Word: pecuchet
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Dates: during 1954-1954
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After they renounce their lives as Paris copy clerks and move to the country, Bouvard and Pecuchet hop from one intellectual endeavor to the other. Their failure at preserving vegetables leads them to chemistry, and each successive disappointment leads to a new venture: geology, biology, medicine, verse, politics, literary criticism. Each new "study" leaves them uncertain and confused, but they feel sure that with one more book, one more discovery, a certain subject will become entirely clear to them...
...Flaubert seems always to have his sympathies with his two befuddled heroes. The follies of Bouvard and Pecuchet are pitiable but not hateful. Accepted as men of mediocre capabilities, the limited success that they do have is a glorious triumph. In comparison to the other characters in the book, their enlightenment is a miracle and their learning, shallow as it is, approaches the profound. Bouvard and Pecuchet are loyal friends, and for Flaubert, friendship is a virtue. Therefore, although these two heroes are the vehicle for some of the author's bitterest comments on the bourgeoisie, they...
...many valid complaints are heard against the shoddy intellectualism which is encouraged by pocket-sized philosophies and "Such a Person Made Easy" books. Flaubert, too, despised this surface learning. In a way then, Bouvard and Pecuchet are victims of circumstances. Even if they had the ability to gain real knowledge of any subject, it would be impossible, Flaubert seems to say, because of the superficial culture of the nineteenth century...
Flaubert has a common tie with other great satirists; his heroes set out to test and idea in the harshness of the world. With Don Quixote it is the chivalric ideal, with Candide, optimism. And with Bouvard and Pecuchet it is the notion that ideas themselves can triumph throughout the world...
...Flaubert grants his two heroes superiority over their contemporaries. Bouvard and Pecuchet, having found that they cannot conquer the world with ideas, return to their old task of copying. They build a double copying desk and set to work together. As in Voltaire's Candide, their last act is their most noble; a realization of the world's shortcomings and the acceptance of a simple, limited vocation as the only attainable reality of life...