SOURCE: Porter, Dennis. “Aestheticism versus the Novel: The Example of Salammbô.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 4, no. 2 (winter 1971): 101-6.

In the following essay, Porter claims that Salammbô is not a well-structured novel, but rather, is at best a manifesto of aestheticism.

From Baudelaire down through Maupassant, Turgeniev, Henry James, and into the twentieth century, Flaubert has been hailed as the first great modern master of his craft, the novelist's novelist par excellence, whose influence on the subsequent evolution of the genre has been as great as that of Baudelaire himself on poetry, and for similar reasons. Both writers brought to fiction and lyric poetry respectively a self-conscious artistry which gave rise to a richness of verbal texture and a symbolic order that especially in the novel amounted to a kind of previously untried-for, formal perfection. And to the extent that he was working in a genre which till...