L’excès de réel – caricature et réalisme dans quelques nouvelles de Maupassant

By its mimetic exaggeration, the caricature could seem incompatible with the aesthetics of realism, which seeks to give an image faithful to reality. Yet the ironist Maupassant often applies caricature in his portrayals in order to highlight the exaggerated features of the character. By establishing firm links between the portrait of the character and the unfolding of the story, which illustrates the negative consequences of this extravagance, Maupassant reveals the danger of deviating from a moderate behaviour. The realism resides in the coherence between the caricatural portrayal of a character and their acts. It also derives from the application of a rational scheme to depreciate the caricatured character, whose extravagance, often in the form of a passion, provoke a misunderstanding of the objective reality. The impossibility of applying such a normative framework, as in the fantastic genre, could indicate the need to abandon partially the realist aesthetics and embrace other forms of writing.