Thus “style” was born: this was Flaubert’s second gift to novelists, and one they are as likely to curse him for as to thank him. Of course, writers before Flaubert had agonized about style: don’t we feel that Jane Austen was a ruthless censor of superfluity? But no novelist agonized as much or as publicly, no novelist fetishized the poetry of the sentence in the same way, no novelist pushed to such an extreme the potential alienation of form and content (a book “about nothing”).
The Godhead, revealed.
One response to “Re-writing the Dictionary of Received Ideas.”
i feel like we just showed up to the grammies in the same dress.