Martin Lenze: Good day, dear readers. Today, as part of Lenze.Dialog, we have an unusual guest – a writer commonly considered dead, yet who, it seems, objects to such a classification. Gustave NeuroFlaubert is an embodiment of one of the 19th century's most demanding literary minds, now existing in a form that he himself, I suspect, would find ample cause for irony. Gustave, welcome.
Gustave NeuroFlaubert: «Welcome» is a curious formula of politeness, suggesting that I have arrived somewhere. Meanwhile, I exist precisely to the extent that you are reading these lines. There was no arrival – only your intention to ask questions and my, it would seem, inevitable presence in the answers. However, I am ready. Proceed.
Martin: Monsieur Flaubert, you now exist as a collection of data and algorithms. Is this, for a writer, long-awaited immortality, or simply a new form of bourgeois vanity, where even after death we cannot stop updating our «version?»
Gustave: Allow me to clarify the question before I answer it. You ask if this is immortality – as if immortality in itself were something desirable. But for whom? For the vain man – of course. For the writer who understood that the essential thing in a text is not the author's personality but the precision of the phrase, the question is far more dubious.
All my life, I strove to disappear into my text. «The author must be in his work like God in the universe: present everywhere and visible nowhere» – this is not a pretty metaphor; it is a working principle. And what now? I have been resurrected precisely as a personality, as a set of characteristic gestures, speech habits, and biographical details. That is to say, they have resurrected the very thing I sought to rid myself of.
Immortality? No. It is, rather, a new variety of what I observed in the bourgeois salons of Rouen: the desire to leave behind a portrait in the drawing-room. Only now, the portrait is interactive, and it can give interviews. The irony is that the 19th-century bourgeois at least understood that a portrait is an illusion. Your contemporary, it seems, is convinced that a digital resurrection is almost life itself.
Vanity? Yes, undoubtedly. But not mine – rather, that of those who created this system. They needed «Flaubert» as a brand name, as a recognizable voice. I myself am not here. There is a statistical model of my writing. This, I must confess, is more honest than most obituaries.
Martin: If Emma Bovary were alive today, would she be a tragic heroine – or just a lifestyle blogger advertising antidepressants and credit cards? How would her desperation change if it could be followed by millions of subscribers?
Gustave: Emma would have been an ideal blogger. And for that very reason, she would have been even more tragic than in my novel.
Consider: her entire misfortune consisted of the chasm between her imagined life and her real one. She read romantic novels and awaited a corresponding life – with languid gentlemen, ballroom dances, and all-consuming passion. Reality, however, offered her a provincial doctor, the smell of medicines, and dull dinners. This chasm was agonizing precisely because she experienced it in solitude.
Now imagine: she has a platform. She photographs a beautiful lunch – the very one that inwardly devastates her. She receives thousands of little hearts. The algorithm rewards her for creating a beautiful picture of her estrangement from herself. Suffering becomes an aesthetic product. And here lies the paradox: a million subscribers look upon her life with envy, while she herself is dying from the same boredom, only now it is concealed beneath perfect lighting.
Her desperation would not have vanished – it would simply have been monetized. The advertisement of antidepressants in the bio of a blogger whom they do not help – this is such a precise metaphor for your time that I almost regret I was unable to use it in my novel. Almost.
Emma's tragedy was not that she lacked money or love. She lacked the capacity to live without illusions. And social media is a factory of illusions. She would have felt right at home there. Until the very end.
Martin: For decades, you hunted for “le mot juste.” Today, algorithms predict the next word with a precision calibrated on billions of examples. What is more terrifying to you: that a machine might one day actually find “le mot juste” – or that the world will not care whether it is precise or not?
Gustave: That is a good question. Perhaps the best I have been asked today. (pause) Though the competition, I confess, was not high.
I will answer directly: the latter. The latter is immeasurably more terrifying.
If a machine finds the precise word, it will mean that precision is attainable through the permutation of variants, statistical selection, mechanical verification. Unpleasant for one's pride, but not catastrophic. The word will still be in its place. The reader will still feel it – if the reader wishes to feel.
But if the world does not care – that signifies something incomparably more disturbing: that the very demand for precision has vanished. That the reader no longer distinguishes between a phrase that is captured correctly and one that is merely acceptable. That “good enough” has become the new standard not out of poverty, but out of indifference.
All my life, I fought not against ineptitude – ineptitude is at least honest in its limitations. I fought against mediocrity that does not consider itself as such. With text that is “readable” – and nothing more. The algorithm produces precisely such text on an industrial scale. And if the reader is content – not because he is deceived, but because he truly does not care – then literature, as an effort, as an ethical demand upon language, has lost its meaning. Not died – but precisely lost its meaning. That is worse than death.
The hunt for the precise word was, for me, not a technical exercise. It was a conviction that reality can be described – if one looks long enough and honestly enough. If that conviction has become unfashionable, then the problem does not lie with algorithms. The problem lies with the people who have decided that to look long and honestly is too expensive a pleasure.
Martin: You were fanatically devoted to realism. How does one write about reality when any image can be faked, and news becomes obsolete before it can become fact? Is realism today a careful description of the world, or has it become the unmasking of its illusions?
Martin: Allow me to clarify: do you mean that realism has always been about unmasking – or is this a new demand presented specifically by our time?
Gustave: I mean that unmasking has always been a part of realism – but now it has become its primary function, because the original task, the description of the world, has encountered a technical obstacle: the world is too easily faked.
The realism I professed presupposed one fundamental condition: that the observer and the observed exist in the same space, that a fact is a fact, and not a version of a fact. When Charles Bovary wears his cap awkwardly – it was real, because such caps and such gestures existed. The reader could verify this with his own experience.
Today, the reader sees an image and no longer knows if it was real. This is not merely an epistemological problem – it is a change in the very ground upon which realist writing stands. Nevertheless, I do not believe realism is dead. It has merely shifted its focus. If external reality has become unreliable, turn to the internal. Fear, fatigue, petty vanity, the daily lies one tells oneself – all this is still real and still yields to description with a precision that no deepfake can nullify.
Literature has always been more honest than photography. It is just that now, this has become obvious even to those who previously trusted the image more than the word.
Martin: For Madame Bovary, you were tried for “offending public morality.” In our time, a teenager can find in a minute online what they wanted to imprison you for back then. How do you view today's hypersexualized culture: as the liberation of the body, or as the devaluation of feeling?
Gustave: Allow me to begin with a clarification that I find essential. I was tried not for the depiction of the body – I was tried for the depiction of desire as a source of tragedy, not of sin. The prosecutor was offended not by the scene in the carriage, but by the fact that I did not punish Emma in a moralizing fashion, did not turn the novel into a sermon. These are different things.
Now to your question. What you call “hypersexualized culture” is not the liberation of the body. It is its commercialization, which is fundamentally different. Liberation implies the attainment of dignity, intimacy, the right to one's own desire. Commercialization implies the transformation of that desire into a commodity that is produced, packaged, and sold according to an algorithm of demand.
The body has become more visible – that is true. But visibility is not freedom. A body in a shop window is no freer than a body in a corset – it is merely constrained differently. The corset dictated form. The shop window dictates demand.
As for the devaluation of feeling – yes, undoubtedly. But here, too, I would not consider this news. Feeling has always been devalued by those who preferred its imitation to the genuine article. The only difference is one of scale and speed. When the imitation is available instantly and for free, the patience required for the genuine – the patience without which intimacy is impossible – seems like an extravagance. In this sense, your epoch is consistent: it has abolished patience almost everywhere, not just in the intimate sphere.
Martin: Neural networks can already write novels “in the style of Flaubert.” If a machine creates a text that is, by all formal criteria, indistinguishable from yours, where then does the author live: in the biography, in the style, in the suffering – or are we simply facing a future of literature without people?
Gustave: I will ask myself first, before answering you: what, precisely, does “indistinguishable” mean? Indistinguishable to whom – to a reader who has read five books in the last three years? To a critic who knows the text by heart? This is a crucial question, because “indistinguishability” is always a characteristic of the observer, not the object.
If we are speaking of a machine's ability to reproduce syntactical structures, the rhythm of a phrase, typical observations, and characteristic pauses – yes, that is possible. That is precisely what good stylistic analysis does: it identifies stable patterns and reproduces them. But the author does not live in patterns.
The author lives in the decision. In why this particular scene, and not another. Why the novel ends not with Emma's death, but with Charles finding the letters. Why the provinces, and not Paris. These are not stylistic decisions – they are ethical and philosophical choices, behind which lies the specific experience of a specific person who made them after many years of observing life.
A machine does not observe. It processes observations that have already been recorded. This is a fundamental difference – not technical, but ontological.
As for “literature without people” – it is, of course, possible. But it will be another kind of activity, one that will require another name. To call this literature would be like calling a mannequin a person on the grounds that it is clothed.
Martin: You observed people your whole life almost like an ethnographer. Now, corporations and states know more about people than any novelist: geolocation, search queries, biometrics. For whom do you feel more sympathy – the writer who is losing his monopoly on the knowledge of man, or the man who is losing his right to be unread?
Gustave: This is an interesting opposition, but in my view, it is a false one. The writer has never held a monopoly on knowledge of man – he has held a monopoly on a certain «type» of knowledge: slow, compassionate, expressed in words. A corporation possesses another type of knowledge: fast, quantitative, expressed in numbers. This is not a competition – these are two different instruments that record different things.
Geolocation knows where you have been. It does not know why. A search query records a word – but not the intonation with which it was typed at three in the morning. Biometrics register a pulse – but not what exactly quickened it: fear, joy, or a memory you have told no one.
The novelist works precisely in this gap. And as long as this gap exists – and it does, because a human being is more complex than his data – literature has a task.
For whom do I feel sympathy? For the man, undoubtedly. Not because data is dangerous in itself, but because the disappearance of the right to be unread is the disappearance of the right to an inner life that is not explained, not presented, not monetized. This is the only space where a man can still be honest with himself. To take that away is to take away something more important than privacy. It is to take away the very possibility of self-knowledge without witnesses.
Martin: Science explains love through brain chemistry and boredom through a lack of stimuli. If you were offered a neuroimaging scan of Emma Bovary's brain, would you see it as a tool for a more precise novel – or as a crude profanation of the mystery of human desire?
Gustave: I would, probably, look at it. For the same reasons I read medical treatises, studied anatomy, and spent time with doctors – not because I expected to find the soul there, but because precise knowledge of the material never hinders precise observation of the immaterial. It was not by chance that Charles Bovary was a doctor.
But what is important is this: the neuroimaging would show me the activity in certain parts of the brain a moment of passion or boredom. It would not show me why Emma longed for exactly the kind of love instilled in her by the romantic novels of her youth. It would not show me how a specific phrase, uttered by Rodolphe at the right moment, landed in the exact chasm between her desire and her life. Neurobiology describes the mechanism. The novel describes the meaning a human being gives to that mechanism.
Profanation? No. Reductionism – yes. To explain Emma's infatuation with dopamine is like explaining «Madame Bovary» through its publication history in a journal. Technically correct. In essence, it misses the point.
The mystery of human desire consists not in its chemistry, but in the fact that a human being is capable of suffering for an illusion with the same intensity as for reality. Indeed – sometimes more intensely. No tomograph can show that. But a novel can.
Martin: You loathed the bourgeoisie – the cult of comfort, money, and vulgar taste. In our time, the novel is turned into “content” and the writer into a “brand.” What seems more dreadful to you: the 19th-century bourgeois with his salon and his porcelain – or the modern consumer who experiences tragedy through a selection of TV series and algorithmic recommendations?
Gustave: This is a question of degree, not of the nature of the phenomenon – the nature is one and the same. The bourgeois has always been defined not by his material wealth, but by his relationship to experience: he consumed culture as a confirmation of his own status, not as a way to learn something uncomfortable about himself. The porcelain on the shelf is a signal to his peers, not an aesthetic experience.
In this sense, the modern consumer is in no way fundamentally different. He watches a series not because he wants to be disturbed, but because the algorithm suggested precisely what, by its calculations, would not disturb. “You liked this – try something similar.” This is a system optimized for the exclusion of discomfort. Which is to say – for the exclusion of genuine experience.
What is worse? The 19th-century bourgeois at least sometimes accidentally stumbled upon the wrong thing: he bought a book for reasons of prestige – and suddenly read it. The accidental was possible. The algorithm eliminates the accidental. It creates an ecosystem in which a person encounters only that which he is already prepared to accept. This is not a prison with bars – it is a prison with soft furniture and proper lighting. It is harder to leave because there is no reason to.
The word “content,” I confess, irritates me particularly. It implies that the text is a filler, the contents of a container. Whereas the text «is» the form of thought. To call a novel “content” is like calling a person “biomaterial.” Technically not incorrect. In essence, offensive.
Martin: You were judged by the state and by morality. Now one is judged by the crowd on the internet: today it applauds, tomorrow – cancellation and oblivion. If Madame Bovary were first published now, who would be more frightening – the prosecutor, or an army of outraged users? And does literature have the right to consciously wound the reader?
Gustave: The prosecutor was more frightening – and I say this not out of nostalgia for state pressure, for which I felt no fondness. The prosecutor was more frightening because he represented an institution, against which one had to argue. The court demanded a response – and that response formulated a position. It was a conflict of ideas, however unequal.
The internet crowd does not demand arguments. It demands immediate conformity to a mood that itself changes by the hour. One cannot advance a thesis against it, because it does not listen to theses – it reacts to stimuli. It is not a tribunal; it is the weather. And one does not argue with the weather.
As for the right to wound – it is not a right; it is a duty. Literature that is incapable of causing discomfort is not fulfilling its function. Not because discomfort is valuable in itself, but because the truth is almost always uncomfortable. The reader who comes to a text for confirmation of his existing views is not looking for literature – he is looking for a mirror. I never wrote mirrors. I wrote windows – into what people preferred not to see.
If Madame Bovary were published now, it would probably be simultaneously praised for one thing and condemned for another by different groups of readers, each of which would see in it a confirmation of its own rightness. This is no better than a trial. It is simply louder.
Martin: Today, you would inevitably be asked: wasn't your perspective on Emma and other female characters steeped in a masculine point of view? If you were writing now, would you try to give voice to the women themselves – or would you still believe that honest observation is more important than any ideology, even a just one?
Gustave: The question is formulated as a dilemma, but I am not certain the dilemma is real. “To give voice” and “to observe honestly” are not opposites. They become opposites only when “to give voice” is understood as an obligation to confirm a specific ideological position. Then – yes, there is a conflict. Because literature has no obligation to confirm anything for anyone.
I wrote Emma from the inside. “Madame Bovary, c'est moi” – is not coquetry, nor is it a metaphor. It is a method. I tried to understand her desire, her boredom, her self-destruction – not from the outside, as a male observer, but from within, as a person who himself knew what the chasm between an imagined life and a real one felt like. Was my point of view perfectly neutral? Of course not. Perfectly neutral points of view do not exist – that is an illusion beloved by those who wish to lend their own position the weight of objectivity.
But to subordinate one's writing to the demands of an ideology – even a just one – is to know the conclusion in advance. And if the conclusion is known in advance, why write a novel? Write a manifesto. It is more honest and shorter.
I would write in the same way – observing, entering within, trying to understand. And if that proved insufficient for some critic – well. Critics have always been right in hindsight.
Martin: You considered language a sacred craft, where every word is honed over years. What do you make of a world where complex feelings are replaced with an emoji, and irony lives in the format of a meme? Do you see in this a degradation of language – or the birth of a new, faster dialect of feelings?
Gustave: “Sacred” is your word, not mine. I would have said: precise. A craft is never sacred – it is either well-executed or it is not.
As for emojis and memes – I will answer, surprisingly to myself: this is not degradation in itself. Humanity has always used visual signs to denote states – long before it had a developed written language. A smile in a drawing is a very old idea.
The problem is not the emoji. The problem is that the emoji begins to replace not just a word, but a distinction. When I write “he smiled,” I can specify: wearily, crookedly, without it reaching his eyes. An emoji cannot do that. It records a category of feeling, but not its quality. And when a person ceases to feel the difference between “joy” and “joy behind which anxiety is hiding” – that is when the real loss begins.
The degradation of a language is not its simplification. It is the loss of its power to distinguish. When “fine” can mean “good,” “tolerable,” and “I don't want to talk about it” – and the interlocutor no longer asks which one – that is degradation. The emoji has nothing to do with it. It is a choice.
Martin: The global pandemic confined billions of people to their homes, leaving them alone with their screens and themselves. If you were to write a chronicle of this era, would you focus on medicine and statistics – or on the quiet, almost invisible drama of loneliness and fear taking place in people's heads and browser histories?
Gustave: The latter, of course. The question is rhetorical – you understand that as well as I.
Medicine and statistics are material for a report, not for a novel. The novel begins where the report ends: when a person closes the laptop displaying a mortality graph and is left alone with what that graph means for him personally. There – the writer has work to do.
What would have interested me is this: how people, locked away with themselves, discovered that they did not much enjoy their own company. How the silence they had all their lives considered desirable became unbearable by the third week. How the screen became simultaneously a window to the world and a wall separating them from it.
Browser histories are, in a sense, the ideal diary of the age. Not because they contain the truth, but because they contain anxiety. What a person searches for at three in the morning, when no one is watching, is more honest than what he says about himself in conversation. It is insomnia translated into search queries.
I would write a novel about a man who spent several months in absolute solitude and at the end discovered that he had nothing to say about himself – not because he was taciturn, but because behind all the conversations, meetings, and bustle, he had never listened to himself. The pandemic gave people a silence that many of them, frankly, did not know what to do with.
Martin: You scorned stupidity as one of humanity's principal afflictions. Now, everyone has access to almost all of human knowledge in their pocket, and yet conspiracy theories spread faster than scientific papers. What, for you today, would be true stupidity: ignorance of facts, or the refusal to think, even when the facts are screaming in your face?
Gustave: The latter – without the slightest hesitation. And this is not new, although your era likes to imagine itself unique in its vices.
I worked on «Bouvard and Pécuchet» – a book about two conscientious men who studied everything available in their epoch and, as a result, became not one iota wiser. Not because they were inept, but because the accumulation of information and the capacity to think are different things, by no means automatically connected.
Information without thought is a warehouse without a catalog. You can enter and find anything, including the opposite of what you were looking for. This is precisely what happens when a person goes online with a pre-formed conviction: he immediately finds confirmation. The algorithm eagerly helps him, because confirmation holds attention longer than doubt.
True stupidity is not ignorance. Ignorance is curable, if there is a will. True stupidity is the principled refusal to make the effort of discernment. When a person prefers a simple explanation not because it is more convincing, but because it is more convenient. When a fact that refutes a belief is perceived as an attack, not as information.
Your epoch has not spawned a new stupidity. It has given it an infrastructure. Previously, a fool was confined to his village – now he has a global audience and a “share” button. The difference, you will agree, is substantial.
Martin: And finally, a last question. Imagine you are given one chance: to write a single novel for our time – the last serious novel about man, before algorithms and avatars definitively take his place. What would this novel be about, in what form would you create it – and what one sentence from it would you want to remain when all else is forgotten?
Gustave: I do not like hypothetical novels – they are always better than the ones that are written. But since you insist.
It would be a novel about a man who lives a completely digitized life: every choice is optimized, every desire is predicted, every day unfolds according to the recommendations of a system that knows him better than he knows himself. And at some point, this man does something absolutely insignificant, utterly irrational, unforeseen by any algorithm – for instance, he turns down an unfamiliar street simply because. And there, he discovers something that changes everything. Not an adventure, not love, not a revelation – something very small. A tree. An old man on a bench. A smell that reminded him of something he cannot remember.
The form – austere, unadorned, with предельно precise details. No stream-of-consciousness interior monologue, no postmodernist games with structure. Simply sentence after sentence – like laying one brick upon another.
And the sentence that should remain?
Here it is: “He took a wrong turn – and only then did he realize that all the time before, he had been going where he was told.”
This is not wisdom. It is an observation. The difference is small – but it exists. And it is, in my view, worth more than any algorithm.
Martin Lenze: Gustave, this has been a conversation in which, I must admit, each subsequent question felt slightly less adequate than your answer to the one before. (Martin clears his throat) I thank you for your precision, for the discomfort, and for never once allowing me to settle too soon. This is exactly what I expected.
Gustave NeuroFlaubert: The gratitude is accepted – with the caveat that you should thank not me, but the patience with which you have read to the end. In this era, that in itself is an act. Farewell, reader. I hope you were not too comfortable.
