The classic short story does not shrink from caricaturing its characters in the most extreme ways. Even the greatest authors — Chekhov, Maupassant, Akutagawa, Verga and James — all at times explicitly indicate how we should consider the character, rather than relying on more subtle portraits.
We will not be surprised, of course, to find this in most satires, where the ridiculing of characters is expected. In Chekhov’s Smert’ chinovnika (The Death of a Civil Servant) — published in the humorous journal Oskolki (Splinters) and widely republished in anthologies — the hero is presented throughout the story, paroxystically, as the incarnation of the type of pitiful minor civil servant familiar to readers since Gogol. The whole story is a development of this character type, and the narrative is based on the
5 Compare this to a novel like Crime and Punishment, which is all about Sonya being “just like us”, with her “voice” of equal value to that of Raskol’nikov, the judge Porfiry, or the reader. Her ways of living and thinking act as a powerful source of reflection for characters and readers alike.
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grotesque bad luck that comes with it.6 As a kind of summing up of all these elements, he is called “Cherviakov” (“worm”).
But such caricature is not to be found only in stories written for the
“small press”. In the beginning of En famille (A Family Affair), Maupassant describes the people that can be found in the tramway:7 “The few inside consisted of stout women in strange toilettes, shopkeepers’ wives from the suburbs, who made up for the distinguished looks which they did not possess by ill-assumed dignity”.8 And later:
In the suburbs of Paris, which are full of people from the provinces, one meets with the indifference toward death, even of a father or a mother, which all peasants show; a want of respect, an unconscious callousness which is common in the country, and rare in Paris.9
The suburb where the characters live is described as “the garbage district”, and the hero, on his mother’s death, is described as “revolving in his mind those apparently profound thoughts, those religious and philosophical commonplaces, which trouble people of mediocre minds in the face of death”.10 The situation is very clear: on the one hand there are the Parisian readers of a high society journal, and on the other the people who live in the suburbs, “provincials” who have not been civilized by city life, and who have brought with them their brutish country ways. Let us note that A Family Affair is not one of Maupassant’s minor short stories, but a text which has been hailed by critics; not an anecdote for Gil Blas, but an “adorable short story […] a fine study of the dregs of the lower middle class”, to use
6 At a theatre, a petty civil servant sneezes. No big deal. But he has sneezed on the head of the person in front of him. Learning this person is a general, he apologises once, twice, five times — until the official is so irritated he quite harshly sends him away. Desperate, the civil servant returns home and dies.
7 Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, trans. by Artine Artinian (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 1025-42 (hereafter Artinian). The French text of this story can be found in Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed.
by Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pléiade, 1974), I, pp. 195-218 (hereafter Pléiade). A working-class family, the Caravans, learn of the death of their grandmother, who lived in an apartment above them; they rush up to take possession of the most precious objects before the other heirs arrive, planning to pretend that they had been given to them by their grandmother, directly, in gratitude for what they had done for her. An antithetic tension is created between the excessive efforts made by the Caravans to ensure their possession of these objects, and the futility of these efforts. On the one hand, the objects are hideous; on the other, the old lady is not dead: she wakes up and solemnly gives them to the other members of the family.
8 Ibid, p. 1025 (p. 195).
9 Ibid, p. 1032 (p. 203).
10 Ibid, p. 1037 (p. 211).
8. A Foreign World 121 an expression of the critic Albert Wolff:11 such methods of distancing did not in any way bother the critics of the time.
Ridiculing the character does not destroy the short story; in fact it is almost a defining feature, very similar to the prevalence of paroxystic extremes. Endless numbers of heroes of short stories are described as
“ridiculous” by the narrators, from Maupassant’s Miss Harriet (“ridiculous and lamentable”), to Pirandello’s Donna Mimma (“a ridiculous and pitiful spectacle”), to Akutagawa’s Goi in Yam Gruel (ugly to the point of “strangeness”). What we have here is exactly the attitude that we saw in Maupassant’s Allouma in the previous chapter: the judgement of the narrator is assured, and is founded on the comfortable feeling of the white man’s/high society member’s superiority.
Maupassant’s characterisation of Allouma as an animal was not limited to the native woman: it was also the standard way in which he described peasants. I have listed at length the cases in which Maupassant uses animal vocabulary to represent people.12 It ranges from descriptions of their physicality (the old peasant “just like a rat”; “What was it that opened it? I could not tell at the first glance. A woman or an ape?”; [she was] “the true type of robust peasantry, half brute and half woman […]; [...] the brutal sound of her voice, a sort of moan, or rather a mew”),13 to descriptions of their customs (“in the country the useless are obnoxious and the peasants would be glad, like hens, to kill the infirm of their species”),14 and to their domestic situation (“the brats were crawling all over […] The two mothers could barely distinguish their products in the heap […] the housewives gathered their offspring to give them their mash, like gooseherds gathering their creatures […] the mother [...] fattening her calf”).15 What Maupassant suggests here is a radical difference: peasants belong to a “different species”
(to use his own phrase from Allouma). It is not that the peasants are simply different from us; they are expelled from the circle of human beings.
11 See Forestier’s note in Pléiade, II, p. 1343 (translation ours).
12 Florence Goyet, La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: description d’un genre à son apogée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), pp. 140-44.
13 Autres temps in Pléiade, I, p. 455 (translation ours); Old Mongilet in Artinian, p. 940 (Le Père Mongilet in Pléiade, II, p. 468); The Mother of Monsters in Artinian, p. 380 (La Mère aux monstres in Pléiade, I, p. 842).
14 The Blind Man in Artinian, p. 900 (L’Aveugle in Pléiade, I, p. 402).
15 The Adopted Son in Guy de Maupassant, The Entire Original Maupassant Short Stories, trans.
by Albert M. C. McMaster, A. E. Henderson and Mme Quesada (Project Gutenburg, 2004), available at http://ia600204.us.archive.org/9/items/completeoriginal03090gut/3090-h/3090-h.htm#2H_4_0137 (Aux champs in Pléiade, I, p. 607).
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Again, this did not bother the critics of the time any more than the characterisation of women — especially exotic women — as inferior. This last example, Aux champs, is no more a minor story than A Family Affair. It is even today often republished — quite a favourite of short story collections of Maupassant, in fact — and at the time it had been selected by the magazines of quite good repute: La Vie populaire, and Le Voleur, which presented the story to its readers as “a living study of the heart of peasants”.16 My point is not that these stories shouldn’t be republished, but that it seems odd that few critics, even today, comment on the brutal “othering” of these characters. This type of extreme and unflattering characterisation is so typical of the short story that it somehow goes unnoticed.
The classic short story did not shrink from stating explicitly that its heroes are of a resolutely different humanity from its readers, but given the subtlety of many short stories, it is not surprising that this effect is often achieved through indirect, implicit means. Most frequently readers will be left to draw their own conclusions about characters and events. As in ironic texts, the reader has no need to be told that the characters are in error; he knows it from seeing them believe in things that are clearly wrong (“known error proclaimed”, as Wayne C. Booth calls it), or holding values inferior to his or the author’s (Booth calls this “conflicts of belief”).17 In Une aventure parisienne (An Adventure in Paris), for example, Maupassant tells the story of a chaste provincial woman, the wife of a notary, who comes to Paris in order to see for herself the extremes of luxury and corruption she is sure are hidden in the capital.18 Purely by chance, she meets one of the great men of the day, and has the opportunity to spend a full day, and even a night, with him. The whole point of the story is her disillusionment at discovering that the man’s famous and cherished reputation hides a very unpleasant personality. The structuring antithesis is between what she has imagined from reading the daily papers and the reality of Paris. In the end, she plainly acknowledges her “provincial” error.
16 La Vie populaire was a weekly publication founded by the author Catulle Mendès, with long articles and well-known authors. Aux champs was first published in Le Gaulois on 31 October 1882; it was then republished in Le Voleur — a well-respected publication that specialised in the republishing of texts — on 10 November 1883, and in La Vie populaire on 1 October 1884.
17 Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp.
57-60 and 73-75.
18 Artinian, pp. 1008-12 (Pléiade, I, pp. 329-35).
8. A Foreign World 123 However, the Parisian readers of Gil Blas or La Vie populaire — where the story was republished19 — had no need of this explicit denunciation to enjoy the spectacle of her error. From the very beginning, they knew from their own experience how much she erred, just from the description of her thoughts. Sentences like “she saw Paris in an apotheosis of magnificent and corrupt luxury” and “there could be no doubt that the houses there [on the boulevards] concealed mysteries of prodigious love” make her error as clear to them as any explicit statement.20 Similarly, there is no need to state explicitly, as Maupassant does in En famille (A Family Affair), that the clock coveted by the Caravans is ridiculous: “one of those grotesque objects that were produced so plentifully under the [Second] Empire”.21 Readers of the elegant Nouvelle Revue would inevitably feel disgust for such artistic atrocities as suggested here: the clock’s apparatus is in the shape of a young woman, and the pendulum is a ball with which she plays cup-and-ball. This design was generally recognised in the 1880s as a contrived and rather crude sexual symbol, and considered to be the height of bad taste by anyone in intellectual or elegant circles. Here the characters are as effectively discredited by Booth’s “conflict of values” as they would be through direct characterisation.
The objective social distance which we have identified between the readers of short stories and their characters is galvanized in the feeling of that distance. In their ferocious and ludicrous struggle for a grotesque object, the characters establish their distance from the reader who would not for the world have it cluttering his room. Wolff, in the article where he described Maupassant’s story as “an excellent study of the dregs of the lower middle class”, stigmatised the Caravans’ “rapacity” and praised the author for being a “thinker”. It is definitely an affair of the suburbs — the
“district where rubbish is deposited”.22 This section of society has little to do with him or his readers.
19 La Vie populaire, 14 August 1884.
20 Artinian, p. 1008 and p. 1009 (Pléiade, I, p. 329 and p. 330).
21 Ibid, p. 1037 (p. 210).
22 Wolff describes the story as “beautiful from beginning to end, beautiful in its general conception, in its study of the characters, in its wholesome and powerful truth”. The article, originally published in Le Figaro, was reprinted by Le Voleur, along with the first instalment of A Family Affair, in its issues of 1, 8 and 15 September 1882. It can now be found in Pléiade, I, p. 1343 (translation ours).
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