Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964 and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he graduated in modern languages (with honours) in 1968.After graduation, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement for three years. In 1977, Barnes began working as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for the Observer.Barnes has received several awards and honours for his writing, including the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending. Three additional novels were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (Flaubert's Parrot 1984, England, England 1998, and Arthur & George 2005). among many other awards.

Flaubert’s Parrot 

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

 Comment
            Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot is the story of a man’s quest to find the writer outside his writings, despite Flaubert’s insistence that the books should be enough and the writer should be left alone. Geoffrey Braithwaite, the protagonist, is a British sixty-year-old doctor. He aims at becoming Flaubert’s unofficial biographer and starts a personal quest for information with that purpose. Finding the stuffed parrot used as model in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart is part of that quest. He thinks Loulou the parrot in Flaubert’s story might be “an emblem of the writer’s voice” (19).
        The work, as metafiction, concentrates on details of Flaubert’s personality, amours, ideas, and works, rather than on building dramatic narrative with characters embroiled in a plot. Thus, it’s odd in form, sometimes like a textbook with categories and lists, sometimes with scenes with characters both fictional and real. It’s full of ideas on writing and writers.
                Braithwaite’s search for Loulou, the stuffed bird Flaubert borrowed from a museum and which sat on his desk for several weeks during the creation of A Simple Heart, is Braithwaite’s central preoccupation. He finds more than one candidate to be the real one, making plenty of parrot references in Flaubert’s work and his life all through the book. For Braithwaite, the bird becomes not merely a possible “emblem of the writer’s voice”, but also a symbol of human activity. With all Braithwaite’s dedication to parrot allusions and possible candidates for the bird, the question of Flaubert’s parrot as “an emblem of the writer’s voice” remains to the end of the book. Braithwaite reports one of Flaubert’s favourite parrot stories, in which a man named Henri K, “afflicted with solitude,” gradually came to revere his parrot as possibly divine. The parrot died, Henri’s isolation increased, insanity grew. He tried to become a parrot, even imitating its way of walking. Despite his passionate defence of Flaubert in everything else, Braithwaite appears even ridiculous with all this parrot obsession.
             Finally, in Chapter 15 (“And the Parrot . . .”), the pursuit of Flaubert’s parrot has exhausted him. He has sought it everywhere, following Flubert’s own traces, with at first two possibilities in separate museums, both claimed legitimate. However, in this last chapter we are faced with the possibility of never finding the real thing. Monsieur Andrieu, secretary of the Societe des Amis de Flaubert, thinks it is unlikely to keep a stuffed parrot more than a hundred years, and reminds that Flaubert’s description of Loulou may have been a creation of his own mind. Braithwaite turns away and ends the book with a visit to another museum, which has three parrots: “They gazed at me like three quizzical, sharp-eyed, dandruff-ridden, dishonourable old men.” He concludes, “Perhaps it was one of them” (190). This image might be Flaubert looking at Braithwaite’s painful and useless search for the parrot of the dead writer. Thus, in Chapter 1 (“Flaubert’s Parrot”), thinking he has found the noble bird, he raised the question, “Is a reader wrong—worse, sentimental—to think of that parrot at the Hotel-Dieu as an emblem of the writer’s voice?” (19) and the answer could be in this last chapter. The parrot is, an image, not a reality.
               All in all, in my opinion, Flaubert’s Parrot is outstanding for many reasons. Its satire and humour, its recollection about Flaubert, 19th century writers, French landscape and geography, perspectives for history, and the brevity of life make it an extraordinary work. It’s also singular in form. It’s full of ideas on writing and writers, it explains positions and challenges, and it pays a tribute to Flaubert.