Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

a) ‘These are the truly stupid things: 1) literary criticism, whatever it may be, good or bad; 2) the Temperance Society…’

b) ‘There is something so essentially grotesque about gendarmes that I cannot help laughing at them; these upholders of the law always produce the same comic effect on me as do attorneys, magistrates and professors of literature.’

c) ‘You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the amount that it is attacked. Critics are like fleas: they love clean linen and adore any form of lace.’

d) ‘Criticism occupies the lowest rung in the hierarchy of literature: as regards form, almost always, and as regards moral worth, incontestably. It’s lower even than rhyming games and acrostics, which at least demand a modicum of invention.’

e) ‘Critics! Eternal mediocrity living off genius by denigrating and exploiting it! Race of cockchafers slashing the finest pages of art to shreds! I’m so fed up with typography and the misuse people make of it that if the Emperor were to abolish all printing tomorrow, I should walk all the way to Paris on my knees and kiss his arse in gratitude.’

f) ‘How rare a sense of literature is! You’d think that a knowledge of languages, archaeology, history, and so on, would help. But not a bit of it! Supposedly educated people are becoming more and more inept when dealing with art. Even what art is escapes them. They find the annotations more interesting than the text. They set more store by the crutches than the legs.’

g) ‘How rare it is to see a critic who knows what he’s talking about.’

h) ‘Disgusted with the old style of criticism, they sought acquaintance with the new, and sent for theatre reviews from the newspapers. What assurance! What obstinacy! What lack of integrity! Masterpieces insulted and platitudes revered! The blunders of the supposed scholars and the stupidity of the supposed wits!’

Flaubert and Bouilhet went to the same school; they shared the same ideas and the same whores; they had the same aesthetic principles, and similar literary ambitions; each tried the theatre as his second genre. Flaubert called Bouilhet ‘my left testicle’. In 1854, Bouilhet stayed a night in the Mantes hotel that Gustave and Louise used to patronise: ‘I slept in your bed,’ he reported, ‘and I shat in your latrines (what curious symbolism!).’ The poet always had to work for a living; the novelist never had to. Consider the probable effect on their writings and reputations if their finances had been reversed.

‘No more soporific atmosphere than that of this region. I suspect that it contributed greatly to the slowness and difficulty with which Flaubert worked. When he thought he was struggling against words, he was struggling against the sky; and perhaps in another climate, the dryness of the air exalting his spirits, he might have been less exigent, or have obtained his results without such efforts’ (Gide, writing at Cuverville, Seine-Maritime, January 26th, 1931). Discuss.

a) Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, jousting with his younger son, asked him to explain what literature was for. Gustave, turning the question back on his surgeon father, asked him to explain what the spleen was for: ‘You know nothing about it, and neither do I, except that it is as indispensable to our bodily organism as poetry is to our mental organism.’ Dr Flaubert was defeated.

b) The spleen consists of units of lymphoid tissue (or white pulp ) plus the vascular network (or red pulp ). It is important in removing from the blood old or injured red cells. It is active in producing antibodies: splenectomised individuals produce less antibody. There is evidence that a tetrapeptide called tuftsin is derived from protein produced in the spleen. Though its removal, especially in childhood, increases the chances of meningitis and septicaemia, the spleen is no longer regarded as an essential organ: it can be removed without significant loss of active behaviour in the individual.

What do you conclude from this?

Maxime du Camp composed the following epitaph for Louise Colet: ‘She who lies here compromised Victor Cousin, ridiculed Alfred de Musset, reviled Gustave Flaubert, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr. Requiescat in pace .’ Du Camp published this epitaph in his Souvenirs littéraires . Who comes out of it better: Louise Colet or Maxime du Camp?

E1 was born in 1855.

E2 was partly born in 1855.

E1 had an unclouded childhood but emerged into adulthood inclined to nervous crisis.

E2 had an unclouded childhood but emerged into adulthood inclined to nervous crisis.

E1 led a life of sexual irregularity in the eyes of right-thinking people.

E2 led a life of sexual irregularity in the eyes of right-thinking people.

E1 imagined herself to be in financial difficulties.

E2 knew herself to be in financial difficulties.

E1 committed suicide by swallowing prussic acid.

E2 committed suicide by swallowing arsenic.

E1 was Eleanor Marx.

E2 was Emma Bovary.

The first English translation of Madame Bovary to be published was by Eleanor Marx.

Discuss.

Speculate on the significance of this dream, noted down by Flaubert at Lamalgue in 1845: ‘I dreamed that I was out walking with my mother in a great forest filled with monkeys. The further we walked, the more of them there were. They were laughing and leaping about in the branches of the trees. There were more and more of them; they got bigger and bigger; they were getting in our way. They kept looking at me, and I became frightened. They surrounded us in a big circle: one of them wanted to stroke me, and took my hand. I shot him in the shoulder with my rifle, and made him bleed; he started howling horribly. Then my mother said to me: “Why did you injure him, he’s your friend. What’s he done to you? Can’t you see that he loves you? And that he looks just like you!” The monkey was looking at me. I felt my soul being torn apart and I woke up… feeling as if I was at one with the animals, and fraternising with them in a tender, pantheistic communion.’

Gustave Flaubert appeared on a French stamp (denomination 8F + 2F) in 1952. It is an indifferent portrait ‘after E. Giraud’ in which the novelist – slightly Chinese in physiognomy – has been uncharacteristically awarded a modern shirt-collar and tie. The stamp is the lowest denomination in a series issued in aid of the National Relief Fund: the higher denominations celebrate (in ascending order) Manet, Saint-Saëns, Poincaré, Haussmann and Thiers.

Ronsard was the first French writer to appear on a stamp. Victor Hugo figured on three separate stamps between 1933 and 1936, once in a series issued in aid of the Unemployed Intellectuals’ Relief Fund. Anatole France’s portrait helped this charity in 1937; Balzac’s in i939. Daudet’s mill got on a stamp in 1936. Pétainist France celebrated Frédéric Mistral (1941) and Stendhal (1942). Saint-Exupéry, Lamartine and Châteaubriand appeared in 1948; Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud in the decadent rush of 1951. The latter year also brought stamp-collectors Alfred de Musset, who had succeeded Flaubert in Louise Colet’s bed, but now preceded him by one year onto the public envelope.