Flaubert’s Parrot
A book is this inflexible thing. What’s on the pages, what’s in the pages — it is what it is? No matter who wrote it? Or where they wrote it? Or why?
Here’s how Julian Barnes puts it in his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, via the voice of Geoffrey Braithwaite who is obsessed with Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, and is on a quest to really “understand” him: “Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well alone? Why aren’t the books enough? Flaubert wanted them to be: few writers believed more in the objectivity of the written text and the insignificance of the writer’s personality; yet still we disobediently pursue.”
Interestingly, the catalyst for me starting to write about books was this Julian Barnes excerpt from a memoir-ish book he wrote called Through the Window: “...writing is a matter of examining the world, reflecting upon it, deducing what you want to say, putting that meaning or message into words whose transparency allows the reader, now gazing through the same window-pane from the same position, to see the world exactly as you have seen it.” I thought I’d attempt to add to the continuum and share what I saw via writers’ supposedly transparent windows…because I think Barnes would agree that transparency can be a somewhat fungible concept.
I’m sure we’ve all had the strange, unsettling experience of someone thinking they 100% “know” you, and, ummm…they’re way off base. Or are they? Read this one to learn about Flaubert in a clever bit of occasional meta-fiction; to engage with “bibliotherapy” via not yourself, but the fictional Braithwaite as he tries to understand the unseen parts of his dead wife’s life (we all have “unseen parts” of our life); and to peek into Barnes’ brain re literary criticism.
“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.”
A reminder that fiction can help us, but it is not “self-help”! (Quelle horreur, I think Flaubert — & Barnes — would say.)
originally published on instagram