THE SKETCH OF MANNERS AND ALIENATION IN THE POETICS OF FLAUBERT AND DOSTOEVSKY
THE SKETCH OF MANNERS AND ALIENATION IN THE POETICS OF FLAUBERT AND DOSTOEVSKY

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the poetics of Realism through the genre of the sketch of manners as this genre is described in theory in the manifestos of Realism and used in practice by two major writers of the 19th century, Flaubert and Dostoevsky. The paper briefly examines the postulates of Realism as these appear in Les français peints par eux-mêmes [The French portrayed by the French], published in 1840 by Curmer, in Paris, together with Baudelaire's doctrine of Beauty which is taken as an elaboration on the poetics of the physiological sketch and feuilleton. With these tools, the paper examines the literary procédé of the two major Realists of the European canon. Based on a brief examination of three novels – Bouvard and Pécuchet, Madame Bovary and The Adolescent - this analysis seeks to uncover how the sketch of manners is transformed to become the vehicle for the representation of the desire of the age, which is will to power understood as self-overcoming and constituted as alienation of the self. Dostoevsky, who thought highly of Flaubert as a writer, with a more pronounced, deliberate artistic gesture than Flaubert's, puts alienation centre-stage in a new space – the space of the unconscious. In this space, Dostoevsky does not capture "living beings…and their luminous explosion in space," as Flaubert did. Dostoevsky's portraits of the time are, like Constantin Guys' sketches, impressionistic ‘daubs' in black crayons, alluding to a shadowy world of the unknown which underlies all appearances. This is the world of repressed desire which is the actual domain of alienation.

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