| dc.description.abstract | Of the various threads woven into the definitions of Modernism, one is the
element of style. One can trace this emphasis on style back to Flaubert’s
famous claim, from a letter from January 1852, apropos Madame Bovary:
“What I’d like to do is write a book about nothing, a book dependent on
nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of
its style [. . .] a book which would have almost no subject, or at least a
subject that is nearly invisible.” 1 Flaubert’s hypothesized work is one that is
about nothing other than itself, its manner, its craftmanship. In his eloquent
survey of the evolution of Modernism’s preoccupation with style, Ben
Hutchinson writes: “Time and again the reification of style threatens to
reduce modernity to a mere pretext for hermetic, ‘pure’ aestheticism.” 2
Taking this critique of Modernism to a self-promotional extreme was the
Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, who in 2012 claimed to much international
press coverage that Joyce’s emphasis on style was deleterious to literature:
“There is nothing there. If you dissect Ulysses, it gives you a tweet. [. . .] I am
modern because I make the difficult seem easy, and so I can communicate
with the world.”3 Amid the exuberance of style, there is no substance, just a
subject that is, at most, almost invisible, with merely 140 or so characters. | en |
