Flaubert and Faulkner: mourning the counterfactual

Thesis

This thesis offers the first extensive comparison between the work of Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner. It is a study not only of the stylistic parallels of their texts, but also of two periods in time: the cultures of defeat that marked France after the events of 1848 and their aftermath, and the American South in the wake of the Civil War. Through close-readings of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale and Madame Bovary, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August, I explore how these authors respond to the question of history’s place in the novel. Over the course of three chapters, I demonstrate that failure, both historical and narrative, incites and necessitates the imagining of alternatives, and that the process of mourning the impossibility of these alternatives is an aesthetic end unto itself.

The comparative approach enables a new understanding of the counterfactual mode in Flaubert and Faulkner. Their use of counterfactuals permits a rendering of events which might have happened, but did not, allowing these imagined scenes to linger and provoke novelistic consequences despite their unreality. In the novels of Flaubert and Faulkner, these unrealised counterfactuals leave their protagonists, like their societies, caught in an interminable process of mourning for events that never occurred, so that the alternate histories, lovers, children, and selves emerge as those that matter most.

For these texts to become not just analysed material, but also tools with which to read, each chapter reads across both authors. The overarching argument of the thesis is that the œuvres of Flaubert and Faulkner are not only symptomatic of their respective cultures of defeat, but also orchestrate a reading process that replicates the experience of living through histories defined by failure. I show that comparative projects between authors that transgress place, time, and language are valuable exercises to identify thematic undercurrents that cut across the specifics of cultural and linguistic contexts, allowing us to use metrics beyond genre and period to address the breadth of their influence. Throughout, I address the challenge of bringing together such disparate authorial personalities, and the friction created by the contextual and structural mismatch between the 1848 Revolution in France and the American Civil War. This friction awakens us to new readings of these heavily studied authors, and moreover to the comparative exercise in which we are always engaged – between the fictions we read and those we live.

Authors: Benoît, R

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-6qkpmkjeb
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English