Flaubert’s Salammbô
(1862) resembles nothing so much as a ‘fifties Biblical or Classical epic, amounting
to the verbal equivalent of a Technicolor, wide-screen spectacular with a cast
of thousands, exotic sets and costumes, and a good share of sex and violence
[1]. Just as such films focused on characters
dressed in elaborate and strange apparel set in scenes of faraway times
and places, Flaubert’s historical novel offers the reader exceedingly detailed
descriptions of exotic clothing, jewelry, and even cosmetics. Like a Cecil B. DeMille feature, Salammbô alternates
warfare and torture with erotic excitement and love-longing, so as never to
lack some appeal to the back-brain.
The author’s
habitual obsession with precise concrete delineation of every scene, his famous
pursuit of le mot juste, here is combined with the prodigious research
with which he prepared to write the novel.
The reader of Salammbô, even with a good knowledge of French,
might likely be slowed by the vocabulary for military units, maneuvers, siege
engines, and the like. (Latin scholars
may recall a similar demand on readers of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.) This fact, as well as the occurrence of numerous out-of-the-way terms
for gems, fabrics, and the like, can make the text difficult. Footnotes would often help. One
suspects that Flaubert was loathe to waste a single fact from his notes, as though the
use of many obsolete, foreign, or otherwise out-of-the-way words would strengthen the substance, gravitas, and beauty in his story.
After Madame Bovary, which had been meant as an uncompromisingly realistic portrayal with verisimilitude as its chief value, but which brought the author an obscenity trial (at which he was acquitted), he chose to direct his gaze to the past. Just as Hedy Lamarr could be sexy in DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), under the protection of the story’s antiquity and, in that case, Biblical authority, Salammbô can fascinate men in the novel with less danger of legal action. Such exotic women had been popular in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) as well as in visual art. Though putatively representing antiquity the rather languid view of the past seen in pre-Raphaelite paintings or those by Lawrence Alma-Tadema or John William Waterhouse has more of a scent of nineteenth century Romanticism and, ultimately, Decadence than their medieval and classical models. Artists who depicted Flaubert’s own invention, Salammbô herself, included Victor Prové (1893), Alphonse Mucha (1896), Desiré Maurice Ferrary (1899), and Henri Adrien Tanoux (1921) [2].
While erotic
elements are surely critically important for the book’s popularity, violence,
just as in the movies, runs a close second.
To some the most boring stretches of Flaubert’s narration, battle
sequences stretch on for page after page with few single combats and a great
many compilations of nations of mercenaries, units of various sorts, slingers,
archers, cavalry and the like, as though the book might be used to train
officers in strategy. But while such
large-scale violence might at times be tiresome, the periodic massacres of
prisoners and the recurring scenes of torture and mutilation are more
disturbing. In fact both violence and
steaming sexuality are more nakedly presented in than in Bovary, but in
the later novel a wash of ancient history makes the sensational more acceptable.
Though aesthetic
value is unprovable, Flaubert’s reputation as a stylist, reinforced very likely
by the reader’s own experience, is sufficient to suggest that each passage is
cunningly crafted to accomplish its effects.
The cinematic parallel would be, perhaps, the mature Eisenstein of Ivan
the Terrible in which every frame is artfully composed, a standard that few
would suggest DeMille ever even sought to achieve. The attention here is not to the actual
complexity of a work of art, but the maker’s level of intention. Whereas Flaubert was hoping to do something
new and to compose a novel of lasting
value, based on its formal qualities alone, most Hollywood filmmakers seek to
adhere to convention and have little ambition more far=reaching than to sell
tickets upon the picture’s release.
Virtually all critics
would agree that Flaubert’s prose is beautiful, and their expositions of this
point are readily available. In many
passages the rhythm of Flaubert’s hypnotic periodic phrasing and the melodious
sound of his descriptions is foregrounded even if a passage contains little specific
information, like this.
They were not Libyans from the area of Carthage who had long made up the
third army, but rather nomads from the plateau of Barca, bandits from Cape Phiscus
and the promontory of Derné, some from Phazzana and Marmarique. They had gone over the desert drinking from brackish
wells amid the bones of camels. The Zuaèces,
adorned with ostrich feathers, had come on quadrigæ, Garamantes, veiled with
black masks, arrived on their painted mounts, others were riding asses, onagers,
zebras, and buffalo. Some among them pulled
the rood of their boat-shaped with their families and their idols. There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by
the water of their hot springs, Atarantians who curse the sun, Troglodytes who
inter their dead laughing under tree branches, and the hideous Ausians who eat grasshoppers;
the Achyrmachides, who eat lice, and the Gysantes, painted with vermilion, who
eat monkeys. [3]
Surely there is
meant to be something incantatory in this list of place names. The exotic customs, none of which, of course,
play any role in the plot, far from reinforcing the historic verisimilitude,
are curiosities, reminiscent of the dog-headed men in Pliny or the immense aspidochelone of
the Physiologus. Whether or not
the reader is susceptible to Flaubert’s calculated cadences, the list of
nationalities, all of which are likely unknown to the reader, in fact makes the
narration not more “real,” but considerably more fanciful. Still Flaubert’s self-consciously meticulous style is undeniable, but here its
appeal is based neither on authenticity nor on painting an imaginable picture,
but rather on the appeal of the unfamiliar and the charm of sound alone, as
in magic formulae.
The other
characteristic that most fundamentally marks the contrast between Salammbô and a spectacular Hollywood epic is
more objectively demonstrable. Mid-twentieth
century American movies made for a mass audience will present an unambiguous
moral universe, with clearly demarcated heroes and villains and a strong
tendency toward retributive justice. The
audience is cheering for one side because it is represented as fundamentally
right whereas its opponents are not.
There is no room for doubt.
In Salammbô
on the other hand, while the reader identifies with the heroine emotionally,
there seems little to choose between the rulers of Carthage and their barbarian
mercenaries. Each side is engaged in
corrupt power struggles [4]. The
motivation that stands apart is the erotic bond between Matho and Salammbô. Even there Matho's passion seems a weakness,
contributing to the great fighter’s downfall, and Salammbô’s death at the end
makes her a pathetic rather than an admirable character. The reader is impressed with the power of
these portraits, but has no wish to emulate them.
This pose of
thematic indifference, a reluctance to delineate moral judgements or other
conclusions about lived experience, is axiomatic in Flaubert’s realism. To impose value judgements would be for him
to compromise the representation of reality itself. As Flaubert put it “stupidity consists of
wanting to come to conclusions” [5]. For
him true realism must be, like science, objective.
Far from accidental, this distinction illustrates one
of the principal characteristics distinguishing popular from “high art,” called
in various contexts elite, courtly, or learned.
Every imagined portrayal of reality satisfies some reader expectations
while challenging or twisting others.
Works consumed by a mass audience, both tribal or folk art without a
known creator and modern commercial productions like movies, television shows,
and potboilers, tend to confirm consumers’ anticipations and artistic
conventions, while those with a smaller yet more sophisticated readership will
more often deny expected ideas and point out problems, contradictions, and mysteries.
The former serves the social function of confirming and perpetuating
group values and customs, whereas the latter opens the way for change and
allows for uncertainty.
Thus Salammbô may
be read, just as a DeMille epic would be viewed, for its more sensational elements of sex and violence; it may
be considered for its success in creating a world of the past through the
accumulation of detail, or it may be contemplated simply as an aesthetic
object, a series of melodious sentences.
1. A number of films
have, in fact, been based on Flaubert’s novel, including Arturo Ambrosio’s Salammbo
(1911), Domenico Gaido’s Salambo (1914), Réda Ait’s Salambo (1916),
Pierre Marodon’s Salammbô (1925),
Sergio Grieco’s The Loves of Salammbô (1960), and Jacques
Perconte’s Salammbô (2022). The predominance of early titles and the fact
that all the cinematic versions were made in Europe suggests that the
reputation of Flaubert’ novel lingered into the twentieth century. There are in addition operas by y Modest
Mussorgsky, (1865, unfinished), Ernest Reyer (1890), and Philippe Fénelon
(1992). More recently Barney B. Johnson
composed an opera-ballet on the theme.
2. An exhibition in
the Musée des Beaux-arts in Rouen in 2021 collected many such works for an
exhibit called "Salammbô: Fureurs! Passion! Éléphants!" The costumes described in the novel are said
to have influenced French fashion, particularly the use of veils, cloaks, and
mantles. In an odd legacy of the book
the area, today a part of Tunis, called Le Kram in 1921 changed it s name to
Salammbo after the discovery there of Carthaginian archaeological remains.
3. Ce n'étaient pas
les Libyens des environs de Carthage; depuis longtemps ils composaient la
troisième armée; mais les nomades du plateau de Barca, les bandits du cap
Phiscus et du promontoire de Derné, ceux du Phazzana et de la Marmarique. Ils
avaient traversé le désert en buvant aux puits saumâtres maçonnés avec des
ossements de chameau; les Zuaèces, couverts de plumes d'autruche, étaient venus
sur des quadriges; les Garamantes, masqués d'un voile noir, assis en arrière
sur leurs cavales peintes; d'autres sur des ânes, sur des onagres, sur des
zèbres, sur des buffles; et quelques-uns traînaient, avec leurs familles et
leurs idoles, le toit de leur cabane en forme de chaloupe. Il y avait des
Ammoniens aux membres ridés par l'eau chaude des fontaines; des Atarantes, qui
maudissent le soleil; des Troglodytes, qui enterrent en riant leurs morts sous
des branches d'arbre; et les hideux Auséens, qui mangent des sauterelles; les
Achyrmachides, qui mangent des poux, et les Gysantes, peints de vermillon, qui
mangent des singes. (From Chapter 12)
4. Some characters
are more attractive than others.
Spendius, for instance, the former slave, is depicted as more venal than
either Matho or Hamilcar. Yet these
distinctions do not guide the narrative or shape a definitive theme.
5. Letter to Louis
Bouilhet of September 4,1850. “L’ineptie
consiste à vouloir conclure.” Later in
the letter the sentiment is repeated: “Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir
conclure.”
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