Where should we look for the origins of the modern novel? There is a way of answering which isolates particular national traditions, so that Dead Souls inaugurates the Russian novel and Robinson Crusoe or Pamela initiates the English. But there is a more capacious reply to the question too, one that seeks some common fount from which a larger and more comparative idea of modern fiction springs. And to that wider question there is one answer that recurs more than any other."The novels of Flaubert appear to us today to mark a turning point in the history of the novel," wrote Peter Brooks a generation ago. Flaubert "is the novelist," James Wood wrote at the turn of this century, "from whom the Modern, with all its narrow freedoms, flows" (several years later Wood added: "Novelists should thank Gustave Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it begins again with him"). "The First Modern Novel" is the title for the culminating chapter of Mario Vargas Llosa's study of Flaubert and Madame Bovary. These termshistory of the novel, modernare used capaciously. For Anglo-American critics Flaubert can be a progenitor of James and Wharton, an ancestor of Joyce and Beckett. The French have meanwhile understood him as something more than a French writer, rather as one of their principal offerings to the world republic of letters. When Sartre wrote that "Flaubert, creator of the 'modern' novel, stands at the crossroads of all our literary problems today," he did not mean the problems facing only France. We might well ask what we mean when we say that Flaubert initiated the modern novel. Usually Madame Bovary serves as the principal exhibit: the narrator is detached and the milieu is ordinary; the tone is cold and the detail is fastidious. The ironies are stifling. An impression of order and control is compulsory. Here the Correspondance is brought in too, for if Madame Bovary is the prototype then Flaubert's letters are the manual. They explain how the modern novelist came to write his modern books.
