The epistemology of the mantelpiece: subversive ornaments in the novels of Guy de Maupassant.(Critical essay)

This article examines episodes from three novels by Guy de Maupassant, Notre Coeur (1890), Bel-Ami (1885), and Pierre et Jean (1888), and analyses how mantelpieces and ornaments become a privileged topos for the fictional investigation of epistemology and the phenomenon of disavowal. Through a parallel treatment of Maupassant and several texts of psychoanalysis, the article suggests a version of Maupassant which differs from critical representations of Maupassant as a pessimistic hater of the bourgeoisie. He emerges instead as ethically more ambiguous, and aware that a certain amount of disavowal is inevitable and indeed necessary in any given community.

**********

In the second part of Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Anti (1885), the protagonist Georges Duroy becomes involved with a financial speculation on the French government's possible expansion in North Africa. In the political debate which surrounds this question, a right-wing deputy, Lambert-Sazzarin, wagers that 'le nouveau cabinet ne se pourrait tenir [...] d'envoyer une arha a Tanger, en pendant a celle de Tunis, par amour de la symetrie, comme on met deux vases sur une cheminee'. (1) The image employed by Lambert is clearly intended to underline the apparently wasteful frivolity of the government's colonial ambitions--France's African territories are 'une chemba [...] qu'on allume avec le papier de la Banque'(p. 405)--but the slightly odd choice of simile has other implications as well. The disparity between an ornamental vase and a colonial holding suggests the government's apparent indifference to the human and material costs of its colonial policy; according to this callous world-view, Lambert implies, the geopolitical ornaments tastefully arranged on France's mantelpiece are, like everyday decorative vases, objects assumed to be without significance, whose cost is not to be enquired after, whose history is irrelevant, and of whose origin the ministerial lover of symmetry is content to remain ignorant.

In this article I shall examine a number of similar moments in Maupassant' s longer fiction where the play of inconvenient knowledge and of strategic ignorance--disavowal--comes to the fore, and where objects which are apparently ornamental take on a new significance. These objects are situated with some frequency on mantelpieces or 'chemi6es', doubtless because the nineteenth-century hearth had 'a practical and symbolic centrality and thus was a site at which both functional and ornamental objects were concentrated'; such ornaments ostensibly '[did] not have obvious use-value, but rather participate[d] in a decorative, semiotic economy'. (2) Maupassant, I shall argue, takes that decorative, domestic semiosis (in which ornaments are signs merely of comfort, of 'home') and turns it into a symptomatology, one which can be read productively alongside Freud and Lacan, and which anticipates some of the epistemological implications of psychoanalytic theory. In this respect, my argument represents an extension of Pierre Bayard'MMuupassant, juste avant Freud. (3) Yet while Bayard centres his study on Maupassant's evocation of psychopathologies (as exemplified in texts such as 'Le Horla' and 'Qui salt?'), my aim in situating Maupassant bien avant Lacan (as it were) will be rather different. I want to show that Maupassant's non-fantastical, 'naturalistic' fiction (and primarily his novels) shares Lacan's interest in interrogating precisely normative psychical and epistemological processes, or what we might call the conditions of possibility of intersubjective life.

The suggestion that the ornament might be subversive is hardly new. Rae Beth Gordon writes that 'one of the primary functions of the ornament is to carry meaning and intent that have been suppressed or excluded from the central field'. (4) While Gordon configures this subversion as a residual opposition to a kind of censorious moral hygiene which evacuates the libidinal to the periphery (a conception which, while no doubt accurate in many cases, is arguably marked by what Foucault has famously called 'l'hypo&e repressive'), (5) the subversion of Maupassant's ornaments is rather different. Firstly, while Gordon concentrates on aesthetic works which exhibit textual ornamentation (be it stylistic or even visual) to the reader or viewer, Maupassant's interest is more narrative and thematic, offering a series of scenes of viewing: the ornament is observed, appreciated, by a viewer within the narrative frame whose reaction is reported. Moreover, if the ornament in Maupassant is an object of desire, that desire is often of the order of epistemophilia: the viewer's desire is not for the ornament, nor for what is represented mimetically in it, but for the knowledge or significance the ornament presents. (6) The subversion comes from the fact that this knowledge, once obtained, may in fact be contrary to the protagonist's desires; it may indeed represent a direct challenge to the viewer's identity, to his own self-image--for the viewer is, incidentally, always male. In Maupassant's novels, far from indulging fantasies, certain ornaments have the power to question the role of mastery which the heroes implicitly or explicitly fantasize for themselves. At stake in the exclusion of such ornaments from the 'central field' is thus the preservation, rather than the tyrannical purification, of the viewing subject.

Through readings of three of Maupassant's novels (Notre coeur, Pierre et Jean, and Bel-Anti), I shall identify three basic possibilities: firstly, that the ornament's knowledge is simply missed; secondly, that it is understood all too well and painfully; and thirdly, that it is briefly glimpsed before being disavowed by the male protagonist in an attempt to protect himself and preserve his existing understanding of the world.

Knowledge Overlooked: 'Notre coeur'