James Wood: Unspeakable Realism. Defending Jean Améry, Defending Gustave Flaubert

Saturday, July 2 2022 at Einstein Forum, Potsdam

Jean Améry’s book, half fiction and half essay, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor rightly accuses Flaubert of an anti-bourgeois prejudice that effectively kills off Emma Bovary’s husband as a site of interest or meaning. This, says Améry, is not only inhumane and thoroughly un-Enlightened; it also renders Flaubert something less than a great realist—or any kind of realist. Améry is surely right, and I will argue that, if anything, he somewhat underestimates the nullifying absolutism of Flaubert’s novel. At the same time, I shall try to defend both Améry and Flaubert, by examining some of the complexities inherent in representing “the real” in fiction.
James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007 and is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He was the chief literary critic at The Guardian, in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. His critical essays have been collected in three volumes, The Broken Estate. Essays on Literature and Belief (1999), The Irresponsible Self. On Laughter and the Novel (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and The Fun Stuff. And Other Essays (2012). He is also the author of a a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works (2008), translated into German as Die Kunst des Erzählens (2011), and two novels, The Book Against God (2003), and Upstate (2018).