Good advice I received once was survey widely but also go deep. Youth is a fine time for surveying widely. That’s usually what being young is about. Fast and furious around the block and beyond. It comes with its risks, badly matched sexual partners, trying out base jumping, riding overpowered motorcycles, as just three examples.
As one ages, going deep should be undertaken — taken under — before too long a wait, because it delivers its rich rewards that no shallow sampling avails. Wait too long and the going deep is provided by nature and it ain’t pretty: sickness, death of family and friends, one’s own mortality approaching like an all-too-human bad smell.
Author Julian Barnes goes deep, his well is Flaubert, and watching him submerge elicits deep empathic breathing and admiration nuanced by nitrogen narcosis. The Flaubert float is part and parcel of a lifetime of love and frisson for all things French, for his parents were French teachers and Barnes probably knows more about ces choses than nearly anybody.
There is Barnes’ celebrated Flaubert’s Parrot, of course. But on this occasion, I am loving his Something to Declare, a collections of essays published in 2002 by Random House Canada. Its first pages, and the reader is in the presence of the non-fiction literature that we long for in the twitter era: erudite, witty in the spirit of the best conversation, immediately entertaining, taking its time on the assumption that the reader will be challenged to respond imaginatively from his or her better self.
“Not Drowning But Waving: The Case of Louise Colet” lays out a brilliant assessment of Flaubert’s lover (and previous biographies of her) that brings that ” . . . bold and melodramatic, impulsive and self-advertising, admirable yet faintly ridiculous” person to life as not only a nineteenth century phenomenon struggling to rip her way out of her century, but also a recognizable potty-mouth type posting instagrams in ours.
The funniest essay for me as a recovering student of English literature theory is in a section called “Flaubert’s Death-Masks.” It’s part “c” of that section, called “Theorist,” and it’s a review of Sartre’s The Family Idiot, his unfinished “three-volume growl at Flaubert.” Says Barnes of Sartre’s style in The Family Idiot, “But then Sartre was always fighting against the allure of lucidity, against the guilt induced by pleasing the reader.”
In other words, going deep isn’t always what pundits claim for it.
J. B. Thompson 