Julian Barnes is the author of Flaubert's Parrot and Arthur & George, both fictional explorations of the personalities and legacies of two prominent, if completely different, authors: Gustave Flaubert and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (His analysis of the latter is especially insightful.) In this manifesto, he invokes the spirit of Flaubert again as a rebuke to writers who would settle for less than their best. He's quite right, too.
"Writers should have the highest ambition: not just
for themselves, but for the form they work in. Flaubert once rebuked Louise
Colet for having the love of art yet lacking 'the religion of art': she fancied
its rituals, the vestments and the incense, but did not finally believe in its
revealed truths. I am a writer for an accumulation of lesser reasons (love of
words, fear of death, hope of fame, delight in creation, distaste for office
hours) and for one presiding major reason: because I believe that the best art
tells the most truth about life. Listen to the competing lies: to the tatty
rhetoric of politics, the false promises of religion, the contaminated voices
of television and journalism. Whereas the novel tells the beautiful, shapely
lies which enclose hard, exact truth. This is its paradox, its grandeur, its
seductive dangerousness. Two famous deaths have been intermittently proclaimed
for some time now: the death of God and the death of the novel. Both are
exaggerated. And since God was one of the fictional impulse's earliest and
finest creations, I'll bet on the novel - in however mutated a version - to
outlast even God."
