Steiner in Real Presences: Is there anything in what we say? (1989) on interpretation as lived (p.

11), exemplified by Dantes Virgil, Joyces Ulysses, A Portrait of a Lady critiquing Middlemarch (contra-diction, 14) and The secondary literature on Madame Bovary is legion and expendable. Biographical, stylistic, psychoanalytic, deconstructive commentaries have been brought to bear on almost every paragraph of Flauberts text. Butit is to another novel that we turn for creative interpretation and assay. Anna Karenina is, in the full connotations of the word, a revision of Flaubert. Tolstoys breadth and spontaneity of presentment, the gusts of vital disorder which blow through the great narrative blocs, argue a fundamental critique of Flauberts willed, sometimes choking perfection. The force of religious inference in Anna Karenina makes us critically responsive to the genius of reduction in Flauberts invention (a genius already noted by Henry James when he spolke of Emma Bovary as too small a thing). (14-15)