Recommendations
Books Like Bouvard et Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert
Works that treat the failure of knowledge as a comedy with philosophical implications
Bouvard and Pécuchet are not stupid — the knowledge itself is contradictory, and their failure is the failure of disciplines rather than individuals. These works share that same comic-philosophical structure: the joke is about what knowledge is and whether it can be applied, not about the people trying to apply it.
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Buy on AmazonDictionnaire des idées reçues
by Gustave Flaubert
The companion text — the dictionary of clichés intended for the second volume of Bouvard et Pécuchet; 'ARTISTE: Ought to be treated as someone special, as they are all penniless'; the most concentrated form of Flaubert's satire of bourgeois language
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Buy on AmazonDon Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
The ultimate predecessor — the Knight who mistakes fiction for reality is the ancestor of Bouvard and Pécuchet who mistake textbooks for reality; both are comedies of misapplied knowledge; Cervantes is Flaubert's acknowledged model
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Buy on AmazonTristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne
The 18th-century structural ancestor — Sterne's novel that systematically digresses from its own subject demonstrates the impossibility of systematic knowledge through comic failure; the structural predecessor of Bouvard et Pécuchet's encyclopedic comedy
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Buy on AmazonL'Éducation sentimentale
by Gustave Flaubert
The novelistic predecessor of the same failure — where L'Éducation presents the failure to develop through sentimental experience, Bouvard et Pécuchet presents the failure to develop through intellectual experience; both are anti-Bildungsromane in Flaubert's hands
- 5Buy on Amazon
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne
Read the full Sterne for the fullest pre-Flaubertian demonstration that encyclopedic aspiration and narrative progress are incompatible; the digressions that prevent Tristram from being born are the philosophical ancestors of the chapters in which Bouvard and Pécuchet cannot grow vegetables
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Buy on AmazonThe Information
by Martin Amis
The 20th-century literary version of the same systematic failure — Amis's 1995 novel of the failed novelist Richard Tull is Bouvard et Pécuchet applied to the contemporary literary world: the detailed description of failure at everything that is intended to produce art
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Buy on AmazonDictionary of the Khazars
by Milorad Pavić
The postmodern encyclopedic novel — Pavić's 1984 'lexicon novel' is the positive form of what Bouvard et Pécuchet satirizes: an encyclopedia that uses its fictional structure to represent the impossibility of definitive knowledge
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Buy on AmazonInfinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
The 20th-century American continuation of the encyclopedic aspiration and the same failure — Wallace's novel tries to contain everything and shows, through its very excess, the impossibility of totalizing knowledge; the American Bouvard et Pécuchet of entertainment
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