Let me tell you why I hate critics. Not for the normal reasons: that they're failed creators (they usually aren't; they may be failed critics, but that's another matter); or that they're by nature carping, jealous and vain (they usually aren't; if anything, they might better be accused of over-generosity, of upgrading the second-rate so that their own fine discriminations thereby appear the rarer). No, the reason I hate critics - well, some of the time - is that they write sentences like this:
Flaubert does not build up his characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their own outward appearance that on one ocassion he gives Emma brown eyes (14); on another deep black eyes (15); and on another blue eyes (16).
This precise and disheartening indictment was drawn by the late Dr Enid Starkie, Reader Emeritus in French Literature at the University of Oxford, and Flaubert's most exhaustive British biographer. The numbers in her text refer to foot-notes in which she spears the novelist with chapter and verse.
I once heard Dr Starkie lecture, and I'm glad to report that she had an atrocious French accent; one of those deliveries full of dame-school confidence and absolutely no ear swerving between workaday correctness and farcical error, often within the same word. Naturally, this didn't affect her competence to teach at the University of Oxford, because until quite recently the place preferred to treat modern languages as if they were dead: this made them more respectable, more like the distant perfections of Latin and Greek. Even so, it did strike me as peculiar that someone who lived by French Literature should be so calamitously inadequate at making the basic words of the language sound as they did when her subjects, her heroes (her paymasters, too, you could say) first pronounced them.
Extract from Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes, Chapter 6, Emma Bovary's Eyes.
