Extract
[...] However, this neutrality is never truly total. The narrator is everywhere, not by his direct voice, but by the choices of narration: focalization, segmentation, rhythm, juxtaposition. In fact, even if Flaubert gives us the impression of disappearing, he creates and maintains control over what the reader perceives. And this with chosen options: for example, internal focalization placing the reader in Emma's head. We are made to believe in her dreams before revealing the illusion, Flaubert positions himself well, showing without explaining, letting see without drawing. [...]
[...] Flaubert invents a new form where style becomes a critical force and literature, a space of lucidity. As Nathalie Sarraute will summarize much later, "What I call tropism, is this movement that precedes speech"The Age of Suspicion p. 19). It would seem that Flaubert, well before her, was already writing against the automatism of language, to reveal what, beneath the surface, makes consciousness waver? Bibliography: - Flaubert, G. (2001). Madame Bovary (Ed. J. Seebacher & G. Leleu, Presentation, notes, chronology and dossier). [...]
[...] This technique gives the style a cinematic fluidity: we enter and exit the consciences. All of this allows us to show, without ever directly commenting: the gaps, contradictions, and sometimes even the ridiculousness of romantic illusions . The rhetorical effect that emerges from this process is strong: we perceive the dissonance between the experienced emotion and the gaze. 3. Emotion in form: rhythm, sonority, and expressive punctuation Finally and lastly, it is crucial to see that Flaubert's stylistics does not reject all emotion: it displaces it into the form. [...]
[...] Flaubert's style is thus a refusal of the easy effect, an art of silence. Thus, we have seen in this second part that Flaubert's style, by its precise description, discreet irony, and rigorous syntax, constitutes a true stylistics of disenchantment: a lucid, distant writing that deconstructs the romantic and gives reality all its dryness. III. The Impersonal Writing: Tension between Style and Subjectivity After analyzing how Flaubert deconstructs the romantic by a rigorous and distant style, it is now necessary to examine how this impersonal writing, claimed as neutral, actually questions the place of the narrator and the circulation of voices in the narrative. [...]
[...] The style itself operates a critical distancing, creating a constant tension between the experience lived by the characters and the ironic evaluation given by the writing. And it is from this founding tension that we will be led to ask the following question: 'In what way does Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, does he give to see the romantic illusion lived by Emma, while deconstructing it by a stylistic of disenchantment, before making emerge, through an impersonal writing, a deep tension between subjectivity and narration? [...]
