Equality, diversity, indifference: Jacques Rancière’s reading of Gustave Flaubert’s "Madame Bovary"

summary

The article reconstructs Jacques Rancière's reading of Madame Bovary. Gustav Flaubert is presented by the French philosopher as a writer with a profound understanding of the contradictions of literature caught up with 'the aesthetic regime of art'. Rancière claims that Flaubert approaches his subjects in a spirit of radical equality. He brushes aside the hierarchies of genres and styles of the belles lettres tradition and in their stead introduces the concept of 'absolute style', treated as the one and only vehicle of literary distinction. He builds the plot with great care, but also halts its progress by bursts of heccéités, impersonal sensations released from the chains of individualization and objectifi cation. Flaubert insists that he believes only in 'art for art's sake', and yet the poetics of his work is deeply egalitarian. These paradoxes, Rancière explains, are rooted in a new regime of the art of writing called littérature. By blurring the distinction between the realm of poetry and the sphere of prosaic life Flaubert establishes its identity as a blend of literature, democracy and politics.