If we read Julian Barnes' novel, Flaubert's Parrot, through the lens provided by Roman Jakobson's theory of the two axes of language, then we discover that Barnes provides creative writers with something like a thesaurus (literally, a "treasure house") of metaphoric and metonymic devices. Flaubert, by the novelist's own appraisal, was a bear. That's a metaphor. Madam Bovary, on the other hand, can be engaged (if not understood) by focusing on her eyes: meaning, one part of this fictive creation can grant us access to whole areas of interest, areas that revolve around problems of characterization. And that's a metonym. But what of Flaubert's parrot? Is it metaphor or metonym? I'd argue that Barnes uses the parrot "poetically" to collapse the metonymic and metaphoric axes of language. From one perspective, the parrot is one manageable item in the set labeled Flaubert. It's a metonym. But from another perspective, the parrot--as a particularly serviceable emblem--stands in, not just for Flaubert and his oeuvre, but for language itself. For example, if you're reading this now (and I'm not around reading it to you), then the parrot might help you understand how it is that you can make sense of my words.
In the stuffed parrot, Julian Barnes discovers a metonym that can be pushed into the realm of the metaphoric (or, if you like, he discovers a metaphor that can be extended to produce a variety of combinations). This, I suggest, is the most practical lesson Barnes teaches the would-be mystorian. This assignment, then, has two aims: