by Maria K.

Created on: August 16, 2011   Last Updated: August 22, 2011

Guy de Maupassant is a master of layered narrative. His novels are stunning, yes. But it is his short stories that emphasize the point that a true artist does not need many words to provide much content.

"My Uncle Jules" is just one such multi-faceted gems of many in Maupassant's body of work. It is not merely a story about poverty and wealth. It is also about the twilight zone between the two: wealth acquired and lost; wealth spent by someone it does not belong to; poverty masquerading as wealth, striving for respectability and sophistication, and falling short; the broke mentality betrayed by words and behaviors, just as the presence of a stain is betrayed by the smell of benzene used to get rid of it.

The most curious aspect of the story is, perhaps, the fact that the title character does not make his appearance until the very end. It is not Uncle Jules' presence, but rather his absence - his very long absence - that is at the core of the Davranche family contradiction. What makes them contradictory is not their radical changes in attitude toward the long-lost relative. No, it is that base hypocrisy contradicting the image they attempt to project. The transformation of "the black sheep" and the target of the family's disdain into the vessel of all their hopes and dreams and back again is in stark contrast with the picture of a comfortably settled and harmonious household the Davranches attempt to present to others.

The most prominent bearer of the contradiction is Clarisse Davranche - the mother of the family, her statements ringing as absolute truths in her own mind. When the truth about the ill-fated Uncle Jules is discovered, Papa Devranche feels sadness and dismay - undoubtedly for his own broken dreams, but also, at least in the small measurement, for his brother. His wife, however, has no such sentiments. Her primary concerns lay with keeping the secret safe from her new son-in-law and with dismissing all of the Davranches as people who could never amount to anything. A proper hypocrite, she utterly misses the point that she herself is married into the Davranches, and that her children are the Davranches as well.

One must wonder, whether Clarisse's statement "As if one could expect anything from a Davranche!" is the final nail in the coffin of mediocrity for the Davranche family, sealing the fate of the father and children to go on as nothing more than empty shells, theater sets with the life of wealth and comfort painted in the front and nothing in the back.

Somehow, the youngest son Joseph manages to escape that fate. Perhaps he has just enough of an adult in him to resist his mother's cruel absolutism and his father's mild-mannered hypocrisy, and just enough of a child to want to be someone else's good fairy for a day. Whatever drives Joseph Davranche, his escape and his five-franc giving habit are the two positive notes that brighten the otherwise somber and sobering mood of "My Uncle Jules".

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