AYMÉ, Marcel

Nationality: French. Born: Joigny, 29 March 1902. Education: School in Dôle. Family: Married Marie-Antoinette Arnaud in 1932; one daughter. Military Service: Served in the French Army, 1922-23. Career: Worked at a variety of jobs, including clerk, translator, film extra, all in Paris; wrote for collaborationist newspapers during war; full-time writer from early 1930s. Awards: Théophraste Renaudot prize, 1933. Died: 14 October 1967.

Publications

Collections

Oeuvres Romanesques complètes. 1989—.

Short Stories

Le Puits aux images. 1932.

Le Nain. 1934.

Derrière chez Martin (novellas). 1938.

Les Contes du Chat perché (for children). 1939.

Le Passe-Muraille. 1943; as The Walker-Through-Walls and Other Stories, 1950.

Le Vin de Paris. 1947; as Across Paris and Other Stories, 1950.

En arrière. 1950.

Autres Contes du Chat perché. 1950.

The Wonderful Farm (for children). 1951.

The Magic Pictures: More about the Wonderful Farm (for children). 1954.

Return to the Wonderful Farm. 1954.

Soties de la ville et des champs. 1958.

Derniers Contes du Chat perché (for children). 1958.

Oscar et Erick (story). 1961.

The Proverb and Other Stories. 1961.

Enjambées (collection). 1967.

La Fille du shérif; nouvelles, edited by Michel Lecureur. 1987.

Novels

Brûlebois. 1926.

Aller retour. 1927.

Les Jumeaux du diable. 1928.

La Table aux crevés. 1929; as The Hollow Field, 1933.

La Rue sans nom. 1930.

Le Vaurien. 1931.

La Jument verte. 1934; as The Green Mare, 1955.

Maison basse. 1935; as The House of Men, 1952.

Le Moulin de la Sourdine. 1936; as The Secret Stream, 1953.

Gustalin. 1937.

Le Boeuf clandestin. 1939.

La Vouivre. 1943; as The Fable and the Flesh, 1949.

Travelingue. 1941; as The Miraculous Barber, 1950.

La Belle Image. 1941; as The Second Face, 1951; as The Grand Seduction, 1958.

Le Chemin des écoliers. 1946; as The Transient Hour, 1948.

Uranus. 1948; as The Barkeep of Blémont, 1950; as Fanfare in Blémont, 1950.

Les Tiroirs de l'inconnu. 1960; as The Conscience of Love, 1962.

Plays

Vogue la galère (produced 1944). 1944.

Lucienne et le boucher. 1947.

Clérambard (produced 1950). 1950; translated as Clérambard, 1952.

La Tête des autres (produced 1952). 1952.

Les Quatre vérités (produced 1954). 1954.

Les Sorcières de Salem, from The Crucible by Arthur Miller. 1955.

Les Oiseaux de lune (produced 1955). 1956; as Moonbirds, 1959.

La Mouche bleue (produced 1957). 1957.

Vu du pont, from the play by Arthur Miller. 1958.

Louisiane (produced 1961). 1961.

La Nuit de l'Iguane, from the play by Tennessee Williams. 1962.

Les Maxibules (produced 1961). 1962.

Le Minotaure (produced 1966). With Consommation and La Convention Belzébir. 1967.

La Convention Belzébir (produced 1966). With Le Minotaure andConsommation. 1967.

Other

Silhouette du scandale (essays). 1938.

Le Trou de la serrure (essays). 1946.

Images de l'amour (essays). 1946.

Le Confort intellectuel (essays). 1949.

Paris que j'aime, with Antoine Blondin, and Jean-Paul Clébert.

1956; as The Paris I Love, 1963.

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Critical Studies:

The Comic World of Aymé by Dorothy Brodin, 1964; The Short Stories of Aymé, 1980, and Aymé, 1987, both by Graham Lord.

* * *

Marcel Aymé wrote 83 short stories that were published during his lifetime in eight major collections: Le Puits aux images, Le Nain, Derrière chez Martin, Les Contes du Chat perché, Le Passe-Muraille, Autres Contes du Chat perché, En arrière, and Derniers Contes du Chat perché. Several other stories have never been published in a collection: "Samson" (1945), "Le Couple" (1963), "Un Crime" (1951), "Héloïse" (1952), and "Knate" (1971).

Aymé's short stories deal with the same subjects as his novels. Two major concerns are the country people in his native Jura and urban proletarians whose lives he observed during his adult life in Montmartre. As in the novels, he also wrote stories with a sociopolitical bite to them, in which he seemed to attack both the left and the right. But since the short stories have a wide range and vary in subject matter and tone, there is no easy way to categorize them.

In general, however, it can be said that the use of the fantastic and the marvelous is a hallmark of Aymé's short fiction. A large number of these works seem like children's stories and continue to be read as such today. These works usually recount the interactions between two little girls, Delphine and Marinette, and various representatives of the animal kingdom. Aymé presents these stories as if social intercourse with talking animals were a perfectly normal everyday occurrence. Children do indeed respond to them, and this is why so many of these stories books remain in print, but they can also be read as political or moral allegories.

Aymé's stories can be divided into féerique and fantastique. The former usually requires a world apart, like C.S. Lewis's Narnia or J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. Some of Aymé's stories belong to this genre but use of the fantastique is more typical of his work. Here, humans are at the center of the action, but strange things are allowed to occur, for instance, invisibility in Le Passe-Muraille. The fantastic is appealing to the modern reader because it allows something strange and unexpected to burst upon the scene in the midst of our humdrum existence. In his stories Aymé helps us to look at our condition critically and to probe beneath the surface.

The title story of Le Passe-Muraille, hailed as a short story masterpiece, describes what happens in the boring existence of a civil servant, Dutilleul, when he finds out that he has the ability to pass through walls. Because of this special talent, he is able to overcome the mediocrity and anonymity to which our modern mass society ordinarily condemns us. He is able to become someone.

A transforming, fantastic device dear to Aymé is to alter the concept of time. In "Rechute" the aging leaders of society decree that the year will contain 24 months, thus slowing the aging process, which they see as favorable to them. But this causes an uprising on the part of children, who do not want to have to wait so long for the onset of puberty. In "La Carte" the state takes time away from people who are considered less beneficial to the state and awards more to those considered more useful. This leads to many complicated situations that are both humorous and troubling.

Aymé devoted so much of his creative energy to the short story because it was an ideal way of showing the multiplicity, diversity, and contradictions of human existence. This genre allowed him to develop an idea principally through the projection of images without the restriction imposed by a long narrative line, as is the case with the novel. Like Rabelais, La Fontaine, and Voltaire, Aymé was essentially a moralist and a philosopher who wanted to portray the foibles of a wide spectrum of the human condition. Like his predecessors, he found that the form of the short story suited this aim well.

Aymé's realistic stories have received far less critical commentary than his fantastic works. In these tales, he usually treats Parisian lower-class people, the country folk of his native Jura, or the school classroom, where young minds, as yet unconditioned by society, do battle with pedantic school teachers.

Condemned by leftists as a voice of the right in the years after the war, because of his inability to keep silent about brutality and hypocrisy after the Germans were chased out of France, Aymé was blacklisted (like Céline, Brasillach, Rebatet, and so many others), and his best work was ignored. Aymé's short stories still rank among the best in France in the twentieth century. The ongoing publication of his stories (and novels) in the prestigious Editions de la Pliéade offers eloquent testimony to this distinction.

—David O'Connell

See the essay on "The Walker-Through-Walls."