Pain

I’m back to reading Madame Bovary again after something of a hiatus. I sort of broke off when we were in the throes of moving apartment, partly as a result of Boon lending me The Fry Chronicles which became my default reading for a week or so, partly because it slipped down so easily. This is not to say that Bovary is a difficult read, far from it I think, but it makes some curious demands on the reader at times which means that it doesn’t necessarily slip down without a fight.

I was reminded of this today when starting to read Chapter 9 of Part 2, the one in which Charles operates to disastrous effect on Hippolyte’s club foot. As I realised what was coming, and remembered how uncomfortable I’d felt in the past when reading the chapter, I felt very inclined to skip the sequence. I don’t think there’s ever been a better description (if that’s what it is – evocation might be a better word) of utterly pointless, miserable, dreadfully almost comic, suffering in literature.

I suppose what makes it so painful, so powerful, is that the poor guy’s pains are almost off-stage, as it were. In the spotlight instead we have the folly of Homais, the incompetence amounting to idiocy of Bovary and the utterly self-centred machinations of Emma. And the attendant sense of horror that this is the way the world is. We know of the very real distress that’s everywhere around us, but to which we cannot choose but shut ourselves away – until it becomes our own, I suppose.