Flaubert's parrot

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Flaubert's Parrot is the German title of the novel by Julian Barnes , which was originally published under the title Flaubert's Parrot and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1984 .

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The novel recounts the thoughts of the former English country doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite about the life of Flaubert and his own life as he tries to find the stuffed parrot who once inspired the great author. In order to suppress the grief over his late wife Ellen, who not only shares her initials with Flaubert's fictional character Emma Bovary , Braithwaite embarks on a search for clues in the relics of the life and work of the French novelist.

He visits France and there the various places connected with Flaubert. When he visits several small Flaubert museums , he notices that two of them each claim to exhibit the stuffed parrot that stood briefly on Flaubert's desk. Finally, while trying to figure out which parrot is the right one, Geoffrey must discover that it may not be either, but it could be one of fifty others that are kept in a large French natural history museum. His attempt to obtain a consistent biographical picture of the French author fails. The past, both in the person of Flaubert and in the figure of his wife, increasingly eludes him.

The main narrative line follows the search for the parrot's originality, but the book also contains many chapters that exist independently and Geoffrey's reflections on topics such as Flaubert's love life and how it was influenced by trains , or about the animal images in Flaubert's works and about them Animals with which Flaubert identified himself, such as the bear .

Narrative technique and meaning of the work

One of the main features of the novel, like postmodernism as a whole, is subjectivism . For example, the novel presents three biographies of Flaubert one after the other : the first is optimistic , lists some of his successes, the second is pessimistic , names the deaths of his friends and loved ones, his failures and illnesses, and the third is a collection of quotations that Flaubert in wrote in his diary at different times in his life. Another example can be found in the repeated examination of the eyes of the figure Emma Bovary, to which Flaubert ascribes three different colors.

Trying to find the real Flaubert is reflected in trying to find his parrot and ends just as fruitless. Flaubert's parrot becomes a central and multi-layered symbol of the novel, in which Barnes not only addresses the question of the truth about the life of the French novelist, but also focuses on the search for an understanding of the biography of the first-person narrator . In the end, the novel shows the failure of every attempt to authentically capture a person's life.

Flaubert's parrot also represents a lot of what characterizes Barne's entire narrative: diverse intertextual references, here for example to Flaubert, Vladimir Nabokov or Philip Larkin and other authors, a special predilection for French literature and culture, a typically British sense of humor or subtle irony as well as a stylistic penchant for the forms of representation of the essay and epigram with extremely polished formulations.

Likewise attacks Flaubert's Parrot on key issues of Barnes, who also appear in his other works at various points again. These include above all the relationship between art and life, the distinction between being and appearance as well as an obsessive preoccupation with the past both as an external, objectively comprehensible history ( historia ) and as an internal history memorized in the subjective memory ( memoria ). Barnes' obsession with the past provides the constantly recurring starting point for an epistemological, often aporetic search for truth and meaning.

With its experimental mixture of novel narration, literary critical essay, quotation collage and story box, Flaubert's parrot is counted among the most outstanding representatives of the postmodern novel in literary studies and literary criticism.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber, Hubert Zapf and Annegret Maack: The novel after 1945 . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 403-422, here p. 416.
  2. ↑ See Christoph Henke: Barnes, Julian [Patrick] . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 30f .