[Reader-list] 'Powerless in the Brave New World': But when were we 'powerful'?

[Shivam Vij]

Dear all,

Pasted below is an essay by Pankaj Mishra in 'Tehelka' (Delhi, dated
16 April 2005) in which he invokes Gustave Flaubert's 1869 novel,
"Sentimental Education", to drive home the point, "Flaubert foresaw,
less self-consciously than the modernists and existentialists of the
20th century, the fragmenting of individual experience in the highly
organised societies coming into being, the world dominated if not
ruled by mendacious politicians, speculators and a corporate-owned
media increasingly compromised by their proximity to power."

At first instance the essay can leave you shaken and stirred, but my
state of 'fragmented individual experience' (and I don't mean at all
to trivialise the idea) makes me wonder if we were ever 'powerful'; if
there was ever a time when individual experience was *not* fragmented.
Let's say, we have a world which only seeks knowledge, sans 'highly
organised societies'. But you only have to read Christopher Marlowe's
sixteenth century play "Doctor Faustus" to see that such a world too
would lead to 'fragmented individual experience'.

Enjoy,
Shivam

-------------------------------------


Powerless in the Brave New World 

Gustave Flaubert prophesied a modern world in which people would be
manipulated by mass-manufactured fantasies of freedom and happiness,
says Pankaj Mishra

Tehelka, Delhi, 16 April 2005
[ http://www.tehelka.com/story_main11.asp?filename=op041605Powerless.asp ]
 
  
In 1851, Flaubert returned from his travels in the Middle East, and
began to write about a bored provincial housewife, the reader of
romantic novels, who is driven to suicide by her longing, only
half-fulfilled, for a life elsewhere. "Madame Bovary, c'est moi,"
Flaubert once said of his most famous creation. But Flaubert finally
exorcised his youthful romanticism, and gave the fullest expression to
his disenchantment with the modern age in the novel he published in
1869: Sentimental Education.

This disenchantment may seem extreme to us. But then the young
Flaubert had put much of his energy and passion into romantic
daydreams. Scorning the bourgeois individual, the mean and timid
calculator of self-interest that the French Revolution had enthroned,
Flaubert yearned for the exotic and voluptuous pleasures of the
Orient; he sought in the modern age the heroism and moral purity he
saw in the age of antiquity. These fantasies of both extreme piety and
licentiousness dictated his early travels — to the Middle East — and
his writings (The Temptation of St Anthony). And, perhaps, they would
have made him an interesting minor writer in the Byronic mould had he
not begun, out of a disgust and disillusionment too deep for anything
but art, to see them as a commonplace and sinister malady. It was the
disabused romantic in Flaubert that wrote his two great novels, Madame
Bovary and Sentimental Education; and his vision matured only after
the failed European revolutions of 1848.

The emotions of educated Europeans in the mid-19th century may be as
remote from us as the passions aroused by 9/11 will no doubt seem to
the inhabitants of the next century. But for Flaubert and many of his
contemporaries, the utopian aspirations of the 19th-century
rationalists which the French revolution had briefly expressed before
degenerating into terror and anarchy, had finally been destroyed in
1848. Traditional beliefs and authorities had been overthrown, several
new nation-states had appeared, universal suffrage and education had
been introduced, but universal happiness or peace still appeared out
of reach. Rather, the much-hated class of the bourgeoisie had become
more powerful; indeed, it had appropriated the slogans of democracy,
equality, and progress; it spoke in the name of the people and the
nation and would soon lead Europe into its most destructive wars.
  
Flaubert lived through the violent events of 1848 and saw closely the
selfishness and brutality of all its participants: the nobility, the
middle class, the working classes and the peasants. As he wrote in
Sentimental Education: "Equality asserted itself triumphantly: an
equality of brute beasts, a common level of bloody atrocities; for the
fanaticism of the rich counterbalanced the frenzy of the poor, the
aristocracy shared the fury of the rabble, and the cotton nightcap was
just as savage as the red bonnet." As Flaubert saw it, men had
overthrown older gods only to prostrate themselves afresh before the
new holy trinity of sex, money and power. The bourgeois now tainted
everything, even the desire to escape from his world.

Flaubert wished Sentimental Education to be "the moral history, or
rather the sentimental history, of the men of my generation."
Accordingly, he turned Paris of the 1840s into the main setting, and
exposed a wide range of people — students, journalists, courtesans,
artists, bankers, political agitators — to the temptations of fame and
wealth that Emma Bovary in the provinces had only dreamed of. He
denied a complex self-consciousness and sense of purpose to Frederic
Moreau, his primary protagonist. Frederic dreams a great deal; but
nothing comes of his grand plans for success in art, business,
journalism and politics. His shallow love affairs peter out; he never
even consummates his only sincere love for an older woman. Even worse,
he has no way of understanding his situation, his place in the world.

The poverty of his inner life is matched by the clichés in which he
often expresses his most private longings. A creature of random
desires and impulses, he drifts from one person to another, from one
day to the next. The years pass and he simply accumulates experience
and grows old without becoming any bit wiser.

Frederic's friends, most of them intellectual manques like himself,
show even less ability to rise above their petty desires and
circumstances. There is the journalist with a craving for political
power, the socialist agitator who turns into a brutal policeman, the
artist who has more theories at hand than talent, and the conservative
banker who manages to be both republican and monarchist. As in Madame
Bovary, Flaubert made his characters speak in clichés borrowed from
journalism, politics, advertising, and romantic fiction. He frequently
flouted his own principle of artistic impersonality to comment
directly on his creations. Here is the art dealer: "With his passion
for pandering to the public, he led able artists astray, corrupted the
strong, exhausted the weak, and bestowed fame on the second-rate,
controlling their destinies by means of his connections and his
magazine."
  
Flaubert had an acute insight into the "instinctive adoration of
force" that the most idealistic of men could lapse into. He saw the
slogan of socialism as hiding a strong tendency towards despotism. But
he was no more enamored of free market democracy. We meet in his novel
all 'the stock characters of the political comedy' who fill up the
op-ed pages of our newspapers: "the old stagers of the Left-Centre,
the paladins of the Right, the veterans of the Middle Way"; and
Frederic's political volte face remind one of the radicals of our own
time who have turned bewilderingly into courtiers to the rich and the
powerful: "The political verbiage and good food began to dull his
sense of morality. However mediocre these people might seem to him, he
felt proud to know them and inwardly longed to enjoy their esteem."

But, above all, the novel is a magnificent testimony to Flaubert's
art. Early in the book, Frederic has been spending some months in the
country when he learns that he has inherited his uncle's wealth.
Delighted, he throws open the window of his house. This is what he
sees: "Snow had fallen; the roofs were white; and he even recognised a
washtub in the yard which he had tripped over the evening before." How
vividly does the image capture the fragility of Frederic's private
excitement amidst an indifferent world, and his restless, distracted
state of previous weeks. The long passages set in the forest of
Fontainebleau show Flaubert's matchless ability to evoke his
characters' inner lives through descriptions of landscapes.

Then, there is Flaubert's great melancholy sense of time. He sensed,
much before Proust, that the individual self has no integrity and
exists only in fragments scattered across time. Thus, he presents
Frederic's life as a series of isolated moments, with a specific mood
or act standing in for whole weeks, months, even years: "He used to
get up very late and look out of the window at the waggoner's cart
going past. The first six months were particularly agonising."

Famously towards the end, Flaubert's narrative both leaps across, and
illuminates, a void of 16 years with just some poetically precise
sentences carefully placed at the beginning of a chapter: "He
travelled. He came to know the melancholy of the steamboat, the cold
awakening in the tent, the tedium of landscapes and ruins, the
bitterness of interrupted friendships."

The melancholy, tedium and bitterness can prove too much. In
Sentimental Education, Flaubert made no attempt to flatter or divert
his audience, and indeed seems to want to linger on his readers'
vulgar fascination with money and power. The reader looking for a
gripping yarn about other people is confronted with his own imprecise
longings and incoherent self. Not surprisingly, the novel, when it
first appeared, was a critical and commercial failure, and has
subsequently enjoyed a cult rather than a popular following. Many
writers, for instance, consider it a more mature novel than Madame
Bovary. Ford Madox Ford claimed to have read it 14 times. In his film
Manhattan, Woody Allen put Sentimental Education on a short list of
things worth living for.

To read it now is to discover how Flaubert out of his obsessive hatred
of his bourgeois peers and their holy creed of self-interest, managed
to draw a comprehensive portrait of the secular, metropolitan realm
that was new in his time and now forms the substance of our life and
dreams: the world of fast communications, big industry, mass media,
and commodified art.

Flaubert foresaw, less self-consciously than the modernists and
existentialists of the 20th century, the fragmenting of individual
experience in the highly organised societies coming into being, the
world dominated if not ruled by mendacious politicians, speculators
and a corporate-owned media increasingly compromised by their
proximity to power.

Although published in 1869, Sentimental Education now reads as the
first major novel of the 20th century in its vivid presentiment of the
brave new world in which powerless human beings will be kept
pointlessly busy, led around by mass-manufactured fantasies of freedom
and happiness, until the point when they do not know who they are or
what purpose they have served, and, furthermore, do not care.

The writer is the author of 
The Romantics and An End to Suffering: The Buddha and the World

 
April 16, 2005