Having found the total corpus of de Maupassant’s contes beyond my ambition for the present, I here consider evidence from thirty-four stories which are listed with their titles and possible English translations of the titles appended. In a list appended to this essay I have numbered them in an alphabetical list and I generally refer to the title itself, but on two occasions, when citing a number of examples, I use the numbers I have assigned.
Flaubert is justly
called a Realist due to his meticulous and precisely detailed descriptions,
sometimes only too full. Balzac likewise
justifies the label with the comprehensive, all-embracing scope of his Comédie
Humaine. Zola deserves the title of
Naturalist for his quasi-scientific attention to hitherto neglected realms of life. Yet Guy de Maupassant, who is often labeled both
Realist and Naturalist, though the protégé of Flaubert, has always seemed to me
to rely heavily on narrative formulae and conventions, notably in his most
popular works, his short stories. Indeed, his literary artifice is the basis for
the popularity of the contes, both in his time and today.
It is scarcely
necessary to document Maupassant’s reputation as a Realist or as a Naturalist. Thus the normative Cours de Civilisation Française
de la Sorbonne titles his section “Portrait of a Master of Literary Realism.” For
one critic he possesses “absolute truthfulness, the best test of realism,”
while for another he “transcribed reality so objectively, so serenely, and so
intensely, that, as Faguet remarks, " le lecteur ne sait pas, quand il lit
Maupassant, si c'est de I'art de Maupassant, ou seulement de la réalité qu'il
a le goȗt."
For these readers the implication is
clear that he accurately records details of the lives of more or less ordinary
people. Yet Maupassant himself rejected the labels, saying
to his friend Paul Alexis "Pourquoi se restreindre? . . . Le naturalisme
est aussi limité que le fantastique"[1].
Of course, no
story is ”realistic,” in the literal sense of corresponding to life
itself. A book is black marks on a page,
a static artifact that bears only a highly mediated resemblance to anyone’s
lived experience. Yet some narratives
are more likely to seem real to readers, a quality called verisimilitude. Since Realism was first championed by
Champfleury the word has been associated with various more specific literary
practices – including Naturalism, Verismo, and Socialist Realism – but it has regularly
been understood to mean characters who seem ordinary, usually of the middle and
lower class and certainly not deities or monarchs. The events of Realistic stories are mundane,
a slice of life, rather than world-shaking or melodramatic. Realist writers, while perhaps craftsmanlike,
have typically adopted a writing style which does not call attention to itself,
but rather seems transparent, a straightforward statement of facts. Their narratives seem to resemble day-to-day
lived experience rather than imitating earlier works or conforming to literary conventions. Chekhov is an author who meets a great part
of these specifications. Joyce’s Dubliners
illustrates how Realism need not interfere with a story’s sublimity.
Maupassant’s
stories do indeed concern people of the middle and lower stations in society,
and their language rarely calls attention to itself in the way that Proust’s sentences,
which may go for a promenade before finding a conclusion, may do. Maupassant ultimately developed an interest
in the supernatural (a clear example is “The Horla”) but most of his stories
are at least plausible. Still, the great
majority of his contes are narratives highly shaped by literary
convention.
One of his
favorite devices, used in nearly a third of the stories in my sample is the
framing story [2]. This had
originally been meant to enhance
verisimilitude, since one may accept that the narrator was told even a fabulous
story more readily than that the incidents might in fact have actually
occurred. Yet the frame, known since antiquity in Egypt (in, for example, the “Tale
of the Shipwrecked Sailor,” and “The Eloquent Peasant” in the Papyrus Westcar)
as well as in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, One Thousand and
One Nights, the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales, became so
commonly used that it came to signify literariness rather than documentary
truth. In Maupassant the frames not only
imply the character of the speaker; in addition, they generate a genial
atmosphere of relaxed recreational social listening that spreads from the page
to the solitary reader.
Most of Maupassant’s
stories fall into one of two types, both designed to make a dependable impact with
maximum effect in the conclusions. They conclude
with either violence or heavy irony.
These simple appeals are the reason that Maupassant enjoys considerable
popular favor even today. Surely, for
many people, “The Necklace” is one classroom assignment that the student
relished and remembered. Yet neither dramatic
brutality nor obvious irony is consistent with the Realist story as a sample of
everyday life.
Five of the
stories (17, 19, 24, 25, and 26) depict incidents from the Franco-Prussian War
from a nationalist point of view. In each
of these a canny French patriot exacts revenge against the invaders, though in
three of the denouements the protagonist is caught and executed. Here national feelings increase the thrill of
the action.
This motive is
absent in other stories which portray gratuitous, almost sensational cruelty. In “Le Gueux” a beggar dies after a vicious
assault by barbaric country people. Similarly,
a fisherman prefers to sacrifice his brother’s arm rather than to lose his
catch in “En mer.” A wolf is cruelly
punished in “Le loup.” The same theme
appears in humorous mode as two peasants in “Une vente” nearly kill the wife of
one of them trying to measure her volume and in the two silly pranks recounted
in “La farce.” In a milder thriller mode
is the ghost of “Apparition” and the elegiac remembrance of the “Miss Harriet”
the pious suicide.
The violence or
threat is compounded with irony in the wreck in “L’épave” in which the teller
is rescued only to lose the love of his life, the woman with whom he had been in
danger. Likewise, the man who goes off to Africa
after discovering his wife with an old general, run off as much from chagrin at his wife’s taste as
from any more substantial motive in “Une soirée.” In “Petit soldat” the lover wins the lady
only to drown soon after.
Whereas these
stories tend to conclude with climactic violence (or its threat or a sudden
rescue or at least drastic action), in these last three the effect is
multiplied by the use of irony. De Maupassant developed the time-honored device
of a concluding twist into a specialty, doubtless in large part responsible for
his popularity with a general audience both in his own time and today.
Sometimes the
irony is a simple surprise, as in “Un Lache” in which the accomplished
swordsman turns out to be a coward, or in “Clair de lune” the moralistic abbe
learns tolerance, while in “Mon oncle Sosthène” an unbeliever acquires a
measure of faith and in “Yvette” the courtesan’s daughter turns out to be moral.
In “La ficelle” what seems altogether trivial turns out to be life-altering.
Irony may also
occur in comic form as in the inappropriate insurance claim of “Le parapluie.” In contrast to the implication of “La parure”
that concern for the trappings of wealth may bring misery, “Le bonheur” is
unusually optimistic in its depiction of a couple who truly find happiness by
rejecting the affluence sought by others.
Other twists on the narrative of romance include “Le retour” in which a
woman’s first husband, who had been lost at sea, returns looking like a
vagabond only to find her remarried and “L’attente” in which a woman spends her
life regretting the loss of her son who ran off when he saw her kissing a lover. In “En voyage” an aristocratic lady saves a
refugee who is afterwards devoted to her though apart. “La Reine Hortense” a dying spinster imagines
the joys of family while her own behaves coldly toward her. In “La Confession” and “Le diable” unlikely unjust
acts amounting to murder are admitted by the victims’ apparently loving
companions, and in “Aux champs” a son the parents refused to give up for
adoption complains that he was thereby mistreated.
The distance of
plots such as these from Realism is obvious in the fact that each story turns
out other than the reader probably expected, that is, other than lived
experience would at first suggest. The
surprise generated by the gap between the reader’s usual “reality” and the
author’s plan is in fact the source of de Maupassant’s effects. “Solitude,” a sort of monologue on human
separation even in the midst of society, casts doubt on the extent to which
experience can be shared with others, while a good many of the other stories
imply that things often turn out in surprising ways. Far from presenting a sort of norm or typical
incident, Maupassant deals in the extraordinary, the unexpected, indeed an outcome
the very opposite of what the reader would anticipate in everyday life.
The stories then depend
heavily either on such irony or else on the intrusion of traumatic action,
including war and murder, to engage the readers’ interest. The skillful use of literary devices is in
fact the heart of verbal art, and the illusion of Realism is one significant
technique. Yet in his short stories de
Maupassant regularly depends on effects other than verisimilitude. It is the critics using the term Realist who
misjudge, not the canny author whose stories have attracted readers for
generations.
If the stories
are in this way deemed “artificial” (of course, all art is by definition
artificial), this descriptor implies no value
judgement. Aesthetic reactions occur at
the point of reception and most readers, even unsophisticated ones, are
gratified by Maupassant’s artful manipulation of expectations. The beauty of a Maupassant story may be often
modest, but reading him is a highly reliable pleasure, perhaps even more
reliable than if the stories were in fact Realistic.
1.
For the Cours, see https://www.ccfs-sorbonne.fr/en/guy-de-maupassant-portrait-of-a-master-of-literary-realism/. The
critics quoted are (in order) Charles Henry Conrad Wright in A History of
French Literature, Kathleen Theresa Butler’s A History of French
Literature, and Janneke van de Stadt, “Seeing “Amiss” or Misreading ‘A Miss’:
Imperfect Vision in Maupassant's ‘Les Tombales,’” Dalhousie French Studies,
Vol. 51 (Summer 2000).
2. In stories numbered 1, 2, 3, 10, 16, 20, 29, 30, 33, and
34.
Stories included in the study:
1
“Apparition” (“A Ghost”)
2 “L’attente” (“The Waiting”)
3 “Le bonheur” (“Happiness”)
4 “Aux champs”(“In the Country”)
5 “Clair de Lune” (“Moonlight”)
6 “La Confession” (“The Confession”)
7 “Deux amis” (“Two Friends”)
8 “Le diable” (“The Devil”)
9 “Un duel” (“A Duel”)
10 “Lépave” (“The Wreck”)
11 “La farce” (“The Joke”)
12 “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”)
13 “Le Gueux” (“The Beggar”)
14 “L’ivrogne” (“The Drunk”)
15 “Un Lache” (“A Coward”)
16 “Le Loup” (“The Wolf”)
17 “Mademoiselle Fifi” (“Miss Fifi”)
18 “En mer” (“At Sea”)
19 “La Mère Sauvage” (“The Savage Mother”)
20 “Miss Harriet” (“Miss Harriet”)
21 “Mon oncle Sosthène” (“My Uncle Sosthenes”)
22 “Le parapluie” (“The Umbrella”)
23 “La Parure” (“The Necklace”)
24 “Le père Milon” (“ Father Milon”)
25 “Petit Soldat” (“Little Soldier”)
26 “Les prisonniers” (“The Prisoners”)
27 “La Reine Hortense” (“Queen Hortense”)
28 “Le retour” (“The Return”)
29 “Une ruse” (“A Ruse”)
30 “Une soirée” (“One Evening”)
31 “Solitude” (“Solitude”)
32 “Une vente” (“A Sale”)
33 “En voyage” (“On the Way”)
34 “Yvette” (“Yvette”)
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