Lydia Davis / I buy it for the Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

Lydia Davis

I BUY IT FOR THE BOVARY

POSTED BY MACY HALFORD

August 25, 2010

Today, I bought a Playboy in the subway station (guess what nobody ever reads on the subway?). The man at the kiosk immediately dropped it into a black bag, and gave me a look that said, I have no thoughts about this transaction whatsoever.

I am not very interested in Playboy, but I am interested in the female form. That is, in one female—Lydia Davis—operating in top form in her new translation of "Madame Bovary," an excerpt from which is included in the September issue:

You can see that Playboy is hoping to lure readers by touting "Bovary" as "The Most Scandalous Novel of All Time." Which claim I hoped would be backed up upon opening the magazine. Because, you see, though "Madame Bovary" was truly scandalous when it was released, it cannot shock now, in part due to Playboy and its role in, shall we say, defining deviancy downward; and in part due to "Bovary" itself—having been written (and successful), it changed the standards for what was acceptable territory for fiction. But Playboy readers hoping for context will be disappointed, for here is all the magazine provides:

She is one of literature's most celebrated sinners. But first she was tempted. In this new translation, Emma's transformation from bored provincial wife to enthusiastic adulterer reminds us what a scandal it can be to be human.

All of this is strange to me. I am aware that Playboy publishes (and pays a lot for) great fiction. But this copy suggests that the magazine expects its readers to be both savvy enough to know who Emma is already and stupid enough to buy into the idea that "Bovary" is naughty by today's standards. Which is why, I guess, the excerpt demands to be accompanied by art of a naked lady flying through the air on a saddle, illustrating a quote pulled out from the text:

With her face tilted down a little, she abandoned herself to the cadence of the motion that rocked her in the saddle.

And this in a magazine which, thanks to cartoons and jokes that seem to date back to the swingin' seventies ("If banks are so good with numbers, why are there always eight windows and three tellers?") and pinups as sexless as Barbie dolls (really—why don't they just shoot naked Barbie dolls?), is itself terribly unscandalous. So unscandalous that I can imagine a cover ofHustler ten years from now with a blurb reading: "A New History of Playboy: The Most Scandalous Magazine of the Nineteen-Fifties."

But anyway: the effect of all this packaging was that the excerpt, which is taken from chapter nine of the second part of "Bovary," when Rodolphe takes Emma riding, sounded to my ear a bit like erotica at first. But soon, quite soon, I was struck delirious by the force of Flaubert's writing, and the precision (the perfection) of Davis's translation. Here is the moment after Emma "gives herself" to Rodolphe:

The evening shadows were coming down; the horizontal sun, passing between the branches, dazzled her eyes. Here and there, all around her, patches of light shimmered in the leaves or on the ground, as if hummingbirds in flight had scattered their feathers there. Silence was everywhere; something mild seemed to be coming forth from the trees; she could feel her heart, which was beginning to beat again, and her blood flowing through her flesh like a river of milk. Then, from far away beyond the woods, on the other hills, she heard a vague, prolonged cry, a voice that lingered, and she listened to it in silence as it lost itself like a kind of music in the last vibrations of her tingling nerves.

THE NEW YORKER