172
PARTISAN REVIEW
stories will likely never be invested with the power of persuasion that
will make them come to life.
It
is possible to seek and find a style of your own. Read Faulkner's
first and second novels. You'll see that from the mediocre
Mosquitoes
to the estimable
FLags in the Dust,
as the first version of
Sartoris
was
ca ll ed, Faulkner found his sty le, the labyrinthine and majestic language,
part religious, part mythical, and part epic, that animates the Yoknap–
atawpha novels. Flaubert also sought and found his style between the
first version of
The Temptation of Saint Anthony,
written in a torren–
tial, unmoored, lyrically romantic style, and
Madame Bovary,
in
which
that unbridled style was severely curtailed and all its emotional and lyri–
cal exuberance sternly repressed in favor of an "illusion of reality,"
which he managed to perfect in five years of superhuman labor, the
same amount of time it took him to compose his first masterpiece. As
you may know, Flaubert had a theory about style: that of the
mot juste.
The right word was the one word-the only word-that was able to
aptly express an idea. The obligation of the writer was to find that
word . How did he know when he had found it? A whisper in his ear:
the word was right when it
sounded
right. The perfect correspondence
between form and content-between word and idea-translated itself
into musical harmony. That is why Flaubert submitted his sentences to
"La gueuLade,"
the shouting test. He'd go outside to read aloud every–
thing he had written, out to an avenue of lime trees that still exists near
what used to be his house at Croisset: the
"allee des gueuLades,"
the
shouting way. There he'd read as loudly as he could what he'd written,
and his ear would tell him if he'd succeeded or if he'd have to keep try–
ing words and sentences until he achieved the artistic perfection he pur–
sued with such fanatic tenacity.
Do you remember the line by Ruben Darlo, "My style in search of a
form"? For a long time I was disconcerted by it: aren't style and form
the same thing? How is it possible to search for form, when it is there
in front of you? Now I understand better, because, as I mentioned in one
of my earlier letters, writing is only one aspect of literary form. Another,
no less important, is technique, since words alone do not suffice in the
telling of good stories. But this letter has gone on too long, and I'd bet–
ter leave that discussion for next time.
Translated from the Spanish
by
Natasha Wimmer
