SOURCE: “Interred Textuality: The Good Soldier and Flaubert's Parrot,” in Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 41, No. 1, Fall, 1999, pp. 45–51.

[In the following essay, Brooks analyzes the relationship between Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.]

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.

—Flaubert's Parrot, 168

Toward the end of Flaubert's Parrot, Dr. Geoffrey Braithwaite ironically concedes his own failure because he has putatively tried to write a book to make sense of his own life. At the novel's conclusion, Braithwaite finds himself unable to say with certainty anything about his own life, his late wife, or his various investigations into the life of Flaubert. Indeed, even the books that had been so important to him no longer provide him with the Positivist assurances that he seeks; nor does his clear distinction between books and life prove tenable. Rather, Flaubert's Parrot, through its complex intertextuality that explores the relation between life and textuality, provides insight into a postmodern world where a stable version neither of history nor of books can be conceded.

Developing a new model of intertextuality has been central to many theories of postmodernism. This emphasis on intertextuality characterizes postmodern literature because, as Collins and others observe, it demonstrates “the highly discursive nature of contemporary culture” (64) where a greater and greater number of cultural productions vie for attention within fields of discourse that are themselves hyperreferential. Hutcheon notes, “[P]erhaps, parody can flourish today because we live in a technological world where culture has replaced nature as the subject of art” (82).¹ Thus, Collins states that “just as any given text may posit a model reader, it may also create a model field of discourses into which it is supposedly asserted” (43). Flaubert's Parrot seems to put itself very self-consciously within the field of postmodern explorations about textuality and history. This “transgeneric prose text” (58), as Scott calls it, is part novel and part criticism of both modern and postmodern theories of textuality. I will not offer a comprehensive argument concerning the text's intertextual framework (the book itself aggressively asserts that such analyses never are truly comprehensive anyway), but I will discuss how one important intertext that is never directly mentioned in the novel can clarify some of the issues Barnes is exploring through Braithwaite and Flaubert's Parrot.

One could summarize Geoffrey Braithwaite's story in Flaubert's Parrot as follows:

An upper-class gentleman tries to come to terms in a rational manner with his wife's death by writing a story that will give the reasons for that death, a death that occurs under somewhat suspicious circumstances and was possibly, although not officially, suicide. The gentleman wonders about his responsibility because the deceased was not only his wife but also his patient. The gentleman has trouble telling this story, so frequently he digresses or discusses other stories from books he has read. Eventually, the gentleman reveals directly that his wife had been unfaithful to him and that it is her adultery that he cannot understand. Ultimately, the gentleman determines that he must avoid the entanglements of love and emotion because they only bring distasteful confusion.

This is Dr. Geoffrey Braithwaite's story, but it is also the story of John Dowell, the narrator of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Yet the two stories have a central difference that demands acknowledgment before exploring further similarities. Because he lives in an age and a novel where Modernist assertions of order can be upheld, Dowell can return with seeming certainty to the correct interpretation of and accounting for events, ones that are appropriate to a “gentleman.” For Braithwaite no such unremitting codes of behavior and interpretation exist. Similarly, the very narrative structures of The Good Soldier and Flaubert's Parrot reveal Dowell's comfort with an artwork introducing order and Braithwaite's utter suspicion of all such ordering devices.

Numerous other similarities in the plots of the two men's stories contribute to our understanding of the two narrators. Both men have an obsession with transportation and digress frequently to discuss the quality of trains or train schedules. Significant sections of both stories take place on ships—Dowell sails from America to Europe; Braithwaite sails from England to France—and in each case the arrival on a new shore introduces the narrator's obsession with a culture not his own. English society fascinates the American Dowell; the Englishmen Braithwaite is enthralled by nineteenth-century France. Finally, both Dowell and Braithwaite, when not looking after their wives, prefer solitary pursuits. However, not only the similarities in plot provide a suggestive connection between the two books; the similarities in narration are perhaps more significant, particularly the narrator's relationship to his own fiction and to his audience.

Braithwaite and Dowell treat their wives as patients; they claim to be the “voice of reasoned authority,” and, thus, know what is best for the poor dependent. That self-righteous attitude extends to their treatment of the readers of the stories that they write. Braithwaite warns his readers that he may suppress certain information to avoid having them jump to hasty conclusions and then commends himself with “See how carefully I look after you” (95). Similarly, Dowell tells his readers that he will protect them from misinformation, so when he feels Lenora has exaggerated, he says “the figure seems so preposterous that I will not put it down” (59).

They take this proprietary stance because they see themselves as the “voice of reason,” of sensible, scientific understanding. Their attitudes result partly from their purported ability to be detached and uninvolved; the Flaubertian epigram that becomes Braithwaite's motto—“If you participate in life too much you don't see it clearly” (49)—is echoed by Dowell who claims to have the ability to tell the story of his wife and the Ashburnhams but still “look at it from the outside” (53). Their “emotional equilibrium” is such that in their marriages both men are “ready enough” to “refrain from [physical] manifestations of affection” (Ford 83) and yet believe they have happy marriages. Braithwaite says, “We were happy”; Dowell claims that the nine years he and Florence spent with the Ashburnhams were “nine years of uninterrupted tranquillity” (37). Indeed, their claims for such great degrees of detachment suggest that their own presences in the stories are negligible. Braithwaite contends: “My own is the simplest of the three [stories]—it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence” (86); Dowell writes, “I don't know that analysis of my own psychology matters at all to this story” (99).

Because each claims that sort of objective, unemotional detachment, both narrators have trouble putting their “love stories” onto paper. Each feels that his story needs to be told in a way that will set it apart from all other stories with which readers may be familiar. Braithwaite says Ellen's is “Pure Story” because it is true;² he even rationalizes telling all the “impure” stories in his narrative first because when the readers get to Ellen's story he wants them to have “had enough of books, and parrots, and lost letters, and bears, and the opinions of Dr. Enid Starkey, and even the opinions of Dr. Geoffrey Braithwaite” (86). Only then can the audience appreciate Ellen's sad story. Dowell calls his narrative “The Saddest Story” (Ford's original title for the novel). It, too, is filled with deferral and digression. Dowell's justification for his style of narration is remarkably similar to the one offered by Braithwaite

I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. […] I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem more real.

(167)

Both narrators convince themselves that they can objectively and dispassionately relate all the facts to readers, thus allowing them to see how they have been scandalously victimized. Both novels then demonstrate a certain skepticism toward the devices of realism they employ, but Flaubert's Parrot foregrounds that skepticism in a self-implicating way that is impossible in a carefully crafted modernist novel such as The Good Soldier.

It is this extraordinary self-delusion regarding their own objectivity that most closely connects Braithwaite and Dowell. In each book, the readers see a much different story than the one that the narrator thinks he tells. Ford and Barnes each employ a narrative voice that I can perhaps best describe as “first person witless”—the narrator acts as if he is an impartial witness to all the events, but his story betrays his complete ignorance. The readers then understand that the repeated deferral of the subject at hand reflects not some sort of narrative “purity,” but rather the narrators' inability to deal with the emotional issues they seek to address unemotionally. The readers see the irony of Dowell proclaiming, “I know nothing of the hearts of men” (14), because he also claims his function in life has been “looking after heart patients,” but his text has exposed him to be a “heartless” man. Similarly, Braithwaite's accusation that Ellen “didn't ever search for that sliding panel which opens the secret chambers of the heart” (127) really reveals instead his own inability to understand affairs of the heart. When Lenora in exasperation implores, “Don't you see what's going on?” (47), readers feel tempted to ask that same question of both Dowell and Braithwaite.

Whether or not Dowell and Braithwaite really do see “what's going on” and simply refuse, or are unable, to acknowledge it is irrelevant. What “is going on” can never be reconciled with their understandings of the necessary behaviors that will keep society from falling apart. Edward Ashburnham, who not only had an affair with Dowell's wife but who also behaved reprehensibly in many circumstances, is to Dowell the foundation of British society. After all, he descended from the Ashburnham who “accompanied Charles I to the scaffold” (12). So, despite Ashburnham's disgraceful activities, Dowell proclaims, “It is impossible of me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright, and honorable. That, I mean, is, in spite of everything, my permanent view” (107). Dowell sees the events of his saddest story as threatening “permanence, stability” (13), but he manages to retain, in spite of everything, his “permanent view.” Braithwaite wants “continuity, stability,” but for him they are transient: “a change of wind or tide could end it all” (82). Dowell finds, as illusory as it may be, an order; Braithwaite finds a tomb, “half morgue, half-purgatory” (190), where at the end of the book he must still equivocate about all he has related.

On the one hand, The Good Soldier is a classic modernist novel and has been critically praised as such. Typical of such comments are Ann Snitow's

Dowell ends by feeling that in the social sphere all that is fine is doomed to being burnt out, desecrated, made to appear mean and ridiculous. The personal life is romanticized here and society is the villain that ruins the purity of self. These are among the great themes of modernism, the war between different systems of meaning in a world where the center cannot hold, where no system has hegemony.

(186)

Other critics praise the text for its “heuristic” qualities and see in the novel a vision of order that stands as an alternative to the chaotic world. But The Good Soldier also can be read as a critique of any sort of modernist project that seeks to find in a work of art an alternative to the vital world. Dowell in fact constructs an alternative; his “saddest story” does bring an order to the events of his life, an order through which the individual can reassert the importance of tradition and still maintain “purity” of self. But Dowell pays a great price: “Yes,” he says, “society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits […] But then I don't like society much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire who has bought one of the ancient haunts of English peace” (227). Dowell's “purity of self” is as ironic as Braithwaite's “pure story.” The Good Soldier is an exceptional artistic construction, as close to a “pure story” as any novel, but “pure stories” can ultimately be only stories. Only if we wish to reduce ourselves to the absurdity of John Dowell can pure stories explain life outside of stories.

With The Good Soldier as intertext for Flaubert's Parrot, another turn is given to the ironic screw. Geoffrey Braithwaite's inability to feel any vital passions and his inability to understand the stories he tells renders him a latter-day version of Dowell. Like Dowell, Braithwaite, rather than seeking to tell the “truth,” turns to available fictions to reconstruct a truth by which he can continue to live. The fictions Dowell turns to are conventional codes of propriety, whereas Braithwaite's fictions are textual and discursive. However, Braithwaite discovers in postmodern society that even stories cannot tell tales that provide a secure foundation. The narrator of Flaubert's Parrot then is two steps removed from the narrator of The Good Soldier. Braithwaite takes the first step when he realizes that the codes of propriety that become Dowell's anchor no longer exist; he takes the second step when he realizes that the codes do not exist in stories either, whether the stories are called fiction or history. The master code that Dowell possesses may render him absurd, but it also allows him to continue living, free from the responsibility for his wife's death. Dowell's ability to accept a well-made story, even if a self-deceit, is his salvation. Dowell insists

Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality […] Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only flourish if the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.

(227)

Braithwaite, too, prefers the fictional to the vital:

Some abstain and observe, fearing both disappointment and fulfillment. Others rush in, enjoy, and take the risks: at worst, they might contract some terrible disease; at best, they might escape with no more than a lasting aversion to pulses. I know in which camp I belong.

(169)

Dowell and Braithwaite find themselves in the same camp, but Dowell's society, despite his aversion to it, allows him to remain safely cut off from responsibility. Braithwaite tries to find a safe haven in fictions because “books are where things are explained to you, life is where they aren't” (168), only to discover that things are not really explained even in books. Thus, Dowell can exonerate himself and be exonerated by society for the death of his wife. Braithwaite, although he is only guilty of the same blindness as Dowell, must acknowledge: “I switched her off. I stopped her living. Yes.” (168). The modernist Dowell is allowed to continue because he has a totalizing narrative that lets him decide that knowledge can be accepted as “truth”; Braithwaite is denied even this “bad faith”; epistemology winds up entombed in his text.

Hutcheon observes that “the object of parody is not always the parodied text, particularly in twentieth-century art forms” (50), and Flaubert's Parrot is certainly not simply about The Good Soldier. Rather, in resituating a very similar story, Barnes has been able to explore directly not only the changes in society that have rendered obsolete the codes that comforted Dowell, but more important, the changes in how stories are understood, those that deny Julian Barnes the codes available to Ford Madox Ford. Or better, Flaubert's Parrot demonstrates that the relationship that modernist texts posited between themselves and their audiences can no longer be accepted innocently. Flaubert's Parrot mentions dozens of other texts, but The Good Soldier is interred within the novel because it represents the very sort of textuality that Flaubert's Parrot suggests a postmodern culture renders impossible. The Good Soldier is a classic text of high modernism praised by many critics, not the least of whom is Ford himself, who in his dedicatory letter proclaims that in studying the text “I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references” (7). The suggestion is that through intricate construction all the references lead to a well-wrought whole, a self-contained artwork that can tell the story. In the opening paragraph of The Good Soldier, Dowell says he knew “Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them” (11). The book lets us feel we know the story of these Ashburnhams; conversely, Flaubert's Parrot ends with these words concerning which stuffed parrot may have actually inspired Flaubert, “perhaps, it was one of them” (190), suggesting that the lesson of the book is that the latter part of Dowell's observation (“we know nothing at all about them”) holds the truth. If The Good Soldier suggests the possibility of formal and social closure, even if that closure—as many have observed about modernist writing—is ironic; Flaubert's Parrot denies even that stance.

But Braithwaite himself also becomes interred within textuality so much that he does not hear a telephone ring but hears a telephone “imitate the cries of other telephones” (19) and when meditating upon his experiences in the war cannot recall “emotions; not even the memories of emotions” (18). Postmodern intertextuality can itself suggest an “interring” in a world of texts that cannot speak outside itself, or it can signal simply an awareness of factors governing all interpretation. As Hutcheon suggests, “parody is one of the techniques of self-referentiality by which art reveals its awareness of the context-driven nature of meaning, of the importance to signification of the circumstances surrounding any utterance” (85). Whereas a more standard notion of intertextuality suggests that allusion serves to clarify meaning in the later text, here we can also see the postmodern text destabilizing the modernist icon. Thus, Flaubert's Parrot can call into question what The Good Soldier means to a contemporary audience, but reading through the lens of The Good Soldier also can make clear what meanings are available within Flaubert's Parrot.

Notes

1. Hutcheon uses the term parody as interchangeable with intertextuality to such a point that in the index to The Politics of Postmodernism the listing intertextuality says simply, “see parody.”

2. Ford in his “Dedicatory Letter” to the story in the collected works claims of The Good Soldier “the story is a true story and […] I had it from Edward Ashburnham himself” (7).

Works Cited

Barnes, Julian. Flaubert's Parrot. London: Pan, 1984.

Collins, Jim. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. New York: Vintage, 1955.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Scott, James B. “Parrot as Paradigms: Infinite Deferral of Meaning in Flaubert's Parrot.” Ariel 21 (1990): 57–68.

Snitow, Anne Barr. Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984.