Customer Reviews

The Temptation of St. Anthony

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This is a work that should not be neglected by those interested in Flaubert or by lovers of French Literature. It's format resembles an old-fashioned cyclorama, which was basically a revolving canvas, portraying various interpretive images to an audience that would be seated in the middle of a room. Or it may recall the same period's "magic lantern" which would produce a similar effect, projecting a series of images on a flat wall, the precursor of modern cinema.

Flaubert ushered in an entirely new sensibility to the world of letters. He reinvented the concept of the literary artist as word-and world shaper. The word is the world and vice-versa. No writer ever engaged in such a Herculean struggle to shape every word, every sentence, every image, every assonance or consonance to perfectly conform to his intention.

Flaubert engaged in a kind of ascetisism his entire adult life, which is hardly news, but is central to an understanding of this work and to his attraction towards St. Anthony for a protagonist. Flaubert was for many years a kind of hermit in his study at Croisset, where he retired to his study to read books and write novels. He had contact with his mother and adopted niece and wrote letters to a mistress (Louise Collet, and later to George Sand) along with a few male friends. He would make brief sojourns into Paris, but for the most part, stayed to himself in his provincial hideaway. What he dreamt of there, besides his most famous works (Madame Bovary and L'Education Sentimentale) were reveries such as this novel and Salammbo, another book set in the Near-East and equally evocative in terms of his treatment of that region's sensual and Byzantine richness.

"The Temptation" sparkles with some of Flaubert's most carefully and lovingly constructed imagery. It is the author's own homage to the fertility of his imagination. He never fathered a child literally that we know of, but this work and Salammbo were his ways of saying that he was fertile in all other respects. Each passing personage or creature is a seed sewn by this father of imagery.

One of the most senseless and ill-informed utterances in the annals of criticism is Proust's comment that Flaubert never created one memorable metaphor. Flaubert's entire cannon is one vast metaphor. They are evident in every sentence and every passage of every novel he ever wrote. This is particularly true in this work, as any informed reader will no doubt conclude after reading it.

One other area of recommendation extends to students of Gnosticism. Flaubert encapsulates much of the central theories of the early Gnostic Fathers and Apostles in a few well-delineated characterisations and brush strokes. I would also recommend the Penguin edition, edited and translated by Kitty Mrosovsky, for her introduction and notes. The only drawback I have with her is that she portrays Henry James as denigrating Flaubert's work, where in fact he generally effusively praises it. To those who can read it in its original text, I can only say I envy you and wish I were there.

This is a startling and brilliant piece of prose poetry that deserves to be more widely read; just don't expect anything like his more conventional novels. Indeed, don't read it expecting a novel at all; it reads more like a cross between modernist poetry and Medieval vision literature.

This work is likely to challenge those readers used to Flaubert's more representative works, i.e. Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, "A Simple Heart." The difficulty lies not in novelty. The Temptation of Saint Anthony harkens back to the morality drama "Everyman" and Erasmus' In Praise of Folly. History notables, mythical personages, and personified qualities appear. Saint Anthony converses with the Queen of Sheba, Apollonius, Buddha, Isis, Venus, the Devil, and the Sphinx. Other characters are simply titled "A Child", "The Old Man", "The Stranger", and so on. These and others occur in a narrative structure that in print resembles the layout of a play. This mode lends itself to Flaubert's ambition to expunge the author's present from the work in the way Yeat's Byzantine dancer is indistinguishable from the dance. As Ms. Mrosovsky says in her lucid and comprehensive introduction Flaubert was so armored of this work he revised it several times during his career. She makes a case for The Temptation to be considered a significant part of the Flaubertian cannon. Most academicians, however, do not agree with this assessment as evidenced by the fact Madame Bovary is easy to come by more than a century after the author's death and The Temptation is not. The exquisite descriptive passages plus the profundities Flaubert attributes to the characters are not enough to endow this book with the dramatic tension and irony a reader finds in his better known works. This is not to relegate the book to obscurity. An encounter with Saint Anthony brings a reader to a fuller appreciation of the master's stringent art illustrated by his more famous novels.

This is not everybody's cup of tea, to say the least. It is not even a novel but a sort of bizarre unstageable play. St Anthony is in Egypt and hallucinates everything possible. The reader is not likely to understand all of the esoteric references. Flaubert's writings are easily divisible into the realistic works such as Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, etc., and the romantic works such as Salammbo and St Anthony. It is virtually impossible for the reader to like both types equally. St Anthony is one among a number of French historical novels dealing with Egypt, such as Thais, Aphrodite, Romance of a Mummy. It is the sort of book that ought to be illustrated by Gustave Moreau.

I am a big fan of the work itself, but wanted to throw in a recommendation for the Penguin Classics edition. By all means, avoid the Kindle translation, as it is crazy bad. Certain passages read strangely while a majority of them are just wrong. I'm no scholar; I just bought both versions and it's remarkable how much better the Penguin Classics edition is. This is a shame, but as the kindle is very convenient. However, the poetry and energy of Flaubert's writing comes through much better in the other translations. Trust me; you'll be glad you paid more for the print copy.