The form is the real: Flaubert read by Baudelaire and Maupassant

Abstract

Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, in terms of its influence, extrapolates the limits of genres, epochs, and literary movements, reaching contemporaneity in a position of paradigmatic work both for the inconvertibility of reality through literature and the irreducibility of the literary to pre-existing realities. The purpose of this article is to show that the writers Charles Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant emphasize, in critical texts about Madame Bovary, the formalism and impersonality of the narrative as a posture that establishes the immanence of the work and singularize the author’s belonging to the realist movement. The return to these criticisms may shed light on later aesthetic experiments in which representation questions the status of the document and of external referentiality.