Closure. I keep hearing that word.

Of the qualities which ordinarily raise novels to eminence, Bouvard et Pécuchet has absolutely none. It is unfinished. It is a failure on almost every level: it is gimmicky, repetitive, the characters are shallow, there is no plot, it is supposedly comedic but never funny, and it tells instead of showing at every turn. Flaubert was well aware of its faults, writing to Émile Zola that "there are no quotable excerpts, no brilliant scenes, just the same situation over and over…" Yet this novel counts among its admirers Borges, Calvino, and Pound. Bolaño classes it among the "great, imperfect, torrential works that blaze paths into the unknown", while Gass says that "it is not for the faintly minded. It is a devastation, a blowup as total as the bomb".

Laurel and Hardy at Epidaurus

On a horizon that receded further each day, they glimpsed things at once strange and wondrous.

The year is 1872. Flaubert starts working on something he's had on his mind for a very long time. The intention is to write a comic novel of ideas, viciously skewering the stupidity he sees everywhere around him. At its center will be two fools, a slapstick duo of dilettantes who embody everything that is wrong with the world and are justly punished for it—a picaresque of knowledge starring two Quixotes and no Sancho. In their adventures they will try their hand at virtually every art and science known to man, from horticulture to theology—and fail, painfully, at every single point. In a letter, he writes:

I’m contemplating something in which I’ll vent all my anger. Yes, at last I shall rid myself of what is stifling me. I shall vomit back onto my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me, even if it means ripping my chest open.

But Flaubert is nothing if not a perfectionist, and if he must write about stupidity then he must first make a comprehensive survey of it. He reads one tome. He reads ten. He reads a hundred. By the time he reaches one thousand it is clear that he's still nowhere near the end. In 1879 he announces to Zola that he has finally finished his readings and will not open another book until the novel is done, but before long he finds himself lost in the pages of yet more ecclesiastical texts. By the end of his life (which will not be long enough to complete his work) he will have read more than 1500 books in his quest to understand the minds of François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet.

He's never really sure about the work, writing to his sister in 1877 that "at times, the immense scope of this book stuns me. What will come of it? I only hope I’m not deceiving myself into writing something goofy rather than sublime." In another letter he writes that "one must be mad to undertake such a task." And between all this, he is also repudiating his earlier style, deconstructing and demolishing the conventions of the realist novel, replacing them with irony, self-reference, and the endless fragmentation of language and meaning. The line between author and characters is blurred, the linear becomes circular, and the very act of reading itself is interrogated as Flaubert inaugurates the 20th century modernist tradition in literature

They Gave Up

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano.

The novel follows two Parisian copy-clerks who meet by chance and quickly bond over their shared intellectual curiosity. When Bouvard unexpectedly inherits a fortune, they retire together to the countryside to devote their lives to learning and self-improvement. Flaubert shoves his characters into a labyrinth of intellectual disciplines and subjects them to relentless misfortune; barely a paragraph goes by without some absurd failure; there is no pause, no space whatsoever for comedic timing, and the joke unfolds in the same way every time—with the inevitability of a mathematical proof.

The vicious cycle begins with curiosity, moves on to true belief, then disillusionment and contrarianism, only for them to give up at the end. A series of grand revelations, each leading nowhere, or worse, back to the beginning. And was the journey worth it? Flaubert offers no answer to that question. The pace is astonishing: in the span of a few paragraphs, they become theologians, stumble on the answer to Job, get depressed, and quit.

Our world is therefore but a point in the totality of things—and our universe, which the intelligence cannot penetrate, only one universe in an infinity of neighboring universes with infinite modifications. Extension envelops our universe, but is enveloped by God, who contains in His thought all possible universes, and His thought is itself contained in His substance.

They felt as if they were in a balloon, at night, in the glacial cold, carried along in an endless rush toward a bottomless abyss—with nothing around them but the ungraspable, the immobile, the eternal. It was too much. They gave up.

When they tire of studying things, they begin studying the discourse about them instead. While trying to understand history, they acquire a totalizing notion of historical truth which is then subverted in the same paragraph; they then immediately move on to historiography, only to find themselves stuck in yet another cul-de-sac.

They no longer had a single fixed idea about the individuals and events of that time. To form an impartial judgment, they would have to read every history, every memoir, every newspaper and manuscript, for the slightest omission could foster an error that would lead to others, and on unto infinity. They gave up. But they had acquired a taste for history, a need for truth for its own sake. Perhaps the truth was more easily uncovered in earlier periods? Surely the authors recounted events more dispassionately at a greater remove. And they delved into the good Rollin. “What a load of hogwash!” cried Bouvard as of the first chapter.

Having stopped caring about dates, they moved on to disdaining facts. What counted was the philosophy of history!

The first moment of true pathos only appears near the end of the novel, as our two protagonists reach their nadir and decide to commit suicide. Just as they are about to hang themselves, they are saved by the gleam of distant lanterns, lit in celebration of a midnight mass, only for the Sisyphean torment to begins anew. They go from suicidal, to being saved by religion, to fanatics of the faith spending a fortune on relics, to skeptics and Spinozists, to mythologists debating priests, to Buddhism (first ironically, then really), and finally to liberation by way of disgust.

C'est moi

Certain authors extol the pleasures of a picnic or a boat ride.

At some point Flaubert discovers that he has been writing about himself all along. What appeared to him as a comic work of social criticism (what was intended as a work of social criticism), ends up being a melancholic meditation on his own being. The act of writing this novel has forced him into the same kind of bookish learning and bewildered ascetic impulse that he mockingly inflicts on his characters. Driven by a barren obsession for knowledge, he has turned himself into an encylopedia of the universe and alienated himself from the real world. The impulse had always existed in Flaubert: decades earlier, in 1854, he wrote in a letter to Louise Colet: "One ought to know everything, to write!"

He writes to Turgenev in a moment of despair, confessing: "At times, it seems to me that I am becoming idiotic." Perhaps this should not surprise us from the man who said "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." It certainly surprised him though:

Bouvard and Pecuchet have filled me up to such a point that I have become them! Their stupidity is my own and I am bursting with it….I live as much as I can in my two fellows…the stupidity of my two characters has invaded me.

As Flaubert becomes more like them, they become more like Flaubert, disenchanted, dissatisfied, and disappointed with everything they see around them:

Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, a burgher’s profile, an inane comment overheard by chance. And reflecting on what was said in their village, and on the fact that one could find other Coulons, other Marescots, other Foureaus stretching to the ends of the earth, they felt upon their shoulders the weight of the entire world.

By the end of the novel they are little more than stand-ins, and Flaubert even grants them the authorship of his own Dictionary of Received Ideas.

And if Flaubert is writing about himself, what does he have to say on the subject? He writes about an infinite curiosity that is always subverted by human finitude; he suffers simultaneously from a superabundance of learning and a desire that will never be quenched. And the novel, too, is torn in opposite directions: between comedy and tragedy, between greed for experience and a corrosive suspicion of Ideas.

Ideas and pain are inextricably linked, right from the beginning: "...their newfound curiosity caused their intelligence to bloom. [...] And, having more ideas, they suffered more acutely." Imagine Faust—sans Mephistopheles! And while our heroes abandon every field they touch, they never give up the greater quest. The struggle of Bouvard and Pécuchet (and Flaubert (and me (and you))) is not comic, but tragic and Romantic—they and he and we are not buffoons but martyrs, tortured and broken on the wheel of the human condition.

The Problem of Knowledge

I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,—
And even, alas! Theology,—
From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before [...]

And see, that nothing can be known!
That knowledge cuts me to the bone.

Are the failures of Bouvard and Pécuchet a commentary on our norms of knowledge? Is the problem with the people, their sources, or how they handle them? Is it a declaration of the triumph of skepticism over truth? Is it a more general attack on Western civilization (as Gass would have it)? Or is it perhaps a condemnation of the entire universe?

The original subtitle of the novel was "An Encyclopedia of Human Stupidity", which was later changed to "On Lack of Method in the Sciences". This change represents a shift in how Flaubert saw his task: it started as a mere attack on the follies of his contemporaries, but in the end it was a much broader assault. The flaws of the characters are still there, but they are not imbeciles: in many ways their faults are understandable.

While the overall structure repeats itself, the actual errors they commit are diverse: sometimes it's a matter of an over-reliance on book learning, at other times it's an issue of science vs metis. Sometimes it's a question of stupid experimental methods, while at other times it's a matter of social epistemology. Flaubert systematically dismantles epistemic authority, pitting each source against another in a cascade of contradictions. His protagonists' earnest curiosity is crushed by the disorienting barrage of information that assaults them from every direction.

The fields they try to tackle are too vast and too complex, so they are too fast, too shallow, and fail to synthesize or think critically. They see knowledge as a conclusion, when it should be a process. They fail to realize the limits of their knowledge. Even when they do acquire some truth, they put it into practice in the wrong way. They believe that knowledge is acquired easily, and once acquired will solve all problems.

But Bouvard and Pécuchet are not just bad learners—Flaubert's true concern runs deeper: they are constantly striving for meaning in a world that resists clear answers. Their epistemological failure is a minor reflection of a much greater existential failure. Their desperate search for meaning in a universe that is indifferent to such inquiries leads only to alienation and disappointment.

Flaubert is not interested in specific epistemological criticisms: those questions are left open to interpretation and that's part of the appeal. Flaubert's ultimate target is the pursuit of absolute truth, epistemological certainty, the idea of reaching the end of thought. He declares that ineptitude is not understanding the twilight.

"Yes, stupidity consists in wanting to conclude. We are a thread and we want to know the pattern. [...] What mind of any strength—beginning with Homer—has ever come to a conclusion?" And this novel certainly revels in its refusal to conclude! For Flaubert, the search for knowledge is an existential trap, a synecdoche for the futility of reaching any kind of certainty or ultimate purpose. Both for him as for his characters, this quest for knowledge leads only to disorientation.

One Must Imagine Flaubert Happy

End with a view of our two heroes leaning over their desk, copying.

Bouvard et Pécuchet is an Ecclesiastes for the 20th century. For Qohelet this was all tragic. For Flaubert, it's an unintentional tragicomedy. For both, it's an existential torment. While Qohelet has a way "out" (unsatisfying as it is) in God, Flaubert has no such option. We moderns, having ripped off the theological blinders of our forefathers, can appreciate the cosmic irony, and—perhaps—laugh back at it. While the ancient existentialist can preach a sense of acceptance and resignation, Flaubert instead gives us...The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, except the wanderer is about to trip and fall under the fog again.

Bouvard and Pécuchet act out of compulsion, convinced that the next piece of knowledge will somehow save them, redeem them, or justify their existence, but it never does. The universe, for Flaubert, is not only meaningless and indifferent, it is also indecipherable. We are doomed to absurdity and contradiction. Even at our best, we may only ever reach the truth of chessmasters, never that of angels.

This sense of futility is not just reflected in the characters—it was Flaubert's experience in writing the novel itself. It's fitting that a book against concluding was left unfinished, almost feels like it's part of the joke. A great work of circularity, with no ending of its own! It even infects its readers: I have been writing this review for more than two years now. The irony of an unfinished novel about the impossibility of finality speaks louder than any conclusion could.

In the novel's intended finale, after so many futile attempts to learn and improve themselves, Bouvard and Pécuchet would return to copying, caught in an eternal loop of seeking, failing, and beginning again. Whether this vision is beatific or horrific is left to the reader to decide.

Every year, despite my best efforts, my to-read list gets longer. Soon it will exceed what I can reasonably hope to achieve before my death. Like Bouvard, like Pécuchet, like Flaubert, like all men—I am destined to spend my meager allotment of time chasing an ever-receding horizon. We are doomed to seek, knowing we will never arrive.