Flaubert: Revue Critique et Génétique (Sep 2010)
Bouvard et Pécuchet et le ruban de Möbius. Variation mathématique sur le désir
Abstract
When, on an idle Sunday afternoon, Bouvard and Pécuchet meet on the deserted boulevard Bourdon, it is love at first sight for both of them. Complementary, antithetical but harmonic, the childless widower and the bachelor resolve the solitude of their lives in this providential encounter which mates them for good: a two-headed protagonist, Bouvard and Pécuchet form an inseparable entity that functions with cross-references, connections, inverted symmetry. Much has been said about the characters’ supposed homosexuality. They are always together, up to the most intimate detail, since, although they do not share a room, they have communicating rooms. Opposites attracting each other so much that they merge, the two heroes could lose themselves, so taken up are they in their “conjugal domesticity”. However to each is attributed an autonomous sentimental affair: to Bouvard the jokester, the Bordin widow strapped in her dove-colored silk dress; to the bashful Pécuchet, indecisive and still a virgin, Mélie the maid, who will soon infect him with syphilis. Yet these adventures scarcely count in the novel’s global economy. Or rather, they count to the same degree as the fellows’ countless experiences, while their only real desire seems to be a desire for knowledge. Like new versions of Frederic Moreau, whose desire to physically possess Marie Arnoux is resorbed – transcended? – in a “boundless painful curiosity”, Bouvard and Pécuchet seem to have become accomplished masters in the art of displacement and sublimation. Having reached a state beyond desire, that could very well be the consummate desire, the characters feed their libido sciendi with the mutability of its objects. Fickle lovers or indecisive amateurs who lose heart at the first obstacle – failure deters them from the object of their quest – they draw from the very non-fulfillment of their passion a renewed and endless energy. Denying Time, which does not dull their vigor, these Don Juans of knowledge, become eternal cherubs, at the end of their experimental journey, launch the perpetual movement that preserves their drive.The very particular structure of Bouvard et Pécuchet, with its perfect circularity susceptible of infinite mitotic efflorescence, is like a form of topological curiosity. True Möbius strip of desire, Bouvard and Pécuchet’s slow progression, both self-enclosed and proliferating, is this protean, paradoxical, dynamic, motionless progression or active stalling, that is triumphant by dint of dissatisfaction.
