On Guy de Maupassant
Picked up a collection of de Maupassant’s 19th-century stories recently. He was famous for writing brief short stories that seemed to translate easily into English. In my adolescence, they called this kind of brief short tale “sudden fiction.” I think with modern technology distracting us, many people have short attention spans and can’t deal with long novels.
One of de Maupassant’s most famous stories is called “The Jewels” in English (He has another famous short story called “The Necklace” that deals with a similar theme: appearance versus reality). It is basically about a marriage in which the wife has the two main hobbies of going to the theater and collecting paste apparently, paste meaning fake jewelry. The husband doesn’t share her interests but loves her. She dies of pneumonia after getting a cold while going out to the opera. The husband, a relatively poor public servant, tries to get rid of her “paste” at stores and finds out they are real jewels, and they make him rich. It appears admirers had been giving her real jewels. After her death, he starts going to the theater and sleeping with prostitutes. He later marries a virtuous woman who makes him “very unhappy.”
It is an interesting story because it deals with the question of appearance and reality and what people find valuable. The Japanese have a deep concept of the difference between appearance and reality, yousu and genjitsu. This dichotomy is a theme in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as the title character is deceptively apparently loyal to a king he plans to kill. In de Maupassant’s story, the husband had thought theater and “paste” were frivolous, and he lies for no reason about how much money he has at the end of the story; it seems his poor character could have contributed to his wife’s death.
It is questionable why people even find art like theater and jewelry valuable at all. Yes, real jewels do look pretty on a woman if you are in a romantic mood, but what does it really matter if it is paste or real? In the Internet age, I suppose many ask themselves if it matters whether relationships are real or only virtual. It does.