Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

Flaubert’s Parrot
Julian Barnes is one of the most experimental writers in the history of British authors. His novel
Flaubert's Parrot, which was his third published book in 1984, marks an important milestone in
his career and shaped his image as an outstandingly talented writer who is fearless of
unconventional writing. In Flaubert's Parrot he merges a postmodern style within a story that is
ought to be biographical, which is both confusing and thought provoking.
The biography of Gustave Flaubert and his significant work, Madame Bovary, institute
themselves as interpretation frames by means of which the character wends his way to his own
reality, proving, initially, that art can found reality – Braithwaite’s attempt to bookishly justify
his personal tragedy by equating the values, attitudes and examples from art with those in real
life.
The novel, published in 1984, is the story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a former physician, a
widower and a fiery admirer of Gustave Flaubert, in search of a detailed understanding of the
latter’s work and life. Braithwaite collects bio-bibliographical references about Flaubert: he is in
possession of diverse anecdotes and incidents related to the French writer and he has direct
access to a corpus of letters and journals.
Braithwaite wishes to establish a personal relation with the world of the one he worships and
who dominates his preoccupations: thus, the stuffed parrot which he discovers at Hôtel-Dieu
from Rouen is, from the immediate perspective of the old physician, the direct testimony of the
writer’s existence. From a museum Flaubert chose a parrot, Loulou, as an inspiring source when
he worked at his Un coeur simple: Braithwaite believes that the stuffed parrot he discovered is
Flaubert’s model – parrot.
Starting from this supposition, Braithwaite will divagate consistently on the theme of the “true
parrot” and on the authentic unfolding of Flaubert’s spirit. All these digressions that cannot be
united coherently hide, in reality, a totally different endeavor of the protagonist, namely, that of
narrating and thus of explicating his wife’s story, the story of a suicide. Braithwaite cannot relate
to his reality and private history unmediatedly; he cannot confess directly what he has not
understood in the case of his wife’s death and he is not capable of talking about himself, the real
one, starting from himself alone. The attempt to build the story about Flaubert in terms of
credibility and authenticity is, in fact, the projection he makes in order to perform the same
endeavor personally as well.
The image of the parrot is significant in this context: a symbol of mimicry, the parrot is
considered, as mentioned before, the “emblem of the writer’s voice”: the postmodern art is an art
of mimicry, of pastiche and numberless masks in a cultural and social context in which we are no
longer faced with the originality and authenticity of entities.
Braithwaite fails both in his process of identifying the parrot and in the one of reconciliation with
Ellen’s suicide: what links, however, the two projects, is the openness of the character to get
involved in searching for meanings, a search whose fragile dynamic should be demotivating.
For Braithwaite, searching is everything, despite the outcome of the whole enterprise or the
disappointment which can be fatal – the case of Ellen who, in search of something beyond
everything else, is overwhelmed by the failure of not having discovered anything and
consequently commits suicide.
As in any postmodern approach to history, here too one faces the problem of the modalities of
recuperating history: the means that Braithwaite has are unreliable – memory is deceptive, while
the witnesses of the past are partial discourses.
Consequently we cannot establish “the truth”, but we can establish probable chronologies,
Braithwaite placing at the reader’s disposal three equally plausible chronologies of Flaubert’s
life: the first, an optimistic one, is the proof of the social and artistic fulfillment; the second, a
pessimist one, proposes a biography of the delusions related to the reception of his work and to a
precarious health, while the third is constituted from quotations of Flaubert about himself. All
three biographies are edified on the basis of the same concrete data; what is different relates to
the modality and the logics on which events are correlated. Establishing the truth or the most
plausible version is a futile attempt, given the fact that each version is the result of the “logic of
subjectivity”, an illusory discourse.
The postmodern elements of the novel are circumscribed to the thematic of the past that cannot
be recuperated integrally and to the discourses that approximate the disparate data of history.
Another argument in favour of the postmodern character of Flaubert’s Parrot is the focalization
on the process of interpretation. Flaubert’s Parrot combines the postmodern approach of the
themes of truth, history, discourse and knowledge with the propensity, constantly met in Barnes,
towards the significant foundation of a saving ethic system. The writer’s reaction to the
contemporary relativism is not a jubilatory one; it is not negative towards the possibility of
establishing meanings but, on the contrary, it is a solemn one, which sustains his “humanist”
enterprise of finding those constants that confer signification to existence.
All the parrots are Flaubert’s, and none of them are. Barthes presentation of multiple parrots as a
metaphor for the mutability of the truth parallels the idea of the parrot as a representation of the
Word. As the parrot, in Braithwaite’s own analysis, can represent “clever vocalisation” (9) in the
absence of any strict linguistic meaning and therefore “Un symbole de Logos” (9). The truth of
language and the language of truth being very similar in this case, as Derridian analysis of
language explains that there is no intrinsic difference link between the word and its meaning. The
word ‘parrot’ does not intrinsically imply a feathered and usually multi-coloured bird, but we
have simply associated the sign of the word ‘parrot’ with the signified of the avian - “structured
prose which turns into sound” (2). The meaning of the word is arbitrary, just as the ‘real’ parrot
is arbitrary to the plot of Flaubert’s Parrot.
“The two parrots in the two museums were, in fact, arbitrarily chosen from fifty possible parrots,
just as words have been arbitrarily derived from a system of differences and endowed, through
convention, with meaning.” (Scott 68) One must then ask where this places the reader in relation
to this revelation. While Loulou the parrot’s repetition of sound is “an indirect confession of the
novelist’s own failure” (11) Barthes’ acceptance of the natural chaos of language is a revelry,
making the comparison not only between the parrot and the noble aspects of Truth and the Word,
but also of the writer themselves, calling them no more than “a sophisticated parrot”. In the
strictest Derridean sense this is entirely true. There is nothing outside of the text, as Derrida so
memorably commented, so all writing is the merely the connection between the texts we have in
culture (and, privatively, the texts we do not have in the culture).

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Flaubert’s Parrot

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