"Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work"
About this Quote
Flaubert is refusing the comforting idea that style is a decorative layer you can drizzle on top of meaning. By pushing it "under the words", he drags style out of the realm of flourish and into the realm of engineering: rhythm, syntax, selection, omission, the quiet pressures that decide what a sentence can even think. In his hands, style isn’t the outfit; it’s the body’s posture, the gait, the breath control. You can’t swap it without changing the person walking across the page.
The soul/flesh pairing is doing sly work. It reads like a spiritual compliment to art, then immediately insists on the material. Style is both: the animating intelligence (soul) and the physical substance (flesh). That double claim is a manifesto against the crude split between "content" and "form" that lets sloppy writing excuse itself as sincerity. For Flaubert, sincerity without precision is just noise with good intentions.
Context matters: this is the novelist of le mot juste, the writer who treated sentences like instruments to be tuned until they rang true. In a 19th-century France wrestling with realism and bourgeois moral certainty, his stance is quietly radical. If style is the soul, then a society’s clichés aren’t harmless; they’re spiritual decay made audible. If style is the flesh, then bad prose isn’t merely ugly; it’s dishonest about the world’s texture. He’s telling writers that craft isn’t cosmetic. It’s ethics, perception, and temperament made visible in grammar.
The soul/flesh pairing is doing sly work. It reads like a spiritual compliment to art, then immediately insists on the material. Style is both: the animating intelligence (soul) and the physical substance (flesh). That double claim is a manifesto against the crude split between "content" and "form" that lets sloppy writing excuse itself as sincerity. For Flaubert, sincerity without precision is just noise with good intentions.
Context matters: this is the novelist of le mot juste, the writer who treated sentences like instruments to be tuned until they rang true. In a 19th-century France wrestling with realism and bourgeois moral certainty, his stance is quietly radical. If style is the soul, then a society’s clichés aren’t harmless; they’re spiritual decay made audible. If style is the flesh, then bad prose isn’t merely ugly; it’s dishonest about the world’s texture. He’s telling writers that craft isn’t cosmetic. It’s ethics, perception, and temperament made visible in grammar.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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