E. Bovary’s downfall was neither
gradual nor unmotivated. There was even
a professor from Berkeley, California, who claims to have discovered the double
source of her death drive: the two-chambered crypt built around the lost mother
and brother of Emma Bovary. While we do not care to dispute this conclusion,
neither are we inclined to take into consideration fanciful arguments construed
by literature professors. It is our task
only to confirm that Ms. Bovary suffered incalculable damage as the result of her
husband’s egregious admittance to the field of medicine There is no doubt in our minds that Charles
Bovary carried the stain of his father’s irresponsible professional engagement.
As Dr. Lacan has noted, every
subject belongs to a circuit that transmits error and secrecy from one
generation to the next. Like Faust before him, Charles Bovary was the
beneficiary of a history of corruption in medical practice. Our records show that his father Monsieur Charles-Denis-Bartholome
Bovary had once been an assistant surgeon in the army. He was “forced to leave the service in 1812
for corrupt practices with regard to conscription”(3). Charles Bovary, however,
was no Faust. He was filled to
satisfaction with the knowledge he felt himself to have attained. So ignorant was he that his wife, asking for
the meaning of a word she had come across in one of her many novels, was
obliged to realize that “this man taught nothing” (135). In our estimation, and after lengthy
deliberation, this complacency of the mediocre in itself may have sufficed to
charge him with willfully introducing the destruction of his legal companion.
Faced with the beance of a non-teaching, a full blockage in the transmission of
knowledge, a distension of transferential activity upon which all healthy
contact is founded, Ms. Bovary had nowhere to turn. It is clear to us that she was an
exceptionally talented woman who experienced difficulty, due primary
identificatory processes, in distinguishing between the Innen and Aussenwelt (Dr.
Freud). We dispute recent reports of her
regression to oral cannibalistic libido while it is evident to us that she
sought the phallus in the desire of the Other. However, the Other had the
indecency of disappearing, which led Ms. B. to endless attempts at restoring it
to the function of an object of imaginary incorporation.
Ms. B.’s psyche was disposed to drug dependency at an
early age. It was made clear to her from
the start, however, that she would have to wait until the next century in order
to properly shoot up. The crucial
catastrophe that led her to assume a full posture of substance dependency
occurred when Gustave Flaubert laced the novel with a fatal autobiographical
injection. Mr. Flaubert was not himself
in control of the substance he administered; however, it dealt the fatal blow
to Emma B. Discharging his poison upon
her, Mr. Flaubert was henceforth free to indulge in hallucinatory trances that
he habitually termed “writing.” It might
be added, for the sake of scientific objectivity, that Flaubert frequented
notoriously dubious characters: a Baudelaire, a Gautier, and not the least of
all, his own mistress, a woman whose loose and reprobate character, a poet, and
at one time the lover of the philosopher and statesman Victor Cousin. Her child, Henrietta, was not fathered by her
legal husband. Additionally, we have
noted Mr. Flaubert’s addictive intimacies with Alfred Le Poittevin, whom he
incorporated, and subsequently with Louis Bouilhet who virtually dictated the
particulars of Flaubert’s oeuvre.
It was the moment when Mr. Flaubert
was performing in the novel a double oedipal bypass that all Ms. B.’s hopes
were dashed. The operation was a complete success for Mr. Flaubert; it destroyed the heroine definitively. As the result of the absolute infighting of
medicine and pharmacy, when everything was staked on the resurrection of a
third leg, the heroine was made to enter a strategic zone that declared her
loser.
We owe thanks here to professor
Harry Levin, formerly of Harvard University, for signaling “the parallel lives
of the author and the heroine daily, weekly, monthly, yearly”. . .
Flaubert’s dependency upon his brother at the moment he develops toxicological
theories (narcissistic self-hallucination induced by over-reading) will prove
fatal . . .
The entire scene originates in a
scheme concocted by the neighboring apothecary, Mr. Homalis. Exposed as the drama of the signifier par
excellence, the critical operation comes down to a young man’s clubfoot. The oedipal showdown commences
with the instigating utterance, offered by the apothecary, “Are you a man or
not? (151) Equally obnoxious was the provocation, “After all, what’s there to
lose?” (150) Indeed, the answer to the
second question obtains in the stakes mounted by the first question. All the loose ends, the bruises and errors
converge in the place of a botched operation. This was Emma B.’s last chance for scoring on sublimation,
displacement, and pride,. Ever looking
“to have something more solid than love to lean on” (150), Emma is willing to
invest the future of her husband’s career psychically. But the future for Emma arrives as a modified
form of the concealed past. The crypt formation, concretized and exteriorized,
is prepared on the model of “a kind of box weighing about eight pounds’ (151)
that was fitted to the leg of a young man, a certain Hippolyte. The crypt-effect attending the operation is
intensified further by the materiality of the bandages, “a whole pyramid of
bandages – the apothecary’s entire stock “(152). The intense cooperation of
medicine, crypt, and pharmacy held out the last hope, it was meant to give Emma
something more solid than love to lean on.
. .
It was quite an event in the
village, that leg amputation.(157)
Against the pain of this impossible
operation the mind begins to alter. Charles, for his part, goes quickly. The
drunk arises as a defense against medicine. “Charles looked at her with the
clouded eyes of a drunken man as he listened to the amputee’s last screams;
they came in a succession of long, varied tones
interspersed with short, fitful shrieks, like the howling of some animal
being slaughtered far away” (160).
In sum, our commission has found the
operating theater to generate the exciting cause, the event of no return for
Emma B. Where Flaubert has thought to exorcise his private Achilles’ phantoms,
he has in truth reinserted the call of the phantom in the house of Bovary. Henceforth she would be reincorporating the
loosened Other according to the exigencies of “intoxication.” Faced with the
event of no return [her husband’s professional reputation ruined], her mind is
about to alter according to the semantic bifurcation that adultery convenes. Emma B. turns to painkillers. Flaubert’s
interjections are precise and to the point:
Her dreams fallen into the mud like
wounded swallows . . . Collapsing under the furious onslaughts of
her pride. She reveled in all the malicious ironies of triumphant adultery.
The memory of her lover came back to her with intoxicating charm . .
. and Charles seemed detached
from her life, as permanently departed, as impossible and annihilated as though
he were on the point of death, gasping his last before her eyes. (159-60)
The wound precedes everything; or,
at least the theater of impossible operations stages the turn towards the
external supplement. Emma B. buys the prosthesis for Hippolyte, ending the
drama of the oedipal operation with a wooden leg. From this point onward she became
a supplier and user of the artificial prosthesis.
Emma B. continued limply to live on,
soon discovering the rush of capital from the local junkie, Mlheureux: “Emma
abandoned herself to this easy way of satisfying all her whims” (163). She
‘remained under the influence of a kind of idiotic infatuation . .
. a blissful torpor; and her
soul, sinking into that intoxication, shriveled and drowned like the Duke of
Clarence in his butt of malmsey.” Her
everyday behavior changed; she even had the audacity to talk with Rodolphe in
public with a cigarette in her mouth.” (165)
For his part, “Charles had not
followed [his mother’s] advice about forbidding Emma to read novels’ (166) She
goes into convulsions because of an apricot basket.
NURSE’S REPORT: Somehow they had
stopped feeding her. Each time, their
departure seemed sudden. Demanding satisfaction from her life was her big
mistake. “Naïve”, as Mr. Flaubert would say, and temporarily misleading. We’d
known this disposition since Faust and all the megarock stars beginning with
Goethe. There was nothing that would intervene to institute distance or
superego; the law of the father was out of working order, which is why she
could not abide deferral or denial. In a
way, she took the route of every belle ame in the ward. Living the fusional desire, she was exposed
to the toxic maternal, en route to dust and dissolution. But where the belle ame strengthens on the
ineffable, transcending even the rude materiality of books, Emma B. madly
demanded that the ineffable satisfy her, that it go to the encounter with life.
Crack
Wars; Literature Addiction Mania
by Avital Ronell, University of Illinois Press, 2004
It was the moment when Mr. Flaubert was performing in the novel a double oedipal bypass that all Ms. B.’s hopes were dashed. The operation was a complete success for Mr. Flaubert; it destroyed the heroine definitively. . . when everything was staked on the resurrection of a third leg, the heroine was made to enter a strategic zone that declared her loser.
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