Flaubert’s Parrot

April 27, 2003

I am about to head off into the wilderness, as I finally resume my bike trip. I’ve been in China almost a month, but spent only four days riding. This was not the plan when I decided to bring the bike to China.

I have no regrets; those four days were great. One in particular, the eighty kilometers between Lijiang and Daju, was the type of incomparable experience that provides raw, thrilling confirmation that life isn’t just some sort of perverse joke. I was going to write about it, but I had nothing to say. It was just a damned fine, beautiful day.

So no updates for a while. I’m hopelessly behind in my writing, but tales of Sichuan opera, acupuncture, the freestyle rap scene in Chengdu, and corrupt rural school officials will have to wait.

Instead, I will leave off with a quote. In Lijiang, I picked up a copy of Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes. Like every British novel ever written, the book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But that’s not why I picked it up.

I grabbed it because I recognized the title from an offhand joke made by a literature professor ten years earlier. I don’t remember reading A Simple Heart, the story from which Flaubert’s Parrot draws inspiration. I do remember Professor L’Heureux making a crack about the pet bird becoming the star of his very own novel. Memory is funny that way.

In the book, the narrator fantasizes about the rules he would impose if he were the Dictator of Literature. Although I am no longer in South America, the following rule seemed relevant to travel writing in general. I also like it for the gratuitous use of the word “propinquity.”

5. A quota system is to be introduced on fiction set in South America. The intention is curb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony. Ah, the propinquity of cheap life and expensive principles, of religion and banditry, of surprising honour and random cruelty. Ah, the daquiri bird which incubates its eggs on the wing; ah, the the fredonna tree whose roots grow from at the tips of its branches, and whose fibres assist the hunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the hacienda owner; ah, the opera house now overgrown by jungle. Permit me to rap on the table and murmur ‘Pass!’ Novels set in the Arctic and Antarctic will receive a development grant.

The next rule isn’t relevant at all, but I’ll throw it in anyway, because it’s funny.

6a. No scenes in which carnal connection takes place between a human being and an animal. The woman and the porpoise, for instance, whose tender coupling symbolises a wider mending of the gossamer threads which formerly bound the world together in peaceable companionship. No, none of that.

6b. No scenes in which carnal connection takes place between man and woman (porpoise-like, you might say) in the shower. My reasons are primarily aesthetic, but also medical.

I’m off to carnally connect with spider monkeys and hopefully bike over some big hills. I admit to being afeared of the altitude. After letting myself go completely to seed, I’m going to bike up to the 4,000-meter Tibetan plateau. Should be fun.

» Tags: Travel

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