The disintegration of the Grand Style from Flaubert to Dujardin

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to approach Gustave Flaubert's novel November and Édouard Dujardin's We'll To the Woods No More in a comparative and hermeneutic way. We will study the obsession with women as a romantic metaphor for aesthetic contemplation and the exercises of style that, by concentrating the focus on this point, completely abandon the action. Flaubert's novel, narrated in the first person, although it does not yet use the indirect free style, already establishes a close dialogue with Dujardin's interior monologue, typical of the literary changes towards the end of the 19th century. In this way, we propose to read the passage from November to We'll To the Woods No More as a gradual transformation of the 19th century bourgeois novel against the Grand Style based on the figure of the beloved, who gradually undergoes changes and disappears until she physically occupies a brief moment in Dujardin's work, while what gains greater preeminence is the thinking mind of the narrator. Likewise, the relationship between lover and beloved that disappears, also blocking the carnal encounter, can be read as disinterested aesthetic complacency or the impossibility of a reproductive and useful art.