In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

436 FRAMES
notebook in which Flaubert collected the most frequently used commonplaces
of contemporary French society, the Dictionnaire cannot be held
up as a model of historiographic strategy, because he was not confronted
with the task of making a past world present. But I don't know of any
other text that provides latter-day readers with such a powerful illusion
of experiencing a past everyday-world from inside. In addition to the
dec entering arbitrariness of the alphabetical order, two additional features
greatly contribute to this effect. Flaubert treats his collected commonplaces
as quotations, as fragments of a historical reality-and not as
descriptions of this reality. They appear as quotes (although they are not
enclosed in quotation marks) because there is no authorial voice or
discourse to comment on them or put them into historical perspective.
This absence, however, creates a prevailing irony. In reading Flaubert,
we tend to attribute such irony to an author who destroys commonplaces
by strictly limiting himself to their reiteration. The irony underlying my
book, in contrast, could perhaps best be characterized as the irony of a
project which tries to re-present the reality of a past world despite (or
because of) its fundamental awareness that such a re-presentation is
impossible. Knowing the impossibility of its own fulfillment, the desire
for immediacy should not degenerate into the illusion of immediacy.