The Temptation of Saint Anthony 
by 

Gustave Flaubert

 

The Creation of Literary Space

Mahler’s last symphony is about the history of European music - if it is about anything at all. Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas is not primarily about the Infanta princess but about the life of an artist in the royal Spanish court of the 17th century. And Flaubert’s Temptation is only incidentally about the Egyptian saint; it’s real subject is books and the way they affect our human existence. All these works expand what constitutes artistic endeavour. They create new genres by commenting upon and exploiting previous artistic achievements.

Flaubert called the Temptation “the work of my entire life.” That life was devoted to literature. So what else could the book be about than the books he had read, the ones he had intended to read, and even the ones he had never heard of. Books, after all, were his life just as music was Mahler’s and painting Velasquez’s. Temptation is an autobiography masquerading as a religious myth. Not unlike Evelyn Waugh’s novel Helena a century later, Temptation is a masque, that is to say, Flaubert’s most deeply considered persona, his best self-assessment. It took him three decades to write. Perhaps, therefore, the book was his own form of psycho-therapy.

The introduction by Michel Foucault in my edition is really essential to Flaubert’s text. In it, Foucault points out the inspiration for Temptation in Breughel’s eponymous painting. Flaubert’s interpretation of that painting is profoundly insightful. As Anthony sits assiduously reading the Bible in his desert cave, he is surrounded by elegant ladies and grotesque demons. These are obviously hallucinatory embodiments of his temptations and he is apparently warding them off through his bible-study. What is not immediately obvious is that these beings have emerged from his reading, from the Bible itself. Or, perhaps more accurately, these strange creatures erupt from the written word of the holiest of books through Anthony’s imagination. Advancing through his creativity from the Bible, the temptations then fill his world with alluring delights and horrid spectres. Paradoxically, therefore, the comfort Anthony seeks is the precisely the source of his need for comfort.

This interpretation might seem unwarranted at first. The Bible creating distractions from contemplation of the Word of God appears as a contradiction. And it is just that, a contradiction embedded in the Christian doctrine with which Flaubert was very familiar. It is a contradiction articulated explicitly by the chief architect of the Christian religion, St. Paul. Among the many contradictions taught by Paul, that of the inherent danger of Scripture is most disconcerting for the believer. Flaubert clearly took Paul seriously.

In the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans, Paul says clearly, “If there were no law, sin would not have power.” The law he is referring to of course is that of the Torah, the first five books of the Judaic and Christian Bible in which not only the Ten Commandments but also the other 411 divine ordinances are contained. In Paul’s mind, the Torah didn’t just define evil, it promoted it, in a sense, by publicising it. Flaubert transforms this still-controversial Pauline insight into an equally radical thesis about his own life.

Both St. Paul and Flaubert undermine a common presumption, namely that we as users of words, books, and language in general, have control over words, books and language. Of course, we do not. These things, we like to think, simply inform, inspire, or develop our unique intellects. But their principal function is in fact to shape us, to ensure that we conform to conventional norms, not just of vocabulary and grammar and appropriate usage, but also of the categories and processes by which we think. Our conceits about words, books and language ‘representing’ reality and stating ‘truth,’ about either the world or ourselves, are unfounded. We are created utterly by what we read and hear. We do not choose what we read and hear; it chooses us; and creates the illusion that what we next randomly hear and read is somehow a matter of choice. 

So Flaubert’s Temptation is a unique biography, not of Anthony who is but one of the people, places and things Flaubert has read and heard about. It is a biography composed of books, allusions to which permeate his entire text. These are the books which have influenced him and established his unique personality. They are he. Or rather he is they. Certainly it is his native gifts which have processed these books, and which perhaps promoted his receptivity to them. But it is the books themselves which have filled the space afforded by those gifts. 

For the rest of us, as Foucault says, Flaubert showed us what this new literary space is. The Temptation is a sort of statement of discovery of that space, as significant a discovery as made by any explorer. And we all can participate in it. The Bible never mentions the creation of space by God. Undoubtedly the ancient writers considered it as ‘no-thing.’ Perhaps, on the other hand, this is because this grand creative function was reserved by God for human beings, particularly human beings like Mahler, Velasquez, and Flaubert.