Salammbô as the Novel of Alterity

Salammbô is a continuation of Madame Bovary only insofar as it continues the earlier novel's deconstruction of the ideology of Romanticism. Salammbô is the attempt to create a text that is radically other: the text of alterity. Since there is no referential reality that is knowable outside the text of the novel, verisimilitude will depend entirely on the effects of language. Flaubert's language of alterity relies on an impersonal voice-less voice of narration and on a recasting of figurality. The results of this linguistic upheaval are the destruction of anthropocentric discourse, the reformulation of systems of representations, and the displacement of textual desire. (LRS)