Je deviens brahme: Indian influences in the poetics of Gustave Flaubert

Abstract

Towards 1846, Gustave Flaubert undertook the writing of a conte oriental which, like other works of the time, remained unfinished and unpublished. For this project, Gustave carried out a series of ‘orientalist’ readings (the Bhagavad-Gita, the hymns of the Rig-Veda, among others) which, in addition to serving the text he was preparing, would have a profound impact on the first version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1849). However, the importance of that bibliographical research is not limited to its mere documentary use: in fact, as verified when reviewing the correspondence of the period, the Hindu and Buddhist texts read by Flaubert play a specific role in the transformation of his narrative poetics, which will be consolidated after the trip he actually makes to the East from 1849 to 1851.

The purpose of this article is to trace those marks and analyze that influence by reading Flaubert's correspondence between 1846 and 1847. Thus, we hope to demonstrate that, in addition to providing him with a more or less ‘exotic’ imagery, the religions and texts of India provide Flaubert with a subtle conceptual framework that, on the one hand, reinforces the literary evolution undertaken a year earlier and, on the other, determines, for the future, new conceptions of the imagination, the impersonality of the artist and, above all, the development of a notion of reading as a specific act of mental creation.