Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T18:42:53.258Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

14 - Flaubert, our contemporary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Timothy Unwin
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Get access

Summary

What can a novelist today learn from Madame Bovary? Everything that is essential to the modern novel: that it is art, created beauty, a construct that produces pleasure. As in poetry, painting, dance or music, this is brought about through formal success, which is the determining factor in the novel's content.

Before Flaubert, novelists sensed intuitively that form played a key role in the success or failure of their stories. Instinct and imagination led them to give stylistic coherence to their themes, to organise point of view and time in such a way that their novels could give an appearance of autonomy. But only after Flaubert does this spontaneous, diffuse and intuitive idea become rational knowledge, theory, artistic consciousness.

Flaubert was the first modern novelist, because he was the first to understand that the main problem to be resolved when writing a novel is that of the narrator, the person who tells the tale – the most important character in any story – who is never the author, even when the narrator uses the first person to take on the name of the author. Flaubert understood before anyone else that the narrator is always an invention. The author is a being of flesh and blood, the narrator is a creature made up of words, a voice. While an author’s existence precedes, succeeds and exceeds his tales, a narrator lives only when telling them, and only lives to tell them. A narrator lives and dies with the tale, and the two are interdependent. One cannot exist without the other.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×