Word: flaubert
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...movie lovers generally can be calculated along an axis: those who like Women in Love intersects the line of those who don't. Those who like it usually don't like Godard, Resnais, exponents of the New Sensibility; they prefer Elvira Madigan to The Emigrants, Tolstoy to Proust, Flaubert to Gide. They choose oreos over hydrox, Pepsi over Coke, The Beatles over Traffic, Ritz over Saltines, Lily Pulitzer over Design Research, Cliffie peaches over Cliffie limes, and so on and so forth. Allston Cinema...
...rich young friend Maxime du Camp had wangled a government mission to photograph the temples of the Nile, then half buried in sand and almost unknown to the European public. Flaubert went along. The two were in Egypt for nine months. They saw the sights and visited the local celebrities, joined caravans of pilgrims and slaves. They sailed up and down the Nile, shaved their heads and wore tarbooshes, sat up late at night smoking long Turkish pipes and comparing their notes and observations. They kept diaries and wrote letters home-chaste and respectful ones to Mme. Flaubert, wildly lubricious...
...Flaubert's first sight of Egypt, as he wrote his mother, came "through, or rather in, a glowing light that was like melted silver on the sea." For all those months he remained plunged in a world of vivid color impressions: black earth, purple desert, the bleached bird droppings of 4,000 years running down obelisks and colossi, the deliriously blue sky. The official object of their expedition left him quite cold: he uttered a cry of conventional ecstasy at the first sight of the Sphinx and its "terrifying stare," but as for the temples, they "bore me profoundly...
Apple-Shaped. All the while, under this gaudily and rather unprepos-sessingly romantic Flaubert, another Flaubert was straining to break out -the pointed, pitiless observer of reality whose ambition was to clear away the vapors of the romantic novel in the cold clear rays of le mot juste. Here he is, describing a dancing girl named Kuchuk as she begins her writhings: "A tall splendid creature . . . When she bends, her flesh ripples into bronze ridges . . . heavy shoulders, full apple-shaped breasts . . . She has one upper incisor, right, which is beginning...
That tarnished incisor was the herald of a literary revolution: the precise, unexpected, vivifying detail added to the general statement, which was to be the mark of serious fiction for the next century. While Flaubert was reveling in the exotic surroundings, he was mulling over a novel about life back in humdrum Normandy, where he knew the people and spoke the language. Accord ing to Du Camp (and Steegmuller tends to believe him) it was on a barren hill overlooking the Second Cataract of the Nile that he cried: "Eureka! I will call her Emma Bovary...