Skip navigation
London Review of Books London Review Bookshop

My Own Ghost subscriber-only content

Adam Phillips

‘Just as the pearl is the oyster’s affliction,’ Flaubert wrote in a letter in 1852, ‘so style is perhaps the discharge from a deeper wound.’ It is an arresting image, not because it was news then that the artist was in some way a wounded soul – someone whose suffering was the source and inspiration of his art – but because we would expect the wound to surface in the writing in the form of ideas or preoccupations rather than as sentence structure or rhythm or verbal mannerism. But even if we agree that the sounds of a novelist’s sentences are soundings of his condition, it is difficult to spell out the connections between them: Flaubert isn’t sure whether a style is itself an affliction, or merely the discharge that comes from one. He wants us to believe, as a man of his times, that beautiful things come from terrible things, and that beautiful things are themselves terrible, that writing is the disguised autobiography of the afflicted soul, and that unredeemed nature is precisely this: a producer of styles and pearls and discharges, and indeed of sentences about what nature is like.

subscriber-only content Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is also available for purchase online: buy this article.

Adam Phillips is the author of Going Sane and Side Effects, among other books. On Kindness, written with Barbara Taylor, is out now.

LRB cover artwork

From the archive

Drip-Feed
Eleanor Birne on Toni Morrison

Emotional Sushi
Ian Sansom: Tony, Nick and Simon

Don’t Ask Henry
Alan Hollinghurst: Sissiness

Political Gothic
Andy Beckett: David Peace does the miners’ strike

Leaf, Button, Dog
Susan Eilenberg: The Sins of Hester Thrale