*
Rousseau’s contributions were principally concerned with the technicalities of music, including entries on tone, rhythm and the chromatic scale. But his major essay for the encyclopaedia concerned political economy, and it has dated welclass="underline"
It is … one of the most important concerns of government to prevent the extreme inequality of fortunes; not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving men of all the means to accumulate it; not by building hospitals for the poor, but by guaranteeing that the citizens will not become poor. The unequal distribution of inhabitants in our country, some crowded together in one place, while other areas are depopulated; the support given to the arts producing luxuries and to the purely industrial arts at the expense of the useful and laborious crafts; the sacrifice of agriculture to commerce … and finally venality pushed to such an extreme that public esteem is reckoned at a low cash value; and even virtue is sold at a market price: these are the most perceptible causes of opulence and poverty, of private interest substituted for public interest, of mutual hatred among citizens.
FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE (a diversion …)
A brief diversion to consider the case of Gustave Flaubert. The novelist appeared to be equally entranced and revolted by the notion of encyclopaedias – their design, their intentions, their overwhelming suppression of wider reading. In Madame Bovary a minor character vainly recommends one as a cure for grief. In Bouvard et Pécuchet the notion of the encyclopaedia appears to overwhelm the entire book.
Flaubert knew Bouvard et Pécuchet was his swansong, and he spent a great many years on it. He claimed to have read 1500 books as background research, but that was just too many books: he died in 1880 with the novel unfinished. The story is simple enough: the eponymous protagonists meet by a canal on a hot day in Paris and start a friendship. They are both copyists (old-fashioned scribes, medieval-style) and in many ways they are copies of each other. They are the same age, and are both vaguely dissatisfied with their lot. Several volumes of Roret’s Encyclopaedia lie scattered around Pécuchet’s Paris apartment, an indication of the narrative to come.*
When one of them inherits they decide to leave Paris and move together to Normandy, where they will better themselves by reading, travelling and learning important skills, an attempt to absorb all human knowledge – philosophical, agricultural, historical, medicinal, geological and theological. They will dismiss almost everything as flawed, contradictory or impossible, and they will alienate those around them. They have become the embodiment of the ‘walking encyclopaedia’, but they have rejected almost all of its elements.
Mais oui, it’s a satire, and an occasionally funny one, and it’s plausible that the person Flaubert was really satirising was himself. In a letter to a friend, Flaubert wrote that he intended his novel to be ‘a kind of encyclopaedia made into a farce … I am planning a thing in which I give vent to my anger … I shall vomit over my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me.’
Julian Barnes has called Flaubert’s novel ‘an encyclopaedia of human endeavour’ and quotes Cyril Connolly’s phrase that it is ‘the Baedeker of futility’. Flaubert himself proclaimed, ‘The book I am working on could have as a sub-title Encyclopaedia of Human Stupidity. The undertaking gets me down and its subject becomes part of me.’ Indeed, the pedantry expressed by Bouvard and Pécuchet is something he shared. Flaubert liked exactitude, although he ‘thundered against’ platitude. He was reclaiming Stendhal’s complaint that ‘an idiot who knows a date can disconcert the wittiest man.’*
The grand sweep of knowledge, Bouvard and Pécuchet concluded, was just too difficult to grasp in its entirety, and was never complete or agreed upon, making any attempt to acquire even the smallest amount quite fatuous. And the same for history in particular. They consult a professor who confirms, ‘It is changing every day. There is a controversy as to the kings of Rome and the journeys of Pythagoras … It is desirable that no more discoveries should be made, and the Institute ought even to lay down a kind of canon prescribing what it is necessary to believe!’
Flaubert’s notes for the unfinished portion of the book, discovered after his death, suggest that his anti-heroes would eventually return to their urban copying duties. In a lovely circle, they may have been obliged to copy the wisdom amassed during their doomed rural experiment, which they may have called a Dictionary of Received Ideas, the name of the volume Flaubert had been composing for years independently of his novel. Inspired by the trite musings of an elderly relative, it was certainly more than a dictionary; it was a battle cry against herd thinking and mediocrity, a collection of corrupted (but funny) aphorisms and other instructions from a world that had rejected original thought in favour of inanities. It wasn’t published until 1911, and if today it strikes readers as coarse and cynical, not to say sacrilegious, then the author has achieved his intention.
A few of Flaubert’s ‘F’s:
FACTORY: Dangerous neighbourhood.
FARM: When visiting a farm, one must eat nothing but wholemeal bread and drink nothing but milk. If eggs are added, exclaim: ‘Heavens, how fresh they are! Not a hope of finding any like these in town!’
FELICITY: Always ‘perfect’. If your cook is named Felicity, then she is perfect.
FEUDALISM: No need to have any clear idea what it was, but thunder against it.
FICTION: Inevitably featuring ‘eponymous protagonists’.
FLAT (BACHELOR): Always in a mess, with feminine garments lying here and there. Smell of cigarettes. If you hunted around, you would find the most extraordinary things.
FOREIGN: Contempt for everything that isn’t French is a sign of patriotism.
FORGERS: Always work in cellars.
FUNERAL: About the deceased, say: ‘To think that I had dinner with him only a week ago.’
FURNITURE: Always fear the worst for your furniture.*
Responding to Flaubert’s list, in 2013 the novelist Teju Cole produced updated entries of his own for the New Yorker.* These included:
PARIS: Romantic, in spite of the rude waiters and Japanese tourists. Don’t simply like it; ‘adore’ it.
GERMANS: When watching football, ‘Never rule out the Germans.’
MAGISTERIAL: Large book, written by a man.
FRANCKENSTEIN’S MONSTER
In Germany in 1731, Jacob August Franckenstein became the first editor of the magisterial Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste, an undertaking of sixty-four volumes published over eighteen years. Each folio was about two inches thick, and ran to some 284,000 entries on 63,000 pages; the estimated word count was 67 million. There were also four later supplemental books, but the authors ran out of alphabetical steam when they reached ‘Caq’.