The Puppeteer as a Puppet: The Cynical Gaze in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot

Abstract

When the subject fractures itself into fragments, then dissolved by the irruption of the postmodernist Real, the postmodern Oedipal subject finds itself cursed with enlightenment transforming it into an anti-Oedipal insurgent. Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot stages this moment of transformation in a distinctly dialectical mode. Yet, this is not the entire story. Within the postmodern impulse to question paternal narratives and then subvert them, a third mode of existence emerges: the cynical one. Standing in opposition to the anti-Oedipal stance and paradoxically produced from it, this mode reconstitutes the Other after annihilating it This cynical mode/gaze unfolds itself through Braithwaite’s cynical quest to track down the French novelist, Gustave Flaubert’s stuffed parrot. This study, therefore, seeks to explore the three overlapping gazes; the pre-postmodernist, the postmodernist and the cynical on which Flaubert’s Parrot is woven. The text will be approached from a psychoanalytic/Žižekian lens, employing Slavoj Žižek’s key concepts such as “cynicism” and “false enlightened consciousness”. In this light, Flaubert’s Parrot may be read as dramatizing a Žižekian Oedipal dialectic, one that begins with traditional Oedipalism, moves through anti-Oedipalism, and culminates in a cynical re-construction.