Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (37 page)

So you have your main story, and you have your surrounding minor characters, some pre-dealt, some personally picked. What, then, are these minor characters for? What are they up to? At a basic level, they are facilitators, they are there to make life go more smoothly for the major characters: they run errands, they run shops, they run baths; they steal dogs if you want your heroine to cry, they rescue dogs if you want your heroine to smile. They are there for plausibility, for colour, for decoration, for incidental humour, for a change of tone, for a change of focus.

And beyond this? Beyond this lies a point of divide among novelists. Do you want your minor characters just to “be themselves,” or do you want them to bear weight, to be “significant”? Having minor characters who are “significant,” emblematic or symbolic, is a high-risk strategy: the risk is that of over-organization, also of giving the reader too close an awareness of the author's guiding hand. Edith Wharton admired and loved Henry James, but even she had difficulty with what she saw as the airlessness and over-planning of the later work. She thought he had become too theoretical, too geometrical, and that in the process he risked losing what she tellingly described in her autobiography as the “irregular and irrelevant movements of life.”

Here she identifies one of the novelist's central preoccupations, and one which can often be seen working itself out among the minor characters. Life has its irregular and irrelevant movements, granted. But a novel is not life, or even an equally weighted representation of life. If you reproduced all life's irregular and irrelevant movements, you would have a novel boring and picaresque to the point of unreadability This is the fundamental battle between structure and vivacity, which novelists settle according to their temperaments and their theories.

In terms of demonstrating the irregularity of life through his minor characters, the archetypal novelist is Dickens: profligate, virtuosic, carefree, careless. Virginia Woolf, writing about
David Copperfield,
described his unmatched ability to conjure up secondary figures almost without thought or effort. “Dickens made his books blaze up not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people on the fire. The interest flags, and he creates Miss Mowcher, completely alive, equipped in every detail as if she were to play a great part in the story whereas, once the dull stretch of road is passed, by her help, she disappears.” This cavalier way with minor characters no doubt sprang mainly from the nature of Dickens's genius; but it must have been accentuated by a technical aspect, the fact that he wrote for serial publication. Imagine that you are on the eighth of twenty monthly episodes; the previous seven are published, unalterable, tyrannical; and however far you plan ahead, the last ten or so episodes are fluid in your mind—in such circumstances even the greatest genius is likely to concentrate on the major characters and use the lesser ones as Polyfilla, as one-offs, or as rather loosely controlled running gags. Imagine a painter being given a large canvas, told to start painting rightwards from the left, and instructed to complete in its final varnished form exactly one-twentieth of the canvas each month, before moving on to the next one-twentieth. We should, I think, be amazed at any formal success the resultant picture might have. Henry James's judgement on the Victorian novel is well known: he called it “a treasure-house of detail but an indifferent whole.”

Flaubert stands at the opposite end of the fictional spectrum to Dickens. He never sullied himself with journalism; he never performed his work in public; he never allowed his books to be illustrated; he published comparatively little; and, most importantly in the present context, he never allowed any part of a novel to appear before the whole was complete. The
Revue de Paris,
when it serialized
Madame Bovary,
was not dealing, as the British serializers of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and Eliot were, with an author inventing against the clock. Flaubert's good fortune came partly from just that—a good fortune, or at least a helpful private income; but it mainly came from an artistic obduracy rare at that time. Dickens was a novelist who flung another handful of people on to the fire to make it blaze; Flaubert stacked his kindling with obsessive care so that the main blaze would come from the logs.

Of course, dividing characters into “major” and “minor” is a critical simplification. There are major, minor-major, major-minor,and minor characters (to propose another simplification). And within what we choose to call the minor characters there are quite different grades with quite different functions. There are those like Dr. Larivière who make a single, splendid cameo appearance: three pages of existence as a
deus ex machina
(except that modern gods do not save any more, and cannot even help; they merely judge, and move on). There are those, like Binet, who are as lavishly characterized as Larivière but whose appearances are intermittent and recurrent, and whose function is more indirect and enigmatic; Binet and his lathe are a sort of droning reminder of transgression in the novel, a moral tinnitus in Emma's ear. And then, at the bottom of the heap, both socially and—it seems—novelistically, there is a character like Justin, whose appearances are tiny and fleeting. Unlike Larivière or Binet, Justin is granted no character-description; it is easy for the reader to ignore him, just as his social superiors in Yonville do; he is only what happens to him. Yet what happens to him, in his disregardable moments of fictional existence, is crucial.

Justin is, primarily (and concludingly), the solution to a narrative problem Flaubert must have faced early in the writing of the novel. Emma is going to die at the end of the book: she is to be a suicide by arsenic poisoning. She could, no doubt, have died in other ways, by rope, gun, or knife; she could, given Flaubert's notorious loathing of the railways, have preceded Anna Karenina as an early track victim, had Flaubert not set his story just before the coming of railways. The fact that Emma's predecessor in life, Delphine Delamare, also took poison should make it less, rather than more, likely that Flaubert would choose the same method for doing in his own character.

But there is a particular appropriateness about arsenic poisoning, since it inflicts the worst torments on the body of a woman who has, in the course of the novel, used that body for scandalous and transgressing pleasure. (No authorial judgement is implied here, merely aesthetic balance.) But if Emma is to swallow arsenic,how is she to get it? She could go into Rouen and shop for it: too boring, and perhaps too difficult—there might be a poisons register to sign. Also, too calculated and time-consuming, since the plot at this point must move headlong, just as Emma herself does. Could she bribe, or perhaps blackmail, Homais? Possible, but unlikely given Homais's established character: she'd just end up with a moral earful. Flaubert's solution, and it is a brilliant one since it combines narrative economy with psychological complication, is to use Justin, and to use him in a particular way. When he leads Emma to the arsenic jar, it is the climax to his traditional minor-character function as domestic facilitator; but on the way there, his every act of facilitation turns out to be double-edged, quietly freighted, allusive.

Justin makes no more than a dozen appearances in the novel; he is such a wisp of a character that he only gets to speak on two occasions. He is, nevertheless, one of the novel's key indicators, the canary found with its feet in the air on the floor of the cage. To string his appearances together inevitably has the effect of making Flaubert's use of him seem more obvious and less delicate than it is; though it won't make it seem less brutal.
Madame Bovary
is a novel about corruption—moral, financial, social, sexual, even sartorial (in the dandification of the mourning Charles). Justin's story is one of almost unnoticeable and yet savage corruption: nowadays the social workers might have been called in.

Justin is the pharmacist's assistant, a distant relation of Homais, who takes him in out of charity and thereafter treats him with relentless lack of charity. The boy's age is never given, nor do we know what he looks like. However, we know that he is old enough to have started noticing that the world is divided into two sexes. He hangs about the Bovary household, initially attracted— at least according to Homais—by Emma's servant Félicité. This sentimental or pre-erotic inclination explains his presence on the day Rodolphe brings along one of his workers to be bled. This is the first encounter between Emma and her future lover; and it is also the first time Justin is seen in Emma's presence. He is ordered to hold the bowl while Charles wields the lancet. Blood spurts, the bowl trembles, Justin faints. Whereupon this happens:

Madame Bovary began to loosen his cravat. There was a knot in the strings of his shirt; her fingers played softly with the boy's neck for a few minutes; then she moistened her batiste handkerchief with vinegar and dabbed his temples, blowing softly as she did so.

All very normal and housewifely, of course; yet Justin (though he is unaware of it) is virtually in Emma's arms, and she is beginning to undress him. The moment seems completely incidental: the main function of the scene is to bring Emma and Rodolphe together, to display Emma as capable and sexually attractive to Rodolphe, and to display Charles as a clumsy doltish fellow who deserves to be cuckolded. Yet Justin is there at this prime moment, and Justin is the one receiving the sub-erotic attention. Homais, who is also there, bawls out his apprentice for fainting. He does this in a manner which, while entirely consistent with his unsubtle nature, is also significantly out of proportion to the event itself. Justin must learn to behave as a man, because one day “you might have to give evidence in court, in a serious case: the magistrate might need your expert opinion.” This is pompous hyperbole; at the same time, Homais unwittingly underlines the scene that has just finished. Its subtext could not be clearer: Blood, Sex, Crime.

From this moment, Justin's fate is bound up with that of Emma. At first, his role seems to be as a fleeting witness to transgression: his next appearance, for instance, occurs when Emma goes out riding with Rodolphe—the occasion on which they first become lovers. Justin slips out of the pharmacy to watch them go. Homais comes out after him, and like some pocket Polonius offers redundant advice to the departing riders:
“Un malheur arrive si vite! Prenez garde!
[etc.].” Polonius, we remember, was not always wrong.

By the time of his next appearance, however, Justin has moved from observer to complicit participant: he is Emma and Rodolphe 's go-between, carrying letters from one to the other. There is no ponderous setting-up of this fact, no “Justin, I'll give you a couple of sous if you take this note, and I'm sure I can trust you to keep quiet,” just the established fact that he is now her servant, and one whose silence can be relied upon. In a sense, of course, nothing has happened: a boy is taking on some extra errands, a boy who is, in any case, still apparently hanging around Félicité, for here he is in the Bovary kitchen watching her do the bleaching and ironing. What could be more innocent, more domestic, more casual? Except that Félicité just happens to be washing Emma's underwear, and so—in a reversal of that first scene—Justin now becomes acquainted with Emma's intimate garments. He gazes at her petticoats and knickers, runs his fingers over her crinoline, touches its fastenings. He asks Félicité what things are for, and she chases him away.

In parenthesis, the servant Félicité has her own story, both inside and outside the novel. Inside it, she suffers the contagious influence of her mistress, corrupted into indolence, sexuality, and crime. Outside it, she provides one of the great rebukes made by real life to imagined literature. Delphine Delamare killed herself in 1848; Emma died (in the first edition, anyway) in 1857; Flaubert himself in 1880. A quarter of a century later, Delphine Delamare's original servant was amazingly still alive and giving interviews. “Félicité,” or rather Augustine Ménage, was then 79, and still had—or claimed—vivid recall of the original events. In 1905 she described the real-life poisoning of 1848 in some detail, and told the interviewer in conclusion: “Oh, it was all a great deal sadder than in the book!”

So Justin is already an intimate in Emma's household. He facilitates her adultery; he also helps cover it up, by cleaning the mud from her boots. This is a moment of particular complicity: first, he is destroying the evidence of Emma's early-morning tramps to Rodolphe's house by removing what Flaubert straightforwardly calls “the mud of her assignations”; second, Justin is presumably— though we are not given a description of his shoe-cleaning technique—placing his hands where Emma had placed her feet. Normal enough, of course; but there is a strong, some would say fetishistic element of podophilia in Flaubert, also in the novel, and here Justin is awarded his momentary share.

When Emma's affair with Rodolphe is terminated, she has a nervous collapse. Who is her regular visitor as she recovers? Justin. He comes with the Homais children and stands just inside the door, silently watching the convalescent:

Often Madame Bovary would start to dress, as if he wasn't there. She would begin by taking out her comb, and shaking her head sharply; and when for the first time he saw the mass of black hair unroll down her back as far as her knees, it was, for the poor boy, like the sudden entry into something new and extraordinary, whose splendour terrified him.

By his constant, faithful attendance Justin suggests that, unlike Rodolphe, he will not forsake Emma; further, he is permitted that most intimate of male sights—of a woman letting down her hair—which would normally have been reserved for husband or lover. Once more, nothing has really happened: Emma does not even notice Justin. But on the other hand, his surrogacy as a lover has almost been achieved, and the prose points us to it with the phrase “sudden entry”
(l'entrée subite).