Guy de Maupassant

René Albert Guy de Maupassant (Dieppe, August 5, 1850 - Paris, July 6, 1893) was a French naturalist writer and poet. He mainly wrote short stories, although he also has six novels and several journalistic chronicles, especially on French literature.

Biography

Her name in French is pronounced as follows: French pronunciation: /ɡid(ə) mopasɑ̃/. There is controversy about the other exact place of his birth, generated by the Fécampés biographer Georges Normandy in 1926. According to a first hypothesis, he would have been born in Fécamp, in Bout-Menteux, on August 5, 1850. According to the other hypothesis, he would have been born in the castle of Miromesnil, in Tourville-sur-Arques, eight kilometers from Dieppe, as his birth certificate establishes. However, everything seems to point to the fact that his true birthplace was the latter.

He had a childhood like any other boy his age, although his mother introduced him to the study of classical languages at an early age. Her mother, Laure, always wanted her son to take over from her brother Alfred Le Poittevin, then a close friend of Flaubert, whose untimely death cut short a promising literary career. At the age of twelve, his parents parted amicably. His father, Gustave de Maupassant, was an indolent man who cheated on his wife with other women. The breakup of his parents greatly influenced the young Guy. His relationship with his father would cool down in such a way that he always considered himself a fatherless father. His youth, very attached to his mother, Laure Le Poittevin, developed first in Étretat, and later in Yvetot, before going to the lycée in Rouen. Maupassant was an admirer and disciple of Gustave Flaubert, whom he met in 1867. Flaubert, at the request of the writer's mother, with whom he was a childhood friend, took him under her wing, opened the doors of some newspapers for him, and introduced him to Ivan Turgenev, Émile Zola and the Goncourt brothers. Flaubert took the place of his father figure. So much so, that it was even said in some Parisian gossip that Flaubert was his biological father.

The writer moved to live in Paris with his father after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He began to study law, but family financial setbacks and the bad relationship with his father forced him to drop out of studies that, in and of themselves, no longer convinced him and he began to work as a civil servant in various ministries, until in 1880 he published his first great work, "Ball of suet", in Las veladas de Médan, a naturalistic volume prepared by Émile Zola with the collaboration of Henri Céard, Paul Alexis, Joris Karl Huysmans and Léon Hennique. The story, strongly realistic according to the guidelines of his teacher Flaubert, was described by him as a masterpiece.

His presence in Les soirées de Médan and the quality of his story, allowed Maupassant to acquire a sudden and sudden notoriety in the literary world. His favorite subjects were the Norman peasants, the petty bourgeois, the mediocrity of civil servants, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, love affairs or hallucinations of madness: The Tellier House (1881), The tales of the woodcock (1883), El Horla (1887), through some of which the first symptoms of his illness are revealed.

His Parisian life, and one of greatest creative activity, was spent between the mediocrity of his work as a civil servant and, above all, practicing sports, particularly rowing, which he bravely indulged in in the towns around Paris in the company of disreputable friends. With a wayward and sexually promiscuous life, he was never known to have true love; for him love was pure animal instinct and he enjoyed it that way. He wrote about it: "The individual who is content with a woman all his life, would be outside the laws of nature like the one who lives only on salads." And in addition, his mother's domineering character alienated him of any relationship that is glimpsed with a minimum of seriousness.

His pessimistic, misogynistic and misanthropic character was motivated by the powerful influence of his mentor Gustave Flaubert and the ideas of his main philosopher, Schopenhauer. the Legion of Honor or to consider himself a member of Zola's literary cenacle, not wanting to be part of a literary school in defense of his total independence. Marriage horrified him; his is the phrase "Marriage is an exchange of bad moods during the day and bad smells at night." However, a few years after his death, a French newspaper, L'Eclair, reported the existence of a woman with whom he would have had three children. Sometimes identified by some biographers such as the "woman in grey", a character who appears in the Memoirs of her servant François Tassart, was named Josephine Litzelmann, a native of Alsace and undoubtedly Jewish. The children were named Honoré-Lucien, Jeanne-Lucienne, and Marguerite. Although the alleged three children of her acknowledged being the children of the writer, they never wanted the publicity that was given to them.

Attacked by serious nervous problems, inherited symptoms of dementia and panic —reflected in several of his stories such as the story Who knows, written in his last years of life— as a consequence of syphilis, he tried to commit suicide on January 1, 1892. The writer himself confessed it in writing: «I am afraid of myself, I am afraid of fear, but, above all, I am afraid of the frightful confusion of my spirit, of my reason, about the which I lose control of and which is clouded by an opaque and mysterious fear". He is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Literary style

Sent on the work of Balzac and Flaubert

Maupassant is considered one of the most important writers of the naturalist school, whose maximum pontiff was Émile Zola, although he never liked being attributed such militancy. It is true that he was a photographer of his time and his literary doctrine is reflected in the prologue he wrote for his novel Pierre et Jean , where he wrote: «The least thing has something of unknown. Let's find it. To discover a burning fire and a tree on a plain, let us stand before that fire and that tree until they do not resemble, to us, any other tree or any other fire." For the historian Rafael Llopis, Maupassant, lost in the second half of the XIX century, was already far from the fury of Romanticism., was "a singular, casual and solitary figure".

His prose has the virtue of being simple but direct, without artifice. His multicolored stories convey with absolute fidelity the society of his time. But what characterizes him the most is the impersonal nature of his narration; he never gets involved in the story and appears as an omniscient being who limits himself to describing his observations in detail. Not surprisingly, he is considered one of the greatest storytellers in the history of literature. In the last years of his life, and influenced by the success of Paul Bourget, he abandoned the tale of customs or realism, to experiment with the psychological novel, with which he was quite successful. It is at this stage that he abandons his impersonal vision to delve deeper into the tormented soul of his characters, probably a reflection of the torment his own suffered. Always suffering from severe migraines, he abused the consumption of drugs, such as cocaine and ether, which further enhanced his natural talent and gave him altered states of consciousness that made him suffer hallucinations and other visions that would ultimately condition his fantastic or horror narrative..

The influence he exerted on other authors was so great that he became one of the most plagiarized. He was admired by Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Horacio Quiroga and a long etcetera. But without a doubt, the author who plagiarized it the most was the Italian Gabriele D'Annunzio. In his anthology of stories Tales of the Pescara River we can find stories and passages copied literally from some of Maupassant's tales. Another of those who plagiarized the French author was Valle Inclán, in his first book Femeninas, where in the story Octavia Santino faithfully reproduces the final scene of the novel Fort comme la mort.

Works

His extensive work includes six novels, some three hundred short stories, the first being "Ball of Suet" ("Boule de Suif") (1880), the most acclaimed, as well as six plays, three travel books, an anthology of poetry and numerous journalistic chronicles. He wrote under various pen names: Joseph Prunier in 1875, Guy de Valmont in 1878, and Maufrigneuse from 1881 to 1885.

Portada de Bel-Ami

As for his short narrative, his horror stories are especially noteworthy, a genre in which he is recognized as a master, on a par with Edgar Allan Poe. In these tales, narrated in an agile and nervous style, full of exclamations and question marks, the obsessive presence of death, madness and the supernatural can be seen: Who knows?, The Night, The Hair, The Hand, Waiter, a "Bock"!, Forgiveness, Queen Hortensia, The Apparition, The Devil or El Horla, a story belonging to the horror genre. According to Rafael Llopis, who quotes the scholar of the fantastic Louis Vax, «The terror that he expresses in his stories is exclusively personal and is born in his sick mind as a harbinger of his upcoming disintegration. [...] the scary tales of him [...] somehow express the desperate protest of a man who feels how his reason is disintegrating. Louis Vax makes a clear difference between Mérimée and Maupassant. This is a patient who expresses his anguish; That is an artist who coldly imagines stories to scare. [...] This centripetal fear is centrifugal in Maupassant. "In 'El Horla' -says Vax- there is at first an inner restlessness, then supernatural manifestations revealed only to the victim; Lastly, the world around her is also touched by visions of him. The disease of the soul becomes putrefaction of the cosmos"".

Maupassant published mostly naturalistic novels: A Life (1883), Bel-Ami (1885) or Strong as Death (1889), among others. Less well known is his facet as current affairs chronicler in newspapers of the time such as Le Gaulois, Gil Blas or Le Figaro, where he wrote numerous chronicles about multiple topics: literature, politics, society, among others.

Cinema inspired by Maupassant

• The rosal of Madame Husson (1931) - Bernard Deschamps (based on the tale of the same title)
• The Shanghai Express (1932) - Josef Von Sternberg (based on Sebo Ball)
• The woman of the port (1934) - Arcady Boytler (based on The port)
• One day in the field (1936) - Jean Renoir (based on the tale of the same title)
• Diligence (1939) - John Ford (based on Sebo Ball)
• Bel-Ami (1939) - Willi Forst (based on the novel of the same title)
• Romance in minor tone (1943) - Helmut Käumer (based on the stories The jewels and The ordinance)
• Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) - Robert Wise (based on Sebo Ball and Mlle. Fifi)
• Sebo Ball (1945) - Christian Jacque (based on the account of the same title)
• Good boy. (1946) - Antonio Momplet (based on the novel Bel-Ami)
• The private affairs of Bel-Ami (1947) - Albert Lewin (based on the novel Bel-Ami)
• The woman of the port (1949) - Emilio Gómez Muriel (based on The port)
• The rosal of Madame Husson (1950) - Jean Boyer (based on the account of the same title)
• A woman without love (1951) - Luis Buñuel (inspired by Pierre et Jean)
• The pleasure (1952) - Max Ophuls (based on The mask, The Tellier House and The model)
• Bel-Ami (1955) - Louis Daquin (based on the novel Bel-Ami)
• Male, female (1966) - Jean Luc Godard (based on Paul's wife)
• The Horla (1966)- Jean-Daniel Pollet (based on the same story)
• Death penalty (1973) - Jorge Grau (based on Crazy)
• Idilio (1978) - Jaime Humberto Hermosillo (based on Idilio)
• Guy de Maupassant (1981) - Michel Drach (biography)
• The woman of the port (1991) - Arturo Ripstein (based on The Port)
• Roll it as you can. (1999) - Frederic Golchan (based on Mosca. Memories of a Remero)
• Bel-Ami (2011) - Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod (based on Bel-Ami)
• Cocote, a dog's story (2015) - Pacheco Iborra (based on Mademoiselle Cocotte)
• A life (2016) - Stéphane Brizé (based on A life)

Theater in Spain inspired by the work of Maupassant

• La Paix du ménage. Dir.- Bertrand. Madrid. Teatro de la Zarzuela, November 1902 in v.o.
• Mussotte. Teatro de la Comedia de Madrid, April 14, 1906
• The epitaph(monologist). Madrid, Teatro de la Comedia, April 1907 (based on The dead).
• The dinner of the humsares. Madrid. Theater Apollo October 22, 1915. Antonio Paso Cano and Joaquín Abati Díaz; music by Amadeo Vives (based on The kings)
• Olympia Star. Madrid. Teatro Apolo, December 23, 1915. Carnos Arniches and music by Rafael Calleja (based on Sebo Ball)
• The pain of sinning or the secret of the dead. Madrid. Teatro Novedades, December 26, 1923. Drama by Francisco Ramos de Castro (inspired by:The will?
• Mr. Mayor. Madrid. Teatro Español 1924. Castilian version of José Ignacio Alberti.Little Roque?
• Doña Diabla. Madrid. La Latina Theatre. 1925. Drama by Luis F. Ardavín (inspired by Yvette)
• The Bird. Madrid. Lara Theatre, November 12, 1926. Comedy of Francisco Serrano (inspired by Hautot, father and son).
• 15 diamonds. Madrid. Rialto Theatre, September 5, 1947. Comedy of Francisco Serrano (inspired by The necklace)
• Hotel Comercio. Madrid. Reina Victoria Theatre, April 21, 1973. Castilian version of A. Sotomayor (inspired by Sebo Ball)

Additional bibliography

Bibliography on Maupassant (in Spanish)