SOURCE: Brombert, Victor. “An Epic of Immobility.” Hudson Review 19, no. 1 (spring 1966): 24-43.

In the following essay, Brombert describes the Flaubertian obsessions that inform Salammbô with nihilism and sacrilege—identifying concepts of immobility, sadism, violence, ennui, and the desire for an unattainable absolute.

                         “La plastique est la qualité première de l'art.” 

—Flaubert

1. the Debauches of the Imagination

The opening chapter of Salammbô, with its orgiastic barbarian feast and the ethereal appearance of the patrician virgin, plunges the reader into an acrid and dreamlike world. This combination of brutality and almost mystic disincarnation is characteristic of Flaubert's poetic imagination. The African dream had long haunted Flaubert. Already in La Tentation de Saint Antoine, which he temporarily set aside, but which continued to take new shapes in his mind, Flaubert had exploited the metaphorical potential of his African image. The exotic dream goes back to his early adolescence. It was...