« Quelques plumes de perroquet » : l’épreuve de la lecture et de la sur-écriture, de Flaubert’s Parrot à « Knowing French » de Julian Barnes

Abstract

‘Knowing French’ presents us with a one-way correspondence. The eleven letters which make up the story are addressed to an author called Julian Barnes and are signed by a reader who has just finished Flaubert’s Parrot and decides to share her impressions with the author. Sylvia is an eccentric and wayward reader who has an even greater tendency to digress and ramble than Geoffrey Braithwaite in Flaubert’s Parrot. The story brings up the questions raised by the strange biographical essay on Flaubert and is another illustration of the fact that talking about someone else only brings you back to yourself. Being read turns out to be a drastically selective process at the end of which only a few feathers are left of a parrot which already embodied a rather personal and reduced approach of the biographer’s exercise. The aim of the text proves uncertain: through the fantasy of being taken apart and gradually diminished before final extinction, the author can be considered to accomplish a form of premature mourning of his own work. As he silences his own voice to make room for the sole voice of his correspondent, he turns himself into a ghostly presence, a mute witness of the reading of his work. At the same time, the loss is overcome in a joyful and light-hearted manner through the colourful character of Sylvia and her ramblings. The story also celebrates an act of writing which ceases to define itself simply as ‘metatext’ or writing ‘on’ and presents itself more openly as a way of writing ‘with’. What remains of the essay is then primarily the urge to share and put into words the effects of an encounter which can beget the most unpredictable forms.

Keywords

• J. Barnes
• biography
• essay
• ghost
• loss
• metatext