gustaf low bear was a great French 19th
century novelist who deserves our love
and sympathy as much for what he wrote
as who he was we can admire him for four
floo bear wrote arguably the single
greatest tragic novel ever written
madame bovary which he worked on for
five years and published in 1857 the
point of a tragedy is to allow us to
experience a degree of sympathy for
others failures that so much greater
than what we ordinarily feel it shakes
us from our customary moralism and
brittle superiority
it helps us empathize in the way the
modern media usually prevents in the
summer of 1848 the terse item appeared
in many newspapers across Normandy a 27
year old woman named el fin de llama
living in the heat just outside oil had
become dissatisfied with the routines of
married life she’d run up huge debts on
superfluous clothes and household goods
and she’d committed suicide under
emotional and financial pressure Madame
de la Mar was leaving behind a young
daughter and a distraught husband one of
those reading the newspaper was the
twenty seven-year-old aspiring novelist
Gustave Flaubert who grew so fascinated
by this story that he used it to provide
him with the exact plot structure for
his eventual novel Madame Bovary one of
the things that happened when Madame de
la Marr the adulteress from he turned
into Madame Pahlavi the adulteress from
the fictional town of young Ville was
that her life ceased to bear the
dimensions of a black and white morality
tale readers of the novel saw how easy
it is to have a thoroughly miserable
marriage without being in any way a bad
person Flo Bears novel shows us the
tensions and travails of married life
without ever really taking sides
Emma gets bored with her husband Charles
loses interest in her child runs up
debts has affairs and eventually kills
herself but by the time readers are
taken in how she pushed arsenic into her
mouth and been laid down in her bedroom
to await her death they would not be in
a mood to judge all they’d be able to
feel was pity the cruelty and
senselessness of life Flo bear seemed
almost deliberately to enjoy unsettling
the desire to find easy answers no
sooner had he presented Emma in a
positive light then he would undercut
her with an ironic remark
but then just as readers were losing
patience with her he would draw them
back to her would tell him something
about her sensitivity that would bring
tears to the eyes we end flow bears
novel with fear and sadness at how we’ve
been made to live before we begin to
know how that how limited our
understanding of ourselves and others is
at how great and catastrophic are the
consequences of our actions and at how
pitiless and vengeful the upstanding
members of the community can be in
response to our errors tragedy inspires
us to abandon ordinary life’s simplified
judgemental perspective on failure and
defeat rendering us generous towards the
foolishness and errors that are endemic
a particular aspect of Madame bovary’s
tragic n sticks out Flaubert tells us in
no uncertain terms that the reason Emma
Bovary grew so dissatisfied and fairly
so with marriage and therefore embarked
on her disastrous affairs was because of
the books she had read flubber tells us
that from a young age Emma used to read
bad romantic novels that gave her an
unrealistic overly rosy picture of love
and that meant that she was unprepared
for the reality of marriage Emma didn’t
know how boring it can be to have dinner
with the same person every night and how
difficult it is to keep a relationship
alive after once had a baby and
therefore she responded to these
situations with to greater degree of
panic having multiple affairs to remind
herself that she was still capable of
passion and going shopping for far more
than she could afford as an alternative
to the sometimes tedious business of
bringing up a child what might
ultimately have saved Emma Bovary was to
read the novel of which she is the
heroine it’s a novel about love designed
to cure us of the naive illusions about
floo bear couldn’t stand newspapers he
belonged to a generation that had
experienced the rise of mass circulation
media at first hand and he believed that
this was spreading a new kind of
stupidity which he turned libecki’s into
every corner of France idiocy wasn’t the
same as ignorance for flerbert’ because
it was compatible with knowing a lot of
things it just meant understanding
nothing the most loathsome character in
Madame Bovary the pharmacist our mare is
introduced early on as an avid consumer
of news who sets aside a special hour
every day to study lieu journal
flerbert’ keeps the word in italics
throughout to send up the neo religious
reverence in which this object is held
in the 1870s floorball began keeping a
record of what he judged to be the most
idiotic patterns of thought promoted by
the modern world in general and by
newspapers in particular published
posthumously as the dictionary of
received ideas this collection of
cliches organized by topic was described
by its author as an OC q PG Dula bitches
you men an encyclopedia of human
stupidity here is a random sampling of
its entries budget never balanced
Catholicism has had a very good
influence on art Christianity freed the
slaves Crusades benefited Venetian trade
diamonds to think that they’re nothing
but coal if we came across one in its
natural state we wouldn’t even bother to
pick it up off the ground exercise
prevents all illnesses to be recommended
at all times photography will make
painting obsolete it’s worth noting how
many of the dictionaries cliches touch
on sophisticated disciplines like
theology science and politics without
however going anywhere very clever with
them the modern idiot can routinely know
what only geniuses had known in the past
and yet he is still an idiot a
depressing combination of traits that
previous eras had never had to worry
about the newspapers had for flerbert’
armed stupidity and given authority to
gustaf LaBelle was a bourgeois a
middle-class Frenchman and yet he
loathed a great deal to do with his
country and his class for flerbert’ the
French bourgeoisie could be a repository
of the most extreme prudery snobbery
smugness racism and pomposity it’s
strange how the most banal utterances of
the bourgeoisie sometimes make me marvel
he wants complained and stifled rage
there are gestures sounds of people’s
voices that I just can’t get over silly
remarks that almost give me vertigo the
bourgeoise for me something unfathomable
flerbert’ wrote that he had nothing but
disdain for this good civilization the
prided itself on having produced
railways poisons cream tarts royalty and
the guillotine what fro bear hated above
all was pomposity this quote to his
girlfriend who escola written in 1846
gives us an insight what stops me from
taking myself seriously even though I’m
essentially a serious person is that I
find myself extremely ridiculous not the
kind of small-scale ridiculousness of
slapstick comedy but rather a
ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to
human life and manifest itself in the
simplest actions and most ordinary
gestures for example I can never shave
without starting to laugh it seems so
idiotic all this is very difficult to
explain flubber in the end wanted to be
a global citizen I’m no more modern than
ancient no more French than Chinese he
wrote and the idea of having a native
country that is to say the imperative to
live on one bit of ground marked red or
blue on the map and to hate the other
bits in green or black has always seemed
to mean narrow-minded blinkered and
profoundly stupid I am a soul brother to
everything that lives to the giraffe and
to the crocodile as much as to the man
in his dictionary received ideas there
wasn’t entry on French how proud one is
to be French when one looks at the Colin
Von Doom paradoxically one can perhaps
be proud us to be French when one reads
Gustav libéré for aside from hating a
lot about his country flubber also
captures some of its best and wisest
sides
we should read him for his earthiness
his humanity his frankness and above all
else his generosity of spirit at the age
of 17 in a somewhat melodramatic mood
flowba wrote art is superior to
everything a book of poetry is worth
more than a railway it rarely is but it
might almost be worth giving up a
railway line or two for the sake of LaBelle’s works
century novelist who deserves our love
and sympathy as much for what he wrote
as who he was we can admire him for four
floo bear wrote arguably the single
greatest tragic novel ever written
madame bovary which he worked on for
five years and published in 1857 the
point of a tragedy is to allow us to
experience a degree of sympathy for
others failures that so much greater
than what we ordinarily feel it shakes
us from our customary moralism and
brittle superiority
it helps us empathize in the way the
modern media usually prevents in the
summer of 1848 the terse item appeared
in many newspapers across Normandy a 27
year old woman named el fin de llama
living in the heat just outside oil had
become dissatisfied with the routines of
married life she’d run up huge debts on
superfluous clothes and household goods
and she’d committed suicide under
emotional and financial pressure Madame
de la Mar was leaving behind a young
daughter and a distraught husband one of
those reading the newspaper was the
twenty seven-year-old aspiring novelist
Gustave Flaubert who grew so fascinated
by this story that he used it to provide
him with the exact plot structure for
his eventual novel Madame Bovary one of
the things that happened when Madame de
la Marr the adulteress from he turned
into Madame Pahlavi the adulteress from
the fictional town of young Ville was
that her life ceased to bear the
dimensions of a black and white morality
tale readers of the novel saw how easy
it is to have a thoroughly miserable
marriage without being in any way a bad
person Flo Bears novel shows us the
tensions and travails of married life
without ever really taking sides
Emma gets bored with her husband Charles
loses interest in her child runs up
debts has affairs and eventually kills
herself but by the time readers are
taken in how she pushed arsenic into her
mouth and been laid down in her bedroom
to await her death they would not be in
a mood to judge all they’d be able to
feel was pity the cruelty and
senselessness of life Flo bear seemed
almost deliberately to enjoy unsettling
the desire to find easy answers no
sooner had he presented Emma in a
positive light then he would undercut
her with an ironic remark
but then just as readers were losing
patience with her he would draw them
back to her would tell him something
about her sensitivity that would bring
tears to the eyes we end flow bears
novel with fear and sadness at how we’ve
been made to live before we begin to
know how that how limited our
understanding of ourselves and others is
at how great and catastrophic are the
consequences of our actions and at how
pitiless and vengeful the upstanding
members of the community can be in
response to our errors tragedy inspires
us to abandon ordinary life’s simplified
judgemental perspective on failure and
defeat rendering us generous towards the
foolishness and errors that are endemic
a particular aspect of Madame bovary’s
tragic n sticks out Flaubert tells us in
no uncertain terms that the reason Emma
Bovary grew so dissatisfied and fairly
so with marriage and therefore embarked
on her disastrous affairs was because of
the books she had read flubber tells us
that from a young age Emma used to read
bad romantic novels that gave her an
unrealistic overly rosy picture of love
and that meant that she was unprepared
for the reality of marriage Emma didn’t
know how boring it can be to have dinner
with the same person every night and how
difficult it is to keep a relationship
alive after once had a baby and
therefore she responded to these
situations with to greater degree of
panic having multiple affairs to remind
herself that she was still capable of
passion and going shopping for far more
than she could afford as an alternative
to the sometimes tedious business of
bringing up a child what might
ultimately have saved Emma Bovary was to
read the novel of which she is the
heroine it’s a novel about love designed
to cure us of the naive illusions about
floo bear couldn’t stand newspapers he
belonged to a generation that had
experienced the rise of mass circulation
media at first hand and he believed that
this was spreading a new kind of
stupidity which he turned libecki’s into
every corner of France idiocy wasn’t the
same as ignorance for flerbert’ because
it was compatible with knowing a lot of
things it just meant understanding
nothing the most loathsome character in
Madame Bovary the pharmacist our mare is
introduced early on as an avid consumer
of news who sets aside a special hour
every day to study lieu journal
flerbert’ keeps the word in italics
throughout to send up the neo religious
reverence in which this object is held
in the 1870s floorball began keeping a
record of what he judged to be the most
idiotic patterns of thought promoted by
the modern world in general and by
newspapers in particular published
posthumously as the dictionary of
received ideas this collection of
cliches organized by topic was described
by its author as an OC q PG Dula bitches
you men an encyclopedia of human
stupidity here is a random sampling of
its entries budget never balanced
Catholicism has had a very good
influence on art Christianity freed the
slaves Crusades benefited Venetian trade
diamonds to think that they’re nothing
but coal if we came across one in its
natural state we wouldn’t even bother to
pick it up off the ground exercise
prevents all illnesses to be recommended
at all times photography will make
painting obsolete it’s worth noting how
many of the dictionaries cliches touch
on sophisticated disciplines like
theology science and politics without
however going anywhere very clever with
them the modern idiot can routinely know
what only geniuses had known in the past
and yet he is still an idiot a
depressing combination of traits that
previous eras had never had to worry
about the newspapers had for flerbert’
armed stupidity and given authority to
gustaf LaBelle was a bourgeois a
middle-class Frenchman and yet he
loathed a great deal to do with his
country and his class for flerbert’ the
French bourgeoisie could be a repository
of the most extreme prudery snobbery
smugness racism and pomposity it’s
strange how the most banal utterances of
the bourgeoisie sometimes make me marvel
he wants complained and stifled rage
there are gestures sounds of people’s
voices that I just can’t get over silly
remarks that almost give me vertigo the
bourgeoise for me something unfathomable
flerbert’ wrote that he had nothing but
disdain for this good civilization the
prided itself on having produced
railways poisons cream tarts royalty and
the guillotine what fro bear hated above
all was pomposity this quote to his
girlfriend who escola written in 1846
gives us an insight what stops me from
taking myself seriously even though I’m
essentially a serious person is that I
find myself extremely ridiculous not the
kind of small-scale ridiculousness of
slapstick comedy but rather a
ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to
human life and manifest itself in the
simplest actions and most ordinary
gestures for example I can never shave
without starting to laugh it seems so
idiotic all this is very difficult to
explain flubber in the end wanted to be
a global citizen I’m no more modern than
ancient no more French than Chinese he
wrote and the idea of having a native
country that is to say the imperative to
live on one bit of ground marked red or
blue on the map and to hate the other
bits in green or black has always seemed
to mean narrow-minded blinkered and
profoundly stupid I am a soul brother to
everything that lives to the giraffe and
to the crocodile as much as to the man
in his dictionary received ideas there
wasn’t entry on French how proud one is
to be French when one looks at the Colin
Von Doom paradoxically one can perhaps
be proud us to be French when one reads
Gustav libéré for aside from hating a
lot about his country flubber also
captures some of its best and wisest
sides
we should read him for his earthiness
his humanity his frankness and above all
else his generosity of spirit at the age
of 17 in a somewhat melodramatic mood
flowba wrote art is superior to
everything a book of poetry is worth
more than a railway it rarely is but it
might almost be worth giving up a
railway line or two for the sake of LaBelle’s works
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