Hallowe'en Countdown: Entry Two
Oct. 12th, 2012 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustToday's subject: “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant.
If you've never read anything by de Maupassant, a good place to start is this link here (http://www.readbookonline.net/stories/Maupassant/19/), which leads to translations of most of his short stories. In a lot of ways, he's like a proto-Kafka, a guy forever obsessing over some self-harmful thought or scenario, apparently unable to expel it except in prose form; better yet, these ideas of his are...really freaky, especially given his time-period (1850-1893). (I can never forget his story “Who Knows?”, in which a man essentially suffers a nervous collapse after accidentally discovering that every night, his furniture gets up and leaves for parts unknown, returning before dawn; “A Mother of Monsters”, OTOH, revolves around a woman who once gave birth to a deformed child who she then sold to the circus, and has been intentionally deforming all her subsequent pregnancies ever since, literally earning her living off her children's misery.) A protegé of Flaubert, he was popular and professionally successful, yet a social recluse, a pure misanthrope. Shortly before his death, he penned his own obituary, saying “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.”
“The Horla”, meanwhile, is not only one of the earliest examples of the sort of epistolary/documentary narrative I love—it's told as a series of increasingly frantic diary entries—but although it's often reprinted in vampire-themed anthologies, the point of the whole story is that the Horla itself is something which defies categorization, or even description: Apparently “invited” by an impulsive wave the protagonist directs at a passing Brazilian schooner, it's a possessive, invisible spirit that manifests as a fierce fever and seems to be draining the narrator's life-force, but can also separate from him and become physically palpable enough to drink water from his bedside table. Our narrator uses this habit as a way to try and poison the Horla, but it doesn't work, and by the end of the tale, he's contemplating suicide.
There are critical theories that posit “The Horla” as some sort of reflection of de Maupassant's own depressive and obsessive tendencies, a tendency towards sleep paralysis, or even the case of syphilis he was suffering from by the time he actually tried to kill himself in 1892. Then again, he does take time out halfway through for a side-plot in which his protagonist witnesses an experiment involving hypnosis, for no apparent reason than to introduce the idea that there is an “invisible world” of influences around us that we can't possibly hope to understand. Has somebody somehow planted the idea of the Horla in his head using occult or scientific means (both equally unquantifiable), the way the hypnotist planted the idea that his cousin's husband desperately needed money and she must therefore demand that money of the protagonist, even though she became increasingly distraught to find she couldn't think of any real reason for him to grant her request? Or is the Horla, itself, the puppet-master, a creature bent on conquering humanity one sleep-deprived self-murder at a time?
(One way or the other, the word Horla itself is definitely not French, and Charlotte Mandell, who translated "The Horla" for publisher Melville House, suggests in an afterword that "Horla" might be a portmanteau of the French words hors ("outside"), and là ("there")—ie that "le Horla" sounds like "the Outsider, the outer [whatever], the one Out There." This sounds about as good an explanation of de Maupassant's intentions in writing the story as any other, to me.)
In other news, I find I've unexpectedly returned to "Trap-Weed", a story I first started writing back in 2009; it's a weird little fairytale in which a selkie and a shark-were are both magically enslaved by a pirate who knows a bit of sympathetic witchcraft. Going pretty well, thus far--I'm already up to 1,650 words--so I guess we'll see. It's certainly odd enough that I might try sending it to Clockwork Phoenix 4, at any rate.
Last night, meanwhile, I was up until 4:30 AM. That sucked. No idea why. But I'm awake now, and working.
We take what we can.
If you've never read anything by de Maupassant, a good place to start is this link here (http://www.readbookonline.net/stories/Maupassant/19/), which leads to translations of most of his short stories. In a lot of ways, he's like a proto-Kafka, a guy forever obsessing over some self-harmful thought or scenario, apparently unable to expel it except in prose form; better yet, these ideas of his are...really freaky, especially given his time-period (1850-1893). (I can never forget his story “Who Knows?”, in which a man essentially suffers a nervous collapse after accidentally discovering that every night, his furniture gets up and leaves for parts unknown, returning before dawn; “A Mother of Monsters”, OTOH, revolves around a woman who once gave birth to a deformed child who she then sold to the circus, and has been intentionally deforming all her subsequent pregnancies ever since, literally earning her living off her children's misery.) A protegé of Flaubert, he was popular and professionally successful, yet a social recluse, a pure misanthrope. Shortly before his death, he penned his own obituary, saying “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.”
“The Horla”, meanwhile, is not only one of the earliest examples of the sort of epistolary/documentary narrative I love—it's told as a series of increasingly frantic diary entries—but although it's often reprinted in vampire-themed anthologies, the point of the whole story is that the Horla itself is something which defies categorization, or even description: Apparently “invited” by an impulsive wave the protagonist directs at a passing Brazilian schooner, it's a possessive, invisible spirit that manifests as a fierce fever and seems to be draining the narrator's life-force, but can also separate from him and become physically palpable enough to drink water from his bedside table. Our narrator uses this habit as a way to try and poison the Horla, but it doesn't work, and by the end of the tale, he's contemplating suicide.
There are critical theories that posit “The Horla” as some sort of reflection of de Maupassant's own depressive and obsessive tendencies, a tendency towards sleep paralysis, or even the case of syphilis he was suffering from by the time he actually tried to kill himself in 1892. Then again, he does take time out halfway through for a side-plot in which his protagonist witnesses an experiment involving hypnosis, for no apparent reason than to introduce the idea that there is an “invisible world” of influences around us that we can't possibly hope to understand. Has somebody somehow planted the idea of the Horla in his head using occult or scientific means (both equally unquantifiable), the way the hypnotist planted the idea that his cousin's husband desperately needed money and she must therefore demand that money of the protagonist, even though she became increasingly distraught to find she couldn't think of any real reason for him to grant her request? Or is the Horla, itself, the puppet-master, a creature bent on conquering humanity one sleep-deprived self-murder at a time?
(One way or the other, the word Horla itself is definitely not French, and Charlotte Mandell, who translated "The Horla" for publisher Melville House, suggests in an afterword that "Horla" might be a portmanteau of the French words hors ("outside"), and là ("there")—ie that "le Horla" sounds like "the Outsider, the outer [whatever], the one Out There." This sounds about as good an explanation of de Maupassant's intentions in writing the story as any other, to me.)
In other news, I find I've unexpectedly returned to "Trap-Weed", a story I first started writing back in 2009; it's a weird little fairytale in which a selkie and a shark-were are both magically enslaved by a pirate who knows a bit of sympathetic witchcraft. Going pretty well, thus far--I'm already up to 1,650 words--so I guess we'll see. It's certainly odd enough that I might try sending it to Clockwork Phoenix 4, at any rate.
Last night, meanwhile, I was up until 4:30 AM. That sucked. No idea why. But I'm awake now, and working.
We take what we can.
