An Entertaining Look at Fiction’s Historical Flaws

SAVAGE REPRISALS

Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks

by Peter Gay

W.W. Norton

192 pages, $24.95

Hefty, solid, vividly detailed, large as--indeed, larger than--life, the great novels of the 19th century are crammed with riches of all kinds. Who can forget the dark, fog-shrouded London of “Bleak House” and the hapless characters caught in the coils of that tangled legal case Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce? Or the tragic story of the vapid yet poignant middle-class adulteress Emma Bovary? Or the melancholy saga of the declining north German merchant family chronicled in Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks”?

Cultural historian Peter Gay takes a fresh look at these three masterpieces in his “Savage Reprisals.” According to Gay, there are at least three ways of reading a novel: “as a source of civilized pleasures, as a didactic instrument serving self-improvement, as a document opening doors to culture.” He fully endorses the first. The second, “with all its good intentions and its earnestness,” he somewhat condescendingly consigns “to pedagogues and salesmen of spirituality.” It is the third way that he has chosen to take issue with, for he believes that it can be a serious mistake to assume that novels are always reliable sources of history.

Do many people read fiction to learn about the historical past? The answer, apparently, is yes. Not only do we have writers of every stripe, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hilary Mantel and Iain Pears to E.L. Doctorow, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., turning their hands to historical fiction. There is also a strong tendency, when reading realist novels of any era, to feel that we are learning a lot about that period. Thus we have Victorian London, courtesy of Charles Dickens; bourgeois France via Gustav Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”; and the last of the German upper-middle-class burghers in Mann’s “Buddenbrooks.”

But are these memorable fictional renderings reliable as history? Gay contends they are not. Which is not to say there isn’t some truth in them. Mann drew upon his intimate knowledge of the German merchant class in his portrait of the Buddenbrook family. Flaubert was famously obsessed with getting every detail of his heroine’s daily life right. Even the more impressionistic and poetic Dickens provides a hauntingly real portrait of the fogbound Victorian city where the law was too often an “ass” and poverty truly a curse.

Yet, as Gay would remind us, reform was already taking place even as Dickens was decrying injustice, and some of the people leading the reforms came from the very groups Dickens satirized, like the “do-gooding” women he mocked in the character of Mrs. Jellyby. The 19th century French bourgeois, far from being the petty, shallow philistines painted by Flaubert, included philanthropists and art collectors. Some even, notes Gay, were readers of “high-level fiction, the kind of reading of which Flaubert would have approved, had he taken the trouble to ask them about the novels on their night tables. Some of them even read Flaubert.”

And finally, Gay contends, the highly schematized contrasts and dichotomies with which Mann invested “Buddenbrooks” had more to do with the novelist’s philosophical ideas than with the lives of actual mercantile families.

The realism of these novelists, Gay explains, is a literary technique and not the same as a historian’s commitment to providing an accurate account of reality. The historian strives for historical truth; these novelists strove for a sense of verisimilitude that would strengthen the aesthetic impact and emotional truth of their novels. Flaubert in particular has been praised for his coolly “objective” realism, so different from the warmly subjective romanticism of his friend and confidante George Sand.

Against this, Gay cites Flaubert himself: “People believe that I am smitten with the real, while I execrate it, for it is in hatred of realism that I have undertaken this novel.” Far from launching an attack on romanticism in “Madame Bovary,” Gay argues, Flaubert defends the pure, exalted romanticism he loves against the debased version of it that leads his heroine astray. To make his argument more dramatic, Gay goes in for a bit of overstatement: The motive behind these novels, he claims, was not to depict social reality but to attack it. For these novelists, writing well was the best revenge. In offering up realism and revenge as two possible motives for writing, Gay creates something of a false dichotomy that oversimplifies the reasons that writers write and the ways in which readers read. And his title, “Savage Reprisals,” gives new meaning to the word “hyperbole.” But the thrust of what he has to say is certainly salutary.

Sophisticated readers, one would think, would not need Gay or anyone else to warn them against mistaking fiction for history. But not all readers are sophisticated, so perhaps the case can never be made too often. The great strength of these essays is that they are truly a pleasure to read: lucid, accessible, sharp, entertaining and witty, written in crisp, inviting prose.

Even those for whom Gay’s thesis is hardly news will enjoy revisiting these classic novels in his knowledgeable, refreshingly astringent company.