#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
Flaubert founds this new style of realism on his use of the eye - the authorial eye, and the character’s eye.
Flaubert’s Frédéric is a forerunner of what would later be called the flâneur - the loafer, usually a young man, who walks the streets with no great urgency, seeing, looking, reflecting.

This figure is essentially a stand-in for the author, is the author’s porous scout, helplessly inundated with impressions. He goes out into the world like Noah’s dove, to bring a report back. The rise of this authorial scout is intimately connected to the rise of urbanism, to the fact that huge conglomerations of mankind throw at the writer - or the designated perceiver - large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail.

is it the novelist who is noticing these things or the fictional character?
Flaubert’s innovation was to make this question unnecessary, to so confuse author and flâneur that the reader unconsciously raises Frédéric up to the stylistic level of Flaubert: both must be pretty good, we decide, at noticing things, and we are content to leave it there.

Flaubert and the rise of the flâneur 34, 35, 36

摘于6/23/2026