Word: parroting
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...literary bestiary, Flaubert's Parrot is actually a centaur--a splendid hybrid with the scholarly countenance of literary criticism and the powerful headquarters of a good novel. Such crossbreeding of genres is not mythical or even uncommon in 20th century literature--take Nabokov's career, for example, which includes a novel in the guise of an annotated poem. Pale Fire, and a literary biography that's also a comic masterpiece. Nikolai Gogol. What makes Julian Barnes's achievement so remarkable, however, is the sheer lack of artifice and pyrotechnics involved...
Novels about literary creation are often hermetic, closed like the library stacks of a writer's mind. To gain full access into Joyce, it would be necessary to know exactly the languages and to have read exactly the books he did--to become Joyce, in other words Flaubert's Parrot is formally challenging and richly allusive--French literary history is constantly invoked, even on the level of sentences like "Ed had pondered the menu as if he were Verlaine being brought his first square meal in months" --but it always includes the reader, even the one who may never have...
Through its fictional conceit, Flaubert's Parrot illustrates, among other things, how scholarship can and should be an expression of passion, a declaration of love...
...novel begins and ends with an bit of literary taxidermy. The loose structure is contained within the story of Braithwaite's search for the stuffed parrot which served as the model for Loulou, the parrot of this housekeeper Felicite in Flaubert's tale "Us Center Simple" ("A. Simple Heart"). More than the trivial by-product of Braithwaite's loopy obsession, the quest for the real parrot becomes a tongue-in-beak metaphor for the essence of Flaubert...
...could say that the parrot, representing clever vocalisation without much brain power, was Pure Word. If you were a French academic, you might say he was symbole de Logos. Being English, I hasten back to the corporeal: to that svelte, perky creature I had seen at the Hotel-Dieu. I imagined Loulou sitting on the other side of Flaubert's desk and staring back at him like some taunting reflection from a funfair mirror. No wonder three weeks of its parodic presence caused irritation. Is the writer much more than a sophisticated parrot...