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”)

Notes on Recent Reading 48 (Huxley, Cossery, de Maupassant)

 

Point Counter Point (Huxley)

     Huxley gets far less respect these days than he did in my youth.  His lack of engagement with the major trends of modernism combined with the intensification of his mystic inclinations toward the end of his career have diminished his importance for many readers in recent years.  He is left with those who are like him interested in cleansing their doors of perception as well as a remnant that relish the social novels of his early days: Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point. 

     Reading Point Counter Point one has the innocent amusement of a roman à clef including, by most accounts, characters based on D. H. Lawrence and Nancy Cunard, as well as a denatured and belated impression of Baudelaire.  There is an all-but-constant stream of weary Bloomsbury wit.  “My wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phryean.”  “Quotations have something facetiously pedantic about them.” “He talks slang as though he were a foreigner with a perfect command of English.”  “[Marjorie] took such horribly small bites from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth, like a guinea pig – as though the process of eating were an indelicate and rather disgusting affair.”  These I found by opening the book at random; they constitute its most reliable reward.            

     I thought of Peacock through much of the book, as one character played off another, none more than two-dimensional, and then of Oscar Wilde and Saki.  Toward the end, when things other than repartee start to happen, the action seems incongruous and faintly disturbing, as though a Punch and Judy puppet were suddenly to express real pain.   Yet the novels are well worth reading, at least up through the ‘thirties.  I myself have a considerable tolerance as well for the Vedanta articles and the allied exploration of the value of psychedelics.  And I have a nostalgia as well, remembering how, as a teen-ager, I loved Texts and Pretexts, his poetry anthology with comments.  He wrote a very great deal, his own poetry, essays, travel pieces, stage plays and screenplays, supporting himself with his pen in a way all but unthinkable today.   

 

Men God Forgot (Cossery)

     Cossery was an Egyptian-born writer of Syrian Christian descent who, despite living in Paris for most of his life, continued to set his fiction in some version of his remembered Cairo childhood.  Though his own father was well off, Cossery found his themes in the slums, among the poor scrabbling to survive and smoking hashish to get through the day.  Men God Forgot, his first book, consists of five stories whose titles convey their tone: three are “The Girl and the Hashish Smoker,” “The Barber Has Killed his Wife,” and “The Hungry Dream Only of Bread.”  The ambiance is supported by the names of roads in his fictional city such as the Cul-de-sac of the Cripples, the Street of the Pregnant Woman, and the Lane of the Pissing Child. 

     Though his original inspiration was Balzac and he wrote only in French, his tales are sure to remind readers of Paul Bowles’ storytellers like Mohammed Mrabet as well as the sophisticated narratives of Naguib Mahfouz.  Cossery’s successful pursuit of lyricism in scenes of squalid ugliness is reminiscent as well of Céline.  

     In Egypt Cossery found allies in the Groupe Art et Liberté, a largely Surrealist and anti-fascist formation and associated as well with such writers as Lawrence Durrell, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller (who contributed a note for a later City Lights edition).  The book was translated by Harold Edwards, a professor at an Egyptian university and published by George Leite’s Circle Editions in Berkeley in 1946.  The many typos seem to testify to the book’s authenticity.  My own copy, from the University Avenue Goodwill store near the UC campus, has a penciled price inside the cover: 25¢.  Cossery would have particularly welcomed, I think, being read on the cheap.

 

Bel-Ami (de Maupassant)

     Georges Duroy is introduced as a man who attracts attention in public places due to his masterful military air and, more importantly, his striking good looks.   Before long the reader finds that he acquired his “swagger” during service in colonial North Africa where he not only indulged in incidents of gratuitous brutality, but then found lasting amusement in recalling them later.  Ego-driven and amoral, he improbably makes his way to wealth and an influential position in Paris journalism, his advancement spurred by his sexual conquests of a series of women.  Utterly cynical about the government and his profession as well as about romance, he rises irresistibly in Belle Époque France.  In the concluding scene, a glorious celebrity wedding, Duroy (or Du Roy de Cantel, as he now styles himself) the toast of the town, his ambition somehow satisfied, gazes out across the city, a master of the universe like Tom Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy, and his thoughts turn to his mistress’s hair, charmingly disordered in bed. 

     The combination of Duroy’s almost inhuman selfishness with his capacity for a nearly (but not quite) tender sensuality heightens the dramatic tension for the reader, while for the character there can be no doubt.  His crass material goals are the only real ends in life.  The story of his affairs plays out before the historical background of French colonial expansion in the Maghreb, a plotline of unbounded national greed to match the individual avarice of the novel’s hero.

     The book, like de Maupassant’s stories, is filled with telling specific details in every scene.  While the human landscape is bleak indeed – the characters generally act from the most venial motives – the context is described with vivid delight and rich plenitude, with scenes set in poverty and in wealth, in the city and in the countryside.  In part at least the reader is enabled, like Lear in the end, to look on fallen society with bemusement, to become one of “God’s spies” in a world that might sometimes seem altogether wicked were it not that we are inextricably tangled in it and we know, if we know nothing else, our own vulnerability.

Thematic Instability in Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse

     The center of Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse is elusive. Though the book is a part of Balzac’s Scenes of Provincial Life a good part of the narrative occurs in Paris.  The family dynamics between Joseph, Phillipe, and their mother seem to be heart of the book until Flore appears and then Maxence with their designs on the Rouget money.

     The unusual instability of the novel’s title reflects this thematic ambiguity.  First published as Les Deux Frères in 1840, it became Un Ménage de Garçon in 1842 and then La Rabouilleuse in 1843.  The final choice is perhaps the most puzzling as Flore, la rabouilleuse herself, has a limited role and is clearly more a motive than an active agent in the plot.  In translation it has appeared as The Black Sheep in Donald Adamson’s version, as A Bachelor’s Establishment in Clara Bell’s, and as The Two Brothers in Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s. 

     Clearly these shifts in the title imply an uncertainty about the central theme of the story.  While the original title focuses on the comparison of Joseph and Phillipe, the second seems to turn primarily to Joseph as protagonist, though it remains uncertain whether the “bachelor” is Phillipe before his marriage, or Joseph whose ménage includes his mother. 

     Balzac’s comments in a brief avant-propos only complicate the question of the book’s primary subject further.  Balzac claims in a dedication to Charles Nodier that his principal theme is to point out the harm done by the weakening of patriarchy.  Few readers might have guessed.  He explains that his story carries “a great lesson for the family and for Motherhood” by calling attention to “the effects of diminished paternal authority.”  In fact, he finds a general decay of morality in modern society which he finds “based solely on the power of money.”  For Balzac as an orthodox believer, the remedy is obvious: the country must “return to the Catholic Church for purification of the masses by religious feeling” and all will be well. [1]

     All these highly conventional opinions seem to have little, though, to do with the narrative in spite of the author’s assertions.  Only in a harsh verdict on Agathe’s husbandless household and her acting the hapless woman by preferring her ne’er-do-well son to the dutiful one might “diminished paternal authority” be relevant to the plot.  Dr. Rouget, a strong husband of the previous generation, clearly errs in his mistreatment of his daughter.  Jean-Joseph, Phillipe, and Maxence are all “strong” male characters with far from exemplary behavior, while the laudable Joseph is quiet and unassertive.  Likewise, apart from the priest’s deathbed counseling of Agathe bringing her to the realization that she had been wronging her more virtuous son, the novel contains little to support the notion that regeneration must come from the Church.  Balzac, perhaps motivated by moralistic critics of his work, claims with little basis that the most respectable values underly his novel.     

     The theme of greed displacing ethics is, however, in a general way, appropriate, as the characters motivated by money or by money’s glow reflected in social prestige are depicted as amoral while those with more humane motivations behave better.  In the plot’s mainline clear patterns of retributive justice govern the paths of Joseph, the character most positively portrayed who finds success and even ennoblement in spite of his indifference to such rewards and the avaricious Maxence, Phillipe, and Flore  all of whom come to ruin.  The final miseries of Flore read almost like a medieval exemplum.  Yet, though she has no worldly ambition, Agathe is profoundly misguided in her treatment of her sons., while the community in general is neither pious nor wicked, [2] though often self-interested and gossipy. 

     This novel is only a small portion of Balzac’s grand project, La Comédie humaine, comprising ninety-one completed works and the planning for another forty-six over a period of two decades.   Balzac’s introductory note to the novel points out the thematic complexity allowed by his comprehensive plan.  His soldiers, he says, in this story indicate the “depravity” that “results from the exigencies of war in certain minds which dare to act in private life as they would on the field of battle,” but the reader can see that this is no general verdict due to the “fine characters,” motivated by “great and noble devotion” depicted in his Scenes of Military Life. 

     The conflicted focus implied by the multiple titles may, then, be an answer as well as a question.  As La Rabouilleuse is a single mosaic stone in a large composition in which every portion need not mimic the whole, the themes of one isolated portion need not agree with those of another.  Even the irreligious among Balzac’s nineteenth or twenty-first century readers may echo Dryden’s cogent praise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales “Here is God's plenty.”  A certain exhilarating liberty emerges, allowing Balzac to compose without preconception. 

     Balzac’s approach to theme, nuanced far beyond his conscious, expressed values, is evident in the ambivalence of his political implications.  Though Balzac was himself a conservative royaloist, Marx and Engels had the highest regard for his work.  Marx had enough respect for the Comédie humaine to envision writing a major, full-length study of it, though he never completed this project.  Engels praised Balzac for writing that belied the conscious reactionary theme, often betraying (to a receptive reader at least) what looks quite like revolutionary implications. 

 

Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

   Engels to Margaret Harkness April 1888

 

     The same authorial freedom that allowed Marx and Engels to see their notions of French society reflected in Balzac’s epic canvas also enables the reader without a partisan view to see large and complex patterns in this narrative world which, like those we observe in life, offer in general no easy answers and include many shades between the extremes, even now and then to revealing the unexpected. 

     The liberty that enables ambiguity need not result in randomness.  Balzac employs observations of unprogrammed lived experience mixed with literary conventions, and he has no difficulty in developing incidents that suggest generalizations that might be called themes.  Rather like some painters who chose to work en plein air claiming to reproduce their sense impressions on canvas, but in fact propelling art in new directions, Balzac’s pose as a scientifical observer of society allowed him to construct fictions in a new vein.

     La Rabouilleuse, a novel that has met more blame than praised from critics, [2] has at any rate a gripping story, punctuated with dramatic incident and scenes of pathos.  The reader who hunts after a theme reducible to a single line may be missing both that simple narrative excitement and the grander sense, based on Balzac’s life’s work, that his novels provide access to a complete and coherent scene of human life, one as subjective as individual as any writer’s.  The specific correspondence to historical moments in France during the author’s life seems almost immaterial, in spite of the references to documented events.  In the end La Rabouilleuse and the entire Comédie humaine are, not because of topical or documentary detail, but by virtue of the specifically Balzacian imagination they record, as resistant to reductive formulae and sometimes as enigmatic as life itself. 

 

 

1. The passages quoted in Clara Bell’s rendering are in the original French: “grands enseignements et pour la famille et pour la maternité; “des effets produits par la diminution de la puissance paternelle;” “puisse une société basée uniquement sur le pouvoir de l'argent;” and “puisse-t-elle recourir promptement au catholicisme pour purifier les masses par le sentiment religieux.”  “Assez de beaux caractères, assez de grands et nobles dévouements brilleront dans les Scènes de la Vie militaire, pour qu’il m’ait été permis d’indiquer ici combien de dépravation causent les nécessités de la guerre chez certains esprits, qui dans la vie privée osent agir comme sur les champs de bataille.”

2.  In  his introduction to the entire Comédie humaine, Balzac notes that in his view “Man is neither good nor bad” (“L’homme n’est ni bon ni méchant”).

3.  A number of negative judgements are mentioned at the outset of Allan H. Pasco, “Process Structure in Balzac's ‘La Rabouilleuse,’" Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1/2 (Fall and Winter 2005-2006).

 

 

 

 

Note of an Accidental Bibliophile

     Feeling I have enough to do to attend to the authors’ words, I don’t seek out rare editions of books, but now and then I happen across an interesting old title in a Salvation Army or library book sale, and I am quite willing then to enjoy a volume’s particular qualities.  My English copy of La Rabouilleuse, titled A Bachelor’s Establishment, was published by J. M. Dent in 1896, translated by the indefatigable Clara Bell and introduced by George Saintsbury, part of his twenty-volume edition of the Comédie Humaine.  (The Times reviewer, grandly named E. Irenaeus Stevenson, welcomed the set on June 25, 1898 in a piece “Balzac in English” which began by noting that Balzac “is not even yet read and measured nicely by all those men and women quick in perception [and] broad in cultivation.”  “It may be doubted,” he goes on, “whether in English translation and with Anglo-Saxons, Balzac will ever attain a much more general circulation that his masterpieces today receive.”

     The design of my copy has charm in its art nouveau cover lettering and decoration, deckle edges and irregular signatures, thick, palpable pages, and engraved illustrations by the Scots painter and printmaker D. Murray Smith.  While not memorable art, they and their inlaid protective tissues grace the book.