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a friendship, feed it like a child, create it like a world."

p 253 2-25-82

Enemies of Realism. New York Review of Books. Feb 18, 82 by Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner

... in avant-garde Realism there is an extreme insistence on the means of representation; the rhythm of the prose or the patterns of brush strokes are always obtrusively in evidence. We are always acutely conscious of the surface of the picture, the texture of the prose. Neither novel nor picture effaces itself modestly before the scene represented. A work of avant garde Realism proclaims itself first as a solid, material art object, and only then allows us access to the contemporary world it portrays.

In avant garde Realism, consequently the beauty of the book or the picture always appears to be irrelevant to what is being represented.

p 29.

... Courbet's Realism, in spite of its use of

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allegory, is a dramatic progress in what has been called "the disappearance of the subject."

p 30

Flaubert: "What seems beautiful to me what I would like to do, is a book about nothing, a book without any exterior tie, which would hold together on its own by the inner force of its style, just as the earth stays up without support, a book which would have almost no subject, or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible. The most beautiful works are those with the least material; the closer the expression is to the thought, the more the word sticks to it and disappears, the more beautiful it is." - Jan 16, 1852

p 30.

"Subject is therefore, not the action or the scene represented: it is what the action or scene is about. "Subject is that which prolongs the [thoughts?] of the spectator beyond