We have to acknowledge the Chinese poets of the 8th century late Tang dynasty for the first profound demonstration of creative writing as visual imagery. Poets like Tu Fu, Meng Chiao, Li Ho, and Ling Shang-yin. Of course the graphic condensation of the Chinese language where an entire sentence becomes a singular graphic sign was conducive to a succession of highly visual descriptive images, and this often substituted for weak sentimental and cerebral phrasing. Whatever his ideological obsessions and flaws, we have to thank the American poetic genius Ezra Pound, and the young innovative Western poets he mentored, like H.D, T.S.Eliot, Robert Lowell, etc, for launching the so-called Chinese/Japanese influenced ‘Imagist’ style of poetic writing in the early 20th century literature of the English language. The popular introduction of realistic Chinese/Japanese picture-writing in the form of  printed graphic books, also led to the birth of comic books out of the West’s evolving  16th century illustrated book-printing industries. It is noticeable that when we look at the most outstanding and internationally recognized poets of the modern age, we see the emphasis and mastery of descriptive visual images in their writing; poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, St-John Perse, Octavio Paz, Guillevic, Andre Frenaud, Derek Walcott, Gary Snyder, and others employing a similar vivid visual language.
But it was in 1857 with the publication of Gustave Flaubert’s novel, ‘MADAME BOVARY’ in France, that the first powerful and definitive example of new writing as visual imagery not only preceded the invention of cinematic form of a half century later, but made the later imagistic development of video/DVD look like supplementary tributaries about to deliver the same staggering succession of visual imagery written in the precise witty mentality of this novel’s narrator. We do not merely read ‘Madame Bovary’, we see it. We see through its words as though they were magic windows open upon a mesmerizingly precise reality. From page one the narrator’s brilliant focus and ironical viewpoint describes in detail, clothes, postures, architecture, attitudes, behavior etc, and for the next three to four hundred pages we flow with a current of endless vivid colorful and geometric descriptions which reel out on Flaubert’s pages like the mobile blueprint for the invention of movies. Indeed, the novel ‘Madame Bovary’ would be filmed at least twice, the first Hollywood version with Jennifer Jones, directed by Vincent Minnelli in 1949, and the colorful highly realistic 1980s version with Isabelle Huppert, directed by Claude Chabrol. Both films are quite good, but Flaubert’s original novel is better, because its intricate pleasurable descriptions exceed the selective time-span of both films which have to quickly satisfy in a few hours the conclusive ‘big picture’ presentation of Madame Bovary’s life. As if to criticize, or warn of such an approach which would focus on the typical value of his novel’s central ‘character’, at the expense of its surrounding goldmine of sparkling, fluid and concise descriptions which bring to life an entire world  surrounding Madame Bovary, including what she imagines, Flaubert inserted a parody of another type of novel, or creative writing, which his entire oeuve was going beyond in its new writing style. Here is a passage which describes the sort of novel which Madame Bovary is given by a maid who loans her such works: ‘In the pocket of her apron she always kept some novel or other which she would lend to the bigger girls on the sly, and the maiden herself devoured, whole chapters at a time, in the intervals of her tasks. They were all about love and lovers, damsels in distress swooning in lonely lodges, postillions slaughtered all along the road, horses ridden to death on every page, gloomy forests, troubles of the heart, vows, sobs, tears, kisses, rowing boats in the moonlight, nightingales in the grove, gentlemen brave as lions and gentle as lambs, too virtuous to be true, invariably well dressed, and weeping like fountains. And so for six months of her sixteenth year, Emma soiled her hands with this refuse of old lending libraries.’
The significant difference between this sort of topical romanticized writing and Flaubert’s strong visual imagery is the difference between the easy availability of stories emphasizing a distracting content which simply can be read in any format. Stories in language like Flaubert’s on the other hand are written in a style which IS its content. It is quite obvious that a good story can fall flat if it is not written in an appropriate style; all good writers know that narrative style, grammatical tense or viewpoint, phrasing and vocabulary, end up being the ‘real’ story behind any truly good novel or piece of fiction. Flaubert’s style, the arrangement of his words, sentences, tenses, paragraphs and chapters, are more interesting than the events of Madame Bovary’s life, which is really quite simple to grasp in a synopsis. For this reason Flaubert’s brilliant visually descriptive novels, including the stunning ‘Sentimental Education’, ‘Salambo’, ‘Three Tales’, and his final masterpiece ‘Bouvard and Pecuchet’, are so visual that they assert the important format of the novel on printed and bound pages which can be pondered, studied easily, and ear-marked anywhere at anytime. This contrast between writing as visual imagery, yet conveyed by words on pages, is what began to establish the novel as a serious progressive art form, giving truth to the original meaning of the term ‘Novel’.
The newness of Flaubert’s 150 year-old novels has not grown stale, passé, or stereotyped with passing time, because the novel as an art form was not encouraged by commercial Trade Publishing to pursue or continue the exploratory directions opened up by writers like Flaubert, Maupassant, Conrad, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Steinbeck or Hemingway. As a result, as recently as a decade ago, the novel as an art form was considered in crisis. With the rise of various processes of guaging the public’s reading habits, the very idea and form of the novel lost its autonomy both to prescribed stereotyped formulas based on what surveys said “people liked’, and also from academic programmes and courses which produced a staggering succession of so-called ‘novels’, minus the ‘new’, all of which seemed to be written by the same writer with an unlimited supply of aliases!
What exactly does Flaubert’s novels have to say about avoiding such pitfalls? The first significant and noticeable point about ‘Madame Bovary’ from its first sentence, is that it is a First Person novel, but in a most unusual way. Its narrator begins: ‘We were at preparation, when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy dressed in ‘civvies’, and a school servant carrying a big desk.’ By the sixth page the narrator, who never writes “I”, has vanished entirely from being part of a class at school, and the novel pretends to be written in the Third Person. What has happened is that the novel begins to recount the learnt or gathered story about a family and one of its descendants, not simply Madame Bovary, but her husband to be, Charles Bovary whom we first see as a new school boy in a class. Indeed his mother is also a Madame Bovary, but then the novel begins to introduce a dizzy array of other characters, locations, occasions, fashions, attitudes etc, as it develops. Once asked about this novel, Flaubert replied: “Madame Bovary is me.” By that he did not mean that he was like Madame Bovary, or that he was effeminate, but that the novel is about his VOICE, his First Person viewpoint writing. The key that unlocks the brilliant honesty and timeless value and freshness of all of Flaubert’s creative writing is the enormous amount of knowledge and information they excitingly convey. Flaubert had a lot to say because he exposed himself to a lot, and pursued general knowledge of staggering variety and in a wide spectrum that went beyond a preference for Western civilization. Each time he wrote, it was this knowledge and experience he brought to the task, not flights of fantasy, or unseen or unreported data. From the beautifully crammed cinematic descriptions of entwined political and social lifestyles in his masterpiece ‘Sentimental Education’, to the precise narration of touching characters in ‘Three Tales’, to the bubbling Baroque profusion of non-Western exoticism in ‘Salambo’, to the stunningly modern encylopediac ironies of ‘Bouvard and Pecuchet’, two curious idiots who follow every new topic, invention or custom they hear about, Flaubert’s oeuve and rapid style predicted the function of later electronic systems of information, such as films, TV, and the computerized Internet. For this reason, he is the forerunner of other modern writers whose works, steeped in visual imagery, already provide an imagistic visual literature.
* ‘Madame Bovary’ and ‘Tang’ in graphics folder New Writing 2.