But he had pioneering predecessors and like-minded contemporaries: The century was one in which the best writers treated prose as an experimental medium. In so doing, the novel remakes these readers' own "postmodern conditions" as more than just Lyotardian epistemological and concomitant ethical crises: it invites them to understand their conditions as ethical crises precipitated by the erotics of making historical determinations in the face of those crises.įlaubert is the foremost nineteenth-century French innovator in prose style. It charges that as the novel diagnoses the erotics of The Family Idiot, Jean-Paul Sartre's "modern" biography of Flaubert, it also implicates postmodern historicist readers in those erotics. The essay contends that the critical silence about these erotics is itself historical evidence about the postmodern condition. Taking as its starting point critics' tendency to make Julian Barnes's Flaubert Parrot mimic poststructuralist theoretical discourse on historical epistemology and ontology, the essay argues that Barnes's novel invests its theoretical energies elsewhere-namely, in exploring the idea that historicisms have their own erotics. This essay tries to disrupt the consensus that recent historicist theory and postmodern fiction participate in the same metahistorical critical project.
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