Telling Madness and Masculinity in Maupassant's "Le Horla"

Telling Madness and Masculinity in Maupassant's "Le Horla" Philip G. Hadlock GUY DE MAUPASSANT'S "LE HORLA" (1886)1 constitutes perhaps one of the most well-known and provocative tales of madness in the nineteenth-century French tradition. The tale is compelling not only for its thematics of madness, but also for its narrative situation: the narrator of the tale's first version sits in an asylum where a number of mental health specialists have gathered to hear him tell them about his madness. The narrative situation thus places special emphasis on the intersection between storytelling and madness in the narrative construction of selfhood; it promises to reveal through storytelling a primal encounter with an unexplainable otherness , an out there ("hors là ") that cannot be reconciled with our models of a sane and rational self. This sort of otherness has often been explained in highly gendered terms. In one noteworthy example, Barbara Johnson suggests that such a divergence from normal selfdom expresses woman's exclusion from our oldest and most deeply entrenched conceptions of man as the model self that gives storytelling its shape and coherence: the monstrousness of selfhood is intimately embedded within the question of female autobiography . Yet how could it be otherwise, since the very notion of a self, the very shape of human life stories, has always, from Saint Augustine to Freud, been modeled on the man?2 Perhaps, then, the thematics of Maupassant's tale prove especially vexing partly because they do not allow recourse to our traditional explanations of otherness3: the narrator, who will tell his own story, is undeniably male, and, according to his psychiatrist, an eloquent speaker ('"Il parlera lui-même'"4). Further, his madness attests an identification with, rather than an estrangement from, that mythic male self that has conditioned Western thought. The narrative strategies and textual design of Maupassant's tale thus seem to challenge the conventions of the masculine normative model: the narrator's madness is contextualized as a curious outgrowth of—rather than an aberration from—that very principle that we continually invoke to lend normalcy to our conceptions and narrative constructions of selfhood. Maupassant compellingly links this inexplicable madness to storytelling itself, the very process that develops and instills confidence in our cultural conviction that maleness constitutes an unwavering model of the human self. Vol. XLIII, No. 3 47 L'Esprit Créateur The entire narrative situation is predicated upon the adumbration of what Roland Barthes might call a "narrative contract" between the storyteller, the alleged madman, and his narratees, the team of psychiatrists assembled to hear his tale. The narrator is summoned solely for the purposes of narrating his own story: "Messieurs, je sais pourquoi on vous a réunis ici et je suis prêt à vous raconter mon histoire, comme m'en a prié mon ami le docteur Marrande " (2:822).5 The tale's structure calls attention in this respect to our very motives for telling (and listening to) stories. The readers are lured into the bond between narrator and narratees as interlopers who in some way supplement the storytelling; yet their function cannot be defined solely in terms of the inscribed narrative bond, from which they are excluded. Whereas the terms of the narrative contract are clearly spelled out between the storyteller and his listeners ("I know why you have come, and I will tell you the story that you expect to hear"), the framing forces the tale's readers to ponder their place in this bond: if the psychiatrists have been convened to remedy in some way the narrator's illness through the storytelling experience, what is our role in any "cure" that might result? what purposes does our reading serve? how are we expected to deal with the story that we are about to read? Through its design and strategies, the tale evokes key aspects of Freud's case history of Dora: the narrative situation beckons the reader to enact a desire that remains latent, impelling, yet never actualized in the storytelling itself.6 Indeed, Maupassant forcefully articulates the inadequacy of the narrative contract to satisfy any such desire. Despite his eloquence and narrative skill, the narrator is unable...