Are de Maupassant’s Stories Realistic?

 

     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”)

Wharton’s Undine

     “Undine.” The reader is given pause at the very first word of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. The name of the leading lady seems unlikely indeed for the child of vulgar Kansas parents, though throughout the nineteenth century the legendary Undine had been the subject of numerous paintings and poems, particularly popular among the pre-Raphaelites. [1]
     Despite links to ancient water nymphs such as naiads and nereids and the Latin name from unda (wave), the figure of Undine is not ancient, but is original with Paracelsus. He posited “spiritual” beings associated with each of the four elements invisible to the ordinary observer. Water is the realm of the undine who can acquire a soul only by attracting a human lover. Thus she is associated with promiscuous self-interested sexual activity and sometimes conflated with malicious seductresses such as sirens.
     Wharton identifies her character Undine Spragg, as “a variation on the eternal feminine.” The obvious application of this universally distributed negative archetype of woman to Undine arises from her willingness to use her extraordinary beauty cynically in pursuit of her own selfish ends, thus ruining her husband Ralph, battering her next husband, and failing to satisfy Elmer who was her first and last.
     Undine is entirely unredeemed by the book’s end. When reminded of his one-time step-father in France Paul bursts into uncontrollable sobs, and Elmer consoles him by saying, “Is it because your mother hadn’t time for you? Well, she’s like that, you know, and you and I just have to lump it.” Though his arms are “firm and friendly,” Elmer cannot help thinking in terms of money. He thoughtlessly refers to the Marquis’ poverty which had allowed him to buy the family tapestries and then comforts the crying child by assuring him “you’ll be the richest boy in America.”
     In comfort and security, Undine remains unsatisfied. “She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, as though there were other things she might want if she knew about them.” By the novel’s last lines, the vague discontent has coalesced about the wish to be the wife of an ambassador. She is a classic addict, who always lusts for more.
     If the nouveaux riches of her day seemed conscienceless and impossibly vulgar, one can only imagine what she would make of today’s America, led by Donald Trump, an utterly tasteless and ignorant buffoon whose idea of beauty is a golden toilet when it is not his own face. In the novel the descent from a version of higher culture to the mass commodified version is signified by the explanation of Undine’s out-of-the-way name – it is the brand of hair product marketed by her father, the foundation of the family fortune. The reader imagines her seeking through marriage to rid herself of her surname, so abrupt and unmusical.
     Thus Undine is, like many modern versions of myths, bathetic, an epigone, ironic in its suggestions of true art, beauty, and intellectual pursuits. Virtually all the characters are narrowly self-interested, without real values. The artist Popple is no less commercially focused than the Wall Street speculators; Mrs. Heeny is a mere appendage of her wealthy clients. Even de Chelles, the genuine aristocrat possessing the attitudes of his class by birthright, who is tender with his unfortunate stepson, seems hidebound, as much out of step with humane considerations as the others if less venal. And he, too, is broken by the modern age, forced at last to sell his Louis XV tapestries.
     The closest approach to an exception is Ralph Marvell, who regularly tries to act with integrity, but who is, in spite of America’s youth, as much an etiolated representative of an order whose time has passed as the marquis. His utter unfitness for work, complicated by vague aesthetic tendencies, may seem attractive enough, especially because he has such a generous heart, but his suicide indicates his crippling neuroses. It is as though wholesome decency has itself rotted.
     Still, Undine is in some respects, no less charged with powerful energy than the sirens who sang to Odysseus. Her sexual allure is all but irresistible. The men she selects she gets, no less than if she had been Circe. The results of her machinations are as severe as if they had been divine visitations: Ralph’s suicide and Paul’s depression foremost. Wharton seems to insist on the seriousness of her characters’ affairs in spite of their short and narrow sight. Aphrodite, or Kama, or whoever among the myriad goddesses is indeed manifested in Undine Spragg of Apex, Kansas.
     Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country strikes me as Gustave Flaubert in the process of becoming Henry James, though Wharton lacked the stylistic mastery of either. While Flaubert set about to transform, as though alchemically, the banality of Emma Bovary into the pure gold of fine art, and James in the end anticipated Proust in his detailing the velleities of highly self-conscious characters, Wharton renders Undine Spragg as simultaneously powerful and unconscious, mired in her commonness. While she shares Emma Bovary’s ambitious restlessness as well as her shallow selfishness -- Flaubert described his characters as “completely commonplace” mediocrities -- he then rendered this consideration irrelevant by his ascent to an ideal of form and the perfection of le mot juste. [2] Lacking that lofty refuge Wharton‘s novel retains its satiric focus on the monstrous development of American capitalism, a process which, despite being slowed by the New Deal and the civil rights struggle, has since continued apace.
     Yet Wharton was anything but a radical. A true reactionary in her harking back to an imagined earlier era, she resembles Trollope in her implied belief in the righteousness of an order of nobility whose time has passed. She sees not only the faults of the new and tasteless ruling class; she sees as well the faults of Mrs. Astor’s New York 400 and the European nobility. In the morass of competing egotisms she suggests that life is livable with a certain unthinking observation of the rules ornamented with a sheen of art. It may be a makeshift strategy, but it represents one way of coping with the predicament of retaining some humanity in a society governed by cash in which water spirits have become gold-diggers.


1. Artists who represented her include Eduard Steinbrück, John William Waterhouse, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Arthur Rackham. Poets who used the Undine story include Aloysius Bertrand, Henry Van Dyke, Antoinette de Coursey Patterson, and Kenneth Slessor.

2. Letter to Louise Colet, September 19, 1852.

The Lyricism of the Ugly: Céline's Mort à Crédit

Page references to quotations from Death on the Installment Plan are enclosed in parentheses and refer to the Signet edition, New American Library, 1966. Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.


     The twentieth century was the great age of irony. One of the period’s masterworks, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Mort à Crédit (expertly translated by Ralph Manheim [1] with the title Death on the Installment Plan) seems built largely of inversions and conundrums. For the author, the ugly is beautiful. According to Céline, “That's what Death on the Installment Plan is, symbolically, the reward of life being death. Seeing as . . . it's not the good Lord who rules, it's the devil. Man. Nature's disgusting, just look at it, bird life, animal life.” [2] The book resembles comedy in its depiction of everyman’s worst sins and faults and failings and in its emphasis on the physical with particular focus on shit and vomit, yet the tone is anything but light. It seems an autobiography, yet the book's protagonist is far more filthy and incompetent than the author, his relationships with family and others far more dysfunctional. We tend to call pictures of the seamy side “realistic,” yet the book is highly fanciful and full of hallucinations, delusions, and visions. The author’s celebrated ellipses, which one might expect to slow the narrative to a contemplative pace, instead accelerate it in a relentless onslaught on the reader's sensibilities. Much of the book’s early notoriety arose from its apparent perverse reveling in the nastiness of people and in their surroundings.
     Contradictions extend into the political realm. Céline was a committed fascist and a vicious anti-Semite, whose opinions, far from private, were published in inflammatory pamphlets before and during the Nazi occupation [3] yet my popular Signet edition from 1966 features blurbs from both Trotsky and Gide (a Communist at the time of the book’s publication). The author (like Heidegger) saw no contradiction in consistently maintaining Jewish friends and lovers while calling for the ruination of “international Jewry” and later drew the admiration of Allen Ginsberg [4] and Philip Roth who called him, pointedly, “a great liberator.” It helps little that even the Nazis were uncomfortable with Celine as an ally. [5] While he consistently portrays the common people as vicious and ignorant, he spent his medical career treating them in what amounted to charity clinics. He had an abiding sympathy for the poor and an anarchist’s distaste for bosses, police, and other authorities. He ridicules father Auguste in the novel for his paranoia in which Jews and Freemasons are responsible for his family’s suffering, yet he practiced precisely the same sort of ignorant scapegoating himself.
     In his narratives people act as though blind, doing their blundering best to pursue self-interest but helplessly in thrall to exploiters, who, though more comfortable, are no less benighted. His everyman is subject to an inexorable torrent of experience which will never slow sufficiently for one to gain a firm footing and which threatens at any moment to overflow in a riot of chaos. The tone is clear from the outset. The book begins as bleakly as anything in Beckett : “Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad . . .I’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over.” (15) But this emptiness soon turns into a plenitude that boils over out of control. Before long he is having sex with Mireille in the Bois de Boulogne (39) and all hell breaks loose as countless spectators gather, requiring twenty-five thousand police to clear the area in a fully Rabelaisian scene. This hallucination is rationalized as a fever, but similar eruptions recur again and again. When the family attempts to have a nice vacation in England, the project collapses in disaster on the passage over with everyone is slipping and sliding in each other’s vomit (124-5) in what seems more a diabolical rite of passage than a catharsis. Angry crowds descend more than once on des Pereires’ Genitron offices just as multitudes of vermin erupt from his sorry attempt at a scientific potato garden.
     Céline’s political derangement had in common with Pound’s a revulsion with modernity, including that cash nexus that forms the basis for human relationships under modern capitalism. In his Paris Review interview he says “I really saw the world was ruled by the Golden Calf, by Mammon!” Ferdinand’s parents cannot adapt to a changing world. In his mother’s shop she sells lace of an outmoded style. In an attempt to keep up with contemporary fashion, she buys boleros, only to see them fall out of favor. Des Pereires is an inventor of the old school, an individual fiddling about in his workshop, clinging to his lighter-than-air balloon, a universal genius able only to devise one hare-brained scheme after another in the manner of Bouvard and Pécuchet.
     The hopeless despair of Céline’s world is only heightened and rendered poignant by occasional strange unearthly rays of light. Gazing at the nightlights of Paris from des Pereires’ suburban home, it seems a great appetitive beast, “an enormous animal, sprawled across the horizon . . . they eat . . . every day . . .yes, indeed, they eat . . . It makes a sad sound, a soft rumbling.” (468) Fellowship appears briefly and obliquely, but only to lament the inability of holding on to time, of stopping the rush of reality if only momentarily: “He was bound to be someplace, chasing after his pittance . . .and his fun.” “Ah, it’s an awful thing . . .and being young doesn’t help any . . .while you notice for the first time . . .the way you lose people as you go along . . . buddies you’ll never see again . . . never again . . . when you notice that they have disappeared like dreams . . .that it’s all over . . . finished . . . that you too will get lost someday . . . a long way off but inevitably . . . in the awful torrent of things and people . . . of the days and shapes . . . that pass . . . that never stop.” “They’re in a dream with the others.” (392)
     The tenderness of that unpreventable loss reminds the reader of Villon. [6] Several relatives also seem almost redemptive in their kindness. The narrator’s mother Clémence strives with unfailing will-power but diminishing strength to sustain her family and mollify her husband. “She did all she could to keep me alive. I just shouldn’t have been born.” This model of dogged maternal love is never modified by set-backs, fatigue, or mixed motives. ( 55) During Ferdinand’s teen-age years his Uncle Édouard repeatedly rescues him, offering him a refuge and resources in spite of the boy’s repeated failures.
     Perhaps most suggestive of the book’s acts of love, each more precious for its rarity, is Ferdinand’s grandmother Caroline’s gift to the child of a copy of lllustrated Adventure Stories in which he reads tales of King Krogold that inspire him to invent his own fairy stories as an alternative to an unacceptable reality. The painting done by the narrator’s father is a similar haven, as, one suspects, Céline’s tumultuous and fevered prose is as well, as Greek tragedy had been for an earlier age, a way to keep living even after realizing with Camus, that that task alone is Sisyphean.
     Earlier writers had so whitewashed the grim and nasty human situation that Céline thought it took a new language to reveal it. His claim that “I've slipped the spoken word into print” contains both a bit of a boast and a measure of truth. He influenced Henry Miller, the Beats, hard-boiled fiction, Genet, Queneau, Robbe-Grillet, and Bukowski who called him “the greatest writer of 2,000 years.” [7] “For me,” Céline says, “you only had the right to die when you had a good tale to tell. To enter in, you tell your story and pass on.” The reader can have no doubt that his story is sufficiently good to warrant a pass into Elysium, a sort of immortality.


1. John H. P. Marks had done a version in 1938. Manheim (whose translation was published in 1966) had begun his career with an edition of Mein Kampf preserving even awkwardness and solecisms in Hitler’s prose. He later did important translations of Brecht, Günter Grass, Martin Heidegger, Hermann Hesse, Novalis, and others as well as transcripts of Eichmann’s trial, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” which was illustrated by Maurice Sendak and Henry Corbin's work Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi.

2. Paris Review,” The Art of Fiction #33,” winter spring 1964 issue, no. 31. Subsequent quotations from Céline not identified by page reference in the novel are from the same interview.

3. Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre) (1937), L'École des cadavres (The School of Corpses) (1938) and Les Beaux draps (The Fine Mess) (1941).

4. According to Ginsberg Voyage a la bout de la nuit was “the first genius international beat twentieth-century picaresque novel written in modern classical personal comedy prose."

5. While WWII was still in progress, he came to believe that both Adolf Hitler and Pope Pius XII must both be Jewish imposters since they were failing to defend the white race with sufficient energy.

6. I think of the “Ballade Des Dames Du Temps Jadis,” “Les Regrets De La Belle Heaulmière,” the Testaments, and many other pieces. Villon also resembles Céline in his literary use of slang and underworld argot.

7. In Notes of a Dirty Old Man.