Frédéric's “Pro-coital” cigarette: Causal indeterminacy in L'education sentimentale

Abstract

This study has a double focus of investigation. It seeks initially to elaborate how the internal logic subtending narrative fiction is the channel whereby meaning is made available to the reader. Drawing on a precise theoretical model, the study when “tests” this assertion by analysing in depth a syntagmatic causal chain which appears at the close of Flaubert's novel and which can be seen to have the useful effect of sensitizing readers to a richly suggestive network of tobacco and smoking imagery informing the aesthetic fabric of the work. The reading I propose invites an interpretation of the text through both a figurative and a non-figurative optic, Flaubertian encoding offering itself as at once representing language and represented language. The theoretical tenets of the analysis are predicated upon the textual conflict between “narrative logic” and “logic of narrativity”, a conflict which invites the reader to see beyond pure mimesis and ultimately to apprehend the motivation underlying Frédéric Moreau's dichotomized responses to Marie Arnoux and Rosanette Bron. The tobacco motif not only serves to underline the complexity of human sexual behaviour, but shows Flaubert as a writer ripely poised between the mimetic and the autotelic.