Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

He recovered, he was allowed to travel; in December 1850 he wrote to his mother from Constantinople, expanding the image of the Bear. It now explained not just his character, but also his literary strategy:

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubbornness in denying that maxim… So (and this is my conclusion) I am resigned to living as I have lived: alone, with my throng of great men as my only cronies – a bear, with my bear-rug for company.

The ‘throng of cronies’, needless to say, aren’t house-guests but companions picked from his library shelves. As for the bear-rug, he was always concerned about it: he wrote twice from the East (Constantinople, April 1850; Benisouëf, June 1850) asking his mother to take care of it. His niece Caroline also remembered this central feature of his study. She would be taken there for her lessons at one o’clock: the shutters would be closed to keep out the heat, and the darkened room filled with the smell of joss-sticks and tobacco. ‘With one bound I would throw myself on the large white bearskin, which I adored, and cover its great head with kisses.’

Once you catch your bear , says the Macedonian proverb, it will dance for you . Gustave didn’t dance; Flaubear was nobody’s bear. (How would you fiddle that into French? Gourstave , perhaps.)

BEAR: Generally called Martin. Quote the story of the old soldier who saw that a watch had fallen into a bear-pit, climbed down into it, and was eaten.

Gustave is other animals as well. In his youth he is clusters of beasts: hungry to see Ernest Chevalier, he is ‘a lion, a tiger – a tiger from India, a boa constrictor’ (1841); feeling a rare plenitude of strength, he is ‘an ox, sphinx, bittern, elephant, whale’ (1841). Subsequently, he takes them one at a time. He is an oyster in its shell (1845); a snail in its shell (1851); a hedgehog rolling up to protect itself (1853, 1857). He is a literary lizard basking in the sun of Beauty (1846), and a warbler with a shrill cry which hides in the depths of the woods and is heard only by itself (also 1846). He becomes as soft and nervous as a cow (1867); he feels as worn out as a donkey (1867); yet still he splashes in the Seine like a porpoise (1870). He works like a mule (1852); he lives a life which would kill three rhinos (1872); he works ‘like XV oxen’ (1878); though he advises Louise Colet to burrow away at her work like a mole (1853). To Louise he resembles ‘a wild buffalo of the American prairie’ (1846). To George Sand, however, he seems ‘gentle as a lamb’ (1866) – which he denies (1869) – and the pair of them chatter away like magpies (1866); ten years later, at her funeral, he weeps like a calf (1876). Alone in his study, he finishes the story he wrote especially for her, the story about the parrot; he bellows it out ‘like a gorilla’ (1876).

He flirts occasionally with the rhinoceros and the camel as self-images, but mainly, secretly, essentially, he is the Bear: a stubborn bear (1852), a bear thrust deeper into bearishness by the stupidity of his age (1853), a mangy bear (1854), even a stuffed bear (1869); and so on down to the very last year of his life, when he is still ‘roaring as loudly as any bear in its cave’ (1880). Note that in Hérodias , Flaubert’s last completed work, the imprisoned prophet Iaokanann, when ordered to stop howling his denunciations against a corrupt world, replies that he too will continue crying out ‘like a bear’.

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

There were still bears around in Gourstave’s time: brown bears in the Alps, reddish bears in Savoy. Bear hams were available from superior dealers in salted provisions. Alexandre Dumas ate bear steak at the Hôtel de la Poste, Marigny, in 1832; later, in his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1870), he noted that ‘bear meat is now eaten by all the peoples of Europe’. From the chef to Their Majesties of Prussia Dumas obtained a recipe for bear’s paws, Moscow style. Buy the paws skinned. Wash, salt, and marinade for three days. Casserole with bacon and vegetables for seven or eight hours; drain, wipe, sprinkle with pepper, and turn in melted lard. Roll in breadcrumbs and grill for half an hour. Serve with a piquant sauce and two spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly.

It is not known whether Flaubear ever ate his namesake. He ate dromedary in Damascus in 1850. It seems a reasonable guess that if he had eaten bear he would have commented on such ipsophagy.

Exactly what species of bear was Flaubear? We can track his spoor through the Letters. At first he is just an unspecified ours , a bear (1841). He’s still unspecified – though owner of a den – in 1843, in January 1845, and in May 1845 (by now he boasts a triple layer of fur). In June 1845 he wants to buy a painting of a bear for his room and entitle it ‘Portrait of Gustave Flaubert’ – ‘to indicate my moral disposition and my social temperament’. So far we (and he too, perhaps) have been imagining a dark animal: an American brown bear, a Russian black bear, a reddish bear from Savoy. But in September 1845 Gustave firmly announces himself to be ‘a white bear’.

Why? Is it because he’s a bear who is also a white European? Is it perhaps an identity taken from the white bearskin rug on his study floor (which he first mentions in a letter to Louise Colet of August 1846, telling her that he likes to stretch out on it during the day. Maybe he chose his species so that he could lie on his rug, punning and camouflaged)? Or is this coloration indicative of a further shift away from humanity, a progression to the extremes of ursinity? The brown, the black, the reddish bear are not that far from man, from man’s cities, man’s friendship even. The coloured bears can mostly be tamed. But the white, the polar bear? It doesn’t dance for man’s pleasure; it doesn’t eat berries; it can’t be trapped by a weakness for honey.

Other bears are used. The Romans imported bears from Britain for their games. The Kamchatkans, a people of eastern Siberia, used to employ the intestines of bears as face-masks to protect them from the glare of the sun; and they used the sharpened shoulder-blade for cutting grass. But the white bear, Thalarctos maritimus , is the aristocrat of bears. Aloof, distant, stylishly diving for fish, roughly ambushing seals when they come up for air. The maritime bear. They travel great distances, carried along on floating pack-ice. One winter in the last century twelve great white bears got as far south as Iceland by this method; imagine them riding down on their melting thrones to make a terrifying, godlike landfall. William Scoresby, the Arctic explorer, noted that the liver of the bear is poisonous – the only part of any quadruped known to be so. Among zoo-keepers there is no known test for pregnancy in the polar bear. Strange facts that Flaubert might not have found strange.

When the Yakuts, a Siberian people, meet a bear, they doff their caps, greet him, call him master, old man or grandfather, and promise not to attack him or even speak ill of him. But if he looks as though he may pounce on them, they shoot at him, and if they kill him, they cut him in pieces and roast him and regale themselves, repeating all the while, ‘It is the Russians who are eating you, not us.’

Were there other reasons why he chose to be a bear? The figurative sense of ours is much the same as in English: a rough, wild fellow. Ours is slang for a police cell. Avoir ses ours , to have one’s bears, means ‘to have the curse’ (presumably because at such times a woman is supposed to behave like a bear with a sore head). Etymologists trace this colloquialism to the turn of the century (Flaubert doesn’t use it; he prefers the redcoats have landed , and other humorous variations thereon. On one occasion, having worried over Louise Colet’s irregularity, he finally notes with relief that Lord Palmerston has arrived). Un ours mal léché , a badly licked bear, is someone uncouth and misanthropic. More apt for Flaubert, un ours was nineteenth-century slang for a play which had been frequently submitted and turned down, but eventually accepted.