Author: wulb

Homme plume

Victor Brombert

Frederick Brown
FLAUBERT
A biography
628pp. Heinemann. £25.
0 434 00769 2
US: Little, Brown. $35. 0 316 11878 8

Flaubert maintained that a writer should never celebrate himself, that he should in fact pretend not to have lived. He claimed to be an “homme plume”, a pen man, and that the only adventures in his life were the sentences he wrote. Yet he was not always tied to his desk, quill in hand. He travelled to Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Greece. In Paris, in 1848, he witnessed the street fighting and the violence of the mob. He frequented some of the most notable people of the period: the sculptor James Pradier, the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, the critic Sainte-Beuve, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, George Sand – with whom he developed a tender friendship – Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, and Maupassant, who considered himself Flaubert’s disciple. He had a turbulent affair with the writer Louise Colet, one of the most flamboyant women of the century.

Despite quasi-monastic vows pronounced in the service of the religion of Art, Flaubert’s life was not as withdrawn as he would have us believe; it is full of encounters and events – a most interesting life in fact, especially when told by as gifted a biographer as Frederick Brown, whose thorough, colourful, intelligently paced book never fails, over close to 600 pages, to hold the reader’s attention.

Many of Flaubert’s claims must be approached with a dose of scepticism. At some point, for instance, he expressed the desire to write “un livre sur rien”, a book about “nothing” – an ideal book that would hold up through sheer force of style and structure, without any concern for subject matter. This metaphor of a godlike artificer’s detached creation has been much quoted by critics eager to enlist Flaubert among the early postmodernists. But the fact remains that Madame Bovary, thoroughly grounded in the daily realities of his native Normandy, contained enough precise subject matter to have made his fellow Normans scream with anger. Emma Bovary, oppressed and repressed by a mediocre society, is a carefully described clinical case. She is also a quixotic figure in pathetic quest of the unattainable, and in that she remains superior to the environment that crushes her. Certainly no one thought at the time Madame Bovary appeared that it was merely a stylistic tour de force. Flaubert’s notoriety in 1857 was largely due to a well-publicized trial for affront to public and religious morality, and to plain decent behaviour.

Nor is Salammbô, which resuscitates ancient Carthage, a novel about “nothing”. Flaubert went to the trouble of meticulous historical and archaeological research, and even travelled to Tunisia in the spring of 1858. As for L’Éducation sentimentale, Flaubert’s great novel about the moral and political history of an entire generation straddling the Revolution of 1848, it focused on precisely documented historic moments, as well as keen personal memories. Brown never loses sight of Flaubert’s grounding in his own time. He does so with a historian’s sensitivity to the changes in mood and manners during an agitated period, uncommonly rich in upheavals and political transformations.

Flaubert was born in 1821 into an affluent and well-respected family. His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was the revered chief surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Rouen. Gustave was a boy under the Restoration that marked the return of the Bourbons after the fall of Napoleon. He grew to be an adolescent after the Bourbons were chased out once again, and France became a constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe. Flaubert was twenty-seven years old when the Revolution of 1848 got rid of that king too, and a Republic came into being. That Republic was short-lived, however. Only three years later, a coup détat by its President transformed France into the Second Empire, and Louis Bonaparte became Napoleon III. Flaubert lived to see the end of this regime also, when Prussia defeated France in 1870, and Prussian soldiers occupied the Flaubert family house in Normandy. The violence of the Commune in 1871 and its brutal repression, which were not soon forgotten, gave way to the apparent stability of the Third Republic. Flaubert died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1880, after years of overeating and excessive pipe smoking, and no doubt also from the long-term effects of epilepsy and syphilis. Daily bouts of indignation surely also affected his blood pressure.

From the first paragraph of Browns Flaubert, where we glimpse his subject dreaming, in his prosaic Normandy, of distant deserts, we know that we are in for a treat. Elegant and well articulated, Browns narrative illuminates the complexity of Flauberts inner contradictions. Jealous of his independence, frequently misanthropic, taking pride in his monk-like withdrawal, the hermit of Croisset, as he came to be known, was in fact thirsting for friendship, affection and encouragement. In later years, despite his grouchiness and iconoclasm, he was flattered to have become a friend and protégé of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, to be a regular in her salon on the Rue de Courcelles, and to be invited to parties at the Imperial Court.

Brown is especially good at detailing the physical and moral portrait of the novelist: his sense of the comic, his bluster and vituperations, his pet dislikes, his erotic fantasies, his loud laughter and stentorian voice, his fascination with imbecility, his jowls and increasingly drooping moustache, his scatological lexicon. Behind the vigorous façade there was, hidden from public view, a vulnerable being who sought refuge from every form of unwanted involvement (such as choosing a career) by welcoming the epilepsy that surfaced when he was in his twenty-third year. Above all, he needed friendship, and in that need he was well served. His friends included the brilliant Alfred Le Poittevin, his early mentor who introduced him to philosophy; Maxime Du Camp, his travelling companion to Egypt; Louis Bouilhet, his literary adviser and confidant over the years; George Sand, late in his life, for whom he felt a special and reciprocated affection that is reflected in their prolific correspondence; and Ivan Turgenev, on extended sojourns in Paris, with whom he formed a strong bond.

Stimulated and encouraged by his history teacher Adolphe Chéruel, Flaubert might have become a historian. His early passion for history is attested by numerous texts and fragments of texts he wrote while still in school. He never lost his appetite for research and erudition. In preparing to write his books, notably La Tentation de Saint Antoine, Salammbô and Bouvard et Pécuchet, he would indulge in encyclopedic readings to the point of indigestion. This obsession with documentation, especially if it had to do with exotic regions and antiquity, was for him a form of travel in time and space. His yearning for exotic thrills was fulfilled when he set out in 1849 for a year-and-a-half-long voyage to Egypt and other Near Eastern countries. He visited the Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings, travelled in a cangia up the Nile, spent a steamy night in Esna with a heavily scented Egyptian courtesan: these experiences would feed his novels. He was mesmerized by the bazaars, the brothels, the bathhouse, the camels, the lewd male dancers (though he found their art somewhat vulgar). But while daydreaming during the slow river journey towards the cataracts of the Nile, he also began to consider liteary projects that would lead back to the realities of Norman boredom and to Emma Bovarys own dreams.

Brown himself seems to have an impressive capacity for documentation. We learn about the French school system, the professional conflicts between surgeons and physicians, the Paris law-school curriculum, the treatment of epilepsy. He provides colourful evocations of Rouen, with its medieval streets and modern textile manufactures; of Paris in the 1850s, when Baron Haussmann demolished large slums and created broad new arteries; of Vichy as it was being developed into a fashionable spa. He leads us on excursions into various French institutions, including literary gatherings such as the Magny dinners, which featured rich food and cacophonic exchanges (when they could hear each other) between such luminaries as Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, the Goncourt brothers, and Flaubert himself. (It was at one of these dinners, every two months, in a restaurant on the Left Bank that Flaubert met Turgenev.) Brown also provides economic information about the earnings of domestic help, the wages of unskilled labourers and the daily diet of the working class, as well as the flow of capital and the fever of speculation in the heyday of the Second Empire.

Every biography of Flaubert must rely on his abundant correspondence, and Brown makes especially good use of the extraordinary letters that Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet during the years he was labouring on Madame Bovary. Their vividness and allure, their variety of moods, their exuberance, their almost spoken quality as Flaubert unbuttons, make of them one of the truly exceptional correspondences in the French language. Through these letters, it is as though, without the benefit of a recording device, we were able to hear Flauberts personal voice. But there is also much substance in them. They communicate the novelists stylistic concerns, his worries about the structure and the rhythm of his book, his strivings and doubts, his theoretical preoccupations. The cult of Art (a word he habitually spelled with a capital A) is at their centre, and this cult, together with an almost religious belief in the writers vocation, is grounded in a deep-seated pessimism about the inadequacy of existence and the instantaneous decay of all things. The letters also help to dispel some hazy notions about Flaubert-the-realist (he in fact detested reality) and ferocious debunker of Emma Bovarys romantic readings. He never ceased to proclaim his allegiance to Romanticism, calling himself an old troubadour. In his craving for the unattainable, the creator of Emma Bovary seems himself afflicted with bovarysme.

Brown has shunned the all too frequent temptation of biographers to psychologize and invent states of being. He does not follow Jean-Paul Sartre who, in his massive LIdiot de la famille, conjured up intimate scenes (for instance between Flauberts father and mother in bed) for which there is not a trace of evidence. Sartres study of Flaubert, the result of years of a love-hate relation with him, is a brilliant tour de force, especially in its analysis of the novelists juvenilia. But it is tendentious in its emphasis on an authoritarian and repressive father, and in its insistence that young Gustave willed his epilepsy in order to justify his passivity and thus become, through writing, a Knight of Nothingness. Brown judiciously gives a different picture of the father who, it would seem, was loving, tolerant and open-minded in his dealings with an often difficult son. He is also fair to the mother (though she was no doubt possessive and given to sentimental blackmail), as he is to Louise Colet, who has in the past been much maligned.

Along the way, this new biography of Flaubert provides lively sketches of some famous and not so famous peole who crossed the novelists path. And there are portraits that amount to mini-biographies. At times Brown appears to overindulge in digressions. Do we need to learn that Pope Pius VII refused to allow gaslight and smallpox vaccination in papal territory? But these digressions usually turn out to be relevant, such as the striking one-paragraph analysis of Alexandre Dumas filss theatre which illustrates societys hypocritical moral values at the time of the Madame Bovary trial.

Frederick Brown has received deserved praise in the past for his biographies of Jean Cocteau and Émile Zola. In his Theater and Revolution (1989) he proved to be an excellent cultural historian, as he did in his illustrated study of the Père-Lachaise cemetery (1973), the great necropolis of nineteenth-century Paris. Even higher praise is now due for his Flaubert. Written with literary flair and restraint, graced by many a happy turn, this biography is sustained by patient build-ups. It covers considerable ground and takes the reader into many side alleys, but never loses its sense of focus and continuity.

Theory in particle physics: Theological speculation versus practical knowledge

When I began graduate school, I tried both theory and experiment and found experiment to be more fun. I also concluded that first-rate experimenters must understand theory, for if they do not they can only be technicians for the theorists. Although that will probably get their proposals past funding agencies and program committees, they won’t be much help in advancing the understanding of how the universe works, which is the goal of all of us.

I like to think that progress in physics comes from changing “why” questions into “how” questions. Why is the sky blue? For thousands of years, the answer was that it was an innate property of “sky” or that the gods made it so. Now we know that the sky is blue because of the mechanism that preferentially scatters short-wavelength light.

In the 1950s we struggled with an ever-increasing number of meson and baryon resonances—all apparently elementary particles by the standards of the day. Then Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig produced the quark model, which swept away the plethora of particles and replaced them with a simple underlying structure. That structure encompassed all that we had found, and it predicted things not yet seen. They were seen, and the quark model became practical knowledge. Why there were so many states was replaced with how they came to be.

A timelier example might be inflation. It is only slightly older than string theory and, when created, was theological speculation, as is often the case with new ideas until someone devises a test. Inflation was attractive because if it were true it would, among other things, solve the problem of the smallness of the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Inflation was not testable at first, but later a test was devised that predicted the size and position of the high angular harmonic peaks in the cosmic microwave background radiation. When those were found, inflation moved from being theological speculation to a kind of intermediate state in which all that is missing to make it practical knowledge is a mathematically sound microscopic realization.

The general trend of the path to understanding has been reductionist. We explain our world in terms of a generally decreasing number of assumptions, equations, and constants, although sometimes things have gotten more complicated before they became simpler. Aristotle would have recognized only what he called the property of heaviness and we call gravity. As more was learned, new forces had to be absorbedfirst magnetic, then electric. Then we realized that the magnetic and electric forces were really the electromagnetic force. The discovery of radioactivity and the nucleus required the addition of the weak and strong interactions. Grand unified theories have pulled the number back down again. Still, the general direction is always toward the reductionistunderstanding complexity in terms of an underlying simplicity.

The last big advance in model building came a bit more than 30 years ago with the birth of the standard model. From the very beginning it, like all its predecessors, was an approximation that was expected to be superseded by a better one that would encompass new phenomena beyond the standard model’s energy range of validity. Experiment has found things that are not accounted for in itneutrino masses and mixing and dark matter, for example. However, the back-and-forth between experiment and theory that led to the standard model ended around 1980. Although many new directions were hypothesized, none turned out to have predicted consequences in the region accessible to experiments. That brings us to where we are today, looking for something new and playing with what appear to me to be empty concepts like naturalness, the anthropic principle, and the landscape.

Theory today

I have asked many theorists to define naturalness and received many variations on a central theme that I would put as follows: A constant that is smaller than it ought to be must be kept there by some sort of symmetry. If, for example, the Higgs mass is quadratically divergent, invent supersymmetry to make it only logarithmically divergent and to keep it small. The price of this invention is 124 new constants, which I always thought was too high a price to pay. Progress in physics almost always is made by simplification. In this case a conceptual nicety was accompanied by an explosion in arbitrary parameters. However, the conceptual nicety, matching every fermion with a boson to cancel troublesome divergences in the theory, was attractive to many. Experiment has forced the expected value of the mass of the lightest supersymmetric particle ever higher. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will start taking data in 2008 and we will know in a couple of years if there is anything supersymmetric there. If nothing is found, the “natural” theory of supersymmetry will be gone.

An even more interesting example to an amateur theorist like me is the story of the cosmological constant. Standard theory gives it a huge value, so large that the universe as we know it could not exist. It was assumed that if the cosmological constant was not huge, it had to be zero. Unlike supersymmetry, there was no specific symmetry that made it zero, but particle physicists expected one would be found eventually. No one took seriously the possibility of a small cosmological constant until supernova observations found that the Hubble expansion seemed to be speeding up. Naturalness seemed to prevent any serious consideration of what turned out to be the correct direction.

At the time Sheldon Glashow, John Iliopoulos, and Luciano Maiani developed the GIM mechanism, the naturalness concept was not in the air.¹ They realized that suppressing flavor-changing neutral currents required restoring a certain kind of symmetry to the quark sector. They added the charmed quark to create that symmetry, and the experiments of my group and Sam Ting’s showed the charmed quark was there.

The score card for naturalness is one “no,” the cosmological constant; one “yes,” the charmed quark, though naturalness had nothing to do with it at the time; and one “maybe,” supersymmetry. Naturalness certainly doesn’t seem to be a natural and universal truth. It may be a reasonable starting point to solve a problem, but it doesn’t work all the time and one should not force excessive complications in its name. Some behaviors are simply initial conditions.

For more than 1000 years, the anthropic principle has been discussed, most often in philosophic arguments about the existence of God. Moses Maimonides in the 12th century and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th used anthropic arguments to trace things back to an uncaused first cause, and to them the only possible uncaused first cause was God.

The cosmological anthropic principle is of more recent vintage. A simplified version is that since we exist, the universe must have evolved in a way that allows us to exist. It is true, for example, that the fine structure constant α has to be close to 1/137 for carbon atoms to exist, and carbon atoms are required for us to be here writing about cosmology. However, these arguments have nothing to do with explaining what physical laws led to this particular value of α. An interesting relevant recent paper by Roni Harnik, Graham Kribs, and Gilad Perez demonstrates a universe with our values of the electromagnetic and strong coupling constants, but with a zero weak coupling constant.² Their alternative universe has Big-Bang nucleosynthesis, carbon chemistry, stars that shine for billions of years, and the potential for sentient observers that ours has. Our universe is not the only one that can support life, and some constants are not anthropically essential.

The anthropic principle is an observation, not an explanation. To believe otherwise is to believe that our emergence at a late date in the universe is what forced the constants to be set as they are at the beginning. If you believe that, you are a creationist. We talk about the Big Bang, string theory, the number of dimensions of spacetime, dark energy, and more. All the anthropic principle says about those ideas is that as you make your theories you had better make sure that α can come out to be 1/137; that constraint has to be obeyed to allow theory to agree with experiment. I have a very hard time accepting the fact that some of our distinguished theorists do not understand the difference between observation and explanation, but it seems to be so.

String theory was born roughly 25 years ago, and the landscape concept is the latest twist in its evolution. Although string theory needed 10 dimensions in order to work, the prospect of a unique solution to its equations, one that allowed the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics, was enormously attractive. Regrettably, it was not to be. Solutions expanded as it was realized that string theory had more than one variant and expanded still further when it was also realized that as 3-dimensional space can support membranes as well as lines, 10-dimensional space can support multidimensional objects (branes) as well as strings. Today, there seems to be nearly an infinity of solutions, each with different values of fundamental parameters, and no relations among them. The ensemble of all these universes is known as the landscape.

No solution that looks like our universe has been found. No correlations have been found such as, for example, if all solutions in the landscape that had a weak coupling anywhere near ours also had a small cosmological constant. What we have is a large number of very good people trying to make something more than philosophy out of string theory. Some, perhaps most, of the attempts do not contribute even if they are formally correct.

I still read theory papers and I even understand some of them. One I found particularly relevant is by Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog. Their recent paper “Populating the Landscape: A Top-down Approach” starts with what they call a “no boundary” approach that ab initio allows all possible solutions.³ They then want to impose boundary conditions at late times that allow our universe with our coupling constants, number of noncompact dimensions, and so on. This approach can give solutions that allow predictions at later times, they say. That sounds good, but it sounds to me a lot like the despised fine-tuning. If I have to impose on the landscape our conditions of three large space dimensions, a fine structure constant of 1/137, and so on, to make predictions about the future, there would seem to be no difference between the landscape and effective field theory with a few initial conditions imposed.

Although the Hawking and Hertog paper sometimes is obscure to me, the authors seem to say that their approach is only useful if the probability distribution of all possible alternatives in the landscape is strongly peaked around our conditions. I’ll buy that.

To the landscape gardeners I say: Calculate the probabilities of alternative universes, and if ours does not come out with a large probability while all others with content far from ours come out with negligible probability, you have made no useful contribution to physics. It is not that the landscape model is necessarily wrong, but rather that if a huge number of universes with different properties are possible and equally probable, the landscape can make no real contribution other than a philosophic one. That is metaphysics, not physics.

We will soon learn a lot. Over the next decade, new facilities will come on line that will allow accelerator experiments at much higher energies. New non-accelerator experiments will be done on the ground, under the ground, and in space. One can hope for new clues that are less subtle than those we have so far that do not fit the standard model. After all, the Hebrews after their escape from Egypt wandered in the desert for 40 years before finding the promised land. It is only a bit more than 30 since the solidification of the standard model.

Burton Richter is former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and former Paul Pigott Professor in the Physical Sciences at Stanford University.

References

1. 1.S. Glashow, J. Iliopoulos, L. Maiani, Phys. Rev. D 2, 1285 (1970) [INSPEC].
2. 2.R. Harnik, G. D. Kribs, G. Perez, Phys. Rev. D 74, 035006 (2006) [SPIN].
3. 3.S. W. Hawking, T. Hertog, Phys. Rev. D 73, 123527 (2006) [SPIN].