Maupassant's Schopenhauer - this one is more of a head scratcher

This one’ll be a little less – I don’t know – significant than the one about Nabokov.

I was puzzled by the inclusion of Guy de Maupassant in a couple of lists of writers influenced by Schopenhauer.  I can hardly think of a less philosophical writer than Maupassant.  From me, this is no criticism, but closer to a compliment.

Maupassant’s contemporaries were smitten with Schopenhauer.  A bunch of decadents and art-for-art’s-sakers, the combination of pessimism and aestheticism must have been irresistible, and I can see how someone like Stephane Mallarmé could have been deeply affected by Schopenhauer.  But I suspect much of the attraction was a confirmation of existing beliefs, a kind of received Schopenhauer.  “Ah! Schopenhauer alone was right,” writes J.-K. Huysman in A Rebours.  What I am asking is, would Maupassant’s fiction have been any different if he had never heard of Schopenhauer?  That is what I mean by “influence.”

At least one story would have been different, I acknowledge that.  “Beside Schopenhauer’s Corpse” is one of Maupassant’s “newspaper” stories, presumably one of the 250 he wrote between 1882 and 1887.  It is no more than 1,500 words, and half of those belong to the narrative frame.  Take a look for yourself, in what must be a translation from one of the century-old “complete” Maupassant sets, before I mention the inevitable twist.

Maupassant, the narrator, meets a dying disciple of Schopenhauer, a German, at a resort.  He is spending his last days reading Schopenhauer, “always the same book… all his wasting body seemed to read, all his soul plunged, lost, disappeared, in this book, up to the hour when the cool air made him cough a little.”  He is temporarily escaping his earthly torments with the assistance of  a work of genius, just as Schopenhauer suggests.

The narrator drops in his own comments on Schopenhauer here and there, calling him “[a] disabused pleasure-seeker ,” which coming from Maupassant does not sound like praise, and “the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.”  I have seen these phrases cited, presumably by people who do not understand fiction, as evidence of Maupassant’s devotion to Schopenhauer.

The disciple tells a brief anecdote about Schopenhauer during his life (he argued “as a dog tears with one bite of his teeth the tissues with which he plays” and had “a frightful smile”), and then a longer story about his death.

Although it begins on a solemn note, “[a] feeling of mystery,” with the disciples, sitting by the corpse, feeling that they are “enveloped” by Schopenhauer’s thoughts, the emphasis shifts to the dead man’s strange laughing face, which makes the watchers “feel ill at ease, oppressed, on the point of fainting.”  It seems the story will take an uncanny turn.  “Suddenly a shiver passed through our bones…”

Well.  I will skip the mechanics, the way Maupassant builds up the scare.  What happened is the decomposing Schopenhauer’s false teeth popped out of his head.  That’s the story Schopenhauer’s devoted follower tells about his master.  “I was really frightened that day, monsieur.”

It just seems to me that, looked at from a certain angle (the direct angle), this story looks like a frivolous, disrespectful attack on Schopenhauer, or on his disciples, or, really, on the fashion for Schopenhauer.  The materialist Maupassant dismisses the elaborate idealism of Schopenhauer’s system as the fantasy of fools.  Death is not a return to another state, but simply an end of life, a stinking corpse and mortifying tendons.

For some reason none of the Maupassant collections I read a couple of years ago included this one.  It is admittedly kind of awful.

Since I skipped Monday, I believe I will write a Saturday post.  Perhaps I will spend some time enjoying the writing of Schopenhauer himself.