§10.

Hello! Just a couple of stray thoughts and an aberration before we proceed:

A step in the towards what generally is called "World irony" Flaubert took late in life with his Herodias, (in Trois Contes), which is a crisply written story, full of correct and incorrect facts from the time of Jesus' life, and which looks upon the world from a bantering bird's eye view, supremely accomplished by playing with the "religious sentiment", the innate fear, which the "only God" evoked in the hearts and minds of the Christian reader of Flaubert's contemporaries in this era. His play with different spheres: 1) worldly power, 2) sexual drives 4.) the joys of eating and 4.) the surreal Meta level, all this is just eminently affective, and to this day, 150 years later. The spontaneity of this story will sometimes quite close to that, contained in his many letter, where impatience, anger, invectives ( it is almost a pathological swearing in those letters ) and senselessness will flower freely side by side with social criticism.
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Parenthetically - quite parenthetically can be cited a style variant and an irony with which Flaubert probably not (what I know) came in contact with, namely Jane Austen. ( Perhaps another person with Asperger traits.... Although of course not to the extent that we see those in Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickinson, to prejudically chose just two women of the pen of utmost importance ...). Her early novel Northanger Abbey (1818) - written at the coffee table, which is all she wrote, in the pauses between household chores - begins with the following "hard to beat" elegant sentence:

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland on her infancy would have supposed her to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard, and he had even been handsome. He had a considerable independence, besides two real good livings, and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of Useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and, instead of dying in Bringing the latters into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on - lived to have six children more - to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will always be called a fine family, where there are heads, and arms, and legs enough for the number; But the Morlands had little other right to the word, for They were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any." ( Jane Austen, NA, p.1).
The book is Austen's first novel. Already in 1803 the script was sold to a publisher for 10 pounds, but was bought back by the author in 1816 for the same amount when the book was announced, but not issued. It is a satire on the Gothic ( id est: Romantic) novel, on Elisabeth Gatskell, Walpole and others. Austen here uses "le style indirect libre" which was so appropriate also for Flaubert in the use for satirical purposes.
The small piece referred above contains such a vast number of implications, winks, etc. even to a person only half awake - or nearly unconscious - reader, that already at this initial suspect that one of world literature's great is born ... right here!!! One of history's greatest ironies. So neglected because of modern totally stupid movies based on the plots of her novels. The peculiar thing – or one of them - with Austen's writing, not more than a handful of novels, is that these take place within a limited sphere. In almost all these novels dealt with (supposedly, allegedly) a single major subject: for a woman to get married. In the satire's character, a limited sphere, a miniature universe. ( For readings on Austen and personages in her novels with Asperger traits, you might look up :
http://www.jasna.org/bookrev/br253p21.pdf.)

By the way: Comments are welcome!