Analyzing Aesthetic Features Of Flaubert’s Modernism From The Perspective Of Bouvard And Pecuchet

Gustave Flaubert(1821-1880) was among the most renowned French novelists in the nineteenth century. He left the world with valuable literary wealth, including such masterpieces as Madame Bovery, Sentimental Education, Three Stories and Bouvard and Pecuche. The essence of objectiveness and truth to demonstrate the real life is pursued in Flaubert’s literary creation, therefore, the reality in his works is of much uniqueness, which is different from traditional realism writers. In terms of reality, Flaubert discovered the "daily life", and replaced the thrilling plot with mediocre and meaningless trivialities. He questioned the modern civilization, reflected on science and technology, and sneered at human ignorance, all which demonstrated his strong pessimism. For the methods of manifesting reality, Flaubert attached great importance to the artistic form, maintained the ontological status of art and pursued the lexical accuracy and the meticulous depiction. He held objective and impervious narrative principles, requiring writers to quit from works and not to give lessons or draw conclusion at random in works. There are similarities between these characteristics and the modernist aesthetic thought, and from Madame Bovery to Bouvard and Pecuchet, with the author’s experience getting rich, writing skills turning mature, modernist elements in his works became more and more distinct. To some extent, Bouvard and Pecuchet fully has been treated as a modernist novel.Bouvard and Pecuchet is the last novel of Flaubert. It tells a story that two scribes inherited a legacy, and came to the countryside to do their yearning scientific researches, then returned to work as scribes again after a series of failures. Due to his sufferings in twilight time, including psychological shock from the death of relatives and friends, economic distress and deteriorating health, Flaubert wanted to inspect all human knowledge, and vent his anger to the world in his work. For this purpose, he completely broke the traditional novel structure and created a new novel type, encyclopedic novel, which resonated with Calvino’s literary view of multiplicity. Multiplicity is in accordance with that a contemporary fiction is an encyclopedia, a cognitive method, particularly a network referring to different events, characters and everything in the world. Such features as rich knowledge, incompact structure, fractured plot, time neglected on purpose, cycle mode and open ending in Bouvard and Pecuchet coincide with the literary view of multiplicity. Therefore, multiplicity becomes a significant modernist aesthetic feature of Bouvard and Pecuchet.Flaubert’ modernity in creation has a profound influence on the later writers. Fiction styles of naturalism, stream of consciousness, Le Nouveau Roman and others all inherited his literary ideas. Such well-known writers as Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Donald Barthelme were influenced more or less by him. All these prove that Flaubert is really the originator of modernism.