28

quickly she replied, 'On the screens of Cinemas'."

Ronald Firbank - The Flower Beneath the Foot

... But to remain in it, to stay drenched in the glittering spray of promotional culture one needed other qualities. One was an air of detachment; the dandy must not look into the lens. Another was an acute sense of nuance, and eye for the eddies and trends of fashion, which would regulate the other senses and appetites and so give detachment its point.

What Is, and Is Not Realism?

by Charles Rosen and Henri Lerner

New York Review of Books Feb 18.82 p. 24-25

"What I find so difficult are ordinary situations and trivial dialogue. To write the mediocre beautifully and at the same time to have it retain its aspect, its shape, its very words, that is truly diabolical, and I am faced now with the perspective

29

of these delights for at least thirty pages. One has to pay dearly for style."

Flaubert letter Sept. 30 1853

None of his characters could shake his fist defiantly at Paris, as Balzac's Rastignac does. None of them is capable of a great act; in his (Flaubert) work unselfish gestures are made only by those who do not fully understand what they are doing

The great achievement of the Realist school in painting, however, was the acceptance of trivial, banal material and the refusal to ennoble it, idealize it, or even make it picturesque.

If contemporary life was to be represented with all of its banality, ugliness, and mediocrity undistorted unromanticized, then the aesthetic interest had to be shifted from the objects represented to the means of representation. This is the justification of the indissoluble