A novel that sometimes disguises itself as a scholarly treatise, Flaubert’s Parrot was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1984. The novel’s structure showcases the stylized self-awareness that is characteristic of postmodernism. The author dispenses with much of the traditional structure of a novel and instead uses striking combinations of imaginative and didactic digressions to sketch the character of the protagonist, Dr. Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired physician obsessed by the quest to understand fully the 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert.
Braithwaite, the novel’s first-person narrator, relates his adventures on the trail of Flaubert’s deepest secrets, but along the way he also gradually reveals his own secrets. As a narrator, Braithwaite is witty and learned without being pedantic, and his enthusiasm for all things Flaubertian is contagious. The particular object of his quest is the stuffed parrot Flaubert kept at his desk while writing one of his most famous short stories, A Simple Heart (Un cœur simple). When he finds stuffed parrots in two different museums that each claim to have the genuine item, his zeal is fired.
Braithwaite retraces Flaubert’s travels in France and reviews the details of the writer’s life, even allowing Louise Colet, the actress with whom Flaubert had an affair while writing Madame Bovary, to speak for herself in a chapter redolent of feminine French charm. Everywhere he goes, and in everything he learns about Flaubert, he discovers parrots of one sort or another.
As Braithwaite continues his search, what began as a story of a retired doctor and a deceased novelist expands to become the story of three couples: Braithwaite and his deceased, adulterous wife; Flaubert and Louise Colet, caught up in their illicit affair; and the adulterous Madame Bovary and her cuckolded husband, Charles. Gradually, the reader realizes that Braithwaite’s obsessive pursuit of Flaubert is also a compulsive evasion of his own memories of his wife. Her death haunts him, as does the weighty knowledge that he loved her more than she loved him, if she loved him at all.
Barnes places his erudition on display throughout the novel, filling it with literary allusions, ironic jokes, parrot lore, and parody; he does so, however, with a light touch. Readers who are just beginning to enjoy serious literature will miss many of the novel’s references, but they should be able to enjoy the many ironies Braithwaite uncovers. Even experienced readers may find that the novel ripens upon repeated readings as greater depths and further parallels become apparent.
Bibliography
Kermode, Frank. “Obsessed with Obsession,” The New York Review of Books, 25 April 1985, 15.
Scott, James B. “Parrot as Paradigm: Infinite Deferral of Meaning in Flaubert’s Parrot,” Ariel 21, no. 3 (1990): 57–68.
Updike, John. “A Pair of Parrots,” The New Yorker, 22 July 1985, 86.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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