Double Bind

Letters

Vol. 5 No. 17 · 15 September 1983

From Robert Wilcocks

SIR: When Julian Barnes’s grudging review of Hazel Barnes’s book on Sartre’s Flaubert appeared (LRB, Vol. 4, No 10) I was tempted to write a point-by-point rebuttal. As you know, I resisted the temptation. Today, having read his ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ (Vol. 5, No 15), I am glad I held my peace. As Grand used to exclaim in La Peste: ‘Hats off, gentlemen!’ I cannot remember having been so hugely entertained by a piece in the LRB. C’est hénaurme! The paragraph beginning ‘I thought of writing books myself once’ is a masterpiece of concision and wilful compression, inviting, almost inciting, the reader to imagine the wealth of experience and sensibility behind the ‘life’ so discreetly suggested. Indeed, the construction of the whole ‘story’ would have brought a smile of complicitous admiration from Flaubert. It is one of the most joyous celebrations of writing, the kind that makes one wish to clasp the hand that wrote it and say, ‘I know what you mean!’, even at the risk of presumption. Two points occur to me with regard to the parrot in Un Coeur Simple. Barnes’s sly introduction to the death of Félicité and the fleeting transfiguration of the bird undermines (deliberately?) his commentary: ‘the intention is neither satirical, sentimental nor blasphemous.’ The intention, such as one can divine it, of the whole story is indeed probably none of those things and the central character is evidently one for whom Flaubert felt compassion and respect. Nonetheless, something within him, it seems to me – shades of le Garçon? – could not prevent the drollery of the transfigured parrot from appearing on the page. The magisterial control of tone rightly appreciated by Barnes in the quoted death scene produces a veritable microcosmographia of writing: the whole spectrum from pathos to bathos and, in this reader at least, reactions from ambiguous empathy to guffaws of Pythonesque ribaldry. I have tried several times to read that entire scene aloud with a straight face. Impossible.

The other point which may encourage Julian Barnes to further literary thoughts is the bird’s ‘ridiculous name’: Loulou. It is only one consonant removed from the surnom of Sartre, which, to his irritation, his mother used even in his mature years: ‘Vous avez lu le dernier livre de Poulou?’she would ask their acquaintances. From Loulou to Saint-Esprit is perhaps no more fanciful than the passage from Poulou to Jean-Paul Sartre. Barnes could certainly write a cadenza on his phrase: ‘Is the writer much more than a sophisticated parrot?’

Robert Wilcocks
Beer, Devon