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Five fictions in search of truth
By Myra Jehlen PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-691-13612-7
Chapter One
Salammbô Three Rough Stones beneath a Rainy Sky I Salammbô is not widely read, and so I begin with a plot summary.
The heroine who lends the novel her name is the daughter of Hamilcar, Carthage's greatest general in that city's days of imperial glory. As the story opens, Carthage has just emerged more or less triumphant from the first Punic War. However, for that war, the Carthaginians hired an army of Mercenaries, or Barbarians, gathered from all over Africa, and these soldiers now await their pay. The rich merchants of Carthage renege, and the enraged Mercenaries turn on their former employers. The new war proceeds indecisively until a former Carthaginian slave, Spendius, tells Mâtho, the Mercenary general, about a temple to Tanit, Carthage's patron goddess, in which stands a statue to the goddess adorned with a mantle that is the gage of Tanit's protection. By stealing the sacred relic, Mâtho and the slave can demoralize the Carthaginians.
Mâtho and Spendius sneak into the temple and carry away the mantle. When he discovers the theft, Tanit's high priest dispatches Salammbô to Mâtho's tent to recover the mantle. Earlier, at a great feast offered by Hamilcar to thank the Mercenaries for their help in winning the war, Mâtho had glimpsed and loved the beautiful Salammbô. When she now appears in his tent, he is confused by passion and lets her carry off the relic. Nothing decisive emerges from this incident, the fortunes of war wax and wane, but Carthage is eventually victorious, and Mâtho, taken prisoner, is put to death by being made to run a gauntlet of thousands of Carthaginians jostling to flay him alive. He dies at the end of this ghastly journey, falling before the tribune upon which Salammbô stands with the nobility of Carthage. When he falls at her feet, she too sinks lifeless, and her death closes the novel.
Published right after Madame Bovary and so benefiting from its success and notoriety, Salammbô still did not find a ready public, nor has it since. Probably most of those who have read it today had it assigned in school for qualities other than readability: its brilliant writing, its exquisite French, and its immense learning, the last commensurately disputed. Salammbô's setting being a city best known for its annihilation, Flaubert's depiction was naturally difficult to document. But Flaubert was adamant in defense of its total truth and entire veracity, as for instance against the formidable chief conservationist of the Department of Antiquities of the Louvre, an archeologist named Guillaume Froehner.
Froehner impugned almost every one of the political and cultural features with which Flaubert had endowed the city and its inhabitants, as, for instance, the gods, at least half of whom Froehner was certain Flaubert had invented: "Who ever heard of an Aptoukhos, a Schaoûl or a Mastiman? Who does not know that Micipsa was not divine but a man of flesh and bone, king of Numidia?" In a very long article filled with the details that Flaubert had gotten wrong, the Louvre's ranking orientalist scoffed at Flaubert's supposed research, which had managed to confuse the facts and traduce the feel of ancient Carthage. His never had and never could have existed. Indeed, it was this broader failure that Froehner regretted most: getting the details wrong might not have been fatal, had Flaubert had any credible sense of the whole.
Flaubert, scorning an easier global defense of his Carthage, rejoined that every single detail, every deity, every rite and ceremony, every outcropping in the landscape, the precious stones in the treasury, the pebbles on the beach, the ramparts, the women's fashions, the musical instruments, the dance steps, the recipes, each had its unimpeachable source, or, more often, several.
"Who ever heard of an Aptoukhos?" Who? D'Avezac (Cyrénaïque) referring to a temple in the surroundings of Cyrène; "of a Schaoûl?", but that's a name I gave a slave (see my page 91); "or of a Mastiman?" He is mentioned as a god by Corippus. (See Johanneis and Mem. de l'Académie des Inscript., volume 12, p. 181.) "Who doesn't know that Micipsa was not a divinity but a man?" This is exactly what I say, sir, and very clearly too, on the same page 91, when Salammbô calls her slaves, "Come here, Kroum, Enva, Micipsa, Schaoûl!" (391; my translation)
Froehner accused Flaubert of having dug Hamilcar's treasure out of medieval Christian lore? "Sir! The stones were all there in Pliny and Theophrastus" (393). He could go on, and did at length, invoking as well, Herodotus (from whom he had learned that the Lydians in Xerxes's army wore women's dresses) (393), the Bible, "Cahen, volume XVI, 37" (392), Armandi, Florus, Diodorus, Cicero (on infant sacrifice) (391), and, of course, Polybius who was his major source. To top off this avalanche of a rebuttal, and lest the tribe of Froehner mislead posterity, Flaubert gathered a dossier of what he called "justifications" to be placed alongside the manuscript in the reserves of the Bibliothèque Nationale ("Dossier constitué par G. Flaubert, ms. NAF 23 662 du département des Manuscripts de la Bibliothèque nationale, fol. 147 a 168."), where it testifies to Salammbô's learning to this day.
Without taking sides, we can simply say that Salammbô represents an enormous work of scholarly research. Before beginning to write, Flaubert spent long months reading and digging in archives. The first mention of the novel in his correspondence tells a friend that he is in Paris studying archeology. Reconstructing the everyday life of ancient Carthage was a Herculean task. Flaubert fretted about the mountain of books he had to read and lamented his meager findings. He pored over classics and gathered reports of the latest digs, but Carthage remained hazy, and for too long he could not start writing.
"For the last six weeks," he wrote to his friend Ernest Feydeau, "I back away from Carthage like a coward. I pile notes upon notes, books upon books, because I don't feel on track. I don't see my target clearly." (Depuis six semaines, je recule comme un lâche devant Carthage. J'accumule notes sur notes, livres sur livres, car je ne me sens pas en train. Je ne vois pas nettement mon objectif.) If he could not bring his novel to life, it must be because his knowledge of the history was not sufficiently intimate. "For a book to 'sweat' the truth, you have to be stuffed to the gills with your subject. Then the color comes naturally, like something that is bound to happen and like the flowering of the idea itself." (Pour qu'un livre 'sue' la vérité, il faut être bourré de son sujet par dessus les oreilles. Alors la couleur vient tout naturellement, comme un résultat fatal et comme une floraison de l'idée même.) Earlier, during the travail of Madame Bovary, he had groaned to Louise Colet about the terrible headaches he developed by reading deep into the night on the subject of club feet in order to write the chapter about Charles Bovary's botched surgery. It was the only way, he explained; "To write, you need to know everything." (Il faudrait tout connaître pour écrire.)
Three months after despairing that he could ever impart enough heat to his thankless tale to make it sweat truth, Flaubert was finally writing, but not happily. To Feydeau, he grumbled that it was hell trying to create "a continuous truth, that is, a series of significant and likely details in an environment two thousand years away" (une vérité constante, à savoir une série de détails saillants et probables dans un milieu qui est à deux mille ans d'ici). At that distance, every description involves translating basic terms and references, and "what an abyss this opens between the absolute and the work!" (quel abîme cela creuse entre l'absolu et l'oeuvre!)
The vision he found so appalling, of an abyss between the work and the absolute ("the absolute" meaning not one absolute truth but the totality of possibilities that contained the reality the work strives to capture), implies, as an ideal opposite, no division between the writing and its object. The task of the writer is to connect them. Choosing a vanished city as his subject, Flaubert had made his task exceptionally difficult. Six months into the writing, the vertigo of that abyss became intolerable, and he threw over books and notes to go look for himself, though all there was to see were broken walls and the lay of the land. Returning, he wrote Feydeau that he was starting over, he had had it completely wrong. "I knock it all down. It was absurd! impossible! False!" (Je démolis tout. C'était absurde! impossible! Faux!)
Better informed, he still labored under the handicap of his subject's excessive exoticism. But there was a way, he explained to Feydeau, to bridge the chasm of time and strangeness, and to strike the exact note, sound the precise tone ("la note juste"). The explanation formulates a central principle of his writing. "This can be attained by an exceedingly intense condensation of the idea." (Cela s'obtient par une condensation excessive de l'idée.) (Italics original.)
Salammbô's opening paragraphs illustrate this intimacy of form and fact.
It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in Hamilcar's gardens. The soldiers whom he had commanded in Sicily were treating themselves to a great feast to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Eryx, and as their master was away and there were a large number of them, they ate and drank in complete freedom. The captains, in their bronze buskins, had occupied the central path, under a purple, gold-fringed awning, which stretched from the stable wall to the first terrace of the palace; the bulk of the soldiers were spread out under the trees, where numerous flat-roofed buildings could be seen, presses, cellars, stores, bakeries, and arsenals, with a yard for the elephants, pits for the wild beasts, a prison for the slaves. Fig-trees surrounded the kitchens; a sycamore wood extended as far as clumps of greenery, where pomegranates shone resplendent among the white tufts of the cotton-shrubs; vines, heavy with bunches of fruit, climbed up the pine branches; a bed of roses bloomed beneath the plane-trees; here and there on the lawns lilies swayed; the paths were sprinkled with black sand, mixed with powdered coral, and in the middle the cypress avenue stretched from one end to the other with a double colonnade of green obelisks. The palace, built of yellow-flecked Numidian marble, rose up at the back with its four terraced storeys on massive foundations. With its great ebony staircase going straight up, the prow of a defeated galley fixed in the corners of each step, with its scarlet doors quartered with a black cross, its bronze grills as protection against scorpions below, and its trellisses of gilded rods blocking apertures above, it seemed to the soldiers, in its savage opulence, to be as solemn and impenetrable as Hamilcar's own features. C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar. Les soldats qu'il avait commandés en Sicile se donnaient un grand festin pour célébrer le jour anniversaire de la bataille d'Eryx, et comme le maître était absent et qu'ils se trouvaient nombreux, ils mangeaient et ils buvaient en pleine liberté. Les capitaines, portant des cothurnes de bronze, s'étaient placés dans le chemin du milieu, sous un voile de pourpre à franges d'or, qui s'étendait depuis le mur des écuries jusqu'à la première terrasse du palais; le commun des soldats était répandu sous les arbres, où l'on distinguait quantité de bâtiments à toit plat, pressoirs, celliers, magasins, boulangeries et arsenaux, avec une cour pour les éléphants, des fosses pour les bêtes féroces, une prison pour les esclaves. Des figuiers entouraient les cuisines; un bois de sycomores se prolongeait jusqu'à des masses de verdure, où des grenades resplendissaient parmi les touffes blanches des cotonniers: des vignes, chargées de grappes, montaient dans le branchage des pins; un champ de roses s'épanouissait sous des platanes; de place en place sur des gazons, se balançaient des lis; un sable noir mêlé à de la poudre de corail, parsemait les sentiers, et, au milieu, l'avenue des cyprès faisait d'un bout à l'autre comme une double colonnade d'obélisques verts. Le palais, bâti en marbre numidique tacheté de jaune, superposait tout au fond, sur de larges assises, ses quatre étages en terrasses. Avec son grand escalier droit en bois d'ébène, portant aux angles de chaque marche la proue d'une galère vaincue, avec ses portes rouges écartelées d'une croix noire, ses grillages d'airain qui le défendaient en bas des scorpions, et ses treillis de baguettes dorées qui bouchaient en haut ses ouvertures, il semblait aux soldats, dans son opulence farouche, aussi solennel et impénétrable que le visage d'Hamilcar.
After the fuss and fury of its preparation, the first sentence-"It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar"-sits quite still. It lists in apposition three places with nothing to inflect them, not an adjective, not a metaphor or simile, only the identifying name and location: at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar. Precise without offering any qualifications, with no transitive verbs to impart even a potential for activity, it has only its rhythm to give it life, and to prevent its resolving into mere geographical notation.
Herman Melville's opening of Moby Dick, "Call me Ishmael," begins that story by commanding an immediate response. "It was at Megara" makes no sign to anyone. By the third clause, which reaps the self-evidence of the second, which had already garnered that of the first, knowing exactly where the story is taking place ("It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar") has the effect opposite to Ishmael's interpolation, of explicitly not pulling us in, even keeping us off. It is sonorous rather than communicative. Also, organizing itself around the verb "to be" is the closest a sentence can come to not having a verb. Salammbô's first sentence makes its one "was" do for all three of its clauses and is consequently almost inert, active only enough to denote the identities that connect Megara, Carthage, and Hamilcar's gardens. The "was," doing little more than ensuring grammatical decorum, says that each succeeding phrase is what it is; together, they are what they are, and the whole sentence this short of tautology.
The second sentence, a new beginning with its own paragraph, is more engaging. The syntax is again mostly immobile, flatly declarative, and the sentence is doubly end-stopped, by its period and by the end of the paragraph. However, the content is livelier, in that it contains persons and actions; and, in the second half, something just may be stirring. We have learned, in the first half, that the assembled soldiers are having a feast to celebrate their victory in a major battle. The second clause does seem to be signaling a dangerous situation: "and as their master was away and there were a large number of them, they ate and drank in complete freedom" (et comme le maître était absent et qu'ils se trouvaient nombreux, ils mangeaient et ils buvaient en pleine liberté). The general is away, the soldiers are on their own: this could be a worry.
Not yet. The prose allays any rising concern by putting the explanation first (as their master was away), so that danger is overlain with reason. The narration proceeds in the same calm voice. An eternity of declarative sentences, stretching over four or five pages, tells us everything about how and where the men have disposed themselves on the grounds, and what the grounds themselves are like.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Five fictions in search of truth by Myra Jehlen Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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