“Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and Sexual “Perversion”

Abstract

Published first in in 1984, Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot remains author's most cited, and perhaps most read, novel. Its attraction to critics and readers lies secondarily, perhaps, in its psychological realism, its investment in story of Geoffrey Braithwaite's troubled relationship with his wife Ellen, and knowledge it imparts about great French author Gustave Flaubert. Its primary interest may lie in its clever metafictional denaturalization of realistic plot. Simultaneously a biography of Flaubert, an undermining of any lingering faith in objectivity, and a contemporary English love story, Flaubert's Parrot garnered substantial critical attention as an instance of breed of postmodernism that Linda Hutcheon labels historiographic metafiction (xiv). Critical approaches to novel, and to Barnes's oeuvre in general, have since hewn fairly narrowly to two well-trodden paths. The first treats Barnes's work under rubric of psychological realism, treating formal experimentation and self-reflexivity as by-products of character or authorial psychology. The second adopts Barnes as an exemplar of aesthetic postmodernism, particularly a kind of apolitical postmodernism that may interrogate and undermine historical and philosophical reality but is little influenced by, or has little impact on, sociopolitical order of day. Not coincidentally, as critical attention in past twenty-five years has turned ever more resolutely toward holy trinity of race, gender, and class, Barnes criticism has been less voluminous than criticism of many of his contemporaries who are easily read under these auspices. (1) Barnes is in danger of becoming critically passe because of his link to an aesthetic postmodernism that is misread as insufficiently political for current critical climate. While Barnes's most recent novel, Arthur and George, dips a cautious toe into postcolonial waters, majority of his work engages less exotic other of France, suburban middle class, and that most passe of romantic/sexual institutions, marriage. When, in 1990, Martin Amis scornfully noted that the typical English novel is 225 sanitized pages about middle classes (qtd. in Elias 19), he may as well have been referring to his friend/protege/rival Barnes, whose work, especially at that early stage of his career, tended to be slim and focused firmly on white, bourgeois, married (or formerly married) English couples. (2) Although rarely sanitized, Barnes's work may seem increasingly out of touch with multiethnic or sexually ambiguous new England of recent authors such as Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Caryl Phillips, Timothy Mo, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Caryl Churchill, Angela Carter, et al. While Barnes cannot justifiably be called conservative, his consistent treatment of white bourgeois marriage in Metroland, Before She Met Me, Staring at Sun, Talking It Over, Love, Etc., and of course Flaubert's Parrot, no doubt contributes to his relative lack of critical attention. It is true that many of above-named authors have also been labeled postmodern at various times, but it seems that they are more easily adopted into alternative camps as well. Rushdie, Mo, and Phillips are easily seen as politically important writers of race and immigration, Winterson and Carter address feminist and queer concerns, and Smith, Kureishi, and Churchill have critical good fortune of falling into both camps. I do not wish to recoup Barnes's work here by arguing for a return to aesthetic and philosophical at expense of political. Rather, I wish to suggest that Barnes has more in common with his more flamboyant contemporaries than critics have typically noticed. To wit, white, bourgeois, heterosexual veneer of Barnes's work, and especially Flaubert's Parrot, is just that, a veneer, and novel consistently undercuts, questions, and reveals it as false or, at very least, tenuous. …