Gustav Flaubert

is a writer emblematic of an attempt to resist absorption into bourgeois literature by making writing into a kind of ‘hard work’, a laborious craft and by figuring himself as a worker and craftsmen.

Barthes explains and expands upon this view of Literature by enumerating a succession of strategies by which authors since the 1850s have struggled to resist absorption into Literature, into bourgeois ‘Letters’. His first example is focused on Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), an author practising his art at precisely the pivotal moment of the 1840s and 1850s. Barthes refers to what he calls the ‘Flaubertization’ of writing, by which he means a move to a notion of writing as ‘hard work’, a laborious craft. Writers such as Flaubert, in other words, attempted to cure their increasing sense of alienation from bourgeois Literature by figuring themselves as workers, craftsmen and craftswomen. It is obvious, however, how easily such a strategy can be absorbed by dominant culture and transformed into bourgeois cultural values which have always in themselves emphasized hard work and perseverance. p.19

gustav flaubert, n.Definitions

gustav flaubert