Barnes passes to his narrator the anti-critical animus. So traditional is the novelist's disdain for critics that one whole section of Flaubert's Parrot consists of Flaubert's acerbic denunciations of professional criticism. Laurence Sterne took this even further in Tristram Shandy, imagining the critic who would hate his own novel to be the same judge who measured a Garrick soliloquy with a stop-watch and pronounced it deficient. The critic is always there, failing to catch him out. Henry Fielding first found it useful, throughout his novel Tom Jones, to address a censorious, rule-obsessed critic ("my good reptile") who keeps failing to catch the tone of a good writer. This fictional figment is almost as old as the English novel criticism has always been part of fiction as well as commentary upon it. The narrator likes nothing more than having a critic to differ from. The critic is the professional misinterpreter, with whose errors you might compare your own more tolerant or modest appreciation of fiction. "Let me tell you why I hate critics," says the Flaubert-obsessed narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite. "The critic" - pedantic, arid, wrong-headed - is one of its imagined characters. Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot is an appropriate novel with which to begin a column on literary criticism, for literary criticism is one of its subjects.
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