Art & Creativity Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert builds a whole theory of art out of a single, humiliating image: language as a broken instrument. A cracked kettle can still make noise, even keep time, but it cannot sing. That’s the wound he keeps pressing on: human speech is serviceable for spectacle (crude rhythms, trained bears, the marketplace), yet hopelessly inadequate for what the artist actually wants to do (music that “will melt the stars”). The joke is grimly funny because it’s true in both directions. Words are absurdly limited, and they’re also all we have.

The bears matter. Flaubert isn’t just lamenting ineffability; he’s taking a swipe at an audience that rewards the obvious, the performative, the easily digestible. Tap the kettle, get applause. Try to “make music,” and you risk silence. That’s the subtext of his perfectionism: the famous obsession with le mot juste isn’t fussy elitism so much as a desperate attempt to force battered tools to produce something like transcendence.

Context sharpens the sting. Writing in a 19th-century France thick with bourgeois respectability and literary commerce, Flaubert distrusted sincerity as a style and popularity as a verdict. The line dramatizes his central contradiction: he believes in the near-impossibility of communicating the deepest feeling and still chooses the medium of communication as his life’s work. The crack in the kettle is permanent; the longing is, too.