#and an incurable case of Jean Hatred | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sinisterexaggerator · 1 year

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I am not sure why I never posted this to tumblr.

Michael De Santa x Trevor Philips.

Summary: It is nearing the anniversary of Michael's "death" though he never died. Trevor is drunk, lonely, reminiscing on his life, on his lost time ... and on his unrequited love. He goes to Michael to beg forgiveness for his many sins, though his apology turns into something more ... tangible.

Warnings: Trikey. NSFW / 18+ Blowjobs. Smut. Angst. Cheating. Drunkenness. Lust. Unrequited Love. Pining. Kissing.

Word count: 2,770

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It should have been me.

The Unicorn was lackluster; Trevor was on his twelfth beer of the evening; the bartender couldn’t cut him off, it was his establishment. He felt especially low this time of year. It was close to his best friend’s deathiversary, though not really. Michael hadn’t died, he was still alive, and it unnerved Trevor to no end.

A whole decade had come and gone; came and went, and T was worse for wear because of it. He had succumbed to drugs and alcohol, to smoking cigarettes and meth. He’d pop pills, deep dive into his subconscious on peyote, snort cocaine and pharmaceuticals, even heroine. Acid, mushrooms, Adderall, MDMA; ecstasy, but nothing filled the gaping hole - his soul was empty, and his heart had broken into tiny pieces long ago.

He was purposely reckless, feckless when it came to Michael; he was his weakness, though he tried to hide it behind an open, festering sore that resided deep in his center - behind snark and sass, snide remarks that were meant to injure, words full of acidity and retribution, yet they never quite expressed what he was truly feeling. It was nearly too much to bear – especially on days like today, nights like this, his resentment melting into feelings of inadequacy and total, all-consuming self-hatred of himself.

He threw the bottle in his hand against the wall, scaring the poor woman who worked behind the bar; he tossed her a fifty-dollar bill and left; he wasn’t so cheap he wouldn’t tip, even if she was employed by him.

He searched out his keys in his tight-assed hipster jeans, stumbling through the front door and past his bouncer. The man side-eyed him, cleared his throat, meaning to ask him if he meant to drive like that, but Trevor’s wrath was second nature, incomparable to many; if he died, so be it. It was no skin off his back.

T started the Bodhi within two turns of the ignition, cursing out “Start you piece of shit!” and the truck obeyed as if afraid to incur his hatred; if inanimate objects could talk, the Canis would have many a story to tell a listening ear.

It purred to life and Trevor sat there, breathing deeply, trying to regain some sort of focus or equilibrium. It wasn’t working. He felt … sad. Depressed. Venomous. All those missed years, those long days and even longer nights. He had cried, and cried, and cried … and that’s what he felt like doing now.

Trevor burst into tears, then he floored the gas. Swerving, speeding through redlights, green ones, skirting pedestrians, and even a few cops. They couldn’t keep up with him. He was drunk, but an expert driver; he had to be to make quick getaways. He led them through the streets of Strawberry until he made the trek to Rockford Hills; Michael’s lair, his secret hideaway, going by the name De Santa even though he didn’t have anyone to hide from anymore.

The driveway was empty, save Michael’s car; he wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think his wife and kids were home. Maybe he was watching movies, eating popcorn, reciting cheesy lines written by his hero, Solomon. Whatever he was doing, he was about to get interrupted, as Trevor had a few things to get off his chest, and now was as good a time as any.

He parked around a corner, out of sight, just in case. One could never be too careful. He was coherent enough to take precautions, though only for Michael's sake.

He stumbled out of the Canis, lumbering forward, nearly falling, sobbing silently, trying to calm himself as he approached the wrought iron gate. It parted for him as if by magic; he didn’t wait, he slipped right in through the smallest crack as soon as it had opened wide enough; Trevor’s boots dragging as he tried to rub his eyes, the pain away, but he knew it was here to stay; the alcohol only made it worse.

He softly knocked at first, not knowing what he was doing, just knowing he had to talk to M; to him, the man he had fallen in love with at first sight all those years ago on a little runway somewhere up north; they’d shared a moment, or at least he thought they had.

His knocking become a fervid, ardent banging, though he didn’t mean to come off as desperate. His emotions were tied up within the sound, but suddenly his fist met air, nearly met with Michael’s chest, and he gasped as he was brought face-to-face with him.

He couldn’t help it - he was handsome, so ruggedly good-looking in his middle-age, charming, witty, and Trevor wished that he were his.

T fell upon his knees, clasping; grasping Michael’s waist and doing what he did best; beg for forgiveness – soak him in his tears. He sobbed without reservation, dirty, broken nails digging into Michael’s khaki shorts. He must have been relaxing, as he was dressed casual enough, though now he was all worked up.

“What the hell, T?!” He tried to move away, pull himself from Trevor’s steadfast grasp, put he was too powerful, his sadness giving him more strength somehow; tenfold what it sometimes was; Michael would know this from experience.

The man wouldn’t stop his heartfelt display, and Michael was worried the neighbors might hear him, jostling his legs beneath T’s iron grip, though he wasn’t going anywhere.

Trevor just kept on crying, the salty remnants leaking down his scarred and battered face, coating Michael’s clothes as he tried to pry his fingers loose.

“Trevor!!!” he finally yelled, loud enough for T’s breath to hitch inside his throat, glancing up at him with two sorrowful, reproachful eyes as the man asked him in his harshest, heavy-handed tone. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

Trevor nearly choked, his words catching, his voice at a loss at first, but Michael deserved an answer, even in his drunken stupor, and he said the first thing that came to mind; the truth. It was too easy. “I don’t care that you tried to kill me, M. I love you; I always have. I just wish you loved me, too.”

“W-what?” Michael became quickly flustered, caught off guard, a small hint of a blush tingeing his cheeks red. Of all the things he had expected him to say, that wasn’t one of them; far from it.

“It should have been me, not Brad. I should be dead. I wish it was me instead.” Trevor had shoved his forehead into the waistband of Michael’s shorts, his breathing hard and heavy as he began to sink down further onto the ground, lost in the tempest that was his irksome thoughts. In doing so, Trevor’s cheek lightly brushed against the soft mound of Michael’s cock beneath his clothes; it was unintentional, but it stirred within him something else; he felt desirous, even though he felt like dying.

“Trevor…” Michael paused, thinking hard, feeling guilty, and nearly jumping at the unexpected touch, the perception of his face raking against him. He thought it had been an accident, pushing it from his mind, a deep remorse overtaking him as he looked down at the top of Trevor’s balding head.

“… Don’t say that.” He let his instincts take over for a moment; T was sad. Most people would want to be comforted. He placed a hand softly atop his crown, just to rest there. That was all it took.

“I’m so… I’m fucking awful! I’m rotten. I’m a terrible person. I don’t deserve to live … Mikey … I’m so sorry. For everything.” Any attention that Michael gave him was lapped up like water by a thirsty dog; he leaned into his hand, his groin, and pressed his teeth against him. He latched onto the flaccid outline that lay in wait, sinking in his canines, his incisors, gently, awakening something there, as the silhouette began to ripen and get hard - just slightly.

“Mm-Mikey … Is … Amanda home?” he mumbled out, halfway to a moan.

The question threw him through a loop, but not as much as Trevor’s mouth, he was shocked he hadn’t waited for his answer; his fly was down.

Trevor nuzzled his nose against Michael’s blue and white striped boxers, continuing his impromptu mission, the whole of his mouth encircling his limp phallus through the thin, cotton fabric, as the beige flaps of his cargo shorts were pushed to either side.

The button remained intact as he groaned against him, Michael now partially hard, if not more than that, and Trevor was himself - those jeans of his not leaving anything to the imagination if Michael had been looking.

“Just… how drunk are you?!” What could he be thinking?! What was going on inside his head?! He thought to push him off; his fingers reaching out to grasp his shoulder blades. His nails dug in as he only half-heartedly tried to remove the man from his pursuit. “Trevor … we’re … outside for Christ’s sake… Someone’s going to see us!” He was most definitely concerned - for his reputation, the neighbors. He didn’t want to be talked about.

Trevor’s eyes rose to meet his and he suddenly released him. Michael backed away into the open doorway, nearly stumbling into his own foyer, as he caught the look of ardor held within his “best friend’s” gaze. It somewhat scared him.

Michael outstretched one wavering hand as if to ward off Trevor’s ardency, his fervent lustfulness; the drugs, the alcohol having sent him to a place of no return where his mind was overcome with passion, a zealous appetite for Michael, one that he felt he couldn’t stop nor was he sure he wanted to. “T … W-what are you doing…”

The man crawled forward on all fours, never having gotten up from his pliant position, offering himself in supplication; wanting to make up for all the years of abuse and mistreatment he had endured at Trevor’s brashness, his loudmouth, his forceful will, wanting to rob and kill despite M wanting to be a family man. He regretted pushing him far enough that he thought he had no way out, thinking perhaps a physical act of appreciation would be more than enough to show him he meant business; he had always loved him - he had said it.

His fingers clawed for purchase against the mixed red brick of Michael’s mansion, dragging his body forward, one knee after the other, his eyes wild, a burning fire dancing in their depths. His tongue dragged across his lips and Michael fell, his back pushed up against the stairwell. He meant to speak, but he was speechless, Trevor’s mouth being the one to exude words instead of his. “Now we’re inside Mikey… no more excuses.”

Trevor’s dirtied hands were at the button of his shorts; he released the clasp and pushed them down his thickset thighs. Michael was aroused, afraid, unsure of everything. He hadn’t been intimate with Trevor since their North Yankton days. If Amanda saw, if Tracey or Jimmy came home … he thought his life flashed before his eyes as his now hard, aching cock entered Trevor’s maw.

“Oh, fuck, T…” was all he could think to say. His eyes rolled back, and then his neck. He was starting to remember. Amanda could never service him like this. She had tried, he had to give her credit, but his wife had never been as good as Trevor at giving head.

Trevor’s writhing muscle licked and slathered Michael’s rigid member, his hand moving to join his efforts as it wound around him. He pumped his cock like it was his own, shoving it as far back as he could stand it, the tip tickling his tonsils, a rough growl issuing forth from out of his larynx. It vibrated against Michael’s swollen flesh, and he thought he might cum any second now. He sucked in a deep breath and muttered out a light command. “Slow. Down.”

Trevor nearly cried again out of sheer joy and neediness; the fact he was allowing him to do this. There was nothing quite like the taste of M’s dick inside his mouth; he had a distinct flavor; one he had sorely missed.

He obliged, steadying his stride. He dug a hand in underneath his quarry and cupped his testicles. He weighed them in his hand like precious diamonds, carefully massaging the sac that held his sperm; the prize he pined for.

His suction became long strokes; his cheeks were hollowing out. There was such power within his jaws that Michael began to thrust. His hips had joined him in a patient dance. The one where Michael’s penis pumped inside his eager throat.

Michael couldn’t help himself; he grasped at his little bit of hair. His fingers snaked through the short, brown locks, clawing, carding, shaking as he felt a familiar tug that started in his bowels and rose up his engorged, blood-filled erection.

“How the fuck are you so… so…” He was going to say “good at this,” but couldn’t manage to get the words out. Instead, his brain recalibrated, trying to straighten himself out – but Trevor was just too persuasive, though he chided and berated him. “You’re such a…a dick…”

Trevor was getting sloppy now, his spit dribbling down his lower lip, sliding down his chin. He hadn’t come up for air, he wouldn’t want to lose his chance. If he even so much as took one millisecond to readjust, Michael might slip away, come to his senses, make him get off of him, when T was the one who wanted to get him off; he would do so before the end of it.

Up and down, back and forth, a perfect rhythm in balance with his jerking hips. Michael succumbed to a sound; it had escaped him; one of being pleased too well, nearly beyond anything he had ever felt from a call girl, a prostitute, his wife, Amanda.

Amanda …

The headlights of a car nearly eluded him, shining through the adjacent windows; Michael almost panicked, but in that moment, he came inside T's mouth. His cum rushed out of him in a torrent, collecting behind Trevor’s parted lips. He watched as the muscles in his throat undulated, guzzling his seed with every flex of Michael’s pulsing cock. He swallowed every bit, excited for it; enthusiastic. He made a loving croon of sorts before Michael scrambled backwards and pulled himself from out of his greedy gullet.

“Trevor!! A-Amanda’s… “

The garage door opened; Trevor heard it. He had been gazing into Michael’s steely blue eyes; they were hypnotizing, but then he faltered - he wouldn’t do that to the man. He had to leave, and fast. But first, a kiss.

He wiped his mouth off with the back of one tattooed hand, gruffly sweeping away the remnants of his meal. He leaned forward, snuck to the highest step that Michael had been propped up against, and planted a long, slow sensation across his lips.

He prodded with his tongue, and he was surprised when Michael allowed it. He let him taste him; it was a tease. He heard the rattling of keys.

Trevor stood and turned, running for the door that was still wide open. He wasn’t thinking, and he had slammed it closed. It made a sound loud enough for his wife to hear, as she came in carrying bags of takeout, staring at her husband who was standing unexpectedly right in front of her, sweaty, perspiring, suspiciously out of breath. And he smelled …

“What the fuck, Michael?!?! Did you have a WHORE in our house??!”

“What?! No! I …"

Amanda threw down what she was carrying and stormed in her leather thigh-high boots to the front of their garish mansion. She threw the door open, and Michael prayed to God in heaven; he was Irish Catholic, after all.

She saw something. He hadn’t waited for the automatic gate. Trevor’s boot disappeared beyond the garden wall and out onto the street.

She sighed, held her breath, took a moment to herself. It was better than a woman, and she knew this much about them. It had never been a secret, and she might never live it down. They had always snuck around.

Amanda faced her husband in the foyer, and he had used a hand to slick his hair back. He looked around nervously and she didn’t say a word. She calmly left the room, and Michael could only expel a haggard breath. His heart was racing, but he was unsure of as to why; was he afraid of his own wife, or how much he had liked it?

#Trikey #Trevor Philips x Michael De Santa #Trevor Philips #Michael De Santa #GTAV #GTA V #Grand Theft Auto V #Amanda De Santa #Angst #Unrequited Love

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7r0773r · 6 years

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Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man by Jean Améry, translated by Adrian Nathan West

. . . I did what had to be done, and there was much that had to be done. Had the law allowed it, had the people deemed it proper, I would have rounded up patients in front of the church and the mairie, yelling like a toothbreaker at the market in the old days. It didn’t occur, the bourgeois is a man of moderation. (p. 43)

***

That the country doctor failed to notice his wife’s first playful flirtations with Léon, that he eagerly advised her to go out riding with the notorious ladykiller Rodolphe Boulanger, that he, a bourgeois, didn’t worry more over the bills piling up, that nothing awakened suspicion in his heart—the reader can hardly accept all that. The masterpiece conceals from us what was real and determinate in the imagined life of poor Charles Bovary. How, then, shall we find some trace of what is hidden? (p. 54)

***

When we observe him, this burdened, difficult man, suffering from himself and the world, working away at his Bovary, which will come to be seen as the insuperable summit of his poetic journey, a plain expression comes unexpectedly to our lips: he “drafts it one page at a time.” But this leads us astray, and must be corrected forthwith. This man is a consummate writer, in line with that dictum of Thomas Mann’s: one for whom writing is especially hard. Each sentence is sounded out for its melody, read histrionically aloud in a voice that booms by fits and turns; Flaubert remains the actor he had been as a boy in the billiards room. Does the cadence rise and fall as it should? One must rehearse it, over and over. Do the adjectives fit? There is always only one, he says; only one that works, and it must be found, and a whole night can pass over a single page, corrected to the point of illegibility. Are the metaphors, in their surrealistic singularity of a kind none has written after him, each and every one right and, once again, irreplaceable? One speaks of “inspiration.” But there is nothing here that in-spires—instead, the search takes place under enormous exertion.—And yet it is afflatus, a breathing-into, to take the word literally, for the most assiduous research is useless where there is not a hard-to-define something guiding it along. And so the work proceeds, slowly. Almost five years for some 350 pages. Balzac would have dispatched a comparable labor in a matter of months. (p. 59)

***

This is plain to see, and has long been proverbial: he detests the bourgeoisie in all its varieties, haute, petty, pettiest. The things the bourgeois prattles on about are platitudes—of Charles Bovary, it is expressly stated that his conversation is flat as a paving stone—what he lives through is incurably banal, even when it is tragic. His thoughts are clichés of language, only good enough for assembling in that glossary of commonplaces, the Dictionnaire des idées reçues, which Flaubert composes to scoff at his own class’s stupidity. (p. 60)

***

Flaubert’s irony is hard, maybe even wicked, in any case profoundly unfair. Let us take a look at one of the most important figures from Madame Bovary, the apothecary Homais, and then proceed from his example. In him, bourgeois enlightenment, the heritage of our civilization, the indispensable fundament of every socialist utopia, finds itself cast into monstrous ridicule. Homais is, if we take up his discourses and analyze them word for word, a clever man, who truly does tower intellectually over his fellow citizens in Yonville-l’Abbaye. All that he says has rhyme and reason. There is no doubt he is the man of progress in his village, and that he strides before us as a vain bounder and fawner is, fundamentally, beside the point. In his artist’s arrogance, his estrangement from reality, Gustave Flaubert has not seen, has not wanted to see, that Homaises of all sort were the bearers of bourgeois progress, the forerunners of those who sided with the Radical Party during the Third Republic, the historical progenitors of those who rightly stood with Zola and Clemenceau on the side of Captain Dreyfus. The unrestrained wickedness of Flaubert’s irony becomes clear to us in that diabolic way he has of making the apothecary utter illuminating and irrefutable truths so that in them, through them, the entirety of the bourgeois enlightenment, including the ethics it represents and the scientific view of the world, are reduced to grotesque prattle. What is happening here? Undoubtedly this: the reality of Gustave Flaubert, of this specific I, this “bundle of perceptions,” stands opposed to historical reality. The man marked by destiny is settling accounts: with himself, for he was an atheist like Homais; with his father, a freethinker so notorious that, during the Restoration under Charles X, the secret police maintained a dossier on him; with friends who, as children of their time, were Voltaireans of some sort, one and all. (pp. 62-63)

***

Shut off from the world, irascible and filled with hatred (the probably consequence of a miserable state of self-hatred), Flaubert, the bourgeois, has little access to the authentic bourgeois subject, who stands before him in the image of poor Charles, the dutiful citizen and simple doctor—not a man of renown like Flaubert père, but a helper and a good Samaritan all the same, a caring family father, a man who pays his debts down to the last sou. In essence, he awaits nothing more than that the author do him justice, after all the injustice that has befallen him. Charles, too, is a bearer of values, bourgeois and social ones, no less deserving of mention than the proletarian and communal values of the old maid, which flicker tenderly as the stage lights fall on them in passing. But no, there is nothing! Charles Bovary, country doctor, is the uncouth weakling his wife takes him for; and the morsel of compassion the author patronizingly offers him now and then is a pittance. (p. 66)

***

Mais oui, Madame Bovary, c’est bien lui, Gustave Flaubert. Her excesses are his, her passionate mysticism an analogue to his mystical subservience to the author’s craft. Her pathos, which the author’s irony barely alludes to, is the pathetic irreality of the visionary from the hermitage in Croisset. He said as much, moreover, if not with direct reference to his own self, which he never wished to turn out into the world. In a letter to Louise Colet, he states he is in the midst of composing something no one has yet ventured: he will mock the palaver of the two central lovers, Emma and her second suitor Léon. But just afterward, illuminating both the conception of the work as a whole and his own emotional constitution, which is nothing less than ironic in regards to Emma: “Irony takes nothing away from pathos; to the contrary, it augments it!” (pp. 67-68)

***

Despite the excessive, even overbearing insistence of decades of Bovary scholarship, from which it takes great effort to break free, Emma is not the victim of her bad-to-mediocre readings, or the occasionally slightly better ones (Walter Scott, for example). The destiny she carries out is one that her beautiful body, burning with sensuality, prescribed for her. Why not come out and say it: She chooses the destiny her love and her beauty demand? The “other” that confronts her is money, or if I may, the law of capitalism, exemplified, like a dreadful statue, in the figure of Lheureux. But this law, no less real than the law of her flesh, is one she does not choose, but simply suffers under, like her creator Flaubert.

His whole life long, Flaubert never had to worry over money, it was simply there, by his father’s grace, according to the conditions of his will. In the same way, Emma needn’t pay attention to grubby trifles, Charles will bring home ducats for her to transform into things to serve her beauty and her carnal pleasures. Luxe et luxure, silk, lace, bijoux, cushions. Or, in the author’s life: voracity and bibulousness, suits of the finest fabric, cut by the best tailors; space, freedom of movement, and calm, which too must be paid for with the good money earned by bourgeois sweat. For Emma Bovary, everything ends in repossession and bourgeois ignominy; for poverty is disgrace, and only because it is so does an uplifting proverb exist to affirm the contrary. Emma dies of shame prepared for her by the law as embodied in the brute, Lheureux. After his own unfaithful beloved, Mme. Commanville, his sister’s child, has brought him to ruin, Gustave Flaubert will weather the economic storm, but with shame and carping, a “ruined man” who needed only to lose his estate in order to become an utter and complete failure, such as he had taken himself to be from the first. Not a “family idiot.” Something worse. The poor offspring of a well-to-do and thus highly regarded house. One reduced to writing petitions so the bankruptcy of his shifty nephew-by-marriage will not make life impossible for him. (pp. 71-72)

***

So Gustave Flaubert was playing as he composed Madame Bovary, groaning under the crushing weight of words; and the game plays out further in these pages, albeit according to a different set of rules. Charles Bovary, the poor man from whom everything was stripped away, love, his beloved, his possessions, and even his memory—for, as he is forced to realize, he has lived in error—was treated by Gustave Flaubert as a quantité négligeable. He comes to see himself as victim and bearer of fatalité, as a man of the abyss. This is reality as a game, its imaginary precepts (though sadly, not the weight of its words) as valid as any other. No moderation, no criteria of truth, no palpable notion of reality is close at hand. Just a postulate: The wife of a country doctor gets caught up in two love affairs, brings her husband to ruin, kills herself. That is all. (p. 101)

***

Why did Charles Bovary not follow the trajectory his era laid before him? Why did he take that dubious leap over the line of demarcation, choosing for his wife Emma Rouault, who was marked for destiny by her beauty? For his creator, it was a foregone conclusion. Charles Bovary remains the person presented to us on the novel’s very first page: a tubby mediocrity. That he was moreover risible—ridiculus erat!—was an additional bit of malice from that incorrigible aesthete, who claimed only to find escape from himself in raging verbal debauchery, and in whose bulging eyes the world of the bourgeoisie—from which, in reality, he never broke free—was a flat caricature; thus the petits bourgeois laugh at themselves when they make their vapid jokes about cuckolds in the Café du Commerce. They do not like themselves because they do not wish to be themselves—and then they look away when the simple hearts turn out not to be so simple, and long in turn after a few crumbs from the bourgeoisie’s wealth! Charles, as his creator makes clear, was not a bad country doctor, only a mediocre one. The kind that might have met with great success, for example, by performing a bold operation on a clubfoot. But it was not to be, the omnipotent master willed it otherwise. (pp. 103-04)

***

The poor devil, who even on the first day of school made the sons of the better families erupt in laughter because, stricken with fear and embarrassment, he pronounced his name Charbovaricharbovaricharbovari, was not allowed to thrive. Because that is the way the story was conceived? Naturally. And yet the fact that it was conceived in this way is unnatural to the highest degree. The unsavory pleasure taken by the author in this bourgeois tragedy from an era in which, indeed, the bourgeoisie scarcely produced any comedies, devoting themselves rather to the codification in history of their constant upward ascension, reflects Flaubert’s profound and sinister predilection for misfortune, which was appealing—so long as he didn’t fall victim to it. (p. 105)

***

No fool is only a fool, petrified as such and beyond redemption in his foolishness. Even supposing that Charles Bovary were shackled to his benevolent stupidity, failing to search for the way out that was due to him by his rights as a citizen, still, the duty he carried out every day by the sweat of his brow should have, ought to have, brought him greater respect. The wealth and merit of the bourgeoisie did not represent an irresolvable contradiction, and the latter was not always simply a veneer to cover up the absence of the former. Not to recognize the universality of the values of the bourgeois form of life, even where the particular interests of the bourgeoisie seem to exceed themselves, is an error that may be overlooked in the case of Marxist-dialectical speculations, which in the Hegelian triads of their hurried steps toward the vanishing point of complete human freedom are bound to skip awkwardly over much that lies in their way, but not for the son of a bourgeois who rigs his exquisite game from a position of wealth and favor. Such labors of reverie are only truly good and beautiful when their reality is not merely lexical, but also societal and moral; an acknowledgement of essences and their overarching reality. (pp. 107-08)

***

Charles Bovary inhabited a world. But what he apprehended of it was an insubstantial excerpt. He lived a life. But this life was concealed from him; adages, stamped-out forms of being, pre-predetermined modalities of feeling, reifications of all sorts barred Gustave Flaubert’s country doctor from achieving self-discovery, and not even the omniscient narrator permits us some insight into the conditions of that system of social coordinates under which a bourgeois living under his bourgeois king may become knowable.

. . . . Flaubert’s Charles Bovary was a dimwit; such a person doesn’t reason, he takes things as they come, chimneys and change and corruption, same as wind and bad weather and the irritable impatience of his bride, when she said over and over amid his awkward approaches at tenderness and his prattling: Laisse-moi! But a realist storyteller would have had to fill in the empty gaps. He would have been obliged to speak himself where his creation’s words failed him. (pp. 114-15)

***

When Emma was struck with meningitis—her broken heart after her betrayal by Rodolphe, with whom she wanted to run away, could lead, according to prevailing notions of the time, to brain fever—Charles was at her sickbed, as doctor and companion, and when his barber-surgeon’s knowledge was not enough, he called for Doctors Canivet and Larivière. It surely would have hit him, after the fact, that it was precisely at that point in time when Rodolphe left Yonville and set off on his worldly travels that Emma’s heart and brain forsook their legitimate functions. But no, nothing. He acquiesced to fatalité: his inventor did not accord him the human right of thought, not even when such a thing, transmitted through the medium of feeling, must be conceded to the poorest sap. (p. 121)

***

Je vous accuse, Monsieur Flaubert!

I accuse you, because you made me into an idiot, incapable of uniting passion et vertu, passion and virtue.

I accuse you, because you described my stupidity, or what you considered to be such, as a kind of guilt, no better than that of Lheureux, the usurer.

I accuse you because you refused me my rights as a man and citizen and made me into a spineless slave, as though we still lived in the benighted days when master was master and the serf a serf, and the latter never dared to raise his hand against the former.

I accuse you of violating the pact you sealed with reality, before you set out to write my story: for I was more than I was, like everyone who exists, who daily and hourly transcends himself, in resistance to others and the world, to negate what he has been and become what he will be.

I lodge my accusation because you, in your stupid hermitage, served only your words and their euphony, and would not look at me with the eyes of a compassionate person. (pp. 140-41)

***

In your auctorial omniscience, you did not want to give me my due; the power, established by nature, inscribed in natural law, which elevates the lessons learned from the pathos of carnal passion higher and higher into the immeasurable beyond, out into the space where a new measure is established, even for the bourgeois. The truth is, you knew nothing about me at the beginning, and nothing when you brought me to an end. With the consummate pitilessness of your haut bourgeois compeers, you burned the brand of stupidity into me even back in school; as if, being lowly, one must also be dumb and blind. (pp. 141-42)

#jean améry #book quotes

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