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Dillluns, 12 d'octubre

Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

 The train-spotters's guide to Flaubert

Gustave belonged to the first railway generation in France; and he hated the invention. For a start, it was an odious means of transport. "I get so fed up on a train that after five minuts I'm howling with boredom. Passangers think it's a neglected dog; not at all, it's M. Flaubert, sighing". Secondly, it produced a new figure at the dinner table; the railway bore. Conversation on the topic gave Flaubert a colique des vagons; in june 1843 he pronounced the railways to be the third nost boring subject imaginable after Mm Lafarge (an arsenic poisoner) and the death of the Duc d'Orleans (killed in his carriage the previous year). Louise Colet, striving for modernity in her poeme "La Paysanne", allowed Jean, her soldier returning from the wars in search of his Jeanneton, to notice the running smoke of a train. Flaubert cut the line. "Jean doesn't give a damm about that sort of thing", he growled, "and nor do I."
But he didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What the poin of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move out, meet anb be stupid together. In one of his earliest letters, written when he has fifteen, he lists the misdeeds of modern civilisation: "Railways, poisons, enema pumps, cream tarts, royalty and the guillotine". "Two years later, in his essays on Rabelais, the list of enemies has altered - all except the first item: "Raylways, factories, chemists and mathematicians." He never changed. Flaubert's Parrot, pg 108

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Julian Barnes

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cromets2:40 p. m.