MARIO VARGAS LLOSA ical” statement regarding this narrative method, which is, in fact, the key to the suppleness of his style, the technique that permits him to effect the constant changes, the harmonious conjunction of different perspectives that enable him to structure the fictitious reality on several planes at once. I do not mean to say that he did not know what he-was doing when he employed this stylistic procedure in Madame Bovery, but rather that, in all likelihood, he regarded it largely as a device, something, that preoccupied him because of the effects that could be obtained through its use—and not, like the metaphors, a matter to be pondered in and of itself—and that he may not have suspected how subversive this technique would turn out to be in the history of the novel. The “Style Indirect Libre” Flaubert's great technical contribution lies in his bringing the omniscient narrator so close to the character that the boundary lines between the two vanish, in his creating of an ambivalence in which the reader does not know whether what the narrator says comes from the invisible teller or from the character who is soliloguizing mentally: “Where, then, had she learned this corruption, so profound, so dissimulated that it was almost immaterial?" Who is the subject who thinks this? Is it the in- visible teller or Léon Dupuis who is the author of this disturbing, question concerning Emma's innermost nature? The cleverness of the device lies in Flaubert’s having undermined the narrator's omniscience; he no longer knows everything, he has doubts, his power has diminished tremendously, and is now precisely that of a character. And since there is a character—Léon Du- puis—who, according to the context, perceives and suffers from Emma's “corruption” more and more intensely as time goes by, the reader has the impression that a transubstantiation has (206 The Added Element taken place, that it is perhaps Léon and not the invisible teller ‘who asks himself this question, It is the style always employed to give an account of in-) timate facts (memories, feelings, sensations, ideas) from the in- side, that is to say, to bring the reader-and the character as close to each other as possible. There were, naturally, monologues , in novels before Madame Bovary. At cettain moments the char acters talked to themselves and told themselves what they felt, thought, or remembered. But this is precisely where the dif fecence lies: they talked to themselves, rather than thinking to ~ themselves. Even when the narrator notes: “'So-and-so thought,” and then exits from the narrative, what remains behind in the story is a voice, a character theatrically reciting the story of his inner life, describing his subjective life from outside, by way of logical discourse—which rarely differs, grammatically ot conceptually, from that of the dialogue between characters. By relativizing the point of view, che style indirea libre finds a way into the character's innermost depths, litte by little approaching his consciousness, drawing closer and closer as the intermedi- ary—the omniscient narrator—appears to vanish in thin air. The reader has the impression of having been introduced into the deepest recesses of the characters, to be listening, secing con- sciousness in movement before it turns into oral expression ot before it even feels the need to do so; in a word, he feels that he is sharing a subjectivity. The method that Flaubert uses to achieve this effect is a clever use of verb tenses, and of inter~ \ rogation in particular. Hereis an example in which the happiness ‘that macriage to Emma brings Charles is described; thanks to the style indirect libre, the entire description appears to be (is?) a silent monologue by Charles himself: Up to now, had any part of his life been enjoyable? Was it his years at school, where he had lived shut up behind those high walls, alone amid schoolmates brighter than he or more clever in class, who 207)MARID VARGAS LLOSA laughed athis accent, who made fan of is clothes, and whose mothers came to the visitors’ parlor with pasties tucked in their mus? Was ic later, when he was studying medicine and never had enough in his purse to go dancing with some litde working girl who might have become his mistress? Critics have pointed out that the style indirect libre consists of a particular use of the imperfect, that it is the Machiavellian use of this tense of the verb that imperceptibly shifts the nar- ration from the outer world to the inner one, and vice versa. ‘The interrogative form is almost always a complementary de- vice to facilitate this subtle transition from one plane to another, so that the change from omniscient narrator to character-nar- rator will not cause breaks in the story and will pass unnotice ‘The imperfect, moreover, is not absolutely indispensable; in certain cases, the suppression of the verb is suficient to represent the mental life of the person, for the space of an instant, like a flash of lightning: “Pere Ronault would not have been dis- pleased to have someone take his daughter off his hands, for she was of little use to him around the place. In his heart, he didn’t hold it against her, being of the opinion that she was too lever to spend her life farming, an occupation accursed by heaven, since it had never yet made anybody @ millionaire.” There is no doubt that it is the omniscient narrator who is speaking at the beginning and end of the passage, that it is the invisible teller of the story who is describing what Pére Rouault thought of his daughter. There is a gradual approach in the paragraph to the consciousness of the character. The first sentence is dis- tant; the narrator is describing something he knows and what he knows is far removed from him. In the second sentence, on the other hand, the character is closer to the invisible teller and to the reader (the key word is the adverbial phrase in his heart: intériewrement), and doesn’t the sentence that I have underlined appear to be an exclamation that crosses the mind of Pére Rowault (208 ‘The Added Element himself? But certainly not its conclusion ("since it had never yet made anybody a millionaire”), where it is clear that the omniscient narrator is speaking again. The prose of Madame Bovary owes to the style indiea libre its flexible quality, its ability to expand and contract, which enables it to effect all these changes in space and in time without the rhythm and the unity of the narrative being altered ™ The style indirect libre is logical. Later Joyce will violate these logical norms in order to provide an even closer approximation of mental life, creating what has become known as stream-of- consciousness nacrative. This would doubtless not have been possible without Flaubert’s invention. The siple indirect libre rep~ resented the first great step by a novelist to narrate a character's mental processes directly, to describe his or her inner life, not shrough its outward manifestations (acts or words), by way of the interpretation of a narrator or an oral monologue, but by representing itthrough writing that appeared to situate the reader in the very heart of the character's subjectivit 209)