In One Brief Moment All Eternity

In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a fictionalised account of Gustave Flaubert’s life, constructed through an omniscient narrative and a chorus of approximately thirty female and non-human voices. The novel combines literary biography, feminist revisionism, historical fiction, magical realism and reflections on the relationship between writers and their creations. Its central conceit is that the women whom Flaubert knew, observed, desired, neglected or transformed into literature are finally given the opportunity to narrate his story. These speakers include members of his family, servants, lovers, prostitutes, artists, fictional characters and women connected to later literary history. The novel also allows places, illnesses, drugs and other abstract presences to speak.

The story opens in 1855, while Flaubert is writing Madame Bovary. He wakes with the knowledge that he is about to “kill” Emma Bovary, the fictional woman he has created and come to love. After considering how she should die, he chooses arsenic, described as the “White Shadow.” As he writes Emma’s poisoning, he begins to experience her physical agony himself, suffering nausea, cramps, vomiting and pain. The scene establishes the novel’s principal ideas immediately: the creator injures himself when he destroys his creation, Emma is both separate from and inseparable from Flaubert, and literary creation contains an element of violence.

Emma then assumes control of the narrative. She is furious about the prolonged and humiliating death Flaubert has given her. Rather than allowing her the graceful, romantic ending she might have imagined, he subjects her to bodily disintegration: her face changes colour, her tongue swells, her skin erupts and black liquid pours from her mouth. Emma accuses him of claiming to understand women while ultimately punishing her in the same manner as other male authors who destroy female characters for breaking social and sexual rules.