Reading Simplicity: Flaubert's `Un Coeur simple'

It has often been observed that Flaubert's protagonists are readers, and that their desires and thoughts are effects of their understanding of the codes of the intelligible world. Since knowledge and desire are available to characters only in terms of things already said, texts constantly demystify protagonists' interpretations. Within this mystified relationship to language, desire and knowledge, there are, however, telling moments represented as meaningful, an excess of language (débordement), experienced by the protagonist and the reader as if it were unmediated. This is an unusual form of irony that the reader must interpret as both "literal" and figural, the "literal" or simple meaning being supplementary to the figural. This study of "Un Coeur simple" examines the implications of the protagonist's "simple" relationship to the world. Félicité is at once the object of Flaubertian demystification, since she takes words to be things, and immune to mystification, since she exists in language as though exempt from its ironies. This essay examines the role of metonymies in Félicité's interpretation of events in the narrative, and her associative connections, her relations to people, objects, a parrot, and the Holy Ghost. (NW)