Maupassant and the Limits of the Self

In 2007 appeared the world's first wiki novel, so called because it was generated by inviting Internet users to contribute text through the same process of iterative online edits popularized by Wikipedia. The results are uneven at best) Time will tell whether future wiki novels more successfully exploit the nebulous zone between individual inspiration and collective sensibility. It is worth remembering for the moment, however, that even when written by a single person, the novel bas always plumbed the limit between individual and collective. Beginning with the structuralist tradition, of course, critics have long called the individuality of literary authorship into question, positing a "death of the author" in the work's construction by the supra-individual forces of language, readership, and society. (2) I am more interested here in how the novel has thematized its own precarious existence at the border between individual and collective--a parallel manifestation, at the level of the human being, of the novel's dueling imperatives toward the particular and the universal--and how this precariousness has destabilized the novelistic text. I shall return to the much-commented negotiation between particular and universal by the novel. Suffice it to say for now that the novel has round this a delicate endeavor. In the nineteenth century, when the porosity between self and collective became a particularly vexed question, the tension of inhabiting such an epistemologically and ontologically ambiguous frontier reached a breaking point. The present essay locates an instance of that tension in the work of French novelist and short story master Guy de Maupassant, taking stock along the way of the consequences for the novel and for its conception of the self. What Maupassant anxiously explored, I argue, is that in the balance struck by the novel between particular and universal, the self faced dissolution in the collective. What is more, the novel's compensating insistence on the individual seemed paradoxically only to hasten that dissolution. Maupassant's literary exploration was corroborated by the philosophical and scientific developments of the age. Advances in the understanding of sensory perception, a nationwide vogue for Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy, and the forays of a nascent psychology into a theory of the unconscious--the phenomena I most closely examine--combined in nineteenth-century France to reignite the classic reflection on whether what resided within the individual was truly distinct from what resided outside him. In this environment appeared Maupassant's 1888 novel Pierre et Jean, his fourth, along with its well-known preface "Le Roman." The preface engages extensively with questions of individuality, and the poignancy of Maupassant's classic novel lies largely in its account of a painful intrusion on the self by the disindividuating currents around it. But even more significant than the intrusion is the manner in which it occurs. Maupassant's psychological excavation of his protagonist Pierre encounters a disturbing limit at which, in its deepest recesses, human interiority turns outward onto exteriority. That limit, I conclude, announced the abiding modern conundrum of an individuality that receded ever further as it increased in importance. Pierre et Jean's preface occupies a place alongside Emile Zola's 1880 Le Roman experimental and Honore de Balzac's 1842 foreword to La Comedie humaine as one of the most frequently invoked expressions of nineteenth-century French realist poetics. Yet in its content and context, "Le Roman" finds Maupassant training his attention as much beyond realism as toward it. Maupassant's essay was written just a few weeks after the August 1887 publication in the newspaper Le Figaro of what has become known as "Le Manifeste des cinq," an open letter to Zola by a group of young writers critical of Zola's naturalism. "Le Roman" thus arrived at a time when realism, or at least its naturalist strain that had recently dominated, was under tire. …