A fragrance of night, not to be defined, that brings on an obscure doubt, exquisite, tender, comes by the open window into the room where I am at work. My cat watches the darkness, as rigid as a jug. A fortune of subtle seeing looks at me through its green eyes… The lamp sings its slight song quietly, subdued as the song one hears in a shell. The lamp reaches out its placating hands. In its aureole, I hear the litanies, the choruses and the responses of flies. It lights up the flowers at the edge of the terrace. The nearest ones come forward timidly to see me, like a troop of dwarfs that discover an ogre… The minute violin of a mosquito goes on and on. One could believe that a person was playing alone in a house at a remote distance… Insects fall with a sidewise fall and writhe gently on the table. A butterfly yellow as a wisp of straw drags itself along the little yellow valley that is my book… A big clock outdoors intones drearily. Memories take motion like children dancing in a ring… The cat stretches itself to the uttermost. Its nose traces in the air an imperceptible evolution. A fly fastens its scissors in the lamp… Kitchen clatter mounts in a back-yard. Argumentative voices play at pigeonvole. A carriage starts up and away. A train chugs at the next station. A long whistle rises far-off… I think of someone whom I love, who is so little to be so separated, perhaps beyond the lands covered by the night, beyond the profundities of water. I am able to engage her glance…
(Translated by Wallace Stevens)
Léon-Paul Fargue was a French poet and essayist. He was born in Paris, France on rue Coquilliére. As a poet he was noted for his poetry of atmosphere and detail. His work spanned numerous literary movements. Wikipedia
It’s found we see. What? – Eternity. It’s the sun, free To flow with the sea. Soul on watch Let whispers confess Of the empty night Of the day’s excess. From the mortal weal From the common urge Here you diverge To fly as you feel. Since from you alone, Embers of satin, Duty breathes down With no ‘at last’ spoken. There’s nothing of hope, No entreaty here. Science and patience, Torture is real. It’s found we see. What? – Eternity. It’s the sun, free To flow with the sea.
Poems: Rimbaud contains selections from Rimbaud’s work, including over 100 poems, selected prose, "Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871," and an index of first lines. READ more here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/rimbaud-poems-by-arthu…/
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found
ADJECTIVE
1Having been discovered by chance or unexpectedly.1.1(of an object or sound) collected in its natural state and presented in a new context as part of a work of art or piece of music.
‘collages of found photos’
1.2(of art) comprising or making use of found objects.
1.3(of poetry) formed by taking a piece of non-poetic text and reinterpreting its structure metrically.
It is high time we rescued Jane Austen from the stifling limitations of her modern success. There is far more to her than godmother of romance, National Trust treasure and all-round safe read. As the 200th anniversary of her death approaches, we should instead be celebrating Austen as a pioneer — the inventor of the modern novel, the first English novelist to explore the effect of contemporary war on the home front, and a businesswoman prepared to stake all on fame and fortune.
Austen’s novels broke new ground in subject matter and style. She saw that everyday events in ordinary places could be the stuff of fiction. But she saw far more. One of her greatest contributions to literature was a way of writing, centred on the heroine, that recognises the longing in each one of us to grow, to change, to become other. Her heroines have inner lives, represented on the page as a kind of conversation with the self. The extraordinary intimacy that Austen inspires in her readers, the identification that her characters generate in each of us, springs from this. Her characters become real to us and, through them, our own limitations become a little less real and our fantasies appear a little more substantial.
Austen wrote about the world she knew, famously declaring “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village” to be “the very thing to work on”. To the men and women who commemorated the centenary of her death 100 years ago, her seeming ignorance of public events licensed her novels as comfort reading in the trenches of the first world war. Austen’s village, clustered around the great house, the rectory and the church, was a vision of England worth fighting to preserve. “Her kingdoms are hermetically sealed, in fact, and here lies the strength of their impregnable immortality,” wrote the traveller Reginald Farrer in July 1917. But consider Henry Tilney’s patient explanation of village politics to the impressionable Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey: “Remember that we are English . . . every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies”. How are we to reconcile this with Farrer’s Austen? Surveillance, as we know, is not an unalloyed comfort.
Austen was war-conditioned; Britain was at war with France almost continuously from 1793 to 1815, most of her adult life. She was also war-informed. Rumour and intelligence, newspapers, an efficient postal service and army and navy lists ate up the distances between far-flung campaigns and home. Chawton these days may be a sleepy Hampshire village, but when Austen moved there in July 1809, it lay at a vital junction on the roads to Winchester, Gosport and London. Her niece Caroline recorded in old age how, when staying with her aunt, “the awful stillness of night” was “so frequently broken by the noise of passing carriages, which seemed sometimes, even to shake the bed”. Making land on the south coast, Napoleon might well have marched his army past Austen’s door.
Austen’s remarkable family connected her to danger and to war zones. Living in Paris in the 1780s, her glamorous cousin Eliza Hancock, almost certainly the natural child of Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal, met and married the Comte de Feuillide, a captain in the Queen’s Regiment of Dragoons. A frequent visitor to her Austen cousins, Eliza was in England only days before the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. Though she escaped the excesses of the revolution, her husband was guillotined in 1794. Settled in London, and later married to Jane’s brother Henry, a banker, Eliza remained entwined with the exiled French community. Moving in émigré society on her regular London visits, Austen attended their benefit concerts, heard of their misfortunes and declared herself amused “to see the ways of a French circle”. Eliza was a major influence on Austen’s writings, while Henry acted as her informal agent in procuring book deals.
Two of Austen’s brothers, Frank and Charles, were sailors who saw service in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. They sent home gifts to their sisters bought with prize money, realised by the capture of enemy ships. They sent letters from the East and West Indies, the Middle East and Mediterranean and North American waters; and Austen posted replies: from Chawton to “Captn Austen, HMS Elephant, Baltic”, and to China. Frank Austen, flag captain of HMS Canopus, one of six ships-of-the-line sent by Nelson to re-provision, missed the action at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, but recorded the victory and Nelson’s death in Canopus’s logbook.
Austen repaired the record in her final novel Persuasion, when she allowed Admiral Croft a share in the victory at Trafalgar, while his brother-in-law, the novel’s hero Frederick Wentworth, attains his captaincy after the action off St Domingo in the Caribbean in February 1806, where Frank Austen commanded the Canopus.
And in a letter of October 12 1813, she joked about the stream of biographies of Nelson: “Southey’s Life of Nelson; — I am tired of Lives of Nelson, being that I never read any. I will read this, however, if Frank is mentioned in it.”
Austen’s wartime vision is neither detached nor limited; what conspires to conceal her response in plain sight is her commitment to record events from the perspective of everyday reality — the routines of women (and men) who wait at home. How many readers today, opening their paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice at the title page, notice that it was published in a “Military Library”? Thomas Egerton, Austen’s first publisher, carried a list composed of military treatises, maps and training manuals, works designed to feed the war effort against Napoleon. Austen was his first female novelist. Three of her books appeared in his Military Library.
By 1813, the year of Pride and Prejudice, the south of England resembled a military camp, with infantry barracks and militia stationed in the smallest towns. Billeted in local lodgings, the militia had a reputation for drinking and womanising. The disruptive effects of the militia on civilian life and morality form the novel’s dark plot. Its love story may centre on Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, but their relationship is only cemented after George Wickham, an officer in the militia, seduces giddy Lydia Bennet.
Mansfield Park, Austen’s third novel, published in 1814, is a wartime meditation on the place of family in the defence of the nation. Austen’s unusual reading during its composition attests to her sombre mood — “Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire” (1810), by Charles Pasley, a captain in the Royal Engineers. A veteran of the Spanish Peninsula campaign, Pasley found the British government guilty of inadequate preparations and half-measures in the face of Napoleon’s brutal fighting machine. He was, Austen joked, “[t]he first soldier I ever sighed for”.
The novel’s action is divided between the spacious Northamptonshire estate of Mansfield Park, home of the Bertrams, and the cramped Portsmouth lodgings of their poor relations, the Prices. But its backdrop is global, encompassing Sir Thomas Bertram’s voyage to his Antiguan plantations and midshipman William Price’s past campaigns in the Mediterranean and West Indies, with North America and the Netherlands in prospect. Portsmouth, an English Channel port of great strategic significance, was in the 1810s a city dedicated to war. During visits to the dockyards (with its new blocking machinery, to the design of the French engineer Marc Isambard Brunel, father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel) and walks on the city’s ramparts and saluting battery, the sophisticated rake Henry Crawford makes his unsuccessful assault on heroine Fanny Price’s heart.
Austen’s writing career was attuned far more than has been acknowledged to fluctuations in the British response to war. With Persuasion, most extraordinarily of all, she took the newly invented historical novel and turned it inside-out. It is Austen’s most time-stamped novel — a tale of mourning and loss (lost youth, lost beauty, lost happiness, lost estates). In Persuasion, the little non-events of heroine Anne Elliot’s suspended life do duty for years of separation and war — the domestic made public. Begun on August 8 1815, the novel opens precisely one year earlier in the late summer of 1814. Written after Waterloo, its events unfold before Waterloo, during the brief respite from fighting that ended abruptly with Napoleon’s escape from Elba in February 1815. In the real and fictional summer of 1814, peace looked secure, naval officers returned home, and among them Captain Frederick Wentworth. The novel’s narrative moves from autumn to spring. Hope recovers. At the same time, the contemporary reader’s slight dislocation from events ensured the poignant understanding that happiness, like peace, is fragile too. The resumption of conflict and with it the threat of loss — what the narrator calls “the tax of quick alarm” — lie just beyond the novel’s frame.
Austen aligned herself with those, like her combat-hardened sailor brothers, whose advancement was by virtue of merit, not inheritance. Merit and risk defined her progress as a writer. Frank Austen’s chief regret at missing the action at Trafalgar, “the loss of pecuniary advantage as well as professional credit”, would strike a chord in one who said she wrote for “praise” and “Pewter” (money). Dependent from birth on her father and latterly on the provision made by her brothers for their widowed mother and unmarried sisters, Austen was clear-eyed in her concern with how to lay out her talent to maximum profit.
Austen was war-conditioned; Britain was at war with France almost continuously from 1793 to 1815
The gamble was whether to sell or keep control of her manuscripts. Apart from Pride and Prejudice, Austen chose to publish all her novels “on commission”. This meant that although she was liable for losses, she retained her copyrights and covered costs for paper and printing out of profits, the publisher taking a handling commission (usually 10 per cent). She always regretted selling the copyright for Pride and Prejudice, which proved her most popular novel. A first edition of Mansfield Park brought her at least £320, her biggest lifetime return on any novel; but the cheque for the sum of £38 and 18 shillings (£38.90, worth about £3,480 today) made out by her second publisher, John Murray, to “Miss Jane Austin”, on October 21 1816, and payable four months later, was all she received from sales of Emma more than a year after publication. A disastrous second edition of Mansfield Park, issued in February 1816, ate up profits, and in any case Emma sold slower than expected. Henry Austen’s banking collapse in March 1816, along with its effect on the financial support available for the Austen women, explains her reluctance to venture on publishing Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, the two final novels. The crisis probably exacerbated her final illness.
Austen’s lifetime earnings of around £630 were modest by any contemporary standard. Her writing never provided financial independence. Posthumous profits and Cassandra Austen’s sale of her sister’s remaining copyrights in 1832 brought Austen’s overall earnings from her novels to around £1,625, most of which were received after death. Despite mounting esteem in her lifetime and latterly the prestige of working with John Murray, the most glamorous publisher in London, Austen earned far less than her contemporaries, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and the bestseller Walter Scott, all now little-read by comparison. “The Rich are always respectable”, Austen quipped. She too has always been respectable, but she would surely have relished the irony that later this year, when hers will be the face of the Bank of England £10 note, she will at last have money and fame.
Kathryn Sutherland is a professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and curator of ‘Which Jane Austen?’, a bicentenary exhibition opening at Oxford’s Weston Library on June 22
How famous was Jane Austen in her lifetime? Although Jane Austen saw some of her works published and favorably received, she herself remained a relative unknown in the literary world during her lifetime. The books were published anonymously, and Austen's name was only attached to them late in 1817, several months after her death. The accolades came quickly and Jane Austen's name became one of the most famous in English literature. Fan clubs for the writer abound; some of the most devout Austen cultists even took her name, calling themselves Janeites. Originally, the self-proclaimed sophisticated Janeites aimed to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi who just loved her stories. Nowadays, the term is more all-inclusive, referring to any readers who are obsessed with Austen and her works. Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775.
Quote:
"Nobody minds having what is too good for them." — Jane Austen
The title comes from a Victor Hugo poem: “... oh, what savage noise in the waning light, the oaks felled for Hercules's pyre.” The following year, Malraux ...
... they make in the twilight, The oaks they are felling for the pyre of Hercules! ... (From the poem A Théophile Gautier, in the posthumous collection of Hugo's ...
Ah! What a brutal sound they made in the twilight,
The oaks they are felling for the pyre of Hercules!
...
Eagles of coral adorn the ebony bed where Nero lies fast asleep callous, happy, peaceful, in the prime of his body's strength, in the fine vigour of youth.
But in the alabaster hall that holds the ancient shrine of the Aenobarbi how restless the household deities! The little gods tremble and try to hide their insignificant bodies. They've heard a terrible sound, a deadly sound coming up the stairs, iron footsteps that shake the staircase; and, faint with fear, the miserable Lares scramble to the back of the shrine, shoving each other and stumbling, one little god falling over another, because they know what kind of sound that is, know by now the footsteps of the Furies.
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The Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) is a towering figure of twentieth-century literature. No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the taboos of his time surrounding homoerotic desire. Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy’s poems make the historic profoundly and movingly personal. READ an excerpt here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/cavafy-poems-by-c-p-ca…/
"All Day I Hear The Noise Of Waters" by James Joyce
All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan, Sad as the sea-bird is when, going Forth alone, He hears the winds cry to the water's Monotone.
The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing Where I go. I hear the noise of many waters Far below. All day, all night, I hear them flowing To and fro.
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This selection of the major poems James Joyce published in his lifetime is accompanied by his only surviving play, Exiles. Joyce is most celebrated for his remarkable novel Ulysses, and yet he was also a highly accomplished poet. Chamber Music is his debut collection of lyrical love poems, which he intended to be set to music; in it, he enlivens the styles of the Celtic Revival with his own brand of playful irony. Pomes Penyeach, a collection written while Joyce was working on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, sounds intimately autobiographical notes of passion and betrayal that would go on to resonate throughout the rest of his work. Joyce’s other poems include the moving “Ecce Puer,” written on the occasion of the birth of his grandson, and his fiery satires “The Holy Office” and “Gas from a Burner.” Exiles was written after Joyce had left Ireland, never to return; it is a richly nuanced drama that reflects a grappling with the state of his own marriage and career as he was about to embark on the writing of Ulysses. In its tale of an unconventional couple involved in a love triangle, Exiles engages Joycean themes of envy and jealousy, freedom and love, men and women, and the complicated relationship between an artist and his homeland. READ an excerpt here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/joyce-poems-and-a-play…/
More than a mere dessert, Bovary’s cake is an artful symbol of the bride’s perishable sentimentality and—as Nabokov wrote—“a pathetic affair in poor taste.”
STILL FROM THE 1949 ADAPTATION OF MADAME BOVARY, STARRING JENNIFER JONES.
There is a certain tradition in French cuisine with a paradoxical connection to French history: following the revolution, bourgeois cuisine saw itself as a sort of heir to court cuisine, and on formal occasions the elaborate productions of the aristocratic table were perpetuated in upper-middle-class dining rooms. This can be observed in many different details, for instance in the history of the table centerpiece. Among the oddest imitations of aristocratic dining extravagances utterly lost to us today was the custom of serving edible structures. The only example we are still familiar with (at least from shop windows) is the wedding cake, which combines elements of architecture, sculpture, and occasionally portrait painting.
Surprisingly, Balzac, the great diner, never provides a detailed description of a grand dinner with all its accessories, a lack of interest implying a certain critique of the stultifying pomposity of these elaborate rituals—he is more concerned with depicting en detail the dreariness of the dinner table at Pension Vauquer. But in one superficially unremarkable passage, the bourgeois novel at its peak casually pulls off a radical exposure of the custom of staging food.
A country wedding is being celebrated. The tables have been set up in the open air. First the author describes the meal, lavish yet simple, down-to-earth yet festive. And it comes to a special culmination and climax:
A confectioner of Yvetot had been entrusted with the tarts and sweets. As he had only just set up in the place, he had taken a lot of trouble, and at dessert he himself brought in a set dish [une pièce montée] that evoked loud cries of wonderment. To begin with, at its base there was a square of blue cardboard, representing a temple with porticoes, colonnades, and stucco statuettes all round, and in the niches constellations of gilt paper stars; then on the second stage was a castle of Savoy cake, surrounded by many fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of oranges; and finally, on the upper platform a green field with rocks set in lakes of jam, nutshell boats, and a small Cupid balancing himself in a chocolate swing whose two uprights ended in real rosebuds at the top.
Until night they ate. When any of them were too tired of sitting, they went out for a stroll in the yard, or for a game of bouchon in the granary, and then returned to table.
The description of the cake served at Emma Bovary’s wedding is embedded in the unfolding of a rustic celebration at which guests doggedly eat vast quantities and devote themselves to coarse pleasures, lifting weights and grabbing women—boorish larks whose ingenuous foolishness is immune to accusations of bad taste. In this rural, archaic milieu, the cake is a foreign body greeted with cries of astonishment: an exotic spectacle. The ambitious confectioner delivers it from Yvetot, a provincial Norman town on the road from Tostes (the scene of the action) to Le Havre, much smaller than the almost equidistant Rouen. And yet it is “modern” and unexpected: its appearance marks the incursion of urban luxury into the rural backwater. Within the context of the novel, it is an artfully subtle symbol. The kitschy details of this confectionary construction discreetly reflect the bride’s perishable sentimentality, her “Bovarysme.” “The lake of jam,” Nabokov writes in his brilliant analysis (Lectures on Literature), “is a kind of premonitory emblem of the romantic Swiss lakes upon which, to the sound of Lamartine’s fashionable lyrical verse, Emma Bovary, the budding adulteress, will drift in her dreams; and we shall meet again the little cupid on the bronze clock in the squalid splendor of the Rouen hotel room where Emma has her assignations with Léon, her second lover.”
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This cake’s symbolic role within Flaubert’s novel is one thing; one can also seek to decode its gastronomic history. It is no mere pastry, it is a structure with mimetic pretensions. Such efforts to shape and reshape are familiar even from the literature of antiquity: the locus classicus is the grotesquely elaborate, endless, tasteless feast held by the nouveau riche Trimalchio in Petronius’s Satyricon, the only Latin novel of imperial Rome that has (in fragmentary form) survived. Here the dishes nearly always seek to simulate something else, shaped from a different substance than anticipated or imitating something they are not—“quinces with thorns stuck in them to resemble sea urchins.” Of the chef—known as Daedalus for his virtuosity—it is claimed: “Just say the word, and he’ll whip you up a fish out of sowbelly, pigeons out of bacon, doves from ham and chicken from pigs’ knuckles.” Another possibility presented here is to make foodstuffs (or other physical materials) into riddles: prizes are raffled off, and the person who wins a moray (muraena) is given a mouse tied to a frog (mus/rana). The author, skewering the aesthetic strategies at Nero’s court as people seek to outdo and astonish one another, portrays these corny puns as examples of nouveau riche tastelessness. But they also reflect a naive, childlike pleasure in the transformation of material, in eating something so skillfully imitative that for a moment one is able to fall for the illusion. All the endless jests of Trimalchio’s banquet aim to astonish: in staged scenes, cooks and servants perform mini-dramas of deception, seeking to arouse both amazement and disgust. The decisive factor is always the surprise effect. For instance, the simplest variant, a mere effigy, is represented by a statue of Priapus made from cake.
There is something embarrassingly pretentious about these arts. This emerges even more clearly when we encounter them once again—first in a simplified form, then gradually becoming more and more luxurious, though still relatively coarse—on the dining tables of the medieval and early modern courts. The dishes are full of ostentation, just as they are often systematically over-seasoned, too sweet and spicy, to demonstrate that the hosts can afford expensive spices; they abound in crude surprise effects, just as guests taking their seats at a princely table might be suddenly drenched by hidden fountain jets. Those things gradually vanish from the dining table, those animals painstakingly restored to their original shape, those sculptures of lard, of ice cream, of mashed potatoes, those castles and parks confected from sugar. Regarding the latter, the late, already anachronistic apotheosis of confectionary architecture comes in the treatise Le pâtissier pittoresque, written by a great chef whose name paradoxically evokes a fast: Marie-Antoine Carême, “le Palladio de la cuisine,” Talleyrand’s cook at the Congress of Vienna. Published in 1815, his book puts all of them on parade once more, the “grand pavillon gothique à 44 colonnes” and the “grand cabinet chinois,” the antique and picturesque structures of pastry and fondant. Our era has forgotten them. In middle-class cuisine, the transformation of food into structures has dwindled away, taught by old cookbooks only for extremely rare occasions, so that now the art has vanished almost entirely; nothing remains of the great edifices and the “pieces montées” but the little paper flags and Japanese parasols stuck into desserts. One last, almost parodic echo is found on the children’s menus of German ice-cream parlors, featuring effigies of Mickey Mouse and other cartoon characters, imitations of spaghetti or fried eggs. This goes back to the confectionary tradition—candy in different shapes, chocolate cigars, fondant Easter Bunnies. Naturally, the wedding cake, as one gigantic sweet, is part of this confectionary practice, but while the sculptures produced by chocolatiers and candy factories generally serve as gifts, stand-alone items isolated from the meal, the cake is served up and displayed on the dinner table. Thus it stands as the final monument to the epoch that sought to mold the courses of a formal feast into astonishing shapes.
Cake is predestined for architecture by the malleability of its material—but this childishly pleasurable plasticity also gives cakes an odd affinity to comedy; the cake fight is a topos of old slapstick movies. Two Laurel and Hardy films stake out the possibilities: From Soup to Nuts (1928, MGM / Hal Roach) is an étude, of some interest for the history of the upper-middle-class society dinner, in which Stan and Ollie are hired as servants and Ollie, in balletically choreographed variations, keeps falling facedown onto the cake he is trying to serve. The Battle of the Century (1927, MGM / Hal Roach) begins with a slip on the traditional banana peel and brings in a pastry shop’s delivery truck to build, step by step, an escalation of misunderstandings and universal retaliatory urges that fills an entire street, ultimately shown in one wide-angle shot, with a rampaging crowd of people throwing pies at each other and covering vehicles and passersby in whipped cream. These are the iron laws of slapstick cinema: a banana is for slipping on; a cake is for throwing in someone’s face. Cake has something inherently comical about it. But in the mythology of the cinema it also acquires something slightly sinister; the more common it becomes, on festive occasions, to have a girl jump out of an outsized cake, striking an innocently lascivious pose to the delight of the guest of honor, the more likely it seems that the cake might bring forth quite a different, lethal surprise—the fate of “Spats” Colombo at the meeting of the Friends of Italian Opera in Some Like It Hot. In Singin’ in the Rain the cake’s two functions are elegantly synthesized: first Debbie Reynolds jumps out of the cake in a professional capacity, and a moment later, in private rage, she is throwing its icing at Gene Kelly (hitting Jean Hagen). The wedding cake is, as it were, the gift of fortune from which the (hopefully attractive) future shall emerge.
STILL FROM SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN.
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The cake served in Madame Bovary is a seemingly incidental detail that the author presents as though it were merely an interesting facet of the sociology of taste, part of realism’s program of offering a thick description of a society’s customs. But it is more than that. Nabokov, that magnificent reader, recognized with his unerring gaze that the multilevel, many-faceted wedding cake picks up another motif of the novel, one that appears at the very beginning. It sounds improbable, yet once you have seen it, it is utterly clear and evident: the motif is the cap worn by the adolescent Charles Bovary as he enters the room where “we were in class” in the first line of the first chapter. This cap is a grotesque object, one of those things “whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile’s face.” What contributes most to its ugliness is its composite character; it is a preposterous assemblage containing “traces of the bearskin, shake, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton nightcap.” The uppermost part of the elaborately ugly structure is made of cardboard; Nabokov notes that the cake, with its cardboard base, starts where the cap leaves off. Both, in Nabokov’s words, are “a pathetic affair in poor taste.” The cap and the cake embody the sort of tastelessness that has something sad, helpless, almost touching about it. The novel is constructed to make them mirror each other in a meticulous arrangement—both of them symbols of failed effort.
In a period that, as the novel was written, was beginning to call itself the “age of reason,” this attempt to salvage some vestige of theatricality from a feudal cuisine of surprise and spectacle is a gastronomical flop. It is a flop not only in Flaubert’s merciless eyes: even his contemporary readers had to realize that despite the naive provincial audience’s cries of amazement the cake is an embarrassment. (The cries demonstrate that the guests are still in a state of consumerist innocence.) Yet in this object, Flaubert lets ugliness come into its own. No author dissected the age’s supposed reason and revealed its vanity with such sardonic precision. Conversely, at times his novels reveal a great, humble respect for what is despised. Of course an object such as the wedding cake, that last veteran of the edible edifices, is nothing more now than a melancholy testimonial to tastelessness. But there is something touching about its ugliness: part of Flaubert’s greatness is his ability to depict the cake simultaneously as a monstrosity and as an affecting attempt to create a thing of beauty with grotesquely unfit means.
This essay appears as part of “Two Gastronomic Vignettes” in Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays by Joachim Kalka, out now from New York Review Books. Reprinted with permission.
Translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole.
Joachim Kalka is an essayist, literary critic, and translator of authors such as Martin Amis, Angela Carter, G. K. Chesterton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Christopher Isherwood, and Gilbert Sorrentino. He lives in Leipzig, Germany.
