Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out by Barbara Vinken

Reviewed by: Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out by Barbara Vinken Kate Rees Barbara Vinken. Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2015. Pp. 480. The title of Barbara Vinken's recently translated critical study of Flaubert and religion, Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out, suggests something of its ambition. While acknowledging Flaubert's renowned status as a central figure in the development of modernism, Vinken argues that Flaubert's works engage in a particular and profound relationship with salvation history and with Biblical and classical texts. She traces a persistent and pessimistic reading, across Flaubert's oeuvre, of a testament against the Gospels and of the idea of redemption through sacrificial love and the image of the Cross. The result is a re-evaluation of Flaubert's major novels, and of his Trois Contes, arguing that their modernity stems in part from this thoroughgoing ironizing or incorporation of ancient and Biblical sources, and from a "crossing out" of the significance of the Cross in Christian history and belief. Flaubert is therefore to be read, in Vinken's analysis, as "postsecular:" less a writer whose works reflect increasing nineteenth-century scepticism towards religion, but instead as one whose meticulous research sees intricate Christian symbolism written into his works, designed to offer the bitterest of readings against the New Testament. Vinken traces images of the Cross throughout Flaubert's works. She notes, among other examples, the cross of the Legion of Honour awarded to Homais at the end of Madame Bovary, Dussardier dying at the hands of Sénécal in L'Éducation sentimentale, his arms outstretched in a cross, and patterns of intersecting verticality and horizontality in the Trois Contes. For Vinken, the persistence of such crosses indicates the idea that for Flaubert, human history echoes the events of salvation history, from Babel, through the Crucifixion and Resurrection; the touchstone for Flaubert's writing is the Bible. Yet the result of such a thoroughgoing engagement with the Bible, as well as with biblical interpreters such as Saint Augustine, is that Flaubert's work becomes an anti-Gospel, a resolutely anti-Christian movement which revises a tradition of love whose primal scene is Christ's act of renunciation on the cross. Instead of embodying self-affirmation or self-transcendence, Vinken's evaluation of Flaubert's crossed-out Christianity sees the crucifixion as an act of forsaking the self and the suffering this entails. She argues for an interpretation of Flaubert's modernity which contradicts a view of this so-called hermit of Croisset as passive, or as a nihilist, as advocated by Sartre or by Nietzsche, seeing Flaubert instead as playing a much more vital role in modernism. She claims that it is instead his rewriting of the crucifixion, seen as an eradication of the self, which makes Flaubert "the founder of modern literature" (93). Her analysis has ramifications for a reading of Flaubert's realism: the obsession with historical truth pertains, she suggests, not so much to realism as to a form of competition with the Bible. The recurring image of the apple tree in Madame Bovary is seen as an indication that the novel should be read "not in a realist mode, [End Page 141] but allegorically" (64); less as emblematic of local Norman flora and fauna than as evocative of the tree of knowledge. In this re-evaluation of Flaubert's biblical reading, Vinken also indicates Flaubert's divergence from his contemporaries; she sees certain motifs within his texts as deliberate anti-Christian rewritings of Hugo's texts in particular. Hugo's Esmerelda, for example, in Notre-Dame de Paris, is redeemed by motherhood, becoming a martyr to maternal love; Emma Bovary is anything but. Vinken applies her reading of Flaubert as "postsecular" to each of his major completed works. Madame Bovary is analyzed as a novel in which the lust of adultery is seen less as banal and physical, than as allegorical: adultery is related to a form of reading gone astray. Vinken connects Flaubert's novel with a line from Augustine's Confessions, in which he describes his reading of the Aeneid as a form of adultery against God; Madame Bovary is also seen as...

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