The Dictionary of Received Ideas

A dictionary of the opinions one is supposed to have, planned by two clerks as the only project left after agriculture, medicine, love, and archaeology have defeated them.

Casaubon dies in the system. Bouvard and Pécuchet survive, and decide the system was the platitude all along.

The dictionary they plan would not explain myths. It would list what one is meant to say about myths, and about agriculture, and about magnetism, so that a person could speak forever without thinking. Flaubert had been collecting those sentences for himself. After his death they were printed as his. That is the knife this catalogue has met before. Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is not The Joye of Snacks. Flaubert’s Dictionnaire is not the clerks’ unfinished copy. One is a writer’s commonplace book. The other is the last project of two men who have discovered that knowledge was always a set of received ideas, and who go back to their desk to copy them out fairly.

The rating follows Nanny, not Fantastic Beasts. You can buy Flaubert’s lists. You cannot buy the dictionary as Bouvard would have paginated it. Both facts are true, and a badge would have lost the difference.

On the readability rating. Quoted, of Flaubert’s notes. Of the clerks’ book — a plan, a double desk, a novel that stops. Almost nothing, which is the correct harvest of their studies.

In-world history

Two Paris copyists retire to the country to know everything, and learn only that everything is already a cliché. The novel breaks off as they return to copying, and as they plan the dictionary that would alphabetise the clichés. Flaubert's own lists — "MAGNETISM: The cause of the Revolution" — were published from his papers. They are his satire. They are not, quite, the volume the clerks would have made, sitting at the double desk, copying the world back into itself.

Why it matters

The Joye of Snacks problem in a frock coat. Flaubert did compile a Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Bouvard and Pécuchet never finish theirs. The real book is adjacent. It is not the clerks'.

Appearances

Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) — Gustave Flaubert Unfinished; the two copyists, having failed at every science, plan a dictionary of the platitudes they have been living among

Editions in our world

Dictionnaire des idées reçues, Gustave Flaubert (from the notes, published from 1911–13) A real alphabet of platitudes in Flaubert's hand. Adjacent to the clerks' unwritten dictionary, as Nanny Ogg's Cookbook is adjacent to the Joye of Snacks. Voice, not identity.

Connected volumes

Related to The Joye of Snacks · Discworld
Related to The Key to All Mythologies · Middlemarch

Catalogue record

Category: Dictionary
World: Bouvard and Pécuchet
Imagined by: Gustave Flaubert
Language: French
First appearance: Bouvard et Pécuchet (posthumous, 1881); the Dictionnaire compiled from Flaubert's notes
Readability: Quoted