Revisiting of Flaubert’s Literary Biography in Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot

Abstract

Julian Barne’s Flaubert’s Parrot is a historical novel that reinterprets Flaubert’s life from postmodernist perspective. It stands out of conventions of writing fiction in its content and style of historical representation; it is ‘a novel about novel’ which tells three separate stories of Flaubert’s life, the writer himself and Louise Coulet. The writer uses Geoffrey Braithwaite as the main narrator. The narrator is very obsessive about Flaubert’s life and wanders in research of the authenticity of ‘Flaubert’s parrot’ which Gustave Flaubert had taken from a Museum for writing his novel Un Coeur Simple. While revistiting Flaubert, he even adds his own personal stories. Thus, this novel is an outcome of a blending between ‘historical fact’ and ‘fiction or the subjectivity of the writer’. Barnes’s reinterpretation of Flaubert’s literary biography, in new historical perspective, questions on truth, problematizes historical understanding and unveils the realities of Flaubert’s life. The history itself is shown to be in crisis of autonomous existence through intertextuality and blurring of genres. New history explores the facts what previous historians forgot to write. Flaubert’s unquestioned literary personality has been shaken on the ground of his patriarchal values, and his authorial failure to escape the subjective reality despite his claim on scientism in style and Platonic belief in beauty, that he wanted a writer to write from observed fact and events and not to give solution or explanation to the problem but to represent social reality.