66
lEO BERSANI
democratization of literature; it "can be found in everything and
governments have followed it, from the oriental despotisms up to the
future socialisms." The enemy of democracy is the rigid "orthodoxy"
of dictatorships; the enemy of a free style is cliche, the
formes
convenues
of the
Dictionnaire des idees
re~ues.
But Flaubert's horror
of cliche is of course equalled only by his fascination with it. For the
cliche is, in a sense, the purest art of intelligibility; it tempts us with
the possibility of enclosing life within beautifully inalterable formulas,
of obscuring the arbitrary nature of imagination with an appearance
of necessity. Thus the drifting of imagination among its unaccount–
able fancies is checked not by the adherence of words to reality, but
by the ideal unreality of a language which disciplines the mind by
making it merely predictable. Obsessed by the distance between words
and things, both Emma and Flaubert regularize imagination by
mechanically formalizing it. All Emma's dreams resemble one another;
she is as cliche-ridden as Homais. And Flaubert's prose, far from
being "free," inflicts upon us the eternal ternary rhythm, the non–
connective
et
to introduce a final clause, the adverb at the end of the
sentence and the deadening
c'etait
at the beginning of descriptions.
The high priest of style is thus the master of the rhythmical tic. By
an irony which should now be clear, the fear of "unnatural" hyper–
bole in the self and in literature can be the triumph of an artificiality
which just parodies inventive artifice. But anxiety may be simply
an excess of invention over understanding; and, at least in literature,
that imbalance curiously resembles creative exuberance.
