Warning!
This Guide Entry may contain spoilers.

(une biographie en bricolage)

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well alone? Why aren't the books enough? Flaubert wanted them to be: few writers believed more in the objectivity of the written text and the insignificance of the writer's personality; yet still we disobediently pursue.

- Flaubert’s Parrot (1985)

1: Flaubert's Parrot

... a novel in disguise ... a novel that constantly surprises

- Dust Jacket

Superficially Flaubert’s Parrot, shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, is the story of an irascible widower’s zealous obsession with author Gustave Flaubert, and more specifically the whimsical search for LouLou, a fictional bird adored by the equally fictional Félicité in Un Cœur Simple, but which in its stuffed reality brought about by taxidermy adorned the desk of and inspired their mutual creator, Gustave Flaubert.

But Julian Barnes aficionados will know that nothing written by Mr Barnes is ever so bland.

Blow away the green feathers and an erudite freestyle semi-fictional gallivant through an array of tangential Flaubertian proclivity and ephemera precipitates a subversive biography of the author of Madame Bovary. According to David Lodge, whose own Small World was included on the same 1984 Booker Prize shortlist, Flaubert’s Parrot could be hailed at once by deconstructionists and traditionalists as respectively an exemplary poststructuralist text and a Menippean satire. Indeed were it not for the fact that the same David Lodge’s scholarly serial contributions to The Independent on Sunday on The Art of Fiction were not printed until 1991-92 readers of Mr Barnes’ effort might be forgiven for postulating that the author had swallowed the entire Lodge collection and regurgitated it into a single literary bowl of Bovary Potage.

Beginning: check. Intrusive Author: check. Point of View: check. Names: check. Sense of Place: check. Lists: check. Surprise: check. Time shift: check. Weather: check. Repetition: check. Repetition: check. Intertextuality: check. Experimental Novel: check. Comic Novel: check. Telling in Different Voices: check. Coincidence: check. Chapters: check. Title: check. Ideas: check. Non-fiction Novel: check. Metafiction: check. Ending: check.

But author John Updike, reviewing for the New Yorker in 1985 and taking umbrage with a perceived cavalier approach to the genre, was less convinced that Flaubert’s Parrot even qualified as a novel:

...if the book is, as its dust jacket shyly claims, “a novel in disguise … a novel that constantly surprises,” it is the most strangely shaped specimen of its genre (that I have read) since Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’. On the other hand, if it is a biographical-critical treatise on a dead writer, it is the oddest and most whimsical such since Nabokov’s ‘Nikolai Gogol’.

- John Updike, A Pair of Parrots, New Yorker, 22 July 1985¹

Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot was published in 1984 by Picador. In Britain it was shortlisted for the Booker fiction prize and in France it was awarded the Prix Medici for the best work of belles-lettres by a foreign writer.

2: Chronology

3: Finders Keepers

Network: Any thing reticulated, or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

- Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

- Flaubert’s Parrot (1985)

tendentious /ˈtenˈdenSHəs/ adj.
There will always be the one that got away. And even a well-cast net can return ripe with red herring. What about Winterson/Winterton for example? Or Brathwaite/Braithwaite and Winstanley/Winstanley? Moreover, like Geoffrey Braithwaite, we too might speculate whether or not Flaubert may have named the his greyhound Julio, after Juliet Herbert. For instance was the parrot ‘Loulou’ named for Louise Colet, with whom Flaubert had a lengthy affair? And what about Jane and Alice, a prickly pair of fictional Barnesian middle-aged novelists? Julian and Amis do you think... with Alice the slut showing too much decolletage?

4: The Flaubert Bestiary

parrot /ˈparət/ n. A person who mindlessly and mechanically repeats the words and actions of another.

The author in his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.

- Gustave Flaubert

In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert’s narration remains, beyond a brief opening appearance, in omniscient abeyance. In Flaubert’s Parrot Mr Barnes is cunning, turning narrational absence on its head and giving the reader the conversational, intrusive and self-referential narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite. Mr Barnes, a known francophone and francophile, even credits Braithwaite upfront for having provided the translations. But as the reader is drip-fed Braithwaite’s story, Mr Braithwaite and Monsieur Bovary converge like railway tracks in the distance: each fictional, each a Doctor, each a cuckold, each a widower, each man broken by the suicide of a wife that didn’t love him.

5: Snap!

Julian Barnes abandons a career in law to pursue literary endeavours.

Gustave Flaubert abandons a career in law to pursue literary endeavours.

Gustave Flaubert fails his professional examinations.

Charles Bovary fails his professional examinations.

Charles Bovary’s wife Emma Bovary does not love him.

Geoffrey Braithwaite’s wife Elaine Braithwaite does not love him.

Geoffrey Braithwaite is the fictional narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot.

Julian Barnes is the nonfictional author of Flaubert’s Parrot.

6: Emma Bovary's Eyes

A critic’s allusion to the fluctuating colour of Emma Bovary’s eyes catalyses Geoffrey Braithwaite to vent angrily at the critic.

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
- Geoffrey Braithwaite, Flaubert’s Parrot

I think the critic should assume that their word carries no weight at all otherwise you get into a state of preening self-importance. Occasionally things will happen to encourage you in the fallacy that your word carries some weight.
- Julian Barnes, Interview with Mick Sinclair, February 1986¹¹

Most critics rush through an inadequate plot-summary in order to get to what really interests them – their Olympian judgment. Judgement should, however, emerge through summary of the book.... How far can a critic go with my novels and not upset me? As far as he likes, because nowadays I don’t read criticism of my work. In the past it’s been a support for the ego, never the slightest help in writing the next book. So I’ve given it up. Giving up criticism is much easier than giving up alcohol or tobacco, I can tell you.
- Julian Barnes, Interview with Lidia Vianu, 2006¹²

But what Madame Bovary’s eyes saw allows Mr Barnes to push another popular Barnesian barrow: the elusiveness of the past and the reliability of historical reportage. Mr Barnes’ ouevre is brimful of the view that 'History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us’.

Little by little, the faces she had seen became confused in her memory. She forgot the tune to which they had danced the quadrille. The liveries of the servants, and the furniture of the rooms, lost their former precision. Details faded but regret remained.

- Madame Bovary (1857)

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.

- Geoffrey Braithwaite (narrator), Flaubert’s Parrot (1985)

But as soon as she took a pen in her hand, the Leon she saw in imagination became a totally different being from the Leon whom she knew - a synthetic figure compounded of things remembered, things read and loved in books and the images created by her own insatiable passion.
- Madame Bovary (1857)

7: Cross Channel

Does the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry?

- Flaubert's Parrot

While the English claim the English Channel as their own, as if naming it thus implies some sort of territorial rights, the French are more subtle employing La Manche (The Sleeve) to keep the unwanted angles and saxons at arm’s length. Ignoring the implied brush-off Julian Barnes, a francophone and a francophile, is an inveterate channel crosser, both in real life and in the fiction he crafts.

• Gustav Flaubert visits England in 1851, 1865, 1866 and 1877.
• In 1959, Julian Barnes went across the channel on holiday.
• In 1966, Julian Barnes went across the channel to teach English in France.
• In 1968, Christopher Lloyd (Metroland, 1990) loses his virginity in Paris.
• Cross Channel is a chapter of Flaubert’s Parrot (1985). Geoffrey Braithwaite is crossing the channel in pursuit of Flaubert.
• In June 1994, New Yorker magazine publishes Julian Barnes’ regular ‘Letter from London’. It is called ‘Froggy! Froggy! Froggy!’ and offers Mr Barnes’ perspective of the Channel Tunnel.
• Cross Channel (1996) is a collection of short stories by Julian Barnes that explore the connections, similarities, and differences between England and France. One such story is entitled ‘Tunnel’.
• Something to Declare (2002) is collection of essays on the subject of France and French culture. Subjects include the Tour de France, French food, and Gustave Flaubert.

In 1997, I went to France with my parents for the last time. For once I was taking them, rather than the other way round. My mother had died a few months previously, my father in 1992, and I was transporting their ashes towards a final scattering on the Côte Atlantique.

- Julian Barnes¹³

8: The Train-spotter's Guide to Flaubert

And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

- Geoffrey Braithwaite (on grief) Flaubert's Parrot

Voici Le Shuttle crossing the Chunnel,
Crass contraction of channel and tunnel,
Opened by the Queen, ouverte par Mitterrand,
Enter at Coquelles, sortir à Cheriton.
The Trans-manche link is now
the Bouvardian nightmare
Mais pardonnez-moi Monsieur,
‘ave you Something to Declare?

9: The Flaubert Apocrypha

These are not the books Gustave Flaubert did not write but instead those which Julian Barnes has written.

Books that have not been written by Julian Barnes include:

• Foucault’s Pendulum
• 
  Pythagoras’ Trousers
• Einstein’s Brain
• Tolstoy’s Gerbil
• Victor Hugo’s Dachshund
• Lindbergh's Sandwiches
• Pushkin's Button
• Audubon's Elephant
• Hockney’s Alphabet
• Adams’ Ark

10: The Case Against

Julian Barnes has yet to appear on a postage stamp.

11: Louise Colet's Version

The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover, or as observed by some fourth party. Madame Bovary narrated mainly from the point of view of Charles Bovary would be a very different book from the one we know.

- David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (1992)

There will always be a different perspective. Like Martin Amis's, or Jeanette Winterson's. Or Charles Bovary’s¹⁴.

McGrath: So Flaubert’s Parrot in a sense is Madame Bovary from Charles’s point of view.
Barnes: Yes, though I think my character, Geoffrey, is smarter than Charles Bovary...¹⁶

12: Braithwaite’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas

AMIS
In 1995, Martin Amis defects from long-serving agent Pat Kavanagh (Julian Barnes’ wife) to take up representation by Andrew “the Jackal” Wylie. Barnes takes umbrage and writes to Amis a letter containing a phrase consisting of seven letters three of which are Fs. The rift is cleverly reprised in fiction in 2004. In Knowing French, a short story which appears in The Lemon Table, Sylvia Winstanley writes that having read all the library’s fiction filed under A, she now has “read many entertaining descriptions of pubs, and much voyeurism on women’s breasts...”.

BARNES/BOVARY/BRAITHWAITE

Sylvia Winstanley (q.v. AMIS) writes to first to Dr Barnes, and then subsequently to Mr Barnes asking why he said he was a doctor. Both Geoffrey Braithwaite and Charles Bovary are doctors and cuckolds. Both have wives that commit suicide.

CROSS CHANNEL

See Manche, La.

DAVID LODGE

Unreliable Narrators are invariably invented characters who are part of the stories they tell... Even a character-narrator cannot be a hundred per cent unreliable. If everything he or she says is palpably false, that only tells us what we know already, namely that a novel is a work of fiction. There must be some possibility of discriminating between truth and falsehood within the imagined world of the novel, as there is in the real world, for the story to engage our interest. The point of using an unreliable narrator is indeed to reveal in an interesting way the gap between appearance and reality, and to show how human beings distort or conceal the latter.
- David Lodge¹⁷

EMMA/ELAINE

Emma Bovary = Elaine Braithwaite?

FÉLICITÉ/FÉLICITÉ

Snap! There are two, both fictional creations of Gustave Flaubert. One is servant to the Bovary household, the other the central character in Un Cœur Simple.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Julian Barnes is a Flaubertista. Or a Flaubertophile.

HISTORY

History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
- John Updike

...When you are the most powerful country in the world, as Britain used to be, you tend to celebrate only your power; you don't appreciate difference or otherness, you only see it as inferiority. And you don't see your history as a moral, exploited, or inferior power does. But I think America is a special case, as opposed to Britain, in terms of having short-term memory.
- Julian Barnes¹⁸

I

I. Indeed.

JULIAN BARNES

Author, francophone, francophile and fierce disciple of Gustav Flaubert.

KAVANAGH

Dan Kavanagh is Julian Barnes.

Pat Kavanagh is Julian Barnes’ wife.

Julie Kavanagh is Pat Kavanagh’s half-sister. Starting in 1974, she had a three-year affair with Martin Amis.

L

“L, don't miss out the “L” or you'll start turning me into a Parisian grocer.”

MANCHE, LA

See Cross Channel.

Not to be confused with Don Quixote de La Mancha.

NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF

Something Julian Barnes is frightened of.

OUEVRE

History, context and memory, love, adultery, suicide, death and separation and Flaubert are recurring themes throughout the eclectic Julian Barnes bibliography.

PAT

“To Pat” or “To P.K.” or “To P.” is a dedication common in the works of Julian Barnes.
Both Pulse, a collection of short stories, and the 2011 Booker Prize winning The Sense of an Ending are dedicated “For Pat”.

QUIXOTE, DON

Where would we be without Cervantes’ Don Quixote de La Mancha?

Je retrouve toutes mes origins dans le livre que je savais par coeur avant de savoir lire, Don Quichotte.
- Gustave Flaubert.

Emma Bovary, like Don Quixote, is seduced by fiction.

RIMMINGTON, STELLA, CHAIR of the 2011 Booker Prize Panel

Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending has the markings of a classic of English Literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading.

STARKIE, ENID

The critic of Flaubert that ignites Geoffrey Braithwaite’s (and puppet-master Barnes’?) choler.

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

Memory, though, is imperfect

That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

There are two suicides ...

Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce.

I thought he was neither hero nor anti-hero but narrator. The drama had all happened elsewhere and he was telling their story. He just seemed to think it was all about him.²⁰

- Researcher U14983202

I did find the protagnoist/narrator annoying, and I found it curious that he choose to tell the story through someone who was only involved in such a peripheral way. I wonder if it would have been better if told from the point of view of Veronica's mother.²¹

- Researcher U185843

UNLESS

The most sinister word in the English language:

Remember it from frightening stories in childhood: Unless this isn’t the door we came in by…

Imagine it in bankruptcy: Unless I’ve misread the figures…

Fear it close to home: Unless, of course, I don’t love you anymore….

Mmm, isn’t the word sinister apt here? Such a coiled and loaded little onomatopeia: roll it around in your mouth and see how it sneaks in through the window and slides up the staircase…

- Julian Barnes in Hockney’s Alphabet

VARGAS LLOSA

Perhaps the only man who loves Emma Bovary (and hence Gustav Flaubert: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”) even more than Julian Barnes does²².

WINSTANLEY, SYLVIA

Sylvia Winstanley is the fictional letter writer in Knowing French who seems to confuse the non-fictional Mr Barnes with the fictional Dr Braithwaite. The fictional letters of response to Ms Winstanley are then lost reminding us that Flaubert’s perhaps apocryphal letters to Juliet Herbert are lost (destroyed by Winterton) in Flaubert’s Parrot. And is it a coincidence that in an entirely different literary circumstance Syliva Winstanley’s granddaughter is Sylvia Brathwaite²³?

X

The letter X is going to be a problem, I can see. There's nothing under X in Flaubert's own Dictionary. And there is no record of Julian Barnes ever having played the xylophone.

YORKER, NEW

A periodical, for which Julian Barnes would write a “Letter from London”. Periodically. From 1990 to 1994.

ZOLA, EMILE
Is the great writer responsible for his disciples? Who chooses whom? If they call you Master, can you afford to despise their work? On the other hand, are they sincere in their praise? Who needs whom more: the disciple the master, or the master the disciple? Discuss without concluding.²⁴

13: Pure Story

We must believe in [love], or we're lost. We may not obtain it, or we may obtain it and find it renders us unhappy; we must still believe in it. If we don't, then we merely surrender to the history of the world and to someone else's truth.
- Julian Barnes²⁵

She was born in 1940, married in 1979, and died in 2008.

We should start again.

She was born in 1940.

She was beautiful and clever and loved to laugh.²⁶

He married her 1979. He was the lucky man.

He took her name to launch his writing career before reverting to his own: it is a writing career littered with angst about love and separation and adultery and death.

Her affair with Jeanette Winterson during the 1980s is said to have inspired Winterson’s 1987 novel The Passion.

He was fiercely loyal to her. His friend’s defection to a rival literary agent in 1995 caused a monumental possibly irreparable rift in his relationship with his erstwhile friend, Martin Amis.

American novelist Jay McInerney observed that their harmonious, hard-working life together made a great case for childlessness.²⁷

In 2007 he wrote movingly (in Marriage Lines) of a widower harvesting memories one picture postcard view at a time.

His 2008 memoir Nothing to be Afraid of is a meditation on mortality and the fear of death.

In 2008, she died, suddenly and unexpectedly, of a brain tumour.

14: Examination Paper

This Page is Intentionally Not Left Blank.

Advanced Level : Breaching Peer Review

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

15: And the Parrot…

Read the book.

The Troutisms Archive

Trout Montague

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