SOURCE: "Flaubert's Parrot and Huysmans's Cricket: The Decadence of Realism and the Realism of Decadence," in Stanford French Review XI, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 323-30.

In the following essay, Humphries questions the ability of realistic fiction faithfully to reproduce reality without evoking an allegorical significance.

It has become almost a cliché of modern literary theory that realism—the school and practice of fiction most closely associated with certain French writers of the nineteenth century (Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert)—finally embraces the failure of its own project, indeed that the failure of mimesis—of art as imitation of reality—is the ultimate subject of every so-called realistic text. Ross Chambers has written [in Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction, 1984] that the famous parrot of Flaubert's story, "A Simple Heart," "represents less the mimesis of everyday life and speech in repetitive time and more the perils of identification...