can give pleasure. All physical activity—and writing is a physical activity as much as drawing—has a ludic dimension, an aspect of play: we take a kinesthetic pleasure in making marks, and this pleasure, like any pleasure, can be playfully pursued for its own sake, quite independent of any communicative intent. Wherever there is pleasure, there is a compulsion to repeat, indeed to repeat with variation so as to avoid the extinction of pleasure that comes with mere accumulation. Hence style, reveling in the pleasure of its own making, tends to encourage distinctive forms of elaboration. Because each style produces its own characteristic kinesthetic pleasures, each encourages elaboration along particular lines. In the case of the mimetic drawing, that intrinsic penchant of elaboration is toward greater subtlety in transition, greater homogeneity of elements of contour and shading, in other words, toward a style in which, as Proust says of Flaubert’s style, “all parts of reality are converted into one and the same substance.” In the case of the analytic drawing of the draftsman, the intrinsic penchant of elaboration is different: toward finer detail, specification of dimensions and materials, indication of tolerances, and so on. In other words, toward a style in which, as Proust says of the style of Balzac, “coexist, undigested, not yet transformed, all the elements of a future style that does not yet exist.”1 The two styles are different, therefore, because they encourage, by virtue of the different pleasures they engage, distinct modes of playful elaboration and thus stand in different evolutionary lineages. Hence, again, one is not a translation of the other. I focus on these two particular forms of style, the mimetic and the analytic, for a reason. Indeed, the idea that art is bound to oscillate between these two poles seems to come up whenever one reflects not only on what translation is but on what art is. Witness Flaubert: “There are in me, literally speaking, two distinct persons: one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of phrase, and the high points of ideas; and another who digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can, who likes
to treat a humble fact as respectfully as a big one, who would like to make you feel almost physically the things he reproduces.”2 At first sight, Flaubert might seem to be making a different distinction. For if the second part of his sentence describes his attraction to the analytic style, digging and burrowing into the truth, he nevertheless speaks of physical sensation with respect to it. And what is the connection of bombast and lyricism with mimesis? What I have in mind will become clearer, I think, if we look not at what Flaubert says about his practice but at what he actually does. There is no purer example of the two poles of Flaubertian style than the eighth chapter of Part Two of Madame Bovary, devoted to the Comices Agricoles in Yonville, the town in which Charles and Emma Bovary reside. The structure of this chapter could not be simpler. Flaubert describes certain aspects of the town and its inhabitants—this is the analytic portion of the text—and he reports instances of their speech and writing— this is the mimetic portion. Notice that I was careful to say that Flaubert describes not the town, but only certain aspects of it. Indeed, he takes Yonville itself quite for granted. It is like any other Norman sous-préfecture, and we know perfectly well that for Flaubert the neutral administrative term sous-préfecture connoted something like a cancer of the soul. One purpose of the Flaubertian style is to give us, as it were, that cancer’s stench. Now, this statement about stench and literary language calls to mind Wittgenstein’s olfactory challenge to ordinary language in the Philosophical Investigations: “Describe the aroma of coffee.—Why can’t it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking?—But how do we get the idea that such a description must after all be possible? … Have you tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded?”3 Let us gloss this by saying that circumstances arise in which we feel our everyday language pressured by what seems an absence of words. Why does our language contain just the words it does and not others—rabbit, say, and not a word for that twitching movement characteristic HOW TO DO THINGS WITH STYLE
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