Flaubert's parrot

[booky]

Here is my thesis: "In Flaubert's parrot the main protagonist, Geoffrey Braithwaite, himself can be regarded as Flaubert's parrot since he cannot find words on his own but can only copy Flaubert"
Do you agree, disagree? Why? I'm looking forward for your replies!

[terefere]

Very interesting suggestion, I am returning to the reading.

[dawnoshiro]

I'm not sure what you mean by "he can only copy Flaubert."

Are you talking about Braithwaite as a writer, or the fact that he quotes Flaubert a lot and obsesses about his life?

For now, I think I'm going to have to disagree. To me, Braithwaite isn't "copying" Flaubert--he's using the writer's life to filter his own experiences and his quest is more like a way to distract himself from his own problems. The parrot becomes symbolic of the search for truth and authenticity, not only in Flaubert's life, but his own.

[booky]

Thank you very much for your replies.
By "he can only copy Flaubert" I meant that, as is obvious in the "Pure Story", he cannot find words to tell his and Ellen's story and therefore always uses quotes by FLaubert to tell his story. Like a parrot, he uses very short phrases that seem like imitations of what other people have said. There seems to be no meaning behind them. Just like a parrot, he imitates people, and as far as we know, he doesn't know the meaning of what he says.
But of course I agree that the parrot is also a symbol for truth and authenticity, I was just wondering whether this is all to it. Since the title is "Flaubert's parrot"....
Or maybe Braitwaite would wish to be like a parrot to Flaubert and to be able to tell his wife's story in the way FLaubert told Emma Bovary's story with the authorial abscence and no assessment of the characters? But he fails; just like the original parrot fails to be a close connection to the writer? Is this very confusing?!

[terefere]

This determination is justified. A parrot of Flaubert is a symbol of the voice of the writer - this definition appears in the fragment talking about the struggle of Flaubert with feeling the inadequacy of its writing tongue and the exaggerated tendency to metaphors (language is lying to the voice, and the voice is lying to thoughts). And so Geoffrey Braitwaite is a voice of Flaubert, of his adored writer, whose words he incessantly appoints, he is also a voice of JB, how I think.

[windmill9]

I am enjoying this thread!

Would any one care to comment on the apparent existence of more than one parrot.

[hushhush]

It seems to me that the problem of many parrots has two aspects.

1) Parrot as the voice of the writer
The key question here is perhaps: “how, and when, did a simple (if magnificent) living bird of the 1830s get turned into a complicated, transcendent parrot of the 1870s?” The writer's voice is changing and one parrot is not enough. Issues related there are too: "on est parlé" (Flaubert's conviction) and the case of Henry K. - the writer who lost his voice.

2) The writer as a parrot.
Museum magazine, purgatory, in which parrots (writers) are being stored in order to replace friends eaten by moths or démodé - it is hard to resist the analogy with the academic criticism of literature. With fifty Amazonian parrots survived only three. (“Why should they hold on to fifty Amazonian parrots? They would only decay. I don't know how many they have now. I should think the Museum got rid of most of them.”) Three colourful parrots sprinkled with the pesticide are writers from the list unfortunate Doctor Enid Starkie et consortes. Matched to academic schedules, waiting for their time. It very sophisticated and merciless diagnosis.

[Felicite]

‘Since the first time I set my eyes on him, I knew he was special,unique.. Sometimes the sun,as it came through the little window,caught his glass eye,so that it shot out a great luminous ray. That,just that, was enough to sent me into ecstasy. But even after his death,he kept haunting my dreams….


Until I discovered his book: part-biography, part fiction, part essay, part satire, part literary criticism but as a whole, a sly, elegant and witty piece of literature…. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, page by page, chapter by chapter and even though I was not one of his fans, I became the admirer of this entertaining and tireless truth-seeker who reminded me so much of him and his stubbornness ,when he denied talking in the presence of others. Is this book written like taking revenge on his behalf?


A biographer should neither be a defender nor a judge. And anyway could or should a biographer know everything? The truth can be deformed even unintentionally as a result of the temporal distance of a described event and  anyway, ‘knowing everything is confusing’... But then who is he? A puer aeternus? Or an old cynic with a puella anima? He is a writer and as a writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.


I don’t know when or how I’ll depart for my eternal journey, but I just hope that when the time comes,he’ll be hovering above my head, as the heavens would part, to receive me…’


FLAUBERT’S PARROT closes 30 years since his first publication in 1984. Ezra Pound claimed that ‘literature is news that stays news’. Flaubert’s Parrot covers the biggest news story of the Father of Modernism told by one of his great grand(e)-sons, a story that would still be news for the next 30 years!!!



Ps: Could you imagine the  great grand(e)-son still alive in 30 years time? Then, I’ll be muttering ‘Cocu,mon petit coco’…….

[THE WRITER'S WRITER'S WRITER]

THIS IS WHO I AM ,et je pense que le secret d'ennuyer est celui  de tout dire!!!!
Now DISAPPEAR GREEK LOVER BOY,BECAUSE YOU DISTRUCT ME!!! AND OF COURSE ONLY YOU  COULD BRING ECSTACY

[dancing girl]

Hello, I am a student from China and is worrying about the graduation thesis now. My topic is about Julian Barnes,but lacks of resources.
There're papers I need.
1.Kermode, Frank, ‘Obsessed with Obsession’, New York Review of Books, 32:7 (25 April 1985);
2.Updike, John,‘A Pair of Parrots’, New Yorker, 61 (22 July 1985)
My Email: [e-mail]
I really need your help and thanks very much for your help!

[Rosalind Franklin]

“An abrupt parting, I know Lord Tennyson, but that’s the way it always is, isn’t it?” I thought when I started tearing off the ‘petals’ and throwing them into the ocean, while the seagulls were staring full of surprise! Until someone shouted “What are you doing?” and I quickly ditched the whole “Crimson Petal and the White” with the hope that it’d vanish into the abyss. I have to admit, I was fooled. I spend 6 months of my life hoping to read an unconventional Victorian masterpiece, until I realized on page 494(!) that I was dealing with a bullshit masterpiece(833 pages).

‘Extremely sophisticated’, said the Daily Telegraph. “If your IQ is 15,surely is”, I thought.

‘Faber is the master of the spine-tingling page –turner, while creating a wholly believable universe'. Says who? Oh, the “DAZED and CONFUSED”. Of course, there are some others who are closer to reality, like the Boston Globe which describes it, like ‘This year’s most entertaining novel’ or S.B.Kelly from Scotland on Sunday, who concludes that ‘from the opening pages it is clear that Faber writes some of the most ravishingly beautiful prose of any young writer’. Indeed Michel Faber is a very good writer and the narrative voice seductive; brought memories of James Joyce, Anthony Trollope and Henry James, but is it enough?

I guess that this novel could have claimed the Man Booker Prize , bearing in mind that books like “Amsterdam” and “the Sense of an Ending” got it (even though that would have upset John Sutherland, Martin Amis and some other English public-school boys ) , but could a book like ‘the Crimson Petal and the White’ stand next to ‘Atonement’ and ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’?


623 pages, yes 623 pages rustle over one another, full of words, full of all kinds of details, from smells to habits and sensations to describe 1,yes 1 year of the Rackham’s life. What is the result? The characters are swallow, one dimensional and never develop. All of them are flawed and unhappy and remain so until the end; there is no transformation, no depth, no metamorphosis. There is no search for the truth and many questions or subplots remain unanswered…. It takes Faber 1,yes 1 page, to kill and bury one of the main characters, yet he uses 40,yes 40 pages, rambling with the letters of the mad wife, who dies shortly afterwards?!! Gillian Bowditch from the Sunday Times wrote that “the Crimson Petal and the White is a compassionate and empathetic novel, while Faber’s problem is NOT his sense of alienation, but his surfeit of humanity”. We have surely been reading different books. For Faber, Sugar is a prostitute who enjoys giving blow-jobs, free professional advice and free child care services; for Faber, Sugar is and remains a sex slave who begs until the end her Master to give her another chance ( to offer Him what more?);for Faber, Sophie is a child with a mad mother who ignores(?) her daughter’s existence and an indifferent absent father ;Sophie ends up a child with a dead mother, an indifferent absent father and a mistress who uses her to play her own power games and finally abducts her. To take her where? To offer her what? ‘A bed.The warmest, cleanest bed in the whole world.’ Aren’t you impressed with this promise? For Faber, Emmeline Fox is an ethically motivated widow who remains a sexually repressed widow longing to change the world; for Faber, the Humanist Faber, having lost your son and brother 3 months ago and living with a mad wife, are minor details which do not prevent you from playing musical chairs and other silly games for Christmas….

And it took Faber 20 years to come up with all these ideas and interesting (?) characters. Oh! He was also assisted by a large number of people (almost 90),yes NINETY!!! Well, I guess that Flaubert and Tolstoy did not take the advice of 90 people in order to create ‘Madame Bovary’ and ‘Anna Karenina’. I guess that Julian Barnes was NOT shaken by Senior Amis’s look, when he tried to explain what he was planning to do with ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’. He just did it.

Michel Faber started this novel in his 20s,when he was in Australia and feeling angry. In his 30s he discovered Scotland. He was offered a room with a view, a pot of tea and a packet of digestive biscuits and was convinced that he was in Heaven, a rather remote Heaven and he had to transform his anger and despair into something positive?!! If ‘Madame Bovary’ is Flaubert, like himself claimed, then ‘Sugar’ is Michel Faber. If Flaubert is a misogynist, then Michel Faber is a masochist. And if both novels bear a vision of meaninglessness and balance above the two abysses of lyricism and vulgarity, the difference is that Flaubert did NOT let the editors to take full charge of the publication and create something good, instead of something imperfect and padded, while Faber was convinced to change characters and plot, he was convinced to betray himself. Do you trust an author who betrays Himself?

When I buy a book by Michel Faber, I expect to read a book written by Michel Faber, not by Michel Faber and Friends.

When I buy a buy a book by David Mitchell, I expect to read a book written by David Mitchell, not by David Mitchell Corporation.

If you read “the Crimson Petal and the White”, you'd realize that Faber was the owner of a diamond , valued at the prize of a crystal Swarovski. And don’t get me wrong: I am a fan and have a great selection of Swarovskis, but, as they say, Diamonds are forever….. It would have been Faber’s autobiographical writing that would have allowed him to expand on his own subjectivity and create complex characters.

The Honourable Byng has 2 choices: either publish or sell, along with  the unissued ‘Photograph of the Jesus’,novels written by Michel Faber Limited.
I wonder whether the original  “Brave Victorian World” would have ended with a bang,Byng,or a whimper?

[manosd]

Well my friend,what do you have to say after watching this?m.youtube.com/watch?v=4qzz_mieaeU[/a
Who is buying the things he says? And does he remember what he had said the previous 2 minutes? Is this the reclusive Michel Faber? Selling her illness,then her death and now her damaged childhood? He may look nice,softly spoken and talk like a loving husband,but for me he is an idiot and not ashamed to act like an idiot.

By the way I have started some stories.Should I send them to Michel Faber to correct them and then we could publish together ManosD.and Michel Faber?
He should not be wondering why people do not buy short stories,but for what reason they do not buy his short stories?!