Je veux qu'il n'y ait pas dans mon livre un seul mouvement, ni une seule réflexion de l'auteur.It is not usually difficult to determine `who sees' in Madame Bovary but it is much more so to determine `who speaks'. The status and identity of the narrator in Madame Bovary is problematic. Several narrators recount Madame Bovary whose voices take over from one another so unobtrusively that we scarcely notice the shift of perspective and retain the impression that there is but one narrator.
Letter to Louise Colet (8 February, 1852)Madame Bovary n'a rien de vrai. C'est une histoire totalement inventée je n'y ai rien mis ni de mes sentiments ni de mon existence. L'illusion (s'il y en a une) vient au contraire de l'impersonnalité de l'oeuvre. C'est un de mes principes, qu'il ne faut pas s'écrire. L'artiste doit être dans son oeuvre comme Dieu dans la création, invisible et toutpuissant;
Letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie (18 March, 1857)
Before we discuss the identity of the narrator in Madame Bovary let's look at the different kinds of narrators available. Gérard Genette has identified four types of narrators:
The first six pages of Madame Bovary present us with the fourth type of narrator as defined by Genette. The very first pages of the novel reiterate the ambivalent status of narratorial authority. The denizen of the narrated world does not speak of himself but of another, of others, of all the others in fact, except himself. He is present, yet we do not see him; he is simply a point of reference, vision and a memory transmitting what he saw and learned at a certain moment. His identity is mysterious not only because of his reserve concerning his own person but because he speaks in the first person plural, which indicates that he is not one but several characters. He might be a collective narrator: the `nous' of the first chapter refers perhaps to the entire student body of the school or to a group of students. The intra diegetic narrator refers to himself only seven times. Throughout the whole of the first tableau Charles' arrival in the school room, the teasing, the episode of the `casquette', the punishment of the teacher in which the intra diegetic narrator's viewpoint dominant, it seems as though we are about to read a personal confession autobiography. In addition to giving the impression that the story he is telling is true, so fulfilling the mimetic thrust which realist writers aim at, the haziness surrounding his grammatical form facilitates his replacement by another the extra diegetic hetero diegetic narrator (the first type). He vanishes and his disappearance is not even noticed because he was very nearly invisible anyway. After Charles has joined the class, the omniscient narrator sketches in background material that the enigmatic `nous' could not possibly know. The plural narrator appears once more to recapitulate and then the omniscient narrator takes over for good.- extra diegetic hetero diegetic narrator an `external' narrator who is not a fictional character in the story he narrates. This is, of course, the third person omniscient narrator which one finds predominant in Madame Bovary.
- extra diegetic homo diegetic narrator an `external' narrator who narrates his own story (corresponding to a first person retrospective narrative, where the narrator is extra diegetic and his past experiencing self is intra diegetic the type of narrator in Manon Lescaut, for example.
- intra diegetic hetero diegetic narrator a fictional narrator who narrates events in which he does not participate.
- intra diegetic homo diegetic narrator a fictional narrator who tells his own story, such as we find in La Peste and oddly at the beginning of Madame Bovary.
In quantitative terms the omniscient narrator has the principal responsibility in Madame Bovary and his attributes are omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience. He moves about freely in time and space and the cardinal tactical decisions that determine the narrative strategy of Madame Bovary fall on his shoulders: he decides which facts are communicated to the reader a which are hidden from him and for how long, the temporal plane on which an episode, description or theme is situated, and at what moment in the narrative is transferred to one or another of the characters, or to their thoughts, feelings, movements, or to the natural setting and the things around them. The majority of the material narrated in the third person singular is recounted by an absence that speaks, a glacial, meticulous observer who does not allow himself to be seen. This invisibility is born, of course, of objectivity; the reader believes he does not exist; s/he has the impression that the narrative material is engendering itself before his/her eyes.
If no author before Flaubert had ever worked out such effective techniques for concealing the narrator's existence, his unshakeable ideas on the subject of impassibility and objectivity were happily not applied as though they were dogma. There are countless instances in Madame Bovary when the omniscient narrator ceases to be invisible; absence becomes presence.
Further Reading
http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/comm.html
Les Chemins du savoir
Concept: Charlie Mansfield, Text: Tony McNeill, Artwork: Carole Baker
The University of Sunderland, GB, Last Update 18-Mar-96