Category: Notes

Guy de Maupassant, this great French writer, tells about his artistic conceptions in the essay Le roman, available as a preface to his Pierre et Jean. This essay is very interesting: Maupassant outlines his vision of the varied literary movements of the nineteenth century, says some of his influences and addresses some particularities of the literary creation process.

Let’s look at two interesting points from the essay.

Saying about what he thinks is the role of an artist, says Maupassant (in my translation):

To move us he must reproduce it (life) before our eyes with a scrupulous resemblance. He will, therefore, have to compose his work in such a skillful way, so hidden and of so simple appearance that it will be impossible to see and indicate his plan, to discover his intentions.

This carries some of Flaubert, incidentally, whom Maupassant considered his master. Accuracy, here is the summary. No flourishing, bluntness or excess: the artist must paint life exactly as it is.

This principle goes through the whole essay and influences different aspects of the creative process. At one point, Maupassant says about excessive explanations, about having the artist to be justifying the action of his characters, as if painting his psychological profile to substantiate his actions. Says the author:

Therefore, instead of explaining in detail the state of mind of a character, objective writers seek the action or gesture that this state of mind should fatally induce this man into a given situation. And they make him behave in such a way, from one end of the work to the other, that all his actions, all his movements are the reflection of his intimate nature, of all his thoughts, of all his desires or of all his hesitations.

Let the acts speak; action…

I like very much Maupassant’s style, as well as that of Stendhal, another French writer associated with realism. I do not think the artist should extend into explanations, treat the reader like an idiot. Letting the characters speak — or rather, act — is an effective technique for building a thought-provoking, moving, and real narrative.

We will continue in these notes on another occasion. For now, the message is this: when a teacher teaches, we do well listening to him.

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Read more:

• Literature as a Foundation of Personality
• The Intellectual Life, by A. D. Sertillanges
• The Burrow, by Franz Kafka
• The Reader of The Future

The distinction of someone with a literary culture is conspicuous. In addition to all the pleasures and all the intellectual elevation from reading, we can say this: literature forms, develops, structures personalities. Literature is able to broaden the reader’s knowledge, providing him with experiences he would never have in his life. It teaches how to deal with the most varied situations, makes one feels the most disparate and extreme emotions, throws one under different skins, different geniuses, educating for life. Thus, the good reader finds himself prepared for all kinds of situations, because his knowledge gathers an invaluable arsenal of examples. He finds himself immune to countless weaknesses, countless mistakes made by characters who have taught him a lesson. In addition, the good reader understands infinitely better other people, the world around: he is accustomed to putting himself under different situations. It cries out to the eyes that literature, in a personality, slows down, strengthens, teaches, aggrandizes — thus leaving indelible marks on the temperament and character of the reader.

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Read more:

• Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
• Literature and Solitude
• The Artist and The Coherence
• Inglorious Occupation

Sometimes I imagine myself in front of a reader of the future. I am, to him, a complete stranger; an animal, I would say… absolutely incomprehensible. Our habits do not match, we have no affinity for tastes, our geniuses are exactly opposites. What would he think of me? Of course, everything one thinks about a little evolved animal. And knowing that my customs would cause him astonishment, I know I would never get of him any approval. Through the lens of the reader of the future, I observe, for example, my acute misanthropy: how much revulsion! how strange! How can a modern guy bow to loneliness? And if the contemptuous expression were not enough, I see it easily transmuting into hatred, once perceiving the mutual disdain. This animal, in fact, deserves a good beating! It is a real social cancer! And as cancer it cannot, under any circumstances, proliferate! Laughter, lots of laughter… The reader of the future does not know that the animal is psychologically neutered, that it disgusts the multiplication. But maybe the animal delire, once fantasizing this reader of the “future”…

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Read more:

• The Burrow, by Franz Kafka
• Sarcasm, Sarcasm…
• The Best of All Times
• Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev