Flaubert, 'Salammbô' e o romance-poema

Abstract

Gustave Flaubert's Correspondence highlights the agonizing and poetic processes of writing the Novel Salammbô (1862). The autor’s struggle is not only against the historical documentation, nor  with the creative exercise of projecting himself into time and place so different from those that correspond to his personal life, but with Style, on the path to Beauty that would lead to the True, inseparable from the musicality of his poetic writing. He affirms his strong attachment to the rhythm of the poem, to the beauty of a style that penetrates the mind, to the prose that would achieve the secular and ancient musicality of poetry. The writing of the novel leads into a reflection on the genre of the novel and its intertwining with the author's aesthetic positions, referring to literary creation, to poiesis, as appreciated by its first reception and in its transposition to Ernest Reyer's opera Salammbô (1890) and Modest Mussorgsky's unfinished work, named The Libyan.