Michael Wood
London Review of Books
London Review of Books
Sentimental Education
por Gustave Flaubert, traduzido por Raymond N. MacKenzie.
Minnesota, 445 pp., £16, janeiro, 978 1 5179 1413 4
A look at some of the techniques of the novel will get us closer to what is going on. First, there is a diligent detailed realism, essential in spite of whatever Pellerin may say. Time, place, action, clothes, food, dialogue and much more are reported – recreated – with impeccable, mildly obsessive care. Second, this approach is frequently, subtly invaded by moments of subjectivity or impressionism: we are seeing not what an observer would see but what the characters see. And, the third technique, a phrase or two suddenly makes us wonder who is talking and who the reader is supposed to be.
These effects – these combinations of reporting, animation and parody – are even more strongly at work in accounts of the private lives of the characters. Frédéric makes gestures or has thoughts that may or may not enact verdicts against him. When he is feeling generous, he looks around for someone he might help. He doesn’t find anyone – but that’s not a problem, since ‘he was not the sort of man who would go out of his way looking for any such opportunity.’ We also read that ‘he felt as if he were being tortured, and he cursed his own youth’ and ‘it seemed to him that the happiness the excellence of his soul deserved was a little tardy in arriving.’ And my favourite: ‘this catastrophe ... opened up and revealed the secret wealth of his character’ (literally, ‘the secret opulences of his nature’).
Some of these analyses are less focused on the individual, more philosophical. ‘Everyone’s conscience has absorbed something from the stream of sophistry that’s been poured into it.’ And: ‘Most of the men there had served under at least four different governments, and they would have sold out France or even the whole human race to protect their own fortunes, to spare themselves the least discomfort or difficulty, or simply out of sheer baseness, out of their instinctive worship of Power.’ The literal term here is a ‘force’, ‘adoration instinctive de la force’, which is perhaps a bit scarier. A similar claim is made more briefly about a character who ‘would have paid for the privilege of selling himself’.
And then realism itself can seem to comment on the frenzy of the characters. Frédéric is rushing to see someone and passes an old man crying in a window, while ‘the Seine flowed peacefully on its way. The sky was a perfect blue; in the trees of the Tuileries, birds were singing.’ Elsewhere, a young woman cries too, and we are told that ‘day was breaking, and some wagons were driving by.’ And on one extraordinary occasion, the real world doesn’t comment or go on its way: it stops in its tracks. Frédéric is happy for once, and ‘the tall trees out in the garden that, till now, had been rustling gently in the wind suddenly stood still. Clouds too were motionless, long, red streaks in the sky, and it was as if all things everywhere were suspended in silence.’ The syntax of realism also works for real illusions.
Finally, I think, we do get a sort of view of Flaubert the writer across all the ambiguities and sarcasms. The best open indication of this is the dry, delicate use of language actually flirting with laughter: the old man who is ‘médiocrement aimable’ (‘minimally amiable’); Frédéric feeling ‘voluptueusement stupide’ (‘in a voluptuous stupor’). At one point there is a ‘homicidal’ smile; elsewhere an ‘ineffable’ one. We get the impression that Flaubert, like Kafka, thinks or knows that the human world is ridiculous or monstrous. Sometimes he is angry about this, but more often the writing suggests a complicated sympathy. There are no saints or heroes, even if Flaubert wrote a novel about St Anthony. And none of us is qualified to feel superior to anyone else. If we haven’t committed any idiocies yet, we soon will, individually and collectively. A sort of desolate democracy.
In a much quoted letter, Flaubert wrote words that became a major motto of modernism. ‘Authors in their work,’ he said, ‘must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.’ They may also be specialists in the laughable, even if they mostly can’t bring themselves to laugh that much. After his remark about the comic element, Flaubert cited Molière’s Malade imaginaire as going deeper in interior worlds than any Greek play, ‘tous les Agamemnons’.
Raymond MacKenzie’s translation is excellent, and if I have occasionally resorted to the French phrasing it is to suggest something of the attractions of thinking about other roads while having a good time on the one we have chosen. Differences between languages are not a problem: they are an invitation to travel. Without moving beyond the pages of this novel we can think about what it means for French to have only one word for both ‘history’ and ‘story’, or for ‘sentimental’ in French to have none of the soggy meanings it often has in English. The work is full of a French usage that has an exact equivalent in some other languages, but nothing like the life Flaubert lends to it. I’m thinking of the personal pronoun ‘on’, ‘one’. It is everywhere, taking up most of the space ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘you’ or ‘we’ or ‘they’ would usually occupy. There are 21 such uses in the first chapter. The practice also takes us back to Flaubert’s ambiguities, since he seems to be deliberately pulling down the blinds, appealing to the clichés we all have littering our heads.
An early appearance of the usage is flanked by other ways of avoiding precision, by exactly the reverse of detailed realism. We are looking at, listening to, the travellers on the boat of the early pages. ‘Beaucoup chantaient. On était gai. Il se versait des petits verres.’ MacKenzie alters the word order and neatly catches the feeling of anonymity: ‘Many were singing. They treated themselves to drinks. The good cheer was contagious.’
Other translators have provided comparable versions: ‘A good many began singing. Spirits rose. Glasses were brought out and filled’ (Robert Baldick, 1964); ‘Many sang songs. They were jolly together. They offered one another a drop to drink’ (Helen Constantine, 2016); ‘Many sang. Spirits rose, and glasses were produced and filled’ (Anthony Goldsmith, 1947); ‘There was singing and gaiety, drinks were being poured’ (Perdita Burlingame, 1972); ‘There was a good deal of singing. People were in high spirits. All around, glasses were being filled’ (Douglas Parmée, 1989). One doesn’t see ‘one’ among the options. The other uses in the chapter, to half-translate them crudely, are: ‘one ran into each other’, ‘one unfolds’; ‘one met’, ‘one could’, ‘one found again’, ‘one had’, ‘one heard’, ‘one pardoned’, ‘one saw’, ‘one perceived’, ‘one discovered’, ‘one went along’, ‘one arrived’, ‘one would have given’, ‘one waited’, ‘one consulted’, ‘one kissed’, ‘one made’, ‘one spoke’, ‘one withdrew’. For these, MacKenzie offers passive verb forms, several ‘theys’, a ‘you’, ‘people’, ‘everyone’, phrases such as ‘came into view’ and ‘the eye’. We could guess that the French language as used by Flaubert has a special interest in keeping active agents out of the picture, and that ‘one’ is a comfortable collective that protects its members. The feeling we get, I think, is that ‘we’, nudged into being ‘one’, are comically predictable, not even dreaming of a laugh. I’m not sure how we defend ourselves against the implied charge.
Minnesota, 445 pp., £16, janeiro, 978 1 5179 1413 4
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), de Flaubert, é corretamente celebrado como uma obra-prima do realismo literário, mas também, de forma bastante consistente, nos faz pensar se sabemos o que é realismo ou o que mais pode estar envolvido nele. Um dos personagens do romance, um pintor, acha o próprio conceito ridículo: "Abaixo o realismo! Um pintor precisa pintar o espírito!" É verdade que esse personagem, um homem chamado Pellerin, mais tarde se torna um fotógrafo, um gesto que somos convidados a ver como a derrota total de tudo o que ele costumava defender.
Talvez a ideia de ironia nos ajude aqui. O romance em si, novamente, tem seus comentários sobre o tópico. O personagem principal, Frédéric Moreau, repete a pergunta evasiva de um amigo sobre pessoas ricas como ele ("É culpa delas?") "com uma arrogante ironia ciceroniana que parecia ter vindo direto do tribunal". Em um contexto diferente, ele tenta "atacar via ironia". Outra personagem, Mme Dambreuse, uma viúva com quem Frédéric quase se casa, tem um "sorriso significativo, educado e irônico ao mesmo tempo" e profere frases que "poderiam passar por atos de deferência ou ironias". Há um convite silencioso ao leitor nessas linhas. Se perdermos as ironias do livro, perderemos a maior parte dele. Mas as frases também nos abandonam antes que saibamos onde estamos.
Flaubert escreveu sobre seu interesse em material cômico que "chega ao extremo, que não nos faz rir, o momento lírico da piada" como o que ele mais queria tratar como escritor, "ce qui me fait le plus envie comme écrivain". Esse desejo continuou vindo à mente na minha leitura mais recente de L'Éducation sentimentale, mesmo que apenas aumentasse minha perplexidade. Em leituras anteriores, eu não havia registrado totalmente a persistência de estruturas narrativas baseadas em comédia, do que poderíamos pensar como a versão de ação de Charlie Chaplin ou Jacques Tati. Este é um romance sério sobre a vida francesa durante e ao redor da revolução de 1848, uma história e também uma história, para ecoar o duplo sentido de seu subtítulo (Histoire d’un jeune homme), mas sua lógica narrativa é a de uma comédia pastelão. Se algo pode dar errado, dará: perfeitamente, sinfonicamente. Quando Frédéric retorna a Paris após uma curta ausência, todos que ele conhece parecem ter se mudado de casa e trocado de emprego, então ele não consegue encontrar nenhum deles. Nós o perseguimos desesperadamente pelas ruas. Quando ele está prestes a se casar com a rica Mme Dambreuse, ele descobre que ela está falida. Sua tentativa mais elaborada de ter uma noite com Mme Arnoux, a quem ele considera o verdadeiro amor de sua vida, falha porque o filho dela adoece e ela não pode sair de casa.
Há muito mais desse tipo de coisa, e o romance termina com uma espécie de fábula, discretamente prenunciada nas primeiras páginas do livro. Frédéric e um amigo, quando jovens, visitaram um bordel em sua cidade natal, mas não puderam aproveitar seus prazeres porque Frédéric se assustou e fugiu. Seu amigo também teve que ir embora, porque Frédéric tinha dinheiro. As últimas palavras do romance descrevem uma conversa tardia entre os dois homens agora bastante idosos:
Eles contaram a história juntos novamente, e longamente, cada um fornecendo detalhes que o outro havia esquecido; e, quando terminaram:"Essa foi a melhor época de nossas vidas!", disse Frédéric."Sim, você sabe, acho que você pode estar certo? Essa foi a melhor época de nossas vidas!", disse Deslauriers.
Não há dúvida sobre o sucesso do efeito, essa palhaçada sem ridículo, mas como Flaubert conseguiu, ao longo do livro, nos impedir de rir? Claro, há muitos lugares onde o riso é realmente convidado. Mas muitos momentos-chave têm essa estranha estrutura de comédia como uma forma de miséria. Frédéric e Deslauriers estão sendo irônicos? Eles estão certos sobre suas vidas mesmo que imaginem que não estão? A memória deles é um disfarce para tudo o que eles não querem pensar? Eles e Flaubert estão conspirando para excluir uma reflexão genuína sobre suas vidas? Temos algo como um acesso às visões do autor sobre tudo isso? Ou do narrador?
A look at some of the techniques of the novel will get us closer to what is going on. First, there is a diligent detailed realism, essential in spite of whatever Pellerin may say. Time, place, action, clothes, food, dialogue and much more are reported – recreated – with impeccable, mildly obsessive care. Second, this approach is frequently, subtly invaded by moments of subjectivity or impressionism: we are seeing not what an observer would see but what the characters see. And, the third technique, a phrase or two suddenly makes us wonder who is talking and who the reader is supposed to be.
A abertura exibe todas as três técnicas lindamente:
Em 15 de setembro de 1840, por volta das seis da manhã, grandes nuvens de fumaça estavam saindo do Ville-de-Montereau, atracado, mas quase pronto para zarpar do cais Saint-Bernard.As pessoas estavam correndo sem fôlego; barris, cabos, cestos cheios de roupas de cama, tudo dificultava a locomoção.
Então o barco decola e o olhar muda: "as margens do rio de cada lado, pontilhadas de lojas, oficinas e fábricas, deslizavam, desenrolando-se como um par de fitas". No parágrafo seguinte, vemos "Paris desaparecendo completamente de vista" e logo depois disso nosso herói, anteriormente descrito como "um jovem de dezoito anos, com cabelos longos", agora é chamado de M. Frédéric Moreau, como se precisasse de uma apresentação formal. O narrador acha que a página é uma sala de estar ou um show?
Há algo frio e estonteante nessa sequência, e versões dela ocorrem repetidamente no romance. O livro se volta para as ruas e palácios de Paris nos primeiros momentos da revolução.
De repente, a "Marselhesa" estourou... O Povo havia chegado. Eles invadiram as escadas em uma enxurrada estonteante de cabeças nuas, bonés, gorros vermelhos, baionetas e ombros, surgindo tão impetuosamente que as pessoas desapareceram na massa abundante, que continuou subindo, como uma maré de primavera que empurra um rio para trás, uma força irresistível com um rugido profundo...Então uma alegria frenética irrompeu, como se ali, no lugar onde o trono estivera, um futuro de felicidade ilimitada tivesse acabado de aparecer; e o povo, não tanto por vingança, mas por uma necessidade de afirmar sua propriedade, começou a quebrar, estilhaçar e rasgar em pedaços as janelas, cortinas, lustres, candelabros, mesas, cadeiras, bancos, todos os móveis, até os álbuns de desenhos e as cestas de bordado. Quando você ganha, é melhor se divertir!
"O Povo" parece abertamente irônico, mas pode não ser. As ideias de alegria e diversão são interpretações carregadas de um clima, mas o clima é contagiante mesmo que o narrador não o compartilhe. Há uma espécie de escárnio na sugestão posterior de que, embora ‘Frédéric não fosse um guerreiro, o sangue gaulês dentro dele foi despertado’, mas não precisamos nos juntar ao escárnio. O clima logo muda de qualquer forma, e o narrador nos presenteia com uma frase maravilhosa onde o realismo desaparece, e o comentário político toma seu lugar:
Apesar da legislação mais humana já aprovada, o espectro de 1793 continuou reaparecendo, e o som cortante da guilhotina podia ser ouvido em cada sílaba da palavra "república"... A França, encontrando-se sem um mestre, começou a chorar de terror, como um cego que perdeu sua bengala, ou uma criança que perdeu sua babá.
Mas essa pode ou não ser a visão de Flaubert ou de seu narrador. Tudo o que temos na página é uma paráfrase do que um certo grupo de pessoas pensa.
These effects – these combinations of reporting, animation and parody – are even more strongly at work in accounts of the private lives of the characters. Frédéric makes gestures or has thoughts that may or may not enact verdicts against him. When he is feeling generous, he looks around for someone he might help. He doesn’t find anyone – but that’s not a problem, since ‘he was not the sort of man who would go out of his way looking for any such opportunity.’ We also read that ‘he felt as if he were being tortured, and he cursed his own youth’ and ‘it seemed to him that the happiness the excellence of his soul deserved was a little tardy in arriving.’ And my favourite: ‘this catastrophe ... opened up and revealed the secret wealth of his character’ (literally, ‘the secret opulences of his nature’).
Some of these analyses are less focused on the individual, more philosophical. ‘Everyone’s conscience has absorbed something from the stream of sophistry that’s been poured into it.’ And: ‘Most of the men there had served under at least four different governments, and they would have sold out France or even the whole human race to protect their own fortunes, to spare themselves the least discomfort or difficulty, or simply out of sheer baseness, out of their instinctive worship of Power.’ The literal term here is a ‘force’, ‘adoration instinctive de la force’, which is perhaps a bit scarier. A similar claim is made more briefly about a character who ‘would have paid for the privilege of selling himself’.
And then realism itself can seem to comment on the frenzy of the characters. Frédéric is rushing to see someone and passes an old man crying in a window, while ‘the Seine flowed peacefully on its way. The sky was a perfect blue; in the trees of the Tuileries, birds were singing.’ Elsewhere, a young woman cries too, and we are told that ‘day was breaking, and some wagons were driving by.’ And on one extraordinary occasion, the real world doesn’t comment or go on its way: it stops in its tracks. Frédéric is happy for once, and ‘the tall trees out in the garden that, till now, had been rustling gently in the wind suddenly stood still. Clouds too were motionless, long, red streaks in the sky, and it was as if all things everywhere were suspended in silence.’ The syntax of realism also works for real illusions.
Finally, I think, we do get a sort of view of Flaubert the writer across all the ambiguities and sarcasms. The best open indication of this is the dry, delicate use of language actually flirting with laughter: the old man who is ‘médiocrement aimable’ (‘minimally amiable’); Frédéric feeling ‘voluptueusement stupide’ (‘in a voluptuous stupor’). At one point there is a ‘homicidal’ smile; elsewhere an ‘ineffable’ one. We get the impression that Flaubert, like Kafka, thinks or knows that the human world is ridiculous or monstrous. Sometimes he is angry about this, but more often the writing suggests a complicated sympathy. There are no saints or heroes, even if Flaubert wrote a novel about St Anthony. And none of us is qualified to feel superior to anyone else. If we haven’t committed any idiocies yet, we soon will, individually and collectively. A sort of desolate democracy.
In a much quoted letter, Flaubert wrote words that became a major motto of modernism. ‘Authors in their work,’ he said, ‘must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.’ They may also be specialists in the laughable, even if they mostly can’t bring themselves to laugh that much. After his remark about the comic element, Flaubert cited Molière’s Malade imaginaire as going deeper in interior worlds than any Greek play, ‘tous les Agamemnons’.
Raymond MacKenzie’s translation is excellent, and if I have occasionally resorted to the French phrasing it is to suggest something of the attractions of thinking about other roads while having a good time on the one we have chosen. Differences between languages are not a problem: they are an invitation to travel. Without moving beyond the pages of this novel we can think about what it means for French to have only one word for both ‘history’ and ‘story’, or for ‘sentimental’ in French to have none of the soggy meanings it often has in English. The work is full of a French usage that has an exact equivalent in some other languages, but nothing like the life Flaubert lends to it. I’m thinking of the personal pronoun ‘on’, ‘one’. It is everywhere, taking up most of the space ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘you’ or ‘we’ or ‘they’ would usually occupy. There are 21 such uses in the first chapter. The practice also takes us back to Flaubert’s ambiguities, since he seems to be deliberately pulling down the blinds, appealing to the clichés we all have littering our heads.
An early appearance of the usage is flanked by other ways of avoiding precision, by exactly the reverse of detailed realism. We are looking at, listening to, the travellers on the boat of the early pages. ‘Beaucoup chantaient. On était gai. Il se versait des petits verres.’ MacKenzie alters the word order and neatly catches the feeling of anonymity: ‘Many were singing. They treated themselves to drinks. The good cheer was contagious.’
Other translators have provided comparable versions: ‘A good many began singing. Spirits rose. Glasses were brought out and filled’ (Robert Baldick, 1964); ‘Many sang songs. They were jolly together. They offered one another a drop to drink’ (Helen Constantine, 2016); ‘Many sang. Spirits rose, and glasses were produced and filled’ (Anthony Goldsmith, 1947); ‘There was singing and gaiety, drinks were being poured’ (Perdita Burlingame, 1972); ‘There was a good deal of singing. People were in high spirits. All around, glasses were being filled’ (Douglas Parmée, 1989). One doesn’t see ‘one’ among the options. The other uses in the chapter, to half-translate them crudely, are: ‘one ran into each other’, ‘one unfolds’; ‘one met’, ‘one could’, ‘one found again’, ‘one had’, ‘one heard’, ‘one pardoned’, ‘one saw’, ‘one perceived’, ‘one discovered’, ‘one went along’, ‘one arrived’, ‘one would have given’, ‘one waited’, ‘one consulted’, ‘one kissed’, ‘one made’, ‘one spoke’, ‘one withdrew’. For these, MacKenzie offers passive verb forms, several ‘theys’, a ‘you’, ‘people’, ‘everyone’, phrases such as ‘came into view’ and ‘the eye’. We could guess that the French language as used by Flaubert has a special interest in keeping active agents out of the picture, and that ‘one’ is a comfortable collective that protects its members. The feeling we get, I think, is that ‘we’, nudged into being ‘one’, are comically predictable, not even dreaming of a laugh. I’m not sure how we defend ourselves against the implied charge.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário