Gautier, Théophile | Horatio E. Smith (essay date 1917)
Horatio E. Smith (essay date 1917)
SOURCE: "The Brief-Narrative Art of Théophile Gautier," in Modern Philology, Vol. 14, No. 11, March, 1917, pp. 135-52.
[In the following essay,Smith compares the narrative processes of Gautier's short fiction to those of the short stories of Poe and of the nineteenth-century German nouvelle.]
When Maxime Du Camp affirms1 that Gautier is less of a romancier than a conteur, he is attempting to distinguish between these as between invention and imagination, arguing that whereas a roman is composed objectively, upon a deliberate plan, a conte or a nouvelle is subjective and spontaneous. This distinction, carried to its logical consequences, means that in novels the writer guides the narrative, in brief tales the narrative guides the writer, a reduction to the absurd even if limited to Gautier. For the structural unity of "la Morte amoureuse" is as voluntary as...
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