paul Sartre, under all his masks - the real Sartre who reveals to us in The Words his fruitless attempts at fruitful living - look no more! This is it.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-15 00:00:00 Dustin Brisker Loved this book if not ultimately the subject - a prolific writer, thinker and woman ahead of her time - I couldn't help but judge her for the ill treatment of her daughter, manipulations of family and lovers and her turning against women uniting together when she had a chance to be at the forefront of that movement A very good book nonetheless