Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

How do we write biography? Well, depending on whether the subject has shuffled off this mortal coil or not, we could talk to them or else their relatives, friends, and enemies. Most likely we will spend a lot of time in archives, scattered around the country or world, reading journals and diaries, letters, and memoirs. To recreate the past we may need to read some history books, or better yet newspapers. If we are writing about a creative person we ought to read their books or watch their films, over and over. And yet if we do only this, we may still end up with something rather soulless.

Richard Holmes employed the “footsteps method”. He would literally retrace the steps of his quarries throughout their lives, allowing himself to imagine his way into their lives in a way that merely memorising poetry could not do. I myself have been to a Dostoevsky house museum in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, two Tolstoy ones in the former city, and there is a Dickens museum not far from me where I am now staying in London. Sometimes seeing these old places can really bring the writers back to life, but more often it seems to be the objects inside them that do that. The Akhmatova museum in Petersburg stands out as doing a great job of reminding me how awful that period of the Soviet Union was for many of its people.

Julian Barnes’ novel and non-fiction work, Flaubert’s Parrot, is an attempt at writing a biography of Flaubert. I say attempt only because its failure is deliberate, and the fault of the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, rather than his creator. We learn a great deal about Flaubert, but far more about the nature of biography. Each chapter seems to employ a different approach to dealing with Flaubert as if Braithwaite is trying to work out which approach will stick. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

We have a chronology chapter, which contains three different chronologies of Flaubert’s life with a little bit of editorial commentary. In the first, Flaubert emerges as a successful, cheery, and social being; in the second his life is one of misery, disappointment, and financial problems; the third is made of extracts from his letters. Each chronology, in fact, quotes from Flaubert, but each ends up leading to an entirely different impression of the man. The authority that we expect to come from the primary source – his letters – only serves to make us look silly for trusting any of the chronologies at all. One message we might take away is just how easy biography, even a simple chronology, can be used to manipulate or mislead.

Another chapter imagines Louise Colet, Flaubert’s legendary mistress (who saved an awful lot of his most fascinating letters for us lucky readers in posterity), and the story she would tell of him. This is imaginative biography, giving us another perspective. One chapter looks at Flaubert through the various animals he used to compare himself to (bears, dogs, sheep, camels etc); another looks at him through the books he hadn’t written, the decisions he hadn’t made in life – a sort of “what if” biography; still another explores his attitude to that most awful of modern inventions, the choo-choo train. What is so brilliant about Flaubert’s Parrot is that each of these angles manages, even while occasionally (deliberately) sharing choice extracts from the letters and novels, to tell us something new about Flaubert, and cast him in a completely different light. Nothing alone, certainly not traditional biography, can fully capture the soul.

A murky patch in Flaubert’s biography concerns an English governess, so Barnes creates some letters that have fallen into the hands of a rival academic (Braithwaite is actually a doctor) which would blow open the academic consensus and bring our narrator fame and glory. The academic relates the story of how he came upon these letters, tells what they contained, but finally informs Braithwaite that he burned them out of respect for Flaubert’s wishes on the matter. Our narrator is outraged – his chances at fame and glory have gone down drastically.

But here there is also something else at play. Biography is often about solving mysteries, eliminating those last few blank spots in the chronology with a fantastic discovery. One of the most memorable pieces of Holmes’ Footsteps concerns his travels around Italy, attempting to work out the truth of Percy Shelley’s relationship with Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife during their own time there. Biography is about taking control over the past and bringing it into order, and Braithwaite has just had the past rebuff him. There were several times as I was reading Flaubert’s Parrot where I thought of W.G. Sebald’s novels – Austerlitz or The Emigrants. In both we have a narrator attempting to recover the past, by all possible means, only to be disappointed. It is not so easy to recapture the world.

Just as literature is not the real world, so too is a biography of a literary figure not the same as that of a friend. Initially, our impression of Braithwaite places him as one of those stock characters we see in 20th-century fiction – the cynical old man spitting on the world and obsessed with his work. For example, Braithwaite gets more upset by moments in Flaubert’s life than he does revisiting memories of his participation in the Second World War. During the chapter involving the letters, he seems positively monomaniacal. But as the book progresses, we get hints of a troubled relationship with his wife, and finally her suicide. For example, we linger longer on the topic of adultery than perhaps even a book on Flaubert warrants.

All this puts the experiments at writing Flaubert’s life in a new light. We might say that Braithwaite is trying to work out what kind of biography might allow him to make sense of his own life, his own loss. Is it a little dictionary of important people, or is it a fictionalised telling of his wife’s side of things? His cynicism finally seems more tragic than tedious, because we see immediately what it takes him a whole book to realise – that life and literature, research, and intimate biography, are separated by a chasm:

“Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

Fiction is a way of building a world where things make sense. And biography is just fiction that sticks close to its source material. But life does not make sense. Letters are burned, lives are ended, in ways that are incomprehensible, and no moral waits for us at the end of the tunnel. Flaubert’s Parrot tells us about Flaubert, and it tells us about Braithwaite’s wife. But it is only Flaubert who seems comprehensible by the book’s end, only Flaubert whose actions can be explained by whichever explanation offered by the book seems to make the most sense to us.

We come away from the novel with a sense of a world that is limited. After the humour (which Flaubert’s Parrot is full of) and the literary games, there comes unease. Biography is so much less comprehensive than we had previously imagined, so much less respective of the truth – because we see that the truth is impossible to determine. Literature appears a refuge, as always, but a cowardly one. And so, we return to the real world, uncertain, because that’s the only thing for it.

I really enjoyed the novel, in case that does not come through. It’s really good fun, and its experimentation serves an obvious purpose. At the same time, it is informative on Flaubert in a way that feels far more useful than a full biography. For example, there’s a chapter on common complaints about Flaubert (his politics, his pessimism, his women) and their rebuttals. This kind of approach is far more exciting and dynamic than just a footnote in a stodgy tome. The novel achieves what the best experimental fiction of our age does – it reveals that there are more ways to read and write than we had hitherto realised and that what is familiar may not even be the best. In this Flaubert’s Parrot is not just inspiring, it’s vital too.

Richard Holmes – The Age of Wonder

Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder takes us into the period between about 1760 and 1830, a time of rapid change in the sciences – and indeed everywhere else. In literary and philosophical matters, we saw the rise of Romanticism, a counterforce to the stodgy orderliness of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason and humanity’s perfectibility. Romanticism, against that backdrop, emphasized a rather more complex view of human nature and the world, one full of the interplay between light and dark, reason and unreason, and chaos and order, where nothing was ever quite completed and put away neatly. It also, in poetry, in particular, brought attention to the importance of personal, subjective experience in a way that had never really been the case before. It is hard for us now to appreciate just how revolutionary Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were when it was first published in 1798.

In others of his books that I have read on this blog, Holmes has dealt with the heroes and heroines of British Romanticism – the likes of Keats, Shelley, and Byron. In the Age of Wonder, he puts forward a Romantic science, to go alongside literary Romanticism. Both science and art, he argues, are linked by a feeling of wonder. Romantic science and its popularizes took Romantic ideas of genius and work, that “ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery”, and used it to shape the myths it told about its famous figures – astronomers, explorers of continents and the contents of test tubes.

One of Holmes’ many achievements in the book is to draw together science and arts once more, to demonstrate to a new set of readers that the two cultures set out in C. P. Snow’s famous lecture of the same name need not be divided but ought instead to be harmonious. Coleridge and Humphry Davy inhaled laughing gas together, after all. But beyond simply making use of the material facts, it is Holmes’ particular artistic talent which serves this end. Holmes makes science exciting – to a non-scientist such as myself – by infusing it with flesh and blood. The Age of Wonder is the fruit of countless years of research. It takes figures from the past and brings them into immediacy so that their discoveries seem to matter, not just for us, whose world is based upon the past, but for their contemporaries. We see just how revolutionary, for example, Davy’s safety lamp for mining was, because Holmes recreates the world of the miner – ugly, dirty, brutish, and short.

We meet a cast of characters ranging from Joseph Banks, who in his youth was an explorer and botanist and who later came to lead the Royal Society (Britain’s great academy for the sciences) for over forty years, to William Herschel and his sister Caroline, Germans from Hanover who after emigrating to England came to revolutionize our understanding of the stars. Although the focus is on British science, Holmes gives us a sense of how European science was at the time, highlighting the connections between figures like Lichtenberg and Humboldt in the German lands, Linnaeus further North, and various French scientists, with their British counterparts.

At the same time, Holmes shows an increasing politicisation of science that is now somewhat familiar. Much of the book takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, and although these wars were punctuated by years of peace, relations between France and Britain were not always cordial. British scientists were often awarded prizes in France which they were kindly advised not to collect. The technology of hot air balloons, which to us now seems so innocent, once was a source of great anxiety, as it was feared that the French could use it to send an entire army across the Channel to catch the British by surprise. 

Perhaps this is most obvious in the case of Mungo Park. He was an explorer from Scotland who took two journeys in West Africa around the turn of the century. The first time he travelled almost on his own, a kind of proto-backpacker, relying on the kindness of the locals he met to see him safely home. The result of this was kidnap and torture, and his papers only survived because they were stored safely in his hat. Still, rather surprisingly, Park made it out of Africa and told his tale. He returned to country life in Scotland but grew restless. He declared he “would rather brave Africa and all its horrors” than stay in these “lonely heaths and gloomy hills”. He organized another expedition, but this time his financial backing came from the Colonial Office. Instead of a one-man jaunt, he led nearly a hundred soldiers. As happened all too often, a few cheery letters arrived from the coast and then rumour ended up being all was left of Park. Captain Cook, whose arrival at Tahiti begins The Age of Wonder, also died after peaceful methods of engaging with natives were replaced by a more aggressive, violent, and indeed imperial approach.

Holmes’ telling of Park’s story is gripping. It wouldn’t look out of place next to Lytton Strachey’s tale of General Gordon in Eminent Victorians. Of course, that is why Holmes’ book is so effective. This is less a work of history than a group biography, “a relay race of scientific stories,” that “link together to explore a larger historical narrative”. Through these stories – of balloonists and astronomers, physicians, and inventors – we have a sense of history passing.

Though there are dates, this is not history as a cascade of facts. We see time passing through the ageing and decline of a cast of characters. Joseph Banks goes from a spry young man to a gout-ridden old one, Davy suffers a stroke and a rapid decline. Almost without noticing it, we realise that one cast of characters has, by the book’s end, been shifted out for another. William and Caroline Herschel have been replaced by their son John, Charles Babbage has come onto the scene, and Michael Faraday has begun to eclipse his mentor Davy. With them, Holmes stops.

Though we wish he could continue forever, his endpoint is not an arbitrary one. Science and artistic Romanticism could coexist for a good reason. Wonder was the natural feeling of these scientists because they could more or less maintain Christian belief as they worked. Their discoveries seemed to reveal God’s greatness – the watchmaker analogy suggested by William Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity – more than they did His absence. There was not as yet a pronounced sense that science was undermining God.

But by the end of The Age of Wonder, this is much less true. Materialism, founded on a sense of deep time and deep space, begins chipping away at the old certainties. And when the book finally ends with Charles Darwin setting off in 1831 towards the discoveries that would make his name, we have a sense almost of apprehension. Gone are the days when a man like Davy could write bad poetry and play with gases, or Novalis could journey into the depths of the earth to look at rocks before writing poetry that actually works. The armies have been drawn up – the artists, retaining their romantic ethos; and the scientists, retaining their commitment to truth. To this day, there are too few connections between them.

Holmes’ work is itself a source of wonder. And for that, it already serves to begin building bridges between science and the arts. To restore the sense of wonder at science is essential to rekindling our present interest in it. The facts are never as important as we may claim they are, at least when we ourselves are not donning lab coats. An artistic approach, that teaches us to see in a new way by recreating the past and the excitement of its questions and problems, is what is truly necessary to make us more rounded readers and beings in the world. And that is exactly what The Age of Wonder provides.

More Holmes can be found here and here.

Cormac McCarthy – The Crossing

The world that Cormac McCarthy creates in The Crossing is one that we can conceive but are grateful not to inhabit. Its keynotes are death, violence, and injustice. The story of Billy Parham and his journey through Mexico, first with a wounded wolf and then with his brother, is one of such desperate bleakness that even reading it is a challenge. There is such failure that we are left asking what the point of all the suffering Billy experiences is. But McCarthy’s language lifts us and his work’s world into something mythic and timeless so that against the darkness there is also a corresponding array of powerful sources of ways to make sense of the world. The fundamental tension of the work lies between these meaning making methods and the world that they attempt to make meaning for. For this is a terrible place, and it does not let itself be redeemed lightly.

The first part of the Crossing is really a novella in itself. Billy Parham and his father attempt to track down a pregnant wolf which has crossed into their land in New Mexico. When Billy catches the wolf, though, he decides to take her back to her home in the mountains across the border rather than kill her. And so, he abandons his family and goes with the limping wolf down to the south, where she is confiscated by the local authorities as “contraband” and then put into a fair.

Billy’s reasons for saving the wolf are murky at best. He is not a talkative person. At one point he says “I’m goin to take her down there and turn her loose”; at several others the narrator reports him saying “that the wolf had been entrusted to his care but that it was not his wolf and he could not sell it”. A strange and even rather modern sense of environmental stewardship animates him, of returning some order to nature which we are responsible for damaging.

This is Billy’s meaning, in this first part of the book – to save the wolf, to set things right. But it does not work. The truth and justice he feels in his soul remain there only. He finds at the fair a stand reflecting little the reality he knows: “they’d rigged a makeshift tent of sheeting over the little tumbril of a cart and they’d put up a sign at the front that gave her history and the number of people she was known to have eaten”. Later on, she is taken to an estate and there she is set upon by dogs for the pleasure of a great mass of onlookers.

It is at this point that Billy steps into the ring to protect her, but the young man in control of the estate stops him and tells him a different story of the wolf to Billy’s own because he is powerful and Billy is not. Billy’s truth is obliterated and with it his power to save the wolf from death: “he looked like a man standing on a scaffold seeking in the crowd some likeness to his own heart.”

Billy manages to bury the wolf’s bones. But as for his mission, it is a failure. When he returns home after his doomed enterprise, he finds an empty house covered in bloodstains. His parents have been murdered, the horses stolen, perhaps in an act of revenge for Billy’s transgression south of the border, perhaps for a moment of kindness earlier in the book. In any case, he reunites with his younger brother, Boyd, who had hidden, and together they go south once more, in an attempt to set things right and recover the horses. The Crossing then follows their journey, with its failures and disappointments, to its inevitably grim conclusion.

A journey itself is a thing that gives structure to a life. It’s a narrative, clear and simple. But the structure it gives is not a thing that stabilises a life – it merely lets us understand it at a glance by seeing its shape. That is one of the truths of the novel. Billy crosses over into Mexico several times throughout The Crossing, but are we to take these as separate journeys or instead as one thing? On the way back home after the death of the wolf, Billy meets some Indians. The elder of them tells him “he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself.” And what is The Crossing if not a story of just such an estrangement, built page by dreadful page?

In the novel’s third part the two brothers encounter a prima donna gypsy they had met earlier. Her words also speak to a truth of journeys, similar to the previous one – namely that journeys are not necessarily a thing that binds people but rather a thing that leaves the distances between them unbridged:

Long voyages often lose themselves.

Mam?

You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travellers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all… You will see. The shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that wears that shape but only the one. And every voyage begun upon it will be completed. Whether horses are found or not.

McCarthy’s world is a world that is not godless so much as ruled over by the shadow of a cruel god, an Old Testament God perhaps. We have people who seem truly cursed, like Job, to suffer. But there is a God here, or the potential for Him: “God [does not] whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair.” This is God, but no comforting spirit.

Near the end of the book, Billy meets a woman who is praying. He asks her whom she prays for and receives the following answer:

“She said that she only prayed. She said that she left it to God as to how the prayers should be apportioned. She prayed for all. She would pray for him.”

Having read hundreds of pages of The Crossing by this point we may find the woman slightly absurd. What use are prayers, when the world is so full of evil – proper evil, incomprehensible and earth-shattering? But the narrator turns this idea on its head. They ask instead how many tragedies the woman’s prayers might have averted. Perhaps, they suggest, we should instead be grateful to her, and others like her. Without them who knows how much worse the world would be.

This is what I like about McCarthy. He creates a distinctive image of the world, but he also leaves much about its inner nature up for debate. We cannot say whether God is absent here, or merely next-to-powerless. Justice, as with the wolf, is rare, but it does exist. Billy and Boyd have some success in retrieving their horses, no matter their subsequent failures, after all – and not just because they carry their father’s shotgun. Kindness does come, and beauty is all around us. The important thing is that in this world questions concerning its deeper nature do not seem an afterthought but are essential to our very survival.  

Perhaps the most extraordinary, unforgettable scene in The Crossing involves a doctor. He comes to deal with a bullet wound and for page, after page, we are treated to his work, detail by detail. We are there in the dark, watching the operation by the light of flickering candles, like guests in a painting by Rembrandt. And yet there is barely any dialogue, no philosophy. The plot would not suffer if the section were drastically cut. Yet taken as a whole it represents a world beyond violence, of healing and of care. It is a moment of redemption in a sea of pain.

We find ourselves in a world where things matter. Death and violence leave us unable to hide behind such structures as society and its rules when constructing our own meanings. Instead, we have to sort things out for ourselves. Every man and woman in The Crossing is a philosopher. Their religions and philosophies and narratives may be false, but nobody reading the book can doubt that they come from a passionate engagement with the reality of their world. That is why, indeed, McCarthy’s philosophising never gets dull – it is always pertinent because it is never a choice for his characters. Montaigne wrote that “to philosophise is to learn how to die.” Nobody knows this more truly than do the characters of McCarthy’s world, for whom evil and death lurk around every corner.