Representing the Unrepresentable: The Desexualization of Desire in Flaubert's `Etre la matière!'

The conclusion of Flaubert's Tentation portrays a liberating disintegration of Saint Antoine as a rational self. In the union with Nature, Antoine goes back "beyond sexuality" and finds in the mystical union a final, reassuring state of fulfillment. However, "Flaubert's struggle with style, his anguish to 'write Perfection' at all cost," illustrates the notion that Antoine's / Flaubert's "project to transform the self into an unstructured energy, capable of filtering through to the source of Life from under Œdipal constraints," is a liberation that cannot take place in praxis, but only in and through the never-exhaustive, "interminable" act of writing. (CT)