hen
Toine, the eponymous innkeeper, is the very model of productive consumption. He is the biggest fan of his own product: the cognac that he calls "extra-special," which he declares to be "the best in France." His zealous praise of his own produce gives him his nickname, "Toine-My-Extra-Special," and his loquacity and cheeriness draw customers from miles around, "for fat Toine would make a tombstone laugh."
But what makes him special (and presumably what makes him cheery) is also his prodigious appetite, which is itself a marvel for visitors to this out-of-the-way hamlet, sheltered in a ravine from the ocean winds: "merely to see him drink was a curiosity. He drank everything that was offered him."
This consumption, however, is not simply wasteful or a drain on his resources. It is in fact what makes his business profitable. Consumption and acquisition are happily mixed in Toine's gregarious nature: "His was a double pleasure: first, that of drinking; and second, that of piling up the cash."
Toine is a poster boy for profitable sybaritism. He is a living rejoinder to miserliness on the one hand, and the Protestant work ethic on the other.
And this is surely what irks his wife. She is angered by the fact that her husband "earned his money without working." The story's narrative, then, is devoted to her efforts to turn him into something more like a laborer: to reap profit not from his consumption but from a more stringent (and more morally acceptable) program of regimentation and discipline.
So she makes Toine into a broody hen.
Laid up after an apoplectic fit (the fruit of his excessive enjoyment, though it hardly slows him down: he sets up a regular domino game by his bedside and he would still "have made the devil himself laugh"), Toine is forced to keep his wife's chickens' eggs warm. For the long, anxious gestation season, his movements are even more radically restricted: he can no longer turn to left or right, for fear of "plunging him[self] into the midst of an omelette."
As time goes by, Toine, whom his wife has long regarded as more beast than man ("You'd be better in the sty with along with the pigs!") comes more and more to identify with the animal kingdom. There's something almost Kafkaesque about his gradual metamorphosis, if not into a pestilent cockroach but into a mother hen. His arms become like wings, under which his precious charges shelter.
And becoming animal is also (here at least) a becoming feminine: he manifests "the anguish of a woman who is about to become a mother." No wonder that his is an "unusual sort of paternity" as he is transformed into "a remarkable specimen of humanity."
But the story is not so much about Toine's gradual animalization, and more about simply his increasing recognition of his animal status. For Maupassant treats all his characters as, frankly, beasts: Toine's wife "walked with long steps like a stork, and had a head resembling that of a screech-owl"; his friend Prosper, whose idea the entire stratagem is, has "a ferret nose" and is "cunning as a fox." Another friend is if anything less human still: he is "somewhat gnarled, like the trunk of an apple-tree."
So perhaps Maupassant's final word is that, whichever economic regime they favour, and whether they choose the moral virtue of restraint or the sybaritic pleasures of unlicensed consumption, in the end all of his characters are animals. Either way, what you have are simply various modalities of affective labor. It's just that some are more in tune with this realization than others.
Maupassant
F. Rastier’s “Daddy Hen” is a very detailed analysis of “Toine” and a very good example of a modern structuralist reading (see bibliography here). I read the story without thinking too much about his article. I then went back to the article and compared my “naive” reading to his. (I will make the article available to you, should you wish to compare your own reading to his.) Some remarks he made, and neglected to make, attracted my attention. This post is a mix of a summary of “Toine”, of Rastier’s remarks about “Toine” and of my own thoughts about both (turtles all the way down).
Oppositions
Maupassant stories are generally seen as “fractured fairy tales”. They progress from an initial problem, usually something related to paternity (the counterpart to fairy tales which always end in marriage), then some magical object is found that leads inexorably to a miraculous solution; here it is the miraculous birth of chicks. Heroes in a Maupassant fairy tale are however never heroic; they are anti-heroes, ironic victims their own actions. Or more often, it is the villain who in the end is the hero. At the center of his stories is a practical joke, which is usually underlined in a parting shot by the unenviable hero or the triumphant villain.
The other dimension to his stories, that Rastier amply analyzes, is the use of an array of stark contrasts. Toine is fat and red like the apples (the setting is Normandy) used to make his “brûlot” (flambée brandy with sugar); his wife, gaunt like the legs of her chickens. Toine’s livelihood is about the pleasure of laughter and alcohol, the “rire chaleureux” that Rastier mentions. His wife’s livelihood is the production of food — turning grain into meat to be slaughtered. She is furious, he laughs.
The husband and wife don’t get along, any more than the ocean and the land that fight over the hamlet itself.
At the end of his analysis, Rastier subsumes these oppositions under a more general over-arching opposition, the yin and yang of the male and female genders. Taoist oppose hot/cold, masculine/feminine, upright/prone, before/behind, joy/sadness, life/death, visible/hidden, expansion/contraction, yes/no. To the female passive, sunken, wet, soft corresponds the male active, protrusive, dry, hard. However in “Toine” these features are mixed in the same actor and at times systematically reversed:
The “grotesque” nature of the text – emphasized by all its commentators – is in part due to this juxtaposition of features that are usually contradictory. (167)
The wife is more male than Toine, Toine more female than the wife.
The “dramatic” or “jarring” nature of the text can also be explained by that juxtaposition: heterogeneous classes cannot be reconciled. Hence the failure or implausibility of all the variations and internal versions of the story. (167)
He notes that:
The interpretative path described does not make it possible for us to choose an isotopy or variation or one where we might find the “deep meaning”. … The interpretative path of certain mythic texts show the form of a labyrinth, and that is why they indefinitely can attract and mislead readers. (162)
The fascination exerted by certain literary or religious texts, and the determined yet seemingly unsatisfactory readings they entail, are undoubtedly in large measure due to the fact that the reader goes round and round in circles as a result of the conflictual interaction between their hypotexts [different readings of the same text]. (150)
Is it this shimmering of meaning that makes a text mythic and therefore artistic? Or is there necessarily something more?
Mythology
Rastier is hesitant to engage in what he calls a “productive reading”. In a footnote, he reluctantly draws a parallel between dimensions of the Christ story and “Toine”: Toine as the Virgin Mary, the miraculous birth, the gathering of the peasants / shepherds as witnesses, and the sacrifice of the chicks. (Not to mention the pagan and Christian significance of eggs.)
Yet it seems likely that the effect of this text lies in part in the fact that it resonates with other texts. Jung would point to atavistic archetypes. In any case literature offers us figures – ready-made characters and situations – that are activated by the writer.
There is a rich history of women described as birds, from chicks and birds to hawks, harpies and owls. One biblical reference is to the ultimate castrating female, Lilith:
Lilith (Hebrew לילית) is a mythological female Mesopotamian storm demon associated with wind and was thought to be a bearer of disease, illness, and death. The figure of Lilith first appeared in a class of wind and storm demons or spirits as Lilitu, in Sumer, circa 4000 BC. Many scholars place the origin of the phonetic name “Lilith” at somewhere around 700 BC despite post-dating even the time of Moses.[1] Lilith appears as a night demon in Jewish lore and as a screech owl in the King James version of the Bible. [Wikipedia]
And men are certainly pigs:
“You’d be better in the stye along with the pigs! You’re so fat it makes me sick to look at you!”
And she would shout in his face:
“Wait! Wait a bit! We’ll see! You’ll burst one of these fine days like a sack of corn-you old bloat, you!”
Toine would laugh heartily, patting his corpulent person, and replying:
“Well, well, old hen, why don’t you fatten up your chickens like that? just try!”
And, rolling his sleeves back from his enormous arm, he said:
“That would make a fine wing now, wouldn’t it?”
And the customers, doubled up with laughter, would thump the table with their fists and stamp their feet on the floor.
The old woman, mad with rage, would repeat:
“Wait a bit! Wait a bit! You’ll see what’ll happen. He’ll burst like a sack of grain!”
And off she would go, amid the jeers and laughter of the drinkers. [Toine]
Since Homer, women have turned men into animals, and specifically pigs:
In Homer‘s Odyssey, her home Aeaea is described as a water mansion standing in the middle of a clearing in a dense wood. Around the house prowled lions and wolves, the drugged victims of her magic; they were not dangerous, and fawned on all newcomers. Circe worked at a huge loom.[1] She invited Odysseus‘ crew to a feast, the food laced with one of her magical potions, and she turned them all into pigs with a wand after they gorged themselves on it. Only Eurylochus, suspecting treachery from the outset, escaped to warn Odysseus and the others who had stayed behind at the ships. Odysseus set out to rescue his men, but was intercepted by Hermes, who told him to use the holy herb moly to protect himself from Circe’s potion and, having resisted it, to draw his sword and act as if he were to attack Circe. From there, Circe would ask him to bed, but Hermes advised caution, for even there the goddess would be treacherous. She would take his manhood unless he had her swear by the names of the gods that she would not.
Odysseus heeded Hermes’s advice, thus securing the transfigured freedom of his fellows. For one year, he and Circe were lovers. She later assisted him in his quest to reach his home. [Wikipedia]
In spite of all the structuralist analyses of mythology, there seems to be no consensus on the status and treatment of intertextual mythology.
Scientific structuralism
Near the end of the article Rastier says “In order that this exposé not be too long, I leave the rest of these observations to the reader” (165).
[to be continued]
Antón
Antón es un cuento que permite, sin lugar a dudas y pese a su brevedad, un amplio abanico de lecturas e interpretaciones. No obstante lo anterior, quisiera centrar mi breve análisis en dos elementos que a su vez se entrelazan en uno: la relación entre el género y el trabajo en el marco de la Francia de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.
Como bien se sabe, la revolución francesa significó, entre otras cosas, el triunfo de la burguesía y el derrocamiento de la nobleza. El siglo XIX en general, ligado a los procesos industrializadotes transformaron totalmente la forma de concebir el ser humano. Entre las nociones trastocadas está sin duda las construcciones de género (de lo femenino y masculino) junto con la relación con el trabajo. Se pasa de una producción de subsistencia a una que apunta a la acumulación, el intercambio y el trabajo remunerado.
Pensemos a continuación de qué modo se refleja lo anterior en el cuento de Maupassant. Antón, protagonista del cuento y quien da nombre al relato, es el dueño de la que es –probablemente- la única posada del pequeño pueblo de Tournevent. Lugar que, como da a entender el autor en las primeras líneas, sólo se constituía de un reducido número de casas que eran “una especie de feudo para el señor Antón”. El evocar la idea del “feudo” nos traslada inmediatamente a un escenario de “Antiguo Régimen”, más aún, al comprobar que efectivamente el protagonista vivía y gozaba acorde a una lógica laboral que no era propia de la sociedad burguesa. Este es precisamente el reproche que le hace constantemente su señora (la que como buena “mujer burguesa” no puede huir de su rol de acompañante): “La molestaba su alegría, su fama de hombre campechano, su inquebrantable salud, su obesidad. Le miraba despreciativamente al verle ganar dinero sin hacer nada y al verle comer y beber por ocho”. Es precisamente el hecho de que su marido no trabaje y gane dinero (al igual que en un régimen feudal), mientras que ella sí trabaja para ganar dinero (engordando pollos), lo que hace que ella se enfurezca.
El momento de la parálisis de Antón representa en cierta medida la saturación de una forma o estilo de vida (nobiliario si se quiere) del vivir sin esfuerzo. Es precisamente en este momento en que su mujer lo lleva a transformar su masculinidad desde una percepción propia del antiguo régimen a una burguesa, el trabajo. Es allí cuando la mujer (trabajadora) debe transformar a su marido en un elemento “útil”. Es interesante que la paradoja que se presente sea precisamente que la “utilidad” de Antón derive de su “incapacidad física”. Mientras tuvo salud no trabajó, pero cuando careció de ella debió hacerlo. Es precisamente esto lo que le recalca su mujer al acomodar los huevos bajo sus brazos: “Antón, asombrado, preguntó: -Pero ¿qué piensas? – Que sirvas de algo: incuba”. En ese momento debió entrar bajo la lógica del trabajo capitalista del siglo XIX, o trabaja o muere de hambre, sólo que esta vez no es “el mercado” quien procede a ejecutar el castigo sino su mujer.
Es precisamente en este momento en que se genera una transformación interesante en términos de género. Antón, quien seguía un modelo aristocrático de vida y masculinidad, pasa a desempeñar un papel femenino ligado a la maternidad. Sin embargo, esta maternidad no es en un sentido aristocrático, sino más bien burgués. Esto se evidencia principalmente en las últimas líneas del relato. Al nacer el último de los pollos, la alegría del protagonista no puede ser escondida: “Y el gordo, borracho de alegría, besó al último con tanta efusión, que a poco más lo espachurra entre sus labios. Quería quedárselo en la cama toda la noche, dominado por una ternura de madre hacia el pobre ser que debía la vida”. Sin embargo, una vez pasado el éxtasis inicial, se aprecia aquel elemento tan cotidiano en un contexto industrial, la utilización del hijo como fuerza laboral, o dicho o en otros términos, la utilización de los hijos para la supervivencia de los padres y la familia. Es precisamente aquel elemento el que aparece en el último diálogo del texto: “—¿Me convidas, para cuando estén ya cebados, a comer uno con tomate? La idea sublime de comer un pollo con tomate iluminó el semblante de Antón, el Triple Antón, con sincero entusiasmo repuso: — ¡Vaya si te convido! Quedas convidado para lo que dices, yerno”. Y así fue como Antón, quien nunca tuvo hija ni casada ni por casar, terminó por acceder a engullir lo más parecido a un hijo que había tenido. Por supuesto, la proyección del cuento queda abierta, no sabemos si tras el parto Antón volverá nuevamente a su vida aristocrática, lo que sí sabemos, es que al menos por el instante único del relato, se lograron trastocar las nociones de clase y de género en la posada del pequeño pueblo de Tournevent.
“Toine” by Guy de Maupassant
So from what I understand about this story, it seems like it is about peasant life. However, the author is not discussing any ordinary peasant life. Instead, he denounces the customary perception that peasant life is wretched and difficult, and describes it as jovial and praise-worthy even. In fact, the name Toine (short for Antoine) is a French name meaning “highly praised” or “praise-worthy”. By doing this, the author is rejecting the notion of social status. He creates a character that is well liked, well received, and comical.
Toine’s zest for life and relationships with the town’s people contrast that of his wife’s. The author is defying social norms by making a peasant the talk of the town and, more surprisingly, a well-respected member of the community (even the mayor knows him). Even when paralyzed, Toine remains jovial – not losing his spirit and maintaining to be the person that he is. The author is effective in making him to be a larger than life character (no pun intended), at one point saying that “he could even make a tombstone laugh” – all things considered, even “Death” treated Toine differently. Ironically, his bad health and paralyzed state was what allowed him to bear life to the chicks that hatched under his arms. It is almost as if the author wants to emphasize that, regardless of social norms or social status, we should not let labels and/or status define the people we are. Instead, we should choose to be the people we want to be; do not let yourself be a slave and succumb to the perceptions of what you ought to be.
Also, the author may be suggesting the idea of equality in society and caring for one another. Toine’s personality and vigour to engage all those he comes across display his adoration for his fellow man. In fact, there is a sense of community amongst everyone in town to visit Toine, see how he is doing, and check on the status of the eggs. It is as if there is no social divide between the people of the town. Not only that, he is even connected with nature, as displayed by his anxieties over how the Hen (who is also attempting to hatch eggs) is doing. This conveys a holistic nature to his personality that the author is suggesting is a quality that should be admired.
Peasant life is often times portrayed negatively, as depicted by Toine’s wife, but it is the way in which we choose to view our life that determines its outcome. Although Toine’s corpulence and excessive gaiety is not typical of a peasant, it highlights that we should not give others the power to determine our identity. The author redefines the meaning of peasant life by depicting a town where there is no hierarchy. This story is remarkable because it shows how the perpetual joy of one peasant brings all walks of life together. This is further illustrated at the end where Toine is delighted by the simple fact of being able to see his friends more often. It is not more chickens that Prosper (Toine’s cunning friend) was concerned about when suggesting to the wife that she could hatch more eggs under Toine’s arms; he simply needed an excuse to spend more time with Toine. By valuing such simplicities, the author shows his disagreement with the wife’s pessimistic attitude toward peasant life. Toine’s love for life and people underlines that happiness is not only found in the exceptional, but also in the commonplace.
Toine
Maupassant’s Toine is a combination of mundane issues and contrasting humor that build up perfectly into the irony of everyday life. This “everyday matter” approach given to the relationship between Toine and his wife works as a humorous cover for an in reality fairly tormenting relationship. However, as the story progresses, one comes to the realization that the antagonism between these two characters is not superficial, the feelings of envy and frustration the wife has in regards to her husband surpass the levels for a normal quarreling couple. And Toine’s ability to make fun of his wife’s concerns and his complete disregard for her emotions seem like the perfect set-up for a tale full of comical conflict. This realization immediately creates expectation, who is going to win the annoyance game? Toine or the wife?
Furthermore, as each one of the main characters is developed as the complete opposite of the other; Toine is a corpulent, joyous man “a friend of all”, the wife is an “ill-tempered” woman who lived in “perpetual discontent”, it is inevitable for the reader to pick sides and hope that in the end one of the characters will benefit over the other. This adds to the twist of the ending, since one might or might not get what one was expecting for the narration.
Along these margins there is something very interesting to note, that is the way in which Maupassant manages to weave whimsical remarks between the lines of the story that mainly serve as clues for what might occur in the end. Antoine rolling his sleeves back and saying: “That would make a fine wing now, wouldn’t it?”. We learn later on that that arm will work as a wonderful wing to hatch eggs under. And the fact that he called everyone his “son-in-law” even though he had no daughters is also a perfect example of the small hints the author skillfully hid amid sentences.
The conclusion of the of the story can be observed from two different points of view, both equally ironic. The first one would be to understand it as a defeat for the wife. Her actions were intended to bother Toine, but backfired and helped him become more content than he was before, they gave him a purpose in life further than just lying in bed and moreover he was able to experience parenthood in someway, an unfulfilled desire that is clearly portrayed throughout the narration.
The other way of approaching the ending could be as a win-win situation. Even though the wife did not completely succeed in troubling Toine, she also got something that she profoundly desired: a husband that would help her earn money through hard work.
First post
¡Bienvenidos! Welcome!
FHIS 501 blog.
I want to learn Literary Theory!!
By Josimar Yácuta Verduzco
Hello world!
Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
A blog on theory
The header image of this blog (an ocean coastline) seems appropriate for our course. It serves as a reminder of how meaning and form have cast their shadow on Western thought since the earliest times, beginning notably with the Bible: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”.
Earth, water, air, fire
In the classical Greek period, the atomist theories taught by Democritus (460 BC) set the stage for the four fundamental elements of Empedocles – earth, water, air, and fire. Not surprisingly, the same four building blocks were recognized very early in other cultures.
The atomists described things of the world as coming from combinations of elements – the form of the elements. Modern chemists would agree. But are these elements part of the world or part of our way of thinking about the world? If other cultures used the same divisions, is it because the world is the way it is or because the mind and human culture are the way they are? Do we have an atomist rationality?
Fire means something important for cultures, therefore it naturally becomes that through which we most easily understand other things in the world. More than a physical thing, it becomes a unit of reasoning, something that we can use metaphorically to describe and reason about other things, such as emotion. The fundamental element fire, like water, air and earth, is that part of language that spreads out through the mind and creates more language. (See Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things – not in our corpus of texts.)
The trough and crest of signs
Saussure used the trough and crest of a wave to describe the relation between the signified and the signifier. Where the signified is not, there is the signifier, and vice-versa. A trough is created by crests; crests, by troughs.
The linguistic fact can therefore be pictured in its totality—i.e. language—as a series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas (A) and the equally vague plane of sounds (B). The following diagram gives a idea of it:
The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units [my emphasis]. Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that “thought-sound” implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance. [my emphasis]
Language might be called the domain of articulations, using the word as it was defined earlier (see p. 10). Each linguistic term is a member, an articulus in which an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound becomes the sign of an idea.
Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished only abstractedly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure phonology.
Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance [emphasis in the original].
http://faculty.smu.edu/dfoster/cf3324/Saussure.htm
We think the ocean is where there is water. Saussure politely points out that in fact there is ocean where there is not land (or air or fire?), and vice-versa. Each is defined as the expression of the other. From that dual delimitation comes the coastline: “Linguistics then works in the borderland…” [my emphasis] (Saussure).
Isn’t form always a combination? Saussure’s goal is to make sure we understand that when we talk about language, we have left that other realm, the realm of substance. Chaos theory tells us how that happens.
That coastline? It is form, not substance. (More discussion here.)
Chaos theory
Chaos theory and the whole dynamic, non-linear family (fractal theory, catastrophe theory, cellular automaton theory, neural network theory, genetic algorithms, etc.) confirm much of what Saussure describes, but in the most precise and mathematical fashion possible. This non-linear approach has become perhaps the most ubiquitous and paradigm-changing approach since Saussure and structuralism. (There are new competitors, such as string theory.)
The coastline is an illustration of a fractal – a line that is mathematically of a dimension greater than 1 but less than 2. The theoretical length of the coast is infinite because of the infinite number of twists and turns we can recognize as we zoom in from outer space to the atomic level. The line lengthens from the undulating edges of continents as seen from space to the wriggling line of a series of pebbles, all the way down to molecular shape. The same form of twist exists at whatever level of detail we may chose, so the coastline is said to be self-similar in its structure.
What these non-linear theories tell us in particular is how form develops and becomes stable even though the substance that takes on form is chaotic: “Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition” (Saussure). Form gives rise to form, but perhaps more importantly, the chaos of substance, its lack of form, gives rise to form.
Waves, then, are regular and of a particular structure because there are “waves all the way down” (see Turtles). Interpretatively as well, there are stories all the way down.
Theory of theories
This theory course is about considering where theories go.
[to be continued]
Toine (French & English versions)
Ces derniers jours, j’ai lu Toine, un conte de Guy de MAUPASSANT, c’ est une histoire intéressante. Maupassant choisit généralement les menus événements de la vie quotidienne comme le sujet de ses œuvres, on s’informe et synthétise les vérités vivantes de la vie par les exemples typiques.
D’abord, je me suis familiarisée avec le style de vie des hameaux paysans de la France au dix-neuvième siècle. Les Toines sont une famille typique aux champs à Normandie.
Maupassant est un romancier qui a bien dépeint ses personnages, surtout leur caractère. Le père Toine, le cabaretier de Tournevent, est un homme gros et optimiste, qui se livrait au vin et se plaisait à rester oisif tout le temps. Au contraire, sa femme, qui se querellait avec lui tous les jours, on la connaît par beaucoup d’intrigues dans ce conte, elle était dure, elle était toujours préoccupée, elle avait la culte de l’argent, elle était mécontente de tout, toute la rancœur qu’elle avait amassée contre son mari et leur vie éclataient chaque jour.
Quant au sujet de ce conte, « faire son mari paralysé ouver des œufs» est une idée ridicule, très drôle, certainement, ce n’est pas une idée sérieuse, à mon avis, c’est assez plaisant! Je crois que Maupassant exagéra un peu sur cette affaire, avec un regard acéré, il ironisa les paysans cupides, ils étaient avide de profit maximum, ils profitaient de toutes les occasions pour commettre des méfaits, en d’autres termes, ils étaient habiles et diligents, bien qu’au commencement on croyait «couver des œufs» est une plaisanterie laborieuse, après le père Toine a réussi à éclore des œufs, comme une mère enceinte suant d’angoisse et d’inquiétude, ce travail a devenu glorieux, même sacré! J’ai vu ce film Toine, adapté du conte Toine et realisé par Jacques Santamaria en 2007, Il y a beaucoup d’assistants curieux à la chambre à ce jour-là, mais y compris un rôle ajouté, le docteur qui soignait Toine, quand le mère Toine l’invita à s’asseoir, il dit : « On se sent si petit devant le mistère de la vie. En attendant une naissance, la science se doit rester debout». Il est à noter que malgré l’esprit étroit des paysans, la société de la France et les sciences humaines en ce temps-là étaient influencés par le développement de l’industrialisation et les pensées de la révolution.
Bref, Toine est un conte satirique, il me rappelle Le Père Goriot et Eugénie Grandet, les héros courent après l’argent, ils sont capables de tout pour gagner ou épargner plus d’or, toutefois, la différence la plus grande entre ces œuvres est leur fin, Toine est une comédie humaine, le père Toine et sa femme ont finalement obtenu un succès fou, de plus, ils continueraient à faire ça, leur vie aurait connu une certaine amélioration. En tout cas, c’est une histoire avec espoir. Le projet absurde sera réalisé si l’on le prend comme une chose sérieuse et y accorde de l’importance. A cet époque, je suis sûre qu’on ne le fait plus, évidemment. J’apprécie quand même le style précis de Maupassant, la créativité littéraire est de grande portée pour un écrivain, la source littéraire de Maupassant est réelle, en outre, il avait des vues pénétrants, ainsi, Toine est une de ses œuvres les plus célèbres et ce conte est connu parfaitement par le public.
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These days, I read Toine, a story by Guy de Maupassant, it is an interesting story. Maupassant usually selects the menu events of daily life as the subject of his works, so we can synthesize the truths of living life by those typical examples.
First of all, I am familiar with the lifestyle of agricultural settlements of France in the nineteenth century. The Toines were a typical peasant family in Normandy.
Maupassant is a novelist who has portrayed his characters meticulously, especially their personalities. Father Toine, the innkeeper in Tournevent, is a huge and optimistic man, who was engaged in the wine and loved to be idle all the time. Instead, his wife, who quarreled with him every day, which could be known by a lot of details in this tale, she was stern and always anxious, she had the cult of money, she was dissatisfied with everything, the resentment she had raised against her husband broke every day.
As for the subject of this story, “let her husband hatch eggs” is a ridiculous idea, very hilarious, indeed, this is not a serious idea, in my opinion, it’s pretty funny! I think Maupassant exaggerated a little on this matter, in an incisive style, he quipped greed of peasants, they were eager to maximize profit, they took advantage of every opportunity to make money, in other words, they were skilled and diligent, although initially we thought “hatching eggs” is impossible, after the father Toine was able to hatch eggs as a pregnant mother sweating with anxiety and worries, this work has become glorious, even sacred! I saw the movie Toine, which is adapted and directed by Jacques Santamaria in 2007, There were many curious villagers in the room that day, including a new role– the doctor who treated Toine, when mother Toine invited him to sit down, he said: “You feel so small before the mystery of life. Science must stand when the new life is coming. ” It should be noted that despite these peasants were narrow-minded, the society of France and the humanities at that time were influenced by the development of industrialization and the thoughts of revolution.
In short, Toine is a satirical story, it reminds me of Father Goriot and Eugenie Grandet, the heroes all run after money, they would like to earn or save more gold by doing everthing, however, the greatest difference between these works is their end, Toine is a comedy, the father Toine and his wife finally got a hit, in addition, they would continue to do that, their lives might have more improvements. We could say this is a story with hope. Even an absurd project could be carried out if we take it as a serious matter and attach importance to it. I’m sure that, nowadays, nobody would do that anymore. I still appreciate the particular style of Maupassant, literary creativity is of importance for an author, the literary source of Maupassant is actual, moreover, he had a penetrating mind, that’s why Toine is one of his most famous works and this story is perfectly known by the public.
Lakoff
In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things George Lakoff argues: first, that emotions are concepts, that they do a form of cognitive work and constitute “an extremely complex conceptual structure” (380); and, second, that these “emotional concepts are embodied, that is, that the actual content of the concepts are correlated with bodily experience” (408). To prove his argument, he presents dozens of idiomatic sayings or expressions, taking the particular case of anger. Anger, he shows, is conventionally associated with heat (“hot under the collar,” “hot and bothered”), pressure (“burst a blood vessel”), and agitation (“hopping mad,” “quivering with rage”). Such idioms correlate, Lakoff suggests, with a “folk theory” that imagines anger in terms of a contained liquied, an imaginary that enables a whole series of “metaphorical entailments” (384). So anger produces steam (“all steamed up”), can at least temporarily be held back (“bottled up”), but, if it does not find relief (either “vented” or “channeled”) is liable to lead to explosion (“flipping her lid,” “blowing his top”).
Lakoff goes further: he presents a sort of basic narrative of anger in terms of this metaphorical structure. An offending event excites anger, which the victim of the event fist tries to control but then fails, until he or she can enact some retribution for the purported wrong-doing (397-98). This is the embodied folk theory of anger.
Where Lakoff goes out on a limb, however, is with his claim that “the conceptual metaphors and metonymies used in anger are by no means arbitrary; instead they are motivated by our physiology” (407). If we think through the body, it is because somehow the body knows best; the verbal idioms and linguistic categories through which we understand emotion in common parlance are rooted in a primary corporeal experience that is transcultural and transhistorical: “if we look at metaphors and metonymies for anger in the languages of the world, we will not find any that contradict the physiological results” (407).
It is therefore all the more startling that Lakoff moves immediately to a discussion, in very similar terms, of idioms of lust and ultimately the language used to justify rape. Though he is careful to note that he himself in no way condones violence against women, he seems very close to naturalizing and so legitimating the fundamentally sexist “folk argumentation” that claims that (in his words) “a woman with a sexy appearance makes a man who is acting morally less than human. [. . .] To be made less than human is to be injured. [. . .] The only way to make up for being injured is to inflict and injury of the same kind” (414).
If language is only an expression of a somehow more fundamental set of embodied concepts, then those concepts are put beyond reach and thoroughly naturalized. It is surely better to see the body as an always contested (or contestable) point of contact between conceptual schemes of diverse origin, between affect and emotion, and between a social order and a corporeal experience that is never anything other than social. The body, in short, is the site of a habituation whereby (in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms) an arbitrary symbolic power is made, quite literally, to feel timeless and necessary.
Bourdieu tries to capture this notion with the concept of “bodily hexis, which he defines as “a political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking” (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 92-94). Or, as he puts it elsewhere, in an only very slightly different context:
The practical acts of knowledge and recognition of the magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated that are triggered by the magic of symbolic power and through which the dominated, often unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting the limits imposed, often take the form of bodily emotions--shame, humiliation, timidity, anxiety, guild--or passions and sentiments--love, admiration, respect. (Masculine Domination 38)The very fact that we seem to be betrayed by our own bodies, by a logic that precedes or undercuts rationality, can seem to legitimate the structures of power that the body thereby apparently confirms. But it is what Slavoj Zizek, in turn, would call the ideological structure of social reality (which is far from ideology as it is usually conceived) that has itself to be interrogated and overthrown.
