Commonplace Book

'So, the Flaubertian method would have had to be applied by the adapters, not to yesterday's idiocies, but to those being spread about today as unshakeable truths. And in that case we would have had Bouvard and Pecuchet busy testing the truth of mass culture, of the cultural revolution, of liberated eroticism, of scientific delirium, of the collage as novel, of global confrontation, of the theater of the cruel, of total mechanization, of the space race, of the disalienation promised by the political parties, of art as therapy and therapy as art, etc. What a marvelous series of chapters and themes! And what a catalogue of unbearably chic ideas! Everybody do his thing.

For today's truth Flaubert would either have rewritten his novel or forbidden the theatrical adapters to use it. For the simple reason that they don't believe in the improvement and incessant variation of stupidity. Which today is no longer so much bourgeois, rationalistic and Voltairean as it was in the time of the pharmacist Homais, as it is oriented towards the future, full of ideas. Today's idiot is full of ideas.'

from a note in the 1969-1972 section of Occasional Notebooks, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano