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blueyorkie 's review for:
Pierre et Jean
by Guy de Maupassant
Mr. Roland, a former Parisian jeweler passionate about sailing, retired to Le Havre with his wife and two sons: Pierre, the eldest, a medical graduate, and Jean, his youngest five-year-old, who has just finished his law degree. During a family fishing trip with a young widow, Mrs. Rosemilly, the two brothers, to please the young woman, engage in a fierce rowing competition that reveals, under the appearance of union and affection, the rivalry that opposes them. The same evening, they learned that Marshal, an old family friend, had just died in Paris and bequeathed all his fortune to Jean. Pierre then feels an irrepressible jealousy, to which a terrible suspicion is soon superimposed. Would Jean be Marshal's son? Awakened by the insinuations of the pharmacist Marowsko, to whom he just learned the notice ("it will not do any good"), and a brewery maid ("it's no wonder he looks so little like you "). From that moment, doubt will enter the young doctor's mind until it becomes an "intolerable certainty." In his investigation, in which the recovery of buried memories and the interpretation of signs gradually confirm his assumptions, Pierre begins to harass his mother while leaving more unrestricted and more accessible to his jealousy towards his brother, which has become, in a way, legitimate in his eyes. Because Jean seems to have to get everything he wants: fortune, a woman (he will marry Mrs. Rosemilly), apartment. Pierre reveals to him the secret of his birth: "I say what everybody whispers, what all the world stinks, that you are the son of the man who left you his fortune. A clean boy does not accept the money that dishonours his mother." When questioned, she confesses the truth to John, who forgives him. Both decide to dismiss Pierre, the legitimate son. He commits himself as a naval doctor and embarks on Lorraine.
As is often the case with Maupassant, the narrative obeys, as we can see, the strict linearity of a tragic and implacable sequence. Implacable also for the reader, who can believe to the end or almost to the jealous delirium of Pierre, and that comes to surprise and despair, in a sense, the absence of rebounding: like the paranoid finally still a victim of the persecution, he fantasy, the young doctor (who does not fail to study as a clinician the evolution of his pathology, alternating, in his case, between clairvoyance and blindness), moved by his unhealthy jealousy, comes to imagine a betrayal. That will prove to have occurred well. Nothing thus escapes Maupassant's radical pessimism: because the madness of the investigator does not exclude the reality of the crime, and vice versa. For "history's morality" is accomplished by evoking a legitimate son of the bastard, the ultimate demystification of the bourgeois family.
The treason and adultery. Illegitimate son, the transmission of good, rivalry between brothers, obsession with the double, quest for identity. Although rooted in the social reality of his time, Pierre and Jean address archetypal themes that refer to the myths and to ancient or biblical tragedies (one thinks, among other things, of the investigation of the soul, the revenge of Oreste, the rivalry of Abel and Cain.) And it does so on the dual mode of a narrative at once subjective. The point of view adopted is, almost from one end to the other of the novel, that of Pierre, whose thoughts and objectives we follow. Classical psychology leaving room for an almost scientific self-analysis of frightening clarity.
If, as in many founding stories, the revelation of the "family secret" is indeed the object of this morbid and masochistic quest, the truth can never really be circumscribed. She remains indistinguishable from fantasy, enveloping and elusive as a "mist" - The last word of the book.
Added at the request of the publisher, who considered the volume a little too thin, the text entitled "The Roman" that precedes Peter and John is part of the movement of critics of naturalism undertaken by Flaubert in reaction to the radical theories of Zola. Maupassant calls for a realistic "visionary" or "illusionist" ("Realists should call rather Illusionists"). "The realist, if he is an artist, will not try to show us the banal photograph of life, but to give us a more complete, striking, more convincing vision than reality itself." As for the advocacy for a reconciliation of the novel of analysis and the objective fiction, it finds its realization in the following narrative, where Maupassant, as we have seen, combines the two approaches.
As is often the case with Maupassant, the narrative obeys, as we can see, the strict linearity of a tragic and implacable sequence. Implacable also for the reader, who can believe to the end or almost to the jealous delirium of Pierre, and that comes to surprise and despair, in a sense, the absence of rebounding: like the paranoid finally still a victim of the persecution, he fantasy, the young doctor (who does not fail to study as a clinician the evolution of his pathology, alternating, in his case, between clairvoyance and blindness), moved by his unhealthy jealousy, comes to imagine a betrayal. That will prove to have occurred well. Nothing thus escapes Maupassant's radical pessimism: because the madness of the investigator does not exclude the reality of the crime, and vice versa. For "history's morality" is accomplished by evoking a legitimate son of the bastard, the ultimate demystification of the bourgeois family.
The treason and adultery. Illegitimate son, the transmission of good, rivalry between brothers, obsession with the double, quest for identity. Although rooted in the social reality of his time, Pierre and Jean address archetypal themes that refer to the myths and to ancient or biblical tragedies (one thinks, among other things, of the investigation of the soul, the revenge of Oreste, the rivalry of Abel and Cain.) And it does so on the dual mode of a narrative at once subjective. The point of view adopted is, almost from one end to the other of the novel, that of Pierre, whose thoughts and objectives we follow. Classical psychology leaving room for an almost scientific self-analysis of frightening clarity.
If, as in many founding stories, the revelation of the "family secret" is indeed the object of this morbid and masochistic quest, the truth can never really be circumscribed. She remains indistinguishable from fantasy, enveloping and elusive as a "mist" - The last word of the book.
Added at the request of the publisher, who considered the volume a little too thin, the text entitled "The Roman" that precedes Peter and John is part of the movement of critics of naturalism undertaken by Flaubert in reaction to the radical theories of Zola. Maupassant calls for a realistic "visionary" or "illusionist" ("Realists should call rather Illusionists"). "The realist, if he is an artist, will not try to show us the banal photograph of life, but to give us a more complete, striking, more convincing vision than reality itself." As for the advocacy for a reconciliation of the novel of analysis and the objective fiction, it finds its realization in the following narrative, where Maupassant, as we have seen, combines the two approaches.