Although Julian Barnes’ 2002 collection of essays is subtitled “Essays on France and French Culture”, it might have been better to call it “Essays on Gustave Flaubert with a few other interesting tidbits thrown in for good measure”. Read it, if you so desire, as a supplement to his novel, Flaubert’s Parrot, and as further confirmation of the obsessive kinship Barnes feels for the man who is arguably the first modernist writer. Nevertheless, to suggest that this is a book that will somehow present to us something as amorphous and wide-ranging as French Culture is misleading. If I were French, I’m not sure how I would respond. To use a Canadian analogy: how would I respond to a book about Canadian Culture that devoted more than half its pages to Margaret Atwood? Not well, I’m sure.
That said, it is an entertaining read, filled with curious facts and observations, urbane, reflective, and sometimes titillating as we would expect from a discussion of French culture. So, for example, we learn that Georges Simenon, author of more than 400 books, 55 screenplays, and 279 television scripts, also claimed to have slept with (“bedded” as Barnes delicately puts it) 10,000 women. He married “up” when he divorced his first wife, who enjoyed threesomes, and wedded his second wife, a lovely Canadian girl of twenty-five, who enjoyed foursomes. His second wife put the estimate of “bedded” women at a more realistic 1,200. Personally, I don’t care for Simenon, but that may be because I was forced to read one of his Maigret novels for my grade 12 French class and thoroughly detested the exercise.
More interesting, or at least currently relevant, are his pieces on the Tour de France. Although written more than ten years ago, they naturally settle upon Lance Armstrong’s performance. Barnes offers a clinic in how to avoid libel and slander litigation while still saying what you want which, in this case, is: Mr. Armstrong, you’re a liar. Mr. Armstrong’s recent revelations to Oprah Winfrey vindicate Barnes’ non-claims. Barnes simply presents the facts: the pervasive use of doping in the sport, facts about human physiology and endurance, the challenge of Mont Ventoux (where cyclist Tom Simpson died in 1967). We are left to conclude that cyclists cannot even qualify without doping. Armstrong’s case is unexceptional.
Barnes is pithy and eminently quotable. Speaking of Mallarmé, he writes: “If he weren’t so French he could easily be English.” And he concludes the same essay with this delightful observation: “If the Mona Lisa ate asparagus, it would show in her urine; and this would make her richer, both as a woman and as a subject for art.” On the European Union: “The old nation-states of Europe are gradually being homogenized into herdable groups of international consumers separated only by language.”
Barnes presents an amusing exchange between Flaubert and George Sand, which he describes as “an ironic reversal of the classic In-my-day complaint about the sexual morality of the rising generation”:
In 1866 Sand mentions a young engineer friend of hers, handsome, frequently ogled by women, and yet with a terrible behavioural problem: “He’s in love, and engaged, and has to wait and work for four years to be in a position to marry, and he’s made a vow,” she records pityingly. “Morality apart, I don’t think young people nowadays have the energy to cope with science and debauchery, tarts and fiancées, all at the same time.” Flaubert harrumphs back that the engineer’s vow is, in his opinion, “Pure foolishness … ”In my day” we made no such vows. We made love! And boldly!…And if we kept away from ”the Ladies,” as I did, absolutely, for two years (from 21 to 23), it was out of pride, as a challenge to oneself, a show of strength…We were Romantics, in short—Red Romantics, utterly ridiculous, but in full efflorescence.”
Sometimes, it’s useful to read about 150-year-old exchanges like this to remind ourselves that our present-day conversations about moral progress or about an opening up or about a loosening of taboos or about a liberalizing of social mores is utter nonsense. If we were truly a liberal society, we’d leave Lance Armstrong alone to his doping and simply enjoy the sport, just as we’d leave people alone to deploy their penises as they pleased; we’d climb down from our high moral horse (a gelding, no doubt) and tell people like Oprah to grow up, stop pandering to the most immature of our impulses. In my day, we left people alone to their bicycles and bedrooms …’