Writing as form: style and desire in November by Flaubert and Silk by Baricco

Abstract

The need to conceive art not as a simple representation of the world, but as an autonomous object itself, had already been pointed out by the romantics of the 18th century and recovered by Gustave Flaubert, who expresses in a letter: “What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing ... which would be held together by the strength of its style.” This idea organizes our article: to study November (1842) by Gustave Flaubert and Silk (1996) by Alessandro Baricco in a comparative way, as texts whose purpose is to exercise or to practice a style. We will consider, thus, from an aesthetic and hermeneutic perspective, that in these works the novelistic creation is organically linked to the creation and staging of the exercise of a style that seeks to create a new sensitivity through desire. This element shapes the common thread not only of the diegesis, but also of the creation of an aesthetic experience. Therefore, our object of study in this work focuses on desire as an essential component of the novel: there is a passage from representation to expression, where content and substance lose their centrality.