Imagination Betrayed (article) by David Arthur Walters on AuthorsDen

Imagination Betrayed!

"The change will begin with those powers which man ascribes to himself, but which, in reality, he does not possess. This means that before a man can acquire any new powers and capacities, he must actually develop in himself those qualities he thinks he possesses, and about which he has the greatest possible illusions." P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution

Inspired by Melina

Madame Bovary is a female Don Quixote. Her adultery was commonplace. The imperial censors were appalled by her novel conduct, but in reality her pastimes would hardly have been novel - quite to the contrary. Flaubert's critics were surprised that he would take up such a mundane subject as adultery in France, and called him a Realist. But adultery was not the point of the novel. Emma Bovary had read too much sentimental trash and took its underlying theme to heart. She also read two of her creator's childhood favorites: the despairing Romantics, Byron and Chateaubriand - as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary, "C'est moi.'

In contrast to Marie Antoinette, a real woman who finally abandoned hope of escape on this earth and then faced the reality of The End with resolve, courage, and dignity, the fictitious Madame Bovary betrayed the Imaginary: she tried to make her escape from reality good on earth: she wanted to realize the Imaginary during her desperate flight from finite reality into the infinite possibilities of imagination, hence in absurd self-contradiction she betrayed the 'pure' Imaginary in itself, which is properly employed as art for art's sake and not for the possession of things in this world. Yet, despite her wordly passion, she unconsciously craved Flaubert's Nothing. Flaubert loved Nothing, wanted to write a book about nothing but Nothing. He had faith in Nothing, a Nothing which is, perversely, the positive devoid of negating content - figuratively speaking, absolute space is positive and objects are negations of its infinity.

Reality tasted like ordure to Flaubert; in a sense he was a misanthrope, perhaps so in a special Satanic sense: Satan hated man because he loved God exclusively. Flaubert's Imagination, drawn to Nothing, vanished into infinity. Eternal YUK, young Flaubert's god of the grotesque, transcended Satan and God. Yuk seized the goddess Truth from Satan and plunged into the Abyss, where he (expletive deleted) Truth to death. There could be no beauty, goodness, truth in the evil something, in the world.

Emma represented a neurotic case of the existential impulse towards the infinitude beyond human existence. In her unwitting or 'innocent' moral turpitude, she strove for exaltation into the transcendental realm while wanting it here and now. Freud associated the impulse to Nothing with a destructive principle he dubbed the "death instinct" - his pleasure principle alone was inadequate to man's dual nature. Of course others insist that the transcendental yearning is not a sublimation of a biological urge to return to the womb if not the elements, but is rather a striving towards a positive, transcendental being.

For philosopher Jules Gaultier, Madame Bovary was a pathological case of a healthy, necessary and natural tendency to illusion, a tendency for a woman to always become; that is, to be something that she presently is not. Hence his philosophy of illusionism, or Bovarysm (Bovarysme). Static "Truth" or Reality or Being is the enemy of dynamic life, which always strives, in a creative-destructive process, not to be, but to become.

"The law of a thing in motion and which exists only on the condition of always being divided with itself, is never able to attain a state of repose.... To become other is the law of life," quoth Gaultier.

The failure to realize the possible does not betray the Imagination itself but rather betrays its particular application. There is no betrayal of the Imagination in the failure to realize the impossible; indeed, to strive to realize the impossible is pathological. The pathological tendency comprises an escape to unreality. The pathological effort is a misapplication of imagination to the inertial force of circumstances.

We can sing the ancient precautionary song in several ways: the Greeks simply said "Know thyself." For most of them, that meant, "Know thy limits." To get to know those limits better, some people have pushed the envelope farther than others. One strives to overcome, but to repeat the same mistake over and over again is not rational. In any event, Gaultier advises us to rejoice even in spectacles of failure, for if all persons were perfect hence equal there should be nothing worthy or superior to live for. At the same time, one must be in harmony with the self to the extent that it can grow, for growth is the criterion of change. We certainly need our illusions, our ideals, but we should take care that our striving is efficacious and beneficial; that is, applied to those activities where realization of the illusion is possible.
For instance, Madame Bovary could not find the perfect man in the world, no more than a geometer can find a perfect circle in the world. She had nothing definite in mind, but strove relentlessly to the infinite and found it in suicide. Furthermore, as we are wont to say, people change, hence some variance from our definition of the ideal mate must be suffered and enjoyed. Unity in marriage is momentary: without differences between mates there is no personal identity. Emma Bovary would have been better off doing the best she could do with the man who loved her the most.