25
" Flaubert’s irony is hard, maybe even wicked, in any case profoundly unfair. Let us take a look at one of the most important figures from Madame Bovary, the apothecary Homais, and then proceed from his example. In him, bourgeois enlightenment, the heritage of our civilization, the indispensable fundament of every socialist utopia, finds itself cast into monstrous ridicule. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
27
" There is no doubt he is the man of progress in his village, and that he strides before us as a vain bounder and fawner is, fundamentally, beside the point. In his artist’s arrogance, his estrangement from reality, Gustave Flaubert has not seen, has not wanted to see, that Homaises of all sorts were the bearers of bourgeois progress, the forerunners of those who sided with the Radical Party during the Third Republic, the historical progenitors of those who rightly stood with Zola and Clemenceau on the side of Captain Dreyfus. The unrestrained wickedness of Flaubert’s irony becomes clear to us in that diabolic way he has of making the apothecary utter illuminating and irrefutable truths so that in them, through them, the entirety of the bourgeois enlightenment, including the ethics it represents and the scientific view of the world, are reduced to grotesque prattle. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
28
" Totalizing dialectical reason, in its opposition to reason of the disintegrating, analytic sort, is a riddle, the rules governing which I see through, and the utility of which I increasingly doubt. Like all dialectical thinking, it depends on who is wielding it: in Jean-Paul Sartre’s hands, it became a fantastic (in both senses of the word) and sweeping instrument for thought; should an assiduous nobody usurp it, the result would be inhuman glossurgy. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
32
" Charles, too, is a bearer of values, bourgeois and social ones, no less deserving of mention than the proletarian and communal values of the old maid, which flicker tenderly as the stage lights fall on them in passing. But no, there is nothing! Charles Bovary, country doctor, is the uncouth weakling his wife takes him for; and the morsel of compassion the author patronizingly offers him now and then is a pittance. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
36
" Mais oui, Madame Bovary, c’est bien lui, Gustave Flaubert. [25] Her excesses are his, her passionate mysticism an analogue to his mystical subservience to the author’s craft. Her pathos, which the author’s irony barely alludes to, is the pathetic irreality of the visionary from the hermitage in Croisset. He said as much, moreover, if not with direct reference to his own self, which he never wished to turn out into the world. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man