The Wörlitz Volcano

August 10, 1794

World literature has at least two great novels that can be considered as true “theories” of the garden and its place in the art system: Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet. Both books lead to a catastrophe: an existential catastrophe and the failure of a political-philosophical model in the 1809 German novel, as well as an aesthetic and epistemological catastrophe in Flaubert’s posthumous work. Although the romantic action of Elective Affinities is lost in an aquatic setting (the drowning of a child), it is the metaphor of fire that accompanies and best symbolizes the tragic turn of events. The four friends, who within a post-Arcadian domain tried to carry out a life project alongside a landscape garden project, created an explosive mixture by massively intervening on the local topography and exposing themselves to the dangerous chemistry of human relations. The emotional disorder and disorder within a brutally reshaped nature—with an artificial lake as the symbol and the site of the catastrophe itself—inexorably led to a disastrous end, announced by several disturbing signals. The healing encounter that should have led to the happy end is imagined as such by Edward, the main protagonist: “[…] he asked his friend to warn him of his success at once by an agreed signal, such as a cannon shot, if it was still daylight, or a few rockets if night had already come.” 1 After finding Ottilie, his beloved, and before parting from her for a moment, it was again shots that drew attention: “Let us listen! He cried as he rose to his feet in a hurry, for he had just heard a shotgun blast which he mistook for a signal from the Major. It was the explosion of a hunter’s gun as he roamed the nearby mountains. Nothing more interrupted the solemn silence of the country, and Edward became impatient and worried.” Shortly after the exchange “for the first time, and without constraint, [of] burning kisses” and the violent separation of the two lovers, the drowning occurs, and everything falls into the water (a child, Ottilie, a book, and the illusions of the two lovers). Everything the protagonists and the reader imagined with them turns into a deadly scene: the new Arcadia is indeed stillborn.

The situation in Bouvard and Pécuchet seems at first glance much less worrying. The two “fellows” of the homonymous novel devote themselves once their first concerns in agricultural matters are abandoned to the art of gardening. The result of their efforts, initially comic, certainly corresponds to the ironic vein and to the overall strategy of systematic deconstruction of illusions and human stupidity established in the Flaubertian anti-novella. However,