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”)

The Pose of Naturalism in Zola’s Germinal

 

     Germinal remains, after over a hundred years, strong stuff.  Zola’s prose continues to deploy the luxurious richness of concrete specific detail found in Flaubert and Balzac, but here the facts alone are merciless and painful.  The excruciating miners’ lives, the consequence of an oppressive economic system, only seem the more miserably unjust when set off by a few scenes of the bourgeois comfort of their bosses.  The book seems in many ways tragic.  The workers, after suffering terrible privations and numerous casualties, gain nothing from their strike.  The unmerited suffering of the poor, rather than being (as in Christianity) redemptive, only degrades and brutalizes them further.   Yet the title is clearly hopeful with its reference to the 1789 Revolution and to germination, here referring to the coming of radical change, an implication made explicit in the final passage.

 

Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages.  And very soon they would crack the earth asunder.  (trans. By L. W. Tancock)

 

Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre. 

 This incongruity between the ugliness of the miners’ degradation and the beauty of the utopian vision of a better economic order represents a more general tension informing the work as a whole.  While claiming to construct narratives out of lived experience alone, Zola consistently allowed observed facts to be overruled by his thematic enthusiasm as well as by emotion, literary convention, and allusion.   

     Zola’s Naturalism was for him a “scientific” method which he regarded as uniquely appropriate for his day.  In The Experimental Novel (1893) he explains that his approach to writing fiction is based on the rigorous research principles of Claude Bernard, the physiologist.  Quoting with approval Bernard’s characterization of the scientist as “the photographer of phenomena,” Zola notes that for the novelist no less than the biologist “his observation should be an exact representation of nature... He listens to nature and he writes under its dictation.”  Just as in the laboratory the scientist forms hypotheses first suggested and then tested by empirical facts, Zola maintains that the writer must survey the scene and formulate possible explanations for events, while remaining, like other researchers, ready to follow the data wherever they may lead.  For him this is possible because in his view human actions are the inevitable result of heredity and environment, just as evolutionary changes proceed independent of any creature’s choices and, in pre-Einsteinian physics, a mechanistic view is possible in which every event is theoretically predictable.  As Zola puts it, “There is an absolute determinism for alI human phenomena.”

     He rejects “the work of the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural,” and declares “The metaphysical man is dead; our whole territory is transformed by the advent of the physiological man . . .. This view of the matter is a new one; we have become experimentalists instead of philosophers.”

     Zola went to some pains in pursuit of this goal of scientific objectivity.  In researching Germinal he visited northern French mining towns at least one of which had recently been through a strike and even descended into the pits under the pretense that he was a government representative.  He had set himself the ambitious goal in his twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle of providing a comprehensive vision of Second Empire France recording not only its nature but also the process of historical change.  Such a picture could, he thought, only be generated through an accumulation of facts.

     Yet the author’s own emotions and the usages of literary convention often take precedence over the data of lived experience.  Though he conceived his project as dispassionate -- he uses the word “impersonal” and insists that “naturalism is not a personal fantasy” -- he nonetheless did not hesitate to include tendentious, melodramatic, and sensational material, elements that in fact made his work moving and popular even as it deviated from his theory. 

     Each of these thematic or affective aspects of his fiction is complicated by a certain ambivalence.  For instance, the most straightforward theme of Germinal, shaping much of the story, is certainly the denunciation of capitalism and the promise of socialism.  While this novel is one of the very best of tendentious revolutionary narratives, arousing sympathy for the exploited and anger against their callous masters, it avoids a reductive cast of heroes and villains while maintaining an unqualified support for socialism.  The miners and their families are not idealized.  All, including Étienne, the outsider, are flawed.  A few, like Jeanlin, can even kill without reason.  Some, like Catherine or old Bonnemort, are so victimized that they possess little other identity.  Many are subject to the temptations of the pleasures available to the poor, principally sex and drinking.  

     Meanwhile, the advocates of change are likewise imperfect tribunes of the people.  Étienne is capable of being seduced by his new celebrity as well as by the whims of an excited mob.  Meanwhile, Pluchart is a professional activist who seems more anxious to promote his own career in the Socialist International than to put himself on the line with the workers, and Souvarine is a Russian anarchist so seduced by violence that he holds himself aloof for much of the action and then sabotages the mine elevator, causing unnecessary workers’ deaths.  

     Rasseneur, the one-time miner who operates a tavern, supports the workers, but feels rivalry with Étienne’s more radical leadership.  Maigrat, the owner of the village shop, offers credit but also sexually exploits his customers.  Even higher on the economic ladder, Zola finds mixed characters.  M. Hennebeau, manager of the mine, is so miserable in his marriage that he fancies he would rather be one of his workers.  His nephew Négrel is already affluent, and is in addition engaged to Cécile Gregoire, the owner’s daughter, yet in the end this capitalist works tirelessly to save the trapped workers and embraces Étienne as a brother.  Deneulin, owner of a smaller nearby mine, tries to act in a responsible fashion, modernizing his operation even though he thereby reduces his profits, and for his pains he is gobbled up by his richer competitor. 

     The contradiction that exists between Zola’s straightforward view of a socialist solution which one might with justice term “idealist” and his more nuanced “realistic” depiction of the actors involved is not the only compromise of the “scientific” Naturalist theory  in the novel.  Lurid, sensational stories in fiction may indeed be equaled by lived experience, but such material is often emphasized in popular works like ‘thirties pulp fiction or Tarantino’s movies from the ‘nineties.  Incidents in Germinal like the women’s bacchante-like mutilation of Maigrat after his death, Bonnemort’s sudden murder of Cécile, and the underground consummation of love between Étienne and Catharine are possible but unlikely, included in order to heighten the story’s impact and to attract readers. 

     Each of these incidents is only barely plausible.  Maigrat’s end seems to owe a good deal to Euripedes.  Bonnemort’s act expresses, as Zola tells the reader, a lifetime of suppressed resentment.  A physician might find his act improbable for a stroke victim, but it is a powerful symbol of the potential explosive energy inherent in every worker.  While it is difficult to conceive of people near death as Étienne and Catharine are when trapped underground as inclined toward or even capable of sexual activity, their love it makes a touching, even sentimental, scene with the two characters with whom  the reader has been most in sympathy, forming a kind of denouement that, amid the ruination of the end, prefigures the novel’s hopeful final words.

     Clearly only literary convenience makes Étienne the tenuous connection of the miners’ saga with the larger Rougon-Macquart cycle.  Though a few references appear relating to other novels, such as the protagonist’s hereditary vulnerability to alcohol, no knowledge of other works is necessary for the reader of Germinal.  The entire encyclopedic concept is entirely artificial in spite of the pretension to scientific objectivity.  Zola’s ambition to render his times in such precise detail that he would be a dispassionate scientific observer, exhibiting neither abstract principles nor personal traits, but simply copying with accuracy the world around him can scarcely overcome one insuperable obstacle.  Every turn of Zola’s plot is the result of his own conscious decision.  His choices are surely based on his own life experience but they  are far from inevitable; the author’s claim to objectivity is untenable.

       Zola clearly distinguished his Naturalism from Balzac’s Realism in his essay Différences entre Balzac et moi (1869), saying “My work is less social than scientific.”  (“Mon oeuvre sera moins sociale que scientifique.)  in his view Balzac’s aim was to be wholly descriptive, simply to illustrate that “there are lawyers, idlers, etc. just as there are dogs, wolves, etc.  In a word, his work seeks to be a mirror of contemporary society.”  (“Il y a des avocats, des oisifs etc. comme il y a des chiens, des loups etc. En un mot, son oeuvre veut être le miroir de la société contemporaine.”)  In contrast for him “My great project is to be purely a naturalist, a physiologist.  In place of social concepts like royalty or Catholicism he meant to substitute scientific laws such as those of heredity” (“Ma grande affaire est d'être purement naturaliste, purement physiologiste. Au lieu d'avoir des principes (la royauté, le catholicisme) j'aurais des lois (I'hérédité.”).  He here disclaims any intention of suggesting themes, whether “political, philosophical, or moral.” For him his story is “the simple relation of the facts of a family, showing the internal mechanism that makes it act.  I accept even anomalies.”  (“Un simple exposé des faits d'une famille, en montrant le mécanisme intérieur qui la fait agir. J'accepte même l'exception.”)

     That last phrase provides the author a useful wild card.   In fact Germinal and Zola’s other novels are shaped by literary convention, as well as by ideology, taste, and a host of elements.  Zola outlines not a new, more scientific form of literature but rather a new posture meant to enhance the reader’s impression of  verisimilitude.  The Naturalist method, rather than delivering art over to science, constructs a new novelistic artifice.  By the profession of objectivity Zola advances his own thematic interest in asserting that the actions of individuals are the foreseeable result of their heredity and environment.  The claim that he is merely transcribing data from life is a rhetorical device to convince the reader that the novelist has been faithful to lived reality.  It is the nineteenth century version of the eighteenth-century writers who presented works of fiction as authentic letters or otherwise reflecting real events. 

     One’s critical estimation of Zola is in no way diminished by the idea that his Naturalism is a calculated effect rather than some new sort of objectivity.  Writing, after all, can be nothing but marks on a page which makes at best a highly selective and refracted use of the sense data of experience.  The literary devices used by writers can only be judged by  their effectiveness in context, and Zola in Germinal has told a dramatic, significant, and well-crafted story.  While the claim of Naturalism is a pose, it is neither more nor less “false” than the pretensions of some writers to relate the doings of divinities.  Everything in art is symbolic.  Whereas Bernard in studying the liver quite properly sought results “objective” enough to be replicated by other researchers, Zola’s view of the miners arose from his passion and the narrative in which it is contained owes more to literary tradition and to the author’s own imagination than to transparent, quasi-scientific reportage.  

Zola’s Nana and the Conundrum of Sex Work

 

Though it engages Zola and Xenophon, this piece is really more about the nature of sexual relations than aesthetics.

 

     Surely in Nana (1880) Zola meant to portray the sordid degradation of the sex workers of his time, even those who populated the more luxurious regions of the demimonde, where salons were occupied by genteel and titled aristocrats as well as by a once penniless girl of the streets.  In this he was contributing to a growing literature of prostitution that included most of the prominent writers among Romantics, Realists, and Naturalists alike.  Among the many who depicted streetwalkers and courtesans were de Vigny in his novel Cinq Mars (1826), Hugo in Marion Delorme (1828), Dumas père in Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843) and La Dame aux Camélias (1848), the Goncourt brothers in La Lorette (1853), Eugène Sue in “La Lorette” (1854), Augier in Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Huysmans in Marthe (1876), and de Maupassant in “Boule de Suif” (1880). [1]

     Though Zola’s approach was sociological rather than moral, tracing Nana’s ruin to her dreadful childhood, her story very nearly fits the form of a medieval exemplum, so horridly does her beauty dissolve in the end into suppurating lesions.  The chance event of her illness reveals to the reader, though not to the lady herself, the vanity and destructiveness of her career as a courtesan.  Yet Nana herself, despite her ups and downs, her short-sightedness and extravagance, had largely maintained a good humor, while her lovers fall into hopeless perdition one after another in what must amount to the greatest career of romantic destruction prior to Dorian Gray (whose conquests are far more obscurely suggested).  Philippe Hugon falls into crime, Georges stabs himself, and Fauchery, Vandeuvres, and Count Muffat suffer financial collapse in the attempt to support her profligate spending, while Nana herself never realizes what she is doing and is brought low only by the random calamity of infectious disease.

     There can be, of course, no question of the fundamental power structure of the patriarchy represented in the novel’s social relations.  The men hold the money and the power and Nana, as she periodically reflects, has nothing but her magnificent body.  Still, the misery and distress she brings her devotees and the disasters they suffer contrast with her generally self-satisfied moods.  She sacrifices true love, perhaps, by cynically using each man she cultivates, and can experience only a cruel caricature of selfless affection in her attachment to Fontan who beats her when he is not simply cold and thoughtless.  Love appears in the narrative only warped by either financial or physical exploitation or hopeless and one-sided obsession.  With fearful concision, Blake knew almost a hundred years earlier in London that “the youthful Harlots curse” “blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”  As the professional in Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” (1930) admits, she can offer “Every love, but true love.”

     If love vanishes when it finds itself in the marketplace, what remains in its place may not be the “trip to paradise” Porter’s lyrics promise, but something more nasty all around.  The world of the Théâtre des Variétés with its titled boxholders may be unknown to the contemporary reader, but comparable phenomena are commonplace today.  One may imagine, without ever having witnessed, the scene in a self-styled “gentleman’s club” next to a truck-stop at an interstate’s exit.  The parallels with Nana’s world are unescapable.  There, daily, groups of men, with more or less furtiveness, sit with overpriced drinks and drop hard-earned dollars in sacrifice to the sexual charms of the performers whose talents, as in Nana’s case, are irrelevant, their nudity (or semi-nudity) being the commodity the customers purchase. 

     This is only the grossest example and it carries the comforting convenience that many can without difficulty avoid that smoky and dim-lit crowd.  Self-interested love may as well be manifested  in the youthful wife of an aging celebrity (or rich man), in a young man’s proclivity for pornography, or the nude scene propelling an actress’ career.  The ordinary course of erotic experience includes moments at least of many sorts, ranging from possessiveness and aggression through mutual respect and responsiveness and on toward self-abnegation and masochism.  In Nana’s world, though, only the ultimately unsatisfying extremes are possible.

     Without questioning the fundamental power relations at play or the oppressive sexism of the dominant ideology, the observer might wonder whether the men or the women are more brutalized in this unequal substitute for love.  Clearly both are denied a satisfying erotic life.  The objectification forced upon the woman descends no less decisively on the man.  Films like The Blue Angel and Of Human Bondage caricature the degradation of an exploitative affair with the man as victim, though the daily newspaper indicates that the reverse is far more commonly the situation.

     Nana’s social position is not entirely unlike that of the ἑταίρα if ancient Greece.   In Xenophon’s account Socrates visits Theodote, a celebrated courtesan, after hearing of her fabulous beauty.  Arriving at her home, he finds her posing for a painter, but when they can converse, Socrates poses her a question.  “Ought we to be more grateful to Theodote for showing us her beauty or she to us for looking at it?  Does the obligation rest with her if she profits more by showing it, but with us if we profit more by looking?”  Eliding the issue of actual sexual contact by describing only her role as the object of visual attention, he observes that “we already long to touch what we’ve seen and we’ll go away aroused and will miss her when we’re gone.  The natural consequence is that we become her adorers, she the adored.”  As she is “sumptuously dressed” and attended by “many pretty maids” in a “lavishly furnished” house, her advantage seems self-evident, and she concedes to Socrates, “Of course I ought to be grateful to you for looking.” [2]  

     Theodote was, of course, quite prosperous.  Her work occurred like Nana’s in a genteel aristocratic atmosphere, just as some women with “sugar daddies” might today mix in moneyed circles.   The answer to Socrates’ question would have been different had he been interviewing a common prostitute, a πόρνη, a word derived from πέρνημι meaning “to sell” and  associated with exploitation and slavery.  Poor, often literally a slave, lacking agency over her own life, such prostitutes resemble today’s street sex workers who are often addicts or victims of trafficking.

     The question that Socrates poses to Theodote ignores a third possibility, that of mutual affection, but that can hardly occur when sexuality is commodified.  Every economic bargain involves a balance of interests, and, when people are buying and selling, a marketplace can assure a modicum of what looks to both parties like “fairness,” but when love is for sale, it is either not really love or not really for sale.  If one party is more powerful, a price must be paid for cynically using another; the possibility of love vanishes altogether.

 

  

1.  Though never prosecuted in France, Zola was the occasion for several major censorship trials in the United Kingdom that ultimately ruined Henry Vizetelly, his publisher.  For a survey of the theme in visual art, see Hollis Clayson’s Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era.  Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) developed an American Naturalism from the considerably more sordid circumstances of the Bowery.  The theme flourished in art movies after World War II in such features as Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (945), Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960), Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962), Pasolini’s Mama Roma (1962), Kurasawa’s Red Beard (1965), and Buñuel’s Belle du Jour (1967).

2.  Memorabilia (III, 11, 2-4) in the Loeb Library translation by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, revised by Jeffrey Henderson. 

Norris’s Visionary

Page numbers refer to the Riverside edition from Houghton Mifflin.


     Theoretical statements of naturalism tend, like those of other schools, to overstate their innovations for polemical reasons. Thus Zola’s novels are in general more conventional than the reader of his essay on “The Experimental Novel” might expect. Americans influenced by Zola, such as Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, enlarged on certain openings in their master’s original concepts, justifying new narratives shaped by realism, romanticism, and local color, as well as by naturalism. While to some extent this “softening” of naturalism was an inevitable response to the nature of the aesthetic text and the demands of readers, such a mixture also sometimes produced anomalies and dissonance. In Norris's The Octopus the character of Vanamee neatly epitomizes this contradiction which weakens rather than strengthens verisimilitude and the construction of theme.
     Zola’s 1893 essay “The Experimental Novel” [1] outlines what the author claims to establish “a literature governed by science” (similar to the “higher critics” treatment of Biblical studies or Marx’s aim of rendering history). According to Zola naturalism “is an inevitable evolution” which “replaces purely imaginary novels by novels of observation and experiment.” The author confidently declares his new “experimental novel” to be “a consequence of the scientific evolution of the century.” He there maintains that the new type of fiction resembles “experimental medicine” in that it “adheres to no . . . doctrine nor any philosophical system.” To him “naturalism is not a personal fantasy, but . . . the intellectual movement of the century.” He insists “there is an absolute determinism in the existing conditions of natural phenomena” and objects to “imbecile arguments, about the impossibility of being strictly true, about the necessity of arranging facts to produce a work of art of any kind.”
     He claims for literature a role precisely parallel to that of science. “The intellectual conquest of man consists in diminishing and driving back indeterminism, and so, gradually, by the aid of the experimental method, gaining ground for determinism.” For him “idealistic novelists deliberately remain in the unknown, through all sorts of religious and philosophical prejudices.” All such ideas are equally juvenile wish-fulfilment based on “the astounding pretense that the unknown is nobler and more beautiful than the known.” Thus romanticism is merely “ravings,” and “our age of lyricism” a “romantic disease.” A writer who does not rely on the scientific experimental method just as it is practiced in a laboratory inevitably finds himself among “the follies of the poets and the philosophers,” one of “the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural.”
     Yet Zola is aware that the analogy between experimental science and fiction is imperfect. He must acknowledge that literature is in part an individual expression of a specific author. He defensively claims that literature “does not depend merely upon the author,” as “the personal feeling is but the first impulse.” Style, the unique fingerprint of each author is discounted. “Rhetoric, for the moment, has no place here. Let us first fix upon the method, on which there should be agreement, and after that accept all the different styles in letters which may be produced, looking upon them as the expressions of the literary temperament of the writers.” Again, Zola concedes aesthetic values, but only in a subordinate, in fact adventitious, role far from his view of narrative as a laboratory experiment.
     The very starting point of Zola’s theory is the attempt to assimilate art to science. For this reason his naturalism ignores the definitive traits of the aesthetic text, among them the valorization of beauty (and its “lesser” cousins entertainment, sentiment, humor and thrills). Acknowledging the individuality of form and style, he regards these as trivial. While admitting that, traditionally, “form is sufficient to immortalize a work,” he reduces this effect to mere display: “the spectacle of a powerful individuality reproducing nature in superb language will interest all ages.” He associates a nebulous “genius” with all the elements of a novel that do not exist in his scientific model: affect, theme, and form. “Not only is a writer’s genius to be found in the feeling and in the idea a priori but also in the form and style. ”For his naturalistic novel, the writer’s desiderata are those of most non-aesthetic texts. “The excellence of a style depends upon its logic and clearness.” (How could any reader of Shakespeare persuade himself of such a formula?)
     Hamlin Garland ‘s version of naturalism, which he called “veritism,” was far more nebulous. He defined his own practice of “realism (or veritism)” as “the truthful statement of an individual impression corrected by reference to the fact." [2] The new element is the term “impression,” influenced by painters of the day. Years later he described his notion of “veritism” as distinguishing him from the followers of Zola. Again calling himself an “impressionist,” he noted that imitation of reality required “verification,” obtainable by “comparing impressions” over a period of time. He was at pains to call for a wholesome, Whitmanic” “normalcy and decorum,” distinguished from the depictions of the underclass associated with “Zola and certain of the German novelists.” [3]
     Frank Norris made his eclecticism explicit. He wrote, in fact, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” [4] calling for “romanticism and not sentimentalism.” With a sneer at popular novelists, he says that while “sentiment will be handed down the scullery stairs” romance can be more than “a conjurer’s trick-box, full of flimsy quackeries;” it can be “an instrument” by which one may penetrate “down deep, into the red, living heart of things.” He maintains his loyalty to his master by asserting that Zola is “the very head of the Romanticists.” Pure realism is “harsh, loveless, colourless, and blunt,” capturing “only the surface of things.” To him romance is required for both emotion and themes in literature. Nature itself is unfeeling, very likely absurd. Only with the human connection, with “Romance” can the reader receive “a complete revelation of my neighbor’s secretest life,” dealing with “hopes and fears,” “joys and sorrows.” Romance “can teach you” “a nobler purpose and a mightier than mere amusement.” “To Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man.” The terms “black” and “unsearched” indicate that this realm is a mystery, presenting the sort of material the aesthetic text is uniquely fit to interrogate.
     For all of his gestures of obeisance toward Zola, Norris mixed romance, realism, and naturalism with considerable abandon. The Octopus, the first volume of a projected Epic of Wheat, unfinished at Norris’ death, certainly exhibits grand ambitions. Norris aimed at producing what his poetical character Presley could not -- the epic of the West, spectacular as the landscape, inscribed with all the tumultuous history of the region. For all the well-defined, idiosyncratic characters, his use of capitalized words -- Wheat, the People, and others -- implies the aim of writing something transcending individuality, and anticipates, for instance, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
     Norris recurs to the theme of his characters’ passivity, their thorough subjugation to fate. Not only the trains and the harvesting equipment, but the very process of economic production itself is figured as a monster, barely controllable, as likely to threaten its human managers as to reward them. Even the fields of cultivated wheat are imbued with animation and even with a sort of enlightenment for Norris: what was “these heated, tiny squabbles, this feverish small bustle of mankind, this minute swarming of the human insect , to the great, majestic, silent ocean of the Wheat itself!” Men are “mere gnats in the sunshine,” while the Wheat is “wrapped in Nirvanic calm . . .alone with the stars and with God.” (307)
     When Presley has an audience with the rail executive Shelgrim, the business man disclaims all personal responsibility for his actions and for those of his corporation. He insists that “railroads build themselves . . . The Wheat grows itself . . . You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and Railroads, not with men.” (395) and admits that he could declare bankruptcy, give up business, but even that drastic action would have no effect as another man would instantly arise to take his place and his profits.
     Here the book's political theme collapses. Though the entire story is built of details that demonstrate the viciously rapacious nature of capitalism, and the utterly amoral behavior of businessmen, Shelgrim is here allowed to get himself off scot-free. In fact his plot is sentimental and sensational in its indictment of the corporation, with such passages as Hilda’s descent into prostitution and her mother’s starvation presented in a chapter which alternates sketches of her agony with Presley’s experience of a lavish dinner filled with exquisite plates and precious remarks. The rough and ready honor of the ranchers of which Magnus Derrick is the most pronounced example contrasts dramatically with the lack of scruples of Behrman, Shelgrim, and their henchmen.
     Yet Norris’s hero is staggered and silent upon being told by a CEO that that the evil-doing of the ruling class is as inevitable as the movements of the heavenly spheres. Of course, no radical challenge is represented in the novel apart from the ranchers’ ill-organized vigilantism and the ultra-left anarchist Calaher, the bar-owner. The farmers are hoodwinked in their amateurish attempt at working corruption for their own benefit and they then fail in their first and only armed confrontation, and the anarchist is condemned outright.
     I need not detail other factors that weaken the political-economic theme of the novel such as the use of an anti-Semitic stereotype in the villainous S. Behrman. [5] Further, many plot details in this novel, generally considered to be realistic or naturalistic are overdetermined by the political theme or implausible. How could the ranchers think that their nomination of Lyman Derrick, son of a prominent anti-railroad activist, would evade notice from the trust? It is a remarkable coincidence, even in the smaller society of turn-of-the-century San Francisco, that Presley knows socially the very people who are stealing from the ranchers with whom he is staying. Shelgrim’s ironic death, buried under wheat in the ship’s hold, is unlikely, but so is the whole notion that this particular ship, the very crop over which the principals have been contending, is being sent by the vacuous charity ladies to India.
     The problem is epitomized in the character of Vanamee, a mystic figure without parallel in Norris’s other work. Vanamee is gifted with extrasensory powers. Further, he seeks and achieves a visionary state on which Norris leverages the entire thematic weight of his epic of the West. Vanamee blunts the social theme of the plot by assimilating the injustices of society (which are presumably, in theory at least, soluble through collective action) to those which are inevitable for every individual: mortality and the loss of love. When Vanamee manages to coax forth, in imagination at least, a reunion with his lost beloved or at any rate a glimpse of her daughter (her offspring, her karma, her immortality) in the growing wheat, he is vouchsafed an answer satisfying to his quest. His ultimate success is foreshadowed early in the book when her memory conjures up an officially capitalized (so the reader knows it is real) “Something.” (109) He need only recognize that he has already conquered “Death.”
     As the ranchers’ case seems less and less viable, and their dispossession approaches inexorably, Vanamee finds peace again through his magical experiences. In “The Wheat! The Wheat!” he feels the mighty potency of a vegetative élan vital sufficient to sustain him. “Life out of death, eternity arising from out dissolution. There was the lesson. Angéle was not the symbol, but the proof of immortality. The seed, dying, rotting and corrupting in the earth, rising again in life unconquerable, and in immaculate purity. – Angéle dying as she gave birth to her little daughter, life springing from her death.” Death is swallowed up in Victory.” (269)
     It is only this supernatural revelation that governs the book’s conclusion. Contrary to all the data of the sprawling Western story, flying in the face of the ruination of all the good and the system’s consistent favoring of the prosperity of the wicked, Norris is yet capable of telling the reader as the book closes, “truth,” it seems, “will, in the end, prevail, and all things surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good.” (448) It is difficult to see how this sentiment would prove much succor to the evicted farmers and their families. The fact that Norris, lacking a socialist alternative, was obliged to turn to metaphysics for optimism itself indicates the desperation of his case. His inclusion of a character with extra-sensory powers is, in a way, a poignant proof of the failure of the real world to offer much hope.
     Norris is a powerful realistic writer. His association with muckrakers and his research into actual history of the San Joaquin Valley and the grand Cinerama-like scope of his Western epic command attention. His stories, while often overdrawn, are engaging. For me, his combination of naturalism and romance in The Octopus results in weakness both in the historical anti-monopoly theme and in the metaphysical one.



1. I quote from Belle M. Sherman’s translation published by Haskell House, New York, 1964 which is available online at Marxists.org. While the reader unfamiliar with naturalism might take the word “experimental” in Zola’s title to refer to literary innovation in general, in fact Zola meant to establish fiction on a specifically scientific basis, similar to medical experiments. His model is not a novel or earlier work of literary theory, but rather an exposition of scientific method, Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Experimentale.

2. See “Productive Conditions of American Literature," Forum 27 [Aug. 1894] and “Local Color in Art” from Crumbling Idols.

3. Letter of February 14 1939 to Eldon Hill in the Hamlin Garland Papers, the Doheny Library, University of Southern California.

4. In The Responsibilities of the Novelist and other literary essays (NYC Doubleday) 1903.

5. None of the historical persons suggested as models for Behrman were Jewish. Doubtless Norris’s most egregious character of the sort was Zerkow in McTeague. Norris was influenced by Darwin and Spencer and his professor Joseph LeConte, the theistic evolutionist. His racist views, not only on Jews, but also regarding “darker” races, are offensively evident today. It is significant that such gross stereotyping was sufficiently normative when the book was published that years passed before the author’s anti-Semitism attracted comment.

6. Similarly in Chapter 19 of Grapes of Wrath Ma Joad offers a hopeful note. "Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on." Surely there is no sense apart from wish-fulfilment in which “them people” (the oppressors) will vanish while “the people” will finally enjoy their long-delayed victory. For the Steinbeck of that era, though, signs of political progress were apparent in spite of a system of oppression.