General Preface to The Complete Novels of Flaubert (Excerpt)
Text | Esmin
Flaubert's creative ideas are clearly in many ways in line with Balzac's. Like Balzac, Flaubert described literature as "a mirror reflecting real life", using authenticity as the main criterion for measuring art: "Beauty means truth, although the real thing is not necessarily beautiful, but the most beautiful thing is always real... If you lose authenticity, you lose your artistry. ”
Flaubert's understanding of authenticity, like Balzac, refers to essential phenomena of universal significance, so he also emphasizes the processing and refinement of the materials of life and the means of typicalization: "A thorough understanding of reality, faithfully reflecting reality through typical means, is a basic criterion that the novelist should follow. He understood that "vividness comes from deep insights and keen insights" and that the artist should be like the straw of a pump "going deep into the heart of something, into its deepest depths." He paid as much attention to the choice of characteristic details as Balzac, and was good at enhancing the credibility of his fictional world through realistic details, and even some of the scenes and details in his works were found to be almost identical to what Balzac wrote in Louis Lambert and The Country Doctor. Based on these factors, it is not unreasonable to see him as Balzac's successor.
Flaubert, however, did not follow in the footsteps of others, and his mirror had its own unique way of reflecting reality. France is a people of originality, and a writer or artist cannot be recognized as a great writer or artist if he cannot surpass his predecessors in some way or take a different path in art. Flaubert's reputation is due first and foremost to his innovative spirit. His greatest achievement is to delete the self from the work and create the so-called objectivity art.
Balzac is universally recognized as a master of realism, but his art retains a considerable amount of romantic color. This great dream seeker is always relentlessly pursuing the "absolute". He tried to "grasp everything, to know everything, to explain everything", and always felt that he "has some kind of thought to express, some kind of system to establish, some kind of doctrine to explain". Therefore, in Balzac's works, the huge figure of the author can always be seen. He is full of passion, breathing with his fictional characters and sharing fate, analyzing their psychology all the time, judging their words and deeds, and even sighing as an author.
Unlike Balzac, Flaubert advocated the exclusion of the self from the work, without revealing feelings, without inserting arguments, without leaving a trace of the author's views or intentions word for word. Flaubert called the novel a "scientific form of life" and asked the writer to restrain his feelings and to make a completely objective and scientific response to things in a calm and objective manner, as natural scientists do with nature. "The author's imagination, even if it makes the reader vaguely guess, is not allowed." He believed that good writers should write by reason, not passion: "Passion cannot become poetry,...... The less you feel about something, the more capable you are to show it as it is. "The smaller the status of passion, the higher the artistry of the work." In fact, Flaubert was not really without passion, but he spared no effort to prevent them from leaking in his works.
Maupassant said he "hid himself deeply, carefully concealing the thread in his hand like a puppeteer, so that his voice would not be perceived by the audience as much as possible". Never before in literature have the author's intentions been hidden as deeply as Flaubert's. It cannot be said that this artistic method is inferior or superior to that of his predecessors, but it is indeed a breakthrough in the realist artistic method and gives people a refreshing feeling. Therefore, as soon as his Madame Bovary was published, it immediately caused a strong reaction in the literary world, from which Saint-Beuve saw "the sign of a new literature" and Zola declared that "a new code of art has been written". Whether or not these claims are exaggerated, they all prove the success of Flaubert's attempt. Through his own artistic practice, Flaubert proved that the artist with profound skills can achieve the purpose of criticizing reality through the combination of characteristic details and events he chooses, without necessarily being lyrical. Plekhanov once commented: "Objectivity is the most powerful aspect of Flaubert's creative method. This method of writing, which took the author and the work at a certain distance, with its objective and indifferent style, later had a profound impact on Twentieth-century French literature, so flaubert became famous in the twentieth century and was regarded as a pioneer of modernist art.
Accompanying Flaubert's art of "objectivity" is the dilution of the theme of the work.
Downplaying the subject is another important feature of Flaubert's creative thought, and he once said that what he was willing to write was "a book that does not talk about any problems, a book without any external constraints,...... The book has almost no subject matter, or, if possible, at least its subject matter is barely visible." In Flaubert's mind, literature, like music and painting, had its first priority to give people the enjoyment of beauty, not necessarily to explain anything. Flaubert was an admirer of pure art, his only faith, the supreme God in his mind, and he did not allow art to have any purpose other than the pursuit of beauty. In his view, if artistic creation has utilitarian considerations, it tarnishes the purity of art. He believed that "art should not be used as a pulpit by any doctrine, otherwise it will decline!" People always distort reality when they want to lead it to a certain conclusion. ...... The fanaticism of wanting to draw conclusions is one of the deadliest and most fruitless weirdness of humanity. ...... The most brilliant geniuses and the greatest works never draw conclusions, and Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, all the firstborn sons of God (as Michelle said) are wary of doing anything other than reproduction."
Flaubert emphasized that "the reproduction of nature" is the basic attribute of art, that criticism, accusations, and lessons do not belong to literature, and that all a writer can do is "faithfully observe life and do his best to faithfully depict it." He said: "Art is a description, we should only think of description", "art is the reality itself". That is to say, no matter what you write, as long as you write it beautifully and vividly, you will achieve the purpose of art, and you do not have to let art bear the burden that does not belong to it. He believed that the artist's thought should be as broad as the sea, as pure as the sea, and should not be fashionable. Flaubert was clearly at odds with the bourgeois "progressive" trend of the time, so he dismissed some writers' pandering to the public's tastes as a "utilitarian" bourgeoisie, and dismissed Hugo's "talk of humanity, of progress, of the development of ideas, and of other nonsense which he himself did not believe." It can be seen that Flaubert's claims on the objectivity, authenticity and dilution of the theme of art are largely aimed at distancing themselves from politics in order to maintain artistic independence.
Flaubert admitted that his overriding hobby was a "love of form." Of course, this does not mean that he believes that form can be separated from content: "Without beautiful form there is no idea of beauty, and vice versa." ...... Ideas exist only on forms, just as it is impossible for a form not to express an idea. But his focus on form did override. Flaubert is a famous French stylist, his writing is fresh and beautiful, simple and simple and vivid, and is recognized as a model of French. "Leaving the genre without works", this sentence fully reflects his great importance to language art. He once taught his disciple Maupassant: "A phenomenon can only be expressed in one way, can only be summarized by one noun, can only be characterized by one adjective, can only be vividly animated by one verb, and the duty of the writer is to seek this unique noun, adjective and verb with superhuman effort." He not only requires the article to be well structured and accurate in wording, but also requires the prose to be catchy, as sonorous as poetry, with the beauty of rhythm and rhythm: "If the sentence can be read to meet the requirements of breathing, it can be said that the sentence is alive; if the sentence can be recited aloud, the sentence is good." Flaubert hated exaggeration and piling up, and especially could not tolerate pretense and mannerism. The beauty he pursues is accurate, concise, simple and without Huawei's greatest characteristics. His works look simple and plain on the surface, and the charm of Fang Zhi is endlessly understood. Maupassant's assessment of his art as "brilliant and bland" is just right.