Thursday, 9 April 2020

'How do you compare two parrots, one already idealised by memory and metaphor, the other a squawking intruder?'

Flaubert’s Parrot |Julian Barnes

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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