Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857-1894

5. Voices of Authority? Maupassant and the Physician-Narrator

5 Voices of Authority? Maupassant and the Physician-Narrator
Thenovelsexaminedthusfarcorroboratethethesisthatlate-nineteenthcentury French literati were acutely aware of the limits of medical science and cynical about the widespread diffusion of a clinical discourse. Yet they exhibit a certain timidity where the medical practitioner is concerned, launching oblique attacks by appearing to target what might be termed today paramedical personnel (Madame Bovary), by setting their narratives in foreign countries (Madame Gervaisais), or by taking aim at the discourse itself rather than the profession from which it emanates (L’Assommoir, En ménage). With Maupassant, a new, equally subtle, and equally subversive strategy comes to the fore: the use of the physiciannarrator . Maupassant is not the first to have made use of physicians as narrators. In the nineteenth century alone, Alexandre Dumas’s Mémoires d’un médecin (1849–60), Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823), and Barbey d’Aurevilly’s “Le Bonheur dans le crime” (1874) all testify to the popularity of the medical practitioner as narrator. Moreover, this is but a sample of the many works that feature physicians in narrative roles. Although on the surface, Maupassant’s exploitation of this popular narrative device does not differ markedly from that of his predecessors, a closer examination of stories narrated by physicians suggests that in bowing to convention, Maupassant had a goal that was in fact highly unconventional. The corpus, if significant, is not large. Despite the considerable number of mental and physical ailments described in Maupassant’s fiction, voices of authority? 111 only a dozen stories feature physicians as narrators. Nor is this paucity of physician-narrators offset by an abundance of physician-characters. While all six of the novels and some fifty stories mention physicians, in all but two instances (Pierre et Jean and “Un coup d’état”) they play peripheral roles, often as helpless bystanders who misdiagnose, propose ineffectual remedies, and aggravate suffering. One early protagonist who bridges the gap between the physician-characters and narrators is “Doctor” Chenet of “En famille.” Called to the home of an old woman, the health officer certifies her death (“Rest assured, I never make a mistake” [1:201]), only to learn the following day that she is alive and well. This early representation of the medical practitioner is rich in innuendoes.Besideshisludicrousincompetence,Chenetischaracterized by his indifference to suffering, his gourmandise, and his garrulousness. When he manages to extract an invitation to dinner from the newly bereaved family, he becomes jovial and loquacious, recounting “stories of deaths that struck him funny” (1:203), anecdotes that, given the circumstances, are indelicate at best. Indeed, his stories, which revolve around the peasants’ legendary nonchalance in the face of death, act both as a mise-en-abyme of the principal narrative and as a mirror of his own matter-of-fact attitude toward life and death. It is precisely this “scientific” objectivity in the presence of human misery that would seem to make of the doctor a credible storyteller in an age during which faith in science was supposedly at its height. It thus seems natural that Maupassant would cast physicians in narratorial roles in several of his best-known stories, “the prestige of their occupation”1 serving as guarantee of their reliability. Moreover, because like Maupassant himself, they are sophisticated, worldly freethinkers, the physiciannarrators appear to be transparent vehicles of narrative authority. As spokesmenforscience,theyareassumedtopresenttheunadornedtruth, no matter how distasteful it may be. Hence Dr. Bonenfant of “Conte de Noël,” conscious of his anticlerical bias, promises to tell his story of a Christmas Eve miracle “naively, as if I were as gullible as an Auvergne peasant” (1:689); and the characters of “La Rempailleuse” decide to settle an argument by taking as mediator the presumably unprejudiced doctor. However, a close reading of these (and other) stories narrated by 112 voices of authority? physicians calls into question the doctor’s neutrality. Bonenfant’s narration of a Christmas Eve exorcism, hardly naive, contains a blasphemous subtext.2 Likewise, “La Rempailleuse,” ostensibly a tale of “true love,” may be read as a sly attack on a professional rival, the village pharmacist. Here and elsewhere, the physician’s motives for narrating are suspect, his objectivity problematical. Angela Moger, while regarding the physiciannarrator as an authorial persona a metaphor for “non-integration in the life process” in a way that recalls Maupassant’s lament about the writer, condemned to be a “spectator of...