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panicroom
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Living in a bubble. Part XIX.
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Living in a bubble. Part XVIII.
   Tue Oct 13, 2015 2:16 pm
The Zadie Smith Kafka problem.
   Sat Oct 10, 2015 7:54 pm
Living in a bubble. Part XVII.
   Fri Oct 09, 2015 8:56 am
Living in a bubble. Part XVI.
   Mon Oct 05, 2015 3:32 am
Living in a bubble. Part XV.
   Sun Oct 04, 2015 8:20 pm
Living in a bubble. Part XIV.
   Sun Oct 04, 2015 4:37 pm
Living in a bubble. Part XIII.
   Sun Oct 04, 2015 12:54 pm
Living in a bubble.Part XII.
   Sun Oct 04, 2015 6:47 am
Living in a bubble. Part XI.
   Sat Oct 03, 2015 10:15 pm
Living in a bubble ( and its consequenses). Part X.
   Sat Oct 03, 2015 3:05 pm
Living in a bubble. Part IX.
   Sat Oct 03, 2015 7:40 am
Living in a bubble. Part VIII.
   Fri Oct 02, 2015 5:22 pm
Living in a bubble ( and its consequenses). Part VII.
   Fri Oct 02, 2015 8:37 am
Living in a bubble. Part VI.
   Fri Oct 02, 2015 8:04 am
Living in a bubble. Part V.
   Thu Oct 01, 2015 3:21 pm
Living in a bubble. Part IV.
   Thu Oct 01, 2015 1:44 pm
Living in a bubble. Part III.
   Thu Oct 01, 2015 12:55 pm
Living in a bubble. Part II.
   Thu Oct 01, 2015 9:01 am

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Living in a bubble. Part IX.

Permanent Linkby panicroom on Sat Oct 03, 2015 7:40 am

§9.

Let us (me) talk about Gustave Flaubert. This is not only important, but it is a very enjoyable thing too. And remember: history is not an exact science! I am trying to find out "the nature of the bubble". It may be so, that I am handling “historical facts” carelessly. But I do my best. Reading is no exact science, and writing about authors have never been a science at all.
Anyway, bluntly said, the young Gustave was a physically clumsy child. He was neglected by his mother, but observed by a maid. He had fits of epilepsy. But he in fact in his twenties moved to Paris (leaving Rouen) to study law. He had friends and he began to write short stories and novels at an early age. Mesmerized by words as he was he in turn was mesmerizing the woman in the parisian saloons. Everybody was awaiting the upcoming of a new Balzac. Flaubert, who had a round big head, was very interested in women (for sex) and had in his early years been attracted to older women, but in Paris he met the young Louise, with whom he ( twice) developed a strange relationship. Gustave never married, and Louise learnt, that Gustave had a terrible temper.
Very soon Gustave left the study of law for literature. And he was to be known to his friends; - he had such – as one who took endless time to finish his works. He wrote a whole lot of letters, and in these letters he is mostly in a rage at other people and at the difficulty of writing good books. The art of compromise was not his. He had from early years chosen his own way, and it seems, as we will see, that he had a VISION of what good literature was. This vision included some very odd features. Flaubert thought that art was enormously important, and - apparently - that it should be regarded as a universe of its own. He was inclined to the perception of synesthesic fantasies. Once he remarked that he with a giant book ( the book on Le tentation de Saint Antoine, a pre-surrealistic orgy ) had ( simply) wanted to give to his reader the impression of … yellow. ( In an essay Charles Bernheimer asserts that Flaubert never seemed to have understood that language is a means of communication. B. claims that we in fact are facing – both in Kafka and Flaubert – a psychopathology of language. Which might in fact be almost true.)
Flaubert was well oriented in the subjects he liked. He knew history, biblical history and he was familiar with the history of North Africa, where he also travelled, together with his sister. ( And he was extremely careful with facts, using the young Maupassant as a detective, hiring him as a secretary.)
Not only is it remarkable how much he was focused on his words, and how he was using women for sex only, how his temper was a problem to each and everyone, but the most trifling experience one may have, when reading the books he actually finished ( only ten or so …; Léducation sentimentale, Madame Bovary, Salammbô (1862) La tentation de Sainte Antoine (1874) November.(1842) and the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet, (1880, the year he died.) is the fascination he had for the intense use of ... irony. ( Flaubert is known to have created a motto:” Le style, c´est la vie.”. – The style is life. - This is a very complicated assertation. To understand this sentence in its entirety it takes a lot. Le poésie pure. ( Mallarmé) .But is Flaubert serious? Or isn´t this utter irony. ). A person who uses irony must have SOME relation to his fellow man. And if you read Madame Bovary you get a whole lot of irony, which is making poor Emma Bovary and poor Charles ( the country doctor ) look like helpless puppets on the stage set by a cruel fate. Flaubert seems to have very little, or no empathy at all regarding these two people. ( In Mad. Bov. of Emma: ”Elle aurait voulu que ce nom de Bovary, qui et le sien, fût illustre, le voir étalé chez les libraires, répété dans les journaux, connu par toute la France. ») . And what was even more troublesome to the public opinion: Flaubert had absolutely no understanding related to the institution of marriage. If you buy a version of Madame Bovary in a French pocket, you are prone to get a version with an lengthy preface discussing the awe arousing lawsuit which followed the publication of Madame Bovary. The use of irony can be seen through the entire authorship. It is perhaps at its peak in the small novel Herodias. We may perhaps return to this masterpiece.....
Flaubert´s relation to language has perplexed many commentators. And just as many has been fascinated by his strange “credo”(?):
” What seems beautiful to me, and what I would like to write, it is a book about absolutely nothing, a book without the slightest connection to the external reality, and which solely was to be held together by the force of its own style. /…/ ... a book , that nearly would have no subject at all.” ( To Louise Colet, Jan, 16 , 1852.)
Maurice Blanchot once remarked that what is striking with Flaubert is the distance, the urge from the narrator to appear as one who has not the slightest interest in what is going on in the story. Thus we are as readers quite consumed with the interest ... in this very uninterest, according to Blanchot.

We might note that the irony of Flaubert much was an irony og extreme contempt.( Flaubert: ”The world is the kingdom of Satan.” ). He himself contempted, yes he loathed society, Romantic verse, conservatism, and maybe he loathed life and loved literature, but only literature in the extreme form, a form he tried to shape all by himself. He is not known to have admired much any other author at all. “The style is life. The style is the blood of the thought itself.”. Thus, to Flaubert, art was - as it seems, perhaps by "inner necessity" - larger than life. And to “poor” Louise, the girl from Lyon, life became hell. In fact, it is a wise thing to study Flaubert as a human being through the eyes of this small, beautiful, energetic woman, who alone with a child ( the father of this child was a famous professor at Sorbonne, V. Cousin, an expert on Hegel (!) and Pascal. ) tried to support herself and the little girl. The letters to Louise Colet are scornful. Gustave laughs - as if life was not real to him - at her. She in turn, is publishing a book on contemporary life, and never reaches her goal, which is to get a loving husband.
Sarte devoted a large portion of his life to the study of Flaubert. His work on Flaubert ( L´Idiot de la famille.) is of huge proportions. Sartre writes:
”How come that the lunacy of one single man came to develop into a lunacy of the mass, or still worse, to develop into the esthetical norm of this epoque? /…/ We might claim that the sickness om Gustave permitted him to in a representive way objectify Objective Spirit, as if the sickness of Gustave in fact was what may be called the neurosis of Objective Spirit.” neuros.” ( L´ idiot d.l.F. III., p.32.). By the concept ”Objective Spirit” ( Sartre in using hegelian terminology here) he simply ( and actually ) refers to ….Marxism.
So. What kind of conception concerning the “bubble” can we draw out of our attention to the works of Flaubert? We might say, that we are meeting a strange bubble, composed of a life lived estethically, and in pure poetry, and one might think of with a certain horror of what might have been the reaction of Sören Kierkegaard´s, had he ever read a book by Flaubert. ( Kierkegaard died in 1855, and could - to illustrate the joys of SK - amuse himself with reading Schopenhauer.) .But we will return to all this.

Before discussing further the nature of "Flaubert´s bubble", let us first take a look, also from a bird´s perspective, at the lives and works of two other men with Aspergers Syndrome, two quite famous characters who along with Flaubert has shaped our look on ourselves: Kafka and Wittgenstein.

Until then: peace !

panicroom

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