FLAUBERT’S CONTEMPT REVISITED.

FLAUBERT’S CONTEMPT REVISITED. I posted here on Flaubert’s contempt for his characters in MADAME BOVARY . I was pleased to see that Lydia Davis, the most recent translator of MADAME BOVARY, finds the same contempt in the book. Jonathan Raban in his review of her translation in the New York Review of Books (October 14, 2010) quotes Davis in an interview: “…he despised everybody in the book, and he despised their way of life….” (Raban disagrees, saying that: “…Flaubert …never sheds the mantle of an haut bourgeois writing …. about members of the petite bourgeosie….But he does not see his characters as despicable.”) Lydia Davis goes farther than simply pointing out Flaubert’s contempt for his characters. She thinks that this diminishes the book. It is remarkable for a translator who has spent a lot of time with a book to speak disparagingly of it, but Lydia Davis is quoted by Raban as describing it as a “great book—so-called.” I didn’t go that far in my earlier post (although I did say that: “Flaubert, the author, had an unfair advantage over his characters. First you throw the fish in the barrel, and then you shoot them”). I am glad to see Lydia Davis’s judgment on the book because I agree with her. Lydia Davis says in her interview: “I like a heroine who thinks and feels….” Like Davis, I don’t think that Flaubert presented Emma as a character who thinks and feels, and it is a major weakness in the book.