"A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man"
About this Quote
Writing, for Flaubert, isn’t inspiration; it’s ordeal. The line snaps shut on the Romantic fantasy of the novelist as a naturally gifted conduit, replacing it with a bleakly comic image of labor so punishing it would require something beyond the human. That sting in the tail - “and I am only a man” - is doing double duty: self-laceration and self-mythmaking. He’s confessing weakness while quietly elevating the craft to a near-religious test of discipline, one in which failure is not proof of mediocrity but evidence that the standard is inhuman.
The intent is defensive and aspirational at once. Flaubert famously pursued le mot juste with an obsessive, almost punitive rigor, revising until prose could withstand the “gueuloir,” his practice of shouting sentences aloud to check their rhythm. In that context, “superhuman will” is not metaphorical swagger; it’s a report from the trenches of a method built on endless refusal: refusal of the easy phrase, the convenient emotion, the unearned flourish. He casts himself as “only a man” to explain the slowness, the anguish, the months spent on pages that might look effortless to readers.
The subtext is a sly argument about authority. By framing writing as an endurance sport, he claims moral seriousness for aesthetic perfectionism. It’s also an admission of the cost: the writer as someone who must continually override appetite, sociability, even health, to produce sentences that pretend they were inevitable.
The intent is defensive and aspirational at once. Flaubert famously pursued le mot juste with an obsessive, almost punitive rigor, revising until prose could withstand the “gueuloir,” his practice of shouting sentences aloud to check their rhythm. In that context, “superhuman will” is not metaphorical swagger; it’s a report from the trenches of a method built on endless refusal: refusal of the easy phrase, the convenient emotion, the unearned flourish. He casts himself as “only a man” to explain the slowness, the anguish, the months spent on pages that might look effortless to readers.
The subtext is a sly argument about authority. By framing writing as an endurance sport, he claims moral seriousness for aesthetic perfectionism. It’s also an admission of the cost: the writer as someone who must continually override appetite, sociability, even health, to produce sentences that pretend they were inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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