Chapter 4 - Flaubert's “musées reçus”

Summary

In nineteenth-century France the multiplication of material things coincides with what is perceived to be an explosion of knowledge, two events which come together in the new public museums which also proliferate during this period. Writing within and against this context, Flaubert accords a central place to the museum episode in his novel Bouvard and Pécuchet, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1880. To summarize briefly, the novel's (anti-)heroes, two unmarried Parisian copy clerks, retire to the country on an unexpected inheritance, where they undertake a seemingly endless series of studies and experiments from aboriculture to literature to theology and much more. The two petty-bourgeois hobbyists have no formal training in any of the activities they undertake, and must rely on their own rather confused readings of scholarly treatises and how-to manuals, which often contradict each other. The long series of amateurish study and scientific experimentation, which provides the only real plot structure for this unusual novel, is recounted (in the third person) in great detail, always following the same pattern: each new enterprise is begun with enthusiasm, soon followed by failure, frustration, and dejection, until the haphazard discovery of a new project, which sets the whole cycle going again. The effect is comic, though repetitious.