ABSTRACT

The work of Flaubert is particularly illuminating because the fiction itself, virtually without discursive statement, generates the ideology of modernist art. Flaubert stands behind Joyce, Beckett, and the new novelists. The opposition between art and life proves to be illusory. Flaubert's hatred of the species that included "those in overalls as well as in a frocked coat" is the master passion of his life and work. Flaubert is, of course, not the only writer of bourgeois origins to despise the species. Flaubert's work is in a sense the archetype for a good deal of modern fiction, which is nourished by the cliche of everyday life just as psychoanalysis is nourished by psychopathology. Flaubert's work contains the paradox of the symbiosis of avant-garde formalism and the conviction of the banality of everyday life. The presentation of the power of the cliche is one of Flaubert's notable achievements.