KAFKA’S REPEATED DECLARATION about an “elective affinity” with the French writer Gustave Flaubert — here in a letter of November 1912 to Felice Bauer — has led to various suggestions from scholars about how to interpret Flaubert’s role in Kafka’s writing. Attention has primarily focused on psychoanalytical and narratological parallels between the two authors. Indeed, it is apparent that Kafka models his letters to Felice Bauer on Flaubert’s letters to Louise Colet; and Kafka’s narrators might have learned from the French model and its “impassiveness.” However, while these suggestions are useful in highlighting some aspects of Kafka’s writing and personality, they fail to explain the full measure of the literary identification declared by Kafka.

Kafka’s affinity with Flaubert can be considered along structural lines by taking into account the state of the literary field of their time. In his major study, The Rules of Art, the French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu analyzes Flaubert’s authorial practice as an art of positioning himself against contemporary literary conventions. He describes Flaubert’s writing in terms of a “double rupture” that breaks with both sides of the most entrenched literary conflict of his time, “realistic” writing versus the “high” style. The “realist” Flaubert does not follow the conventions of realist writers, who chose to accompany their socially rather “humble” characters with a certain stylistic anonymity. On the contrary, he submits the realistic subject to a cult of form, as it was practiced in the poetry of his time, and which focuses the attention of the reader on the “how” of the narration itself, requiring from her a scrutiny of every word. Flaubert was well aware of this revolutionary pairing and reflected it in letters to Louise Colet, which Kafka read in a 1904 translation. In this vein, while writing Madame Bovary, Flaubert remarks: “The whole value of my book, if it has one, will consist in its capacity to have walked upon a hair that is spanned between the double abyss of Lyricism and the Vulgar (I want to melt both into a narrative analysis).”