Tim Unwin
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fond de l’horizon, s’abattit de la cime des rocs déchirés, du haut des cieux; il se
forma, du bruit de l’Océan, de la lumière du jour, quelque chose d’exquis que je
m’appropriai comme d’un domaine céleste, je m’y sentis vivre heureux et grand,
comme l’aigle qui regarde le soleil et monte dans ses rayons.
3
Now it is not hard to find ways in which these passages stand
in contrast to one another. While Balzac talks dithyrambically of prehistory, Flaubert is focussed mystically on something much nearer the
present. Balzac is (ostensibly, at least) speaking of one of the nineteenth century’s first great scientific icons, while Flaubert appears to
be offering an unmediated, and quite unscientific description of a personal experience. Balzac conveys his vision through an explicit reference to scientific discourse, while Flaubert’s is intensely lyrical. And
if Flaubert’s framework is one of pastoral harmony, far removed from
the city and signs of civilization, Balzac evokes, alongside the natural
world, the spectre of past and even present civilizations that, like nature itself, come and go. Most significantly, while Balzac’s vision is of
a creative act that restores plenitude and meaning almost ex nihilo,
Flaubert locates and verbalizes an already existing abundance of
meaning in the natural scene around him. Balzac, it should be added,
writes at a time when the story of dinosaurs is just beginning to
emerge fully – heralding an era of fieldwork and discovery in the
1840s that has been comically described as “la ruée vers l’os” –
whereas Flaubert evokes a natural world that, for him, is already complete, and needs only to be observed and transcribed in its dramatic
presence and fullness.
For both, though – and this is the crucial point – the discovery
of nature is absolutely synonymous with that of the power of language. Despite many differences between them, each articulates
through the perception of nature a vision and a poetics that will be
central to their approach as novelists. Faced with the spectacle of nature at first or at second hand, ancient or modern, scientifically mediated or mystically intuited, the writer finds in it a source of rich
significance and of analogies with his own creative processes. Balzac
explicitly builds his passage on the notion that observed reality would
be nothing, literally remaining in almost total obscurity, without the
___________________________
3 Gustave Flaubert, Novembre, in Œuvres de jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p.
781.
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fond de l’horizon, s’abattit de la cime des rocs déchirés, du haut des cieux; il se
forma, du bruit de l’Océan, de la lumière du jour, quelque chose d’exquis que je
m’appropriai comme d’un domaine céleste, je m’y sentis vivre heureux et grand,
comme l’aigle qui regarde le soleil et monte dans ses rayons.
3
Now it is not hard to find ways in which these passages stand
in contrast to one another. While Balzac talks dithyrambically of prehistory, Flaubert is focussed mystically on something much nearer the
present. Balzac is (ostensibly, at least) speaking of one of the nineteenth century’s first great scientific icons, while Flaubert appears to
be offering an unmediated, and quite unscientific description of a personal experience. Balzac conveys his vision through an explicit reference to scientific discourse, while Flaubert’s is intensely lyrical. And
if Flaubert’s framework is one of pastoral harmony, far removed from
the city and signs of civilization, Balzac evokes, alongside the natural
world, the spectre of past and even present civilizations that, like nature itself, come and go. Most significantly, while Balzac’s vision is of
a creative act that restores plenitude and meaning almost ex nihilo,
Flaubert locates and verbalizes an already existing abundance of
meaning in the natural scene around him. Balzac, it should be added,
writes at a time when the story of dinosaurs is just beginning to
emerge fully – heralding an era of fieldwork and discovery in the
1840s that has been comically described as “la ruée vers l’os” –
whereas Flaubert evokes a natural world that, for him, is already complete, and needs only to be observed and transcribed in its dramatic
presence and fullness.
For both, though – and this is the crucial point – the discovery
of nature is absolutely synonymous with that of the power of language. Despite many differences between them, each articulates
through the perception of nature a vision and a poetics that will be
central to their approach as novelists. Faced with the spectacle of nature at first or at second hand, ancient or modern, scientifically mediated or mystically intuited, the writer finds in it a source of rich
significance and of analogies with his own creative processes. Balzac
explicitly builds his passage on the notion that observed reality would
be nothing, literally remaining in almost total obscurity, without the
___________________________
3 Gustave Flaubert, Novembre, in Œuvres de jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p.
781.