#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
Flaubert needs to do this because he is at once a realist and a stylist, a reporter and a poet manqué. The realist wants to record a great deal, to do a Balzacian number on Paris. But the stylist is not content with Balzacian jumble and verve; he wants to discipline this welter of detail, to turn it into immaculate sentences and images: Flaubert’s letters speak of the effort of trying to turn prose into poetry.

that the narrator was somehow ‘really there’, and that the narrator is not really a writer. Or rather, what Flaubert’s flâneur tradition tries to establish is that the narrator (or designated authorial scout) is at once a kind of writer and not really a writer. A writer by temperament but not by trade. A writer because he notices so much, so well; not really a writer because he is not expending any labour to put it down on the page, and after all is really noticing no more than you and I would see.

Flaubertian realism, like most fiction, is both lifelike and artificial.

So realism is at once true and artificial, pulled between life and art, the capacious and the selective, the camera and the painting.

Flaubert and the rise of the flâneur 36,39,40,41

摘于06/24/2026