Myriad Musings on
the Metaphor!
[Part – 5]
Francis Bacon, in
his highly philosophical take on the value of reading [in his essay titled, Of Studies,] makes this much-loved
statement –
Says he –
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested!
Like a Milton or
a Ruskin or a Johnson, he places such great value on the art of reading! And
in this particular essay, in especial, he makes a sweet and subtle distinction between
the various types of books!
The intended
inference is that, some books are worth a superficial browsing or a quick
reading, to get hold of just one thought or idea! – They’ve just got to be
tasted!
At the same time,
there are books that ought to be swallowed, says he! These books are to be read
intensely from end to end, as they’ve got such a high value tag on their
content – on what they intend to convey to their reader!
In addition, there’s
yet another category of books, that should be digested, says Bacon!
By ‘digested’, he
means to say that, these books should be read so slowly, so patiently and so
thoughtfully, if at all the reader wishes to get at the treasures contained
within the book!
The thoughts and ideas enshrined within these books are so
precious and so dear, so enriching and so nourishing, that it could even impact
his heart, influence his mind, sway his soul, and condition his very being!
One such book
that tags itself by default under the ‘digestive’ label, would be the novel Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes.
You are
spontaneously reminded of Byatt’s Possession,
or Nabokov’s Pale Fire when you
gently flip through the pages of Flaubert’s
Parrot!
Flaubert’s Parrot, again, is
highly metaphoric in its import!
Considered one of his
greatest accomplishments as a writer, Flaubert’s
Parrot, [published in the year 1984] is a genre-blender of sorts – a judicious blend of fiction, biography
and literary criticism!
The impish
epigraph to the book is a cue and a clue to what’s in store –
When you write the biography of a friend,
you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him.
Added, the
ambivalence and the ambiguity contained within any biographical account are
laid bare by Barnes, in this highly intriguing novel of sorts!
The narrator to
the novel is Geoffrey Braithwaite, a 60-year old retired doctor. Being a great
fan of Gustave Flaubert, Geoffrey intends to seek the ‘truth’ about the
writer’s life and sets out on his quest, to accomplish on this, his mission!
The narrator then puts
forward three entirely different stories on Flaubert’s life, from three
different sources!
The first
perspective chronicles Flaubert’s life as a highly successful one, showing him
in such an optimistic, favourable light!
The second perspective
to his life portrays him as a failure, showing him in a negative way, and in an
unfavourable light!
The third
perspective uses Flaubert’s own accounts of his life using his journal
jottings!
On his Flaubert-fixated-study
tours, Geoffrey chances upon two museums which sport identical parrots claiming
to be Flaubert’s parrot, that sat at Flaubert’s desk while he was writing A Simple Heart!
Says Geoffrey –
The conjunction of these two museums seemed odd at first.
Then I saw the parrot. It sat in a small alcove, bright
green and perky-eyed, with its head at an inquiring angle. ‘Psittacus’, ran the
inscription on the end of its perch: ‘Parrot borrowed by G. Flaubert from the
Museum of Rouen and placed on his work-table during the writing of Un coeur
simple, [A Simple Heart] where it is called Loulou, the parrot of Félicité, the principal
character in the tale’.
A Xeroxed letter from Flaubert confirmed the fact: the parrot, he wrote,
had been on his desk for three weeks, and the sight of it was beginning to
irritate him.
Loulou was in fine condition, the feathers as crisp
and the eye as irritating as they must have been a hundred years earlier. I
gazed at the bird, and to my surprise felt ardently in touch with this writer.
I am bothered by my tendency to metaphor, decidedly
excessive.
Crouched on top of a high cupboard was another parrot.
Also bright green. Also, according to both the gardienne and the label on its
perch, the very parrot which Flaubert had borrowed from the Museum of Rouen for
the writing of Un coeur simple.
I asked permission to take the second Loulou down, set
him carefully on the corner of a display cabinet, and removed his glass dome.
How do you compare two parrots, one already idealised
by memory and metaphor, the other a squawking intruder?
My initial response was
that the second seemed less authentic than the first, mainly because it had a more
benign air. The head was set straighter on the body, and its expression was
less irritating than that of the bird at the Hôtel-Dieu.
Then I realised the
fallacy in this:
I mentioned the question of authenticity to the
gardienne. She was, understandably, on the side of her own parrot, and confidently discounted the claims of the
Hôtel-Dieu. I wondered if somebody knew the answer. I wondered if it mattered
to anyone except me, who had rashly invested significance in the first parrot. The writer’s voice –
what makes you think it can be located that easily? Such was the rebuke offered by the second parrot.
Now Geoffrey, the
protagonist is in a real dilemma of sorts! Which among the two was the parrot
that sat at Flaubert’s desk?
Geoffrey means to say that, it was quite next to impossible to know the real Flaubert for oneself, much akin to finding out which of the two parrots sat at his desk!
In a subtle way,
Geoffrey also brings out the realization that, the truth of biography can
always be contested, and that, attesting to the authenticity of the past through any single point of view could be an exercise in futility!
That’s hence, he
gives a beautiful analogy of sorts to this effect, straight at the opening
chapter itself –
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.
In other words,
the facts of history have many versions to it, as much as people have many
perspectives to their life stories, says doctor Geoffrey!
Well, some of the
lines in this brilliant Barnes’ masterpiece are such memorable, take-home
delights for us all!
Giving y’all a
few to digest –
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.
You can do the same with a biography. The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it
in, sorts, throws back, stores, fillets and sells. Yet consider what he doesn’t catch…! there
is always far more of that.
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that.
Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry …
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it
is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously. The writer must be universal
in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly. Flaubert
always sides with minorities, with ‘the Bedouin, the Heretic, the philosopher, the hermit, the
Poet’.
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the
idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
For once I agree with Du Camp, who used to say that Gustave’s
preferred form of travel was to lie on a divan and have the scenery carried
past him.
As for that famous oriental trip of theirs, Du Camp (yes, the odious
Du Camp, the unreliable Du Camp) maintained that Gustave spent most of the
journey in a state of torpor.
Style? If so, you are taking your own first tremulous steps into fiction. You want some maxims for
writing? Very well. Form isn’t an overcoat flung over the flesh of thought (that old comparison,
old in Flaubert’s day); it’s the flesh of thought itself. You can no more imagine an Idea
without a Form than a Form without an Idea.
Everything in art depends on execution:
the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must
write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let
everything else go hang. When a line is good, it ceases to belong to any
school.
Listen to Auden: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’.
Do not
imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence.
Art is not a brassière. At least, not in the English sense.
But do not forget that brassière is the French for
life-jacket.
Gustave belonged to the first railway generation in France;
and he hated the invention. For a start, it was an odious means of transport.
‘I get so fed up on a train that after five minutes I’m howling with boredom’.
But he didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated
the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point
of scientific advance without moral advance?
The railway would merely permit more people to move
about, meet and be stupid together. In one of his earliest letters, written
when he was fifteen, he lists the misdeeds of modern civilisation:
‘Railways, poisons, enema pumps, cream tarts, royalty
and the guillotine’. Two years later, in his essay on Rabelais, the list of
enemies has altered – all except the first item: ‘Railways, factories,
chemists and mathematicians.’
He never changed.
To be continued…
image: amazondotcom
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