Realistic and modernistic simultaneity; Flaubert and Rozanov

Abstract

Simultaneity is a phenomenon while simultaneism is a system of transferring or modeling simultaneous processes. At llie start of his chapter "The fonns and programs of simultaneism" in the book The Basis of Modernism, V. Žmegač gives an example of simultaneism from a novel out of the realistic tradition - Flaubert's Madame Bovary. However, V. Žmegač cautions llrat Flaubert's "representation of simultaneity" - taking place as it does amongst spatially distanced events - "despite its unusual appearance, is an element which accords without obstacles with the vision of reality which was customary in the literary works written in accordance with the programatic intentions of realism". Žmegač maintains that one can speak of simultaneism as a modernistic procedure only when "the homogeneity of action in the old sense of the word has been discarded, that is, when one of its 'series' does not stand in an immediate fabular relation with another". According to this conception simultaneism emphasises the disparity of phenomena - the joining of a number of different, various happenings, events or processes within the framework of one whole (the text) in one and the same temporal constellation - "so that this second kind of simultaneism can conditionally be named disparatism ".