DANILO KIS
Two Variations on Flaubert
Idiots and Martyrs
Until Flaubert, literature was a whole (recall Balzac) , a totality of world
and being, a pillar of life and society on the order of army, government,
philosophy, state, family. With Flaubert began an age of"decadence" that
has lasted to the present. Literature lost its dominance, its integrality.
Literature has had a hard time learning to live with the tragic aware–
ness ofa paradise lost. Witness Flaubert's vain attempt - through the work
itself
(Bouvard and Pecuchet,
for example) - to recover its totalitarian status,
its now unthinkable universality. He seemed not to realize that the world
had been smashed to smithereens, that a previous static model had been
forced into motion, that the age of the fixed easel was gone forever. He
hoped to repair the
zerbro chene r Krug,
the shattered jug, at aU costs. Hence
his style, hence his martyrdom.
If
prose did not disappear entirely after
Balzac, we have mainly Flaubert to thank for it.
"Decadent" literature, born with Flaubert, has lasted, through Joyce,
to the present. Aware of a unity gone forever and reconciled with the loss.
Aware that it is doomed to fragmentation, yet hoping by means of frag–
mentation to provide a comprehensive vision of the world and humanity.
In
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
Flaubert used documents from the past
to locate a possible fixed point in this world of inconstant structures,
thereby founding a literary school Foucault calls "the Fantasia of the
Library."
Flaubert thus taught us that style is an entity unto itselfand ushered us
into an extended family of idiots and martyrs.
-1980
Flaubert and Borges
Thanks mainly to his correspondence and to the traces of creative effort
clearly visible in his manuscripts, Flaubert's quest for the
mot juste,
the
right word, and his
affres de style,
torments of style, are now legendary. His
unique creative drive resulted from a suspicion he could never quite
