Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

What happened to the truth is not recorded.

In the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence occurs there is usually someone at hand to comment, ‘It’s just like Anthony Powell.’ Often the coincidence turns out, on the shortest examination, to be unremarkable: typically, it might consist of two acquaintances from school or university running into one another after a gap of several years. But the name of Powell is invoked to give legitimacy to the event; it’s rather like getting the priest to bless your car.

I don’t much care for coincidences. There’s something spooky about them: you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan. I prefer to feel that things are chaotic, free-wheeling, permanently as well as temporarily crazy – to feel the certainty of human ignorance, brutality and folly. ‘Whatever else happens,’ Flaubert wrote when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, ‘we shall remain stupid.’ Mere boastful pessimism? Or a necessary razing of expectation before anything can be properly thought, or done, or written?

I don’t even care for harmless, comic coincidences. I once went out to dinner and discovered that the seven other people present had all just finished reading A Dance to the Music of Time . I didn’t relish this: not least because it meant that I didn’t break my silence until the cheese course.

And as for coincidences in books – there’s something cheap and sentimental about the device; it can’t help always seeming aesthetically gimcrack. That troubadour who passes by just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow scuffle; the sudden but convenient Dickensian benefactors; the neat shipwreck on a foreign shore which reunites siblings and lovers. I once disparaged this lazy stratagem to a poet I met, a man presumably skilled in the coincidences of rhyme. ‘Perhaps,’ he replied with a genial loftiness, ‘you have too prosaic a mind?’

‘But surely,’ I came back, rather pleased with myself, ‘a prosaic mind is the best judge of prose?’

I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that’s where they belong. Go on, take them: let the pilot whose parachute has failed to open land in the haystack, let the virtuous pauper with the gangrenous foot discover the buried treasure – it’s all right, it doesn’t really matter…

One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That’s what smart people do. Irony is, after all, the modern mode, a drinking companion for resonance and wit. Who could be against it? And yet sometimes I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn’t just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence.

I don’t know what Flaubert thought about coincidence. I had hoped for some characteristic entry in his unflaggingly ironic Dictionnaire des idées reçues ; but it jumps pointedly from cognac to coitus . Still, his love of irony is plain; it’s one of the most modern things about him. In Egypt he was delighted to discover that almeh , the word for ‘bluestocking’, had gradually lost this original meaning and come to signify ‘whore’.

Do ironies accrete around the ironist? Flaubert certainly thought so. The celebrations for the centenary of Voltaire’s death in 1878 were stage-managed by the chocolate firm of Ménier. ‘That poor old genius,’ Gustave commented, ‘how irony never quits him.’ It badgered Gustave too. When he wrote of himself, ‘I attract mad people and animals’, perhaps he should have added ‘and ironies’.

Take Madame Bovary . It was prosecuted for obscenity by Ernest Pinard, the advocate who also enjoys the shabby fame of leading the case against Les Fleurs du mal Some years after Bovary had been cleared, Pinard was discovered to be the anonymous author of a collection of priapic verses. The novelist was much amused.

And then, take the book itself. Two of the best-remembered things in it are Emma’s adulterous drive in the curtained cab (a passage found especially scandalous by right-thinkers), and the very last line of the novel – ‘He has just received the Legion of Honour’ – which confirms the bourgeois apotheosis of the pharmacist Homais. Now, the idea for the curtained cab appears to have come to Flaubert as a result of his own eccentric conduct in Paris when anxious to avoid running into Louise Colet. To avoid being recognised, he took to driving everywhere in a closed cab. Thus, he maintained his chastity by using a device he would later employ to facilitate his heroine’s sexual indulgence.

With Homais’s Légion d’honneur , it’s the other way round: life imitates and ironises art. Barely ten years after that final line of Madame Bovary was written, Flaubert, arch anti-bourgeois and virile hater of governments, allowed himself to be created a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur . Consequently, the last line of his life parroted the last line of his masterpiece: at his funeral a picket of soldiers turned up to fire a volley over the coffin, and thus bid the state’s traditional farewell to one of its most improbable and sardonic chevaliers .

And if you don’t like these ironies, I have others.

In December 1849 Flaubert and Du Camp climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops. They had slept beside it the previous night, and rose at five to make sure of reaching the top by sunrise. Gustave washed his face in a canvas pail; a jackal howled; he smoked a pipe. Then, with two Arabs pushing him and two pulling, he was bundled slowly up the high stones of the Pyramid to the summit. Du Camp – the first man to photograph the Sphinx – was there already. Ahead of them lay the Nile, bathed in mist, like a white sea; behind them lay the dark desert, like a petrified purple ocean. At last, a streak of orange light appeared to the east; and gradually the white sea in front of them became an immense expanse of fertile green, while the purple ocean behind turned shimmering white. The rising sun lit up the topmost stones of the Pyramid, and Flaubert, looking down at his feet, noticed a small business-card pinned in place. ‘Humbert, Frotteur’, it read, and gave a Rouen address.

What a moment of perfectly targeted irony. A modernist moment, too: this is the sort of exchange, in which the everyday tampers with the sublime, that we like to think of proprietorially as typical of our own wry and unfoolable age. We thank Flaubert for picking it up; in a sense, the irony wasn’t there until he observed it. Other visitors might have seen the business-card as merely a piece of litter – it could have stayed there, its drawing-pins slowly rusting, for years; but Flaubert gave it function.

And if we are feeling interpretative, we can look further into this brief event. Isn’t it, perhaps, a notable historical coincidence that the greatest European novelist of the nineteenth century should be introduced at the Pyramids to one of the twentieth century’s most notorious fictional characters? That Flaubert, still damp from skewering boys in Cairo bath-houses, should fall on the name of Nabokov’s seducer of underage American girlhood? And further, what is the profession of this single-barrelled version of Humbert Humbert? He is a frotteur . Literally, a French polisher; but also, the sort of sexual deviant who loves the rub of the crowd.

And that’s not all. Now for the irony about the irony. It turns out, from Flaubert’s travel notes, that the business-card wasn’t pinned in place by Monsieur Frotteur himself; it was put there by the lithe and thoughtful Maxime du Camp, who had scampered ahead in the purple night and laid out this little mousetrap for his friend’s sensibility. The balance of our response shifts with this knowledge: Flaubert becomes plodding and predictable; Du Camp becomes the wit, the dandy, the teaser of modernism before modernism has declared itself.