After
the success of Boule de Suif ("Ball
of Fat") in 1880, the touching
little story of the prostitute who reluctantly goes to bed with a Prussian
officer in order to procure the release of her traveling companions and then is
scorned by them, Guy de Maupassant began to write anecdotal articles for two
newspapers, the practice of which served as preparation for writing the short
stories that were to make him famous.
His
first full volume of short fiction appeared in 1881 under the title of his
second important story, La Maison Tellier
("Madame Tellier's House"), a comic piece about a group of
prostitutes who attend a First Communion. After the success of this book,
Maupassant published numerous stories in newspapers and periodicals which were
then reprinted in the volumes of his stories that began to appear at the rate
of approximately two a year. Many of his stories created a great deal of
controversy among the French critics of the time because he dared to focus on
the experiences of so-called "lowlife" characters.
However,
in addition to the realistic stories of the lower-class, Maupassant also
experimented with mystery tales, many of which are reminiscent of the stories
of Edgar Allan Poe. Instead of depending
on the supernatural, these stories focus on some mysterious dimension of
reality which is justified rationally by the central character. As a result, the reader is never quite sure
whether this realm exists in actuality or whether it is a product of the
obsessed mind of the narrator.
The
year 1884 saw the publication of Maupassant's most famous short story, La Parure, usually translated as
"The Necklace," which has become one of the most famous short stories
in any language. Indeed, it has become so famous that it is the story which
most commonly comes to mind when Maupassant's name is mentioned, in spite of
the fact that most critics agree that Maupassant's creation of tone and
character in such stories as Boule de
Suif and La Maison Tellier are much more representative of
his genius than this ironically-plotted little trick story about the woman who
wasted her entire life to pay back a lost necklace, only to discover that it
was fake.
La Horla, a story of psychological horror, is
actually the pinnacle of several stories of madness which Maupassant had
experimented with previously. The story
focuses on the central character's intuition of a reality which surrounds human
life but remains imperceptible to the senses.
Told by means of diary entries, the story charts the protagonist's
growing awareness of his own madness as well as his lucid understanding of the
process whereby the external world is displaced by psychic projections.
What
makes "The Horla" distinctive is the increasing need of the narrator
to account for his madness as being due to something external to himself. Such a desire is Maupassant's way of
universalizing the story, for he well knew that human beings have always tried
to embody their most basic desires and fears in some external but invisible
presence. "The Horla" is a masterpiece of hallucinatory horror
because it focuses so powerfully on that process of mistaking inner reality for
outer reality which is indeed the very basis of hallucination. The story is too
strongly controlled to be the work of a madman.
Of all the
Maupassant tales that focus on madness, hallucination, obsession, and the
mystery of a dimension beyond the senses, the most sustained and deservedly the
most famous is "The Horla."
Although many critics point to the autobiographical elements in this
story (for during its writing Maupassant was possessed by the increasing
madness caused by syphilis), still others suggest that the work stands on its
own merits as a masterpiece of psychological horror. Told by means of diary
entries, the story charts the protagonist's growing awareness of his own
madness as well as his understanding of the process whereby the external world
is displaced by psychic projections.
The story begins
with many of the same themes that Maupassant had earlier developed in
"Letter from a Madman," even at times using much of the same language
as that story. The narrator begins
considering the mystery of the invisible, the weakness of the senses to
perceive all that is out there in the world, and the theory that if there were
other senses, one could discover many more things about the world around human
life. The second predominant Maupassant
theme here is that of apprehension, a sense of some imminent danger, a
presentiment of something yet to come.
This apprehension, which the narrator calls a disease, is accompanied by
nightmares, a sense of some external force suffocating him while he sleeps, and
the conviction that there is something following him; yet when he turns around
there is nothing there.
This sense of
something existing outside the self but not visible to the ordinary senses is
pushed even further when the narrator begins to believe that there are actual
creatures who exist in this invisible dimension. This conviction is then developed into an
idea that when the mind is asleep an alien being takes control of the body and
makes it obey. All of these ideas then lead easily into the concept of
mesmerism or hypnotism; for under hypnosis it seems as if an alien being has
control of our actions which, when we awake, we have no awareness of. Although the narrator doubts his sanity, he
also feels he is in complete possession of all his faculties, and he becomes
even more convinced that an invisible creature is making him do things that his
own mind does not direct him to do. Thus
he finally believes that there are Invisible Ones in the world, creatures who
have always existed and who have haunted mankind even though they cannot be
seen.
The final event
to convince him of the external, as opposed to the psychological, existence of
the creatures, is a newspaper article about an epidemic of madness in Brazil in
which people seem possessed by vampire-like creatures who feed on them during
sleep. He remembers a Brazilian ship
that sailed past his window and believes that one of the creatures has jumped
ship to possess him. Now he knows that
the reign of man on earth is over and that the forces of the Horla which man
has always feared--forces called spirits, genii, fairies, hobgoblins, witches,
devils, and imps--will enslave man.
Finally, in a
scene which was used earlier in "A Letter from a Madman," he
"sees" the creature in the mirror when its presence blurs his own
image by coming between him and the mirror. He decides to destroy the creature
by locking it in his room and burning his house to the ground. As he watches
the house burn and realizes that his servants are burning too, he wonders if
indeed the Horla is dead, for he considers that it cannot, like man, be prematurely
destroyed. His final thought is since
the Horla is not dead he shall have to kill himself; the story ends with that
decision.
What makes
"The Horla" distinctive is the increasing need of the narrator to
account for his madness as being something external to himself. This universalizes the story, for human
beings have always tried to embody their most basic desires and fears in some
external but invisible presence named gods, devils, spirits, etc. "The
Horla" is a masterpiece of hallucinatory horror because it focuses so
powerfully on that process of mistaking inner reality for outer reality which
is the very basis of hallucination.
Because of his
ability to transform the short mystery tale from a primitive oral form based on
legend into a sophisticated modern form in which mystery originates within the
complex mind of man, Maupassant is an important figure in marking the
transition between the nineteenth-century tale of the supernatural and the
twentieth-century short story of psychological obsession.
Guy
de Maupassant is one of those writers whose contribution to literature is often
overshadowed by the tragic facts of his life and whose real experimentation is
often ignored in favor of his more popular innovations. Too often it is his promiscuity and
profligate Parisian life style that receives the most attention from the casual
reader. As if to provide evidence for
the payment Maupassant had to make for such a lifestyle, these readers then
point to the supposed madness-inspired story
La Horla--a fit ending for one who not only wrote about prostitutes but
paid for their dangerous favors as well with his life.
However,
Maupassant's real place as a writer belongs with such innovators of the
short-story form as Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Ambrose Bierce, and O.
Henry. Too often, whereas such writers
as Turgenev and Chekhov are admired for their so-called lyricism and realistic
vignettes, writers such as Bierce and O. Henry are scorned for their so-called
cheap narrative tricks. Maupassant falls
somewhere in between. On the one hand,
he indeed mastered the ability to create the tight little ironic story that
depends, as all short stories do, on the impact of the ending, but on the other
hand he also had the ability, like Chekhov, to focus keenly on a limited number
of characters in a luminous situation. The Soviet short-story writer Isaac
Babel has perhaps paid the ultimate tribute to Maupassant in one of his stories
by noting how Maupassant knew the power of a period placed in just the right
place.
Maupassant
had as much to do with the development of the short-story genre in the late
nineteenth century Chekhov did. in somewhat different ways. However, because such stories as "The
Necklace" seem so deceptively simple and trivial, his experiment with the
form has often been ignored. Not until
the short story itself receives the recognition it deserves as a respectable
literary genre will Guy de Maupassant receive the recognition he deserves for
his contribution to the perfection of the form.
1 comment:
The plot captures and intrigues with the first words. Guy de Maupassant knew how to touch the strings of the soul, make him feel his stories, empathize with each hero. Thank you for the review.
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