Flaubert’s Style and the Idea of Literary Justice

Abstract

Whereas it has often been argued that Flaubert’s preoccupation with style constitutes the rejection of an ethical function for literature and art, or at best bespeaks a purely private ethic of effort and artistic self-consciousness, this article proposes that, in his famous pursuit of the ‘mot juste’, Flaubert is seeking to institute a public form of ‘literary justice’ (a concept he introduces explicitly in his correspondence with George Sand). It is argued that, in contributing to the creation of an autonomous literary domain governed by its own criteria of rightfulness, Flaubert was not simply withdrawing into style as a self-sufficient realm of aesthetic perfection (as Pierre Bourdieu and many others have maintained), but rather was knowingly employing style as an inherently political instrument in order to create a bewilderingly inscrutable — and therefore more just — moral universe at variance with that unthinkingly inhabited by the state and the majority of its citizens.