‘Everything we look at but do not see’
Elusive meaning, a puppeteer, and Maupassant’s ‘The Horla’
In weird fiction, you don’t get to know. The search for truth leads to wonder, not an epiphany.
Weird fiction’s common subjects like ghosts, the uncanny, and annihilation refuse to be explained with existing systems of knowledge like religion and science. To venture into weird story-worlds is to abandon certainty. To drop a rational compass. To leave God behind. To give up on trying to figure it all out.
And not knowing is disconcerting.
A good uncanny tale reminds me of a memory I will never fully recall. A good ghost story reminds me of the specter I will never meet. And a story about an indifferent supreme being that could erase everything? It’s the nuclear extinction blooming just out of sight of my perpetual, anxious gaze.
In all of these kinds of stories, I push through fear and horror and dread and I figure out what my mind is really confined by: the obsessions I can’t shake, the questions I can’t answer, the enduring fears that temper my choices, the desires I will never, ever pursue.
There’s no better source for exploring interior limits than Guy de Maupassant’s supernatural tales. The French author’s “The Horla” (1887) is a great starting point. In form, this short story is a diary of a man’s haunting by a “Terrible, Invisible Being” that begins by drinking from his nightly water bottle. The situation escalates when the thing restrains him, then sucks his soul from his mouth during sleep, then steals his reflection from a mirror.
What’s interesting is how the diarist suspects from the get-go that something wicked is ever-present, growing in force, but unverifiable:
Whence come these mysterious influences, changing our happiness into gloom, our self-confidence into vague distress? […] Is it the shape of the clouds, or the colour of the day, the ever-changing hue of things, that has entered my eyes to trouble my thoughts? Who can say? Everything about us, everything we look at but do not see, everything we brush against but do not know, everything we touch but do not feel, has, on ourselves, on our senses, and through them, on our thoughts, on our very heart, effects that are sudden, surprising, inexplicable.1
I like this idea that we don’t fully grasp the mysteries surrounding us. Think of the toddler who plays happily with her blocks until she suddenly doesn’t. The cat who violently catches up with the squirrel to idly toy with it. The button on the shirt that always pops loose, despite being shaped and sewn exactly into place like the others. If we stop to ponder these little mysteries with our big brains and don’t figure them out with some reliable explanation, their defining elusiveness will taunt us. We will want to know why. And if why is out of reach? Our sanity is in peril.
Just look at how Maupassant’s diarist careens back and forth from science to the supernatural in search of an answer. He initially believes the haunting might be the effect of a fever. Or, not a fever: a vampire of sorts. Instead, might it be a “disturbance of the brain,” the symptoms of which read like a stroke? No, it’s much worse than that. It’s a supreme being, the one humanity has always feared, the one that has come to replace us all. Convinced that the being is up to no good, the diarist pleads desperately to God (not science), again and again, for mercy.
It’s the vacillation from the rational to the faithful that fascinates me. The diarist is both a modern man looking to knowledge to understand and a penitent man pleading for a divine intervention to make the torment stop.
“The Horla” thus stands as a kind of record of how tormented a late 19th century mind might have been. God or reason: what was the guiding light of the mind in Maupassant’s day?
The writings of psychologist Julian Jaynes offer a historical view on why Maupassant’s diarist might have looked to the divine when grappling with inexplicable mysteries. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), Jaynes describes a human mind that has radically changed over the past few millennia from a mentality guided by inner voices to a consciousness that has arisen as a “learned process based on metaphorical language.” Jaynes theorizes humans went from acting as if their impulses and emotions were controlled by “chiefs, rulers, and gods” to behaving as if these governing forces are part of a self-driven “internal dialogue,” where consciousness is seated in the brain or, at the very least, somewhere wholly within the body.
While the bicameral mind has receded, humans still retain the impulse to seek outside help in answering really big questions. Jaynes writes:
For in spite of all that rationalist materialist science has implied since the Scientific Revolution, mankind as a whole has not, does not, and perhaps cannot relinquish his fascination with some human type of relation to a greater and wholly other, some mysterium tremendum with powers and intelligences beyond all left hemisphere categories, something necessarily indefinite and unclear, to be approached and felt in awe and wonder and almost speechless worship […] .
A supernatural writer like Maupassant, who emerged after the Scientific Revolution but just before more established weird fiction, offers in “The Horla” an example of a wonder-seeker who posits that a “wholly other” might be behind his haunting. This other is not a traditional god. It can’t be explained by religion. As a supreme force, it seems to be something newer — an “over-man” that threatens to control the diarist like a puppet. Maupassant writes:
I was a somnambulist, unknown to myself, I was living that strange double life which makes us wonder whether there are two creatures inside us; or whether an alien creature, unknowable, invisible, quickens our captive limbs at times, when our mind is asleep, and they obey this other creature, just as they would, more faithfully than they would, obey ourselves.
But what is this other, really? Does the diarist recognize it as a inner voice, a hallucination, or an external force? Is the diarist right to be afraid? Is Maupassant just telling a ghost story, or does the earnestness of his prose suggest he takes this idea more seriously?
And am I right to drawn a connection between a 19th century supernatural storyteller, who made tall tales seem very real, and a 20th century psychology researcher, who looked at myths and storytelling as a historical record of human consciousness?
Each time I read Maupassant, my answers to these questions get cloudier. My curiosities increase in number. I wonder if Maupassant was thinking of a traditional god or possessive demon when he imagined his Horla. I just don’t know. I’m inclined to concede he was doing both: reaching back to familiar ideas about ghosts to put a new spin on them.
If there is any comfort to be had in exploring these dark thoughts, it’s that I’m not alone in not knowing. I never have been. My darkness goes back to writers who mused about ghosts. Who wondered how moods could shift on a whim. Who worried that supreme beings didn’t have our best interests in mind. Who were ever curious about “everything we look at but do not see.”
The search for meaning can be horrifying, but at least we have centuries’ worth of stories to keep us company.
Translated by Brian Rhys.