Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

Flaubert does not build up his characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that on one occasion he gives Emma brown eyes (14); on another deep black eyes (15); and on another blue eyes (16).

This precise and disheartening indictment was drawn up by the late Dr Enid Starkie, Reader Emeritus in French Literature at the University of Oxford, and Flaubert’s most exhaustive British biographer. The numbers in her text refer to footnotes in which she spears the novelist with chapter and verse.

I once heard Dr Starkie lecture, and I’m glad to report that she had an atrocious French accent; one of those deliveries full of dame-school confidence and absolutely no ear, swerving between workaday correctness and farcical error, often within the same word. Naturally, this didn’t affect her competence to teach at the University of Oxford, because until quite recently the place preferred to treat modern languages as if they were dead: this made them more respectable, more like the distant perfections of Latin and Greek. Even so, it did strike me as peculiar that someone who lived by French literature should be so calamitously inadequate at making the basic words of the language sound as they did when her subjects, her heroes (her paymasters, too, you could say), first pronounced them.

You might think this a cheap revenge on a dead lady critic simply for pointing out that Flaubert didn’t have a very reliable notion of Emma Bovary’s eyes. But then I don’t hold with the precept de mortuis nil nisi bonum (I speak as a doctor, after all); and it’s hard to underestimate the irritation when a critic points out something like that to you. The irritation isn’t with Dr Starkie, not at first – she was only, as they say, doing her job – but with Flaubert. So that painstaking genius couldn’t even keep the eyes of his most famous character a consistent colour? Ha . And then, unable to be cross with him for long, you shift your feelings over to the critic.

I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary , I never noticed the heroine’s rainbow eyes. Should I have? Would you? Was I perhaps too busy noticing things that Dr Starkie was missing (though what they might have been I can’t for the moment think)? Put it another way: is there a perfect reader somewhere, a total reader? Does Dr Starkie’s reading of Madame Bovary contain all the responses which I have when I read the book, and then add a whole lot more, so that my reading is in a way pointless? Well, I hope not. My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it’s not pointless in terms of pleasure. I can’t prove that lay readers enjoy books more than professional critics; but I can tell you one advantage we have over them. We can forget. Dr Starkie and her kind are cursed with memory: the books they teach and write about can never fade from their brains. They become family. Perhaps this is why some critics develop a faintly patronising tone towards their subjects. They act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn’t said anything new for years. Of course, it’s her house, and everybody’s living in it rent free; but even so, surely it is, well, you know… time ?

Whereas the common but passionate reader is allowed to forget; he can go away, be unfaithful with other writers, come back and be entranced again. Domesticity need never intrude on the relationship; it may be sporadic, but when there it is always intense. There’s none of the daily rancour which develops when people live bovinely together. I never find myself, fatigue in the voice, reminding Flaubert to hang up the bathmat or use the lavatory brush. Which is what Dr Starkie can’t help herself doing. Look, writers aren’t perfect , I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is, If they seem so, they can’t be. I never thought my wife was perfect. I loved her, but I never deceived myself. I remember… But I’ll keep that for another time.

I’ll remember instead another lecture I once attended, some years ago at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. It was given by a professor from Cambridge, Christopher Ricks, and it was a very shiny performance. His bald head was shiny; his black shoes were shiny; and his lecture was very shiny indeed. Its theme was Mistakes in Literature and Whether They Matter. Yevtushenko, for example, apparently made a howler in one of his poems about the American nightingale. Pushkin was quite wrong about the sort of military dress worn at balls. John Wain was wrong about the Hiroshima pilot. Nabokov was wrong – rather surprising, this – about the phonetics of the name Lolita. There were other examples: Coleridge, Yeats and Browning were some of those caught out not knowing a hawk from a handsaw, or not even knowing what a handsaw was in the first place.

Two examples particularly struck me. The first was a remarkable discovery about Lord of the Flies . In the famous scene where Piggy’s spectacles are used for the rediscovery of fire, William Golding got his optics wrong. Completely back to front, in fact. Piggy is short-sighted; and the spectacles he would have been prescribed for this condition could not possibly have been used as burning glasses. Whichever way you held them, they would have been quite unable to make the rays of the sun converge.

The second example concerned ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. ‘Into the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred.’ Tennyson wrote the poem very quickly, after reading a report in The Times which included the phrase ‘someone had blundered’. He also relied on an earlier account which had mentioned ‘607 sabres’. Subsequently, however, the number of those who took part in what Camille Rousset called ce terrible et sanglant steeplechase was officially corrected to 673. ‘Into the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred and seventy-three’? Not quite enough swing to it, somehow. Perhaps it could have been rounded up to seven hundred – still not quite accurate, but at least more accurate? Tennyson considered the matter and decided to leave the poem as he had written it: ‘Six is much better than seven hundred (as I think) metrically so keep it.’

Not putting ‘673’ or ‘700’ or ‘ c .700’ instead of ‘600’ hardly seems to qualify as a Mistake to me. The shakiness of Golding’s optics, on the other hand, must definitely be classed as an error. The next question is, Does it matter? As far as I can remember Professor Ricks’s lecture, his argument was that if the factual side of literature becomes unreliable, then ploys such as irony and fantasy become much harder to use. If you don’t know what’s true, or what’s meant to be true, then the value of what isn’t true, or isn’t meant to be true, becomes diminished. This seems to me a very sound argument; though I do wonder to how many cases of literary mistake it actually applies. With Piggy’s glasses, I should think that (a) very few people, apart from oculists, opticians and bespectacled professors of English would notice; and (b) when they do notice, they merely detonate the error – like blowing up a small bomb with a controlled explosion. What’s more, this detonation (which takes place on a remote beach, with only a dog as witness) doesn’t set fire to other parts of the novel.

Mistakes like Golding’s are ‘external mistakes’ – disparities between what the book claims to be the case, and what we know the reality to be; often they merely indicate a lack of specific technical knowledge on the writer’s part. The sin is pardonable. What, though, about ‘internal mistakes’, when the writer claims two incompatible things within his own creation? Emma’s eyes are brown, Emma’s eyes are blue. Alas, this can be put down only to incompetence, to sloppy literary habits. I read the other day a well-praised first novel in which the narrator – who is both sexually inexperienced and an amateur of French literature – comically rehearses to himself the best way to kiss a girl without being rebuffed: ‘With a slow, sensual, irresistible strength, draw her gradually towards you while gazing into her eyes as if you had just been given a copy of the first, suppressed edition of Madame Bovary .’