Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

You expect something from me too, don’t you? It’s like that nowadays. People assume they own part of you, on 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. Flaubert disapproved. ‘The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.’ For the religious, death destroys the body and liberates the spirit; for the artist, death destroys the personality and liberates the work. That’s the theory, anyway. Of course, it frequently goes wrong. Look what happened to Flaubert: a century after his death Sartre, like some brawny, desperate lifeguard, spent ten years beating on his chest and blowing into his mouth; ten years trying to yank him back to consciousness, just so that he could sit him up on the sands and tell him exactly what he thought of him.

And what do people think of him now? How do they think of him? As a bald man with a drooping moustache; as the hermit of Croisset, the man who said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ ; as the incorrigible aesthete, the bourgeois bourgeoisophobe? Confident scraps of wisdom, hand-me-down summaries for those in a hurry. Flaubert would hardly have been surprised at the lazy rush to understand. It was an impulse out of which he made a whole book (or at least a whole appendix): the Dictionnaire des idées reçues .

At the simplest level, his Dictionary is a catalogue of clichés (DOG: Especially created to save its master’s life. A dog is man’s best friend ) and cod definitions (CRAYFISH: Female of the lobster ). Beyond this it’s a handbook of fake advice, both social (LIGHT: Always say Fiat lux! when lighting a candle ) and aesthetic (RAILWAY STATIONS: Always go into ecstasies about them; cite them as models of architecture ). At some times the manner is sly and teasing, at others so challengingly straight-faced that you find yourself half-believing it (MACARONI: When prepared in the Italian style, is served with the fingers ). It reads like a confirmation present specially written by a malicious, rakehell uncle for a serious-minded adolescent with ambitions to get on in society. Study it carefully and you would never say anything wrong, while never getting anything right (HALBERD: When you see a heavy cloud, never fail to say: ‘It’s going to rain halberds.’ In Switzerland, all the men carry halberds . ABSINTHE: Extremely violent poison: a single glass and you’re dead. Always drunk by journalists while writing their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouin ).

Flaubert’s dictionary offers a course in irony: from entry to entry, you can see him applying it in various thicknesses, like a cross-Channel painter darkening the sky with another wash. It tempts me to write a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas about Gustave himself. Just a short one: a booby-trapped pocket guide; something straight-faced yet misleading. The received wisdom in pellet form, with some of the pellets poisoned. This is the attraction, and also the danger, of irony: the way it permits a writer to be seemingly absent from his work, yet in fact hintingly present. You can have your cake and eat it; the only trouble is, you get fat.

What might we say of Flaubert in this new Dictionary? We might set him down, perhaps, as a ‘bourgeois individualist’; yes, that sounds smug enough, dishonest enough. It’s a characterisation which always remains unshaken by the fact that Flaubert loathed the bourgeoisie. And how about ‘individualist’, or its equivalent? ‘In the ideal I have of Art, I think that one must not show one’s own, and that the artist must no more appear in his work than God does in nature. Man is nothing, the work of art everything… It would be very pleasant for me to say what I think and relieve Monsieur Gustave Flaubert’s feelings by means of such utterances; but what is the importance of the said gentleman?’

This demand for authorial absence ran deeper still. Some writers ostensibly agree with the principle, yet sneak in at the back door and cosh the reader with a highly personal style. The murder is perfectly executed, except that the baseball bat left at the scene of the crime is sticky with fingerprints. Flaubert is different. He believed in style; more than anyone. He worked doggedly for beauty, sonority, exactness; perfection – but never the monogrammed perfection of a writer like Wilde. Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought. The correct word, the true phrase, the perfect sentence are always ‘out there’ somewhere; the writer’s task is to locate them by whatever means he can. For some this means no more than a trip to the supermarket and a loading-up of the metal basket; for others it means being lost on a plain in Greece, in the dark, in snow, in the rain, and finding what you seek only by some rare trick such as barking like a dog.

In our pragmatic and knowing century we probably find such ambition a little provincial (well, Turgenev did call Flaubert naïve). We no longer believe that language and reality ‘match up’ so congruently – indeed, we probably think that words give birth to things as much as things give birth to words. But if we find Flaubert naïve or – more likely – unsuccessful, we shouldn’t patronise his seriousness or his bold loneliness. This was, after all, the century of Balzac and of Hugo, with orchidaceous Romanticism at one end of it and gnomic Symbolism at the other. Flaubert’s planned invisibility in a century of babbling personalities and shrieking styles might be characterised in one of two ways: as classical, or modern. Looking back to the seventeenth century, or forward to the late twentieth century. Contemporary critics who pompously reclassify all novels and plays and poems as texts – the author to the guillotine! – shouldn’t skip lightly over Flaubert. A century before them he was preparing texts and denying the significance of his own personality.

‘The author in his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.’ Of course, this has been keenly misread in our century. Look at Sartre and Camus. God is dead, they told us, and therefore so is the God-like novelist. Omniscience is impossible, man’s knowledge is partial, therefore the novel itself must be partial. That sounds not just splendid, but logical as well. But is it either? The novel, after all, didn’t arise when belief in God arose; nor, for that matter, is there much correlation between those novelists who believed most strongly in the omniscient narrator and those who believed most strongly in the omniscient creator. I cite George Eliot alongside Flaubert.

More to the point, the assumed divinity of the nineteenth-century novelist was only ever a technical device; and the partiality of the modern novelist is just as much a ploy. When a contemporary narrator hesitates, claims uncertainty, misunderstands, plays games and falls into error, does the reader in fact conclude that reality is being more authentically rendered? When the writer provides two different endings to his novel (why two? why not a hundred?), does the reader seriously imagine he is being ‘offered a choice’ and that the work is reflecting life’s variable outcomes? Such a ‘choice’ is never real, because the reader is obliged to consume both endings. In life, we make a decision – or a decision makes us – and we go one way; had we made a different decision (as I once told my wife; though I don’t think she was in a condition to appreciate my wisdom), we would have been elsewhere. The novel with two endings doesn’t reproduce this reality: it merely takes us down two diverging paths. It’s a form of cubism, I suppose. And that’s all right; but let’s not deceive ourselves about the artifice involved.