207
Guy de Maupassant
"Le Horla"

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, a number of writers, like Nietzsche, foregrounded a loss of belief in the human ability to consciously perceive the world objectively.  They flatly rejected the Cartesian (Descartes's) belief in objective perception, objective reason, and the empirical nature of science.  

For these writers, all of consciousness's representations of itself or the exterior world were "colored," what we now call "mediated," by something that makes us see the world in a specific way.  This mediating "something"  is no longer the lies of an Evil Demon, as it was for Descartes, but the imperfection of all rational thought, as for Pascal, and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, society's conventional ways of talking about the world and the self according to Nietzsche and Marx.

For Nietzsche, reason's imperfection and society's conventional ways of representing world and self make consciousness construct an outer world and an inner self that are not objective.  We imagine that we are conscious of the exterior world and our self, when in fact we are only conscious of what society's conventional representations  makes us conscious. 

Not only do society's typical ways of representing world and self blind each person's consciousness to world and self; they also tend to blind us to society's power over our consciousness.  We tend to be unaware that society is making us see the world and our selves the way it wants us to see our world and our self.

For Nietzsche, the loss of belief in objective consciousness reveals the power of society’s language (its representations) to deceive and manipulate individual consciousness and determine individual action.  Only a few elite individuals, he argued, are capable of demystifying the illusions that society’s words create.   They free themselves from the power of society's words through the creation of an art that differentiates itself from these words.

The late nineteenth century thus increasingly doubted, not only God, but the possibility of an objective consciousness and of science.  It focused on a number of secular "forces" that were primarily determining our consciousness of the world.  These secular forces were the historical transformation of the structure of society for Marx, the psychological construction of consciousness by the unconscious for Freud, and the structure of language for Nietzsche.

For Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, consciousness thus ceased to be Descartes's unmediated representation of the world that were determined by God, and became the repetition of mediated representations of world and self that were determined, at least in part, by sub-conscious social, linguistic, and psychological structures. These unconscious structures construct and organize consciousness in the same way that modern technology enables us to construct fictional photos or camera images and to pass them off as real. 

This change had a strong effect on the notion of the self, which had been strongly foregrounded by Romanticism in the first half of the nineteenth century.  Romantics often asserted the force of the emotions as that which "color" the unique way in which the self sees the world and determine many of our acts.  Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, in the latter half of the century, saw the self as being dissolved, even destroyed, by psychological, social, or linguistic structures and forces which construct a socially conventional representation of the self.  The Romantic notion of a unique, emotional and imaginative self is simply a conventional representation purveyed by Romantics that does not necessarily correspond to anything unique at all.

Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud thus denied the centrality of the self.  They, and many twentieth-century thinkers that followed them, decentered the self within secular forces that appeared to control  human consciousness and action.  This decentering of the individual was driven into twentieth-century human beings by the experience of the First World (Global) War between 1913 and 1918, a deadly war that killed hundreds of thousands of men in Europe, followed by the Second World War (1939-44).  Individual conscious and action increasingly seemed to be impotent in the face of global political, economic, and media forces that determined them, a fact that continues to frighten many at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The growing awareness of forces that structure individual consciousness has seriously undermined Descartes's assertion that consciousness knows itself: "I think [that I think and know that I think]; therefore I am [a thinking self].  In Pascal's terms, how can individual consciousness and science know consciousness, since the latter is a minuscule part of a global whole -- global business and media -- that determines to a large extent what we see on T.V. and hear in our schools.  Do we fully understand the effects of the global publicity and media control over our individual thoughts?  Not really.

The awareness of forces that structure the consciousness of individuals and groups has helped us understand the dynamics of social groups which tend to include in a group only those who see the world in the same way that they do and exclude those who do not.   As a modern Freudian psychoanalyst has argued, consciousness is structured in a manner that is paranoid.  As a result, socially dominant groups tend to project whatever contradicts the way in which they habitually see the world onto those who do not conform to this way of seeing the world.  For example, if things don't turn out the way society's tells us they should, we tend to blame others, or groups of others, as scapegoats, for this unexpected turn of events.  We do not put into question the way society tells us the world is. 

Society thus tends to blame all that it cannot accept within itself, particularly its own violence, on those who are different, who have a different color skin, background, culture, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Society's terror of those who are different (such as poor black males, immigrant Mexicans, Muslims, Palestinians, etc.), society's fear of violence by minority groups, would be projections of its own violence when it isolates and disadvantages these minorities. One critic (in Cannibal Culture) has thus made the following case.  The conquering Spaniards who discovered the New World condemned the native Americans they found for cannibalism.  They tortured and executed many of them.  But there is very little concrete evidence that native American cannibalism actually existed among most of the tribes punished by the conquering Spaniards.  By calling native Americans cannibals, were not the Spaniards blaming them for their own violence of "cannibalizing" native American lands and cultures? 

Maupassant lived at the same time as Nietzsche, during the end of the nineteenth century. He went mad at about the same time as Nietzsche, in the late 1880s and early 1890s.  "The Horla," which Maupassant wrote in the late 1880s, hauntingly prefigures his madness. But it also dramatizes ways in which his generation conceptualized the notion that consciousness was being controlled by forces beyond its control.   Maupassant's generation blamed not only of social and psychological forces for manipulating what it saw and did; it also blamed spiritual forces.  Our modern notion of spiritualism (contacting the spirits of the dead, etc.) developed explosively in the latter half of the nineteenth century, perhaps as an alternative to the growing awareness of how human society affected our actions.  This generation projected onto the spiritual much of the violence of an increasingly industrialized, modern world that was rapidly changing virtually everyone's life.

READ THE ENTIRE STORY

*1. May 8 Read the May 8 entry to the narrator's diary.
*a.  Emphasizing the first three paragraphs, explain how the first-person narrator ("I") characterizes the external world in which he lives, his self which lives in that world, and the relation between world and self.

*b. With what realist attributes does does the first-person narrator construct the everyday world and the self of which he (the subject) is conscious and how do these attributes construct a realist illusion that he is seeing reality as it is?

*c.  How do the narrator's words suggest that his conscious representations of world and self are shared with and determined by society (or groups within society)?  Pay particular attention to the habits of perceiving and acting that he associates with his home, property, "this part of the country," and the bells of the local church which ring at the same times every day, and the self that perceives them.

*d.  "Towards eleven o'clock...smoke."  Which words in this paragraph raise questions about the way in which the narrator conventionally constructs his world and self.  What questions do these words raise?

*2.
*a  May 11, In this second entry, something changes the narrator's entire representation of his relationship to world and self:  as we represent it by means of our senses, our thought, and our emotions. By comparing the May 8 and May 11 entries, explain how, according to the narrator, this relationship has changed.

b. May 16-June 2.  What does the narrator fear most about this hidden cause of his sudden depression and feelings of illness?

3. June 3 - July 2  Notice not only the monk's representation of the relationship between individual consciousness and the world, but also the slippage from religion to legend and fantasy.  Notice also how all sensations, like the sounds of birds, take on at least two meanings, one conventional and one unconventional. (Mont-Saint-Michel is a monastery on an island near the point where the coast Normandy and the peninsula Brittany meet. At low tide, one can walk out to the island.)  What cause does the narrator posit here for his sense that an invisible being is following him and trying to strangle him?

4.  Notice the extreme rationality of the narrator, who, when confronted by unexpected phenomena, tries to explain them as rationally as possible. 
a.  July 5 How does the narrator's self become split and how does thus relate the relationship between conscious representation and an unconscious?

b.  July 6-10  How do the narrator's experiments change any possible explanation of who or what is drinking his water and milk? 

5. July 13 - 21 In Paris, the narrator blames solitude and pure imagination for having caused the disorienting experiences at his home on the river (July 13). He tries to cure himself of his solitary imaginings in the big city, by adapting to society's common ways of taking about the world, to its"discourses," and thus recapturing his habitual consciousness of the world: he makes social calls, goes to the theater, the races (Dumas the Younger wrote plays on social themes, dramatizing everyday social life, particularly of the downtrodden).

a) How do the July 14, 16, 19, and 21 entries written in Paris put the narrator's hypothesis (that his problems were pure figments of his imagination) into question (signs that he eventually comes to recognize)?;

*b) What does the hypnotism incident (particularly Mme Sablé's reaction to the suggestion that she must ask her cousin for money)  have to say about society and other forces (religion, legends, the media) as causes of the narrator's conscious representations of world and self and as causes of his actions?

6. August 6-7
a. Compare the description of nature -- August 6 (the rose that was a "terrifying scarlet flash") and August 7, the paragraph "I thought…my ears" -- to the descriptions of nature in the first three paragraphs of the story. How has the narrator’s way of experiencing the world (objects) changed since the beginning of the story? How has his relation to otherness (that which is different) changed since the beginning of the story?  How do these passages construct a new self for the narrator? Explain.

7. Aug 8 -16
a. What is the effect of the invisible being on the narrator’s conscious will and on his act of expressing this will through speaking words and physical actions? What are the possible implications of the invisible being for the narrator as subject of the act of writing in his journal?

*b. August 17-18 What does the story of the invisible being reading the narrator's book (a book about invisible beings) say about the narrator as subject of   the act of reading (about the self who does the reading)?  (Who is reading?   What is he reading?) 

8. Aug. 18-19 (first entry). The narrator sees himself now as a slave and the invisible being as his master, one he believes he can overthrow.  By the way, "horla" in French combines the word "hors", "outside," with "là," there. The being is outside rather than inside, there rather than here.

a.According to these pages, what are the implications of this invisible being for the modern (Cartesian) definition of "man" as a rational and perceptual being who controls, through his consciousness and science, his own destiny?

*b.  Discuss the last three paragraphs of the first August 19 entry.   What is the narrator saying about the self of all human beings?