Marcel Aymé

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Aymé, Marcel (1902–67), an eclectic French author of plays, novels, and essays best known for his short stories in which fantasy coexists with reality. He spent his childhood in his grandparents' village in the Jura, where illness later forced him to abandon engineering studies for a career in writing. In 1933 he gained international fame with La Jument verte (The Green Mare) and its risqué talking horse. He wrote several award‐winning narratives about peasants, corrupted cities, and post‐war France before embracing the theatre. His most celebrated play, La Tête des autres (Other Peoples' Heads, 1952) was a vitriolic indictment of the judicial system; his last works were science‐fiction satires about absolute power and man's inhumane nature.

Aymé's social satire, ludic wordplay, ribald humour, and use of the marvellous earned comparisons to Rabelais, Balzac, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll, Queneau, and Verne. Les Contes du chat perché (The Wonderful Farm, 1934) was a popular prize‐winning series of illustrated tales ‘for children from 4 to 75’. Here, as with the medieval fabliaux and La Fontaine's Fables, talking animals inhabit a rural Wonderland. All of his short stories, such as ‘Le Passe‐muraille’ (‘The Walker‐Through‐Walls’, 1943), were actually philosophical tales that used fairies, seven‐league boots, parallel worlds, divided identities, or time travel to allegorize man's relation to society.

Bibliography

• Brodin, Dorothy, The Comic World of Marcel Aymé (1964).
• Lecureur, Michel, La Comédie humaine de Marcel Aymé (1985).
• Lord, Graham, The Short Stories of Marcel Aymé (1980).

— Mary Louise Ennis

Aymé, Marcel (1902-67). Novelist. Brought up in the Jura, he was fond of a rural setting for his many novels, which practise an ironic humour and often treat the tensions between anticlericals and Catholics (see also CléRambard, one of many plays written after 1942). Bawdiness (La Jument verte, 1933) and the fantastic (La Vouivre, 1943, and the kshort stories of Le Passe-muraille, 1943, and En arrière, 1950) are both essential elements of his work, giving edge to his ironic view of human beings and of the universe. Fantasy gives his work depth. Sometimes accused of lacking the philosophical dimension which would make him ‘truly great’, he was hated by the intellectual Left for his attack on them as bourgeois hypocrites in Le Confort intellectuel (1949). Despite his defending Brasillach and Céline, there is no question of his being a collaborator. He was a nonconformist opposed to both fascism and socialism, considered artists (unlike politicians) as the conscience of their era, and caused great offence to the legal establishment by his play La Tête des autres (1952). A more sympathetic reassessment of his work is overdue. It deals in (often conventional) types rather than individuals, but for that reason has been described as a 20th-c. human comedy. He is noted too for his comedies and children's stories (Contes du chat perché, 1934-58).

[Graham Dunstan Martin]