Volume 53, Number 9 · May 25, 2006
Flaubert, C'est Moi
By Julian Barnes
Flaubert: A Biography
by Frederick Brown
Little, Brown, 628 pp., $35.00
Bouvard and Pécuchet
by Gustave Flaubert, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti, with a preface by Raymond Queneau
Dalkey Archive, 328 pp., $13.95
In 1819 Keats went to the London offices of the East India Company in Leadenhall Street to inquire about becoming a ship's doctor on an Indiaman. While there, he saw on display Tippoo's Tiger, the famous mechanical beast manufactured for the Sultan of Mysore and captured by the British some twenty years previously. Life-sized, it stands menacingly over its latest victim, a prone Redcoat about to receive the coup de grâce. It is part comic, part scary; part vast toy—an internal organ produces tigerish roars and human shrieks, while the victim's arm flails to fend off the beast—part growling reminder of the intrinsic power the subcontinent may easily wield over the impertinent white man. Keats was so impressed that he put it into his satirical poem 'The Cap and Bells':
Review, 4232 words
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