Metafictional Traits
Metafictional Traits found in Flaubert's Parrot and in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, before comparing these with the elements of realism in Isaac Singer's The Family Moskat.
"For some, Life is rich and creamy ... while Art is a pallid commercial confection ... For others, Art is the truer thing, full, bustling and emotionally satisfying, while Life is worse than the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, peopled by bores and rogues, short on wit ... and leading to a painfully predictable denouement."1
Thus Barnes compares Life and Art in Flaubert's Parrot; but these words could just as easily refer to the different perspectives of realist and metafictional writers.
Bearing these perspectives in mind, this essay will examine the metafictional traits found in Flaubert's Parrot and in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, before comparing these with the elements of realism in Isaac Singer's The Family Moskat. By considering the advantages and disadvantages of these novelistic schools of thought, it shall then be demonstrated that the reader's own views on Life and Art may determine the value one assigns to these alternative styles.
When Braithwaite muses, "If I were a dictator of fiction,"2 the process of creating fiction itself becomes the subject matter of the narrative. Barnes himself is clearly a dictator in the sense that he has control over the content of his own novel, but in this instance, Braithwaite is referring to all fiction. This reference to the production of fiction is a common quality of metafiction, and it recurs frequently in Flaubert's Parrot. The theme is picked up later when Braithwaite says, "Many critics would like to be dictators of literature,...
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...out, for example, p. 87.
19 Ibid., throughout, for example, p. 108.
20 Ibid., p. 97.
21 Ibid., p. 261.
22 Ibid., pp. 262-4.
23 Ibid., p. 59.
24 Ibid., p. 98.
25 Barnes, p. 47.
26 Ibid., p. 169.
27 Ibid., pp. 50-2.
28 Ibid., pp. 160-70.
29 Ibid., p. 87.
30 Ibid., p. 108.
31 Fowles, p. 390.
32 Barnes, p. 88.
33 Ibid., p. 68.
34 Ibid., p. 88.
35 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, The Family Moskat, translated by Gross, A. H., Penguin, London, 1980, p. 582.
36 Ibid., p. 193.
37 Ibid., p. 606.
38 Ibid., p. 179.
39 Ibid., p. 636.
40 Ibid., pp. 132, 490, 543.
41 See Barnes, p. 46.
42 See Fowles, p. 268.
43 Ibid., p. 98.
44 Barnes, pp. 49-65.
45 For example, Singer, pp. 239-242 (Letter from Adele to her mother), 444-52 (Hadassah's diary entries).
46 Barnes, p. 88.
Gustave Flaubert incorporates and composes a realistic piece of literature using realistic literature techniques in his short story, “A Simple Heart.” Flaubert accomplishes this through telling a story that mimics the real life of Félicité, and writing fiction that deliberately cuts across different class hierarchies; through this method, Flaubert
Though people can look into color and composition, others can still even look into the source of the art itself. Cole goes deeper, delving into the source of the art, looking in particular into the idea of cultural appropriation and the view a person can give others. Though it is good for people to be exposed to different opinions of a group or an object, sometimes people can find it difficult to tell the difference between the reality and the art itself. Sometimes art can be so powerful that its message stays and impacts its audience to the point where the viewer’s image of the subject of the art changes entirely. Cole brings up an important question about art, however. Art has become some kind of media for spreading awareness and even wisdom at times, but in reality, “there is also the question of what the photograph is for, what role it plays within the economic circulation of images” (973). Cole might even be implying that Nussbaum’s advertisement can sometimes be the point of some media, and that sometimes the different genres of art can just be to make someone with a particular interest happy. One more point that Cole makes is that “[a]rt is always difficult, but it is especially difficult when it comes to telling other people’s stories.” (974) Truthfully, awareness and other like-concepts are difficult to keep going when a person or a group is not directly involved.
In conclusion, according to Simmon O. Lesser in “The Role of Unconscious Understanding in Flaubert and Dostoevsky”, “ It is interesting to compare the way Flaubert and Dostoevsky handle triangular situations, realism puts the reader in flow of the story from the beginning; paints the picture. The description in “A Simple Heart” gives the reader a front row sit in a day in the life of Felicite. In the description of Notes from the Underground gives the reader a front row seat inside a man mind.
Herman Melville's Moby Dick is a book which can be read as a general metaphor for the battle between the evil powers of the Devil versus the divine powers of God and Jesus, both try to obtain the souls of mankind in order to assist in each other's destruction. In this metaphor, the Devil is shown through the person of Captain Ahab, God becomes nature, Jesus is seen as the White Whale, and the representation of mankind is the crew. The voyage of the Pequod, therefore, is a representation of a similar voyage of mankind on earth, until the death of Jesus, during the whole thing the influences of these three “supernatural forces” are connected. Thus, the basis of this idea is that in the plot of Melville's book, there are also peeks of the "plot" of the Bible.
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Heath, Stephen. Landmarks of World Literature Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1992.
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