When Braithwaite goes to Rouen in pursuit of
Flaubertian knowledge, he describes his quest as being "randy for relics" (3), explicitly highlighting the intertwining of epistemological and sexual desire.
The volume ends as it began, with the subject of editing and the transcription of a fine inedit to add to the
Flaubertian corpus: a seventy-page unpublished manuscript of notes on Hegel, a rich terrain for subsequent scholars to explore.
Marcel Proust, not only the novelist writing in the wake of Flaubert but also the critical reader, pasticheur, and essayist, draws attention to what is for him a specifically stylistic
Flaubertian revolution.
"The sentimental as the insincere, the manipulative, the vicarious, the morbid, the knowing, the kitschy, the arch," as Sedgwick put it (143): the discrediting of such writing in these terres, already begun by
Flaubertian realism, would only be amplified by the pioneers of early twentieth-century modernism.
His work was not
Flaubertian. "if there's anything i know it's flaubert!
To cite only one example taken from the following essays, the motif of windows and high perspectives in Madame Bovary constitutes, simultaneously, an imperious theme in
Flaubertian revery, a morphological theme and a means of articulation; one can probably assume that this important motif escaped Flaubert's constructive intent and his conscious mind.
For him, the famous
Flaubertian ideal of the impersonality of the author is in truth impossible, and a writer only really speaks about his or her own life; he is in this respect in tune with the fashion for "auto-fiction" in recent French literary production.
(706) The parrot is a
Flaubertian variation on the compromised artist metaphor, neatly combining overtones of automatized reproduction with fears that the artist is a performing animal.
Hawkes evinces an old-fashioned
Flaubertian dislike of the philistine in his portrayal of the merchant, ironically "with no thoughts of trade" as his corpse stands propped up with a cocoon in his open mouth (94).
Disinterestedness is his byword; he is a fundamentalist of the
Flaubertian school of literary theology.
He proposes the notion of the "dessous" (the implicit, or more precisely, what lies underneath the surface) in order to address the contrast between a linear (lectio) plot-oriented reading of the text and the more desired non-linear (meditatio) reading which requries a consideration of echoes within the text, those between various
Flaubertian works and finally those between Flaubert's narratives and others.
She concludes her study, in truly
Flaubertian manner, by stressing the joy in creativity that underpins the Goncourts' often bitter struggle with the modern.
