HISTORY IN FLAUBERT: REPRESENTATIONS, DISCOURSES

Although history is essential to the works of Flaubert, critics have failed to come to terms with its place and definition in these texts. Nonetheless, the Flaubertian oeuvre remains in large part an attempt to define the historical and to situate man in relation to history. This study therefore explores history as it appears in the mature works of Flaubert, in the form of discourse.;Close readings of L'Education sentimentale and Salammbo further elucidate this shift to history as fiction or literary production. Freudian models of repetition demonstrate how L'Education sentimentale repeats the experience of 1848 by means of a polyphony of historical discourse in an attempt to effect a passage from passive to active, to master that experience; Flaubert in this way tests the limits of the novel form. The predominance of metaphoric discourse in Salammbo reveals an alienation from history; all other discourses are subsumed in its ahistorical perspective, a perspective which denies historical change and ultimately signals a certain failure of the historical novel. Historical discourse, as an act, thus participates in history; the discourse of history must then be considered as historical events themselves.;Using textual examples from "Un Coeur simple," Madame Bovary, L'Education sentimentale and Bouvard et Pecuchet, the study first identifies four major discourses, each informed by one of the master tropes (metonymy, metaphor, synecdoche and irony), then examines them in conjunction with the representational arts that also appear in these works. The juxtaposition of one discursive mode to another results in a problematics of representation and its reading. The intersection and interference of two or more historical discourses thus produces a degradation of representational forms and a loss of historical perspective most evident in the advent of kitsch. An increased focus on the rhetorical strategies of historical discourse as well as on the active and passive elements of language reveals a movement from history as representation to history as creative art.