RHYMING DICTIONARY: To use one? Shameful!ĭICTIONNAIRE: En rire-n'est fait que pour les ignorants.ĭICTIONNAIRE DE RIMES: S'en servir? Honteux! 5ĮNCYCLOPEDIA (THE): Laugh at it in pity and even thunder against it as a rococo work.ĮNCYCLOPEDIE (L'): En rire de pitié, et même tonner contre comme étant un ouvrage rococo.Nowhere do Flaubert's explorations of the relation of signs to the objects they signify reach a more thorough study than in this work. And the things that people say about the writing that speaks to them are as catty as the conversations of teenaged girls are reputed to be:ĭICTIONARY: Laugh about it-made only for the ignorant. Moreover, as Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas clearly records, their fame precedes them.
They collect information, ideas, and objects and arrange them. These are Enlightenment institutions that are not merely storehouses for knowledge but shrines to writing. Bouvard et Pechuchet is, from the moment Flaubert plants "several volumes of Roret's Encyclopaedia" 3 ("plusieurs volumes de l'Encyclopedie Roret" 33) 4 and The Magnetist's Manual in Pecuchet's apartment, a novel that assigns starring roles to the encyclopedia, the dictionary, and the how-to book. Neither of these views-that we should blame the message, that we should blame the messengers-captures the book's peculiar charm and seriousness. Since they fail at everything they try, perhaps, we might think, the problem is not with their sources but with them. Yet Bouvard and Pecuchet's failures could equally be seen as problems that are uniquely theirs. Because they frequently consult some of the sources that aim to offer the latest, most up-to-date views, it would be easy to imagine that the novel's chief target is progressive modernity.
They are committed to self-improvement and to improvement in all things. 2 Its characters repeatedly endeavor to learn how to perform various actions-from handling grain that has just been harvested to finding items for a geological collection-and repeatedly fail. Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet is a Tendenz-Roman without a clear proposition to espouse, 1 or, as Jacques Neefs has said, a comedy of ideas.
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