We have seen that the short story does not hesitate to use types — social if not traditional literary types — in order to facilitate the reader’s rapid entry into the story (see Chapter Four). Instead of being reworked, the type is usually developed along expected lines. When Akutagawa, for instance, describes the life of brigands in the Middle Ages in Chūtō (The Brigands), he relies on all the reader’s preconceived ideas of what constitutes a
“brigand”.23 With little surprise — but with all the power of the topos — we see the development of life outside the law, with its train of evil deeds perpetrated with the greatest indifference, and encounters endured with the greatest sangfroid. Similarly, Maupassant’s La Maison Tellier (Madame Tellier’s Establishment) plays on the stereotype of the prostitute, while Pirandello’s Lumie di Sicilia (Sicilian Limetrees) builds for our pleasure an antithesis between the immoral urban female singer, and the poor and virtuous provincial musician in love with her.24
Rarely will a narrative short story bypass the opportunity offered by exoticism of this kind, even when the author appears as the “defender”
of a type known to be ridiculous. From this point of view, Maupassant’s Miss Harriet is a particularly interesting story, because critics have seen in it the symbol of the author’s “compassion” for his characters.25 As we become aware of the many signs of distancing, such a conclusion becomes surprising. From her first appearance, Miss Harriet is characterised as having the “face of a mummy”; she is “a sour herring adorned with curling papers”, a “singular apparition” which makes the narrator “laugh”.26 This
23 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū, 19 vols (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1954-1955), I, pp. 207-75.
24 Artinian, pp. 43-58 (Pléiade, I, pp. 256-83); Luigi Pirandello, Il vecchio Dio (Milan:
Mondadori, 1979), pp. 133-44.
25 Artinian, pp. 328-41 (Pléiade, I, pp. 876-95). In a letter to Maupassant, the editor Victor Havard describes Miss Harriet as having “accents of tenderness and of a supreme emotion” (quoted in Pléiade, I, p. 1546, translation ours); Louis Forestier himself argues that Maupassant shows in this story “a sensibility and a sensuality that are not absent from the rest of the works, but are here particularly visible” (ibid, translation ours).
Denise Brahimi, in a book dedicated to the denunciation of the clichés of the criticism on Maupassant, uses the word compassion dozens of times, for example: “he sometimes reveals without mask his infinite compassion”. Denise Brahimi, Quelques idées reçues sur Maupassant (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2012), p. 62 (translation ours). Fusco (1994), while not calling it “empathy”, feels nevertheless that Maupassant had “sympathy” for his characters, even the Norman peasants (p. 27). But he puts to light the central role of irony (especially pp. 17, 21, 67-70).
26 Artinian, p. 331 (Pléiade, I, p. 880).
8. A Foreign World 125 narrator, a “strolling painter” who collects sketches and favours from the farm girls on his walks through Normandy, does not subscribe to the peasants’ judgement of her as a “demoniac”. But he goes on to develop at length what she truly is:
She was, in fact, one of those people of exalted principles, one of those opinionated puritans of whom England produces so many, one of those good and insupportable old women who haunt the tables d’hôte of every hotel in Europe, who spoil Italy, poison Switzerland, render the charming cities of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carry everywhere their fantastic manias, their petrified vestal manners, their indescribable toilets and a certain odor of India rubber, which makes one believe that at night they slip themselves into a case of that material. When I meet one of these people in a hotel I act like birds which see a manikin in a field.27
This time the type is well documented: this particular kind of elderly lady, typified by the “English Old Maid”, haunted the literature of the time, just as she haunted the tourist hotels. True, Maupassant embellishes the worn-out topos: his narrator makes friends with her. But we should not forget under what conditions: it is because she is so pitifully bizarre that she interests him, and then she expresses her admiration for one of his sketches.28 He never refrains from characterising her as ridiculous:
Wrapped up in her square shawl, inspired by the balmy air and with teeth firmly set […] She now accepted these with the vacant smile of a mummy.
[…] She was a caricature of ecstasy.
I turned my face away from her so as to be able to laugh.29
And this at the precise moment when he says that both of them are “as satisfied as any two persons could be who have just learned to understand and penetrate each other’s motives and feelings”.30 I do not see how the narrator’s representation of a caricature permits talk of “compassion”, or of a touching and emotional understanding of a being whom the rest of society despised. He feels the same interest in her as he did in “the little bell which struck midday”. The narrator admits that he felt for her
“something besides curiosity” which even makes him say: “I wanted […]
27 Ibid, pp. 331-32 (emphases mine) (p. 881).
28 “This woman appeared so singular that she did not displease me”. Ibid, p. 332 (p. 881).
29 Ibid, p. 334 (p. 885). I take the liberty to modify Artinian’s translation, which reads “It would have been an ecstatic caricature”. (Maupassant: “la caricature de l’extase”).
30 Ibid. Note the two juxtaposed sentences: “And we became firm friends immediately. / She was a brave creature with an elastic sort of a soul […]”.
126 The Classic Short Story
to learn what passes in the solitary souls of those wandering old English dames”.31 However, that is what short story narrators never do. And when, in the end, he meditates on the “secrets of suffering and despair” borne by Miss Harriet, he still talks of her “disagreeable” and “ridiculous” body, with the same mixture of pity and ridicule, as when he met her (“Poor solitary beings […] poor beings, ridiculous and lamentable”) or when he discovered that she loved him (“feeling that I could just as soon weep as laugh”).32 Of course he wants to weep, and this is what strikes the critics when they speak of compassion and understanding; but nevertheless he still wants to laugh.33
We are prevented from seeing this distancing because this type is considered to be obvious by both readers of the time and modern critics. It clearly relies on the traditional image of the English spinster who evoked in every late nineteenth century reader the same sentiments Maupassant ascribed to his painter. The English Old Maid is thought to be laughable and Miss Harriet will certainly not change our opinion. The story merely succeeds in showing that it is possible to have pity, even within the heart of ridicule.34
When pretending to rework a type, the classic short story will generally be establishing another. Maupassant will provide us with a quick example.
In La Rempailleuse (A Strange Fancy), published in Gil Blas, the heroine is a poor and elderly chair-mender.35 The narrator is a worldly Parisian doctor
31 Ibid, p. 333 (p. 883).
32 Ibid, pp. 335 and 337 (pp. 886 and 890).
33 Admittedly, the narrator calls himself, in the same sentence, “ridiculous”; but he only describes in this way his behaviour as a philanderer who had not, for once, anticipated his success, finding the adventure as “both comic and deplorable”, feeling “ridiculous”
and thinking her nearly crazy with unhappiness. He thinks his own departure should take care of everything. In the meanwhile he continues to expound: “that grotesque and passionate attachment for me” and finally these thoughts “put [him] now in an excited bodily state” (ibid, p. 338): he will go on to kiss the servant.
34 The examples I have come across all show that short stories were more abrupt when published in the press, and much of the violence of the short stories were softened before publication in a collection. In the original version of Miss Harriet published in Le Gaulois (9 July 1883), the caricature is more extreme. Firstly, it lacks the great description of nature at the beginning that unites the “principled fanatic” and the painter. Secondly, the definition of the activity of the “strolling painter” is much more trivial (“studies of servants and memorable nonsense”). The adventure with Miss Harriet thus is in violent contrast to the lesser loves which are the only background. Finally, the “portrait” of the Englishwoman is much shorter: “sour herring”, “she never spoke at table” […] [but read] a small book of some Protestant propaganda” (the original version can be found in Pléiade, I, pp. 1546-52).
35 Artinian, pp. 651-55 (Pléiade, I, pp. 546-52).
8. A Foreign World 127 who has retired to the provinces. To contribute to the inevitable, endless after-dinner discussion of love and passion, he announces the story of a
“love which lasted fifty years”, and his audience of women of the province’s
“good society” immediately break into lyrical couplets about life-long love.36 When he tells them that the protagonists are the village pharmacist and the chair-mender, however, the ladies now express violent disgust — the chair-mender is considered to be part of the dregs of society, even lower on the social scale than peasants. When the narrator asserts forcefully that her love is no more ridiculous than any other, we are ready to believe that he is free from the prejudices usually expressed by the short story. However, his characterisation of the girl is paroxistically pejorative: she is “ragged, flea-ridden, sordid”.37 She is also shown as being taken in by all the spectacles of society — exactly those that the Parisian readers of Gil Blas would not be taken in by. She is enamoured by the pharmacist’s son — who becomes her idol and accepts repeatedly all her money — and enchanted by the pharmacy window, before which she stays “charmed, aroused to ecstasy by this glory of coloured water, this apotheosis of shining crystal”.38
Yet the characters who are ultimately “distanced” in this story are the narrow-minded women to whom the doctor tells the story. Gil Blas published hundreds of stories about love told by similar narrators, and the chair-mender’s love is shown to be no more ridiculous than that of the provincial women. Readers are in agreement with the doctor in their contempt for the silly, romantic notions seemingly found in every bourgeois woman.