The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, Volume 1 by Jean-Paul Sartre

Author:Jean-Paul Sartre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Two Ideologies

Gustave was not content just to live his unhappy condition as younger son; he had to ponder it. By this I do not mean either that he understood it objectively or that he made a theory out of it; I mean simply that he believed he was clarifying it by discourse—when on the contrary he was obscuring and mythifying it. In other words, he undertook—as we all do at first—to approach experience through the ideologies of his time. He had two at his disposal: one, faith, came from his mother; the other, scientism, from his father. This last is the one we shall discuss first—we shall soon see why. The paterfamilias, in effect, was not only the black lord who had created his vassal in order to cast him into the worst possible world, or even the chief instructor embodied by Pedrillo, who revealed to Gustave his inadequacy by forcing him to learn his alphabet. He was also a great man of the provinces, a capacité, a philosopher; on the outside his statements were respectfully received, within his family they had the force of law, which conferred on him still another function, that of educator and model. In short, when he had the time or the inclination, he spoke; by his intermittent statements, his allusions, his judgments, more rarely his conversations, he infused his sons with his convictions, which instantly became gospel. His authority was so great that even when he evoked a personal memory his conduct in those circumstances unintentionally assumed an exemplary, sacred cast. Hence the ethic of duty and mechanistic thought, although radically contradictory, were simultaneously accepted by the children, issuing as they did from the same hero, from the founder; and both expressed him completely. What did Gustave gain from this teaching? How was he penetrated by bourgeois ideology? How was it structured in this dark soul who rejected it with all his might, in vain? How could Gustave use it to “illuminate” himself and the world? We shall not answer these questions decisively until we have studied the two portraits Gustave drew of his father, one long after Achille-Cléophas’s death, which depicts him as Larivière, the other drawn from life in August 1839, which describes him in the guise of Mathurin.

A. REGRESSIVE ANALYSIS

The study of these two incarnations seems indispensable since the single valid connection between morality and mechanism, for Gustave as much as for Achille, was the celebrated man who managed to produce sacred words as well as exemplary behavior. Both words and behavior were worth only as much as he was. Here the very person of Dr. Flaubert is thrown into question. For Achille, time would have no effect on the matter; his father would last until the incontestable end, as we have seen. And for Gustave? Let us return to Dr. Larivière; what makes the pages relating to him in Madame Bovary so valuable is that they allow us to see the deceased father the way Gustave at thirty-five remembered him. The testimony is irrefutable.

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