To do-lists and to-be lists: identities as inventories in Bouvard et Pécuchet and À rebours

Abstract

This essay analyzes the inventory as a literary strategy in the nineteenth-century French novels Bouvard et Pécuchet by Flaubert (1881) and À rebours by Huysmans (1884). We argue that the authors adopt the inventory process to determine the main characters’ identities in the lack of a proper plot line. For the petty-bourgeois Bouvard-Pécuchet couple, life is a plotless repetition of something ever new to do; for the sophisticated aesthete des Esseintes, it is a plotless repetition of what he wants to go on being. In comparing the two texts, we establish a reversal symmetry between depth and surface. Des Esseintes’ inventories (flowers, perfumes, books, gemstones) are presented as solid and deeply meditated, their narrative status relating to categories like mastering, intimacy, and distillation. In contrast, Bouvard and Pécuchet’s inventories sound precarious and spontaneous, relating to categories like naivety, extraneity, and cluttering. The same reversal symmetry is also found when comparing the ending of the two novels when their protagonists’ fates are decided. Taking inventories as a critical part of the social negative of the era, the two novels represent the pathological poles of the same generational malaise.