Le Blanc et le Noir: The Spectre behind the Spectrum in Maupassant's Short Stories

Abstract

In Maupassant's short stories, as psychologically distressing events proliferate and his protagonists descend into madness, polychromatic modernity fades away to reveal a stark world of black and white. Such monochromism also engenders an anxiety-ridden reading experience. Black and white draw our attention beyond intradiegetic events to the diegesis itself, where Maupassant's play on textual shape and punctuation gestures towards the non-signifying white page beneath the comfortingly signifying black-ink words. This article explores Maupassant's dissolution of the spectrum, as he moves beyond the nineteenth-century's fascination with colour towards the bleak, monochromatic realm at the very edges of the symbolic.