The Epistemology of the Parrot - Bruno Penteado Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 43, Spring-Summer 2015, Numbers 3-4, pp. 144-157 ...
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The Epistemology of the Parrot
Bruno Penteado
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 43, Spring-Summer 2015, Numbers
3-4, pp. 144-157 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2015.0003
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/580043
Access provided at 18 Mar 2020 01:37 GMT with no institutional affiliationThe Epistemology of the Parrot
Bruno Penteado
This article presents a reading of “Un cœur simple” from a perspective
that brings together the philosophy of stupidity, the animal, and religion.
Focusing on the links between stupidity and irony, it proposes that Félicité’s
fusion of God and the parrot implies a hermeneutical grid that sees religion
as parrotry, insofar as her transcendence depends upon the idea of God as
purveyor of non-referential language. In “Un cœur simple,” irony operates
within the problem that a judgment of stupidity poses: judging someone
stupid becomes a stupid judgment.
[L]e perroquet imite le signe le moins équivoque de la pensée, la parole qui
met à l’extérieur autant de différence entre l’homme et l’homme qu’entre
l’homme et la bête, puisqu’elle exprime dans les uns la lumière et la supériorité
de l’esprit, qu’elle ne laisse apercevoir dans les autres qu’une confusion d’idées
obscures ou empruntées, et que dans l’imbécile ou le perroquet elle marque le
dernier degré de la stupidité, c’est-à-dire l’impossibilité où ils sont tous deux de
produire intérieurement la pensée, quoiqu’il ne leur manque aucun des organes
nécessaires pour la rendre au dehors. (Buffon 55–56)
Stupidity was Gustave Flaubert’s greatest enemy and constant companion.
An artist of stupidity, he was, while writing Madame Bovary, already mulling
over a project that was to haunt him throughout his life: one in which he
would develop what he saw as the inherent stupidity of democratic societies,
the Dictionnaire des idées reçues. He explains his scope and motivation to
Louise Colet on 16 December 1852:
Ce serait la glorification historique de tout ce qu’on approuve. J’y
démontrerais que les majorités ont toujours eu raison, les minorités
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43:3–4 www.villanova.edu/ncfstoujours tort. J’immolerais les grands hommes à tous les imbéciles, les
martyrs à tous les bourreaux, et cela dans un style poussé à l’outrance,
à fusées. Ainsi, pour la littérature, j’établirais ce qui serait facile, à
savoir que le médiocre étant à la portée de tous est le seul légitime et
qu’il faut donc honnir toute espèce d’originalité comme dangereuse,
sotte, etc. Cette apologie de la canaillerie humaine sur toutes ses
faces, ironique et hurlante d’un bout à l’autre, pleine de citations, de
preuves (qui prouveraient le contraire) et de textes effrayants (ce serait
facile), est dans le but, dirais-je, d’en finir une fois pour toutes avec
les excentricités, quelles qu’elles soient. Je rentrerais par là dans l’idée
démocratique moderne d’égalité [. . .] et c’est dans ce but, dirais-je, que
ce livre est fait. On y trouverait donc par ordre alphabétique, sur tous
les sujets possibles, tout ce qu’il faut dire en société pour être un homme
convenable et aimable. (Correspondance 2: 208)
If the goal of the envisaged work is to expose the stupidity of life in community
and the mediocrity of the ideas that sustain the bourgeois enterprise, an
immersion into stupidity concomitant with the acceptance of its sovereignty
may appear counterintuitive at first. But the closing sentence of the quotation
(ironically) tells us that the Dictionnaire will be a safe manual containing
what one must say to be found suitable in society. These reified linguistic
constructs or formulas, employed uncritically and automatically, are those
that speakers so often “parrot” in polite society. The language of idées reçues
is, for Flaubert, the language of ideology, here associated with stupidity.
Mediocrity is legitimate, Flaubert tells us, because it is within everyone’s
reach: all we need to do is to open our mouths and start speaking.
The passage nevertheless betrays a performative engagement with
stupidity that can be reformulated as follows: breaking free from stupidity is
only possible by playing stupid; eluding stupidity hinges on a full acceptance
of its inevitability. The aporia is necessary: when playing stupid, when
deliberately employing the formulas that keep a bourgeois community tight,
arbitrariness shines through, and others get a glimpse of the stupidity that
orbits around them, or rather around which they orbit. This strategy, which
Jonathan Culler identifies in Flaubert’s Garçon,1 a character conceived in
the author’s youth, is not altogether different from Baudelaire’s stumbling
philosopher in De l’essence du rire: when the philosopher falls, he or she
quickly finds his or her double as a “spectateur désintéressé” (21). Falling
down is stupid because it reminds us of how maladroit and at the mercy of
physics we are. In a sense, the philosopher never falls alone.2
If democracy legitimizes any sort of discourse—on 30 April 1871, Flaubert
writes to George Sand of his hatred of democracy (“je hais la démocracie”),
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2015 145claiming that it relies on “la morale de l’évangile,” and describing it as
“l’exaltation de la grâce au détriment de la justice, la négation du droit, en
un mot l’anti-sociabilité” (Correspondance 4: 314)—this is perhaps because
Flaubert sees stupidity at its root. Anne Green argues that, were we to speak
of Flaubert’s political views, they would be “[. . .] based on his hatred of any
form of constriction, any political dogma which attempts to force society
into its mold. Even more, he fears the stultifying effects of a regime which
seeks to level society by crushing individualism and minority groups, and
which he believes can lead only to utilitarianism and mediocrity” (74). But
this does not mean, for some critics, that Flaubert’s literary production is
not essentially democratic. Jacques Rancière proposes that the birth of
literature coincides with the rise of democracy, and he sees Flaubert’s style
of indifferentiation, despite the Normand’s attacks on democracy, as “the
incarnation of democracy” itself (17). At any rate, this retreat into stupidity
(“le médiocre [. . .] est le seul légitime”) functions as the strategy for a return,
the return of the idiot, to borrow Avital Ronell’s formulation in Stupidity,
the idiot who troubles the entire system by pretending not to understand
the rules of the game, thus drawing attention to their arbitrariness. Philippe
Mengue, in a fine study of Deleuze’s micropolitics, reminds us that this
politics of the idiot means “alterity before all current social and political
organizations” (97). The politics of the idiot—the politics of stupidity—is a
strategy of indifferentiated opposition.
In any event, by clearly identifying himself as an ironist (“ironique et
hurlante”), Flaubert undermines the cynic’s disavowal (“le mediocre [. . .] est
le seul légitime”). The outcome is that cynicism, here, is shattered by irony.
Through the reflexive operations of irony, itself reflexive, it becomes a type of
discourse that folds onto itself and questions its own validity. Therefore, if the
acceptance of stupidity cannot be enunciated outside of an ironic discourse,
it follows that it cannot be disconnected from a prior refusal, that is, a
refusal of stupidity that precedes and determines its apparent acceptance: if
Flaubert asserts that his project praises stupidity, we can expect this praise to
be, in the end, a nasty piece of diatribe.
The question of stupidity is (and has been) at the core of critical inquiries
into Flaubert’s work. In a way, Flaubert systematizes stupidity, forging
through literature a catalogue (which, if we keep Bouvard et Pécuchet in
mind, is nothing short of ironic) of its uses, abuses, overuses, and effects.
In fact, much of the philosophy and literature of stupidity, a brief survey
of the bibliography proves, has been influenced by the Normand’s work.
After all, as Avital Ronell remarks, “Flaubert is the unsurpassed thinker of
stupidity” (Stupidity 223). Alain Roger’s Bréviaire de la bêtise places Flaubert
at the heart of la bêtise littéraire (“Ecce Homais!”)—and so does, as one
146 Bruno Penteadomay draw from Claude Coste’s Bêtise de Barthes, Roland Barthes, “formé à
l’école de Flaubert” (63). A recurring argument about Flaubertian stupidity
is its indissociability from language. As Brigitte le Juez summarizes, “[. . .]
il est admis que, dans la prose flaubertienne, le langage, loin d’être un
instrument malléable au service d’un sujet parlant, libre et confiant de ses
déclarations, domine l’expression de la pensée et devient l’assujettissement
même du locuteur” (93). Jonathan Culler’s classic study of Flaubert contains
a section on stupidity that is at once comprehensive and attentive to detail:
Culler understands stupidity in Flaubert’s work in terms of language (161),
regarding it as a set of codified responses (165), and “language lifted away
from the world becomes a self-contained system of empty phrases which
we exchange and transmit but which we neither invent nor investigate”
(166). Culler claims that the entries of the Dictionnaire are “stupid, not
because the facts on which they rely are false but because the particular
meanings offered do not exhaust an object or concept and because they
place it in a self-enclosed system of social discourse which comes to serve
as reality for those who allow themselves to be caught up in it” (160). One
of the most recent endeavors to understand Flaubertian stupidity is owed
to Anne Herschberg-Pierrot’s volume Flaubert, l’empire de la bêtise; in one
of its essays, “Petit éloge de la simplicité,” Françoise Gaillard differentiates
simplicity from stupidity, taking Félicité as an example of Flaubert’s idiot,
whom she distinguishes from his stupid characters. Gaillard argues that
Flaubert attacks the stupid, but shows compassion for the simple (73).
Félicité would be simple and idiotic, but not stupid, for, “à la difference de
la simplicité, la bêtise est incurieuse, la bêtise est têtue, la bêtise [. . .] campe
sur ses certitudes” (80). With regard to the scene when Félicité tries to locate
her nephew’s home on a map, Gaillard claims that she is not stupid, for she
is suspicious of the parole marchande (Gaillard sees in this the beginning of
a critical consciousness) and relies on verification and experimentation (80).
In this essay, however, I envisage stupidity as an unstable and irreducible
topic that resists both predication and classification.
The relation of Flaubert’s bestiary to both religion and stupidity merits
further study. As Didier Philippot remarks, “l’on pourra s’étonner qu’un
tel sujet [Flaubert et l’animal] n’ait pas davantage occupé la critique
flaubertienne, alors qu’il fait se croiser des problématiques familières, celle
de la bêtise et de la bestialité, celle de la sainteté et de l’animalité, celle de la
symbolique animale, etc.” In this article I develop some brief thoughts on
part of this corpus, “Un cœur simple,” the opening text of the Trois contes. My
claim is that Félicité’s religious transcendence takes place exactly by means
of immanence, that is, God’s immanence through Loulou, thus suggesting
that stupidity is welcomed as an effective strategy of resistance. My reading
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2015 147conflicts with a branch of criticism that has consistently denied “Un cœur
simple” any ironic power. Peter Brooks, for instance, adheres to this critical
line: “I agree with Flaubert that ‘Un cœur simple’ is not ironic. There would
be no point in exercising irony on the limited and unambitious mental and
emotional world of Félicité. Irony is to be exercised on the pretentious, on
the bourgeois who claim to understand things and to tell us how to live,
such as Homais the pharmacist in Madame Bovary [. . .].”3 However, drawing
from Barbara Vinken, for whom the story stages “la littéralité la plus crue”
as opposed to “un accomplissement spirituel transcendant la lettre” (160),
I argue that a compelling ironic reading of “Un cœur simple” comes to be
when we approach the story à la lettre: Loulou is God, his speech is God’s
speech, and Félicité’s sight of a gigantic Loulou is consistent with the text’s
logic of her transcendence. The literality of her transcendence (which, we
will see, is a transcendence that occurs in language) thus allows us to suggest
that religion is nothing but parrotry,4 and that God is tantamount to the
Word that has come to signify nothing.
The words of Buffon that I employed as an epigraph above draw attention
to the connection between language and stupidity: the parrot is like the
imbecile who speaks without thinking, without manifesting thought
through language. Buffon subscribes to the tradition that saw language as
“[. . .] marks for the ideas within [man’s] own mind, whereby they might be
known to others, and the thoughts of men’s minds be conveyed from one
to another” (Locke 176). Flaubert, however, will tell us a different story, one
that introduces the parrot as the spokesman of God. In “Un cœur simple,”
Flaubert also breaks from the philosophical tradition according to which
language is seen as the “demarcation line distinguishing the animal from the
human.”5 If language conveys nothing but language, the parrot’s ontology
(the nature of its being perceived by Félicité as the reality of God), combined
with an epistemology of parrotry (which would thus account for what can
be known and claimed about the idea of language devoid of reference, or
language only referencing itself, contained in the figure of the parrot), can
lead us to a reassessment of the place of stupidity in “Un cœur simple.”
“Un cœur simple” has a precise genealogical history—it is a response
to George Sand’s demands that Flaubert write a more touching story, and
the text is “conceived to answer her complaints that [he] was hard-hearted,
unfeeling, even cynical in his writing” (Brooks 121). Flaubert claimed that
he was not being ironic in the text when Félicité confuses Loulou with the
Holy Spirit: “cela n’est nullement ironique, comme vous le supposez, mais
au contraire très sérieux et très triste. Je veux apitoyer, faire pleurer les âmes
sensibles—en étant une moi-même” (Correspondance 5: 57). However, this
assertion can also be interpreted as a claim about the absence of irony within
148 Bruno PenteadoFélicité’s confusion, an absence that functions as a negation of this confusion,
therefore an affirmation of the literality of her transcendence. Moreover,
if critics have taken this confession at face value, it is important to specify
what we mean (and if we mean what we mean) by irony. If “understood” as
a strategy of deferment and dissemination, it can be seen as an interruptive
self-awareness (Schlegel’s and de Man’s permanent parabasis) of the
proliferating power of a text, which in its turn becomes a site of conflict and
disagreement.6 I am thinking here from a de Manian perspective of irony,
one reworked by Kevin Newmark in his recent book, Irony on Occasion.
Newmark sees irony in terms of an occasion (occasion as scandal, as the
occasion of a fall), which is “both like and unlike causality” (5). Irony, an
accidental interruption in the course of history—Newmark even claims that
irony is the “condition of possibility for history”—undermines “‘cause’ and
‘causality,’” which are “interrupted and forever displaced by what actually
happens on occasion, therefore only by accident” (11). It is “because irony all
by itself is not easy to locate, to determine, to define and to control” that we
depend on the occasion to “ever be granted access to [it]” (7). The accident
of irony, the possibility of the fall into irony, produces non-reconcilable
moments of hermeneutic tension that must be taken into account at
once. Apropos of Mémoires d’un fou, Shoshana Felman demonstrated an
additional procedure of Flaubert’s irony: its power of de- and re-ironization.
Irony de- or re-ironizes itself, but the new readings that emerge do not cancel
out previous ones. It is then a question of coexistence, not exclusiveness: no
reading “can be considered exclusive or privileged,” inasmuch as a text puts
forth “a strategic confrontation of different positions of meaning” (94). This
is due, Felman argues, to “[. . .] the dynamic of reversal inherent in language,
with the very principle of negativity constitutive of language as such” (83).
Specifically in “Un cœur simple,” irony is ironized when we return to an
immediate, apparently non-ironic reading of the text, that is, by reading it as
an avowal of Félicité’s transcendence via God-qua-Parrot.
In “Un cœur simple,” Félicité, Mme Aubain’s humble servant, lives
a life of misery for almost “un demi-siècle.” After a series of fetishistic
identifications (Paul, Virginie, Victor, Mme Aubain herself, and constantly
and uninterruptedly God), she focuses her devotion on Loulou, a parrot. After
Loulou dies, Felicité has the bird stuffed, and finally, as she herself passes
away, she mistakes Loulou for the Holy Spirit: Flaubert informs us that,
with regard to God, “elle avait peine à imaginer sa personne; car il n’était
pas seulement oiseau, mais encore un feu, et d’autres fois un souffle” (170).
The story’s pathos is powerful: page after page, Félicité is mistreated and
misunderstood; Flaubert’s nihilism is perfectly well balanced with summoned
empathy in a narrative that encourages the reader to pity the misfortunes
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2015 149of the poor servant, who, “pour cent francs par an [. . .] faisait la cuisine et
le ménage, cousait, lavait, repassait, savait brider un cheval, engraisser les
volailles, battre le beurre, et resta fidèle à sa maîtresse—qui cependant n’était
pas une personne agréable” (166). As she progressively goes deaf, and her
ties to her community are weakened (“ne communiquant avec personne, elle
vivait dans une torpeur de somnambule,” 176), this allows her to focus on a
religious transcendence grounded in the figure of the animal: “souvent sa
maîtresse lui disait:—‘Mon Dieu! comme vous êtes bête!’; elle lui répliquait:
‘Oui, Madame’, en cherchant quelque chose autour d’elle” (166). Félicité,
despite Mme Aubain’s abuse, passively assents; it is Loulou, the animal, that
speaks up for her, emulating the mistress of the house: “et, aux coups de la
sonnette, [il] imitait Mme Aubain,—‘Félicité! la porte! la porte!’” (166).
At a certain point in the text Flaubert sheds light on Félicité’s reasoning:
a dove cannot truly be the animal God chooses “pour s’annoncer,” for “ces
bêtes-là n’ont pas de voix” (176). A dove cannot speak, and therefore cannot
speak for God. Before Loulou’s appearance in the story, Félicité is already
leaning towards parrotry; her catechism is a product of observation and
assimilation through repetition and copying: “ce fut de cette manière, à force
de l’entendre, qu’elle apprit le catéchisme, son éducation religieuse ayant été
négligée dans sa jeunesse” (170). Her education is parrotry, for “dès lors elle
imita toutes les pratiques de Virginie, jeûnait comme elle, se confessait avec
elle” (170). It is not only the bourgeois who are caught in the mechanical
stupidity of life in community; Félicité, too, is subject to idées reçues. This
automatism does not bother her, however; she seems to be comfortable with
her limitations: “quant aux dogmes, elle n’y comprenait rien, ne tâcha même
pas de comprendre” (170, emphasis added). Her assumption that Loulou is
more appropriate than a dove to give voice to the Holy Spirit is not precisely
far-fetched within Catholicism, especially if we bear in mind the long
hermeneutical tradition according to which God is described as the Word:
À l’église, elle contemplait toujours le Saint-Esprit, et observa qu’il
avait quelque chose du perroquet. Sa ressemblance lui parut encore
plus manifeste sur une image d’Épinal, représentant le baptême de
Notre-Seigneur. Avec ses ailes de pourpre et son corps d’émeraude,
c’était vraiment le portrait de Loulou.
L’ayant acheté, elle le suspendit à la place du comte d’Artois,—de
sorte que, du même coup d’œil, elle les voyait ensemble. Ils s’associèrent
dans sa pensée, le perroquet se trouvant sanctifié par ce rapport avec
le Saint-Esprit, qui devenait plus vivant à ses yeux et intelligible. Le
Père, pour s’énoncer, n’avait pu choisir une colombe, puisque ces bêtes-
là n’ont pas de voix, mais plutôt un des ancêtres de Loulou. Et Félicité
150 Bruno Penteadopriait en regardant l’image, mais de temps à autre se tournait un peu
vers l’oiseau. (170)
The parrot is not canonized because the dove in the image d’Épinal reminds
her of Loulou: she synthesizes both because Loulou, as an animal that can
mimic human language, is a much better fit than a dove; a parrot has an
undeniable claim to language that is promptly extended to a claim to the
Word, and therefore to God, as we will see shortly. Even when she goes deaf,
the Word still comes to her through Loulou, and we can assume that now she
hears God in his plenitude: “Un seul bruit arrivait maintenant à ses oreilles,
la voix du perroquet.”7 The stupidity of parrotry, however, is not on Loulou’s
part; Ronell reminds us that “only humans can be, or be predicated as, bête.”8
Moreover, Loulou’s parrotry is not an arbitrary or meaningless discourse that
has not been put through the grid of reason. The stupid move, here, would
be to deem the voice of the animal stupid (if it is possible—and not stupid—
to say that animals have voice). It is not exactly the case that Félicité mimics
religious discourse in her constant prayers, nor that Loulou says words that,
given his inability to tie signifier to signified, have no meaning. If Loulou
spells out the terms of Félicité’s transcendence, he cannot speak the language
of Félicité: he speaks language, and he is always already in language, insofar
as language, as we are about to see, means only the potentiality of meaning.
In “The Idea of Language,” Agamben proposes that the Word of God,
which is the language of revelation, is nothing but the revelation of this
very word, the revelation of the divine in the world—it is language itself.
Revelation reveals nothing but the potentiality to reveal: “the meaning of
revelation is that humans can reveal beings through language but cannot
reveal language itself” (40). In other words, if language means, this meaning
cannot reveal what language means, it only reveals that language means,
but it does not mean anything in itself. “Language is what must necessarily
presuppose itself” (41), and revelation as language entails “not a meaningful
discourse but rather a pure, insignificant voice” (42). Such language “is
therefore not that of meaningful speech, but rather that of a voice that,
without signifying anything, signifies signification itself” (42). There would
be in this sense no difference between human language and the language
of God, because language is God’s gift to humans, and it is in language
that God makes himself known. If God is language, he offers himself to
us only in terms of that language that he is. In “Un cœur simple,” Félicité
listens to the Word and starts speaking Loulou’s language: it is the case
of the shift from human language to animal language, here equaled both
to human language itself and the language of God (God qua parrot). In a
different essay, Agamben suggests that the voice “is no longer the experience
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2015 151of a mere sound,” but it is “not yet the experience of meaning. [. . .] Being
is in the voice as an unveiling and demonstration of the taking place of
language” (Language and Death 34). The voice, as a consequence, is caught in
a potentiality between animal sound and the advent of meaning in language.
Flaubert, by choosing a parrot as the Holy Spirit, ascribes the possibility, or
at least the potentiality, of meaning to Loulou.
Here I am trying to push a somewhat immediate, surface understanding
of the text to its limits; in other words, by not taking the story with a grain of
salt, that is, by taking it as a given that Loulou is the incarnation of the Holy
Spirit—thus believing, along with Félicité, in this belief that has become
a plenitude, believing without judgment in the verb “croire” (“elle crut
voir, dans les cieux entrouverts, un perroquet gigantesque” [177, emphasis
added]), and abandoning ourselves to this belief—we once again ironize the
story, exactly by accepting it in its fullest, albeit silenced, literality, that is, the
literality of Félicité’s transcendence as she believes it to happen. For Félicité,
Loulou’s being is being in and through language, through human language:
he speaks, he speaks human language, he speaks for God and, above all,
he reveals God’s Word through human language.9 Furthermore, if Loulou
mediates Félicité’s experience of God, this mediation becomes in its making
no longer a mediation, but an equivalence (Loulou = Holy Spirit = God), and
subsequently a merging of identities (Loulou—Holy Spirit—God). Félicité,
contrary to Emma, is not on crack;10 she has a different addiction: she is on
God, which amounts to the same as saying that she is on the Parrot. And if
Loulou speaks and reveals God’s being in language (as well as as language,
for “the Word was God”), the language of God is, conversely, Loulou’s
parrotry: “Il s’appelait Loulou” (174); he was called Loulou, his name was
Loulou, or, more importantly, he called himself Loulou.
But if God is language revealing the possibility of revelation, God becomes,
in this context, parrotry. The language of God is the empty language of the
meaningless utterances that constitute human language; or conversely,
still following Agamben, human language is the language of meaningless
utterances that constitute the language of God. If the language of God is
language, the voice of God is Loulou’s animal sound, imbued with linguistic
meaning for humans. Loulou, the Parrot, embodies human and divine
languages, for the reality or actuality of God, or God’s revealing himself as
God, constitutes itself in language. Thus this ironic dimension of the story
finally shines through: religion, too, is parrotry, and if we keep in mind that
Flaubert linked democracy to some sort of refurbished Christianity, it follows
that the heart of idées reçues, or at least one of its epicenters, is religious
parrotry,11 especially if, following Agamben’s reasoning, language means the
possibility of meaning, but never meaning itself (this would be a hybrid of
152 Bruno Penteadothe idea of language revealing the possibility of revelation). To quote Vinken,
“le perroquet est un oiseau qui, au sens propre, au sens le plus littéral, dit la
vérité, mot à mot: la vérité d’un monde qui, réduit au cliché, reste une aveugle
répétition figée, que personne ne comprend plus avec le cœur.”12
Félicité, the virgin blessed among women, sees Loulou both as “un fils”
(the Son) and “un amoureux” (the Father);13 she gives birth to the Word
that simultaneously conceives itself. Her transcendence pivots on God’s
immanence made perceptible in, through, and as Loulou’s language. Her
dialogues with Loulou are described thus by Flaubert: “Ils avaient des
dialogues, lui, débitant à satiété les trois phrases de son répertoire, et elle,
répondant par des mots sans plus de suite, mais où son cœur s’épanchait”
(175). It seems legitimate to ask if Félicité embodies Flaubert’s lack of hope in
democratic regimes by means of her personification of stupidity, for I believe
that telling stupidity and simplicity apart is a denial of stupidity’s inexorable
“unclassifiability”; stupidity is, after all, an umbrella term that manages to
comprehend radically opposite ideas. The only way Flaubert can write a
tender story is by making it ferociously ironic, and I postulate this irony
through two readings that are as contradictory as they are interdependent.
We, the readers, are the ones being mocked by the text when we think its
lack of ironic dimensions means we should take pity on Félicité’s confusion,
whereas the most evident, non-ironic, immediate reading is in fact the
most ironic one: she is not confusing Loulou with God, her transcendence
is avowed by the text, and therefore we stupidly judge her fusion of God
and the Parrot to be a confusion. In this sense, we fail to account for the
simplicity with which she accepts God as Parrot and parrotry. But a different
type of ironic reading, one that would envisage Flaubert as mocking
Félicité’s stupidity, lies in her refusal to understand what has become
evident through Loulou, that is, that religion is parrotry after all. All things
considered, Flaubert believes that the bourgeois aren’t the only stupid ones:
there’s also the masses, the herd of subjects who assent to equality within
the voice of the community (democracy). Flaubert’s definition of democratic
equality would nevertheless claim that we are all equal because, when put
together, we are all equally stupid. He once wrote that “tout le rêve de la
démocratie est d’élever le prolétaire au niveau de bêtise du bourgeois.”14 But
what if, by being content with her limitations, Félicité transcends stupidity
indirectly, exactly by making us judge her, by demanding that we see her
as simple, by imposing on us the necessity of the condescending regard of
the enlightened? Let us keep in mind that stupidity imposes a double bind
that Ronell demonstrates through the following aporia: “The other is always
stupid,” but “I am stupid before the other.”15 It is upon this disjunction that
my reading of “Un cœur simple” depends.
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2015 153How can we posit Félicité with regard to stupidity (and how does she posit
herself with regard to it)? A brief illustration of the aporia mentioned above
is in place. Félicité, thinking of her nephew who is now in Havana, wonders:
“pouvait-on ‘en cas de besoin’ s’en retourner par terre? À quelle distance
était-ce de Pont-l’Éveque? Pour le savoir, elle interrogea M. Bourais.”16 A
condenscending M. Bourais, showing her his atlas, with “un beau sourire de
cuistre devant l’ahurissement de Félicité,” starts speaking of longitude. How
is her confusion laughable in any sense? Her question was straightforward:
how far is Havana from Pont-l’Éveque? She is neither interested in nor
worried about a different kind of language—cartographic language—nor
does she want the answer for such a simple question to contain yet another
construction. She did not ask where Havana is, and yet M. Bourais, “avec son
porte-crayon [. . .] indiqua dans les découpures d’une tache ovale un point
noir, imperceptible, en ajoutant: ‘Voici.’ [Félicité] se pencha sur la carte.” But
she cannot see anything remotely resembling her nephew’s home. “Ce réseau
de lignes coloriées fatiguait sa vue, sans lui rien apprendre.” If we switch the
locus of stupidity from Félicité to language, human language (cartographic
language) fails. It reveals its arbitrariness under her scrutinity; for her it
is nothing but doodle. “Elle le pria de lui montrer la maison où demeurait
Victor”—since, of course, Bourais, not exactly answering her question,
stupidly assumes that pointing at a black dot on a map and claiming that it is
the place where one resides are perfectly self-evident assertions. It is Bourais,
in this logic, who is utterly stupid. By assuming that she is stupid because
she does not speak the same language as he does (his point, given his “beau
sourire,” is clearly to humiliate her), he ends up claiming that her nephew
lives in a black dot on a piece of paper. But Bourais “rit énormément [. . .]
tant son intelligence était bornée,” whereas Félicité “n’en comprenait pas le
motif.” What if the acceptance of mediocrity is seen as a strategy (but not
necessarily a conscious one) according to which a subject, when displaying his
or her stupidity “with a blatant and provocative self-confidence” (Culler 164),
denounces the stupidity of the ones who are judging? Judging someone stupid,
to insist on the aporia outlined above, depends, according to Ronell, upon a
destruction of alterity, insofar as “stupidity involves a judgment that, having
arrived at its conclusion, passes itself off stubbornly as a truth” (Stupidity 70).
While Bouvard and Pécuchet, when stumbling on unintelligibility and
failure, move on to other fields and institutions of knowledge, Félicité shrugs
and remains where she is; in this sense her stupidity differs from that of the
scriveners. Especially in the context of nineteenth-century epistemophilia,
her abnegation turns into a decision not to, similar to that of Bartleby in
Deleuze’s account of Melville’s story, showing itself to us as a triumph,
the triumph of the potentiality of refusal. Although M. Bourais laughs at
154 Bruno PenteadoFélicité’s stupidity, it is he himself who sets the parrot laughing: “Dès qu’il
[Loulou] l’apercevait, il commençait à rire de toutes ses forces” (174). By
remaining in stupidity, Félicité has us approach her in stupid terms. By
having us judge her, thus by forcing us into a position whose prerequisites
are knowledge and mastery, she has us turn into parrots who quote profusely
as we attempt to understand her. When we find ourselves in parrotry, thus
putting ourselves on the same level as Félicité, this is her (and Flaubert’s)
moment of triumph. She leaves us there and, in her bliss (félicité), rejoins
Loulou, who in his turn is “dans les cieux entrouverts [. . .] planant au-dessus
de sa tête” (177), probably laughing.
Department of Comparative Literature
Brown University
Notes
1. Stupidity in Flaubert is always ultimately directed at oneself; that is the role of
the Garçon: “How can one prick stupidity without claiming supreme intelligence?
One solution, which the Garçon outlines, is to ‘se declarer bête’ and display one’s
stupidity with a blatant and provocative self-confidence” (Culler 164).
2. Baudelaire’s falling philosopher has a prominent position in de Man’s theory
of irony. See Blindness and Insight 212–14.
3. 122. Brooks, however, sees in the story “the question of stupidity—not in this
case the stupidity of cliché, of the already-said-and-repeated, but rather of the lack
of ideas” (125).
4. I borrow the term from Brooks: “Parrotry, as I have called it, is disturbing in
that it imitates the meaningful utterance in a way that is purposeful but (we assume)
devoid of intention” (125).
5. Traisnel 83; also see Bailly 9.
6. Regarding conflicting readings in hermeneutical practices, see Armstrong.
7. 175; see Derrida 37. In Flaubert, however, the parrot does speak, and Félicité
does listen to its animalized human language (or humanized animal language).
8. Stupidity 320; also see Pouillon 219–20.
9. See Le Juez 46.
10. See Ronell on Madame Bovary and addiction in Crack Wars.
11. See Vinken 143.
12. 161; compare with Le Juez: “Dans ces contes traditionnels, le perroquet est
souvent le personnage auquel la vérité est attribuée. Même dans les cas où cette
vérité a des conséquences néfastes pour d’autres personnages ou pour lui-même, le
perroquet reste positivement moral” (29).
13. 175; see Vinken 155.
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2015 15514. Letter to George Sand, October 7, 1871 (Correspondance 4: 384). On the same
page, we also read that “la masse, le nombre est toujours idiot,” and that “cependant
il faut respecter la masse si inepte qu’elle soit, parce qu’elle contient des germes d’une
fécondité incalculable.”
15. Stupidity 39, 60; also see Coste 63.
16. The quotations from Flaubert in this paragraph come from page 171.
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