A Life (2 page)

1
Letter to Louise Colet, 16 Jan. 1852.
aesthetic effect than the 'inner force' with which, stylistically, the novelist shaped and presented his subject.

For both Flaubert and Maupassant, indeed, such a distinction between style and subject was scarcely tenable: a life is the construction we place upon it. Nowhere is this more manifest than in Flaubert's novel
L'Éducation sentimentale
(1869), the account of the amiable but feckless young Frédéric Moreau who meanders through life with no more urgency or direction than the Seine itself. The representative of a generation which had been fired with revolutionary ardour only to see the 1848 Revolution lead on to Louis-Napoléon's Second Empire and the triumph of bourgeois materialism, Frédéric spends most of his time falling in and out of love (if love it be) with a small number of women of varying class and shadowy moral character. Just as (famously) the colour of Emma Bovary's eyes changes according to which character in the novel is looking at her, so too the principal (and never-attained) object of Frédéric's erotic fantasies, Madame Arnoux, would appear to have at least three different Christian names and be simultaneously a Madonna of moral perfection, a nondescript and stereotypically bored housewife, and a woman whose sense of conjugal loyalty is no stronger than her husband's and who is to be espied all alone with an unknown gentleman in his carriage while attending the races at Longchamp. In other words, an age-old tradition of plot and character (heroic, handsome boy meets perfect, pretty girl and something happens, usually marriage or death) is replaced by a more 'naturalistic' structure (ineffectual chump happens to meet unremarkable females, and not much happens, repeatedly). But, as Flaubert recognized, shapelessness is not conducive to great art, and he wrote ten years later about the possible reasons for the lack of both critical and popular success which
L'Éducation sentimentale
had met upon publication: 'It is too true and, aesthetically speaking, it lacks
the distortion of perspective
. Having been so well put together, the structure [of the novel] disappears from view. Every work of art must have a high point, a summit, like a pyramid, or else the light must strike one point on the sphere. Now life is not like that. But Art is not inherent in Nature! No matter! I believe that no one has taken honesty further.'
2

Maupassant was clearly influenced by Flaubert's attempts to write a different kind of novel, one which calls into question the philosophical assumptions about causality and identity implicit in traditional narrative procedures; and in his short essay 'Le Roman' (The Novel), published with
Pierre et Jean
in 1888, it is evident that he shares Flaubert's anxieties about the tension between the contingency of reality and the need for the novelist to present a concerted 'vision' (or perspective): if he is an artist, he will 'endeavour not to present us with a banal photograph of life but to provide us with a vision that is at once more complete, more startling, and more convincing than reality itself'. Life is full of surprises and contrasts, it can be brutal, 'full of inexplicable, illogical, and contradictory catastrophes'; whereas art 'consists in taking precautions and preparing for things in advance, in orchestrating clever, unseen transitions, and, by the sole skill of composition, in placing the essential events under the spotlight and lending the remainder a sufficient degree of relief, according to their relative importance, in order to convey a profound sense of the special truth one wishes to display'. All of us have our own way of seeing the world; the great artists are those who succeed in making us see the world through their own particular eyes.

Maupassant's own particular 'vision' has usually been described as 'naturalist'. In his excellent study of the naturalist novel, David Baguley has identified five main characteristics of the genre and divided it into two fundamental types. The first of the characteristics is that 'there will appear a scientific or sociological theme, posited and developed as the guiding principle of the novel, turning on a preoccupation with neurotic, pathological states or on the unmasking of the seamy side of life'. Secondly, 'the naturalist novel will admit a more poetic, decorative kind of discourse, which aestheticises the often sordid and banal reality that is being represented'. Thirdly, the plot will manifest itself 'as the reversal or parody of a ''romanesque" [meaning 'romantic' or even 'novelettish'] or heroic, action, subjecting manor, more

2
Letter to Mme Roger des Genettes, Oct. 1879.
frequently, woman, to some ironic or degrading fate, displaying the emptiness of human existence, disclosing the veiled depravities of bourgeois life' (Baguley sees
A Life
as exemplary under this heading). Fourthly, 'the action will take place within the detailed, thoroughly documented representation of a particular milieu'. Finally, there is 'an often ferocious and uncompromising element of satire of bourgeois manners'.

Of the two fundamental types, one 'takes up the tragic model of the fall, presenting it as a process of deterioration, prolonged in time and deriving its causality from particular determining factors (hereditary taints, neurotic dispositions, adverse social conditions)'; while in the other 'the determining factor is more generalised, a fundamental inadequacy of the human condition which traps the individual in the inextricable dilemmas, frustrations and disillusionment of daily existence'. 'The process of disillusionment', Baguley continues, 'becomes the only dynamic element in these works, which seem plotless like
L'Éducation sentimentale
, following the repetitive course of biological needs and constant deceptions in which life is frittered away before its inevitable extinction.'
3
In short, the 'characteristic movement' of the naturalist novelof both typesis 'in the direction of disintegration and confusion.' It depicts the human individual 'being subjected to a
natural
condition' and as such therefore subject to an inevitable process of entropy.
4

Does
A Life
display these characteristics? To which fundamental type of the naturalist novel does it correspond? While there is no dominant scientific theme, a clear sociological thread can be seen running through the novel. Such an assertion may seem surprising in view of the eminent Marxist critic Georg Lukács's well-known comment that 'the purely private character of the action [of
A Life
] deprives it of an historical character'. For Lukács, 'the essential action of the novel [which is set in the period 1819
c.
1848] is quite "timeless"; the Restoration, the July Revolution, the July Monarch, etc., events which objectively must make an extremely deep impression upon the daily life of an

3
David Baguley,
Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision
(Cambridge, 1990), 946.

4
Ibid. 208, 215.
aristocratic
milieu
, play practically no part'.
5
This is true, yet the process of disintegration which takes place within the novel would seem to include a gradual decline in wealth and influence which is characteristic of the aristocracy as a whole. Jeanne's family, the Le Perthuis des Vauds, are seen, like the de Lamare family before them, to fall on hard times: poor estate management, well-bred munificence, and a waster of a grandson are sufficient to reduce a potential annual income of 30,000 francs to some 8,000. The Fourvilles have no heir; the elderly Brisevilles are like 'conserved specimens of the nobility', buried away in their dusty chateau, seeing no one but 'writing frequently to their noble relations scattered throughout France' (p. 87) in a frenzy of sterile caste solidarity; and the Cortuliers are so insufferably condescending and wedded to the past that even Julien de Lamare, despite his snobbery, cannot countenance another visit.

A Life
presents a world in which the members of the aristocracy seem like dinosaurs; where Jeanne must sell her house to a man who has made his fortune out of sugar-refining; where it is now money, not 'breeding', that counts ('without money we're all just ignorant country folk': p. 204); where her own maid, thanks to the Baron's generosity but also to Rosalie's husband's hard work, has achieved her 'place in the sun' (p. 204) and has almost as much money as her former employer (p. 204); where Jeanne's son squanders a fortune in speculative investments and ends up so destitute that he and his mistress are obliged to flee their creditors. A quiet revolution had taken place, ostensibly set in the first half of the century but still proceeding in the second. It was a shift in social relations which Maupassant had experienced at first hand, both in the loss of his family's wealth and in his own attainment of riches through becoming a bestselling author.

As to 'neurotic, pathological states' and the 'unmasking of the seamy side of life', it is evident that Baguley's criteria are of more immediate relevance to Zola's
Thérèse Raquin
(1867) and
L'Assommoir
(1877). But there is clearly something pathological about this decline of the aristocracy, if only at a symbolic level. The monstrous physique of the Comte de Fourville, his avid

5
Georg Lukécs,
The Historical Novel
(Harmondsworth, 1969), 237.
enthusiasm for hunting, shooting, and fishing, and his violent murder of his wife and her lover foreshadow the atavistic figure of Jacques Lantier in Zola's
La Bête humaine
(1890); while the Baroness's 'hypertrophy' seems to bespeak a distortion of affectivity, a swollen sentimentality born of inaction and the determination to live resolutely in the past, the past of her own extra-marital fling, but a past also in which the only tree that truly mattered was genealogical. And Jeanne's own emotional make-up likewise betrays considerable instability. As a 17-year-old just out of the convent she is filled with 'unruly joy' (p. 19) which has her racing along the clifftops or swimming (quite implausibly for a young girl of her time and social rank) far out to sea, where she would 'let out piercing shrieks of sudden, frantic joy, and slap the surface of the sea' (p. 20). In Corsica the sight of a particularly beautitul bay has tears welling from her eyes, the evidence (at least in the opinion of her callous husband and quite probably also in that of the sexist Maupassant) of 'women's "nerves", these emotional disturbances to which the sensitive creatures [are] subject, becoming overwrought at a mere trifle, as easily agitated by some fond enthusiasm as by total disaster, and capable of being thoroughly upset, of being driven wild with joy or despair, by the least identifiable of sensations' (p. 67). Not that Rosalie ever seems to suffer from such 'nerves'. . . Perhaps it is only well-born ladies, like Jeanne, or Gilberte de Fourville, or indeed Maupassant's own mother, who betray this pathological pattern of the
grande hystérique
.

And what of the other characteristics of the naturalist novel? Clearly the pupil of Flaubert has aimed at 'a poetic, decorative discourse', as any page will demonstrate; and equally clearly the landscape and customs of Normandy are the subject of a 'detailed, thoroughly documented representation of a particular milieu'. Is the plot based on 'a reversal or parody of a "romanesque" or heroic action, subjecting manor, more frequently, woman, to some ironic or degrading fate, displaying the emptiness of human existence, disclosing the veiled depravities of bourgeois life'? If one substitutes 'aristocratic' (and 'ecclesiastical') for 'bourgeois', then
A Life
displays all of this. The  conventions of romance dictate that the nubile Jeanne, freshly released from her convent incarceration, shall meet '
Him!
': 'All she knew was that she would adore him with her heart and soul and that he would cherish her with all his might.' Mr Right shall appear and they shall have two children, 'a son for him and a daughter for her' (pp. 1415). Why should there be any delay? Perhaps this person she hears walking along the road on her very first night at Les Peuples is indeed 'Him'. . . The tale of Pyramus and Thisbe which adorns her bedroom will prove wide of the mark as she later experiences marital rape and then her husband's infidelities; and the dream of idyllic parenthood will be replaced by the bitter experience of an unloving son and a stillborn daughter. Instead of a world of conjugal loyalty unto death, she discovers that her father and mother have both been unfaithful to their marriage vows, and that her only friend, Gilberte, is deceiving her doting husband, the Comte de Fourville, and sleeping with Julien. By the time she does encounter the spectacle of true devotion (ironically, in the relationship between her son and his supposedly unsuitable mistress), her maternal love has become so bitterly possessive that she fails to see through her prejudice and jealousy to perceive its reality. She discovers the 'depravities' taking place behind the imposing façades of chateau and manor-house, and eventually sees the irony whereby Rosalie's arranged marriage with the splendidly named Désiré Lecoq has provided her maid with more affection and security than her own 'love-match' with a callous and avaricious hypocrite. She is degraded materially by the loss of her house and fortune, socially by the humiliation of her final visit to Paris, and sexually by the horror of her wedding-night, by her priest's approval of masturbation as the antidote to an inattentive husband, by the necessity of intercourse with a husband she loathes in order to bear a child, and by an ultimate 'unsexing' as she comes to abhor sensuality with the vehemence of the fanatical Abbé Tolbiac, who stones courting couples and excludes the 'fallen' from communion. For Jeanne, a life is one in which the illusions of romance are replaced by the bleak vista of hopeless despair: 'She believed herself to be so directly the target of unrelenting misfortune that she became as  fatalistic as an Oriental; and the habitual experience of seeing all her hopes and dreams crumble and vanish meant that she shrank from all further endeavour' (p. 231).

Human Destiny and the Seasons