by Travis
I was suddenly taken back to our Lovecraft month today as I listened to this week’s story from The Classic Tales: Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (text here). It’s a great reading by B.J. Harrison of a truly chilling tale, and it strongly reminded me of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories. As I listened to the story in my car, I thought, This predates Lovecraft; I bet it was a big influence. Sure enough, when I got home I Googled “Horla” + “Cthulhu” and found that Lovecraft praised the story in his essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and that scholar S.T. Joshi argues in favor of my first impressions of the story.
So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to Harrison’s production of “The Horla” (or just read it) and draw comparisons between that and Cthulhu.
For what it’s worth, I think there’s a strong sense in which Dementors and even Voldemort himself thematically represent what Guy de Maupassant and Lovecraft were doing with those stories.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
That was a great reading by B.J. Harrison! “The Horla” and Arthur Machen’s “Novel of the Black Seal” are, I think, recognized as the two foremost influences on Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” To respond to your comparison, both the Horla and Cthulhu affect the minds of others and seek to control them, and both represent the forefront of a malevolent force whose intentions are to subjugate humanity. Sounds rather like Voldemort to me (except he’s not extraterrestrial in origin). The Horla and Cthulhu both represent something vast, overwhelming, hopelessly beyond human capacity to oppose… Dementor-like in some ways, perhaps? In effect, if not in kind.
When I think of the way Rowling describes Dementors – as representative of depression and as resulting in the inability to ever feel happy again – I think of the effects on the mental health of the protagonists both of “The Horla” and some of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories. So yes, “in effect, if not in kind.”
And, to continue to build hopes and expectations in the minds of SoG readers concerning the forthcoming book (which still desperately needs me to finalize a title): when it’s published, see chapter five for more on this!
It really was a tremendous reading; one of his best yet!
I’ll take a stab at the mission, even though I’m not that well versed in Lovecraft mythology. I do love “The Horla” though & thought Harrison’s reading was masterful.
I’d like to do differences rather than comparisons, though. I think the main difference between the Great Old Ones & the Horla is the personal nature of the Horla’s involvement with mankind.
I always had the impression that the Great Old Ones were never really concerned with humanity all that much. While the Horla are intimately connected with the lives of men & of possessing men for their bidding. I also thought the Horla are more of an advanced race, evolutionarily beyond humanity, but still of this world. Whereas the Great Old Ones are beyond human conception & come from extraterrestrial sources.
While both are some strange combination of material & spiritual or more rather non-substantive, mankind still seems to have the ability to interact with the Horla & even to some extent threaten them with harm. The narrator also seems to consider them to still be mortal beings to some extent; just way beyond the ken of humanity’s understanding of how mortality works.
To me, The Horla is a more frightening story than the Cthulu mythos in that it is much more rational & more akin to human experience. The Great Old Ones are so far beyond humanity that it doesn’t have much scare impact. But a being closer to humanity yet higher & able to hit us so close to home as it were, now that’s frightening.
Just compare the madness of the narrator in The Horla with the madness in Cthulu. The gradual, tentative, growing madness brought on by the Horla which leaves the narrator grappling with the horror of having to end his own life to escape it or the sudden madness brought on by the Old Ones which just leaves someone a gibbering idiot.
Anyway, just my stab at it.
As always, I start with the author. The common denominator here is syphillis.
Maupassant was the master of the short story form. Most of his stories are about everyday people in everyday situations, and the comical, ironical, and sometimes tragical insights to be found while watching them go about their everyday business. He also wrote some horror stories, two of which “He” and “The Horla” are particularly sinister: the narrator is haunted (possessed) by an invisible entity.
Maupassant contracted syphillis in his twenties. He died from the disease at age 42. In those days, there was no cure for syphillis, which in its later stages produced dementia, with personality and emotional changes. Some critics view his horror stories, especially the ones where the horror seems to reside within the narrator, as his documentation of the horror of becoming insane. The author is describing his own probable fate, while he still has possesion of his senses, and his considerable talent.
Now turn to Lovecraft. He did not suffer from syphilis, as far as we know. But someone close to him did. I have conjectured elsewhere that the stories he wrote where the narrator – who is the author’s voice – begins to transform into the horror which he initially dreaded, are reflections of his fear that his father’s fate would befall him. Thus Delapore and the heir of the Marsh clan become what they fear.
Dementors? That’s not much of a stretch, is it? The Dementors are clinical depression personified. JKR has said so herself.
But Voldemort? Voldemort is but a man, driven by fear to destroy his own soul (and murder quite a few people in the process). He’s not really horrible in the sense of the Horla, or Delapore’s last snack as a free man.
A last thought: Maupassant did try to take his own life, when the illness overtook him. Just like his protagonist resolved. He didn’t succeed, but he was committed to an insane asylum, and died less than a year later.
“The Horla” was allegedly influenced by a French translation of the story “What Was It? – A Mystery” by Fitz-James O’Brien. The original version of the story (usually not anthologized at full length) is available in the magazines at Cornell. This story also influenced Bierce’s “The Damned Thing”.
And of course I made an audiobook of the story.
Thanks for the link to my
Oops. No direct link – evil frames.
Well, it’s in the March 1859 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
Reyhan,
Some very interesting & excellent insights. Syphillis or venereal disease in general is a common denominator. Maupassant’s mentor Flaubert also died somewhat early from venereal diseases.
But is it possible that Maupassant’s horror writing is driven more by his interest in psychiatry & the diseases of the mind rather than an anticipatory look forward at his own fate? Admittedly it could be both. How much of this is just speculation, though? Did Maupassant indicate anywhere that his main horror stories were a look forward?
revgeorge,
Interesting that you should ask. I have read all of his short stories at one time or another, including all the horrror ones, but I can’t recall them all in detail. I think that the horror stories can generally be divided into three: the ones which are clearly about ghosts (e.g. The Spectre, which still gives me a shiver of repulsion – who knew that hair could be so scary?); the ones which are about insane people (e.g The Diary of a Mad Man) and the ones which are half-and-half, like “He” and “The Horla”. It is the latter, where the sanity of the narrator is in question, which are the most interesting ones.
Now I doubt that an insane man could have written those stories. And they date from before the days that Maupassant’s illness became debilitating. And critics point out that his interest in the paranormal and abnormal psychology predated his symptoms (although not his infection, which was incurred in his twenties).
Was he aware of what would happen to him? Did that influence his writing? Did he become interested in insanity because he knew he had contracted syphilis which by and by might drive him insane? It would be difficult to figure out the direction of the influence, I think.
In order to answer your question, I think it would be helpful if we could somehow get an idea of the author’s intent with regards to the sanity of the narrator in The Horla. Did Maupassant write him as a sane man being haunted by an evil spirit? Or did he write him as an insane man imagining he was being haunted by an evil spirit? The latter interpretation would add some weight to the suggestion that he might have been writing about himself.
One would have to do research, reading letters and diaries and so on, to answer your question, I think.
In the meantime, one near-contemporary had no doubts about the question. HP Lovecraft wrote:
“The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own; being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen.”
Lovecraft didn’t have his facts straight (Maupassant wasn’t writing as his final madness overtook him, unlike VanGogh who painted all the way to the end). And like I said, insane people can’t write very well. But he is right about Maupassant being a supreme realist. He has no illusions about people (read Ball of Fat for as pitiless a condemnation of human hypocrisy as you can find). Some of his characters are dreamers and live in fantasy, but the reader is never left in doubt about where the reality is.
So what was such a realist doing when he wrote his horror stories?
Reyhan,
Thanks for your response. It does lead us into all sorts of speculation & maybe even conclusions about Maupassant’s writing. It’s been awhile since I’ve read his short stories & I think, besides, The Horla, that I actually read more of his upbeat ones rather than the horror ones. I’ll have to dig up my volume of his short stories.
I’ll try to comment some more on your post tomorrow. I’m kind of fading out right now. Thanks again, lots of food for thought.
reyhan wrote:
“In order to answer your question, I think it would be helpful if we could somehow get an idea of the author’s intent with regards to the sanity of the narrator in The Horla. Did Maupassant write him as a sane man being haunted by an evil spirit? Or did he write him as an insane man imagining he was being haunted by an evil spirit? The latter interpretation would add some weight to the suggestion that he might have been writing about himself.”
Just taking a guess without doing the background research I would say Maupassant wrote the narrator as a sane man being haunted by an evil spirit. There’s a textual indication for this, namely the accounts of the strange phenomena in Brazil, the widespread madness of people.
“The frightened inhabitants are leaving their houses, deserting their villages, abandoning their land, saying that they are pursued, possessed, governed like human cattle by invisible, though tangible beings, by a species of vampire, which feeds on their life while they are asleep, and which, besides, drinks water and milk without appearing to touch any other nourishment.”
I’d think it be a pretty far stretch for a madman to conjure up something like this account. So, it seems as if the narrator is a sane man slowly being driven mad by a very real, yet unseen, being. And the narrator looks at it, for someone going mad, very rationally, the Horla seems to be a more advanced albeit natural creature like man, the next & perhaps final step in the evolutionary chain. Thus the narrator’s chilling refrain, “After man, the Horla.”
So, I think it quite possible for a realist to write such gripping horror stories without having to refer to a supernatural or religious definition of evil. We know Maupassant had an antipathy towards religion. But a paranormal explanation for what’s going on here would fit in for a realist, because paranormal simply means something beyond our normal understanding but which could be understood if we had the proper tools.
Which leads us to the interesting speculation that one does not necessarily have to define the Horla as evil. It is just doing to man what man has done to so many other creatures, even fellow men.
Lewis hit upon this in one of his lesser known essays, when he said regarding extraterrestrial life that we wouldn’t necessarily want a race of advanced beings contacting man because they’d probably do to us what we’d done to the primitive natives our Western civilizations had encountered.
revgeorge
You’re right: the text does offer an “objective” framework or context to understand the Horla: the Brazilian ship and the associated similar behaviour of the people of San-Paolo; there is also the phnenomenon of mesmerism, and the fact that one of the servants at least seems to have a similar experience.
On the other hand, the overall structure of the story is an amazingly accurate depiction of what is referred to as “paranoid insight”. Someone experiencing this first experiences a series of inexplicable phenomena, negative or even threatening events, with no rational explanation, grows anxious and even distraught, until finally there is a flash of blinding insight: some malevolent force is behind the inexplicable phenomenon. Finally, everything makes sense. I am not insane, thinks the victim, there really is something weird going on. This kind of insight is in fact the opposite of true insight; it is a delusion.
What makes the story even more intriguing is the fact that before the narrator gains his “insight” (ie. that he is being haunted by a creature who stands on the next step on the ladder of evolution), he rationally – albeit with a lot of distress – considers the fact that he may be going insane:
“I ask myself whether I am mad. As I was walking just now in the sun by the riverside, doubts as to my own sanity arose in me; not vague doubts such as I have had hitherto, but precise and absolute doubts. I have seen mad people, and I have known some who were quite intelligent, lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one point. They could speak clearly, readily, profoundly on everything; till their thoughts were caught in the breakers of their delusions and went to pieces there, were dispersed and swamped in that furious and terrible sea of fogs and squalls which is called MADNESS.
I certainly should think that I was mad, absolutely mad, if I were not conscious that I knew my state, if I could not fathom it and analyze it with the most complete lucidity. I should, in fact, be a reasonable man laboring under a hallucination.”
The narrator evaluates the possibility that he is going insane, compares his symptoms – accurately – to those of others who don’t seem insane because they are sane in every respect except for one circumscribed delusion, and decides that since he is lucid in every respect except this, he must be sane.
That is as beautiful a piece of circular logic as one can hope to come upon. And explains as well why paranoid people can’t develop insight into their paranoia.
But what about the Brazilian ship, the stories from San-Paolo, and the distressed servant? Not to mention the hynpotic suggestion placed upon the cousin, and the tales of the monk from Mont Saint Michel? Are these pieces of a real puzzle? Or are they random, unconnected bits of information which the narrator’s paranoid mind puts together to make sense of the inexplicable?
The wonderful thing about the story is that it can be interpreted in two ways: as a tale of a man going mad, and as a tale of possession. And it works both ways.
It makes me think of JKR, and King’s Cross, which is another piece of marvellous writing. And which too is capable of being successfully interpreted in two differente ways, without any loss of enjoyment.
reyhan wrote:
“It makes me think of JKR, and King’s Cross, which is another piece of marvellous writing. And which too is capable of being successfully interpreted in two differente ways, without any loss of enjoyment.”
Until JKR tells us what the interpretation has to be.
But aside from that, marvelous insights on The Horla. In regard to your comments on the Brazilian phenomena, & the ship, & hypnotism & the monk’s stories, there’s a phenomenon, I can’t remember what it’s called, in which the mind takes random patterns & tries to put them into some sort of logical pattern. Could it be the narrator, in his madness, links them all together & yet still comes up with the right answer, that there is the Horla? The old case of “Yes, I may be paranoid, but that still doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” I don’t know.
As you say, the story can be read several ways, which like King’s Cross & the end of Titanic, makes for great reading. It can be read both ways & still be satisfying either way.
I thought this link might be appropriate because of the connection between Maupassant & Poe.
Poe’s grave mystery, again
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080119/ap_on_fe_st/poe_mystery_visitor
revgeorge,
I did a bit of research – marvellous thing, the Internet – and found some letters. Nothing about the Horla, except that he made a trip in a balloon named the Horla (but indignantly denies that he was the one who gave the name of his story to a balloon ). Not much about the stories in the letters. There are quite a few towards the end that talk about his illness and suffering. One of the last ones he wrote, in November or December 1891, just before his suicide attempt in January 1892, is truly heartbreaking. It’s in French:
“Certains chiens qui hurlent expriment très bien mon état. C’est une plainte lamentable qui ne s’adresse à rien, qui ne va nulle part, qui ne dit rien et qui jette dans les nuits, le cri d’angoisse enchaînée que je voudrais pouvoir pousser… Si je pouvais gémir comme eux, je m’en irais quelquefois, souvent, dans une grande plaine ou au fond d’un bois et je hurlerais ainsi, durant des heures entières, dans les ténèbres. Le cerveau usé et vivant encore, je ne peux pas écrire. Je n’y vois plus. C’est le désastre de ma vie…”
My French is shaky, but he’s talking about dogs, how the howling of a chained dog expresses his own feelings, how if he could he would go into the depths of a forest and whimper like a dog, howl for hours and hours in the darkness. He says that his mind is weary, but still active, but he can’t write anymore, he doesn’t want to. He says it’s the disaster of his life.
In his last dated letter, at the end of December 1891, he writes:
“C’est la mort imminente et je suis fou. Ma tête bat la campagne. Adieu ami, vous ne me reverrez pas.”
He knows he’s about to die, and that he is insane. He bids his friend farewell.
There are no letters after that. It’s possible, of course, that his friends and family suppressed any crazier letters, but these two samples show a man totally aware of what’s happening to him. Not delusional at all.
That doesn’t help explain the author’s intent for the story. But I think it disproves Lovecraft’s theory that Maupassant’s mind was in a pathological state when he wrote the Horla.
reyhan,
Well, your French is much better than mine which is close to non-existent. Maybe if he had written in Spanish or Latin.
I wonder sometimes, though, about the insanity part. It can have such a loose definition, especially back then. Is he insane as in babbling delusional madmen we all think about from the movies but with occasional flashes of sanity? Kind of like Renfield in Dracula. Or is he insane in the sense of a deep clinical depression, which we know can cause some of the symptons he describes, namely the ability to still do the things one loves but the total lack of desire or will to do them?
I guess we’ll never know. Certainly he doesn’t sound, in those two letters, like a raving lunatic. But as you say, his family could’ve suppressed the worst ones. Thank you so much for finding those letters. They do help shed some light on this, albeit while raising more questions. And they do highlight the terrible tragedy of his disease.
“Certains chiens qui hurlent expriment très bien mon état. C’est une plainte lamentable qui ne s’adresse à rien, qui ne va nulle part, qui ne dit rien et qui jette dans les nuits, le cri d’angoisse enchaînée que je voudrais pouvoir pousser… Si je pouvais gémir comme eux, je m’en irais quelquefois, souvent, dans une grande plaine ou au fond d’un bois et je hurlerais ainsi, durant des heures entières, dans les ténèbres. Le cerveau usé et vivant encore, je ne peux pas écrire. Je n’y vois plus. C’est le désastre de ma vie…”
Some dogs which howl express very well my state. It is a pitiful plaint addressed to none, which is going nowhere, which says nothing, which is thrown out into the nights, the cry of enchained agony which I would like to be able to push..If I could groan like them, I would go sometimes, often,into a big plain,or into the depths of a wood and I would also howl, during entire hours, in the shadows. The brain ruined yet still living, I am not able to write. I see nothing more. It is the disaster of my life.
I wrote out my translation, which is also shaky, but I think it important to emphasize “peut” – he wants to write, but is unable to do so, hence the agony. He knows what he wants to do and can’t do it.
Again, his final sentences:
“Death is close at hand, and I am mad. My head beats the ground. Farewell, friend, you will not see me again.”
Even in his final agonies, he is well aware of what is happening to him and expresses his thoughts poetically. What a tragedy!
Thank you for the translation, Mary Jo. That is very helpful. Helpful in a sad way, because it really drives home the pathos of his situation. Thanks again.