The list effect in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s parrot

receding material realities

Abstract

The lists in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot attract not only other fictional characters to scrutinize them and see what they signify but literary scholars as well. Critics drawn to investigate the significance of this ancient technique (lists are as old as the great epics of antiquity) have discussed the constellation of things, objects, and subjects drawn into them. I argue that in Flaubert’s Parrot there are so many lists because the word kills the thing but does not annihilate it altogether. The novel is interred within (inter) textuality and covered by words caught up in enumerations and accumulations because the whole thing/scene is an interminable haunting, an inescapable afterlife, and an inexorable unknowability of the world.