This book is the biography of Gustave Flaubert written by the Francophile Julian Barnes. Trying to reproduce the past, we always tend to patronize it… (You think I am joking? In March 1983, the newspaper Libération urged that the French Minister for Women’s Rights should put on her Index for ‘public provocation to sexist hatred’ the following works: Pantagruel, Jude the Obscure, Baudelaire’s poems, all Kafka, The Snows of Kilimanjaro – and Madame Bovary.) Still, let’s play. All copies of this seductively bad novel must be destroyed at once. So-and-so will not be reprinted until we say so. This month, everyone must write about this next month, nobody is allowed to write about that. …many critics would like to be dictators of literature, to regulate the past, and to set out with quiet authority the future direction of the art. In 1850, from Constantinople, Flaubert announces three projects: ‘Une nuit de Don Juan’ (which reaches the planning stage) ‘Anubis’, the story of ‘the woman who wants to be fucked by a god’ and ‘My Flemish novel about the young girl who dies a virgin and a mystic… in a little provincial town, at the bottom of a garden planted with cabbages and bulrushes…’Ĭontemplating vicissitudes of world literature Julian Barnes doesn’t forget to mention the ghoulish and everlasting obscurantism of critics…
Julian Barnes doesn’t write a biography… He researches Gustave Flaubert’s life… Therefore even the dreams that didn’t come to pass become a part of history… It makes me recall a holy relic of Jesus Christ’s prepuce… Throughout Christian history dozens of churches possessed this wondrous relic. When Gustave Flaubert was writing A Simple Heart the stuffed parrot served him as an inspiration… But actually there are two such parrots in two museums… Which one is authentic? Are both fake? The past can’t be resurrected… But it can be made up. The past often seems to behave like that piglet. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process.
It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. How can we know the past? Old articles are silent witnesses of the days gone… The old object in question is a green stuffed parrot…
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