The Horla
I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.
I read Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla while on a flight to Dublin the other day. (It’s very short). I was reading the handsome volume from Melville House , part of their "Art of The Novella" series. It includes two versions of the story, from 1886 and 1887, and an earlier version entitled Letter From A Madman , of which the quote above forms the opening paragraph. I think I prefer this first take. It’s very direct, much shorter even than The Horla itself, and it ends with the line, "What should I do?" which had me looking out at the runway of Dublin Airport in a bit of a panic. Damned if I know what you should do, Guy.
The story is straightforward. A man feels that he is gradually becoming in some way haunted, or perhaps possessed, or in any case considerably fiddled with, by a presence, an invisible something-or-other, which drinks the water on his bedside table while he sleeps, and drinks the milk he leaves as a test (because he hates milk himself) and which causes him to suffer greatly and feel deep fear and unease and dread, unto the point of despair, and in the last version, violence. He thinks he’s going mad. Then he thinks that there is another possibility. That the creature, which he takes to calling Le Horla (he doesn’t know why) is a higher form of life that has arrived to take the place of mankind. He finds evidence for this in reports of a strange illness in a town in Brazil.
The translation is a lovely piece of work, by Charlotte Mandell. In an afterword, she points out that the neologism ‘horla’ combines hors , meaning outside, and là , meaning there. "So le (note the masculine gender) Horla sounds like the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There."
De Maupassant’s descriptions of nocturnal activities in a locked room where he is ostensibly alone immediately put me in mind of Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work , about which I’ve written on this blog . Glavinic takes (I’m sure he must have read The Horla ) what is a slight but startling set of ideas about our perceptions and our sense of ourselves, and expands them into a terrifyingly empty world, which nevertheless seems to have someone else in it. These are stories about the self. But the self isn’t single.
Melville House tell us that The Horla "was published shortly before the author was institutionalised for insanity". It’s a bit of a stretch, that, I think, to be fair. He wrote Letter From a Madman a full seven years at least before he entered the asylum after a suicide attempt. But it’s clear that De Maupassant was thinking and writing about what ‘insanity’ feels like. It’s terrifying, clearly. And the terror comes in large part from what it also feels like - reasonable, and logical, and precise.
