Flaubert - A Simple Heart
Okay, this one won my heart. While some of these stories have left me tantalized or reflective, let alone moderately appalled, this one gifted me with tranquility. After I was done I looked around my apartment full of distractions and realized I had no desire for anything other than a bit of life, so I put my shoes on and walked out the door.
What to say about it? It's a life. It's a hard life and in many ways it's a pitiable life. But it is not a regretful life, and in that there is a peculiar kind of dignity that does not stand on the greatness of her character nor her achievements. I do not like that some people try to characterize her as 'saintly', because that misses the point. She was a creature of her place, with good instincts, but let us not lay out the carpet and blare the trumpets before her coming. I don't think she'd much like that anyway.
That's really how Flaubert honors her, too. I've never read anything by him, but I can see the realism that he is known for. It's a type of objectivity which at first may appear clinical, but in depth is true pathos: nothing is imputed to her, good or ill, which she does not warrant. She is simply shown to us as she is and thereby understood and cared for as just that. How many people have been like her in history, with an understanding extending not beyond their own experience, and their affections no further than their arms could reach? Laugh at her should you wish, for she does not even know where Havana is, but what knowledge she does have is her own, earned.
It is the parrot, perhaps, that best exemplifies this hard-won wisdom. The Holy Spirit has baffled theologians for millennia, and I am in agreement with Kenneth Clark that, "Our concept of the Trinity has been permanently weakened by the fact that art never evolved an adequate symbol of the Holy Ghost." Without metaphors we are so curiously lost, and while the dove is a lovely abstraction, any real interaction with that species teaches you that it is not quite the ethereal mouthpiece you would imagine. So why not a parrot? It can speak, it had a personality, it cared about her and she for it. The priest might throw up his hands at such simplistic ponderings, but for her it made it real and so she was able to act on it:
The sowings, the harvests, the wine presses, all these familiar things the Gospel speaks of, were a part of her life; they had been sanctified by God's sojourn on earth... [But] she found it difficult to imagine His person, for He was not only a bird, but a flame as well, and at still other times, a breath. She thought perhaps it is His light that hovers at night on the edge of the marshes, His breath that moves the clouds, His voice that gives the bells their harmony! Thus she sat in adoration, delighting in the cool walls and the peacefulness of the church.
As for Church dogmas, she did not understand or even try to understand them. The priest gave his sermon, the children recited, and she finally fell asleep. It is that last detail which cements this is no feigned belief. When she does not understand she can do no other than be human and succumb to drowsiness in comfort. Saintly? The word isn't worth bothering with here because it merely obscures the important details.
And it's really the details that sum to something more. There is realism because one wishes to make a social statement. There is realism because one wishes to reject supernatural beliefs. There is realism in the unformed chaos of life, smothering us with details that have no place. This is realism because it grasps that our lives are just details, and are not less for it. "Fifteen minutes later, Felicite was settled in her new house." The house that she would meaningfully live in for the rest of her life, determined by accident and decided without fanfare. Absurd? The word isn't worth bothering with here because it merely obscures the important details.
I do not really know how to end this; I feel that despite my efforts I have not really captured it, because to capture it I would have to write it. Things happened, but they weren't part of a greater drama, and therefore were free to be meaningful just as they were.
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