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Historical Cliché: Irony and the Sublime in L'éducation sentimentale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Vaheed K. Ramazani
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Abstract

Flaubert's representation of the 1848 revolution in L'éducation sentimentale brings irony and the sublime into a relation of simultaneous opposition and dependency. An uncertain irony constructs the revolution as an aporia: as both an impoverished imitation of 1789 (a cliché) and a tragic modern apocalypse. Particularly in the famous Fontainebleau episode, where the rhetorical violence of irony is enacted in the analogy between the awesome turbulence of nature and the chaos of a nonteleological historical process, irony gives rise to the affects of fear and transport characteristic of the sublime. And the turn from an uncanny irony to the countermode of self-empowerment is set in motion by the same fear of death that haunts the novel's historiographical intertext, the Micheletist cliché of resurrection. But while the Micheletist sublime constructs a version of historical and ontological truth, the Flaubertian sublime transforms meaninglessness itself into power. Reified as ideology, that power would be neither inflexible nor monolithic, for it emerges and recedes repeatedly in the context of a self-interrogating and fundamentally ironic narrative. (VKR)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 1: Special Topic Literature and the Idea of Europe , January 1993 , pp. 121 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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