"A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man"
About this Quote
Flaubert sets the bar at the level of the inhuman: to write demands a will beyond ordinary endurance, yet he admits he is bound by ordinary flesh. The contrast is not melodrama; it maps his credo that literature is an absolute calling, one that asks for a monk’s austerity and a craftsman’s patience. He distrusted inspiration as a reliable engine and trusted only labor, the iron persistence needed to chase the exact word, to sand a sentence until nothing extraneous remains.
His letters record days spent on a paragraph, sometimes a single sentence. He read drafts aloud in his gueuloir to test cadence and pressure. He excised pages without remorse, pursued le mot juste with a fervor that made writing a form of ordeal. Such rigor underwrote the impersonality he prized: the author should be everywhere present in the work and nowhere visible, which requires a will strong enough to resist vanity, rhetoric, and the easy flourish.
I am only a man arrives as both lament and spur. It admits fatigue, illness, distraction, the smallness one feels before an ideal one will never fully reach. Flaubert knew that gap intimately as he built Madame Bovary over years and then endured a public trial for obscenity. He retreated to Croisset, pared his life to the work, and still felt the task towering above him. The superhuman is not a claim to transcend humanity but a measure of the task; the impossibility becomes productive, the friction that sharpens style.
The line speaks beyond the 19th-century study. Any sustained writing asks for the stubborn refusal to be satisfied, the willingness to fail, to revise, to begin again. For Flaubert, art without that will collapses into chatter. The confession therefore doubles as a vow: to keep attempting the impossible until the sentence finally rings true.
His letters record days spent on a paragraph, sometimes a single sentence. He read drafts aloud in his gueuloir to test cadence and pressure. He excised pages without remorse, pursued le mot juste with a fervor that made writing a form of ordeal. Such rigor underwrote the impersonality he prized: the author should be everywhere present in the work and nowhere visible, which requires a will strong enough to resist vanity, rhetoric, and the easy flourish.
I am only a man arrives as both lament and spur. It admits fatigue, illness, distraction, the smallness one feels before an ideal one will never fully reach. Flaubert knew that gap intimately as he built Madame Bovary over years and then endured a public trial for obscenity. He retreated to Croisset, pared his life to the work, and still felt the task towering above him. The superhuman is not a claim to transcend humanity but a measure of the task; the impossibility becomes productive, the friction that sharpens style.
The line speaks beyond the 19th-century study. Any sustained writing asks for the stubborn refusal to be satisfied, the willingness to fail, to revise, to begin again. For Flaubert, art without that will collapses into chatter. The confession therefore doubles as a vow: to keep attempting the impossible until the sentence finally rings true.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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