The Perpetual Quest for Author(ity) and Authenticity in Flaubert’s Parrot

Abstract

Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is significant in its employment of metafiction, which is one of the key characteristics of the postmodern novel. Flaubert’s Parrot can be defined as a self-reflexive text, which is utterly aware that it is fiction. Moreover, it presents an intertextual network, which connects Gustave Flaubert’s Un coeur simple and Madame Bovary with the fictional amateur biographer Geoffrey Braithwaite’s narrative. The narrator/protagonist Braithwaite’s quest for truth and certainty, ironically, creates a multi-layered narrative involving multiple points of view. The novel’s portrayal of (the lack of) truth, knowledge, and certainty becomes more conspicuous with the twenty-first century’s emphasis on post-truth. The novel questions the relationship between real life and fiction, and the parrot becomes the embodiment of this mutual relationship. Furthermore, it can be argued that the imitative nature of the parrot emphasizes the relationship between life and art as well. With this semi-biographical novel Barnes not only fictionalizes Flaubert but also poses existential questions to critics and scholars. The speculations concerning an author’s life and the creativity of the biographer accentuate the (lack of) boundaries between fact and fiction, life and art, author and critic. That is the reason why the primary aim of this paper is to display this novel’s relation to postmodernism as well as the nature of the collaboration and/or the battle between the author and the biographer/critic/academic.