Flaubert: portraits d'un ironiste

The manipulations of the ironic process through stylistics in Flaubertian texts were concomitant with the generation of various narrators by the author of Novembre, L'Education sentimentale of 1845, and the early correspondence, foreshadowing the mature works. Portraits of the various ironic narrators are recreated by a reader who must be aware of the cultural climate in which the novelist wrote, in order to make intelligent use of the various rhetorical, semantic, and semiological devices that underlie the author's technique. The first emergent portrait is that of a sarcastic young man, the correspondent who considers himself at first Hugolian, then Rabelesian. Next is the portrait of a cynic who has already decided to devote himself to the production of literature-literature that only has a function insofar as it entertains the wives of "serious men," in Flaubert's positivist society. Flaubert's concept of irony as the "spirit of analysis" becomes the preoccupation of the "author" – portrayed as such – of the 1840s. The proto-Flaubert of the mature years would place himself, in a grand historical canvas, between Sainte-Beuve in the resistance to materialism, and Baudelaire in the battle against philistinism. Insofar as a theory of reading is concerned, each text under consideration will generate the reader's composition of the portrait, while the portrait will direct the reader's retroactive understanding of the ironic process in the text. Furthermore, it is because the narrators reflect the self-conscious reading by the author of his own text, that the ironic process can be seen as inscribed in both reading, and text-generation. (SAD)