From Horror Vacui to the Reader's Boredom: Bouvard et Pécuchet and the Art of Difficulty

Among the many extraordinary aspects of Bouvard et Pécuchet's reception, it is the accusation of boring its audience that caused the most controversy. This essay uses the phenomenological writings of Roman Ingarden on the relationship between indeterminacy and concretization to analyze the question of readability in Bouvard et Pécuchet. Ingarden's analysis of the use of evidence in literary vs. scientific texts enables us to size up the explosive combination at work in Flaubert's last, unfinished novel. Flaubert consciously worked difficulty into the core of his novel, but never quite relinquished more conventional modes of fiction. It was this conspicuous friction between fact and fiction, between the descriptive and the narrative, that exacerbated the confusion of his audience.