160 Flaubert and the French Literary Field is perhaps because the entry into adult life, that is, into one or ano*her the social games that society asks us to invest in, does not always Se °* the most obvious thing to do. Frederic, like all difficult adoleScen,. serves as a formidable analyst of our deepest relationships with soqet.' To objectify romantic, fictional illusion, and above all, the relations}/' with the so-called real world on which it hinges, is to be reminded^ the reality against which we measure all our imaginings is merely ^ recognized referent for an (almost) universally recognized illusion. Flaubert says all this without saying it, and it is quite understandably that we understand without understanding. One is reminded of Prou$t's comment: 'A work that is stamped with theories is like an object that is still stamped with its price.' That is to say, there is something vulgar about bringing to the surface of a literary work its underlying theories. And yet, one should go all the way and try to make explicit the theory 0f the literary effect, of the novel's charm that is contained within the analysis of the effect that the sociological analysis exerts upon a literary text. The novelistic vision simulates and dissimulates reality; in the very act of giving it, it withdraws it. The form of the literary creation by which writers are able to say whatever the formal conventions of the day allow them to say is itself a mask; it brings unreality to what it presents as reality. Literary charm lies in this double game: 'Quae plus latent, plus placent,' said Saint Bernard. The more a work hides, the greater the pleasure. The more the writings are able to suggest, veiling what they are unveiling, the greater is the specifically literary effect that they produce and that the objectification tends to destroy. Literary charm lies in a relationship of veiled revelation between an historical form and an historical content or context. The 'eternal charm' that Marx himself felt obliged to confer at least to Greek art may be understood in purely historical terms. It appears when what the veiled revelation reveals is an invariant historical structure, as, in the particular case of Sentimental Education, the structure of the field of power that every adolescent (at least every bourgeois adolescent) must confront, in 1848 as well as in 1968. These are my initial reflections on Sentimental Education. Since the novel only reveals the structure of the society which it expresses in disguised fashion, in the next lecture we shall have to come back to the direct, frankly sociological analysis of the structure of the field of power and of the literary field in which Flaubert himself took shape and which lies behind his representation of this structure. Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus 1 The reading of Sentimental Education has allowed the extraction of two bodies of information: first, Flaubert's representation of the structure of the field of power and the writer's position in that structure; and second, what 1 have termed Flaubert's formula, the generative scheme which, as the fundamental structure of Flaubert's habitus, is at the basis of the Flaubertian construction of the social world. In sum, on the one hand, Flaubert's sociology, meaning the sociology which he produces;on the other, the sociology of Flaubert, meaning the sociology of which heis the object. If it is true that the former furnishes us with elements for the latter, we must first of all submit it to the test. What is the structure of the social space in which the Flaubertian project was generated.' In my opinion, the approach the analyst should take in order to understand Flaubert's position, and thus uncover the principle ofhis work, is precisely the opposite of Sartre's approach in The Family Idiot. Generally speaking, Sartre seeks the genetic principle of Flaubert's work in the individual Gustave, in his infancy, in his first familial experiences. Using the method outlined in the chapter of the Critique ofDialectical Reason entitled 'Questions of Method', Sartre hopes to discover a mediation between social structures and the work. He finds this mediation thanks to a method of analysis which integrates psychoanalysis and sociology in a social psychology of Flaubert, and which, as evidenCed by the title, accords an enormous role to Flaubert's position in h's family and to the experiences associated with the relationships between Flaubert, his father and his older brother. 162 Flaubert and the French Literary Field One may credit Sartre with having reintroduced the social dimensjQ into intra-familial relations: the relationship to the rather or the 11 brother is one of the probable careers which are proposed to Flaub ^ and thus to the space of social possibles available to him. Neverthele^1 we do not abandon the point of view of the individual; or indeed, wh ' we do, it is to leap, in one motion, into the 'society' taken in its em\r^ (vol. 2 of The Family Idiot). Thus we have on the one hand * macro-sociology, and on the other a social micro-psychology, without' relation between the two ever being truly established. We find here something that happens to all who attempt a sociol0 gical analysis of literary creation; it is as much the case with Lukács 0ř Goldmann as with Adorno in relation to Heidegger, among so manv others. This is also what makes one doubt the possibility of a true sociology of literary creation. Sartre's merit is that, with his characteristically mad energy, he pushed the paradigm to its limits, setting the considerable resources of his talent and culture to the task of attempting to account totally for a creative project as a function of social variables. And 1 believe he railed (even if he brings interesting ideas to the psycho-sociology of Flaubert's family experience). Thus, we must completely reverse the procedure and ask, not how a writer comes to be what he is, in a sort of genetic psycho-sociology, but rather how the position or 'post' he occupies - that of a writer of a particular type - became constituted. It is only then that we can ask if the knowledge of particular social conditions of the production of what 1 have termed his habitus permits us to understand that he has succeeded in occupying this position, if only by transforming it. The genetic structuralism 1 propose is designed to understand both the genesis of social structures - the literary field - and the genesis of the dispositions of the habitus of the agents who are involved in these structures, i This is not self-evident. For example, historians of art and literatury victims of what I call the illusion of the constancy of the nominal, retrospectively transport, in their analyses of cultural productions prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, definitions of the writer and the artist which are entirely recent historical inventions and which, having become constitutive of our cultural universe, appear to us as a given. The invention of the writer and the artist, to which Flaubert himself greatly contributed, is the end result of a collective enterpr'* which is inseparable from (1) the constitution of an autonomous literaO' field, independent of or even opposite to the economic field (e-8" bohemian vs bourgeois), and (2) the constitution of a tactical positi011 within the field (e.g. artist vs bohemian). What do 1 mean by 'field'? As I use the term, a field is a separate soC^. universe having its own laws of functioning independent of those ^ politics and the economy. The existence of the writer, as fact and I Field of Fower, Literary Field and Habitus 163 is inseparable from the existence of the literary field as an va nom°us universe endowed with specific principles of evaluation of ^ctices and works. To understand Flaubert or Baudelaire, or any P major or minor, is first of all to understand what the status of >vrit.er'consists of at the moment considered; that is, more precisely, the clal conditions of the possibility of this social function, of this social s ,rs0nage. In fact, the invention of the writer, in the modern sense of the j\ m js inseparable from the progressive invention of a particular social me, which I term the literary field and which is constituted as it establishes 'ts autonomy, that is to say, its specific laws of functioning, within the rield of power-To provide a preliminary idea of what 1 mean by that I will make use 0f the old notion of the 'Republic of Letters', of which Bayle, in his pictionna're historique et critique, had announced the fundamental law: 'Liberty is what reigns in the Republic of Letters. This Republic is an extremely free state. In it, the only empire is that of truth and reason; and under their auspices, war is naively waged against just about anybody. Friends must protect themselves from their friends, fathers from children, fathers-in-law from sons-in-law: it is a century of iron. In it everyone is both ruler and subject of everyone else.' Several fundamental properties of the field are enunciated in this text, in a partly normative, partly positive mode: the war of everyone against everyone, that is, universal competition, the closing of the field upon itself, which causes it to be its own market and makes each of the producers seek his customers among his competitors; the ambiguity, therefore, of this world where one may see, according to the adopted perspective, the paradise of the ideal republic, where everyone is at once sovereign and subject, or the hell of the Hobbesian battle of everyone against everyone. But it is necessary to make the definition somewhat more precise. The literary field (one may also speak of the artistic field, the philosophical field, etc.) is an independent social universe with its own laws of functioning, its specific relations of force, its dominants and its dominated, and so forth. Put another way, to speak of 'field' is to recall that '■terary works are produced in a particular social universe endowed with Particular institutions and obeying specific laws. And yet this observa-D°nruns counter to both the tradition of internal reading, which considers works in themselves independently from the historical condi-n°ns in which they were produced, and the tradition of external rgi'5''cat'0n' which one normally associates with sociology and which ates the works directly to the economic and social conditions of the foment. a ^"h's field is neither a vague social background nor even a milieu *»tk Ue ''^ 3 nniverse of personal relations between artists and ers (perspectives adopted by those who study 'influences'). It is a 164 Flaubert and the French Literary Field at,ons ^ veritable social universe where, in accordance with its parties there accumulatesa particular form of capital and whSre rel force )Gf a particular type are exerted. This universe is then.,'"* <>f entirely specific struggles, notably concerning the question of k'j* * who ,s {.art of the universe, who is a real writer and who is no?^8 important fact, for the interpretation of works, is that this^uCo' ^ social universe functions somewhat like a prism which rZ«^ external determination: demographic, economic or political even> always retranslated according to the specific logic ofthe field 1"? byjh.s intermediary that they act on the logics the devefeel;1^; To know Flaubert (or Baudelaire or Feydeau), to understand ! work, ,s thus ^understand, first of all, what this LnctyZSi ^ rse is, with customs as organized and m™^;™*.?!.' SOa* universe organized and mysterious as rhncp c* primitive tribe. It is to understand, in the first place how itVdT 3 fundamental law of this specie ^^^7* that jJ which establishes a negative ^c,rre.a;,V;3e^Sei;ettw:;nC)ftedn;SeS(neodtnael!f' financial) success and properly artistic value, is tneni„lCcTc0of,thc,!aW economic exchange. The artistic field is a in.-.^ers^oj^o!^^ Si:^i^.Ct'0"Ld'St'n^UIsheS <™ the production of the mot c™ objects in that it must produce not only the ob,ect in its also the value of this obiecr. rh: This most common materiality, but - tfs^,:seloCa^abt;iSfC)b,eCt;,that reC°gn,t,0n ^rtisticlegi^im^. ^inseparable from the production of the artist or the writer as mining 'c^f't^e] aTrrS^ 35 3 "i?'0' °f Va,UC" A refIeCt,on on the meaning of the artist s signature would thus be in order. come^or™^ P 'hisauLt0?°m0US field, a kind of com defol.eor I Wh° e"Lter thiS comP'etely particular social neiTh^d P 'n, dom,nat,on> b"t as dominated agents: they are neither dominant, plain and simple, nor want to believe at certain momentsof their U^^r^M dodm,nmatneadtedorPmC,S'fC,n i^'"^ C,3SS' a-ownL ofa st wtt^ consecrating or condemning by speech, and the fool, a character freed from convention and conformities to Vmti is acc°rded transgression without consequences, inspired by the *ure pleasure of breaking the rule or of shocking. Every ambiguity of the ^odern intellectual is inscribed in the character of the fool: he is the ugly [^ffoon, ridiculous, a bit vile, but he is also the alerter who warns or the a(jviser who brings forth the lesson; and, above all, he is the demolisher of social illusions. Significantly, all statistical inquiries show that the social properties of agents, thus their dispositions, correspond to the social properties of the position they occupy. The literary and artistic fields attract a particularly strong proportion of individuals who possess all the properties of the dominant class minus one: money. They are, if I may say, parents pauvres or 'poor relatives' of the great bourgeois dynasties, aristocrats already ruined or in decline, members of stigmatized minorities like Jews or foreigners. One thus discovers, from the first moment, that is, at the level even of the social position of the literary and artistic field in the field of power, a property which Sartre discovered within the domestic unit and in the particular case of Flaubert: the writer is the 'poor relative', the idiot of the bourgeois family. The structural ambiguity of their position in the field of power leads writers and painters, these 'penniless bourgeois' in Pissarro's words, to maintain an ambivalent relationship with the dominant class within the field of power, those whom they call 'bourgeois', as well as with the dominated, the 'people'. In a similar way, they form an ambiguous image of their own position in social space and of their social function: fris explains the fact that they are subject to great fluctuation, notably in •fie area of politics (for example, when the centre of gravity of the field shifted towards the left in 1848, one notes a general swing towards social art': Baudelaire, for instance, speaks of the childish or 'puerile Utopia of art for art's sake' and rises up in violent terms against pure art (seeQe I'tcole paienne, 1851). The characteristics of the positions occupied by intellectuals and joists in the field of power can be specified as a function of the positions ev occupy in the literary or artistic field. In other words, the position 0 the literary field within the field of power affects everything that 166 Flaubert and the French Literary Field occurs within the latter. In order to understand what artists andty • can say or do, one must always take into account their membership s dominated universe and the greater or lesser distance of this univ^9 from that of the dominant class, an overall distance that varies ?Se different periods and societies and also, at any given time, with , r' positions within the literary field. One of the great principle 115 differentiation within the literary field, in fact, lies in the relations}^ towards the structural position of the field, and thus of the writer th'^ different positions within the literary field favour; or, if oneprefe'rs at the different ways of realizing this fundamental relationship, that js' 'n the different relationships with economic or political power, and w'j^ the dominant fraction, that are associated with these different positions Thus the three positions around which the literary field is organize between 1830 and 1850, namely, to use the indigenous labels, 'Socja| art', 'art for art's sake' and 'bourgeois art', must be understood firstas so many particular forms of the generic relationship which unites writers, dominated-dominant, to the dominant-dominant. Thepartisans of social art, republican and democratic like Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc or Proudhon, or liberal Catholics like Lamennais and many others who are now completelyunknown, condemn the 'egotistical' art of the partisans of art for art's sake and demand that literature fulfil a social or political function. Their lower position within the literary field, at the intersection of the literary field with the political field, doubtless maintains a circular causal relationship with respect to their solidarity with the dominated, a relationship that certainly is based in part on hostility towards the dominant within the intellectual field. The partisans of 'bourgeois art', who write in the main for the theatre, are closely and directly tied to the dominant class by their lifestyle and their system of values, and they receive, in addition to significant material benefits (the theatre is the most economically profitable of literary activities) all the symbols of bourgeois honour - notably the Academy. In painting, with Horace Vernet or Paul Delaroche, in literature with Paul de Kock or Scribe, the bourgeois public is presented with an attenuated, softened, watered-down version of Romantic'snl-The restoration of 'healthy and honest' art is the responsibility of what has been called the 'school of good sense': those like Ponsard, Emile Augier, Jules Sandeau and, later, Octave Feuillet, Murger, Cherubuliez> Alexandre Dumas fils, Maxime Ducamp. Emile Augier and Octave Feuillet, whom Jules de Goncourt called the 'family Musset', and who1*' Flaubert detested even more than Ponsard, subject the most frenzie Romanticism to the tastes and norms of the bourgeoisie, celebrat'°^ marriage, good management of property, the honourable placement o children in life. Thus, Emile Augier, in L'Aventuriere, combines tn rieia uf rower, merary neiu ana naunus id/ • ental reminiscences of Hugo and Musset with praise of morality sent'^milv life, a satire on courtesans and condemnation of love late in ''^rh s the defenders of art for art's sake occupy a central but turally ambiguous position in the field which destines them to feel strUL doubled intensity the contradictions that are inherent in the kjRuous position of the field of cultural production in the field of er. Tneir Position in the field compels them to think of themselves, P°Wthe aesthetic as well as the political level, in opposition to the bourgeois artists', homologous to the 'bourgeois' in the logic of the i]A and in opposition to the 'social artists' and to the'socialist boors', Flaubert's words, or to the 'bohemians', homologous to the 'people', c" ch conflicts are felt successively or simultaneously, according to the olitical climate. As a result, the members of this group are led to form contradictory images of the groups they oppose as well as of themselves. Dividing up the social world according to criteria that are first of all aesthetic, a process that leads them to cast the 'bourgeois', who are closed to art, and the 'people', imprisoned by the material problems of everyday existence, into the same scorned class, they can simultaneously or successively identify with a glorified working class or with a new aristocracy of the spirit. A few examples: 'I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in working smocks and the bourgeois in frock coats. We, and we alone, that is the cultured, are the people, or to put it better, the tradition of humanity' (letter to George Sand, May 1867). 'All must bow before the elite: the Academy of Sciences must replace the Pope.' Brought back towards the 'bourgeois' when they feel threatened by the bohemians, they can be prompted by their disgust for the bourgeois or the bourgeois artist to proclaim their solidarity with all those whom the brutality of bourgeois interests and prejudices rejects or excludes: the bohemian, the young artist, the acrobat, the ruined noble, the 'good-hearted servant' and especially, perhaps, the prostitute, a figure who is symbolic of the artist's relationship to the market. Their disgust for the bourgeois, a customer who is at the same time fought after and scorned, whom they reject as much as he rejects them, ls fed, in the intellectual field, the first horizon of all aesthetic and Political conflicts, by disgust for the bourgeois artist, that disloyal competitor who assures for himself immediate success and bourgeois "onour by denying himself as a writer: 'There is something a thousand ^mes more dangerous than the bourgeois,' says Baudelaire in his ^""Osites esthetiques, 'and that is the bourgeois artist, who was created *° come between the artist and genius, who hides each from the other.' {x is remarkable that all the partisans of art for art's sake, with the 168 Flaubert and the French Literary Field exception of Bouilhet and Banville, suffered resounding defeat • theatre, like Flaubert and the Goncourts, or that, like Gautje'n ^ Baudelaire, they kept librettos or scripts in their portfolios.) Si^-i^ the scorn shown at other times by the professionals of artistic r'y, vour, the partisans of art for art's sake, towards the literary proi^e'" who are jealous of their success, inspires the image that they have T1** 'populace'. The Goncourts, in their Journal, denounce 'the tyran the brasseries and of bohemian life over all real workers' and0l?^ °^ Flaubert to the 'great bohemians', like Murger, in order to justify conviction that 'one must be an honest man and an honouraLjlr bourgeois in order to be a man of talent'. Placed at the field's centre ^ gravity, they lean towards one pole or the other according to the state °f the forces outside the field and their indirect consequences within th field, shifting towards political commitment or revolutionary sympj6 thies in 1848 and towards indifference or conservatism under the Second Empire. This double rejection of the two opposing poles of social space and of the literary field, rejection of the 'bourgeois' and of the 'people', at the same time a rejection of 'bourgeois art' and 'social art', is continually manifested in the purely literary domain of style. The task of writing is experienced as a permanent struggle against two opposing dangers: 'I alternate between the most extravagant grandiloquence and the most academic platitudes. This smacks alternatively of Petrus Borel and Jacques Delille' (to Ernest Feydeau, late November/early December 1857); 'I am afraid of falling into a sort of Paul de Kock or of producing Chateaubriandized Balzac' (to Louise Colet, 20 September 1851); 'What I am currently writing runs the risk of sounding like Paul de Kock if 1 don't impose some profoundly literary form on it' (to Louise Colet, 13 September 1852). In his efforts to distance himself from the two poles of the literary field, and by extension of the social field, Flaubert comes to refuse any mark, any distinctive sign, that could mean support, or, worse, membership. Relentlessly hunting down commonplaces, that is* those places in discourse in which an entire group meets and recogmzes itself, and idees recites, generally accepted ideas that go without say'n8 for all members of a group and that one cannot take up without affirming one's adhesion to the group, Flaubert seeks to produce socially Utopian discourse, stripped of all social markers. The need to distance oneself from all social universes goes hand ^ hand with the will to refute every kind of reference to the au^'en^e expectations. Thus Flaubert writes to Renan about the 'Prayer on ^ Acropolis': 'I don't know whether there is a more beautiful P3^ ,t prose in French! It's splendid and I am sure that the bourgeois w°".f understand a bit of it! So much the better!' The more artists affirm tn Field of Fower, Literary Held and Habitus 169 ' 0lT1y and produce works which contain and impose their own jjt0f1 of evaluation, the greater their chances of pushing the 'bourgeois' ""^point where they are incapable of appropriating these works for t°r elves. As Ortega y Gasset observes: 'by its very existence new art iherne|s the bon bourgeois to admit who he is: a bon bourgeois, a c°mPn unworthy of aesthetic feelings, deaf and blind to all pure beauty' 0Qgfjumanization of Art). The symbolic revolution through which ''' free themselves from bourgeois demands and define themselves as ^'sole masters of their art while refusing to recognize any master other ^C 5 their art - this is the very meaning of the expression 'art for art's L' _ has the effect of eliminating the market. The artist triumphs over $l 'bourgeois' in the struggle to impose aesthetic criteria, but by the 'me token rejects him as a potential customer. As the autonomy of cultural production increases, so does the time-lag that is necessary for works to impose the norms of perceptions they bring along. This time-lag between supply and demand tends to become a structural characteristic of the restricted field of production, a very special economic world in which the producers' only customers tend to be their own competitors. Thus the Christ-like mystique of the artiste maudit, sacrificed in this world and consecrated in the next, is nothing other than the retranslation of the logic of a new mode of production into ideal and ideology: in contrast to 'bourgeois artists', assured of immediate customers, the partisans of art for art's sake, compelled to produce their own market, are destined to deferred economic gratification. At the limit, pure art, like pure love, is not made to be consumed. Instant success is often seen, as with Leconte de Lisle, as 'the mark of intellectual inferiority'. We are indeed in the economic world reversed, a game in which the loser wins: the artist can triumph on the symbolic terrain only to the extent that he loses on the economic one, and vice versa. This fact can only reinforce the ambivalence of his relationship to the 'bourgeois', this unacceptable and unobtainable customer. To his friend Feydeau who is attending his dying wife, Flaubert writes: 'You have and will have some good Paintings, and you will be able to do some good studies. You'll pay for ^nem dearly. The bourgeois hardly realize that we are serving up our eart to them. The race of gladiators is not dead: every artist is one of _ e"i. He entertains the public with his death throes.' This is a case of ,ot letting oneself become caught up in the mithridatizing effect created °ur dependence on literary bombast. Gladiator or prostitute, the nst invents himself in suffering, in revolt, against the bourgeois, eco'nSt money> by inventing a separate world where the laws of js n°wic necessity are suspended, at least for a while, and where value n°t measured by commercial success. 170 Flaubert and the French Literary Field That being said, one cannot forget the economic conditions Gf tL distancing of oneself from economic necessity that we call 'disinterest j1 ness'. The 'heirs', as in Sentimental Education, hold a decisive advant in a world which, as in the world of art and literature, does not provlf immediate profits: the possibility that it offers for 'holding out' jn ti e absence of a market and the freedom it assures in relation to ur„e e needs is one of the most important factors of the differential success f the avant-garde enterprise and of its unprofitable or, at least, ven, long-term investments. 'Flaubert', observed Theophile Gautier to fev deau, 'was smarter than us. He had the wit to come into the world wi^ money, something that is absolutely indispensable to anyone who wants to get anywhere in art.' In short, it is still (inherited) money that assures freedom from money. In painting as in literature, the most innovative enterprises are the privilege of those who have inherited both the boldness and the insurance that enable this freedom to grow ...J Thus we come back to the individual agents and to the personal characteristics which predispose them to realize the potentialities inscribed in a certain position. I have attempted to show that the partisans of art for art's sake were predisposed by their position in the intellectual field to experience and to express in a particularly acute way the contradictions inherent in the position of writers and artists in the field of power. Similarly, I believe that Flaubert was predisposed through a whole set of properties to express in exemplary fashion the potentialities inscribed in the camp of art for art's sake. Some of these characteristics are shared by the whole group. For example, the social and educational background: Bouilhet, Flaubert and Fromentin are sons of famous provincial doctors; Theodore de Banville, Barbey d'Aurevilly and the Goncourts are from the provincial nobility. Almost every one of them studied law, and their biographers observe that, for several, the fathers 'wanted a high social position for them' (this opposes them to the partisans of 'social art' who, especially after 1850, come in large part from the middle class and even the working classes, while the 'bourgeois artists' are more often from the business bourgeoisie). In the position within social space of what was at the time termed capacites - that is, the 'liberal professions' - one can see the principle o particular affinities between writers issuing from that position and art for art's sake which occupies, as we have seen, a central position in 1 _ literary field: les capacites occupy an intermediary position betwe ^ economic power and intellectual prestige; this position, whose oCC]\ pants are relatively well endowed with both economic andcultu _ capital, constitutes a kind of intersection from which one can contint^e with roughly equal probabilities, towards the pole of business °r pole of art. And it is truly remarkable to see how Achille-Qeop Field of Power, Literary Field andHabitus 171 kert's father, invested simultaneously in the education of his fjj-Jjren and in real estate. "7e objective relation established between les capacites and the other :nns of the dominant class (not to mention the other classes) d ou £ti°"S ktless oriented the subconscious dispositions and the conscious resentations of Flaubert's family and of Flaubert himself with respect re^he various positions that could be explored. Therefore, in Flaubert's 10 reSpondence one can only be struck by the precocious appearance of c,e oratorical precautions, which are so characteristic of his relation to rlting, and through which Flaubert, then ten years old, distances Itself from commonplaces and pompous formulae: 'I shall answer ur letter and, as some practical jokers say, I am setting pen to paper to write to you' (to Ernest Chevalier, 18 September 1831); 'I am setting pen t0 paper (as the shopkeeper says) in order to answer your letter punctually (as the shopkeeper again says)' (to Ernest Chevalier, 18July 1835); 'As the true shopkeeper says, 1 am sitting down and I am setting pen to'paper to write to you' (to Ernest Chevalier, 25 August 1 838). The reader of The Family Idiot discovers, not without surprise, the same stereotyped horror of the stereotype in a letter from Dr Achille-Cleophas to his son in which the ritualistic considerations — here not devoid of intellectual pretension - on the virtues of travel suddenly take on a typically Flaubertian tone, with vituperation against the shopkeeper: Take advantage of your travel and remember your friend Montaigne who reminds us that we travel mainly to bring back the mood of nations and their mores, and to "rub and sharpen our wits against other brains". See, observe, and take notes; do not travel as a shopkeeper or a salesman' (29 August 1840). This programme for a literary journey, so extensively practised by writers and, in particular, by the partisans of art for art's sake, and perhaps the form of the reference r° Montaigne ('your friend'), which suggests that Gustave shared his literary tastes with his father, attests that if, as hinted by Sartre, F'aubert's literary 'vocation' may have had its origin in the 'paternal curse' and in the relationship with his elder brother - that is, in a certain ision of the work of reproduction - it met very early on with the understanding and the support of Dr Flaubert who, if one can believe ■s letter and, among other indications, the frequency of his references |. Poets in his thesis, must have been not insensitive to the prestige of the 'taary enterprise. ex iUt r^'S's not a"' ^r r^e r's^ °^ seem'nS to Pusn r^e search for an p p'anatJon a bit far, it is possible, starting from Sartre's analysis, to art r °Ut r^e h°mo'°8y between the objective relationship that tied the Itel 1 3S Poor relation' to the 'bourgeois' or 'bourgeois artist' and the at,onship that tied Flaubert, as the 'family idiot', to his elder brother, 172 Flaubert and the French Literary Field and through him - the clear objectification of the most probable care for their category - to his class of origin and to the objective futll j implied by that class. We would therefore have an extraordjn fe superimposition of redundant determinations. When Sartre evokes ^ relationship that Flaubert maintains with his family milieu, the child'6 and the misunderstood student's resentment, he seems to describe th! relationship that the segment of artists and writers maintains wjth th dominant fractions: 'He is outside and inside. He never ceases to demand that this bourgeoisie, in so far as it manifests itself to him as hjs family milieu, recognize and integrate him.'2 'Excluded and comnro. mised, victim and accomplice, he suffers from both his exclusion and his complicity.'3 To evoke the relationship that Gustave maintained with his brother Achille, an objective realization of the objective probability Gf a career attached to his 'category', is to evoke the relationship of the partisans of art for art's sake with the 'bourgeois artists', 'of whom they sometimes envied the success, the resounding fame, and also the profits':4 'It's the older brother Achille, covered with honours, it's the stupid young heir who is satisfied with an inheritance that he does not deserve, it's the solemn physician reasoning at the bedside of a dying patient whose life he cannot save, it's the ambitious person who wants power but will be satisfied with the Legion d'honneur ... This is what Henry will become at the end of the first Education: "the future belongs to him, and those are the people who become powerful and influential".'5 One could ask what has been gained by proceeding as I have, from the opposite side of the most common approach: instead of starting from Flaubert and his particular oeuvre, I went directly to the space in which he was inserted, I tried to open the biggest box, the field of power, in order to discover what the writer was about, what Flaubert was as $ writer defined by a predetermined position in this space. Then, in opening the second box, I tried to reconstitute this dominated-dominant in the literary field, where I found a structure homologous to that of the field of power: on one side the 'bourgeois artists', dominated-dominants with the emphasis on the dominant, and on the other side 'social art') dominated-dominants with emphasis on the dominated; between tn* two, art for art's sake and Flaubert, dominated-dominants with ntf emphasis on either side, in a state of equilibrium, unstable between the two poles. Finally, I examined the initial position of Gustave in social space and discovered, I believe, the immobile trajectory which, starting from the position of equilibrium between the two poles of the field °' power that is represented by the position of the physician, directed him to occupy this position of equilibrium in the literary field. This lon£ aside was not superfluous, I believe, since it permitted the observation1 Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus 173 many properties which one could be tempted to attribute to the Jocular characteristics of Flaubert's history, as was done by Sartre, inscribed in the position of 'pure' writer, ^^at we have learned through this analysis also accounts for ■ ubert's quasi-miraculous lucidity. If Flaubert was able to produce a sj-objective representation of social space of which he was himself 1" product, it is because the position he never ceased to occupy in this 1 3ce from the very outset, and the tension, even the suffering associated ![jth the indetermination which defines it, promotes a painful lucidity, ^ince it is rooted in powerlessness, converted into a refusal to belong to one or the other group situated at one or the other of the poles of this space. The objectifying distance, close to Frederic's contemplative indifference, which enables Flaubert to produce a global vision of the space in which he is situated, is inseparable from the obsession of powerlessness which is associated with the occupation of neutral positions where the forces of the field are neutralized. Flaubert's trajectory is, one might say, an Aufhebung of what is involved in Frederic's position: Flaubert has passed from an indeterminate state, close to Frederic's, in the field of power, to a homologous position in the literary field. And if Flaubert was able to project on to Frederic his own experience of the adolescent's indetermination situated at the neutral point of the field of power, it is because he was able to situate himself, through art for art's sake, in a homologous position within the literary field, but from which he could realize the objectiviza-tion of his past position. It is indeed easy to find in young Flaubert's Correspondence, or even in his first works, all the traits of Frederic's indetermination: 'I am left with all the major roads, the well-trodden paths, the clothes to sell, the employment possibilities, a thousand holes that get plugged up with imbeciles. I shall therefore be a "plug" [bouche-trou] in society. I'll do my duty, I'll be an honest man, and everything else, if you want, I'll be like somebody else, respectable, just tike everybody else, a lawyer, a doctor, a sub-prefect, a notary public, an attorney, a judge, as stupid as anyone else, a man of the world or a Sovernment official, which is even more stupid. Because one has to be something, and there is no middle of the road solution. Well, I have chosen, I have made up my mind, I'll study law, which far from opening UP all opportunities, directs you to nothing" (to Ernest Chevalier, 23 July 1839). This description of the space of the positions objectively offered to the bourgeois adolescent of the 1840s owes its objectivistic rigour to an indifference, a lack of satisfaction and, as Claudel used to say, an ,|mPatience with limits', which are hardly compatible with the magical exPerjence of the 'vocation': 'I will pass my bar examination, but I 174 Flaubert and the French Literary Field scarcely think I shall ever plead in court about a party-wall or on t>eL of some poor paterfamilias cheated by a rich upstart. When pen speak to me about the bar, saying "This young fellow will make a f-trial lawyer", because I'm broad in the shoulders and have a boorr^ voice, I confess it turns my stomach. I don't feel myself made for completely materialistic, trivial life' (to Gourgaud-Dugazon, 22 Janu a 1842). ar* So, the status of the writer devoted to pure art, situated at enu distance from the two polar positions, also appears as a means 1 holding on to the refusal to belong, to hold and to be held, which characterized the young Gustave. Pure art transforms Frederic's 'jnact ive passion' into a wilful position, a system: 'I no longer want to be associated with a review, or to be a member of a society, a club, Qr an academy, no more than to be a city counsellor or an officer in the national guard' (to Louise Colet, 31 March 1853); 'No, sacre nom de Dieu!, no!, I shall not attempt to publish in any review. It seems to me that, under present conditions, to be a member of anything, to join any official organization, any association or small club [boutique], or even to take a title no matter what it might be, is to lose one's honour, to debase oneself, since everything is so low' (to Louise Colet, 3-4 May 1853). Again at the risk of seeming to push the analysis too far, I should like to describe finally what appears to be the true principle of the relationship between Flaubert and Frederic, and the true function of the work of writing through which Flaubert projected himself, and projected a self through and beyond Frederic's character. What is at stake in this relationship is the inescapable social genesis of a sovereign position which proclaims itself free of any determination. And what if social determinations which encourage distance vis-a-vis all determinations did exist? What if the power that the writer appropriates for himself through writing were only the imaginary inversion of powerlessness? What if intellectual ambition were only the imaginary inversion of t^e failure of temporal ambitions? It is evident that Flaubert never ceased'0 ask himself whether the writer's scorn for the 'bourgeois' and the wordiy possessions of which they are the prisoners does not owe something10 the resentment of the failed 'bourgeois' who transforms his failure int°_ elective renunciation; unless it is the 'bourgeois' who, by keeping hima a distance, enable the writer to distance himself from them. Flaubert knew all too well that flights into the imaginary, Just| 1 revolutionary declarations, are also ways to seek refuge from powerl _ ness. One can return now to Frederic who, at the apex of his traject in the Dambreuses' salon, reveals, through his disdain for n's. ajy revolutionary friends, his conviction that the artistic or revolutI°n Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus 175 tj0ns are nothing but refuges from failure - the same Frederic who v0ca feels more intellectual than when his life goes wrong. It is when he •^red w'rh Monsieur Dambreuse's reproach for his actions or by i5 Jame Dambreuse's allusions to Rosanette's coach that, surrounded bankers, he defends the positions of the intellectual in order to c|uJe: 'I don't give a damn about business!' C°jt would appear that Flaubert was not able to forget the negative , terrninations of his writer's 'vocation', free of all determination. The chantment of writing enables him to abolish all determinations which 01 the constituent parts of social existence: 'This is why I love Art. It's because at least there, in the world of fictions, everything can happen; 0ne is at the same time one's king and one's people, active and passive, victim and priest. No limits; humanity is a jokester with little bells that one jingles at the end of one's sentence, like a street performer at the end of his foot' (to Louise Colet, 15-16 May 1852); 'The only way to live in peace is to leap in one motion above humanity and to have nothing in common with it, except to gaze upon it.' Eternity and ubiquity are the divine attributes the pure observer appropriates for himself. '1 could see other people live, but a life different from mine: some believed, some denied, others doubted, and others finally were not at all concerned by these matters and went about their business, that is, selling in their shops, writing their books, or declaiming from their podiums.'6 But Sentimental Education is there to prove that Flaubert never forgot that the idealist representation of the 'creator' as a 'pure' subject who is inscribed in the social definition of the writer's metier is rooted in the sterile dilettantism of the bourgeois adolescent, temporarily freed from social determinations, and is magically realized in the ambition, that Flaubert himself professed, to 'live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod'.