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.