Chapter 8: Herodias
Victor Brombert
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On servit
des rognons de taureau, des loirs, des rossignols, des hachis dans
des feullies
de pampre; et les pretres discutaient sur la resurrec tion.
Ammonius,
eleve de Philon le Piatonicien, les jugeait stupides, et le disait des
Grecs qui se
moquaient des oracles. Marcellus et Jacob s'etaient joints. Le
premier
narrait au second le bonheur qu'il avait ressenti sous le bapteme de
Mithra, et
Jacob l'engageait suivre Jesus. Les vms de palme et de tamaris,
ceux de Safet
et de Byhios, coulaient des amphores dans les crateres, des
crateres dans
les coupes, des coupes dans les gosiers; on bavardait, les coeurs
s'epan
chajent. Iacim, bien que Juif, ne cachait plus son adoration des
planetes. Un
marchand d'Aph aka ebahissait des nomades, en detaillant les
merveilles du
temple d'Hierapolis; et ils de mandaient combien couterait le
pelerinage.
D'autres tenaient leur religion natale. Un Ger main presque aveugle
chantait un
hymne cele brant ce promontoire de Ia Scandinavie, ou les dieux
apparaissent
avec les rayons de leurs figures; et des gens de Sichem ne
mangerent pas
de tourterelles, par deference pour la colombe Azima. (III)
(They
served bull kidneys, dormice, nightin gales, minced meat in vine leaves;
and the
priests discussed the question of resurrection. Ammonius, disciple of
Philo the
Platonist, thought them stupid, and said so to some Greeks who were
making fun of
oracles. Marceilus and Jakob had met. The first was telling the
second of the
happiness he had experienced on being baptized into Mithras,
and Jakob was
urging him to fol low Jesus. Palm and tamarisk wines, the
wines of
Safet and Byblos, flowed from jars into bowls, from bowls into cups,
from cups
into gullets; there was much talking and all were in an ex pansive
mood. Jacim,
although a Jew, no longer concealed his worship of the planets.
A merchant
from Aphaka was dazzling the nomads by de tailing the wonders
of the temple
of Hierapolis, and they were asking how much a pilgrimage there
would cost.
Others held fast to the religion of their birth. A German who was
almost blind
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sang a
hymn of praise to that promontory of Scandinavia where the gods
appeared with
their radiant faces; and people from Sichem refused to eat
turtledoves,
out of deference for the dove Azima.)
This passage, so typical in its effects of variety, confusion and counterpoint, fulfills both a dramatic and a thematic function preceding the climax in Section III of Herodias. Coming soon after the description of the lavish banquet hall where the tetrarch Herod is entertaining priests, Roman officers and notables of various faiths and regions, it suggests the mounting frenzy of mind and body, and sets the stage for Salome's dance and Saint John the Baptist's decollation. The episode is based on accounts in the gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Mark, as well as on a large iconography with which Flaubert was obviously familiar. The elaboration of details and the interpretation of psychological relationships and of events are, however, Flaubert's own.
The story, in Flaubert's version, is set against a back ground of political tension. Herod, worried by the situation at home and by military danger, anxiously awaits the arrival of the Roman proconsul Vitellius and his legions— though he is full of apprehension about them also. The feast in celebration of his birthday is to have political as well as diplomatic value. But when Vitellius and his de cadent son Aulus arrive, it becomes increasingly clear that Herod's worries are not exclusively political and military. Symbolically locked up in a cistern like an underground guilt, John the Baptist, known to the Jews as Iaokanann, and reputed to be a resurrected Elias, continues to bellow forth prophetic denunciations of the tetrarch's adultery and incest, and to invoke eschatological punishment upon the sinful Pharisees and Sadducees.
The gastronomic orgy and heated conversations thus take place against a
background of intrigue and fanaticism, in a climate of latent guilt, suspicion,
religious antagonisms and racial hatreds. The appearance of rare dishes such as
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bull kidneys and nightingales is preceded by agitated controversy on resurrection, and followed by explosions of bigotry and clear signs of a rebellious mood. Very skill fully Flaubert thus prepares the stage for Salome's dance. Almost without transitions, and with great naturalness, the political and religious turbulence is transmuted into sexual fever. The dance itself progresses from a mood of youthful expectation, to funereal despondency, to languid surrender, to brutal quest of satisfaction, and finally to a frenzy which mimes the female's lascivious ecstasy. This crescendo in turn builds up to the backstage execution of Iaokanann and to the lurid display, at the banquet table, of his decapitated head.
The beginning of the quoted paragraph reveals Flaubert's perennial fascination with eccentric feasts. His ob session with appetite and digestion comes to the fore in the figure of Aulus, who spends most of his time stuffing himself and vomiting. Aulus' capacity for gulping and guzzling is truly impressive. Once again, goinfrerie is the physical equivalent of a craving which betrays a fundamental lack of balance. Decadentism is here not merely a metaphor: Aulus, "this flower from the mud of Capri" (II), has participated in the debauches of Tiherius' imperial court, and was later to gain the favor of Caligula, Claudius and Nero. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute such decadent motifs to a simple desire to epater le bourgeois. The taste for truculence and exotic flight of fancy Flaubert carried deeply and permanently in himself. This, more so than any similarity of sources and setting, explains why he was so concerned with the danger of imitating Salammbo. He knew That the same fondness for the gueulade animated his Biblical tale. ". . ca se presente sous les apparences d'un fort gueuloir . . ." he writes to Turgenev; and to Maupassant a few days later: ca se gueule."1
The banquet, in addition to representing one of the set elements of the legend, is thus far from gratuitous. The
1 Flaubert, Corresp., VII, 369, 377. Complete citations for all notes
may he found in the Bibliography.
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personal and dramatic values of the episode are obvious. But its thematic function should not be overlooked. For this prelude to violence and death takes the form of a false communion. The guests partake of the same meats and wines, but nothing breaks down the barriers between them. Carnality is thus once again linked to the theme of incommunicability. On numerous other occasions the sharing of food, in Flauhert's novels, brings out a sense of distance and divorce. Emma Bovary feels most exasperated and lonely at mealtimes; the entire bitterness of her conjugal life seems served to her on her plate. Similarly, though in a different register, the dinner at the Cafe Anglais, in L'Education sentimentale, stresses the gap between Frederic's desire and Rosanette's whorish perfidy. And after the supper he offers in his new apartment, the saddened young man feels as though a "large ditch filled with darkness" separates him from his friends (II, 2). An almost deathlike sterility is often associated, in Flaubert's work, with moments seemingly given over to sensuous provocation or satisfaction. Salome appropriately dances to the "funereal sound" of pipes. Death, of course, reigns in the very landscape of Herodias. The hot wind seems to carry the stench of the accursed cities of Sodom and Gomorrab, buried under the heavy waters of the Red Sea. As for the mountains Herod surveys from the top of his citadel in Machaerus, they appear like tiers of huge petrified waves.
The opening sentence of the quoted paragraph is of further interest because of a characteristic construction repeated three times in the same passage. Its two parts are divided by a semicolon and by the conjunction et, which Flaubert here preferred to the more obvious temporal conjunctions pendant que or tandis que. The result is a total absence of subordination, and a leveling or equalization of all experience. The author subversively re fuses to establish any hierarchy among the elements of the description or the events. Eating dormice and nightingales thus appears exactly as important, or unimportant,
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as discussing the question of resurrection. This juxtaposition of dissimilar elements is among Flaubert's favorite instruments of irony and intervention, one which he has inherited from the eighteenth-century ironists, in particular from Voltaire, whom he admired immensely. The paratactic et of course also helps establish an atmosphere of confusion, and suggests the din in the banquet hail; it does serve a function here not of consecutiveness but of simultaneity. Above all, it tends to discredit the manner and subject of the priests' discussion.
This equalization of values, leading to a pervasive relativism, is brought out even more sharply in the following sentence. A disciple of Philo the Platonist expresses his opinions about the stupidity of the priests to some Greeks, who in turn make known their contempt for oracles. The multiplicity of points of view is intensified by the fact that Philo was born a Jew (he represents Alexandrine Judaism) and that the Greeks, on the other hand, have become skeptical about their own traditions. This parallel and antithetic construction is carried on as we learn that Marcellus tells Jakob of the beauty of Mithraic initiation, while Jakob urges him to become a follower of Jesus. The syncretic tendencies of the conversations are neutralized by the fact that nobody seems really to listen. We witness a frantic 'bazaar of ideas, as Flaubert succeeds simultaneously in evoking the clash of beliefs and in establishing a climate of absurdity. Interest in the distant past and especially in the history of religions usually corresponds in him to his most pessimistic moods.
As the paragraph progresses, there is a crescendo of confusion and meaninglessness. The wines do not add to the lucidity of the guests. Flaubert insists on the variety and the flow of wines (from jars to bowls, from bowls to cups, from cups to gullets), and this variety and flow provoke and symbolize the nature of the conversation. Ebriety corresponds to ideological intemperance, to muddled talking and thinking. "Iacim, bien que Juif, ne
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cachalt plus son adoration des planetes." The sentence is loaded with the irony dear to the Encyclopedists. The "bien que Juif" stresses religious relativism; the adverb "plus" points simultaneously to the usual prudence of Iacim and to the effects of alcohol. At the same time, religious beliefs are reduced to the level of personal pref erences and passing fads, as erratic and eccentric as human temperaments under the effect of excessive libation.
Even more humorously degrading is the next sentence. A merchant flabbergasts the nomads by describing the marvels of the temple in Aphaka. Merveilles has an appropriate double sense: religion is here entrusted to the rhetoric of traveling salesmen. Religious pilgrimages are talked about as though they were visits to special fairs that should not be missed. Once again the sentence is divided by a semicolon followed by the conjunction et, thus establishing an ironic equality between the first part, in which the temple is extolled, and the second part, in which the listeners and putative converts inquire about the cost of the journey. A not so faint suggestion of charlatanism creeps into the account. Spirituality is replaced by pedestrian material concerns.
The last part of the paragraph completes the relativistic subversion. Flaubert utilizes the biblical historical moment to stress not revelation, but the absence of a unique Truth. "D'autres tenalent leur religion natale." At first sight, the sentence seems to emphasize spiritual allegiance. But the very word "others" implies precisely that no experience is universal; it is a reminder of the fragmentary nature of experience. The allegiance is, moreover, of a very limited kind. The word "native" is brought into a critical, and potentially derogatory, association with the word "religion." The entire Voltairean heritage is felt in this sentence.
The climax occurs when the mystic song of a German praising the Northern gods is opposed antithetically to the superstitious refusal of the people of Sichem to eat turtledoves. Once again the semicolon followed by the con junction et is the instrument of oblique irony. The evoked
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vision of divine figures appearing in all their radiance is brought into perfidious juxtaposition with some meaning less tribal taboo. The end of the sentence might have come straight out of the Lettres persanes or Candide. The sentence is doubly insidious, for the dove Azima is unmistakably an allusion to the Holy Ghost.
The paragraph which has been under discussion is an excellent example of Flaubert's passionate impartiality. For his apparent impassiveness is not to be taken as a sign of aloofness, but rather as the very method whereby he imposes his personal vision. It would be as wrong, how ever, to consider this style a proof of the author's archeological distance as it would to interpret such a passage as a blunt attack on religion. The critique goes deeper. Values, beliefs, truths, experiences—all these are thrust here, as elsewhere in Flaubert's work, into a hopeless juxtaposition. Coexistence brings about neither ultimate peace nor resolute war, but a latent frustration from which there is no cure. It makes of living and believing a chronic "impossibility." From contradictions arise neither a purifying conflict nor a definitive debate, but dizziness and surrender. Torn between incompatible imperatives, worn-out Herod gives up Iaokanann's head.
Although there is nothing in Flaubert's correspondence to indicate that he was interested in the mystic possibilities of the story (he claimed to be fascinated by the political and psychological elements), the tale suggests a nostalgia for that precisely which seems to be absent. If Flaubert can be said to "associate" with any of the characters in Herodias, it is surely with the life-weary tetrarch. He was indeed very taken with this personage. "La vacherie d'Herode pour Herodias m'excite." And again: "What tempts me here is the official expression of Herod (who was a true prefect)."2 But it is clear that the fascination, at least as it developed during the process of writing, had more to do with his sadness and his lethal fatigue. All
2 Flaubert, Corresp., VII, 296, 309.
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hope seems to escape from the fortress of Machaerus as the three men carry Iaokanann's heavy head toward Galilee. The end of Herodias, appropriately ambiguous, reminds us that the spiritual theme is never absent in the Trois contes.
As usual, Flaubert reveals far more of himself than would at first be suspected. Personal memories are trans muted into a special form of poetry: the legend or historical fact "overdetermines" preexisting experiences or velleities. This is especially obvious in the case of Salome's dance. The performance of Herodias' daughter is indeed at the heart of the tale; it is that focal point in the genesis toward which all attitudes and events seem to converge. But its intimate significance is that it rehearses, after an interval of twenty-five years, the dances of the Near Eastern prostitutes Flaubert and his friend Bouilhet had witnessed in the house of the courtesan Kuchiouk Hanem during their journey through Egypt. It is clear that the dance of Salome was for Flaubert the culminating point of his tale. "I am sick with fear at the thought of Salome's dance. I'm afraid to spoil it," he writes to his niece Caroline. 3 The Notes de voyages of 1850 contained details which, from the point of view of 1876, present an undeniable proleptic interest. Aziza's motionless face as she dances with her neck sliding back and forth on her vertebrae ("terrifying effect of decapitation")4 prefigures the expressionless face of Salome (". . et son visage demeurait immobile" III). The performance of Kuchiouk Hanem, who during her dance gradually lowers the head until she reaches with her teeth a cup of coffee on the ground, prefigures Salome's feat of leaning over so low, with her legs spread apart, that her chin touches the floor. But far more interesting still is Flaubert's remark, in his 1850 travel notes, that while lying beside Kuchiouk, with his fingers passed through her necklace, he was reminded of
3 Flaubert, Corresp., VIII, 14.
4 See Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame B ovary, p. 211.
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Judith and Holofernes.5 It is significant that from the out set the experience of the Near Eastern dance is associated with a biblical image, and more specifically with the de capitation of a man by a woman's will, in an atmosphere heavy with sexuality. The entire memory is further charged with a special melancholy, as Flaubert wonders whether Kuchiouk Hanem will think of him more than of the many others who have been there. The exercise of the senses leaves behind an acrid taste—an experience that was to be come familiar in the fictional work of Flaubert.
Nothing is thus more deceptive than the apparent dry ness and impartiality of the tone in Herodias. The colors of the "Orient" and the tensions of the human drama are suggested in condensed, muscular, almost elliptic sentences. These sentences are often remarkable for their impeccable sobriety, which only stresses the latent violence of the atmosphere.
Il fouilla
d'un regard aigu toutes les routes. Elles etaient vides. Des aigles
volaient au-dessus
de sa tete; les soldats, le long du rempart, dormaient contre
les murs;
rien ne bougeait dans le chateau. (I)
It is truly a historian's style, exploiting in particular the resources of the indirect discourse:
Vitellius
demanda pourquoi tant de monde. Antipas en dit la cause: le festin de
son
anniversaire . . (II)
At times the condensation is almost baffling:
Les
Sadduceens feignirent un grand emoi;—le lendemain, la sacrificature leur
fut rendue;—Antipas
etalait du desespoir; Vitellius demeurait impassible. (III)
or even more so in the following paragraph, which could come straight from the pen of the tersest memorialist:
L'exaltation du peuple grandit. Ils s'abandonnerent des projets
d'independance. On rappelait la gloire
5 Notes de voyages, I, 160
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d'Israel.
Tous les conquerants avaient chaties: An tigone, Crassus, Varus. . . .
(III)
The lapidary quality of sentences such as these is clearly the result of a conscious effort. Shortly before writing Herodias, Flaubert confided to George Sand his boundless admiration for the rhythmical achievements of Montes quieu's prose. He cited the following as an example: "Les vices d'Alexandre etaient extremes comme ses vertus. Il etait terrible dans sa colere. Elle le rendait cruel." 6 The pattern is obvious: one could adduce endless examples of Flaubertian sentences modeled along these lines, in apparent contradiction to his turbulent lyricism.
This interplay of a chiseled prose and an eruptive physical and psychological setting, though it underscores the occult ferment and prepares the paroxystic effect, does bring about some needless obscurity. In his desire to streamline his tale, Flaubert was determined to avoid lengthy explanations. He tried to leave out what he him self, in a letter to Maupassant, calls the "explications in dispensables." No wonder that Taine, despite his admira tion, reproached Flaubert for some needless obscurities.7 A number of passages indeed require elucidations: the genealogy of Herodias, the identity of the two Vitelliuses, the reasons for the Roman general's dislike of Herod are not made translucid to the unprepared reader. The verbal denseness, characteristic of Flaubert's art, is brought in Herodias almost to the danger point. It has been said that Flaubert would tear down a forest in order to construct a matchbox. The documentation, even for his shortest works, is impressive and eclectic. The efficacy of his prose is in large part dependent on this wasteful and at the same time astringent economy. "It seems to me that French prose can achieve a beauty inconceivable so far," he writes to his
6 Flaubert, Corresp., VII, 282.
7 Flaubert, Corresp., VII, The letter by Taine is quoted in the Conard
edition of Trois contes (Flaubert, Oeuvres completes, op. cit.), pp. 226—228.
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friend Turgenev.8 This obsessive struggle with the demon of language shows no sign of relenting. Neither Madame B Bovary, nor Salammbo, nor L'Education sentimentale, nor even La Tentation de saint Antoine has satisfied his dream. He continues to yearn for that impossible beauty. He con tinues to search for that "bon motif," as he puts it, which will be just right for his "voice."9 The artist's personal struggle remains to the very end at the center of his work.
Finally, the immobility of the moral and physical setting can be as deceptive as the apparent neutrality of the style. Stasis is in part the result of a repeated substitution of description for narration. As Genevieve Bolleme puts it, with Flaubert "description is narrative."'10 It does seem to cancel the event. Moreover, in Herodias—just as in Salamm bo—Flaubert insists on the plastic and terrifying fixity of landscape and architecture, and toys with geometric pat terns. The very first sentence describes a rocklike forma tion in the shape of a geometric figure:
La
citadelle de Machaerous se dressait l'orient de la mer Morte, sur un pic de
basalte ayant
la forme d'un cone.
The geometric imagery is further developed as Flaubert describes the houses at the "base" of the rock, surrounded by the "circle" of a wall, and the wall of the fortress with its numerous "angles." Nor is this imagery reserved for military installations. The region of Engedi draws a black line ("bane noire") across the landscape; Hebron rises in the shape of a "dome"; and, dominating Jerusalem, appears the huge "cube"-shaped tower of Antonia. But this choreography of forms which seem immobilized (much like the hills which appear like petrified waves) conveys the impression of an eruptive terrain. Silence, in Herodias, is oppressive; it announces the cry of terror or agony. And
8 Flaubert, Lettres inedites Tourguene if, p. 106
9 To Louise Colet he writes: " ... peutetre trouverai-je un jour un
hon motif, un air completement dans ma voix, ni an-dessus ni au-dessous" (Flaubert,
Corresp., III, 143).
10 Bolleme, La Lecon de Flaubert, p. 195.
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it is significant that the most "silent" paragraph in the entire tale—the one that describes the empty roads, the sleeping soldiers and the ominous tranquillity in the castle
—immediately precedes the outburst of the cavernous voice of Iaokanann rising as from the bowels of the earth. This disquieting irruption is symbolic of Flaubert's relation to his artistic material. From behind the apparently unperturbed surface and wall of controlled craftsmanship, a pressing, at tines anguished voice can be heard. It belongs to one who is also a manner of prophet.