Here you can read part of a critique of LE HORLA compared to Edgar Allen Poe's, THE BLACK CAT and E.T.A. Hoffman's, THE SANDMAN by Terry Heller
The complete article can be found be clicking the link below
III
Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" (1887) creates an irresolvable ambiguity, leaving the implied reader suspended between two alternative explanations of the narrator's experience, but it, too, offers a kind of closure that reduces insistence upon this ambiguity and therefore allows the reader to escape the reading experience.
"The Horla" is the story of the transformation of the narrator into the Horla, an alien, invisible being. For this reason, it cannot easily be a retrospective narration. Instead, the story takes the form of a daily journal in which the gradual transformation is visible, even though it is not consciously presented by the narrator. Because the implied reader must deal with a document, there is a kind of built-in expectation of closure, an expectation that the document will have a limit. Furthermore, there is distance from the narrator's present condition, in contrast, for example, to At the Mountains of Madness or Wieland where the narrator's condition in the time present of the telling draws the implied reader into a close identification. This narrator has left a document in which time present coincides with the events narrated. The question that the story raises but never answers concerns whether this transformation is psychological or supernatural. Does the narrator go mad as he is taken over by an unknown aspect of himself, a second personality? Or, as he comes to believe, has a new sort of being made its appearance on the earth with an idea of conquest? Details in the story support both views.
All of the evidence for the supernatural interpretation has one inescapable flaw: it is reported by the narrator. The reliability of his reports depends upon his trustworthiness. This narrator does establish a fairly high degree of reliability by means of his own skepticism. Indeed, for most of the several months covered by his journal, he is convinced that he is hallucinating. He encourages the formation of a sympathetic implied reader who shares his love of the peaceful country life and whose mind moves with his in the examination of the unusual phenomena he begins to perceive. This parallel movement of minds is strengthened by the narrator's moving spontaneously to the kinds of explanations of his ambiguous experiences that their strangeness ought to provoke. He looks for natural causes and is incredulous of indications to the contrary. He is willing to grant that we do not understand all about the relations of our bodies and minds to the natural world. Though he is skeptical about a monk's belief in invisible spirits, he keeps his mind open. When the water disappears from his bottle at night, his first conclusion is that he has been sleepwalking. After his elaborate test of this possibility seems to prove the presence in his locked room of another being, he flees to Paris and society. The improvement of his condition there leads him to conclude that he must have been hallucinating and that solitude is bad for him. Though he is skeptical of the power of hypnotism and, then, momentarily convinced by a demonstration of its power, he returns to the open-mindedness [openmindedness] that he adopted in response to the monk at Saint-Michel. As the apparitions increase in power and as he comes to feel himself under the influence of the Horla, he continues to vacillate between the belief that he is mad and belief in the Horla. Only in the last month of the journal, when he feels possessed and gradually transformed, does he cease to assert that the Horla is a hallucination. The intended effect of this movement would seem to be to identify the narrator and the implied reader for as long as possible. Insofar as the narrator reacts plausibly to his situation, he seems reliable. The longer this reliability continues in a daily journal, the more fully the implied reader identifies with the writer.
The narrator's reliability is supported as well by third-party confirmations, reported by the narrator usually before he can appreciate their significance. His footman is haunted while the narrator is at Mont Saint-Michel. The servants report unusual events in the house. Dr. Parent seems to demonstrate the existence of some as yet unknown power when he shows that a hypnotized subject can use a card as a mirror to see what is behind her. A magazine reports an outbreak of supposedly hallucinatory illness in Brazil, connecting his experiences with the arrival of a Brazilian ship that was towed up the Seine past his house on the first day of his journal, the day before he first fell ill. These more or less verifiable external events add to the narrator's credibility. In fact, they make it almost impossible to prove that he hallucinates without either arbitrarily asserting that he dreams everything or refusing to take the story on its own terms. These confirmations work, of course, only as long as the implied reader continues to accept the convention that the journal was added to daily and not fabricated whole. A refusal to accept this convention opens up many possibilities -- for example, that the journal is a hoax -- but does not allow a verification of any of these new possibilities. Though we cannot prove he hallucinates, we can find ample evidence to suggest that he does.
For example, Brewster E. Fitz argues in his essay that the narrator's hallucinations may be explained psychoanalytically. He asserts that the narrator takes literally the paradox of the primary alienation necessary for the formation of self-consciousness in the mirror phase of development. This paradox is that the self must be both the perceiver and the perceived: "the 'I' must be thinking and thought at the same time, that is, it must be both subject and object, it must be where it is not" (960). Fitz helpfully works out various forms of mirror images and analogues to support this view. Another way of arguing this position, which seems to me a little more convincing, is to take note of the stages by which the transformation is achieved. From the beginning, the narrator has the feeling that something is trying to occupy his space. It sucks out his air in the night, leaving him in "low spirits" in the daytime. Then it shifts to drinking fluids belonging to him. It takes his place at home in his absence. It is near him in his home activities. It uses his chair and his book when he sleeps. Finally, it usurps his body and soul, taking his place in the mirror. This transformation, in which the exchange of bodily fluids associated with air, spirits, and blood seems crucial, goes through stages that are suggestive of a psychological origin.
When he first falls ill, he wishes for other organs that would make the invisible visible to him, as the card later does for his hypnotized cousin. Soon after this wish, he becomes more sensitive. He feels there is something near him that he ought to fear. Like the wishes of the characters in Dracula, his wish seems to begin coming true in a frightening manner. In his sleep, he is attacked by an invisible being of the air, which steals his air. When, on 2 June, he takes a walk to recover his spirits, he suddenly feels alone and afraid. This implied wish for companionship is immediately answered when he feels the presence of an invisible companion. These wishes, especially the first, seem to give form to all his subsequent experiences as he gains access to the invisible. As his desire is realized, he is terrified because the process of wishing becomes involuntary. In Paris, it is suggested that hypnotism "proves" the existence of an invisible power that humans might tap. Soon after he hears about this power and sees a demonstration of it, he feels himself to be under the same sort of power, as if to tap it were to submit to it. He sees it manifested in all sorts of mass behaviors, such as government holidays. His escape to Rouen takes him to the library where a book suggests that his apparition is no human invention. He then speculates that perhaps it is a conquering invader, a superior being from another planet. Once he has conceived this idea, it proceeds to become real. The journal story on Brazil then verifies his hypothesis, and on the same day the Horla uses the narrator to write its own thoughts in his journal. This, of course, is the equivalent of the card becoming a mirror that reflects the unseen; his journal has become a means of fulfilling his original wish. When the narrator realizes that the Horla has spoken through him, he exclaims, "He is within me, he is becoming my soul; I shall kill him" (268)! This incident is duplicated physically a few days later when he looks in the mirror and sees nothing at all. He has become invisible. He sees the Horla as having absorbed his reflection, his "I." In Lacanian terms, it is the subject who fails to appear in the mirror, for the Horla is the invisible subject that has no image except the "I." At this point, the narrator has lost his self and therefore can see nothing in the mirror. This perception leads eventually to the conclusion that the Horla can be destroyed by suicide.
That the narrator's perceptions of apparitions seem to grow directly out of prior wishes and that these apparitions seem generated by an initial wish to see the invisible make it difficult not to believe that the whole narration is an account of his efforts, unconsciously directed, to see his self as subject. We may even argue that this desire erupted out of the narcissistic calm of his extreme pleasure in occupying his point of origin in isolation. We learn in the 19 August entry that the Horla may have been attracted to his house because it, like the Brazilian ship, was white (blank). Perhaps this mirroring of the ship with the house of his birth draws the apparently involuntary pleasure and salute from the narrator on 8 May. This reflection, then, tempts him to examine his own reflection, to peer into the mirror of a journal page (also blank) in search of the reality behind the image, in search of the self that looks. To really see, he must undo the paradox that Fitz describes, but that paradox can only be undone by dying, figuratively in madness, or literally in suicide.
Does the narrator become the victim of some sort of alien being that attempts to usurp his body and produce a new species? Or does the narrator succumb to an unconscious wish to return to a state previous to self-consciousness? To affirm either possibility opens the implied reader to the critique of the other. The evidence in favor of each alternative is strong enough to explain by itself, but ever present is the evidence for the other alternative, which cannot be ignored. As in "The Sand-Man," the implied reader is split between two readings, and the real reader is subjected to the anxiety of aesthetic incompletion. Like Hoffman, Maupassant offers aid to both readers, though in this case primarily by means of a strong closure.
The narrator's conclusion that he must commit suicide is an acknowledgment of the completion of his transformation in either interpretation. His attempt to kill the Horla has only destroyed others, not the Horla. Whether the Horla is within as an alien being or as the alienated self, it now possesses him. The narrator's dilemma is at an end; his experience is closed. Since he is no longer the self who began the journal, his journal is also complete. Furthermore, the earlier stages of the transformation tend to gradually distance the implied reader from the narrator. It becomes impossible to continue moving with his mind when that mind is clearly taken over by some alien force, whether internal or external. The implied reader's investment in the narrator is reduced, the narrator's transformation is completed, and his experience and journal are closed off in the decision to die.
Though Maupassant provides a strong closure, the issue of whether his narrator is mad or victimized seems more urgent than in the case of Nathanael, partly because the elements of closure seem weaker than those of "The Sand-Man." The main reason for this is that the tale has no frame. Hoffman's third-person narration increases distance between the implied reader and the protagonist, in part by interposing a perspective between the implied reader and Nathanael. In "The Horla," the implied reader must deal directly with the narrator or, at least, with his document. Though the reader must pull away from the narrator as evidence of his transformation becomes stronger, he still must see that transformation from the terrifying "inside." It is also not clear that this narrator, like Nathanael, is from his earliest memory subject to his doom. He begins his journal a happy and healthy man, then alien experience suddenly intrudes upon his life. This sudden attack intensifies the implied reader's need to settle on an interpretation, to uncover the true causes of the narrator's destruction.
While Maupassant uses some of the same devices as Hoffman to help the reader deal with the anxiety his tale is likely to produce, he also intensifies that anxiety. "The Horla" presents a stronger threat not to allow a completion of its reading. In discussing "The Sand-Man," we said that the implied reader became defined as the hesitation between the two main interpretations of Nathanael's experience. Hoffman reduces the anxiety of this hesitation by means of distance within the work and closure. While the hesitation cannot be resolved, if its intensity is kept to a minimum, the effect will be an unusually disturbing tale of terror. The extra disturbance derives directly from the residue of irresolvability that must form part of the concretion of the whole work. Maupassant increases that disturbance, augmenting the intensity of the irresolvability of the two main interpretations of his narrator's experience. As a consequence, the split in the implied reader may produce a recognition of the difference between the implied and the real reader. The implied reader, like Lacan's "I" is after all a form of ego-ideal, implied in the language of a particular text. The real reader constructs this temporary "I" according to the rules of literary art to which he is accustomed. Maupassant's story threatens, more strongly than does "The Sand-Man," to make the implied reader into an alien being. Just as the narrator may be said to lose himself to an alien being of his own creation, so the real reader is threatened, at least mildly, with a similar relation to the implied reader. If the role will not end, the real reader cannot be rid of the implied reader; he will be "haunted" by the unresolved question for as long as he chooses to attend to the tale. Maupassant has so constructed his story that the role of implied reader has no end. Like Brown and Hoffman, he has intuited the possibility of enhancing the effect of a tale of terror by disturbing the expectations of aesthetic experience. In Maupassant's case, intuition may have been easier, because unlike Brown and Hoffman, Maupassant was able to read the first real master of this form of the tale of terror, Edgar Allan Poe.
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