In this week's web-exclusive article for Prospect, Brussels-based arts writer Brigid Grauman tells the story of how a dedicated international team of professional and amateur volunteers have made literary history, creating for the first time a full online archive of every single draft of Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary. One of history's most meticulous and relentlessly self-critical of authors, Flaubert produced over 4,500 pages of manuscript drafts during the creation of the 400-page novel that was to transform French literature; and every word is now available to read online at twofine websites (in French). As Grauman explains, this was a process only made possible by a staggering combination of passion, rigour and prolonged collaboration:
Literary scholars have long known about this Eldorado of handwritten manuscripts, but were always daunted by its sheer size. The task of deciphering a single page of Flaubert’s handwriting, much of it furiously crossed out, with words scribbled in the margins and others fitted between lines, would take a single scholar three to ten hours, says Yvan Leclerc, Rouen University’s Flaubert specialist who is behind the project. With an unpaid team of school teachers, academics, doctors, social workers, an oil prospector and even a cleaning lady in France, the United States, Britain, Argentina, New Zealand and Thailand, the transcriptions were finished in two years and a half.Further welcome proof that that most democratic of media, the internet, is just as adept at investigative and academic rigour as it as at gossip, cute photos of dancing cats and videos of skateboarders injuring themselves.
