Vitalpoetics

Reading Colin Dray’s recent Vitalpoetics post got me thinking about Gustave Flaubert, firstly as a man whose rebellion against romanticism drove him to explore the everyday, and secondly as the man who undertook the project of “accepting everything, saying everything, depicting everything—a most ambitious statement” (Flaubert, 94).

This is certainly a different kind of saying everything to that of Sade or Blanchot—one more concerned with the world as tangible, demanding as a premise that the world be tangible. Leslie Hill observes that Flaubert denotes “a fundamental shift in emphasis in the relationship of the author toward his material and his language […] arriv[ing] at an awareness of the near impossibility of a successful mimesis of reality” (333). But it is this near impossibility that founds a search for something beyond, a search initiated by Mallarmé and further executed by Blanchot, among others.

Although Flaubert attempted to distance himself from the realist movement, he acknowledged that he was considered one of its “high priests” (96). In his study of the milieu surrounding realism, Stromberg notes that “the realist movement was not only reacting against the romanticism of the previous era, but also the philosophical idealism of the German school, in particular of Hegel” (xv). Erich Heller senses the irony of this reaction against Hegel. Reading Flaubert through a Hegelian lens, Heller writes, “Flaubert, indeed, blatantly gives away the conspiracy of Realism […] Somewhere in its heart quivers the hatred of reality and the lust for conquest” (96).

If I may be permitted to read along the lines of Heller through a 20^th-century lens, it strikes me that Flaubert’s efforts have much in common with the motion of the Hegelian dialectic as characterised by Alexandre Kojève. It would seem that literary realism, in its quest for absolute expression, employs the dialectical movement it reviles. In his letters Flaubert claimed that the impersonality necessary to objective writing is achieved by assimilation of the objective world: “exterior reality must enter into us, almost make us cry out with it, if we are to represent it well” (93). In a phrase which could have been uttered by Kojève, Flaubert demands that writers “absorb the objective” (93). This idea of becoming impersonal via absorption is very close to Kojève’s portrayal of the dialectical movement. According to Kojève, the being whose desire is directed toward a natural-object (such as the tangible world Flaubert seeks to express in its entirety?) “creates and preserves its own reality by the overcoming of a reality other than its own, by the ‘transformation’ of an alien reality into its own reality, by the ‘assimilation’, the ‘internalisation’ of a ‘foreign’, ‘external’ reality” (4).

The dialectical movement is a neat way of thinking about the expansion of knowledge, but it also necessitates thinking about that which cannot be known, that which resists assimilation into individual consciousness and emphasises difference. Arguably this revelation is Flaubert’s greatest achievement.

Citations:

Flaubert, Gustave. “On Realism.” In Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Edited by George J. Becker. 89-96. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Heller, Erich. “The Realistic Fallacy.” In The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays. 89-97. New York: Random House, 1965.
Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Edited by Allan Bloom. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1969.
Stromberg, Roland N, ed. Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism: Modes of Thought and Expression in Europe, 1848-1914. New York; Evanston; London: Harper and Row, 1968.