Revisiting The Past, Refiguring The Individual, Reconsidering The Discourses Of Authority In Postmodernist Historiographic Metafiction Julian Barnes, ‘flaubert’s Parrot’

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REVISITING THE PAST, REFIGURING THE INDIVIDUAL, RECONSIDERING THE DISCOURSES OF AUTHORITY IN POSTMODERNIST HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION:

JULIAN BARNES, ‘FLAUBERT’S PARROT’

Julian Barnes was born in England in 1946, from a family of French teachers. He is the author of numerous stories, essays and some translations, one of a book written by the French author Alphonse Daudet and of an entire collection of cartoons made by the German singer Volker Kriegel. Barnes has also written novels, the most important being the 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel ”The Sense of an Ending” and also ”The Noise of Time”. Barnes’s writing has earned him respect at that time, as a very complex author who deals good with interesting themes like history, reality, truth or love.

Being interviewed, Barnes commented about the famous French novelist and playwright Gustave Flaubert, that “he’s the writer who I think has spoken the most truth about writing”. Julian Barnes demonstrates a deep interest in French literature and considers Gustave Flaubert as being one of the best French writers. In a way, “Flaubert’s Parrot”, Barnes’s novel, is just a way to pay the French writer homage.

In “Flaubert’s Parrot”, Julian Barnes spins out a multiple mystery tale, an exuberant metafictional inquiry into the ways in which art mirrors life and then turns around to shape it, giving us a look at the perverse autopsies that readers perform on books and lovers perform on their loved ones all with a glimpse at the nature of obsession and betrayal.

“Flaubert’s Parrot” combines the postmodern thematic of the relative truth, unstable history and multiple discourses with the tendency of significant foundation of a redeeming ethic system. The fundamental value that Barnes opposes to the multiplicity of the elements of the real, to the plurality of the discursive plans, consists in the assiduity of involving the protagonist in illusory searches of the truth about himself and the others, no matter its outcome.

Although knowledge is not an immediate one, but a mediated and fictionalized one, this aspect does not prejudice Barnes’s endeavor to follow establishing the authenticity of the most plausible variant.

The partiality of reconstruction in “Flaubert’s Parrot” is complemented by the sustained recuperative effort, by the writer’s doctrine that history, in spite of perspectival limitation, can be recuperated or built and thus instituted as a testimony of the envisaged logical truth.

The novel “Flaubert’s Parrot” is the story of a retired English doctor and an amateur literary scholar named Geoffrey Braithwaite. Geoffrey Braithwaite’s preoccupation with the French novelist borders on obsession. Through the book, Barnes presents Flaubert’s life, narrating it from different perspectives.

From the beginning Geoffrey Braithwaite states that he has three stories to tell: first Flaubert’s story, his own story and his wife Ellen’s story. The novel written by Julian Barnes is part fiction and part literary criticism, the novel tracing Geoffrey Braithwaite’s search for the truth about Flaubert’s work.

The title of Julian Barnes’s novel refers to the parrot that has stayed on top of Gustave Flaubert’s desk during his writing of ”Un Coeur Simple”. The parrot inspired the French author in creating Loulou, a fictional character in his story and the parrot of Félicité, the main character of the tale. In ”Un Coeur Simple”, the stuffed parrot is the object in which Félicité invests most of her religious beliefs and sentiments, thinking that the parrot is the Holy Spirit.

Flaubert’s Parrot starts and ends with Geoffrey Braithwaite’s attempt to find out what really happened with the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed. The image of the parrot is significant because he is a symbol of mimicry, being considered the “emblem of the writer’s voice”.

Braithwaite is recently retired from medical practice and with free time on his hands he decides to follow his favorite author. On a visit to Flaubert’s home city in Normandy, he stumbles upon the enigma that frames the novel, the two stuffed existing parrots. Geoffrey Braithwaite thinks that one of those stuffed parrots is a fraud and wants to know which one of them was Flaubert’s model for Loulou.

It takes two years to Braithwaite to try and solve the case of the stuffed parrot. Barnes’s book ironically revolves around the complicated dilemma of which is the authentic stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed and on the inconclusiveness of Geoffrey Braithwaite’s pursuit.

In his search, Braithwaite discovers that Flaubert was romantically involved with a woman named Juliet Herbert, although all evidence of their affair was destroyed. After some research, Braithwaite dives into the criticisms regarding Flaubert and the way he lived his life. In a way, following Flaubert’s life and work, Braithwaite tries to figure out of his own life.

Julian Barnes raises the question of whether a person can really know the truth. In his novel he shares the belief that absolute truth doesn’t exist, objectivity being just a pretense to our possibility to know the world around us. In the novel Julian Barnes doesn’t offer a definitive solution, but only contingent facts and uncertainty. Through the novel, Barnes sends the message that Braithwaite’s attempts to find the real stuffed parrot might be as futile as any human attempt to find the truth about the past or a veridical reckoning of past events.

Braithwaite is determined to find the truth, so he makes a visit to Normandy in order to find the real stuffed parrot. On his visit, Braithwaite discovers that there were two Flaubert museums, both claiming to display the authentic stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed.

When contacting a Flaubert expert, Braithwaite finds out that the original stuffed parrot was borrowed by Flaubert from the Museum of Natural History, but it was eventually returned to the museum. The curators from both Museums chose the parrot which resembled Flaubert’s description the most, but that doesn’t mean that they picked the right one among the other stuffed parrots.

“Flaubert’s Parrot” is not written as a traditional novel, however, nor is it a traditional work of fiction. Braithwaite’s interpretation of Flaubert’s life is not made in the fanciful mode of a historical novelist, but neither is based on documented facts.

“Flaubert’s Parrot” suggest a realm where literary criticism, biography and fiction meet and the lines between them are very blurred. As Braithwaite searches for the real stuffed parrot, he truly seeks an answer referring to how we can seize the past, but Barnes’s technique poses a more modern question referring to what is literature and what is an author.

The major characters are historical figures long dead: Louise Colet who was Flaubert’s lover; Louis Bouilhet who was Flaubert’s closest friend, Madame Flaubert who was his domineering mother and Flaubert himself.

Geoffrey Braithwaite’s obsession with Flaubert covers his own confusion and pain over his wife Ellen’s death, focusing on his relationship with her. We find out that Ellen had numerous affairs along their marriage and Braithwaite had conflicted feelings about her. Through the book, Geoffrey tries to decide whether he and Ellen were happy or unhappy and if she loved him or not. Braithwaite is tormented by the fact that he shut off Ellen’s life support, basically killing her, even though there really was no hope left for her.

The entire novel is a cover for Geoffrey Braithwaite’s grief over his wife Ellen and for life’s endings in general. During the chapters about Ellen, Braithwaite combines satire with tragedy, smiles with tears, all followed by confusing pauses and meaningful silence.

The only conventional story lines in the novel are the stuffed parrot mystery and the story of Braithwaite’s dysfunctional marriage. These stories are deliberately underplayed, but both plots unravel a lot about Braithwaite’s psychological construction, as they serve as variations on his obsession with Gustave Flaubert. For Braithwaite, all trivial concerns pale beside Flaubert’s eminence.

Flaubert’s Parrot is actually an anomaly in the literary world, being a thoroughly imaginative work which was based on the historical facts. Known and unknown facts of Flaubert’s life are observed with criticism. Braithwaite’s knowledge of Gustave Flaubert’s life and work are very comprehensive, making the readers to gain a good knowledge of Flaubert’s life, work and artistic philosophy.

Above all, the invention of this narrator, his connection to Flaubert’s, enables an elegant incorporation of the author’s research. Barnes’s novel risks making the excess of its knowledge quite overt: it begins with elaborate details about the making of three statues of Flaubert. For Geoffrey Braithwaite reality means not the identification of an ultimate structuring plan or finding absolute meaning, but his openness to get involved in the search for meaning and in the attempt to recuperate the past.

The juxtaposition of modern and postmodern elements results from the continuous confrontation between Braithwaite’s project of structuring comprehension of reality by appealing to discourse and the plurality and contradiction inherent to postmodern poetics.

“Flaubert’s Parrot” truly questions our assumptions regarding what history really is and about how can we discover the truth. Every chapter of the novel offers an alternate way in approaching history or the life of a person, emphasizing how our vision about history changes with a certain format and perspective.

Julian Barnes’s novel is the story of a man’s quest to find the writer outside of his writings, in spite of Flaubert’s insistency that an author books should be more than enough and the respective writer should be left alone. In his quest, Geoffrey Braithwaite pursues museums, letters, literary works and criticism regarding Flaubert’s person in order to find out the truth.

As a metafictional novel, “Flaubert’s Parrot” reveals a comprehensive vision regarding Flaubert in forms that cannot please everyone. Flaubert’s admirers may be more pleased than those looking for conventional storytelling, because the novel concentrates most on details about Flaubert’s personality and amorous life.

With all of Braithwaite’s commitment to the stuffed parrot dilemma and the plausible candidates for the parrot that Flaubert studied in his long weeks of composing ”Un Coeur Simple”, the question of Flaubert’s parrot as being the voice of the writer remains unanswered until the end. In the end, the case of the stuffed parrot is solved. The real parrot that sat upon Flaubert’s desk is representing the Truth, the Word, and the Biographer all in one form.

“Flaubert’s Parrot” is extraordinary for a large number of reasons. Throughout the satire and the insights about Flaubert and the perspectives for real historical events the novel is extraordinary in its form, having character-driven scenes with figures that border on both the fictional and the real world. Julian Barnes`s novel pays humble homage to the realism Gustave Flaubert has sought after.

If “Flaubert’s Parrot” wasn’t a postmodern novel and was to focus on a linear narrative and narrator, we could see it as a detective story in which Braithwaite plays the role of a detective trying to unravel the case of the stuffed parrot. At its simplest, the “Flaubert’s Parrot” novel could be a response to the question regarding where is the real stuffed parrot, but for Geoffrey Braithwaite the discovery of the real parrot is just a link between the reader and the author.