Gustave Flaubert

He was the second son of Anne Justine Caroline (née Fleuriot; 1793–1872) and Achille-Cléophas Flaubert (1784–1846), director and senior surgeon of the major hospital in Rouen.[11] He also engaged in intercourse with male prostitutes in Beirut and Egypt; in one of his letters, he describes a "pockmarked young rascal wearing a white turban".He occasionally visited Parisian acquaintances, including Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgenev, and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.He read the novel aloud to Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp over the course of four days, not allowing them to interrupt or give any opinions.At the end of the reading, his friends told him to throw the manuscript in the fire, suggesting instead that he focus on day-to-day life rather than fantastic subjects.[21][22] Flaubert believed in and pursued the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key means to achieve high quality in literary art.Flaubert published much less prolifically than was the norm for his time and never got near the pace of a novel a year, as his peers often achieved during their peaks of activity.You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.As a writer, other than a pure stylist, Flaubert was nearly equal parts romantic and realist.Kafka liked to draw his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of the author's private sentiments; this was exactly Flaubert's method through which he achieved a singular poetic effect.[7] Even after the decline of the Realist school, Flaubert did not lose prestige in the literary community; he continues to appeal to other writers because of his deep commitment to aesthetic principles, his devotion to style, and his indefatigable pursuit of the perfect expression.[7] He has been admired or written about by almost every major literary personality of the 20th century, including philosophers and sociologists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the latter of whose partially psychoanalytic portrait of Flaubert in The Family Idiot was published in 1971.Apart from Perpetual Orgy, which is solely devoted to Flaubert's art, one can find lucid discussions in Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist (published 2003).In a public lecture in May 1966 at the Kaufmann Art Gallery in New York, Marshall McLuhan claimed: "I derived all my knowledge of media from people like Flaubert and Rimbaud and Baudelaire."[30] On the occasion of Flaubert's 198th birthday (12 December 2019), a group of researchers at CNRS published a neural language model under his name.