SOMETHING IN THE WATER: SELF AS OTHER IN
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SOMETHING IN THE WATER: SELF AS OTHER IN
GUY DE MAUPASSANT'S LE HORLA:
A BARTHESIAN READING
THE FIRST VERSION OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT'S SHORT STORY Le Horla, in
the form of a recit, was published in Gil Bias in October 1886; a second
version, reworked as a diary, or 'journal intime', appeared in May of the
following year.1 The first version, through the frame device of a perplexed
doctor, presents the case of a man apparently insane or possessed. The
second version dispenses with the intermediary authority figure of the
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doctor, and records in the first person the diarist-narrator's account of his
experiences as they happen. Whether Le Horia is a tale of madness or of
the supernatural (or possibly both) is an enigma which the carefully
constructed ambiguities of the text render irresolvable. Whether the
diarist remains sane, and becomes increasingly enslaved to a foreign will,
or whether he becomes increasingly insane, and perceives alien forces only
in his own deranged hallucinations, is a hermeneutic circle which cannot
be closed. However, the rewriting of the recit in the form of a diary turns
the preoccupation of the story away from this undisclosed enigma, and
towards the question of writing itself, and of writing the self, as the diarist
holds up his journal as a mirror to himself, and as a written self-portrait
for his imagined readers. The diary form writes 'to the moment' and
effectively doubles the suspense, since, unlike the retrospective narratorial
stance of the recit, the diarist-narrator has no more foreknowledge of
events than has the reader. This writing 'to the moment' exposes the
minutiae of the processes of the construction — or, in the case of Le Horla,
the disintegration — of the self in terms of its specular scriptural double.
In this study I shall deal exclusively with the more widely known diary
version. In doing so, I shall be seeking to suggest that language is a more
fundamental theme in the diary version of Le Horla than madness or the
supernatural, and that the text is a metalinguistic journal about the very
process of writing a journal. In the narcissistic diary form, language
mediates the space between the self and its reflection, between the self
and its other self. I shall reformulate the question of whether Le Horla is a
tale of madness or of the supernatural by addressing the problem of
whether it is the diarist who writes the journal, or the journal which writes
the diarist, as the anonymous narrator's sense of identity is increasingly
alienated from itself and overwhelmed by otherness.2
The reading technique I have adopted for this approach is drawn from
Roland Barthes's SIZ in which he identifies the codes which animate and
enable the intelligibility of the reading process.3 The codes are the patterns
of relationships inscribed in a culture through which a text passes in orderMAUPASSANT'S LE HORLA 43
to mean; they constitute a mirage of structures, the interweaving of off-
stage voices, a network of quotations from many discourses, so many
references to the vast intertextual Book of life-as-culture, 'dans la masse
perspective du dejd-ecri^ .* A musical analogy is suggested with a diagram
of a codal score;5 the codes would be the scales of linguistic notes along
which particular utterances are plucked on an instrument-text by a
hypothetical, composite reader. Barthes takes as his 'tutor' text the Balzac
novella Sarrasine, which he arbitrarily — although conveniently — breaks
down into 'lexies' ('lexias'), fragmentary and manageable units of reading.
Each and every lexia activates one or more of five codes — in order of
appearance: the hermeneutic, the semic, the symbolic, the proairetic and
the cultural. Of the five codes, I shall be drawing chiefly on the symbolic,
but incorporating an implicit use of the semic code.
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Although Barthes inventories the codes in an arbitrary order of
appearance, the symbolic would seem to occupy a privileged position.
The symbolic code should not be misunderstood as the interpretation of
symbols. Barthes's symbolic evokes Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic
theory of the Symbolic Order, and does not conform to the patterns of
conscious thought or of association of ideas. Michael Moriarty, in Roland
Barthes, offers concise definitions of each of the codes, and writes that the
symbolic is the code which most resists classification.6 Its notations are
the most heterogeneous of the five codes, it is the most abstract, and the
furthest removed from the level of linguistic signifiers. Moriarty writes
that 'the symbolic is no respecter of persons, but an impersonal structure
of relationships between figures'.1 It operates transformations, displace-
ments and reversals of relationships between figures. Moriarty continues:
'The symbolic sabotages its own dividing-lines. [. . .] Symbolic power
relationships are unstable: the partners change places, and the form of the
relationship alters.'8 The symbolic field is 'a space of desire (or repulsion),
power, meaning, exchange, substitution'.9 While evoking Lacan's theory
of the Symbolic Order, Barthes's symbolic is not per se psychoanalytic.
Barthes invokes various theoretical discourses without wholly taking any
on board. For example, the transgressions and reversals which operate in
the symbolic field draw on Jacques Derrida's theoretical practice of
'deconstructing' systems of hierarchical binary oppositions of thought.
Barthes's analysis of Sarrasine is the reading because it is any reading and
no reading. The connotative signifieds activated by each lexia offer a
sketch on which particular readings, on which a reading, may elaborate,
'la matiere semantique (divisee mais non distribute) de plusieurs critiques
(psychologique, psychanalytique, thematique, historique, structurale)'.10
In this study, the whole of the tutor text of Le Horla will not be dissected
into a series of contiguous lexias, as Barthes — partly for demonstration
purposes, as a blueprint for possible readings — does with Sarrasine. This
is proposed as a particular reading of Le Horla, and so signifying units in44 MARTIN CALDER
the text will be picked out as they arise in the course of the analysis of the
symbolic field. The use of the semic code will be assumed rather than
signalled as such, since the migrations of the semes, 'les particules d'une
poussiere, d'un miroitement du sens',11 he in the wake of the transforma-
tions of the symbolic field, and the semic figures can be bypassed on the
way to the correlative symbolic categories.
Barthes accesses the symbolic field in Sarrasine through the formal
device of antithesis, which is constructed in the Balzac novella around the
opposition of sexual difference. Barthes describes antithesis as perhaps
the most enduring and fundamental pattern of thought: 'Les quelques
centaines de figures proposees, le long des siecles, par l'art rhetorique
constituent un travail classificatoire destine a nommer, a fonder le monde.
De toutes ces figures, l'une des plus stables est l'Antithese'.12 For Barthes,
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the agent of transgression of the rhetorical wall of antithesis in Sarrasine is
castration, which subverts the oppositional identities male and female,
and their culturally constructed correlates masculinity and femininity
respectively (Zambinella, the castrato, is fatally mistaken by Sarrasine for
a female-woman). Castration is a supplement, a third term, which belongs
to neither side of the antithetical pairings.13 The supplement cannot
resolve binary oppositions, but by transgressing the axis of antithesis, it
does undermine the very binarism of the opposition itself. Castration is
also a menace, which dissolves the distinction between homo- and hetero-
sexualities, and which disrupts the economies of amorous exchange
between Sarrasine and Zambinella, and of narrative-amorous exchange (a
story for a night of love) between the narrator and his narratee, Madame
de Rochefide. In Le Horia, the symbolic field will be accessed through the
antithetical structure of the categories Self and Other (which I shall
henceforth capitalize), and their corresponding sub-categories such as
interiority and exteriority, familiar and strange, reason and madness,
science and superstition, master and slave. The outcome will follow Le
Horia in subverting the very oppositionality of Self and Other as mutually
exclusive categories, and in challenging the notion of identity as a Self-
comprehending and Self-sustaining plenitude. The displacements,
reversals and eventual confusion of the categories will chart the dissolution
of the Self by the force of the Other, and the release of the unknown Other
Self, already inherent within the Self. I shall seek to suggest that in Le
Horia, the supplement which breaches the wall of antithesis of Self and
Other, of inside and outside, the mediating agent, and the site of the
fusion of contradictions, is the very language of the diary, which belongs
both to the diarist and to his scriptural double, but which does not wholly
belong either to himself or to an Other.
One term of an antithesis is announced in the tide: among the possible
hypothetical motivations of'Horia' would be the homophonic contraction
of 'hors-la', or 'out there'. By semantic inversion, the opposing termMAUPASSANT'S LE HORLA 45
would be 'in here'. The antithetical spatial regions 'in here' and 'out there'
correspond to the symbolic categories of Self and Other, interiority and
exteriority, respectively. Before analysing the reversals of these categories,
and the subversion of their oppositionality, I should like to establish how
the text initially constructs an interior space, and to adumbrate the
attributes of that space.
An interior space is constructed in the first paragraph of the first diary
entry, when the diarist-narrator, enjoying the fine weather, is stretched
out on the lawn in front of his house:
8 mat. — Quelle journee admirable! Pai passe toute la matinee etendu sur l'herbe,
devant ma maison, sous l'enorme platane qui la couvre, l'abrite et Pombrage tout
entiere. J'aime ce pays, et j'aime y vivre parce que j'y ai mes racines, ces profondes
et delicates racines, qui attachent un homme a la terre ou sont nes et morts ses
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aieux, qui l'attachent a ce qu'on pense et a ce qu'on mange, aux usages comme
aux nourritures, aux locutions locales, aux intonations des paysans, aux odeurs du
sol, des villages et de l'air lui-meme.14
The lexia 'maison' connotes interiority and security, and evokes the
category of the Self. The Self-ness of the lexia 'maison' is emphasized by
the subsequent uses in the text of the expression 'chez moi', referring to
the abode {12 mat), but pertaining also to the person (7 aoiLi). This
particular house is doubly interior since it has two roofs: its own, and that
provided by the plane tree. The cradling line of enclosure is circumscribed
from the upper branches of the tree to the diarist's figurative roots. The
roof of the house is later used as a synecdoche for the whole of the house:
'un etre invisible habitait sous mon toit' (12 juUlei), and again: 'il existe
pres de moi un etre invisible [. . .] qui habite comme moi, sous mon toit
..." (6 aout). The roof also functions as a metaphor for the head. The
house and the tree, through a chain of metonymic associations, are linked
with foundations and roots (in both the literal and figural senses), with
the soil, with the locality of the environment, with ancestry, and with
regional particularities of language and thought — all connoting security,
stability, the known and the familiar, and, for the diarist, the basis of his
sense of well-being and his very sense of Self. The house and the garden
are constructs and projections of the diarist's Self no less than the Self is a
construct and an internalization of the house and the environment. The
garden is an extension of the house; though outdoors it is a domesticated
space of tamed or cultivated nature. This first paragraph sets up a
momentarily static point of departure for the subsequent mutations of the
antitheses of the symbolic field. It will be crucial for the development of
the narrative, for the fusion of the categories, and for the subversion of the
identity of the Self, that the diarist has already signalled the interdepend-
ence of the outer world and the inner notion of Selfhood, and that he has
defined himself in terms of the perceived familiarity of his surroundings.
When all seems well, the sunlight 'emplissait mon regard d'amour pour la46 MARTIN CALDER
vie', the agility of the swallows 'est une joie de mes yeux', and the rustling
of the reeds 'est un bonheur de mes oreilles' (7 aout). But when Self-
equilibrium is disrupted, 'Nous subissons effroyablement l'lnfluence de
ce qui nous entoure' (2ijuillet). The concentric interior spaces of the Self
are the plane tree, the house, the bedroom and the bed; their parallel
correlates in the diarist's person are his body, his mind, his soul and his
innermost recess of all — sleep. As the insidious influence of the Other
takes over, he is unable to find a safe haven: 'Je marche alors dans mon
salon [. . .] sous l'oppression d'une crainte confuse et irresistible, la crainte
du sommeil et la crainte du lit' {2$ mat).
The motifs of the Self are thus signalled by interiority, stability, solidity
and knowledge. The rationalizing passages in the text, when the diarist
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attempts to explain phenomena in terms of spurious pseudo-scientism
(hypnotism, populist epidemiology) or cognitive scepticism (common
sense) connote reason and Self-knowledge, and alternate with passages of
uncertainty, incomprehension, delirium and hallucination, which are the
motifs of the Other. The gradual loss of control over mind and body traces
the Self ceding control to the influence of the Other. The fallibility of the
sensory organs, and of cerebral assimilation, become fixations for the
diarist as his conscious, rational Self struggles for clarity, sunlight and
reason. There is stability when the diarist is master of his own mind
and perceptual faculties, when orders are obeyed in hierarchical succes-
sion, when the people obeys its political leaders and when political leaders
obey abstract illusory principles (i4Juillet), when the servants can pass the
blame for the broken glasses down through their ranks (4 aout), and when
animals devour one another in the order of a 'chain of being' (19 aout I).15
The increasing impossibility of Self-affirmation through these familiar
reference points undermines Self-identity and swells the unknown,
unknowable identity of the Other, 'une autre ame parasite et dominatrice'
(15 aout).
The category of the Other, of strangeness and alterity, is first signified
overtly in the body of the text by the lexia 'Seine' in the second paragraph
of the first diary entry. Unlike the sure-footed certainty of dry land, and
the private enclosure of the garden, the river connotes movement, fluidity,
instability and imperceptible depths. As the house is connected in a
metonymic chain to the locale, so the river opens onto a network of
associations with distant places along its course, Rouen and Le Havre, out
into the sea, and to unknown lands; those specifically named in the text
are Brazil (£ mat), and its cities, Rio de Janeiro and S3o Paulo (19 aout I),
and the Indies (21 juillet). As a thoroughfare, the river connotes foreign
vessels, 'deux go61ettes anglaises' and notably the 'trois-mats bresilien', of
which the significance is produced analeptically on 19 aout I, when the
diarist learns of the epidemic in S5o Paulo. The movement of the river is
transmitted to the sky through the flag, which 'ondoyait sur le del', of oneMAUPASSANT'S LE HORLA 47
of the English schooners. Water, with its unstable currents, announces the
proximity of the Other, from the Seine to the bedside carafe. The Horla
arrives when the diarist is stretched out in front of the river, and its
influence is first recorded four days later after he has taken a short walk 'le
long de l'eau' (12 mai).
Like water, the air too, connoting fluidity, flux and translucence, evokes
the category of the Other. These two elements are opposed to the stability
of the earth and the clarity of the sun. The text lists the four elements, 'le
feu, Pair, la terre et l'eau' (19 aout I), and the division between Self and
Other opposes fire and earth to air and water respectively. Algirdas Julien
Greimas has demonstrated how these four elements form a structural
topos which operates in the writings of Maupassant.16 During the diarist's
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repeated experiments with bedside consumables, he establishes that the
Other has a preference for liquids over solids: 'On a bu — j'ai bu — toute
l'eau, et un peu de lait. On n'a touche ni au vin, ni au pain, ni aux fraises'
{iojuUlet). The only liquid substance offered which the Other will not take
is wine — a very un-French gesture, and a mark of foreignness. Moreover,
the Horla is showing a preference, like bestial animals, for natural
substances, milk and water, as opposed to the manufactured intoxicant
alcohol which is peculiar to human animals. On the approach of the
Other, the fuel of the tugboat (presumably solid) is aerified into 'une
fumee epaisse'. Water and air — fluid, translucent or invisible — affirm
the physical presence of the Other through its visual absence; such
invisible subversive stealth makes of the Other a formidable adversary:
'l'air, Pair invisible est plein d'inconnaissables Puissances, dont nous
subissons les voisinages mysterieux' (12 mai). As the monk at the Mont-
Saint-Michel observes: 'void le vent, qui est la plus grande force de la
nature [. . .] l'avez-vous vu, et pouvez-vous le voir? II existe pourtant'
(2 juiUet). The instability of the supernatural manifestations on the sands
around the Mont is signified by 'roder' which, with its cognate forms such
as 'rodant' and 'rodeur', will be frequently used in the text to connote the
Other.
Noise — as opposed to the initial tranquillity of the garden and the
diarist's peace of mind — is another distinctive attribute of the Other. The
convoy including the 'trois-mats bresilien' arrives with a tugboat 'qui
ralait de peine'. The sound of the bells of Rouen are brought aerially to
the diarist: 'leur [. . .] lointain bourdonnement de fer, leur chant d'airain
que la brise m'apporte' (8 mai). The noise of the wind is evoked by the
monk: 'le vent [. . .] qui siffle, qui gemit, qui mugit' (2 juillet). Howling
noises are a salient feature of the figures of the supernatural — signifiers
attached to the ghosts around the Mont include: 'beler, belements, cris,
plaintes'. Their strangeness is signified by 'une langue inconnue', even if
it be no more than 'les cris des oiseaux de mer'. As the revenants around
the Mont-Saint-Michel cry out, so too will the Horla: 'il me semble qu'il48 MARTIN CALDER
me crie sonnom' {19 aoutT). After the naming of the Horla (igaoutl), the
verb 'hurler' — an approximate homophone — is used twice.
Given the diarist's obsessively repetitious vocabulary, it may prove
convenient to tabulate some of the lexias pertaining to the respective
categories Self and Other (see Appendix).17 The groupings are symbolic,
not thematic, and so any one lexia in the left hand column may activate
more than one connotative signified. The table is not a structure, but a
momentary freezing of the flux of the symbolic field, illustrating a
relationship of the categories. According to Barthes it would be impossible
to impose a temporal dimension on the symbolic field.18 However, if we
follow the temporal order of the tutor text, the table begins to distort.
Transgression of the axis of antithesis follows a migration of the notations
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of the column 'Other' towards the column 'Self, resulting in fusion and
contamination of the categories, as the Self is 'aneanti'. Other will become
Self, and Self will become Other.
Transgression is intimated in the description of Rouen: 'la vaste ville
aux toits bleus' (8 mai). Roofs — tiled or arboreal — delimit the interface
between inner and outer. The roofs of Rouen, viewed from the windows
of the house, mark the demarcation line between earth and sky, solid and
fluid, Self and Other. But these roofs are blue, like the sky, blurring the
line of demarcation, and fusing the categories on the interface. The
'grille', which marks a similar interface between the garden and the river,
is traversed by the Other — be it in fact or in the diarist's imagination —
to alter the tranquillity of the scene. The moaning of the tugboat and the
peal of the bells invade the silence of the garden. The approach of the
foreign ships brings the distant near, and announces the proximity of the
Other. The direction of transgression is from outer to inner, suggesting
the activity of the Other and the passivity of the Self. Even the garden
connotes an interface located between 'maison' and 'grille'; from the very
first diary entry, the diarist has situated himself in a potentially vulnerable
intermediary zone between inner and outer, so exposing himself to foreign
infection. The garden is 'devant ma maison', as the Seine lies beyond the
next outer layer, 'devant ma grille'. The text marks numerous possible
interfaces — 'platane', 'yeux', 'peau', 'grille', 'fenetres', 'pone', 'per-
sienne' — such that it would not be possible to locate a definitive frontier
between the inside and the outside.
The inward movement of the Other can be traced from Brazil through
the three-master, to the Seine, the garden, the house, the bedroom and
the bed. In his 'detresse' resulting from his first conscious internalization
of Otherness, the diarist immediately conflates the person with its
domestic metaphors: 'je rentre desole, comme si quelque malheur
m'attendait chez moi' {12 mai). His body is afflicted with an 'atteinte d'un
mal encore inconnu, germant dans le sang et dans la chair' {16 max). As
his body is afflicted, so is his mind, as environmental disturbances areMAUPASSANT'S LE HORLA 49
reproduced both somatically and cerebrally, blvirring the distinction
between the mental and the physical:
Tout ce qui nous entoure, tout ce que nous voyons sans le regarder, tout ce que
nous frolons sans le connaitre, tout ce que nous touchons sans le palper, tout ce
que nous rencontrons sans le disonguer, a sur nous, sur nos organes et, par eux,
sur nos idees, sur notre coeur lui-meme, des effets. {12 mat)
The Self-equilibrium of the opening paragraph is disrupted, 'ebranle',
'trouble', 'enerve', 'bouleverse', as the diarist internalizes and reproduces
the attributes of the Other. The instability of the river and the air, and the
strangeness of Brazil, migrate to the diarist's increasingly agitated person.
The displacements through the person and their domestic correlates move
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in parallel, through 'maison' and 'organes', through 'chambre' and
'pensee', and arrive at the same point: 'lit' and 'sommeiP. It is in sleep
that the destabilizing 'cauchemars' will have their most powerful effect:
'parce que Pappareil verificateur, parce que le sens du controle est
endormi' (7 aout). When the conscious rational Self is asleep, an Other
Self is awake. The troubled sleep of the diarist reproduces the wateriness
of the Other: 'je tombe tout a coup dans le repos, comme on tomberait
pour s'y noyer, dans un gouffre d'eau stagnante' {25 mat). The categories
fuse when the diarist reproduces the noise of the Other; he will eventually
cry out, like the ghosts on the sands around the Mont-Saint-Michel, like
the wind, and like the Horla: 'je me mis a courir vers le village en hurlant
[en horlant?]' {20 septembre).
As the power of the Other increases, the structures in the chain of
command are disrupted. The Horla multiplies into a people, a proletarian
'horde' (which the diarist would like to dismiss as 'un troupeau imbecile'
(i4Juillet)), disobeying and usurping its masters. Human beings, once at
the head of a hierarchy of species, are threatened with becoming the
'chose', the 'serviteur', of a new master, who will govern 'par la seule
puissance de sa volonte' (19 aout I), and by the expropriation of human
will. But apparently worse than the fear of no longer being the master of
one's own mind is the fear of being eaten; 'Le Horla va faire de l'homme
ce que nous avons fait du cheval et du boeuf: [. . .] sa nourriture' (19 aout I).
In the homo-eroticized oneiric scene of vampirism, the diarist imagines a
paralysing loss of Self: 'sa bouche sur la mienne, buvait ma vie entre mes
levres' (4juillet). The vampiristic-cannibalistic act goes further than the
Self internalizing the Other, for the Other internalizes the Self in turn,
doubly mutating, liquefying and dissolving the exclusive boundaries of
the categories.
The diarist loses control of language as the Horla steals his speech and
places its Other words in the diarist's mouth; in Rouen: 'j'ai voulu dire:
"A la gare!" et j'ai crie [. . .]: "A la maison'" (16 aout). The Other has
come within, for the house which once connoted the safe haven of the Self50 MARTIN CALDER
has been inverted and it would be safer to flee. The purpose of the trip to
Rouen had been to borrow from the library a treatise by Doctor Hermann
Herestauss on the unknown inhabitants of the ancient and modern
worlds. But the treatise will also serve the purposes of the Horla. The
apparently successful speech act, the 'joie de pouvoir dire a un homme
qui obeit: "Allez a Rouen!"', had been, as Brewster Fitz observes, 'but a
coincidence of wills'.19 When it is a question of escaping further, the Horla
commands them both back to the house. The diarist spends the evening
fuelling his imagination with the treatise, and awakes in the night to find
the Horla also reading the treatise: 'je compris qu'il etait la, lui, assis a ma
place, et qu'il lisait' (IJ aout). The diarist imagines a giant butterfly
fluttering from star to star (19 aout I). The Horla orders the diarist to order
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the coachman to go to Rouen and then back to the house so as to procure
the treatise that will swell the diarist's imagination at the expense of his
reason: 'C'est lui, lui, le Horla [. . .] qui me fait penser ces folies' (undated,
but located between the two entries for 19 aout).20 The scene of going to
Rouen and back enacts a parallel of the scene of hypnotic suggestion
wherein the diarist's cousin, Madame Sable, is made to believe that she
must borrow five thousand francs from the diarist on her husband's
behalf. It is interesting to note the evocation of paternal influence in the
name of the doctor, 'Parent', who implants ideas in Madame Sable's mind
in parallel with the Horla's infiltration of the diarist's speech.
Not only does the Other put words in the diarist's mouth, but also in
his pen; a close reading of the passage in which the text struggles to name
the Horla reveals the naming to be an act of repetition, reproduction and
mimicry.
D est venu, le . . . le . . . c o m m e n t se nomme-t-il . . . le . . . il m e semble qu'il m e
crie son n o m , et je ne l'entends pas . . . le . . . o u i . . . il le crie . . . J'ecoute . . . je ne
peux pas . . . repete . . . le . . Horla . . . J"ai e n t e n d u . . le Horla . . . c'est l u i . . .
le H o r l a . . . il est v e n u ! . . . (79 ao&t I)
The aphasia which punctuates the naming of the Horla marks the pauses
of the diarist losing his own language and listening to and repeating the
sounds of the Other. The Horla dictates to the diarist who has become the
Other's pupil and stammering scribe. The Other writes the diary which
writes the diarist. The text and its fictional author become mutually
parasitic.21 The diarist is no longer master of the language in which he
constructs his account of his Self and of Otherness.22
Loss of Self is enacted in the two mirror scenes which are an inversion
of one another.23 In the first scene {16 jutllet) Mme de Sable is able to
perceive her cousin's reflection where it is not; in the second scene
{19 aout II) the diarist cannot perceive his own reflection where it should
be. This play of presence and absence conjures up the slippages of
Self-location and definition. Becoming invisible, the diarist acquires oneMAUPASSANT'S LE HORLA 51
of the most salient attributes of the Other which has now stolen both his
scriptural and specular reflections. The diarist cannot identify himself
visually or verbally, leading inevitably to Self-extinction. As the wind has
the power to 'deracine[r] les arbres', so the Other has the power to
'deracine[r]' the Self. From the title 'Le Horla' to the last word 'moi',
interiority is overwhelmed by exteriority, and the Self is effaced by the
Other. When the diarist believes the Horla to be afraid of him, 'il avait eu
peur, peur de moi, lui!' (77 aout), they have reversed roles. On 8 May, the
house functioned as a figure for the Self, but on 10 September, when the
Horla is locked inside the burning building and the diarist has fled, the
house functions as a figure of the Other, and of the displacement of
the Self. Outside, watching the fire take hold, the diarist is figuratively
beside himself. The house has become Other, and the Self, dislocated
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from the sustaining domestic construct, can no longer function as an
enclosed unit.24 Having destroyed his house and internalized the Other,
the diarist 'a touche a la limite de son existence', and has already
committed the suicide which he plans: 'il va done falloir que je me tue
moi! . . .' (10 septembre).25 When the diarist forgets about his servants in
the burning house, he has relinquished his role of master, which
presupposes responsibility as well as command.
Although the story of Le Horla describes a process of the invasion of the
interiority of the Self by the exteriority of the Other, I would suggest that,
in the atemporality of Barthes's symbolic field, traces of Otherness were
always inscribed within the attributes of the Self, and that the apparent
fusion of the categories which would seem to have occurred at the end of
the journal is already marked in the very first entry. What is ruptured is
not only the stability of the opposition Self and Other, but also the unity
of the Self with itself. As the diarist's unknown Self articulates its howling
voice, the forces of destabilization arise as much from within his Self as
from external influences.
The first paragraph of the entry for 8 mai informs us that 'racines' are
'delicates', suggesting a possible fragility of the foundations of the Self,
which perhaps should not therefore be wholly assigned the attributes of
stability and equilibrium. The numerous interfaces between Self and
Other are defined as much by their concentricity as by their opposition,
by degree rather than absolutely. Thus far in this analysis, Self has been
identified with a known inner space and Other with an unknown outer
space. Yet the diarist's Self is incipiently positioned in the garden in an
intermediary space between 'maison' and 'grille'. The text would seem to
locate the conscious Self somewhere between inner and outer, and the
diarist situates his own perceptual faculties in a similar intermediary
space:
Comme il est profond, ce mystere de l'lnvisible! Nous ne le pouvons sonder avec
nos sens miserables, avec nos yeux qui ne savent apercevoir ni le trop petit, ni le52 MARTIN CALDER
trop grand, ni le trop pres, ni le trop loin, ni les habitants d'une etoile, ni les
habitants d'une goutte d'eau . . . (12 mat)
Self-consciousness and cognitive assimilation are located somewhere
between inner and outer, between an Other that is distant and outer, and
an Other that is near and inner. The inner that is unknown is as Other as
the outer that is unknown. The topos of interior alterity, of the split Self,
of the inner monster awaiting release — expressed in Rimbaud's adage 'Je
est un autre', and culminating in Freud's postulation of the unconscious —
was a common thread in nineteenth-century literature and thought, and
numerous intertexts could be cited.26 The theme is explicitly reproduced
in Le Horia through the diarist's concerns about his Doppelg&nger.
je vivais, sans le savoir, de cette vie mysterieuse qui fait douter s'll y a deux etres
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en nous, ou si un etre etranger, inconnaissable et invisible, anime, par moments,
quand notre ame est engourdie, notre corps captif qui obeit a cet autre, comme a
nous-memes, plus qu'a nous-memes. (jjuilkt)
The destabilizing force of interior alterity traverses the Self and is directed
outwards so that the hallucinatory perception of external reality becomes
a projection of internal forces: 'je rouvris les yeux; les arbres dansaient; la
terre flottait; je dus m'asseoir' (2 juin). The Self — like the Freudian
consciousness — is subject to both internal and external influences; the
two-way traffic across the Self makes it a vulnerable, paranoid structure
on the frontier between inner and outer.27 The diarist's ambivalent
behaviour is symptomatic of this. His split selves are caught in an
antagonistic relationship, vacillating between fear of, and desire for, the
presence of the Other. When he is asleep his conscious Self is divided as
he is able to picture himself sleeping and to adopt the gaze of the Other:
'Je sens bien que je suis couche et que je dors . . . je le sens et je sais . . . et
je sens aussi que quelqu'un s'approche de moi, me regarde, me palpe,
monte sur mon lit' (25 mat). When he later writes 'Figurez-vous un
homme qui doit' (5 juillet), the second person addressee is himself as
reader, his scriptural alter ego.
The text of Le Horla is as irreducibly schizophrenic as the diarist who
writes and who is written by it. The discourse is alternately dictated by the
Self and by the Other. This interweaving is evident in the confused
juxtaposition of the opposing signifiers of Self and Other. The antithetical
pronouns 'moi' and 'lui' are conflated in the ambiguous pronoun 'on',
which suggests the plurality of the first person singular, the split Self, the
scission and the fusion of the T and the 'not I':
On avait done bu cette eau? Qui? Moi? moi, sans doute? Ce ne pouvait etre que
moi? (jjuillet) [...] On a encore bu toute ma carafe cette nuit; — ou plutot, je l'ai
bue! Mais, est-ce moi? Est-ce moi? Qui serait-ce? Qui? (6 juillet) [. . .] On a bu —
j'ai bu — toute l'eau, et un peu de lait (jojudlei) [. . .] Qu'ai-je done? C'est lui, lui,
le Horla, qui me hante, qui me fait penser ces folies! II est en moi, il devient mon
ame. (between the two entries for 19 aout)MAUPASSANT'S LE HORLA 53
The discourse is unable to resolve these contradictions, for the diarist or
for the reader. Whether it is a case of madness or of the supernatural,
'moi' or 'lui', remains an undisclosed enigma. This question is displaced
onto the dilemma of whether it is 'moi' or 'lui' who writes the diary, as
'moi' and 'lui' undergo a mutual contamination of identities: is it the Self
which writes of its Other, or the Other which tells the Self what to write?
The diary is doubled and split with itself like the diarist who lives
19 August twice — or rather the diary which records the diarist twice —
two diarists once each on the same date.
The site of the fusion of contradictions, the third term, the supplement,
is the language of the text, in which the unstable play of Self and Other,
'moi' and 'lui', dissolves the categorical opposition. The very act of writing
implies a reflective distance which dislocates the Self from itself. Autobio-
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graphical writing engenders a split between a je-narrant and a je-narre,
each of which is doubly split in Le Horla.28 According to Doctor Parent,
the very acts of thinking and writing have coincided in human history with
the fear of failings in the Self and of the supernatural: 'Depuis que
l'homme pense, depuis qu'il sait dire et ecrire sa pensee, il se sent frole par
un mystere impenetrable pour ses sens grossiers et imparfaits [. . .] De la
sont nees les croyances populaires au surnaturel' (16 juillet). Language
supplements an immanent lack in the concepts of Self and Other — they
cannot exist or articulate their respective or oppositional identities without
language. As the Self at once constructs and loses itself in the language of
the diary, so the Horla becomes real only when it can be conceived
linguistically. The whole of the text is a struggle to name the 'Horla', to
speak the unspeakable, to know the unknowable, to name the unname-
able.29 As Tzvetan Todorov writes, the supernatural is a rhetorical figure,
born of language and existing only in and through language: 'seul le
langage permet de concevoir ce qui est toujours absent: le surnaturel'.30
The final uncertainty of the text repeats and reverses the name of the
Other: 'Alors . . . alors . . . [Horla . . . Horla . . .]' {10 septembre). The
Horla comes into existence with language, but as language disintegrates
into aposiopesis, so the Horla will expire. As the Other dies, so too must
the Self, for the one cannot subsist without its counterpart.31
Le Horla articulates a difference within, the difference of the diarist
from himself, and the difference of the text from itself. The symbolic code
has been deployed to read Le Horla as a Self-dislocating text which is
always Other to its Self, which cannot resolve its internal contradictions —
whether it is a tale of madness or of the supernatural, whether the diarist-
narrator is reliable or unreliable. One of Barthes's principal strategies in
SIZ is to demonstrate the irreducible plurality of voices operative in the
process of reading as the production of meaning. The Other that is the
'Horla' is overdetermined by a 'densite de connotations' which may be
variously interpreted as insanity, the supernatural, the unconscious, the54 MARTIN CALDER
proletariat (from the diarist's bourgeois perspective) or a cultural Other
come from South America. These possible readings, like Barthes's sketch
for the potential readings of Sarrasine, exist side by side, without cancelling
one another out, and could form the bases of other studies. Each and
every reading and re-reading of a text encounters the same but different
text, 'le retour du different [. . .] meme et nouveau'.32 As Barthes famously
writes: 'ceux qui negligent de relire s'obligent a lire partout la meme
histoire'.33 This paradoxical statement, like a reading of Le Horia, reverses
received ideas of sameness and difference, suggesting the repetition of
difference within the return of the same.
MARTIN CALDER
UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM
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APPENDIX
CATEGORY
Lexias Self Other
maison/racines/sol/terre/toit/sang/chair/corps/ame/ INTERIOR
profondes/moi/chambre/lit/pres/sommeil
Seine/Rouen/Le Havre/San-Paulo/Indes/Rio de EXTERIOR
Janeiro/anglaises/bresilien/ciel/air/la-bas/la-haut/
etxanger/etoile/foule/devant/lui/Horla/loin/lointain/
demesur6e
terre/sol/maison/soleil/racines/aieux/locales/raison/ STABILITY
calme/admirable/charmante/gueri EQUILIBRIUM
Seine/eau/vent/air/bnse/brumes/roder/rodant/rodeur/ INSTABILITY
palpitant/fr6missement/fievre/fievreuse/foule/ MOVEMENT
demence/enerve/bouleverse/tremblant/vanable/
inquietude/folie/dansaient/flottait/haletant/tourner/
toupie/fnsson/tressaille/vagues/vibrations/vomissant
terre/soVraison/faculte/venficateur/controle/rdsultats/ KNOWLEDGE
intelligence/comprendre/sage
inconnue/inconnaissable/invisible/verre/air/eau/ UNKNOWN
limpide/mystere/inexplicable/fantastique/peur/ MENACE
transparent/possede/gouverne/puissance/parasite/
menafant/inJfluences/harcelee/subissons/dompteur/
bizarre/domination/iniperceptible/surnature/Horia
raler/vent/siffle/gemit/mugit/crier/beler/belementB/ NOISE
plaintes/chant/vibrations/sonores/hurler/hurlant/bruit/
sonnent/bourdonnementMAUPASSANT'S LE HORLA 55
1
Both versions appear in the Ganuer-Flammanon ediuon (Guy de Maupassant, Le Horia et
autres comes d'angouse (Pans, Garmer-Flammanon, 1984), the shorter first version pp 43-52,
the diary version pp. 53-80. A detailed comparative lexicographic analysis of the two versions
is conducted by Beatrice Ness in 'Les Deux Versions du Horia Un parcours mcthodologique
pour l'analyse des textes en francais langue etrangere', French Review, 62 5 (1989), 815-30
2
This article is, in part, an observation of the relanve paucity of recent cnncal response to Le
Horia as against comparable intertexts such as Frankenstein, Jane Eyre and 77K Strange Case of
DrJekyU and Mr Hyde There are, of course, numerous studies of Maupassant and a number of
articles focusing particularly on Le Horia, some of which are cited below (including articles
from a recent issue (94.5 (1994)) of the Revue d'Hisxotre luteraire de la France, devoted to
Maupassant). The apology is often made that Maupassant's writings are not as straightforward
as they may at first seem, but the current volume of cnncal works does not reflect this
imbalance. I hope in this study to sketch out some points of departure for more lengthy
analyses
5
Roland Barthes, SIZ (Pans, Seuil, 1970).
4
SIZ, p 28. Barbara Johnson offers a concise explanation of the 'already-read' 'what we can
see in a text the first time is already in us, not in it, in us insofar as we ourselves are a stereotype,
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an already-read text, and in the text only to the extent that the already-read is that aspect of a
text that it must have in common with its reader in order for it to be readable at all' ("The
Critical Difference BartheS/BalZac', in The Critical Difference Essays m the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Reading (Baltimore-London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp 3-12
(P 3))-
' S/Z, p. 36.
6
Monarrys definition of the symbolic perhaps reflects the difficulties of summarizing 'The
symbohc is the most difficult of the five codes to characterize. It covers processes of
transformation and substitution. In Lacan's reading of Poe's 77K Purloined Letter, the circulation
of the signifier — the letter — causes individuals constantly to change places, determining their
relationships and their fate. This displacement and reversal of relationships is for Lacan the
sign of the pre-eminence of the Symbolic Order, and it is likewise the charactensuc effect of the
workings of the symbolic in Barthes' (Michael Monarty, Roland Barthes (Cambndge, Polity
Press, 1991), pp. 121-22).
7
Ibid., p. 123
" Ibid., p. 125.
' Ibid., p 124.
10
SIZ, p 21
11
Ibid., p. 26.
12
Ibid., p 33-
" Barthes's use of the supplement draws on Jacques Demda's analysis of supplementanty in
the works of Rousseau 'La supplemeritante [. . .] veut que le dehors soit dedans, que l'autre et
le manque viennent s'ajouter comme un plus qui remplace un moms, que ce qui s'ajoute a
quelque chose nenne lieu du defaut de cette chose, que le defaut, comme dehors du dedans
sou deja au-dedans du dedans' (De lagrammatobgie (Pans, Minuit, 1967), p. 308)
14
Rather than cite page references for quotations from Le Horia, I have chosen to give the date
of the diary entry. Given the brevity of most of the entnes, this should prove more convenient
than page references which vary from one edition to another.
" There are two diary entnes for 19 August which I shall differentiate as 19 aout I and :o aout II
respectively
14
Greimas derives the semionc square, or 'four term homology', from Maupassant's tale Deux
amis
vie mort
(Soleil, feu) (Terre)
non-mort non-vie
(Eau) (Ciel, air)
(This is an approximate synthesis of vanous stages of the development of the semionc square
in Algirdas Julien Greimas, Maupassant. La sbnionque du texte exeraces pratiques (Paris, Seuil,
1976).)56 MARTIN CALDER
17
The diarist's repetitious vocabulary, his repetition of the Monk's description of the wind
(79 aout I) and his repennon of 19 August, may be symptomatic of a 'compulsion to repeat'
expounded by Freud in the essays 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' (On Metapsychology, ed.
Angela Richards, vol 11 of The Penguin Freud Library, 14 vols (Harmondsworthj Penguin,
1973-85), 11 (1984), 269-338) and 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through' (The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed James Strachey,
24 vols (London, Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-1974), xn, 145-56).
The compulsion to repeat is the manifestation of the power of the repressed, an ungovernable
process originating in the unconscious, whereby the sufferer deliberately, and sometimes
ntualistically (as in the diarist's bedside experiments) re-enacts distressing situaoons.
18
SIZ, p. 37
19
Brewster E Fitz, 'The Use of Mirrors and Mirror Analogues in Maupassant's Le Horla',
French Review, 45 5 (1972), 954-63 (p. 958).
The Horla's use of the treatise to manipulate the diarist's reason is an inversion of traditional
vampire lore where the cure is often found in learned books.
31
Luce Ingaray, in 'Le V(i)ol de la lettre', describes the vampinsnc function of the text and
the scnbe the scene of wnnng 'fait de 1'inscnpteur un cadavre, vampire, pion, ounl, etc ' ("Le
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Wi)ol de la lettre', in Parler n'estjamais neutre (Pans, Minuit, 1985), pp. 149-68 (p. 161)).
The topos of reversing the hierarchy of master and pupil, tutor and scnbe, is redolent of the
frontispiece to the thirteenth-century fortune-telling book Prognosnca Socraas basHei, which
Dernda happened upon during a visit to the Bodleian Library in 1977 and subsequently used
as a motif for La Carte postale. Plato (the pupil) is depicted leaning over the shoulder of Socrates
(the master) and dictating his thoughts to the master-turned-amanuensis (reproduced in
Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale De Socrate a Freud et au-dela (Pans, Flammarion, 1980),
p. 268). An interesting investigation of literary-paternal influence might examine the role of
Flaubert as Maupassant's fellow Norman and literary mentor. The house depicted in Le Horla
would seem to resemble Flaubert's famous house at Croisset, near Rouen, on the banks of the
Seme. The two versions of Le Horla were written in 1886 and 1887 respectively; the diary
version begins, and the revenant returns, on 8 May. Flaubert died on 8 May 1880. However,
since both authors are now dead, and since they died again in another sense with the publication
of Barthes's essay 'La Mort de Tauteur" (Mantiia, 5, 1968), such a line of inquiry would seem
to belong to the domam of biographical criticism Nevertheless, it could form the basis of a
biographical study which would not follow traditional explanations of the Horla in terms of
Maupassant's supposed insanity
23
Analyses of the mirror scenes can be found in Trevor Hams, Maupassant m the Hall of
Mtrrors (London, Macmillan, 1990), in Brewster E. Fitz, "The Use of Mirrors and Mirror
Analogues in Maupassant's Le Horla' (cited above), and in Jean Pierrot, 'Le Portrait et le
miroir Idennte et difference dans les romans de Maupassant1, Revue d'Histotre htteratre de la
France, 94.5 (1994), 774-85-
The diarist's account of his expenences, and his relanonship to his house, would seem to
correspond to Freud's description of the effect of the 'uncanny' when the distinction between
imagination and reality breaks down in the perception of ghosts, double-goers, presentiments
and coincidences and, m the case of obsessional neurotics, the omnipotence of thought ("The
"Uncanny" ', in The Standard Edition, xvn, 217-56). 'Uncanny1 is a rendering of the German
'unheimlich', meaning literally unhomery, but also strange, ghostly, haunted, unfamiliar,
unknown, disconcerting. Working through the shades of meaning of dictionary definitions,
Freud questions the assumption that 'unheimlich' must be the semannc opposite of'heimlich',
meaning homely, domestic, familiar, known, reassuring. The dictionary reveals an ambivalence
whereby 'heimlich' can also mean concealed, secret, underhand. Freud concludes that
'unheimlich' is not the opposite, but in fact a sub-species of 'heimlich', displaced from itself,
the return of the same but different, homeliness turned strange 'the uncanny is in reality
nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and
which has become alienated from it' (p. 241). The 'uncanny1 is also, I would suggest,
transferred onto the interpretative process of reading Le Horla in a similar manner to the
uncanny reading effect described by Shoshana Felman in her analysis of the relationship
between Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and the psychoanalytic theory which has been
brought to bear on it, such that James's short story is shown to turn around an irresolvable
dilemma of whether it is a tale of the supernatural or of sexual frustration (Shoshana Felman,
Turning the Screw of Interpretation1, m Shoshana Felman (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis
The Question of Reading Otherwise (Baltimore-London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982),
pp. 94-207)-MAUPASSANT'S LE HORLA 57
25
'Limit-states' in the writings of Maupassant are discussed in Anne-Mane Baron, 'La
Description clinique et Panalyse des etats-limites chez Maupassant', Revue d'Histotre httiraire
de la France, 94.5 (1994), 765~73-
For example Mary Shelley's Fran^CTutem (1818), Prosper Mtnmtc's Les Ames du purgatotre
(1836), Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of
Dr JckyU and Mr Hyde (1886), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892),
numerous tales by Edgar Allan Poe, and Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
27
This description of the Self has resonances of the psychoanalytic term rEgo' Freud's
German term 'Ich' has both a highly specific psychoanalytic sense and a more general sense
which might be rendered in English as T or 'Self'. Freud exploits this ambiguity (the same
ambiguity is retained in the French term 'moi"), but the English adoption of the Latin 'Ego'
renders only the specific meaning with the loss of the wider sense In the context of this analysis,
I should like to suggest the psychoanalytic specificity of'Ego' while retaining the terminological
flexibility of'Self'.
28
Narrative aspects of Le Horla are discusses m Andre Targe's significant study, 'Trois
apparitions d u Horla', Poinque, 6 (1975), 4 4 6 - 5 9 .
Sarrastne is a struggle not to n a m e castration; as Barbara Johnson writes 'Balzac repeatedly
castrates his text of the word castration. F a r from being t h e unequivocal answer to the text's
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enigma, castration is the way in which the enigma's answer is withheld. Castration is what the
story must, and cannot, say" ( The Crutcal Difference, p . 11).
30
Tzvetan T o d o r o v , Introduction d la haerature fantasnque ( P a n s , Seuil, 1970), 87
31
T h e ending of Le Horla in enigmatic suspension ('Alors . . . alors ' will h e kill himself?
has h e killed the H o r l a ' was it madness or the supernatural?) would seem to resemble the last
lexia of Sarrastne, 'Et la marquise resta pensive' (S/Z, p . 222), to which Barthes resists assigning
a code. T h e apparently open ending Barthes describes as the last closure of the text, 'la derniere
cldrure, la suspension' (ibid , p . 223), a rhetorical device which lets it b e said that n o t all has
been said T h e pensiveness of M a d a m e de Rochefide a n d of Sarrasine, the uncertainty of the
dianst a n d the enigma of the Horla, are 'le sigmfiant d e l'lnexpnmable, n o n de l'inexpnme',
(ibid., p 222). T o the question 'A qumpensez-vous? (ibid , p 223), the marquise a n d the text
in which she figures will not and cannot reply. T o the question, 'was the Horla a tale of madness
or of the supernatural?', the text will not reply, has n o m o r e to say, a n d can say n o m o r e , for it
is sustained by its signifying ambivalence, by its refusal to resolve and disclose.
32
S/Z, p 23
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