A Reader-Response Reading Of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot

Julian Barnes is one of the major contemporary British novelists who is often classified as a postmodern writer. In his thirty years of writing, he has experimented with many literary genres and styles, and is often inclined to include themes discussing the act of writing and reading in his fiction. Written in1984, his novel Flaubert’s Parrot is a daring experimentation on both fiction writing and biography writing. Different from previous researches on this novel, which focus either on the text or the author alone, this thesis aims to analyze this book from the perspective of the reader response theory. One of the main figures of this branch of theory, Wolfgang Iser, has always underscored the inseparability of the reader and the text in the meaning formation of the reading process, and this book is an entification of this argument. The novel is a parable of a reader’s reading process, and in a certain sense a special biography of the French writer Gustave Flaubert. This book uses a model of the actual reader to present the essentials embodied in Wolfgang Iser’s reader response theory:the motivation for reading, the factors at work in the process of reading and one of the many functions of literature.The novel uses its fictional protagonist Geoffrey Braithwaite as a model for the actual reader to show that, before and during the reading process, a reader seeks a writer of the past due to his need to sanctify a past writer and his urge of interpretation. The actual reader, Braithwaite, is an individual figure which has taken shape from the potentiality embodied in Iser’s textual structure, the implied reader. As a specific reader, he naturally has his own mental needs to seek Flaubert. Moreover, he shares some of his reasons with the mass reader:to elevate a past writer as a secular saint and to have the natural urge of interpretation which is explained by the concept of Gestalt in Iser’s theory, and this innate feature of human beings safeguards the functioning of other factors to chase a past writer.While as a highly introspective reader, Braithwaite encounters difficulties that other readers may ignore. He realizes that potential difficulties of interpretation are caused by one’s individual temperament and historical position, and thus one can only come up with a comparatively subjective understanding of a person in the past. These factors have rendered his search of Flaubert as an impossible mission, which is in fact the common plight for all readers. Such factors include the vastness of indeterminacies against the determinacies, which specifically include the the language barrier due to the alteration of the meaning in the passage of time and the problem of the incompleteness of the documents gathered and the difficulty to confirm their reliability.At the same time, if to examine the aspect of the text which is inseparable from the aspect of the reader, one can find that the textual structures also help actively elicit responses from the reader in the process of concretization. The novel juxtaposes typical postmodern elements of fragmentation, competing viewpoints and hybridity of genres as an important part of the textual strategies, actively helps achieve one of the many functions of literature, which is to modify the prevailing mainstream value systems by highlighting and contrasting them with the marginal thought systems.As a novel, Flaubert’s Parrot has achieved its writing purpose, which is to write a special biography for his all-time literary hero Gustave Flaubert. It shows the unbridgeable discrepancy between life and art, reality and fiction. In a way, it manages to warn the readers of their subjective judgment made under the natural urge of interpretation. The book also restores the multiple possibilities of a life that a man once truly lived and rescues it from the subjective interpretation of biography readers while still providing us with a large amount of information and possibilities about Flaubert.