Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

After all, if novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of life’s possibilities, this is what they’d do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn’t select. That ’s what I call offering the reader a choice of endings; but you may find me quite unreasonably literal-minded.

As for the hesitating narrator – look, I’m afraid you’ve run into one right now. It might be because I’m English. You’d guessed that, at least – that I’m English? I… I… Look at that seagull up there. I hadn’t spotted him before. Slipstreaming away, waiting for the bits of gristle from the sandwiches. Listen, I hope you won’t think this rude, but I really must take a turn on deck; it’s becoming quite stuffy in the bar here. Why don’t we meet on the boat back instead? The two o’clock ferry, Thursday? I’m sure I’ll feel more like it then. All right? What? No, you can’t come on deck with me. For God’s sake. Besides, I’m going to the lavatory first. I can’t have you following me in there, peering round from the next stall.

I apologise; I didn’t mean that. Two o’clock, in the bar, as the ferry sails? Oh, and one last word. The cheese shop in the Grande Rue: don’t miss it. I think the name’s Leroux. I suggest you get a Brillat-Savarin. You won’t get a good one in England unless you bring it back yourself. They’re kept too cold, or they have chemicals injected into them to delay the ripening, or something. That is, if you like cheese…

How do we seize the past? How do we seize the foreign past? We read, we learn, we ask, we remember, we are humble; and then a casual detail shifts everything. Flaubert was a giant; they all said so. He towered over everybody like a strapping Gallic chieftain. And yet he was only six feet tall: we have this on his own authority. Tall, but not gigantic; shorter than I am, in fact, and when I am in France I never find myself towering over people like a Gallic chieftain.

So Gustave was a six-foot giant, and the world shrinks just a little with that knowledge. The giants were not so tall (were the dwarfs therefore shorter too?). The fat men: were they less fat because they were smaller, and so you needed less stomach to appear fat; or were they more fat, because they developed the same stomachs, but had even less frame to support them? How can we know such trivial, crucial details? We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.

I have a small watercolour of Rouen on my wall by Arthur Frederick Payne (born Newarke, Leicester, 1831, working 1849–84). It shows the city from Bonsecours churchyard: the bridges, the spires, the river bending away past Croisset. It was painted on May 4th, 1856. Flaubert finished Madame Bovary on April 30th, 1856: there at Croisset, there where I can jab my finger, between two spreading and unknowing sploshes of watercolour. So near and yet so far. Is this history, then – a swift, confident amateur’s watercolour?

I’m not sure what I believe about the past. I just want to know if fat people were fatter then. And were mad people madder? There was a lunatic called Mirabeau in the Rouen asylum who was popular with doctors and medical students at the Hôtel-Dieu because of a particular talent: in exchange for a cup of coffee he would copulate on the dissecting table with a female corpse. (Does the cup of coffee make him more, or less, mad?) One day, however, Mirabeau was to prove a coward: Flaubert reports that he funked his task when faced with a woman who had been guillotined. No doubt they offered him two cups of coffee, extra sugar, a slug of cognac? (And does this prove him saner, or madder, this need for a face, however dead?)

Nowadays we aren’t allowed to use the word mad . What lunacy. The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words. Dead , I say, and dying , and mad , and adultery . I don’t say passed on , or slipping away , or terminal (oh, he’s terminal? Which one? Euston, St Pancras, the Gare St Lazare?), or personality disorder , or fooling around, bit on the side, well she’s away a lot visiting her sister . I say mad and adultery , that’s what I say. Mad has the right sound to it. It’s an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van. Terrible things are also ordinary. Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary ? He said it was ‘a most conventional way to rise above the conventional’.

Any history of adultery would doubtless quote Emma’s seduction in that careering cab: it’s probably the most famous act of infidelity in the whole of nineteenth-century fiction. Easy enough for the reader to imagine such a precisely described scene, and to get it right, you’d think. Yes indeed. But still easy enough to get it just a tiny bit wrong. I cite G. M. Musgrave, sketcher, traveller, memoirist, and vicar of Borden, Kent: author of The Parson, Pen and Pencil, or, Reminiscences and Illustrations of an Excursion to Paris, Tours, and Rouen, in the Summer of 1847; with a few Memoranda on French Farming (Richard Bentley, London, 1848) and of A Ramble Through Normandy, or, Scenes, Characters and Incidents in a Sketching Excursion Through Calvados (David Bogue, London, 1855). On page 522 of the latter work the Reverend Musgrave is visiting Rouen – ‘the Manchester of France’, he calls it – at a time when Flaubert is still flailing away at his Bovary . His account of the city includes the following aside:

I was mentioning, just now, the cab-stand. The carriages stationed there are the most dumpy vehicles, I conceive, of their kind, in Europe. I could with ease place my arm on the roof as I stood by one of them in the road. They are well-built, neat, and cleanly little chariots, with two good lamps; and ‘cut’ about the streets like Tom Thumb’s coach.

So our view suddenly lurches: the famous seduction would have been even more cramped, and even less romantic, than we might previously have assumed. This piece of information is, as far as I am aware, hitherto unrecorded in the extensive annotations which have been inflicted on the novel; and I herewith offer it in a spirit of humility for use by professional scholars.

The tall, the fat, the mad. And then there are the colours. When he was researching for Madame Bovary , Flaubert spent a whole afternoon examining the countryside through pieces of coloured glass. Would he have seen what we now see? Presumably. But what about this: in 1853, at Trouville, he watched the sun go down over the sea, and declared that it resembled a large disc of redcurrant jam. Vivid enough. But was redcurrant jam the same colour in Normandy in 1853 as it is now? (Would any pots of it have survived, so that we could check? And how would we know the colour had remained the same in the intervening years?) It’s the sort of thing you fret about. I decided to write to the Grocers’ Company about the matter. Unlike some of my other correspondents, they replied promptly. They were also reassuring: redcurrant jam is one of the purest jams, they said, and though an 1853 Rouennais pot might not have been quite so clear as a modern one because of the use of unrefined sugar, the colour would have been almost exactly the same. So at least that’s all right: now we can go ahead and confidently imagine the sunset. But you see what I mean? (As for my other questions: a pot of the jam could indeed have survived until now, but would almost certainly have turned brown, unless kept completely sealed in a dry, airy, pitch-dark room.)