Stupidity for Dummies

Aaron Schuster explores the intersection of Flaubert, language, and ChatGPT in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Aaron SchusterAugust 21, 2024

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This piece is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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“AT TIMES I FEEL crushed by the mass of work”; “How mad I must be to have embarked on it!”; “One needs to be a master of asceticism to inflict such labors on oneself”; “Frankly I can’t take any more.” Thus does Gustave Flaubert complain to his friend Ivan Turgenev about his novel in progress, Bouvard and Pécuchet. It’s killing him. And in fact, he would die before finishing it; the book was published posthumously, in 1881, after several years of labor. But this moaning bears on something stranger than the usual case of writerly frustration: there is an inhuman dimension to Flaubert’s undertaking, as if he were emulating, by hand, a FlaubertGPT.

Bouvard and Pécuchet tells the story of two copy clerks who quit their jobs and retire to the countryside after one of them, Bouvard, inherits a small fortune. There they indulge their insatiable intellectual curiosity by undertaking a series of investigations that appear to run the whole gamut of human knowledge, and yet despite their voluminous reading, they never manage to understand a thing. A comedy of absolute knowing, the book is a piece of experimental or avant-garde writing more akin to an encyclopedia than a realist novel; Flaubert called it “a critical encyclopedia as farce” (“une encyclopédie critique en farce”).

The mammoth research project conducted by its protagonists is rivaled only by the author’s own: Flaubert claimed to have read some 1,500 books in preparing the novel. To give a sense of its sweep, the duo, in the course of their investigations, take up agriculture, gardening, liquor-making (one priceless episode involves their botched attempt to concoct the ultimate spirit, “Bouvarine”), chemistry, anatomy, physiology, medicine, astronomy, natural history, geology, archaeology (including a very detailed bit on Celtic archaeology), French history, Roman history, universal history, literature, grammar, aesthetics, politics, political economy (“Let’s find the best system!”), love, gymnastics, mesmerism, hypnotism, spiritualism, philosophy, logic, metaphysics, religion, Christianity, Buddhism, phrenology, and pedagogy, where they raise two abandoned children as an educational experiment. In an uncanny anticipation of Kafka’s The Castle (although I have no proof of this, I like to think that it’s a deliberate reference on Kafka’s part), the last profession they try their hand at before the novel breaks into notes and sketches is land surveying. Each endeavor ends in a fiasco, or boredom, but this never deters the plucky amateurs for long. “Besides, what does one failure prove?”—this coming at nearly the end of the novel. Their failures, flops, and disappointments only serve to propel Bouvard and Pécuchet into ever new research.

The funny disjunction between theory and practice that drives the narrative—boundless enthusiasm for the former, unremitting incompetence at the latter—might recall Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but Flaubert’s “phenomenology” is strangely static and repetitive (perhaps Hegel’s is as well?). Bouvard and Pécuchet try to learn and understand, but they only ever recite and repeat. The Flaubertian universe is one of canned knowledge, empty formulas, and doctrines that clash with one another and cancel each other out. Bouvard and Pécuchet are essentially parrots (the parrot being a favorite Flaubertian animal), and the text of the novel is composed as an elaborate web of paraphrases and quotations. Where could this possibly lead? In Flaubert’s plan for the novel’s conclusion, there is a kind of reconciliation, a happy ending. After a final debacle, Bouvard and Pécuchet give up trying to learn and return to their original profession: copying. The duo have a special two-sided desk built for them and set about copying anything and everything they can get their hands on.

“They copy haphazardly, whatever falls into their hands, all the papers and manuscripts they come across, tobacco packets, old newspapers, lost letters, believing it all to be important and worth preserving.” Each and every signifier, the totality of the symbolic order, must be copied. During their previous experiments, Bouvard and Pécuchet yearned to be celebrated for their scientific achievements: “Like all artists, they craved applause.” By the end of the book, they have given up their narcissistic fantasies and committed themselves to a purer vocation. In a 1967 essay, Michel Foucault drew the connection between Flaubert’s clerks and his earlier portrait of Saint Anthony. There is a quasi-mystical dimension to the labor of the copyists, a kind of secularized ecstasy for the era of the modern office. Just as Saint Anthony dreamed of becoming pure matter, so the modern-day clerkly saints dream of becoming pure discourse. This is how Foucault concludes his interpretation of the novel, by imagining, in an Escher-like loop, Bouvard and Pécuchet copying Bouvard and Pécuchet. Quite fittingly, the plot of the novel was itself a copy: Flaubert borrowed its basic outline from the 1841 story “The Two Clerks” by Barthélemy Maurice, about an aging pair of legal clerks who retire together to the countryside and plan on leading new lives, only to discover that copying is their true calling and source of happiness.

It is illuminating to compare Flaubert’s copyists with that other fabled copy clerk of 19th-century literature, and subject of intensive philosophical reflection, Melville’s Bartleby—who is himself heir to Gogol’s copyist Akaky Akakievich, the protagonist of arguably the greatest story in Russian literature. (A literary history of clerks, a genealogy of the office comedy, has yet to be written.) On the one hand, we have the diabolical copyist who, preferring not to copy, becomes the bone in the throat of the system, the singular object that cannot be assimilated by the symbolic order (in this case, the rules and quirky routine of the lawyer’s Wall Street office). On the other hand, we have the copyist-saints who elevate the symbolic order itself to the level of the sublime object, and who, in a mise en abyme, become nothing other than “discourse folded upon itself” (to follow Foucault’s interpretation). By not only withdrawing from his copyist duties but also refusing to budge or even explain himself, Bartleby becomes an enigmatic “Thing,” an obtrusive presence that resists understanding and symbolization. Bouvard and Pécuchet, in contrast, are consummate copyists for whom everything is to be integrated into a vast seamless book, an ever-expanding patchwork of linguistic detritus. To put it in Lacanian terms: either the Thing appears as the internal limit of the symbolic, its indivisible remainder, or else the symbolic order itself occupies the place of the Thing, thereby becoming one gigantic all-consuming remainder—not the prison-house but the dustbin of language. Archive or library (Foucault titled his essay “Fantasia of the Library”) is perhaps too dignified a term: Bouvard and Pécuchet treat language more like a data dump. Flaubert’s final novel announces, at the pinnacle of realist literature, a world where literature has been surpassed, where stories and myths no longer hold pride of place, but where all words are equal and every last scrap of writing deserves to be redeemed. Such is the salvation of words: to be copied.

Flaubert’s disciple Guy de Maupassant described Bouvard and Pécuchet as “the Tower of Babel of science, where all the diverse, contradictory, yet absolute doctrines, each speaking its own language, demonstrate the impotency of effort, the vanity of affirmation, and ‘the eternal misery of everything.’” But it’s not simply that the novel pokes fun at the incompetence of its protagonists, or uses them to expose the more ridiculous doctrines of its times, or delivers a moral lesson about the vanity of human striving. Rather, the monstrousness of Flaubert’s encyclopedia-cum-novel—the seriousness of its extremely prolonged joke—lies in a much more uncanny effect: language appears as an anonymous and autonomous power, the discourse of the Other turning its subjects into human parrots, spoken rather than speaking subjects. Writing of his Dictionary of Received Ideas, which was to form the final part of the book, Flaubert explains that its intended effect is to stun its readers into silence: “Once one has read it one should dare not speak for fear of spontaneously uttering one of its phrases.” For the novel to succeed, Flaubert knew he had to push it to the point of epistemological vertigo, so that the reader would no longer know what the author intended or believed: Flaubert had to identify with the texts he was copying, with the labor of his copyists. (As Flaubert explains to Turgenev in a letter dated July 25, 1874, “If it’s done briefly, with a concise, light touch, it will be a more or less witty fantasy, but will lack impact and verisimilitude, whereas if it’s detailed and developed, it will look as though I believe in my story, and it can become a serious and even a frightening thing.”) He had to become a universal knowledge processor.

Critics have argued that the literary style of Madame Bovary anticipates the advent of cinema, with its intercutting of shots, zooms-ins to significant details, and use of the hors-champ. Sergei Eisenstein praised in particular Flaubert’s cross-montage of dialogues. Likewise, Bouvard and Pécuchet anticipates the era of digital search engines and machine intelligence. It’s as if, from within the form of the realist novel (which he, moreover, arguably invented), Flaubert anticipated another future medium. Doesn’t Google make Bouvards and Pécuchets of us all? Isn’t Bouvard and Pécuchet the original ChatGPT, providing canned answers for all queries, culled from an unfathomably vast scrap heap of data, the “universal library”? Flaubert’s knowledge-regurgitating clerks already sound a bit like AI. (The uncanny effect of chatbots is not that they can simulate human speech but that some human beings already sound like chatbots.) Bouvard and Pécuchet are extremely well-read imbeciles who only ever parrot the texts they consume, relentless and mindless as algorithms. They are human book processors, an automated intelligence avant la lettre, with Flaubert in effect bemoaning the cost of doing what ought to be a machine’s work, manually creating a universal knowledge engine: “Frankly I can’t take any more.”

Neither could many of his readers. Flaubert himself worried about this: “The great danger is monotony and boredom.” Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote an existential psychoanalysis of over a thousand pages on Flaubert, disliked the novel, finding it “deadly boring.” Perhaps it’s only today that the farcical critical encyclopedia has found its ideal reader. ChatGPT furnishes an eminently Bouvard-Pécuchetian answer to the prompt “How is the novel Bouvard and Pécuchet like ChatGPT?” including its claim of superiority over Flaubert’s amateurs of science:

“Bouvard and Pécuchet” is a satirical novel by the French writer Gustave Flaubert, published posthumously in 1881. The novel tells the story of two copy-clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, who decide to abandon their jobs and devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge. They embark on a series of experiments and investigations, but their efforts invariably end in failure and absurdity. In some ways, “Bouvard and Pécuchet” can be seen as a precursor to the idea of an artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, which is also designed to accumulate knowledge and generate responses based on that knowledge. Like Bouvard and Pécuchet, ChatGPT is also capable of providing information and insights on a wide range of topics, but its responses are ultimately limited by the quality and scope of the data it has been trained on. However, there are also significant differences between ChatGPT and the characters of Bouvard and Pécuchet. Unlike the human protagonists of the novel, ChatGPT does not have the capacity to experience frustration or disappointment when its efforts fall short. Instead, it simply processes the available data and generates a response based on that data, without any emotional attachment or investment in the outcome. Additionally, while Bouvard and Pécuchet are portrayed as bumbling amateurs who are in over their heads, ChatGPT is a highly sophisticated tool that is constantly being refined and improved by its developers.

It’s true that the Flaubertian Generative Pretrained Transformer was trained on a mere 1,500 volumes compared to the 300 billion words and 570 billion gigabytes of text datasets consumed by ChatGPT. Flaubert’s research for Bouvard and Pécuchet is now cataloged in an online project by the European Association for Digital Humanities. To quote the website, its “main asset is an original computing device producing configurable arrangements of quotations extracted from the published documents. Among other arrangements, web users can produce hypothetical reconstructions of Bouvard et Pécuchet’s second volume.” Curious readers can now play Bouvard and Pécuchet with Flaubert’s original archive: a kind of choose-your-own-adventure through the oddest corners of the 19th century hive mind. The Bouvard and Pécuchet system of our era operates on a far vaster epistemic scale. It’s also, as ChatGPT itself observes, perfectly dispassionate, without the capacity for frustration, disappointment, and other all-too-human affects that afflicted the original copy clerks. On the other hand, Flaubert’s “bumbling amateurs” already manifested a machine-like perseverance, never giving up on their quest for the absolute. Their answer to any setback or impasse is always more knowledge: “Maybe we just don’t know enough about chemistry!” Failure is attributed to a lack of knowledge, that is, to an insufficiency of inputs. There is never a question of a lack in knowledge, of a rupture or break within a given framework. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet in which he claimed that Flaubert was the first to shatter the realist novel he created; he also thought that its bureaucracy of knowledge looked ahead to Kafka. And Kafka was indeed a great admirer of Flaubert. But Kafka was obsessed precisely with this other lack, writing about structures riddled with gaps and holes, the missing word. He is the author not of the Tower of Babel of science but of, to cite one of his fragments, the “pit of Babel.”

At one point, Bouvard and Pécuchet do experience a kind of break:

Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, a burgher’s profile, an inane comment overheard by chance. And reflecting on what was said in their village, and on the fact that one could find other Coulons, other Marescots, other Foureaus stretching to the end of the earth, they felt upon their shoulders the weight of the entire world.

This is as close to a direct statement by the author as one can find in the novel—the “piteous faculty” of stupidity detection is Flaubert’s own. Flaubert intended his Babelesque novel as a revenge on his epoch: “I am planning a thing in which I give vent to my anger […] I shall vomit over my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me.” But it’s the automated form he so presciently anticipated—a purely descriptive literature that does nothing but rehash already existing discourse, vomiting back whatever it has digested—that’s now wreaking its revenge on Flaubert, minus the anger and disgust.

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Featured image: Thomas Rowlandson. Two Penny Cribbage, 1810. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959. The Met (59.533.1357). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed August 19, 2024. Image has been cropped.