Bouvard e Pécuchet de Gustave Flaubert: a antecipação de técnicas estéticas vanguardistas na literatura do século XIX

Abstract

This work aims to analyze precursor elements in nineteenth-century literature through the oeuvres of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), more specifically in his last book, Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881). The French writer was consecrated in prose with Madame Bovary, in 1857, bringing a new literary conception, going from the subject to the innovative structuring of the novel. Furthermore, regarding the title "Bouvard and Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert: the anticipation of avant-garde aesthetic techniques in nineteenth-century literature", we hypothesized that Flaubert anticipates aesthetic aspects that will be concerned with the pictorial processes of the avant-garde in the twentieth century, such as the Cubists and the Dadaists, creating a fragmentary, nonlinear and intertextual narrative based on the technique of collage of ideas and the defunctionalization of some processes of traditional prose, configuring, in the second part of the book, the Dictionary of Received Ideas. In addition to these structural processes, the writer in this book constructs an ironic atmosphere in reference to the scientific and encyclopedic knowledge in vogue at the time in order to denounce human foolishness in attempting to embrace all existing knowledge and dictate them as irrefutable truths, through the figure of its two main characters. For this, we consider it necessary to understand the historical and aesthetic context in which Gustave Flaubert became a writer, using, as a theoretical basilar contribution, visions of Sartre (2013), Tadié (2011), Bourdieu (1996), Gombrich (2003) and Bergez (2011). In convergence with this process, from the perspective of Barthes (1974, 2004), Biasi (2011), Thibaudet (1992), Dord-Crouslé (2000), and others, we approached the influence of science and how this relation interfered in the formation of his literary style and his obsession with the scriptural form, besides emphasizing the pessimistic character that each Flaubertian oeuvre carries with aesthetic purposes. Finally, in order to analyze the aesthetic anticipation in Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), we adopted the approach of intertextuality brought by Kristeva (2005), Compagnon (1996; 2006), Genette (2010) and Samoyault (2008), creating a comparative parallel with the Cubist and Dadaist movements in the twentieth century, with a discourse based on concepts by Francastel (1990), Cottington (1999) and Tassinari (2001).