Flaubert, Zola, and the Incorporation of Disciplinary Knowledge

L. Duffy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137297549
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is about how France's two major documentary authors of the nineteenth century – Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola – incorporate medical knowledge about the body into their works, and in so doing exploit its metaphorical potential of the body to engage in critical reflection about the accumulation and reconfiguration of knowledge.

Part I
Flaubert and Professional Incorporations

1

Madame Bovary and the Incorporation of Pharmacy

This chapter examines the incorporation within the literary text of the discursive shifts and institutional changes that occur as a profession reincorporates itself, and considers how the nature of that textual incorporation is suggestively connected not only to that profession’s discursive incorporation as disciplinary body through interaction and overlap with other discourses, but also to its incorporative activities concerned with its essential mission: the admixture of substances and their administration to the physiological body. The connections claimed here are plausible primarily because the profession in question here is pharmacy, which underwent a major transformation in France around the beginning of the nineteenth century, linked to other institutional and social changes, not least the scientific and French revolutions. The repercussions of pharmacy’s disciplinary and professional refashioning were still being felt during the July Monarchy – the period represented in the literary text that will be our cultural point of reference in this chapter as in others, Madame Bovary. I will argue that Madame Bovary, rather than coincidentally representing the pharmacist – simply on account of his being a middle-class professional – as representative of the rising bourgeoisie and its purportedly universal values, in fact problematises, through its incorporation of the rhetoric of what we might term a new pharmaceutical ideology, and its articulation of key institutional and legislative developments, the relationship between literary discourse, specifically mimetic fictional discourse, and contemporary scientific discourse. Pharmacy is, then, not a random choice of discipline or profession: it is by its nature a hybrid vocation, straddling scientific and commercial spheres, and is – usefully for the novelist preoccupied with what is said – emblematic of the expansion and intermingling of disciplinary fields and their discourses in the nineteenth century.

Homo pharmaceuticus

Homais, then, Flaubert’s infamous representative of the pharmaceutical profession, has long been a figure of derision for critics, as well as for the novel in which he appears. He is in many respects an easy target, a caricature of the self-seeking, anti-clerical petit-bourgeois. However, there is perhaps rather much more to him than this. Michel Crouzet’s landmark article, ‘“Ecce” Homais’ (1989), painstakingly analyses the apothicaire of Yonville as a kind of pompous everyman – his name derived, as a scenario for the novel (9, f^o 46v) suggests, from Homo – embodying the self-interested received ideas of the early-to-mid-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie and promoting them as if universal principles.¹ At the same time, Homais combines the high-minded philosophical rhetoric afforded by membership of a profession bearing scientific credentials with the basic economic imperatives of that profession and its artisanal antecedents. An important point that Crouzet makes (1989: 980) is that it is not sufficient simply to consider Homais in terms of his being ‘un objet de satire sociale’ [‘an object of social satire’]. Simply to regard him as representative of bourgeois stupidity is to participate in the very rhetoric which Madame Bovary citationally undermines. Rather, his bêtise lies precisely in the fact that he is profusely informed, intelligent ‘parfaitement!’ [‘perfectly!’], as Thibaudet (1935: 120) memorably put it.² Moreover, he is not a mere mentality or personality: he embodies and produces a profusion of discourse and savoir [‘knowledge’] as a pharmacist, that is, as a chemist. It is his status as pharmacist, considered within its nineteenth-century professional, institutional context that this chapter will argue is inseparable from his production of knowledge.

It is not as if the pharmaceutical aspects of Madame Bovary have been ignored by previous criticism. Lilian Furst (1993) touches on pharmacy in a documentation of the contemporary medical context in which the novel (among others) should be read. Douglas Siler (1981), in a meticulously detailed genetic account of the medical sources consulted for the narrative of Emma’s death, traces the pharmacist’s pronouncements on various matters to specific medical texts. Héla Michot-Dietrich argues for a homeopathic reading, suggesting (1987: 317) that Flaubert ‘presents a clear homeopathic case history in each of Emma’s illnesses’, and even goes so far as to suggest (1987: 314) that the pharmacist’s name is a pun on ‘Hom[ais-]opathy’. Discussions of the novel’s pharmaceutical content grounded in critical theory have, unsurprisingly, addressed the connection between pharmacy and discourse; Homais’s activity as pharmacist dispensing substances that can be remedy or poison can quite productively be linked to his incessant production of prescriptive discourse. Maryline Lukacher, reading the novel as an ‘exploration of the double-bind logic of the pharmakon’ (1985: 37), tackles the suggestive connection between the pharmacist and the Platonic (or Derridean) pharmakos – the sorcerer or charlatan dispensing poisons (Derrida 1972: 149) – and identifies Emma as the site not only of pharmaceutical substances – both remedial and poisonous – administered to the body, but also of literary discourse, which is by analogy a kind of pharmakon. For Emptaz (2003), Homais’s role as pharmacist is that of ‘celui qui assure la circulation du savoir et des idées’ [‘he who assures the circulation of knowledge and ideas’]. Indeed, as embodiment of Hermès, the messenger, ‘il divulgue les informations, garantit la communication’ [‘he divulges information, guarantees communication’].

While Homais-as-pharmacist has hardly, then, been overlooked by criticism, what has received rather less attention is the historically specific disciplinary and institutional context in which he practises his profession. Yet the development of pharmacy as both discipline and profession from the late eighteenth century onwards is in fact of great significance to Madame Bovary. The novel incorporates key details of pharmaceutical history and its discourses as found in contemporary scientific periodicals and treatises, and as expressed in earlier publications and disciplinary debate. In so doing, it articulates the institutional development, at national and local levels, of pharmacy as a profession in the early nineteenth century. By articulating in fictional form the recasting of the relationships of pharmacy with other disciplines and professions, the novel reconsiders pharmacy’s – and, implicitly, literature’s – disciplinary limits. As with other fields of knowledge and cultural production in the period, pharmacy’s parameters are in flux: Homais’s profession, like his discursive practice more generally, encroaches on other epistemological domains, just as he as businessman encroaches on Charles Bovary’s commercial territory. In this he is representative not just of pharmacy, but of expanding professional disciplines and epistemological fields more generally. We shall discuss Homais’s diversification into other fields presently, but first a clearer institutional contextualisation for pharmacy is needed.

Nos sommités pharmaceutiques: institutional revolution, the Bulletin de Pharmacie, and Cadet de Gassicourt

Two factors are crucial in the early nineteenth-century development of pharmacy. One is the profound transformation in its relationship with chemistry; the other is the bringing of medicine under centralised control during the Revolution and Empire. Chemistry had until the late eighteenth century been intimately associated with pharmacy, understood as an art or craft. Scientific chemists, more or less indistinguishable from apothecaries, were concerned primarily with the pharmaceutical contribution of their science to the healing of the sick. Chemistry was in effect a subdivision of pharmacy. However, as Jonathan Simon (2005: 8, 22, 85) recounts, the chemical revolution associated with Lavoisier, whose Traité élémentaire de chimie [Elementary Treatise on Chemistry] (1789) expressed chemistry in terms of a new nomenclature rather than in terms of its eventual practical applications, had elevated chemistry to the level of a ‘philosophical’ science. Pharmacy, with its comparatively mundane and artisanal concerns, became excluded from what had become an emphatically theoretical science now necessarily asserting independence from practical applications. The chemical revolution, as Simon (2005: 2–3) contends, has tended to be seen as a struggle between competing scientific theories, rather than as a process involving a reshaped discipline staking its claims in institutional, professional, and social terms. Accordingly, the status of pharmacy is seen simply to have been downgraded in the aftermath of a battle of ideas, and the reaction of pharmacy as profession to the changed disciplinary status of chemistry has been overlooked. That reaction – one of acute concern over the scientific status of pharmacy – came in two stages. In the pre-Revolutionary period, pharmacists had chiefly been concerned with how they should assert themselves as practical professionals, to distance themselves from the ‘pure’ chemists who had abandoned them. After reforms enacted during the Revolution and Empire, however, and in order to give pharmacy more scientific credibility within new institutional frameworks, emphasis shifted to the appeal of associating pharmacy with chemistry, since the latter was now an established scientific discipline grounded in Enlightenment principles and philosophical systems. Pharmacy, then, having at first tried to distance itself from the chemistry which had abandoned it, thus asserted itself in the immediate post-Napoleonic period as a ‘philosophical’ science through stressed association with chemistry, and also in ways similar to medicine which, through figures such as Bichat, was claiming the status of experimental science enjoyed by physics and chemistry (Léonard 1981: 26–8).

A key organ promoting this new image of pharmacists as chemists, scientists, and philosophers is the Bulletin de Pharmacie, launched in 1809 by members of the Société de Pharmacie de Paris disenchanted with their organisation’s reticence in asserting itself as a scientific body standing up to the disdain of chemists. Indeed, just as much as it was a periodical, the Bulletin was a faction in a disciplinary turf war. In a letter to the leadership of the Société de Pharmacie, the editors of the new journal send a shot across the bows, effectively setting themselves up as a rival organisation (Parmentier, Cadet et al. n.d., emphasis in original):

Les travaux importants auxquels nous allons nous livrer ne nous permettant pas de perdre notre temps aux Séances de votre Société; nous vous prions de prévenir vos collègues de l’intention où nous sommes de n’être plus portés sur votre catalogue; il est désormais impossible que des Pharmaciens observateurs, forts des principes qu’ils ont puisés aux leçons des grands maîtres; qui se sont mis au courant des méthodes naturelles, des Systèmes Philosophiques, et mis d’amitié avec les premiers Chymistes et Physiciens de l’Europe, puissent aller de pair avec des Pharmaciens qui ne sont que des manipulateurs plus ou moins adroits et dépourvus des connoissances qui éclairent leur art; En effet, monsieur, n’est-il pas désolant pour nous, de nous voir dédaignés par des Chymistes qui ne s’occupent que de Théorie, nous qui nous sommes rendus si recommandables par tant de travaux utiles, qui avons éclairé du flambeau lumineux de notre génie, une Science ingrate; Et nous serons regardés comme des Perroquets?³

[The important projects to which we are going to devote ourselves not permitting us to waste our time at the Meetings of your Society, we request that you alert your colleagues to our intention no longer to be included in your catalogue; it is henceforth impossible for observational Pharmacists, fortified with the principles which they have drawn from the lessons of the great maîtres, who have informed themselves of natural methods, of Philosophical Systems, and have established friendships with the foremost Chemists and Physicists in Europe, to be associated with Pharmacists who are only manipulators of a greater or lesser degree of skill and deprived of the knowledge that enlightens their art. Indeed, Monsieur, is it not devastating for us, to see ourselves disdained by Chemists concerned only with Theory, we who have made ourselves so commendable through so many useful works, who have enlightened with the luminous torch of our genius an ungrateful Science? And we are to be looked on as Parrots?]

The point being articulated here is that whereas old-style pharmacists, currently standing aloof from chemists, have no knowledge of theory, and new-style chemists know nothing other than theory, the new observational pharmacy, although thus far underappreciated, is endowed with both enlightened (and enlightening) theoretical knowledge – gleaned from both chemistry and physics – and useful practical skills. Rather than being engaged ‘comme des Perroquets’ [‘like Parrots’] in the endless second-hand repetition of formulae, as disdainful theoretical chemists might misrepresent them as being, especially if their more traditionalist colleagues reject new theoretical knowledge, these enlightened chemists have something radically new – advantageously rooted in both theory and practice – to offer. Observational pharmacy is thus the essential scientific discipline, the essential healing profession, and its value derives from its hybridity, which comes to be the distinguishing factor in rhetorical representations of it, not least in terms of justifying, on the grounds of its theoretical validity as science, its incorporative applicability to numerous areas of practical activity far beyond the healing of the sick.

The first article in the inaugural issue of the Bulletin, ‘Considérations sur l’état actuel de la pharmacie’ [‘Considerations on the Present State of Pharmacy’], is a polemic arguing for a ‘chimie pharmaceutique’ [‘pharmaceutical chemistry’] with privileged professional status. Its author, one of the signatories – if not indeed the principal author – of the letter to the Société de Pharmacie de Paris, and also responsible for a ‘fort beau rapport’ [‘a very fine article’] on poisoned sausages invoked in Madame Bovary by Homais as Emma writhes in moribund agony, is styled by Flaubert’s pharmacist as ‘une de nos sommités pharmaceutiques, un de nos maîtres, l’illustre Cadet de Gassicourt’ (OC I: 683) [‘one of our leading pharmaceutical lights, one of our masters, the celebrated Cadet de Gassicourt!’ (Flaubert 2004: 287)]. Institutionally, Charles-Louis Cadet de Gassicourt is indeed a ‘sommité’ [a ‘leading light’] given his status as ‘Pharmacien de l’Empereur’ (Cadet 1809b: 520), and veteran – as well as chronicler (1818) – of Napoleon’s Austrian campaign of 1809; he is a key player in pharmacy’s realignment with chemistry and in its claims to scientific and indeed philanthropic status. The author of his obituary in the Journal de Pharmacie – successor to the Bulletin – clearly regards him as central to the refashioning of pharmacy as a professional discipline. He and the chemist-agrarian Parmentier (a co-signatory of the letter to the Société de Pharmacie), ‘ces deux promoteurs des sciences philanthropiques’ [‘those two promoters of the philanthropic sciences’] are pharmacy’s ‘plus nobles ornemens’ [‘noblest adornments’] (Virey 1822: 1–2). The social vocation of pharmacy is reflected in Cadet’s setting up of a Conseil de salubrité publique – at the heart of what was to become widely known as ‘hygiène publique’ – of which he was the secrétaire-rapporteur. While he held this role, he was a prolific producer of learned discourse, scourge of charlatans threatening to contaminate the pharmaceutical body, and champion of its professional rights:

Il ne se passait pas de séance sans qu’il fît de nombreux rapports; ces travaux, quoique ignorés et sans éclat, étaient toujours frappés au coin de l’utilité générale, et empreints de l’amour du bien public. C’est de là, comme d’une haute citadelle, qu’il précipita tant de fois le charlatanisme, qu’il revendiqua pour l’art pharmaceutique des droits trop méconnus, et rendit à la médecine de si éminens services. (Virey 1822: 9)

[There did not occur a single meeting without his producing numerous reports; these works, however much they might be ignored and untrumpeted, always bore the stamp of general utility, and were imprinted with the love of the public good. It was from this standpoint, as from a high citadel, that he cast down charlatanism so many times, that he insisted on rig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Note
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Translations
• Note on Manuscripts and Transcriptions
• Introduction: Knowledge, Incorporated
• Part I Flaubert and Professional Incorporations
• Part II Flaubert, le corps redressé
• Part III Zola: Professional, Pathological, and Therapeutic Incorporations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index