Gustave Flaubert - Perfectionist Style

Perfectionist Style

Flaubert scrupulously avoids the inexact, the abstract, the vaguely inapt expression which is the bane of ordinary methods of composition; he never allowed a cliche to pass him. In a letter to George Sand he said that he spends his time "trying to write harmonious sentences, avoiding assonances."

Flaubert believed in, and pursued, the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key mean to achieve quality in literary art. He worked in sullen solitude — sometimes occupying a week in the completion of one page — never satisfied with what he had composed. In Flaubert's correspondence he intimates this, explaining correct prose did not flow out of him and that his style was achieved through work and revision.

This painstaking style of writing is also evident when one compares Flaubert’s output over a lifetime to that of his peers (for example Balzac or Zola). Flaubert published much less prolifically than was the norm for his time and never got near the pace of a novel a year, as his peers often achieved during their peaks of activity. Walter Pater famously called Flaubert the "martyr of style."