Flaubert and Seinfeld, The Art of Nothingness
George and Jerry contemplating the art of nothingness
Recently, I was reading Frederick Brown's biography of the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, when I came across this interesting quotation from one of his letters to Louise Colet: "what I would like to create is a book about nothing."
Although the letter goes on to amplify what he means by "nothing," all I could think of were the characters from the wildly popular sitcom Seinfeld, George Constanza and Jerry Seinfeld. I imagined the two comedians pitching their idea for the show at the meeting with the NBC execs, Jerry trying to equivocate and George insisting, "No, it's about nothing." Clearly, the influence of pop culture is pervasive, once it gets into your consciousness it colors everything.
Flaubert goes on to say: "The most beautiful works are those that have the least matter; the closer expression hugs thought, the more words cleave to it and disappear, the more beautiful it is." An aesthetic like this demands an exactitude of expression. It goes far to explain Flaubert's obsession with finding just the right word. In 1853, he wrote in a letter that Madame Bovary "had grown by only sixty-five pages in the last five months." Art isn't in what the work is about; art is in the execution.
Of course, if this is truism it is also true that a television show can be about nothing and still be a significant work of art. When you say it this way, when you get rid of the "about nothing" phrase with its Seinfeld connotations, the idea becomes a lot more significant to the modern ear.
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