Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

The patient. Ellen. So you could say, in answer to that earlier question, that I killed her. You could just. I switched her off. I stopped her living. Yes.

Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.

Perhaps I am too accepting. My own condition is stable, yet hopeless. Perhaps it’s just a question of temperament. Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory. Such is the Flaubertian temperament. Compare the case, and the temperament, of Daudet. His schoolboy visit to a brothel was so uncomplicatedly successful that he stayed there for two or three days. The girls kept him concealed most of the time for fear of a police raid; they fed him on lentils and pampered him thoroughly. He emerged from this giddying ordeal, he later admitted, with a lifelong passion for the feel of a woman’s skin, and with a lifelong horror of lentils.

Some abstain and observe, fearing both disappointment and fulfilment. Others rush in, enjoy, and take the risks: at worst, they might contract some terrible disease; at best, they might escape with no more than a lasting aversion to pulses. I know in which camp I belong; and I know where I’d look for Ellen.

Maxims for life. Les unions complètes sont rares . You cannot change humanity, you can only know it. Happiness is a scarlet cloak whose lining is in tatters. Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around. Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear. You cannot change humanity, you can only know it. Les unions complètes sont rares .

A maxim upon maxims. Truths about writing can be framed before you’ve published a word; truths about life can be framed only when it’s too late to make any difference.

According to Salammbô , the equipment of a Carthaginian elephant driver used to include a mallet and a chisel. If, in the midst of battle, the animal threatened to run out of control, the driver was under orders to split its skull. The chances of this happening must have been fairly high: to make them more ferocious, the elephants were first intoxicated with a mixture of wine, incense and pepper, then goaded with spears.

Few of us have the courage to use the mallet and the chisel. Ellen did. I sometimes feel embarrassed by people’s sympathy. ‘It’s worse for her,’ I want to say; but I don’t. And then, after they’ve been kind, and promised me outings as if I were a child, and brusquely tried to make me talk for my own good (why do they think I don’t know where my own good lies?), I am allowed to sit down and dream about her a little. I think of a hailstorm in 1853, of the broken windows, the battered harvests, the wrecked espaliers, the shattered melon cloches. Is there anything stupider than a melon cloche? Applaud the stones that break the glass. People understand a little too quickly the function of the sun. The function of the sun is not to help the cabbages along.

Candidates must answerfourquestions:bothParts of Section A, andtwoquestions from Section B. All marks will be awarded for the correctness of the answers; none for presentation or handwriting. Marks will be deducted for facetious or conceitedly brief answers. Time:three hours.

It has become clear to the examiners in recent years that candidates are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between Art and Life. Everyone claims to understand the difference, but perceptions vary greatly. For some, Life is rich and creamy, made according to an old peasant recipe from nothing but natural products, while Art is a pallid commercial confection, consisting mainly of artificial colourings and flavourings. For others, Art is the truer thing, full, bustling and emotionally satisfying, while Life is worse than the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, peopled by bores and rogues, short on wit, long on unpleasant incidents, and leading to a painfully predictable dénouement. Adherents of the latter view tend to cite Logan Pearsall Smith: ‘People say that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ Candidates are advised not to use this quotation in their answers.

Consider the relationship between Art and Life suggested by any two of the following statements or situations.

a) ‘The day before yesterday, in the woods near Touques, at a charming spot near a spring, I came across some cigar butts and some bits of pâté. There’d been a picnic there! I’d described exactly that in Novembre eleven years ago! Then it was purely imagined, and the other day it was experienced. Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry… My poor Bovary is without a doubt suffering and weeping even now in twenty villages of France.’

b) In Paris, Flaubert used a closed cab to avoid detection, and presumably seduction, by Louise Colet. In Rouen, Léon uses a closed cab for the seduction of Emma Bovary. In Hamburg, within a year of the publication of Madame Bovary , cabs could be hired for sexual purposes; they were known as Bovarys.

c) (As his sister Caroline lay dying) ‘My own eyes are as dry as marble. It’s strange how sorrows in fiction make me open up and overflow with feeling, whereas real sorrows remain hard and bitter in my heart, turning to crystal as soon as they arise.’

d) ‘You tell me that I seriously loved that woman [Mme Schlesinger]. I didn’t; it isn’t true. Only when I was writing to her, with that capacity I possess for producing feelings within myself by means of the pen, did I take my subject seriously: but only when I was writing . Many things which leave me cold when I see or hear about them none the less move me to enthusiasm or irritation or pain if I talk about them myself or – particularly – if I write about them. This is one of the effects of my mountebank nature.’

e) Giuseppe Marco Fieschi (1790–1836) attained notoriety for his part in a plot on the life of Louis Philippe. He took lodgings in the boulevard du Temple and constructed, with the help of two members of the Société des Droits de l’Homme, an ‘infernal machine’, consisting of twenty gun-barrels which could be discharged simultaneously. On July 28th, 1835, as Louis Philippe was riding past with his three sons and numerous staff, Fieschi fired his broadside against established society.

Some years later, Flaubert moved into a house built on the same site in the boulevard du Temple.

f) ‘Yes, indeed! The period [of Napoleon III’s reign] will furnish material for some capital books. Perhaps after all, in the universal harmony of things, the coup d’état and all its results were only intended to provide a few able penmen with some attractive scenes.’

Trace the mellowing of Flaubert’s attitude towards critics and criticism as represented by the following quotations: