Reading the News, from Maupassant to Freud

Abstract

Abstract This article takes as its subject the shorter fictions of Guy de Maupassant — in particular ‘Jadis’ (1880), ‘L’Ami Joseph’ (1883), ‘Le Crime au père Boniface’ (1884), and ‘Le Protecteur’ (1884) — and considers the representation of newspapers and their readers in light of critical and historical writing by Carlo Ginzburg and Naomi Schor. It explores the connections between Maupassant’s portrait of the press in these shorter works and that offered by Sigmund Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904), but does not do so in an attempt to pursue a psychoanalytic reading of Maupassant’s fiction. Rather, Maupassant and Freud are analysed as part of a reflection on the cultural history of journalism over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article argues that both writers draw attention to the mistakes or slips that creep into the simple act of reading the news. From Paris to Vienna, depictions of newspapers and readers reveal the traces of a set of deeper anxieties about the influence of the mass press on daily life — anxieties about the gap between fame and anonymity, and the distance of the past from the present.