Flaubert Interlude

I'm reading Flaubert's Sentimental Education, with great pleasure (nothing fancy: the Robert Baldick translation, Penguin ed.) A friend warned me that this will soon pass, and I'll become bored, as he is finally, with all Flaubert's novels. Of course, my friend also admitted that he would rather read Pierre Bourdieu on SE to reading the novel, preferring in true postmodern (or is it Hegelian?) fashion, the explanation of art to the artwork itself. 

Dear Blog Reader, I guess I'm not postmodern; my pleasures are simple. I enjoy deadpan ironic narrators, who cast scorn on the dreams and aspirations of their characters (characters aren't real people, so it's all right to treat them ironically).  I enjoy it when the narrator pokes fun at his hero, Frederic Moreau, in his self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and prideful moments, as in this passage, when Fredric returns to his first dinner at Chez Arnoux in the presence of his beloved Madame Arnoux. Frederic comes home and catches a glance at the mirror: "His own face presented itself to him in the mirror. He liked the look of it, and remained there for a minute gazing at himself." 

And this dramatic oration proclaimed at the Arnoux table, by bohemian painter Pellerin: "I don't want any of your hideous reality!What do you mean by reality anyway? ...There's nothing less natural than Michelangelo, and nothing more powerful. The cult of external truth reveals the vulgarity of our times; and if things go on in this way; art is going to become a sort of bad joke inferior to religion in poetry and inferior to politics in interest. ...Look at Bassolier's pictures,...Solicitors pay twenty thousand francs for them, and there isn't tuppence-worth of ideas in them; but without ideas, there is no grandeur, and without grandeur there is no beauty! Olympus is a mountain. The proudest of all monuments will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste, the desert is better than a pavement, and a savage is better than a barber!" 
As my friend Jackie said, give or take a phrase here, and this might be the late Malcolm McLaren.