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Ouvrages Année : 2001

Flaubert's Parrot de Julian Barnes

Résumé

The aim of this study is to present a thorough examination of Flaubert's Parrot so as to determine its specificity and originality in contemporary British literature. The novel challenges any attempt at categorisation, classification and genre taxonomy, mixes fiction and non-fiction, and simultaneously exploits and subverts the need for structure. This study traces Julian Barnes' attachment to Gustave Flaubert and analyses the various forms of Flaubertian metatextuality, intertextuality and hypertextuality in the novel. It also focuses on the circulation of texts in Flaubert's Parrot which demands that the reader be active and take part in a form of intertextual game, and then on the linguistic medley between English and French, based on contrastive phenomena, literal translations and bilingual puns, whose aim is mainly humorous but also reveals the author's keen concerns about novelistic techniques. The book analyses the main features of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a self-conscious and reluctant narrator who wavers between a reluctance to discuss his private life, as emblematised by the indirections, delays, ellipses and gaps in the text, and a willingness to share with the reader the traumatic subject of his wife's adultery and suicide. Braithwaite creates a new form of biography which is hybrid, subjective, partial, incomplete and contradictory, hence reflecting the new awareness of the irretrievability of the past. Flaubert's Parrot presents itself as a historiographic metafiction in which the narrator does not consider historical or biographical knowledge as an unproblematic category, but questions the ways in which we come to know the past.
Hommage insolite de Julian Barnes à l' « homme-plume » français, Flaubert's Parrot se présente comme une célébration enthousiaste de l'écriture et de la littérature. Livre palimpseste, l'ouvrage propose une plongée vertigineuse dans l'univers flaubertien et évite les écueils de la biographie traditionnelle en entrecroisant plusieurs genres littéraires. La démarche polymorphe, hybride et audacieuse exige alors du lecteur une aptitude à assembler les pièces du puzzle que le narrateur, Geoffrey Braithwaite, a volontairement laissées éparses. Amateur éclairé de Gustave Flaubert et chercheur obsessionnel, Braithwaite s'interroge sur les modes et conditions de connaissance du passé mais il embrasse surtout cette entreprise passionnée afin de mettre à distance le drame personnel qui le taraude et s'immisce dans les failles et replis du discours. La présente étude entend rendre compte des chemins multiples et chaotiques tracés par un ouvrage qui, en 1984, a bousculé le paysage littéraire britannique.
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Dates et versions

halshs-00442914 , version 1 (23-12-2009)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00442914 , version 1

Citer

Vanessa Guignery. Flaubert's Parrot de Julian Barnes. Armand Colin, pp.140, 2001. ⟨halshs-00442914⟩
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