The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gustave Flaubert · a novel in fifteen chapters · Michel Lévy, Paris, November 1862 · scored on Flaubert’s French, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and A. J. Krailsheimer’s translation (Penguin Classics, 1977) for sense
Mode
A historical novel turned against the historical novel: an epic of war and ritual in impersonal tableaux, with a love plot hung on a sacred thing
Mythos
The moon and the sun, Tanit and Moloch, dividing the book; the goddess’s virgin and the barbarian who steals the goddess’s veil; the sacred touched, and paid for
Phase
From the feast of the unpaid army in Hamilcar’s gardens to Mâtho’s death at Salammbô’s wedding feast, through the Mercenary War of 241 to 237 BC
Presentation
Fiction; fifteen chapters, great scenes alternating with chapters of campaign, the persons given in gesture and costume rather than in thought; little dialogue, and that mostly oration, invocation and command
Register
One cold, exact register from feast to famine, weighted with things and with the vocabulary of archaeology, and never lapsing into modern sentiment
Scale
A city, its council, its cults and its treasure; an army of many peoples; a father, his daughter and his son; desert, drought and rain
Governing Proposition
Carthage will not pay the army it hired for the First Punic War, and the mercenaries, feasted in Hamilcar’s gardens, turn on the city. One of them, Mâtho, takes from the temple of Tanit the goddess’s veil, the zaïmph, and is drawn to Hamilcar’s daughter, the goddess’s virgin, as to the goddess herself; the war that follows is fought over a debt and a sacred thing, until children burned to Moloch bring the rain, the army starves in a defile, and Mâtho dies at Salammbô’s wedding feast. The wager of the novel is that a world two thousand years gone can be made present without being made familiar: rendered from outside, in tableaux of things and gestures, with no modern sentiment lent to it, so that its gods, its cruelties and its ledger keep their own law, and the reader can only look.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“C’était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d’Hamilcar.”
“It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar.” The book opens on a feast. The army Carthage hired for the First Punic War has come back unpaid, and the city feasts it in the gardens of Hamilcar Barca: hundreds of soldiers of many peoples, their dishes and their quarrels. The sacred fish of the Barca are killed and eaten. Then Salammbô, Hamilcar’s daughter, comes down the stairs singing of the gods. In one chapter the book has set out its two matters, the army and the girl.
The matter is the Mercenary War that followed the First Punic War, 241 to 237 BC, and its source is the first book of Polybius. The historical frame is Polybius’s; the heroine, the veil and the love plot are Flaubert’s. The novel runs to fifteen chapters, and the war fills the greater part of them. Salammbô herself is at the centre of perhaps four, the third, fifth, tenth and eleventh, and of the last pages of the fifteenth. Little of the book is dialogue, and what is spoken is mostly oration, invocation and command. The persons are given in gesture and costume, seen from outside, as figures in a sequence of great scenes.
Flaubert began it in 1857, the year of the Madame Bovary trial, travelled to Tunis and the site of Carthage in the spring of 1858, and worked on it for some five years. Michel Lévy published it in Paris in November 1862. It was a great success and, for a time, a fashion in Paris; its first critics found it cold, cruel and unreadable. Sainte-Beuve gave it three articles in December 1862, and Flaubert answered him in print, and answered the archaeologist Froehner. Those replies are context, not the work. The work is the novel as Flaubert published it, judged on his French.
Movement II
The war is a debt dispute. Carthage will not pay the army it hired, and the army turns on the city that hired it. On the road to Sicca, in the second chapter, lions hang crucified, and the book’s key is set: cruelty will be shown, at length and without comment, on both sides, and on both sides it will follow the ledger. No one in the book is made a hero of the quarrel, and no modern feeling is lent to either party to make the reader choose.
Mâtho, a barbarian of the army, and Spendius enter Carthage by the aqueduct and take the zaïmph, the veil of Tanit, from the goddess’s temple (V). The theft joins the love plot to the war. Salammbô is Tanit’s virgin, kept by the eunuch Schahabarim; she has a nurse, Taanach, and a father who suspects her. Mâtho is drawn to her as to the goddess herself. The veil is a thing: it is stolen, carried off and, later, recovered, and every turn of the book passes through it.
Then the campaign. Chapters VII to IX run battle after battle and march after march, set out with a clarity of movement rare in the novels of their time and with a documentation that does not know when to stop: the inventory of Hamilcar’s treasure, the catalogues of the peoples in the army. Behind the battles stands the state that will not pay: the Council of Ancients, its factions and its finance, and Hannon with his leprosy. The city’s politics and the army’s hunger are one subject, and it is money.
Movement III
Salammbô is alone with the python (X). She coils it about her before she goes to Mâtho. The scene is given as the whole book is given, from outside, in things and gestures: the serpent, the body, the act. Of what she feels the book says little that is not a mood, of languor and of fear. She is a figure in a rite before she is a person, and the rite is performed in full view.
She goes to Mâtho’s tent (XI), and her night there recovers the veil. The war turns. The love plot has done its work in the war’s machinery, and it has done it without a scene in which either of the two lovers is entered from within. Mâtho’s inner life, so far as the book gives one, is a fixation. Their meeting is the hinge of the book, and it is seen as a spectator would see it.
This is the method, and the book’s knowledge lies in it. A sympathetic consciousness would make Carthage familiar, and the book refuses that: its world cannot be entered from within, its gods and its cruelties have their own law, and the modern reader can only look. The aqueduct returns in XII, in a night entry. The tableau and the campaign alternate, scene and chronicle, chronicle and scene, toward the sacrifice.
Movement IV
In the drought the bronze Moloch stands with its arms raised, and the children of Carthage are passed up into the fire while the crowd sways (XIII). Hamilcar hides his son Hannibal, and a slave’s child is given in his place. Then the rain comes. The book does not explain the rain away: the price is paid, and the god answers, and the myth is true inside the book.
The sacred, here, is a transaction. The veil is a thing that can be stolen and returned; the children are a price paid for water. The moon and the sun, Tanit and Moloch, have divided the book between them, the virgin and the veil on one side and the fire on the other, and the book keeps both as material as a ledger. The religion is a construction of 1860, partly borrowed from other Semitic cults, and it is built into the plot so that the plot cannot stand without it.
The mercenaries are trapped in the Défilé de la Hache (XIV). The chapter is built in stages of starvation, with a terrible patience. The army comes to eat its dead, and the lions feed on the rest. The eye that watched Salammbô with the python watches this with the same coldness and the same weight of things: bodies, things and gods of one matter, desire and hunger one force.
Movement V
Mâtho walks through Carthage under the blows of the whole city (XV). He dies at Salammbô’s wedding feast. She dies at the sight of his heart. The book gives the death and no preparation for it from within her; it is asserted, as a rite is performed, and the last sentence names the cause: “Ainsi mourut la fille d’Hamilcar pour avoir touché au manteau de Tanit.”
“Thus died Hamilcar’s daughter, for having touched the mantle of Tanit.”
The novel that opened in Hamilcar’s gardens closes on his daughter, and on a fault that is not a feeling but a contact: she touched the sacred thing, and the sacred is touched at a cost. From the feast to this sentence the register has not changed. No modern sentiment has entered, and no warmth has been admitted that might test the book’s law. That is its strength and its narrowness together.
The book made a fashion. Its imagined Carthage passed into the Symbolists and the Decadents, into Reyer’s opera of 1890 and Mussorgsky’s unfinished one, into Mucha’s image and Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), and into Lukács’s argument, as the type of the historical novel’s turn from history to décor. After its first decades its readers narrowed, and it is read now chiefly by students of Flaubert and of his century. It has stayed in print in French throughout, whole as Flaubert published it, its Carthage still other, and its Orient an image of 1860.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. The unpaid army, the stolen zaïmph, the veil recovered in Mâtho’s tent, the turn of the war, the sacrifice to Moloch that brings the rain, the trap in the Défilé de la Hache and Mâtho’s death at Salammbô’s wedding feast: each hinge moves the next, and the veil binds the love plot to the war so that neither can be cut out. The subtractive test fails in the middle. The campaign chapters (VII to IX) run battle after battle and march after march, and much of their matter could be shortened without the loss of a fact the book needs; the inventory of Hamilcar’s treasure and the catalogues of the army’s peoples are there because the documentation was there. That holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, level with The Unconcealment: necessity real in the plan and weak in the volume of the execution. The cap is met at its edge.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and three findings hold. A state that hires its violence and will not pay for it is devoured by it: Carthage’s war is a debt dispute, and the cruelty on both sides follows the ledger. The sacred is a material transaction: the veil is a thing, stolen and recovered, and the children given to Moloch are a price paid for rain, and the rain comes. And the past is other: no modern sentiment is lent to Carthage, and the book refuses the consolation that the ancients were like us. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the persons, opaque by design: Salammbô’s inner life is a mood of languor and fear, Mâtho’s a fixation. The book discloses a world’s surface and law more than a meaning that can be lived from within, and much of what it renders is mood, which ranks below meaning.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. The crucified lions on the road to Sicca (II) set the key early. Around them: the feast of the first chapter, where the sacred fish of the Barca are killed and eaten; Salammbô alone with the python (X), coiling it about her before she goes to Mâtho; the night entry by the aqueduct (XII); the bronze Moloch with its arms raised, the children passed up and into the fire while the crowd sways (XIII); the starving army in the Défilé de la Hache, eating its dead while the lions feed on the rest (XIV); Mâtho’s walk through Carthage under the blows of the whole city (XV). The book rises again and again. It is held below the top because the dread is cold and its height is visual more than moral: the reader is overwhelmed rather than transported, and the warm sublime is almost absent.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and load-bearing. Tanit and Moloch, the moon and the sun, divide the book: Salammbô is the moon goddess’s virgin, kept by the eunuch Schahabarim, and Mâtho, the barbarian who steals the goddess’s veil, is drawn to her as to the goddess herself. The zaïmph is the hinge of every turn, and touching it is the fault the last sentence names. The rain that answers the children’s burning makes the Moloch myth true inside the book. The particular stays particular: Salammbô is a girl with a nurse, Taanach, and a father who suspects her. Held a tenth below the gate because the archetypes are made of attributes more than of persons: the figures are hieratic by design, and Mâtho and Salammbô do not carry the myth from within. The Carthaginian religion is also a construction of 1860, in part borrowed from other Semitic cults, which keeps the myth partly a set.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the historical novel of Scott and its French heirs, Vigny, Hugo and Dumas, where a modern sensibility is placed in costume and the past is made familiar through its ordinary people; and the classical antiquity of Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs. Flaubert turned from all of it: an antiquity with no Christian or Greek centre, chosen because it was almost unknown; no point of view the reader can share; documentation pushed until the world is opaque; the impersonal method of Madame Bovary applied to a subject where it could borrow no plausibility from the reader’s experience. The stake was real and was paid: he followed a celebrated and prosecuted novel with a book its first critics found cold, cruel and unreadable, and had to defend it in print against Sainte-Beuve and Froehner. Held off the top because the exotic and the archaeological were already in the air of the 1850s, above all in Gautier’s Le Roman de la momie (1858).
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The impersonal tableau, a sequence of great scenes seen from outside, with the persons given in gesture and costume rather than in thought, is the instrument of the book’s one deep knowledge: that this world cannot be entered from within, that its gods and its cruelties have their own law, and that the modern reader can only look. Tell it through a sympathetic consciousness and that knowledge goes. But the form is also a container for long stretches. The campaign chapters are sequenced by chronicle, not by the form’s necessity; the love plot is too thin to bear the weight the ending puts on it, so that Salammbô’s death at the sight of Mâtho’s heart is asserted rather than prepared; and the alternation of tableau and campaign is a rhythm more than an argument. The floor is met with room.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The evidence is real, and narrower than for Flaubert’s other major books. The novel has drawn readings without exhausting: Sainte-Beuve’s three articles of December 1862 and Flaubert’s reply; Lukács, in The Historical Novel (1937), who made it the type of the historical novel’s turn from history to décor; the twentieth century’s interest in its descriptions as writing for its own sake, and in its violence; the postcolonial readings of its Orient and its Africa. Its questions stay open: whether its cruelty is critique or relish; whether Carthage is a mirror of the Second Empire or a refusal of every mirror; what the veil is. Held where it is because the yield is more on the question of method than inside the book: few readers return to it for its people, and its formal depth is mainly the depth of its sentences.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, beyond it, the European historical novel. The intrinsic force is real: the book made the past a site of estrangement rather than of identification, and showed that a novel could be built of description and image with plot held to a frame, a turn in what the historical novel could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a great success on publication and a fashion in Paris; the iconography and mood of the Symbolists and Decadents, with Moreau’s world its neighbour and Huysmans’s line running through it; operas by Reyer (1890) and, unfinished, by Mussorgsky; Mucha’s image; Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) and the cinema of antiquity after it; and, as a negative example, Lukács’s whole argument. Held well below the gate because the reach runs mainly into décor, exoticism and spectacle, which are discounted, and because the redirection of the novel as an art came from Madame Bovary, not from this book.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and sixty-four years. The text survives whole, as Flaubert published it in 1862, and has been in print in French throughout; it is translated into the major languages, several times into English. The charge is presence alone, a tenth: after its first decades of fashion its readership narrowed, and it is now read chiefly by students of Flaubert and of the nineteenth century, in the academy more than by the common reader. Its surface is in one sense immune to its moment, since it set its world two thousand years back; in another, its Orient is an image of 1860, and that is the surface that has dated most. The form is whole and legible, and nothing of it is lost. A survival under two centuries does not stand with the millennia, and that, with the narrowed presence, holds the figure where it is.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on the French, as far as it can be heard here. The prose is Flaubert’s at full command: the sentence weighed by ear, the cadences built to close, the imperfect tense used to set a whole world in motion at once, the concrete noun placed where a lesser writer would put a feeling. The first chapter’s feast is a set piece of construction, hundreds of soldiers, dishes, peoples and quarrels governed by rhythm until Salammbô descends. The battles are handled with a clarity of movement unusual in the period, and the Défilé de la Hache is built in stages of starvation with a terrible patience. Charged to this book’s making, not to the hand: the vocabulary of archaeology, which in places makes the sentence a museum case; the speeches, often stiff and declamatory; and the middle chapters, where the command is sustained but the material repeats.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Salammbô alone with the python, and the army eating its dead in the defile. One law governs both: bodies, things and gods are of one matter, desire and hunger are the same force, and the sacred is touched at a cost. The tone does not change between them: the same cold eye, the same weight of things, the same refusal to judge. From the feast to Mâtho’s death the register holds without a single lapse into modern sentiment, which is rare in a historical novel of its century, and the range it holds is wide: politics in the Council of Ancients, Hannon’s leprosy, war, ritual, love. Held below the top because the law is held partly by narrowness of feeling. The book admits no warmth that might test it, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Held, not listed, and integrated through the veil and the war. The state: the Carthaginian council, its factions and its finance. War, at length and in its logistics. Labour: the slaves of Hamilcar’s estates and the needs of an army. The sacred: the cults of Tanit and Moloch and the priests who serve them. The family: Hamilcar, his daughter, and his son Hannibal, hidden at the sacrifice with a slave’s child given in his place. The natural order: desert, drought, rain, lions and the serpent. History is an agent, not a ground. What is thin is consciousness: no mind in the book is held from within for long, and that order, which the novel holds best, is the one this novel declines. That holds the axis a step down.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Made at 8.8. A text whole and in print in French for a hundred and sixty-four years, charged only on a presence that narrowed after its first decades; and Flaubert’s sentence at full command, from the feast of the first chapter to the stages of starvation in the Défilé de la Hache. Behind them stand The Sublime and The Swerve at 8.6: a book that rises again and again into a cold dread, and an antiquity turned away from the historical novel of costume at the cost of its first critics.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Unconcealment, each at 7.6. A plan in which every hinge is required, carried out at a volume the plan does not need, in campaign chapters, inventories and catalogues that could be shortened without loss; and a disclosure of real findings, the war as a ledger, the sacred as a price, the past as other, held below the human person by figures opaque by design, so that much of what the book renders is mood. Next above them, The Bottomless Well at 7.8, a yield more on method than inside the book, and The Living Form at 7.9, a form that is the instrument of the book’s knowledge and, for long stretches, its container. The sound of Flaubert’s French beyond the sentences known here is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short of it by a tenth, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 by five tenths and The Unconcealment at 7.6 by nine. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.2, from a sum of 98.9, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, published in Paris by Michel Lévy in November 1862. The unit scored is the novel as Flaubert published it, in fifteen chapters, judged on his French. Flaubert’s published replies of 1862 and 1863 to Sainte-Beuve and to the archaeologist Froehner are context, not the work. No text was in hand; nothing was measured by script, and no quotation was checked against a file. French is quoted only where its words are certain, the first sentence and the last, with the desk’s own plain English beneath; no published translation is quoted. Chapters are cited in roman numerals where the reading places a scene. Translation · A. J. Krailsheimer’s (Penguin Classics, 1977) is the version best known to this reading and was used for sense, as the closest modern English known to it. It is not in hand, it is not quoted, and nothing in it is charged to the novel. The structure, the persons and the set pieces are judged in full; the sound of Flaubert’s French beyond the sentences known is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the titles of the fifteen chapters, the novel’s length in words, the share of it that is dialogue, the extent of the variants between later editions, and the wording and date of a letter often cited on why the book was undertaken.