"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry"
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Flaubert is baiting anyone who thinks fiction is a lesser cousin of fact. "Everything one invents is true" sounds like romantic license, but it’s really a declaration of craft: invention, done properly, doesn’t float free of reality; it condenses it. A made-up scene can be truer than reportage because it doesn’t have to honor the clutter of what merely happened. It has to honor what coheres: motive, consequence, the pressure points of human behavior.
The second line is the provocation with teeth. Poetry, he insists, is "as precise as geometry" - not because it produces equations, but because it demands structure. Geometry is a system where every line implies another line; a small error breaks the whole proof. Flaubert is importing that ruthlessness into art. Each word is a measurement. Each cadence is a constraint. Precision isn’t the enemy of feeling; it’s the machine that generates it.
Context matters: this is the author who made "le mot juste" a doctrine and treated style as ethics. In an era increasingly enthralled by positivism and bourgeois common sense, Flaubert counters with a sly inversion: the novelist’s fabricated world can be audited more strictly than the everyday one. The subtext is a warning, too. If you invent carelessly, you don’t get a charming lie; you get a falsehood - a world where nothing necessarily follows, and the reader feels it in the gut.
The second line is the provocation with teeth. Poetry, he insists, is "as precise as geometry" - not because it produces equations, but because it demands structure. Geometry is a system where every line implies another line; a small error breaks the whole proof. Flaubert is importing that ruthlessness into art. Each word is a measurement. Each cadence is a constraint. Precision isn’t the enemy of feeling; it’s the machine that generates it.
Context matters: this is the author who made "le mot juste" a doctrine and treated style as ethics. In an era increasingly enthralled by positivism and bourgeois common sense, Flaubert counters with a sly inversion: the novelist’s fabricated world can be audited more strictly than the everyday one. The subtext is a warning, too. If you invent carelessly, you don’t get a charming lie; you get a falsehood - a world where nothing necessarily follows, and the reader feels it in the gut.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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