Flaubert’s Parrot

Julian Barnes
Moisean Silvia, RO-EN
Pintican Mirela, RO-EN
Ordace Sebastian, RO-EN
Content
Here’s what you’ll find in our presentation:

1. Julian Barnes’ Biography

2. Flaubert’s Parrot. Genesis
3. Post-modernism
4. Major themes
5. The genre(s) issue
6. Book’s structure
7. Intertextuality
8. The narrator and the reader
9. The pure story
10. Irony
11. Title
12. The ending of the novel
13. Bibliography
 1
Julian Barnes’
Biography
 Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer and was
born on 19 January 1946 in Leicester, being educated
at the City of London School and Magdalen College,
Oxford.
He started his career by working as a lexicographer
on the Oxford English Dictionary, afterwards starting
his career as a journalist, reviewing for the Times
Literary Supplement and became a contributing
editor for the New Review in 1977.
 Barnes’s first novel was Metroland, published
in 1980, and follows the adventures of a young
man escaping English suburbia; it was followed
by Before she met me, published in 1982, a
story of jealousy and obsession. The next book
is the acclaimed Flaubert’s Parrot, published in
1984, which was shortlisted for the Booker
Prize for Fiction and won the Geoffrey Faber
Memorial Prize.
His writing has earned him considerable
respect as an author who deals with the themes
of history, reality, truth and love
I think a great book—leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on—is a
book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as
telling new truths—about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or both—such truths having not been
previously available, certainly not from official records or government documents, or from journalism or television. For
example, even people who condemned Madame Bovary, who thought that it ought to be banned, recognized the truth of
the portrait of that sort of woman, in that sort of society, which they had never encountered before in literature. That is
why the novel was so dangerous. I do think that there is this central, groundbreaking veracity in literature, which is part
of its grandeur. Obviously it varies according to the society. In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of
literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

The Paris Review, winter of

2000
Julian Barnes started as a journalist, but after publishing his first
novel Metroland in 1980, he carved out a reputation as one of
contemporary Britain’s most brilliant novelists, often grouped
with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.
After these two fairly traditional linear novels (Metroland and
Before she met me), Barnes’s first major success came with
Flaubert’s Parrot, published in 1984 his first book to be written
in an experimental, non-linear style. A highly inventive and
brilliant work, Flaubert's Parrot intertwines the realistic personal
story of its protagonist, Geoffrey Braithwaite, with a wealth of
literary and artistic references, and a complex web of different
genres and textual forms, combining fiction with biography,
literary criticism, letters and other documentary texts.
Flaubert’s Parrot. Genesis

The story behind Flaubert’s Parrot starts in September 1981 when Julian Barnes
was commissioned to write a book about French writer’s houses. Visiting numerous
places, among which Michelet’s château at Vascoeuil, Monet’s garden, Voltaire’s
patron’s château at Sully, he also visited Gustave Flaubert’s birthplace and pavillon.
He also visited Flaubert’s museum, where he was especially attracted by a parrot,
which was lent to G.F while writing Un Coeur simple, the same parrot that he saw a
few days after, while visiting Gustave Flaubert’s house in Croisset.
In FLAUBERT’S PARROT DE JULIAN BARNES : « UN SYMBOLE DU LOGOS ? » , by Aïssatou Sy-
Wonyu, Philippe Romanski and Antoine Cape, Julian Barnes, during an interview, says the following: As I
am looking for somewhere to photograph it (the parrot), the sun comes out—this is on a cloudy, grouchy,
rainy morning—and slants across the display cabinet. I put it there and take two sun-lit photos, then, as I
pick the parrot up to replace it, the sun goes in. It felt like a benign intervention by Gustave Flaubert,
signaling thanks for my presence, or indicating that this was indeed the true parrot.’

In the same interview, Julian Barnes says that this was a moment that he wrote it down in a notebook, and
revisiting it, he decided he wants to write a book about this subject: When I re-read that passage, I thought it
was quite a good example of what you can and can’t do and use as a writer, what is true in life but does not
work as fiction—because it really happened that I was there in the second museum, took the cover off the
parrot, put it down somewhere, and all of a sudden on a typical grey Normandy day a great shaft of sunlight
comes into the pavillon and it lights up this second parrot

 
Post-
modernism
Postmodernism
Jean-François Lyotard proposes a definition: postmodernism means the distrust of metanarratives that
legitimized truth and knowledge: "Simplifying to the maximum, we consider as ``postmodern'' the
distrust of metanarratives".[6] As distrust, postmodernism appears as a form of skepticism, doubting
the ultimate foundations of truth and leading to anti-foundationalism, to the questioning of those
ultimate foundations on which knowledge rests. (Nicolae Turcan, Babes Bolyai University)

Postmodern literature is a highly experimental and self-reflective form of writing. Postmodern works
often use nonlinear narratives and fragmentation instead of traditional storytelling techniques.
Flaubert's Parrot features the postmodernist process known as intertextuality, which is when an author
shapes their work as a response or rebuttal to another writer's work.
The post-modernist features that we find in the novel:

-deconstruct the genre with its emphasis on

intertextuality, fragmentation and metafiction
-non-linear narratives and fragmentation
-ignore plot or story in favor of a more in-depth
character study
-the novel switches between several styles, from
biography to literary criticism and long section where
the narrator uses argumentative techniques,
chronology and dictionary.
- Barnes fully immerses the reader in Geoffrey s
obsession
-unreliable narrator
Major Themes

● The
The Truth Subjectivit
y
 The Truth

“Much of the book is devoted to the question of what truth is and how one can know it. This
arises from the start in the question, surely somewhat absurd, of which is the real Flaubert’s
parrot? The parrot itself is of interest only because the novelist borrowed it to look at while
writing about a fictional parrot in Un Coeur Simple, so the search for Flaubert’s parrot is in part
a question of the real life original of a fictional character, in this case an animal." (Merritt
Moseley)
The theme that can be found throughout the novel is the truth, or rather, finding out the truth. The desire to
learn as much as possible about Flaubert's life starts from a statue (I begin with the statue, because that is
where I began the whole project. Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why cant we leave well
alone? Why aren’t books enough?) but the doubts about the truth only begin when the two parrots are found
at the Museums Hotel-Dieu and Croisset (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). And from this point,
a real adventure to search for the pure truth begins. The attention shifts from the author to the symbol: the
parrot, or to its authenticity. But an obstacle in finding out the truth is the impossibility of accessing the past
(Sometimes the past may be a greased pig, sometimes merely the flash of a parrot). When Geoffrey begins
his quest to uncover the truth about Flaubert's stuffed parrot, he gathers a group of historical documents.
Each source presents a different view of the facts and is impacted by the author's subjective opinion. As
Geoffrey dives deeper into his quest, he begins to realize that all of the sources used in historical records and
biographies are tainted by the personal nature of memory and opinion. As Cornelia Scott said ”Against a
background of traditional biography, in which the notion of historical fact waiting to be discovered is a
given, we are faced with the question about the reliability of sources, how to distinguish between the
important and unimportant facts, and what the effect on the whole picture and on the constructed narrative
will be if the information gathered has to remain incomplete- which is after all usually the case”(Cornelia,
76). Throughout the novel, a tension is always felt because of the impossibility of finding credible and
completely true sources.
 The Subjectivity
This subjectivity connects to the idea of truth. But before that, let's define subjectivity. Subjectivity
refers to judgments people make based on their opinions, experiences, and feelings. The opposite of
subjectivity is objectivity, where judgments are based on facts rather than opinions or emotions.
Most academic disciplines strive to maintain objective analysis.
Geoffrey discovers that while it has long been assumed that there is only one version of the truth,
this is actually not the case. It is impossible to construct a single objective fact since historians and
biographers rely on sources that are based on memory. Geoffrey also learns that historians and
biographers have the option of omitting information that does not benefit their subject. Geoffrey
employs a variety of biographies, and each one has a distinct interpretation of Flaubert's life. Even
Geoffrey is guilty of holding an unduly positive opinion of Flaubert.
 The Genre(s) Issue
• Asked about the genesis of the book, Barnes answered: ‘I had always wanted to do something
about Flaubert, but I knew I did not want to write any sort of biography or any sort of work of
criticism. This impatience with these latter categories may explain why Barnes chose instead to
combine an array of genres (p. 38, Vanessa)

• This is precisely what occurs in Flaubert’s Parrot, an aspect which has drawn the attention of
various critics and is one of the most recurrent features of postmodernist literature. Far from
feeling bound by conventions or strict rules, Barnes appears to advocate innovation and attempts
to renew the outmoded, worn-out, exhausted forms and genres of the past by mixing them. (p. 70
Vanessa)

• The paratexts (which Gérard Genette defines as ‘thresholds’ to the text and which are liminal
devices such as the title, subtitle, epigraph, dedication, preface, cover, blurb . . .) tend to confuse
the reader rather than clarify the genre. (p. 37, Vanessa)
• Flaubert’s Parrot therefore exhibits a proclivity for hybridity, multiplicity and
decompartmentalisation, and the mixture of genres enables the narrator to
approach Flaubert in original and varied ways and to avoid the pitfalls of each
individual genre. (p. 40 Vanessa)

• Is therefore arguably not a novel in the strictly conventional sense of the word.
Critics have shied away from being categorical about the book's genre, but the
terms "biographical" and "biography” have nevertheless kept reappearing in
reviews. (p. 72 Cornelia)

• However, the approach of this analysis is not to resolve the genre question. It
aims to show that reading Flaubert's Parrot as an experimental and thought-
provoking Flaubert biography which uses many different means of portrayal yields
the most interesting results. (p. 72 Cornelia)
The biography
Flaubert’s parrot is clearly not an usual biography; the narrator is not impersonal and the distance between
him and his subject is short or it doesn’t exist. The narrator is emotionally involved in his research project
and he often finds himself defending Flaubert when he discovers accusation about his literary or personal
life.

A further problem of the biographer is that of the relation between a writer's life and his work. Flaubert's
own position was that a writer should disappear behind his work and should definitely not be the center
of a critic's attention. Flaubert wanted his books to be the only part of him to be of interest to posterity.
Braithwaite is aware of this opinion of Flaubert's but still cannot help looking for the person in a wav that
is almost reminiscent of a personal cult. (p. 76 Cornelia)

In the course of his investigations, which the reader can trace through the journal-like elements of the
book, Braithwaite comes across several classic problems of biography, which he addresses directly and
on which he has his own opinions.(p. 74, Cornelia)
Book’s Structure
The book includes 15 chapters with suggestive titles. Some of them seem to be pretty close to critical assumption
of the narrator, such as chapter six, ”Emma Bovary’s eyes”, where Geoffrey critics the critical interpretation of
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary based on the color of the protagonist’s eyes. The narrator opens the chapter by
declaring the main reason he writes it “Let me tell you why I hate critics”, by this sentence that works life a hook,
the reader’s attention is captured.
While other chapter’s name suggests personal information about the narrator’s conjugal life. This is the case of
chapter thirteen called “Pure story”.
Through these 15 chapters, the reader finds three story lines as the narrator claims “Three stories contend within
me. One about Flaubert, one about Ellen, one about myself.”

As the synopsis illustrates, the novel is comprised of three distinct layers of diegesis. There are three stories that
progress almost simultaneously through use of leitmotif, flashback and foreshadowing. These diegetic levels are
the mystery of the parrot, Flaubert’s selective biography and Braithwaite’s relationship with his wife.
Consequently, Flaubert’s Parrot is a multi-generic novel that not only blends fact and fiction, but also employs
different conventions of writing. (p. 120 Şenol Bezci)

Because Flaubert’s Parrot is a postmodern novel that abuses traditional conventions of genres, the novel does not
end in the fashion of detective fiction; the mystery is uncovered only to a certain extent. In other words, the
murderer is never found out. In this respect, we can call the novel a failing detective story. (p. 121 Șenol Bezci)
 Intertextuality
Flaubertian intertextuality is so extensive that Braithwaite’s voice sometimes tends to disappear
beneath or behind that of Flaubert. Chapters such as The Flaubert Bestiary and Examination Paper
almost take the form of a collage of quotations from Flaubert’s correspondence so that Braithwaite’s
role seems limited to that of a compiler or a parrot, Flaubert’s parrot. (p. 49 Vanessa)

Again, imagery is used to illustrate this topic: the symbolic parrot and the net metaphor. In the
Flaubert museum in Rouen Braithwaite comes across a stuffed parrot, labelled as the one that Flaubert
borrowed from the natural history museum to have on his desk while writing "Un Coeur Simple".
Braithwaite experiences a kind of epiphany and is emotionally moved in a way that seems to be a
parody of religious ecstasy, a reference to "Un Coeur Simple", which deals with a similar case of an
(actually already slightly mocked) religious experience. While contemplating the parrot, Braithwaite
believes that he can feel the presence of the writer (p. 76 Cornelia)

” Un Coeur Simple" have already been mentioned, so that these examples shall suffice here. They
illustrate very well how Barnes makes connections and creates intertextual references and how he uses
them to turn his own book into a web of quotes, cross-references and Flaubert's spirit which makes it a
prime embodiment of Barthes's literary theory on the one hand while at the same time negating the
death of the author. (p. 94 Cornelia)
Intertextuality also occurs with the narrator’s personal life.

In chapter six, explaining the features of a “common but passionate reader’s” experience
with a novel, the narrator claims “Look, writers aren’t perfect, I want to cry, any more than
husbands and wives are perfect. I loved her, but I never deceived myself.” This paragraph
illustrates the intertextuality between the critical assumption of the narrator and his
personal view of his conjugal life.

Talking about the color of Flaubert’s protagonist, Emma Bovary, the narrator declares
“Eyes of brown, eyes of blue. Does it matter?”, but at the end of the same paragraph he
concludes that the eye color might matter in another case, perhaps in his personal story
“My wife’s eyes were greeny-blue which make her story a long one.”

Ellen Braithwaite shows some very obvious parallels to Emma Bovary (in addition to her
initials): both commit adultery because they are unhappily married, both reach a point
where they cannot carry on living, and both leave behind husbands who did not
understand them in life and do not understand their decisions to end it. (p. 93 Cornelia)
The narrator
“You expect something from me, don’t you? It’s like that nowadays. People assume they own part of
you, no matter how small an acquaintance; while if you are reckless enough to write a book, this puts
your bank account, your medical records, and the state of your marriage irrevocably into the public
domain.”

“You can see, at least, the color of my eyes. Not as complicated as Emma Bovary’s are they? But do
they help you? They might mislead. I’m not being coy, I’m trying to be useful.”
The narrator is directly addressing to the reader, moreover it seems like he is transforming the reader
into his witness; a witness in his searching process of the parrot and also his process of confessing his
personal story with his wife. Therefore, the relation between the narrator and his reader is a very
close one.

Braithwaite as a narrator does not really have much of a story to tell but rather holds the chapters
together through his person and with his Flaubert research project. (p. 73, Cornelia)

Several critics have focused on the figure of Braithwaite as he is certainly a typical postmodernist
self-conscious narrator in so far as he exposes the constraints upon his research and comments on
his own choices as he goes along. The irony consists in choosing an intrusive narrator in a book
devoted to Flaubert, who specifically claimed the necessity for an impersonal type of narration. (p.
47 Vanessa)
The reader
The reader receives a major role in Barnes novel; he is facing a process of underestimating or
overestimating his expectation. If the reader only expects to find an usual biography, he will be surprised
to find something more; and if the expects to discover a personal story, he will detect an original way to
tell it. Either way, the reader becomes involved in the story line and also kept at distance; this kind of
mixture fabricate his relation with the narrator and the story(s) itself/themselves.

The first encounter between the narrator and the reader is linked through a symbol, the parrot.
”The image of the statue also represents the larger-than- life esteem in which Braithwaite holds Flaubert.
This is an indication to the reader as to what kind of biography to expect, namely one that is fiercely
written in the spirit of the opening quote. However, the reader is also immediately provided with an
inkling of the idea that Braithwaite's project may not go as well as he expects, when he states: "The statue
isn't the original one."

” Most of all, Braithwaite fears the reader’s reaction to his painful confession, and, as I sought to
demonstrate in an essay, he oscillates throughout the novel between a desire to share his
experience with the reader or narratee, to establish an intimate relationship, and a reluctance to
entirely confide in him. The book constantly moves between intimacy and distance, so that the
reader sometimes feels involved in the fiction and sometimes feels distanced from it, but is
undoubtedly made aware of the fact that the narrator manipulates him/her, guides his/her
judgements and controls his/her reactions” (p. 48 Vanessa)
The pure story
The chapter is opened in an abstract way “This is a pure story whatever you may think”. By this sentence,
the narrator doesn’t allow the reader to create their own opinion on what is about to be said in the next
pages. The structure “a pure story” remains up in the air because, the narrator never confesses why the
story is pure or what “pure” means in this context, expect “She wasn’t corrupted. Hers is a pure story.”.

Even if it seems like Ellen’s life is a side-story in this novel because it is limited to only one chapter in the
book, Geoffrey mentions her several time during the main chapters of the plot. More important the her
being mentioned, the sentence “Ellen’s a true story; perhaps it is even the reason why I’m telling you
Flaubert’s story instead” reveals the signification of her story has on Geoffrey and that is why is easier for
him to tell someone else’s story than his own wife’s.

He has no need to use Flaubert’s story as a way of avoiding Braithwaite’s; he uses Braithwaite’s telling of
Flaubert’s story as Braithwaite’s way of telling his own story, mostly against his will and without his
knowledge (Moseley,1997:72)
 Irony
Flaubert’s parrot by Julian Barnes is a very complex piece of writing, one of the most Modernistic signals
being the discontinuous narrative, the self-conscious narrator aware of his place in literary criticism and,
nonetheless, the wrenching of a narrative perspective through irony.
We could definitely add up to the issue of Flaubert himself, that could be considered an ironist parent of
our Modern writing. Given such a clue, irony abounds in this novel- not only the biographical ironies
about Flaubert’s life (both persecuted artist whose work is carried to track, and venerated author awarded
the Legion d’honneur), but also the irony in the life of the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite. He is an
amateur Flaubert scholar that takes an excursion into the writer’s past by visiting first his room in Rouen
and then another preserved study in Croisset. There, he finds what pretends to be the original stuffed
parrot Flaubert used as the model for the parrot in his story Un Coeur simple. This mystification leads the
narrator to investigate further the parrot mystery and thus to his own—sometimes imaginative—recasting
of Flaubert’s life.
Nonetheless, as we discover reading the novel, Dr Braithwaite, like the doctor husband in Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary, had a wife, Ellen, who, like Emma Bovary, was an adulteress and a suicide. The parallel
is neat, the irony consistent, and the diagram complete.
The title
The title contains the central symbol of the text namely: the parrot. Already from the title, it can
be seen that the analysis moves from the author to the symbol. ”Parrot” is a recurring word in
the novel: soupe a perroquet, Le Perroquet (a restaurant), vanity as a parrot ( Vanity is a parrot
which hopping from branch and chatters away in full view), the parrots in the city and those in
the museum. Also, parrots are a recurring symbol in Flaubert's writings: in Salammbo every man
has a parrot tattooed on his chest and carries parrots on his shoulders, in Un coeur simple the
parrot Loulou.
On the one hand, Cornelia Scott said that ”Maybe a return to the question of the significance of
the parrot will help clarify the issues of the validity of this book as a biography. In the text the
parrot is called ”an emblem of the writer s voice”, a statement which can be seen as based on
Barthes s theory but also on Saussure s theory of language, according to which a writer does not
create anything new but only makes use of the existing system according to his aims or
wishes” . On the other hand, while the title refers to a single bird, Flaubert's parrot, the presence
of many stuffed parrots in the book conveys the ideological premise of the text: It is impossible
to identify a single objective fact while investigating the past. There is no way to tell which of
the parrots was perched on Flaubert's desk as he penned his book, as a result.
The ending of the novel

The end of the novel is closely related to what we talked about throughout the
presentation. The fact that out of fifty parrots there are three left and the final
sentence ”Perhaps it was one of them” emphasize the idea that truth is not
objective, that there are multiple points of view on a fact, and that the past is not
totally accessible. Vanessa Guignery notes that ”The book ends on an enigmatic
note, suggesting that the quest for the parrot, for Flauberts voice and past, for the
truth of his own life, has not beens completed but, as James B. Scott remarked, to
such a ” Grail-questing knight” as Braithwaite, „the search is all”, Flauberts Parrot
thus reminds the reader that, to quote David Coward, ” There are questions to
which there are no answers”
Bibliography
1.Julian Barnes in Conversation. Available at:
https://books.openedition.org/purh/6557?lang=en (accessed 16.12.2022)

2. The Paris Review. Julian Barnes, The Art of Fiction No. 165. Available at:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/562/the-art-of-fiction-no-165-julian-barnes (accessed
16.12.2022)

3. Julian Barnes biography at British Council. Available at:

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/julian-barnes (accessed 16.12.2022)

4. Post-modernism. Available at:

https://nicolaeturcan.ro/ro/definitii-postmoderne/ (accessed 17.12.2022)

5. Flaubert’s Parrot Analysis. Available at:

https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/english-literature/american-literature/flauberts-parrot/
(accessed 17.12.2022)

6. Cornelia Stott, The Sound of Truth- constructed and reconstructed lives in English novels sine Julian
Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, Tectum Verlag, 2011

7. Vanessa Guignery, The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism), RedGlobe
Press, 2006