"Flaubert y su destino ejemplar," first published in La Naciôn, 12 Dec. 1954. Included in later editions of Discusiôn, from 1957 on.

In an article intended to abolish or discourage the cult of Flaubert in England, John Middleton Murry observes that there are two Flauberts: one, a large-boned, strapping man, lovable, rather simple, with the look and laugh of a rustic, who spent his life agonizing over the intensive husbandry of half a dozen dissimilar volumes; the other, an incorporeal giant, a symbol, a battle cry, a banner. I must say that I do not understand this opposition; the Flaubert who agonized to produce a precious and parsimonious body of work is identical to the Flaubert of legend and (if the four volumes of his correspondence do not deceive us) of history. This Flaubert is more important than the important literature he premeditated and carried out, for he was the Adam of a new species: the man of letters as priest, ascetic, and almost martyr. Antiquity, for reasons we shall examine, could not produce this figure. In the Ion we read that the poet is an "ethereal, winged, and sacred thing who can compose nothing until he is inspired, which is to say, mad." Such a doctrine of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth (John 3:8) was hostile to a personal appreciation of the poet, who was reduced to a fleeting instrument of divinity. A Flaubert is inconceivable in the Greek city-states, or in Rome; perhaps the man who most closely approximated him was Pindar, the priestly poet who compared his odes to paved roads, a tide, gold and marble carvings, and buildings, and who felt and embodied the dignity of the literary profession.

To this "romantic" doctrine of inspiration professed by the classics,1 one fact may be added: the general feeling that Homer had already exhausted the possibilities of poetry, or in any case had discovered its utmost form, the heroic poem. Each night, Alexander of Macedonia placed his knife and his Iliad beneath his pillow, and Thomas De Quincey tells of an English pastor who swore from the pulpit "by the greatness of human suffering, by the greatness of human aspirations, by the immortality of human creations, by the Iliady by the Odysseyl" The wrath of Achilles and the rigors of Ulysses' voyage home are not universal themes, and posterity based its hopes on that limitation. To superimpose the course and configuration of the Iliad on other plots, invocation by invocation, battle by battle, supernatural device by supernatural device, was the highest aspiration of poets for twenty centuries. It is very easy to make fun of this, but not of the Aeneidy which was its fortunate result. (Lemprière discreetly includes Virgil among Homer's beneficiaries.) In the fourteenth century, Petrarch, a devout follower of the glory of Rome, believed he had found in the Punic Wars the durable subject of the epic poem; in the sixteenth, Tasso chose the first crusade, to which he dedicated two works, or two versions of one work. The first - the Gerusalemme liberata - is famous; the other, the Conquistata, which attempts to stay closer to the Iliady is barely even a literary curiosity. In the Conquistata, the emphases of the original text are muted, an operation which, when carried out on an essentially emphatic work, can amount to its destruction. Thus, in the Liberata (VIII, 23), we read of a valiant, wounded man who still resists death:

> La vita no, ma la virtu sostenta
> quel cadaver c indomito e féroce
> [Not life, but valor sustained the fierce, indomitable corpse]

In the revised version, hyperbole and impact disappear:

> La vita no, ma la virtu sostenta
> il cavalière indomito e féroce
> [Not life, but valor sustained the fierce, indomitable cavalier]

Milton, later, lives to construct a heroic poem. From childhood, perhaps before ever writing a single line, he knows himself to be dedicated to letters. He fears he was born too late for the epic (too distant from Homer, and from Adam) and in too cold a latitude, but he schools himself in the art of versification for many years. He studies Hebrew, Aramaic, Italian, French, Greek, and naturally, Latin. He composes Latin and Greek hexameters and Tuscan hendecasyllables. He practices self-restraint, because he feels that profligacy might waste his poetic faculty. He writes, at the age of thirty-three, that the poet ought himself to be a true poem, "that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things," and that no one unworthy of praise himself should dare to sing high praises of "heroic men or famous cities." He knows that a book mankind will not let die is to emerge from his pen, but its subject has yet to be revealed, and he seeks it in the Matière de Bretagne and in the two Testaments. On a casual scrap of paper (today called the Cambridge Manuscript) he notes down a hundred or so possible subjects. Finally he chooses the fall of the angels and of man - a historical subject in that century, though today we consider it symbolic and mythical.2 Milton, Tasso, and Virgil consecrated themselves to the composition of poems; Flaubert was the first to consecrate himself (and I use the word in its full etymological rigor) to the creation of a purely aesthetic work in prose. In the history of literatures, prose is later than verse; this paradox was a goad to Flaubert's ambition. "Prose was born yesterday," he wrote. "Verse is the form par excellence of the literatures of antiquity. The combinations of metrics have been used up; not so those of prose." And in another passage: "The novel awaits its Homer."

Milton's poem encompasses Heaven, Hell, the world, and chaos, but remains an Iliad, an Iliad the size of the universe; Flaubert did not wish to repeat or surpass a prior model. He thought that each thing can be said in only one way, and that the writer's obligation is to find that way. As classics and romantics waged thundering debates, Flaubert said that his failures might differ but his successes were the same, because beauty is always precise, always right, and a good line by Boileau is a good line by Hugo. He believed in the pre-established harmony of the euphonious and the exact, and marveled at the "inevitable relation between the right word and the musical word." This superstitious idea of language would have made another writer devise a small dialect of bad syntactical and prosodical habits, but not Flaubert, whose fundamental decency saved him from the risks of his doctrine. With sustained highmindedness, he pursued the mot juste, which of course did not exclude the common word and which would later degenerate into the vainglorious mot rare of the Symbolist salons.

History has it that famous Lao Tzu wanted to live in secret, without a name; a similar will to be ignored and a similar celebrity mark the destiny of Flaubert. He wished to be absent from his books, or barely, invisibly, there, like God in his works; and it is a fact that if we did not already know that one and the same pen wrote Salammbô and Madame Bovary, we would not guess it. No less undeniable is the fact that to think of Flaubert's work is to think of Flaubert, of the anxious, painstaking workman and his lengthy deliberations and impenetrable drafts. Quixote and Sancho are more real than the Spanish soldier who invented them, but none of Flaubert's creatures is as real as Flaubert. Those who claim that his Correspondence is his masterpiece can argue that those virile volumes contain the fact of his destiny.

That destiny continues to be exemplary, as Byron's was for the romantics. To an imitation of Flaubert's technique we owe The Old Wives' Tale and O primo Basilio; his destiny has been repeated, with mysterious magnifications and variations, in Mallarmé (whose epigram "Everything in the world exists to end up in a book" voices one of Flaubert's convictions), in Moore, in Henry James, and in the intricate and near-infinite Irishman who wove Ulysses.

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1. Its reverse is the "classic" doctrine of Poe, the romantic, who makes the poet's work an intellectual exercise.

2. Let us follow the variations of a Homeric trait across time. Helen of Troy, in the Iliad, weaves a tapestry, and what she weaves are the battles and misadventures of the Trojan War. In the Aeneid, the hero, a fugitive from the Trojan War, arrives in Carthage and sees, in a temple, representations of scenes from that war and, among the many images of warriors, his own image as well. In the second Gerusalemme, Godofredo receives the Egyptian ambassadors in a muraled pavilion whose paintings represent his own battles. Of the three versions, the last is the least felicitous