Guy de Maupassant: Ironically Disturbing

Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant was a prolific French writer of the mid-to-late 1800s writing some 300 short stories, six novels, three travelogues, and one volume of verse (a book of poetry). He published his first story, “Boule de Suif” or “Ball of Fat” in 1880 and it is considered by many to be his best work. He is credited for being the father of the modern short story. Personally mentored by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant’s stories are known for their efficiency and their effortless dénouements (endings or resolutions). Damaged psychologically in the Franco-Prussian War

of the 1870s in which he had served in the Navy, he captures not the front lines, but the citizens whose welfare is ignored because of the French government’s greed for a sense of power and control or its total malfeasance. He also captures those who are less affected and still ignored, and he undermines those whose pride causes their despair. However, both these groups are scarred nonetheless, most of whose pride is ruined. At the same time, his stories always find a way to be ironic.  

Contrary to popular (a middle schooler’s) belief, literary irony does not come in one form and it is not always intended for humor. Literary irony comes in three forms: dramatic, verbal, and situational. Dramatic irony is used by writers to keep readers reading by giving them information that a character does not have, making the reader feel more tension. Verbal irony is more than sarcasm. It is irony through words, the use of wordplay to create a double meaning that is different from what is blatantly expressed. Situational irony is when the unexpected happens. An author uses the setting of the story, the situation that the character is in, and the outcome that is implied to twist and to turn the situation inside-out. There is always a meaning to take whenever this technique is used because it is never just a gag. It tells the reader that anything can happen, and will happen in a memorable way. How would someone not know these forms of irony? Well, they are usually well integrated into their works and usually cause a careful, second read. In fact, I call it structural irony when, upon finishing the story, one looks around for a secret answer, as if it is lurking in the room. There seems to be a bitter, a tart, or an acrid taste in one’s mouth, depending on the story. One cannot know exactly what it is that makes the story unforgettable. One will find this to be true when one reads Maupassant’s stories. 

It is still not to say that irony is not humorous, because irony is a large part of humor. In fact, reading many of Guy de Maupassant’s ironic stories has impacted my sense of humor because there is always something that feels wrong to laugh at. This is dark humor where the humor typically involves pain. All humor plays on surprise. When a darkly humorous joke is told, people do not know how to react quickly and settle with laughter. Concerningly, my humor has not drastically changed though it has grown, partially in recognition, partially reinforced. In fact, I was not surprised when I read Maupassant at how dark and weird his stories can get. This is because it is surprisingly easy to create dark humor, because it is semi-fake. It is also because of the human desire for attention, and laughter is the best type of attention, seen as a positive reaction even to negative things. In my eyes, the only acceptable pieces of dark humor are the ones that would not be hurtful to other living people. Enter Guy de Maupassant’s short stories. He brings in dark humor as an integrated part of his stories and they are intricately woven in the lines. They are woven so intricately that the dark humor is not there for a joke, rather, it is the base of the storytelling.

Maupassant’s story “On the River” is a peculiar tale narrated by a river boatman, set on the Seine. The river boatman tells a tale of one of his bone-chilling days back when he would ply the Seine and how an unassuming, quiet, and calm river can be a façade for a graveyard of evils. However, it is assumed that the river boatman continued with his work even after his horrifying experience and still loves the river that caused him a night of terror. 

Maupassant gives an insight into the horrors that stay covered up and the ones that prefer to stay that way. He contrasts the river with the sea by saying that the sea reveals its power while the river stays ever so silent and mysterious. “It shrieks, it roars, it is honest, the great sea…” reveals the sea’s noise and its openness. In comparison, Maupassant describes the river as “silent and perfidious,” therefore being the scarier one because one cannot know the crimes that the river is capable of, unlike the sea which throws its power around. Furthermore, this is even more applicable at night because the river can seem bottomless and endless, all the while staying deceptively calm and still. In addition, Maupassant details the conditions when there is no moon, where a river boatman can feel lonely to the point of feeling vulnerable to the conditions of nature.

The story is about a moonlit night where, on the river, and returning from a dinner party, the boatman gets snagged and must pass the night on his boat. The river boatman becomes uncomfortable in his boat as the river is unusually silent. He begins to see things. To him, the river is seemingly throwing his boat around, something that the sea would do. The silence is also replaced by the noises around. He stands up, and the river stops. This is Maupassant emphasizing the malignant power of the river and its ability to cause traumatic experiences, for the river boatman is nearly paralyzed by fear. He narrates, “I could not smoke; at the second draw I was nauseated… I began to sing. The sound of my voice was distressing to me. So I lay still, but presently the slight motion of the boat disturbed me.” The river boatman is on edge as he considers how he’ll get unstuck. Once he realizes that the river, a non-living entity, is messing with him, he begins to pull on the anchor, but “the anchor did not come up.” Nature has trapped him in the “silent and perfidious” river. The narrator’s fear subsides (the narrator being a lonely boatman) as he sees a bright landscape, contrasting to the earlier dark river. This light connects back to how he fears the river more than the sea because of its silence, but here it has become bright with fog that “had gradually cleared off and massed on the banks.” The fearsome darkness and secrecy of the river fades and this is all topped by “the frogs [croaking] furiously.” Also, he is in “such an unusual landscape that the most remarkable things would not have astonished [him]. His ability to think is partially removed which shuts his ability to fear. In other words, he finds an escape from the limitless river as he stares into this contrasting landscape: “Strange to say, I was no longer afraid.” This is important because the light shines on everything and makes things predictable while the darkness instinctively makes someone want their back to a wall. For the narrator, it shows him a wonderland: he wants a world where he can know what is going to happen instead of being trapped on the silent and perfidious river.

The last paragraph of the story reveals these hidden horrors as the narrator ends up finding “the corpse of an old woman with a big stone round her neck.” The river seems to hoard its crimes and dark secrets behind a locked door and uses its dark bottom to deter anyone who could expose the evil lair. Also, the denouement gives the reader a sense of why the narrator describes the river as an area filled with secrets. The structural irony of the story is shown in the narrator’s arc of confidence, and with his lack of it at the beginning, he gains it back in the middle, and is probably scarred for life at the end, which is likely why he fears the river… yet oddly enough, he still loves it.

“A Ghost” is a tale recounted among friends by an old man about his younger days, masquerading as a truly peculiar ghost story. This old man was a military man in his twenties, and just so happened to come across a friend he hadn’t seen in a while during these military days. This friend seemed fifty years older as “a terrible event had broken him down.” He had fallen in love with a young woman who had died from heart disease, “no doubt killed by love itself.” However, the narrator seems apathetic towards his friend’s troubles and what could await him. By revealing this, his horror later is seen as a result of hubris. 

 His pride is exhibited as vainglorious: his mood in “A Ghost” when he departs to the manor house is of ignorance and innocence as he thinks that he is just going to do a regular errand, one that will take an hour on horseback. His ignorant and apathetic mood is seen multiple times as, “[he] [is] almost hurt” by someone’s words without realizing the meaning behind it. He is touchy; his ego is on alert, and his pride is right beneath the surface. Indeed, on his approach, his arrogance mixed with pride raises him to a summit of experience: not only is he riding a horse, but he is so content and “avid” that he bites a leaf as he canters through the wood. His attitude towards life is that of a master: he is sitting pretty, as some would say. On the contrary, when he races back, he runs back like a seven- year-old running up the stairs at night. This is because his entire view of the world, his military pride as Maupassant describes, was crushed, shown as he spent “an hour [asking himself] whether [he] had not been the victim of a hallucination”. Here, it is learned that not only are there ghostly horrors in the world, but it is they that are the most crushing to those who think they are masters of this world. The irony of this story comes in the form of structural irony. The reader imagines a pompous air around the narrator as he walks, and sees how after encountering the ghost, he is a shell of the man he once was. His uncertainty and insecurity are laid bare.

Maupassant’s “A Normandy Joke” stretches the limits of the term joke. In this story, we see an extreme practical joke (a trick played on someone to make them look foolish and to amuse others) unfold as a man’s wedding day is ruined by his pride. “A Normandy Joke” starts with a wedding procession, the bridegroom being a wealthy sportsman by the name of Jean Patu and the bride who was courted by many other fellows but of course, picked “the richest farmer in the neighborhood.” 

During the big wedding dinner, four young groomsmen think of practical jokes for the newly married couple and find one so good that when one shared the idea out loud, “the whole table convulsed with laughter.” They then suggest that people would poach on his land during the wedding, an idea that Jean did not like, so he challenged them. He would be proven wrong. Later, in his marriage chamber, his wife and he hear two shots while getting ready for bed, and he races out to hunt them down in a tumultuous rage.” The next day, he would be found “two leagues from the farm, tied hand and foot, half dead with rage, his gun broken, and a placard on his chest with these words: ‘Who goes on the chase loses his place.’” The irony here is the dramatic kind because the reader can infer early on that the four young fellows had been planning this from the start. There is also a strong stench of situational irony where Jean Patu, the hunter, is lured into a trap like an animal and for a moment becomes the hunted.

Maupassant’s “An Uncomfortable Bed” speaks in irony as a man brings out his undoing that he so desperately tried to prevent. In “An Uncomfortable Bed,” a man is described as an “old ferret”’ is staying with his friends for the hunting season in a chateau in Picardy. His friends are fond of practical jokes and he is immediately suspicious when he steps into the “chateau,” for he is greeted by “princely reception” as they “embraced” and “cajoled” the old ferret. He also notes excessive mirth at the dinner table as if they were getting their appetizer-giggles out before the main course, and by the title, it is assumed to be an uncomfortable bed? Apparently, they needed a second appetizer as “during the entire evening, everyone laughed in an exaggerated fashion.” They even needed a third as they escorted the old ferret to his apartment and he “heard laughter and whispering in the corridor.” The old ferret inspected everything like a paranoid animal and found that “the bed was particularly suspicious- looking.” So, he pulls the mattress onto the floor. Dessert is coming soon, do not worry. 

The ferret goes to sleep. What happens? He is awakened by the fall of a heavy body. He “[receives] on [his] face, on [his] neck, and on [his] chest a burning liquid which made [him] utter a howl of pain. And a dreadful noise, as if a sideboard laden with plates and dishes [fell] down, [penetrates] [his] ears.” It turns out that as a consequence of his suspicion, he brought “the interlude [he] had been striving to avoid,” as a valet, bringing breakfast, tripped over his makeshift bed and failed to catch himself, scalding our ferret with coffee. Dessert is the best course of a meal. The irony here is of the situational kind where the unexpected happens. In this story, it finally feels like the narrator will win while he essentially loses to himself because of his paranoia. 

For both of the stories, “A Normandy Joke” and “An Uncomfortable Bed,” the characters suffer from their undoing because their troubles could have been prevented, which makes the pain resound more.

Would rendering a blind individual useless before even trying to help them, appear in our modern world? Well, I cannot answer that question, but Maupassant’s “The Blind Man” gives an insight into how this issue would unfold in a pessimistic fashion. Maupassant begins the story “The Blind Man” by rapturously praising the gift of sight – he frames the tragedy with excluding those who “sit in the doorways, impassive in their eternal darkness.” He emphasizes the primacy of the visual sense, but also throws an ironic tone, for it is rapturous and seemingly divinely inspired, this gift of sight. Is the blind man’s family even capable of this type of reflection? No, as they are the scum of the earth, worse than dogs, cruel and unusually wicked.

The family engineers him to become a moneymaker by making him into a laughingstock and essentially turning him into a circus animal. They would gather the townsfolk to watch the man eat his soup and perform practical jokes and, “ranged along the wall would burst out laughing, nudge each other and stamp their feet on the floor.” They would “nudge each other” because they love knowing what the blind man doesn’t, and they cherish his suffering. Is this issue solved? No, spoiler alert, the blind man dies. The irony here is verbal, where he is considered useless by his family while becoming a moneymaker for them. The irony also comes when the blind man’s eyes are pecked out by crows, the eyes that were useless to him for his entire life.

Maupassant’s “The Beggar” is akin to Maupassant’s story, “The Blind Man” where injustices are committed against these individuals when all they need is a loving home. The beggar’s head is depicted as being squeezed between two mountains with shoulders, hunched up because of his crutches. He has these crutches for an idiotic reason – he got drunk. He had been walking on the Varville highway in a stupor after being given and drinking several glasses of brandy by a baker without knowing the effects as he is “utterly without education.” This is an almost complete mimic of the poverty cycle. A foundling, “picked out of a ditch” he was too poor to afford a good education, and he would end up making a bad decision that would ruin his life and lower his status to beggar. This is also an unfortunate and nowadays rarer form of natural selection in society, where he doesn’t get to pass on his genes because society deemed him far too crippled. The beggar goes on to beg, for his life is on the line. 

The townspeople eventually get annoyed and start to think that giving a piece of stale bread to the beggar is like giving away their life savings, their first-born child, all their property, and their soul to the beggar. He eventually gets arrested for trying to steal some chickens when he had finally tired out the townspeople he knew, and he dies in a jail cell immediately because the police did not think he needed food. The structural irony here is where he had foraged for himself for a long time and the reader thinks that his story will go on for longer when the beggar dies because of negligence. This is also a great example of Maupassant’s efficient denouements.

Maupassant’s “My Uncle Jules” is made peculiar because of the weird family dynamics that he brings to the table. This family is made unique by the interesting bond between the narrator’s father and Jules, which is more of a company/investor bond than a brother/brother bond. This is shown as the father was only excited about Jules’ potential return when according to him, “business is good.” The unique nature of this family is this: they have false hope, and this hope, like cancer, eats away at them. The only other hope they have is in the possibility of the daughters marrying some rich stud, and of course, when Uncle Jules makes his appearance, he is hidden from the suitors. In all, the Davranche family is led by a weak-willed, materialistic, and arrogant father. It is heavily implied that Jules would do nothing good, especially in the beginning where “a white-haired old man begged [them] for alms”… and then that reminds the narrator of the story of Uncle Jules, implying the Jules would become a poor unfortunate like the white-haired old man. There is also dramatic irony with the mother, father, narrator, and the son-in-law who doesn’t know that Uncle Jules failed in his quest to be rich; his quest was the deciding factor in the son-in-law’s decision, but the family wants to marry off the daughter to hopefully bring in money. This keeps the readers reading because they are expecting a little bit of conflict, but it is mostly all washed away, just as Jules washes the oysters in preparation for selling them. The end of the story is bleak, but it does seem as if, because the Uncle is seen as a washout, that perhaps the family can get a dose of reality and stop pinning their hopes on this donkey.

Maupassant’s “The Donkey” covers the adventures of mischievous crooks, Mailloche and Chicot. Mailloche resembles a sailor, typically a pirate and one that takes orders from another pirate. It is easy to picture him with a pirate hat and a black eyepatch. As a man of 40- 50 years, he seems tense and was very glad in cruel enjoyment, or sadism. He seems a little paranoid about being stopped in what he is doing, as the text describes him, “with the restless eye…” he either doesn’t get enough sleep, or he is always trying to analyze his surroundings. This paranoia is also shown as he is the one that hides the fish and the gun, much more than Chicot hides. This shows his fear of being caught even for things like possession of a gun, which I’m pretty sure he should be able to just get a permit for, like a hunting license or something of that sort. Chicot assumes a leadership role over Mailloche as he seems to bring a lot less stuff to the table than Mailloche, so to prevent him from being less useful than Mailloche, he leads the two and decides what they should do each day to get by. Chicot has an irreverent streak calling men and women alike ‘sister’ and he uses this to disarm people so that they consider him a harmless freak, and as they’re put off-guard, he filches their money, abuses their trust, and continues on his way, maniacally laughing. Chicot is a crook, one who takes advantage of every possible scenario, aiming to line his pockets, keep his wineskins full to bursting, and his belly full with the carcasses of any animal he can poach. His exuberance allows him to stay in an irreverent state, making fun of all occurrences and keeping his head above conflict. He engages in conflict-bringing activities but seems to get away, leaving despair in his wake. In calling men and women alike ‘sister’, he disarms them with this odd and frivolous term, and in the interim where they wonder at his seriousness or respond to his absurdity, he gleefully makes his way forward in taking advantage of them. 

The emotional tone of the story is very mischievous which is especially shown in the actions of Chicot and Mailloche. “Sometimes looking for drowned people and searching for their clothes,” the story paints them as criminal, wrong, and as leeches as they are riding off of what other people did. They even stretch the term “junk-gatherers” and steal and sell stuff that is not junk, like a boat that someone is still using. Another example of stealing “not junk” is when they hunted the rabbit. What is so stomach-churning about this is that they aren’t doing this legally, or they don’t want to be recognized, and the text emphasizes this by saying “they were approaching the shore so slowly, so quietly that no noise betrayed them.” The author plays with the tone by driving the story to a darker side and then bringing it back to a very cruel triumph when they scam an innkeeper for 20 francs by making him pay upfront for a dead donkey. The emotional tone changes from calm and peaceful to a journey deeper into the cruel daily life of crime of the two junk-gatherers. The story starts with a description of a calm and peaceful shore of the Seine at dawn and is interrupted by the noises of Chicot and Mailloche poaching fish. They then shoot a rabbit, and Guy de Maupassant includes a disturbing detail that the rabbit was not yet dead when they picked it up. They then pay money to torture a donkey and then end up killing it for trying to escape. This clearly shows the emotional tone being driven into a darker tone. Then, the story resurfaces to the mischievous plot to scam the innkeeper. It is interesting how it seems as though Chicot and Mailloche’s presence alone disturbs the calmness and peacefulness of Frette. There is dramatic irony with the innkeeper where the reader knows what Chicot and Mailloche know while the innkeeper is thinking that he got a great deal.

Irony is a strange tool in writing, one that Guy de Maupassant used to its fullest extent. What is that fullest extent? What is the full potential of irony?  It is the power to create a compelling story through the harshest conditions while keeping it simple. With irony, the story does not rely on long monologues and flowery sentences that make the average reader start to snooze. In Maupassant’s stories, irony is the heartbeat, pumping the life into the story instead of the convoluted symbolism of blue curtains. That is the fullest potential and that is why it is almost freeing to read Guy de Maupassant’s stories.