Of forgotten questions and obvious answers

1My intention in this article is to interpret Guy de Maupassant’s Le Horla through the prism of problematology. I do so because I would like to show how and why the thought of Michel Meyer urgently matters to literary criticism, how and why problematology could possibly offer a way out of the current impasse in which criticism vacillates between hermeneutical indeterminacy and ideological over-determinacy, when it is not simply the glib performance of juxtaposing various parallel fragments woven together with a vague argument. Since Meyer has himself written extensively about the application of problematology to literary analysis and the place of problematology vis-à-vis hermeneutics, reception theory, and deconstruction, it seems to me futile to simply paraphrase his writings. Yet, I am aware that this article may be read in itself as perhaps a first step toward further readings in problematology. I will therefore first take the liberty of rapidly foreshadowing the concepts gleaned from Meyer’s problematology which are essential to my own reading of Le Horla.

2The notion of problematology could be best understood in contrast to logical and linguistic propositionalism, a contrast and a foil against which Meyer repeatedly positions himself. Problematology is above all the study of questions and answers dynamically understood in their specific contextual dimensions, which include historical, cultural, and psychological considerations. Problematology focuses on the tensions between questions and answers, and especially the resistance to and repression of questions as such. It investigates how and why most pertinent questions are not asked in the first place as well as how and why the answers given to them—when these questions are finally asked—tend to repress their subversive or disturbing potential, attempting to render them harmless. Michel Meyer contends that Reason should be based on just such a procedure; a procedure that will yield a rational analysis. At first sight, problematology seems to be an obvious procedure. Yet Meyer contends that the history of philosophy is replete with the repression of just such an interrogative conception of reason and rationality—and he is right. Propositional theories of language postulate that to know the meaning of a sentence is to be capable of producing another sentence, its semantic equivalent, its synonym. Professors of literature are all too often confronted with this interpretative move. When we ask students about the meaning of a passage, they more often than not simply paraphrase the passage in question. Meaning then is accomplished by the substitution of one sentence for another, the ability to paraphrase, to reproduce sameness, to forge an unassailable identity by means of semantic and logical equivalency. Even more distressing for a literary critic is the fact that the basic unit of signification in propositional theory is the sentence, which ideally should be studied ad hoc, out of context. This is why only propositional philosophers of language would seriously analyze an absurd sentence such as ‘The present King of France is bald’ [1] —an absurd sentence unless, of course, it was uttered in a modernist play, and even there it would exist in the context of the theater of the absurd genre, and therefore be perfectly understood within that given context.

3But what if language could be understood in a rational way, yet without pretense to an all encompassing rationalism? Such is precisely Meyer’s wager. Instead of focusing on the thatness of sentences (the sentence states that… ), problematology opens up language analysis by focusing on their whatness (what is really at question here is… ). All utterances must be understood as either questions or answers spoken by persons in specific situations, by persons who are more or less conscious of what they are saying and why. What is always at stake is the question-answer difference, be it explicit or implicit, critical or repressed. Rather than paraphrase the above sentence (i.e., ‘The present King of France is bald’means that ‘The head of the current monarch of Gaul is hairless’), problematology would investigate the implicit or explicit questions that would give rise to the uttering of such a statement in the first place. Presuming that it is not a direct quote from the nineteenth century (the last time France had a king), who indeed would ask such a counterfactual question today, and why ? What question does this declarative statement answer ? What sort of an identity is assumed by a speaker who is invested in studying the signification of this sort of a sentence ? What is ideologically at stake in posing this absurd question instead of a context-based question that satisfies historical and contextual truth conditions ? You will have noticed that once we move from thatness to whatness, from proposition to interrogation, instead of narrowing signification to substitution and repetition we are opening it up to expansion and difference. Thus, meaning can be investigated by elucidating the literal question-answer difference and then proceeding to the more complex metaphorical, psychological, ideological, and historical significations—without which meaning possesses only a self-same formal identity. This formal identity may work well for certain geometrical theorems, but is rather useless when it comes to the analysis of more complex utterances that we encounter in literary analysis. Always riveted to specific context and logic, problematology remains rational yet it eschews the rationalist demand for perfect identities (geometric, semantic identities). The rationalist demand all too often simply degenerates into various idealist subjectivisms (reception theory) and nihilist skepticisms (deconstruction), which are but two instances of the perennial dogmatism-skepticism-dogmatism dynamic so symptomatic of the whole history of philosophy. [2]

4Problematological thinking is a problem-solving activity. Likewise the process of discovering meaning (i.e., interpretation, hermeneutics) should be a specific kind of acutely self-conscious activity in which all phrases (declarative, interrogative, deictic, etc.) are analyzed as being either questions or answers—and most often, as being answers that repress the original questions and therefore pose the questions anew but in a more oblique manner. Problematology, therefore, has much to say about how meaning is discovered through the minute analysis of the explicit and/or implicit interrogation embedded in every text. And, since literary texts are by definition figurative and enigmatic, problematology investigates the tension between the explicit and the implicit levels of meaning which it conceives as a variation on the question-answer difference. For example, is Le Horla simply an explicit story about a man taken over by an alien, or is it implicitly a finely woven allegory for the disintegration of the rationalistically empirical and democratic man ? The explicit level of a text represents the order of easily available answers that every reasonably intelligent first-year student can paraphrase. The implicit level represents the order of potential, suggested questions which are obviously less intuitively available to even the most competent readers for a variety of both textual and subjective reasons. The potentially disturbing tension between the explicit and implicit levels explains our natural and existential attachment to the explicit (we desire comforting and familiar answers, answers that are well within our mental habits) as well as our fear of the implicit which might trigger a perturbing chain of questions, ultimately calling into question our very identity. In sum, for problematology the process of interpretation should be the process of asking the right questions of a text that is mostly constructed by assertions and/or by oblique metaphors. Interpretation is thus the archaeology of the answerhood of propositions and metaphors; an archaeology that seeks to unveil the underlying question—precisely that question which is most often avoided.

5At its most existential core, problematology postulates that most human interpretative activities consciously or unconsciously eschew the real question at hand; that, unless forced by historical events, we tacitly desire not to elucidate the real question at hand, not to know the ultimate ‘whatness’ embedded in certain declarative propositions. Thus, as we just saw above with regard to the supposed baldness of the non-existent king of France, real problematological questions of even the most banal declaration such as ‘What a beautiful day it was !’ would, for example, ask what is the real subject of a given utterance ? To what question does it respond ? Why is the question-answer difference so often repressed in favor of partial and rarely satisfactory answers ? Problematology’s core intuition is that human communication is rarely ‘about what it is about.’ Problematology’s ultimate task is above all else to seek out the core ‘aboutness’ [ce dont-ness] inherent in both ordinary and literary language.

6We can already formulate Meyer’s categorical imperative : ‘One must always respect the problematological difference of questions and answers, of problems and what resolves them, so that we do not chase shadows and do not allow ourselves to be abused by false answers.’ [3] Thus, a clear distinction should be made between apocritical and problematological answers. Apocritical answers (apokrisis from the Greek for answering) are consciously given as answers to questions; they most often implicitly desire to do away with the question, solve the problem, but in so doing they simply restate the question in different, albeit repressed terms. Suppose A asks B : ‘Is it two o’clock yet ?’ B answers : ‘No, it is 52 minutes past one.’ The answer is apocritical and literal (it answers the obvious question), but it most probably circumvents the real implied question which might be, for example : ‘Don’t you think it’s time that we part ways ?’ A’s answer simply deferred or repressed the implied statement (‘We should part ways’) and repressed the even more urgent question regarding the reason why in the first place A would want to part ways with B. The apocritical repression may be existentially comforting for A but it nevertheless keeps alive, albeit repressed, the problematological difference between the real question posed by A and the possibility of a real answer which B wants to avoid at all cost. A much more abstract historical example would be the restorative nature of the Cartesian cogito and its desire to resolve or repress once and for all Montaigne’s vigorous reactivation of skepticism. As we see in Descartes’ Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, the order of partial questions (the doubt, the evil genie) and the apocritical order of complete answers (the cogito, the method) ultimately tend toward dogmatism, that is, toward a system of answers whose identity exists beyond question. Problematological answers, on the other hand, seek to keep alive the question-answer difference; they seek to remain aware that the answers they offer are but limited, local attempts at serious questions which they take pains to keep alive in the very answerhood of their propositions. An excellent literary-philosophical example here would be the manner in which the dialogical nature of Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot’s masterpiece, puts into question the hubris of the philosophical ethos per se, including Diderot’s own narcissistic delusions about the symbolic independent status of the philosopher in the city. By way of contrast, Maupassant’s Le Horla occupies a middle ground between Descartes’ dogmatism and Diderot’s dialogism. In a word, Le Horla attempts at all cost to resolve apocritically the problem/question concerning the mental, phenomenological, and cultural borders of the narrator’s identity—but the failure of a series of these apocritical responses prompts Maupassant’s narrator to deeper problematological probing of the returning question (symptom), until the question alienates him, destroys his ego.

7Although clothed in analytical, linguistic and rhetorical meta-languages, Meyer’s problematology points toward a real, urgent, and gripping existential paradox : In order to live we must lie, or at least avoid asking the right questions since the (real) answers to these real questions would surely make our existence untenable. In order to think critically we must then unhinge ourselves, at least in certain critical and professional circumstances. Usually praxis wins over logos. Thus, even the history of philosophy—as Meyer repeats so often—is the history of avoiding the ‘order of questions’ in favor of ‘the order of answers.’ In other words, dogmatism invariably wins over critical skepticism; and critical skepticism itself invariably degenerates into thinly veiled dogmatism. Meyer’s frustration with the resistance to questioning as the first and most pronounced principle in philosophical practice is especially palpable in the rhetorically charged Preface to Questioning and Historicity (see Meyer, this issue). [4]

8Of particular interest for my work are Meyer’s concepts of identity, difference, and metaphor. Put simply, the work of conscious or subconscious discourse is the creation of identities. Since we have no transparent access to reality in itself, this identity is always mediated through the figure, the metaphor. Thus, the metaphor is taken for an identity (‘Richard is a lion,’ being Meyer’s favorite example), that is, identity is always and by definition a partial, weak identity, a metaphorical identity in which the self is identified with attributes of another entity (animal, vegetal, mechanical, etc.). The extent to which a given subject is aware of the weakness of an identity depends on the nature of his society. If one lives in a prehistorical society, the force of repetition and consensus, the force of a highly correlated habitus (as Bourdieu would have it) reinforces identities such that they seem literal, necessary, and naturally self-evident. But once history, through differentiation, begins to create multiple and differential identities in the accelerated unfolding of events through time, with the inevitable clash among older and newer identities, identities are revealed to be partial and even arbitrary—that is, subject to question, to dispute. This always creates identity crises, of which modern literature, since Don Quixote, constitutes the richest symbolic representation. Problematology is very powerful in analyzing the question-answer difference inherent in metaphorical identities, especially when they are analyzed as a chain of metaphors that dynamically interact with plot and narrative. In the same manner, problematology is equally attuned to and conscious of psychoanalytical concepts, especially with regard to identity formation, repression, and symptom—all subsumed in the question-answer, explicit-implicit, literal-metaphorical problematological differences. This is precisely why and how problematology can become such a powerful mode of thinking for literary interpretation.

Le Horla (Out There/Here)

9Few texts would conform to Meyer’ problematological dynamic as Le Horla, Guy de Maupassant’s most famous fantastic short story. The apparent textual simplicity, combined with the concentrated layering of problematological topics such as the declarative-interrogative nature of the text; the conceptual difficulties of relating a particular event or being to an idea; the repeated and various attempts at repression resulting in the creation of a sequence of metaphors of a weakening identity; and the whole complemented by a precise historical, ideological, and scientific layering suggest Le Horla as a prime candidate for problematological analysis. To read Le Horla is to confront a radical difference, a radical interrogation that cannot be resolved by metaphorical excess (as in tragedy) nor by excessive investment in the literal sense of realities long dead (as in comedy). [5] With Le Horla the radical difference that history brings about leads to the dissolution of an identity-fantasy, a dissolution for which psychosis is but a convenient metaphor for both author and reader. This is why interpreting Le Horla as a highly stylized autobiographical representation of Maupassant’s own mental illness constitutes, in my opinion, a form of resistance to the text, a repression on the part of the reader of that which is really at work here, a resistance to identifying the real questions at stake. The biographical misreading (when it is dominant and implicitly excludes other interpretations) becomes yet another instance of a strong problematological repression supplemented by a patina of apodictic scientific answers (including biographical details), which amount to reducing Le Horla to a stylized phenomenology of a descent into psychosis. To be sure, this psychiatric reading is not entirely false; it is hermeneutically plausible, which only makes the problematological repression all the more alluring.

10On the literal, explicit level, Le Horla is the story of a man gone mad, a victim of psychosis. The plot is straightforward and Maupassant’s style is characteristically—and deceptively—direct, limpid. Narrated in the first person as a series of entries to an intimate diary over a four-month period, the narrator begins by asserting his ease of being in his Norman estate, his sense of homely belonging in his pays and with his fellow neighbors. The subject pronoun ‘he’ and the possessive adjective ‘his’ conflate into a single identity; the subject is one with the Other and one with the World, his identity implacable, organic and social symbiosis reigns—or so he believes. Then, suddenly, an alien, later named Horla, intrudes into his world, steals his peace, inhabits his nights and his dreams, invades his intimate space, drinks his water and milk, reads his books, cuts his flowers, follows him wherever he goes, forces him to flee his house and cast about in the cathedral of Mont Saint-Michel, the streets of Paris and Rouen; besides manifesting his presence physically, the alien also progressively inserts himself into the Narrator’s mind, enslaving him. Now and again, by different means the narrator convinces himself that he has understood or explained away the alien, but to no avail. In a last gambit to rid himself of the intruder the narrator—in a rare moment during which his mind is free of Horla’s domination—believing that he has finally trapped Horla in his house, makes a quick exit and burns the house down to the ground, killing collaterally his loyal servants for whom he had much affection. As he walks away from the fire he nevertheless immediately realizes that the holocaust was not the answer to the problem, to Horla. He capitulates, madness ensues.

11Let us then start at the beginning, with the symptom. Meyer states that ‘problems that pass into answers must be demarcated, and that is the role that the symptom plays : [the symptom] translates a problem in the answers, as answers, but its recurrence, its quality of rupture, even its strangeness, differentiate it from other answers of the subject.’ [6] Meyer goes on to offer as an example the classic Freudian slip ‘I have nothing against you’ as a paradoxical answer to an implied question ‘Do I have hostility toward you ?’, for which the answer ‘I do indeed have hostility toward you’ is repressed. Using this problematological definition of the symptom, I posit here—somewhat more abstractly than the Freudian example favored by Meyer—that the first paragraph in Le Horla (a string of emphatic declarative sentences) constitutes a massive symptom-response of the variety ‘my-life-is-just-perfect-in-my-static-world.’ And, indeed, until the appearance of the alien the questions to which this proposition is an answer were repressed, relegated, as it were, to the seemingly self-evident identity of the narrator.

12Here is the first part of the first diary entry :

13

May 8. What a glorious day ! I spent the whole morning lying on the grass in front of my house, under the enormous plane tree that provides it with complete shelter and shade. I love this part of the country, love living here, for it is here that I have my roots—those deep and delicate roots that bind a man to the soil on which his forefathers were born and died, to traditional ways of thinking and eating, to local customs, dishes, idioms, to the lilt of the peasants’ voices, to the smell of the earth, the villages, and even the air itself.
I love this house where I grew up.
[…]
What a lovely morning it was ! [7]

14One way to dismiss or repress the questions so urgently embedded in these emphatic propositions is to assume that they belong to the conventional stasistocrisis narrative rhetoric. But seen against the plot, and more specifically, seen against the interrogative violence of the title Horla—which is not a word in French or in any other language—and seen against the second diary entry, this narrative rhetorical approach would not result in the discovery of meaning. Instead, careful attention should be paid to how a particular identity-fantasy of an existence free of questioning is emphatically asserted here, so emphatically and repeatedly that it must belong more to the symptom than to convention. Or perhaps it is the symptom carefully embedded in the familiar confines of convention, which only makes it all the more effective. Every sentence here is pregnant with the repression of problematological differences. ‘What a glorious day !’ responds to the question ‘What kind of day was it ?’—which seems banal enough, except that we later find out that this very day marks the beginning of the end of a certain comfort with being, a certain ending to the problematological repression of the real questions. Notice the exclamation mark, which in fact could be placed at the end of most of the above sentences. Then comes the metaphor of rootedness : ‘Narrator as the enormous plane tree’ or [the subject asserts] ‘I am a rooted tree’. The narrator ‘lie[s] on the grass in front of [his] house, under the enormous plane tree that provides it with complete shelter and shade.’ Body, earth, tree, roots and fellow neighbors are one; the narrator implies organic belonging to his estate, writ large. Just as the tree belongs deep below and far above the earth, providing cover (‘shelter and shade’) against all intrusion of difference, so is the author of the diary rooted in his familial ground, sheltered against the intrusion of difference, the intrusion of history and of foreignness. And, lest the meaning of the metaphor escapes the reader, Maupassant parses it out : ‘I love this part of the country, love living here, for it is here that I have my roots—those deep and delicate roots that bind a man to the soil on which his forefathers were born and died, to traditional ways of thinking and eating, to local customs, dishes, idioms, to the lilt of the peasants’ voices, to the smell of the earth, the villages, and even the air itself [my emphasis].’ Why assert this so emphatically, so repeatedly ? It is because this very identity (I am an enormous plane tree) is precisely the symptom of what is about to dissolve in an instant in the aquatic solvent of difference which the ocean and the Seine river will bring to the narrator’s doorstep. ‘What a lovely morning it was !’—yes, indeed, what a wonderful identity-fantasy it was ! One that is about to experience an obstacle thrown down on its ‘road,’ which is the etymological meaning of the Greek word, problema; a problema which at the end will bring us back to the tree-covered house, but this time as a burnt offering. The metaphorical loop begins with the house/tree/earth/air as a grounding of identity and ends with the burning house as a metaphor of loss of identity and an explicit descent into psychotic chaos.

15The second part of the first diary entry reads :

16

Toward eleven, a long line of ships sailed past my gate, drawn by a tugboat the size of a fly, which groaned under the strain and spewed forth thick clouds of smoke.
Behind two British schooners, with their red flags fluttering against the sky, came a magnificent Brazilian three-master, spotlessly white and gleaming all over. I waved to it, I hardly know why, except that the sight of it gave me such pleasure. [8]

17The event, the appearance of the Brazilian three-master, modulates the movement from declaration to interrogation. At the river’s bank, the very river that opens to the world the narrator’s non-problematic existence, he observes first this British ship, familiar enough, followed by an arresting Brazilian ship. I am struck here by the narrator’s desire to wave to the Brazilian three-master, something in this particular ship gave this self-assured country gentleman a frisson, an unconscious desire perhaps to melt away his iron-clad identity-fantasy. At any rate, he knows not why he waves to that particular ship and no other. When at a later stage of the narrative he recalls the incident he forgets this fatal hand wave, this invitation to expose himself to difference. What difference ? The plausible answers can be many, but let us say at a minimum that Brazil represents the exotic, the New World, global commerce, a different kind of reason or unreason, a fact that will become more explicit later in the story when the narrator recounts a news report of collective madness having taken hold in the region of Rio de Janeiro. He thus suspects his unwanted guest, Horla, to have descended from the Brazilian three-master. In other words, he takes the metaphor (alien, the New Man or even Brazil itself as proper name with a well-defined topos) for the real (the unconscious). From the Renaissance cosmographers (Thévet, Gomez), and most notably Montaigne in his celebrated ‘Of Cannibals’, Brazil represents the most exotic space of the Americas, a metaphor for absolute difference. [9] Most notably in the Brazilian topos is the cannibalism and vampirism so explicitly prevalent in Le Horla: ‘Last night I felt someone squatting on top of me, with his mouth against mine, sucking my life out through my lips. Yes, he was sucking it from my throat like a leech.’ [10] In calling upon it despite himself, the narrator invites the most metaphorical difference to come into his life so that he could finally be relieved of his identity-fantasy—relieved from it unto death, if it must be. His call is heard. The effects will be immediate.

18Second diary entry :

19

May 12. For several days now I have had a bit of a fever; I feel somewhat ill, or rather, I feel depressed. Whence do they come, these mysterious influences which turn our happiness into dejection and our confidence into misery ? It is as if the air, the invisible air, were filled with unknown Forces, whose mysterious proximity acts in some way upon us. In the morning I wake full of joy, my throat swelling with a desire to sing. — Why ?—I go down to the river bank, and suddenly, after a short stroll, I turn homeward with a heavy heart, as if some misfortune awaited me there. — Why ?—Is it a shiver of cold which, passing over my skin, has shaken my nerves and filled my soul with gloom ? Is it the shape of the clouds or the shades of light, the ever-changing hue of things which, entering through my eyes, has disrupted my thoughts ? Who can tell ? Everything around us, everything we look at without seeing, everything we brush past without noticing, everything we touch without feeling, everything we encounter without truly perceiving, has sudden, astonishing, and inexplicable effects upon us, upon our senses, and through them, upon our thoughts and our very hearts [my emphasis]. [11]

20The fall from certitude to doubt, from a declarative to an interrogative state, is clearly marked by the rhetorical device of repetition, and even more significantly by the repetition of direct questions. If the first entry was dominated by the exclamation point, the second is dominated by the interrogation mark : Whence ? Is it ? Who ?—and even more so the disruptive exclamatory interrogation—why ?—, twice repeated to great effect. We abruptly enter the realm of the problematic where questions prevail over answers, a realm dominating new realities, thus new questions that cast anxious doubt on established identities. The familiar world in which one is at home becomes unfamiliar, threatening; we move from the heimlich to unheimlich (uncanny), in Freud’s pertinent terminology. On the metaphorical level, whereas being was equated just above with solid objects such as the massive plane tree—grounded deep in the beloved soil, towering in the cherished air—this very being/identity-fantasy is threatened by an entity that comes from far away via the river. The aquatic conduit opens the narrator’s existence to dissolution in the hand of the alien who comes from across the ocean whose only nourishments are milk and water. Even the grammatically declarative final sentence brims with embedded questions. All common perception, all coordinates of a calm existence come into question, voiding thus the very organic rootedness and social belonging so emphatically affirmed in the first entry. What is at question then are categories of existence as such, thus the adjective/pronoun ‘everything’ [tout] is repeated five times in the last sentence.

21In the space of a single page we have moved from answers to events to questioning, from the regime of answers as symptom of massive repression to the metaphorical event/difference (Horla’s appearance) to the regime of radical questioning. Henceforth, there will be no way to circumvent the alien; the narrator’s identity will weaken as he attempts to answer the questions posed by Horla’s radical difference and as he creates metaphorical identities, each one weaker than the previous. All attempts at apocritical answers (i.e., self-evident, rational explanations) fall short of being satisfactory. Only pure difference remains, hence the figurative insanity beginning with the very title of the short story ‘Horla,’ which begins to make sense or non-sense only through the problematological analysis of the first two diary entries.

22To appreciate the radical nature of Le Horla, of the name itself ‘Horla’ as we shall see below, requires that we think for a moment here about the relationship among names, phenomena, and ideas. Meyer’s analysis of ideology in Language and Literature, is acutely pertinent in thinking about Horla, this particular phenomenon perceived yet dissociated from any idea and any name. In keeping with Plato and Kant, Meyer states that we understand any given phenomenon in terms of universals, in terms of ideas. In other words, ‘[a]n idea is what (ce qui) is in question in that which (ce qui) is perceived by the senses, a singular thing,’ and, ‘ideas are what (ce qui) is seen in what is seen [original emphasis].’ [12] When we perceive a chair we understand it in terms of the concept of chair that we know; a concept is a universal, meaning simply that it ‘applies to many things,’ [13] as in many different forms of chairs. Perception is thus logically circular : I see (now) what I (already) know. For ‘[t]he relation between particulars and an idea is of a logical order : there always exists a general conceptualization which covers the particular, of which it is a particularization. The particular falls a priori under some idea.’ [14] For our purposes here in understanding the problematological dimension of Le Horla, we might conclude that concepts and names act as an existential tonic, a repression of the problematical difference because, by the very circularity of its logic, ideas allow difference to be reduced to repetition. But what if we sense or see a phenomenon for which there exists no general conceptualization which covers the particular ? At the very least, a failure to link a particular to an idea would keep the question inherent in the idea-less particular alive, foiling thereby any attempt at repression. This, again, is precisely why the second entry of Le Horla is saturated with questioning. And to begin to answer, the first imperative is to name ‘it’—to name this idea-less ‘it’—which Freud, wisely, tautologically named ‘It’ (Id, Ça, Ich).

23To begin with, ‘Horla’ is a word that does not exist in the French language. It is a neologism, the meaning of which is open to debate. A number of interpretations have been put forth, some more convincing than others. [15] If nothing else these various interpretations (mostly clever anagrams of people, places, and events) point toward the difficulty of the probing reader to understand this thing named Horla, which mirrors exactly the narrator’s difficulty in deciphering what befalls him. Thus, the title signifies first and foremost the act of radical questioning per se; the struggle of a pesky particular in search of a universal idea. Such in fact is the first meaning of Horla : ‘I am,’ it says to us, ‘that phenomenon that haunts you without making its nature (idea, universal) known to you.’ Thus, the very title places the whole narrative under the sign of a profound interrogation. But we can go further. Horla must be a response to the questions posed in the text : Who am I ? Do I have control over myself ? Where is the membrane that separates me from the other, from this other who is slowly becoming …me ? And here the more recent interpretation of Michel Serres—in itself the most intuitive and obvious fusion of adjective hors and the deictic là (hors/là, out (there) /here)—is the most convincing : ‘Hors indicates the exterior and the remote, while là designates a nearby place : Horla describes thus a tension among the adjacent, the related [attenant], the contiguous, the far away [éloigné], the reachable and the inaccessible, starting from this proximity.’ [16] Put differently, the enigmatic title signifies the series of problematological differences inherent in the narrative. This is accomplished by the analogy of space, more precisely of proximity. What is really at stake here is the threatening erasure of basic categories of existence such as inside/outside, self/other, identity, difference, and contradiction. Semantically and logically an oxymoron, Hors-là conveys the existential situation of the disoriented narrator. All the facts he had previously so firmly attributed to himself, the other and the world have been turned to questions about a monstrous being who erases these very differences; a being for whom no synonym exists, and for whom the only analogy available is a deictic oxymoron, out (there)/here. Le Horla just might be the most honest fictional title in literature.

24Now that we have laid out the problematological dynamics of the first two diary entries and the title, and just prior to proceeding to a close discussion of the series of futile solutions (answers) that the narrator will attempt in responding to the problems he confronts, we should clarify the problematological arc of our discussion of Le Horla by briefly returning to Michel Meyer’s definition of repression taken from his recent book, Comment penser la réalité:

25

In resolving a problem, the responses brought forth make them disappear. What remains apparent is only what was in question [in the most apparent sense]. This is why the real can manifest itself as such, while the answers, as such, can be forgotten to its profit. The evacuation of questions into the implicit, due to their resolution, is the privileged form that repression has always taken. The explicit is answers, but as there are no more questions, since they were resolved, there are also no more answers properly speaking, but only what was the object [of questions and answers] and which alone forces itself to our attention. In a more general manner, repression is the manner in which questions remain outside of answers. Repression is the distancing from the problematic, which permits avoiding all confusion. The distancing can be formalized by different means. The most evident, the most common, given the primary and daily character of efficacy [effectivité], is the dissociation of the implicit and the explicit; the first being reserved to questions, the second, to answers, thus to what makes the [explicit] object [of the questions].’ [17]

26As we emphasized above, our greatest existential desire is to do away with questions, to erase the question-answer difference. This holds true invariably, from the archaic to the postmodern. But with the acceleration of history it becomes increasingly more difficult to pretend that questions do not arise within the unfolding of time and events, to pretend, in short, that only immutable reality exists. Such is in fact the narcissistic identity-fantasy of the narrator at the beginning of this story, the problematological degree zero from which the whole narrative unfolds.

27To repress is to quarantine questions outside of answers, to forget that answers were in fact initially responses to questions; the responses themselves then lose their original problematical nature, lose the trace of the original interrogation, thereby erasing the question-answer difference. Answers simply become facts, and facts forget that they are fossilized answers to long-forgotten questions. Simply put, a belief X is no longer seen as a current answer to a question posed recently or long ago, but rather X is seen as a self-evident truth, universal and timeless. We desire to perceive reality, including and especially beliefs and judgments, as self-evident and necessary, what we normally fancy as common sense. Meyer here, in his own logical, analytical and rhetorical fashion, is congruent with the genealogy-of-morals tradition from Montaigne to the French Moralistes to Nietzsche : ‘The goal of an ideology is to silence the absence of foundation of foundational ideas…Ideology, understood in the strict sense (=politics), is a system of legitimation.’ [18] The efficacy of this repression process is easy enough to conceive in archaic societies. But as soon as history accelerates, the mechanisms deployed to repress the contingent and the dynamic become the most arresting object of analysis for a problematologically-oriented thinker. Nowhere is there a better illustration of this process than in literature.

28In terms of analyzing Le Horla problematologically, much of what unfolds in the narrative after the first two diary entries can best be understood in terms of various distancing mechanisms : the quarantining of questions from answers, and the quarantining of answers as such (with the trace of the problematic they might still contain) from reality. Thus, both questions and answers disappear in favor of facts, for the sake, as Meyer puts it, ‘of avoiding all confusion.’ Reality altogether coagulates into a collection of facts linked by a causal chain in which every particular is clearly linked to an idea which invests it with sense. This is why all thought is ideo-logical by nature. [19] Questions and answers having disappeared, only reality remains—until it is disrupted, until the non-problemato-logical identity-fantasy comes to an abrupt end, which sets in motion a series of questions, the quest for partial answers, and the enduring desire for repression, for distancing. With this in mind, let us now then return to Le Horla.

29And so after being haunted by a series of white nights—insomnia, nightmares, the uncanny sensation of being in the presence of an invisible other, a being so proximate yet so alien—the narrator decides to set out on a voyage, to give Horla the slip. He runs away from the question, but in fact he runs into a symbol representing the answer—the Mont Saint-Michel, that haunting and massive cathedral on the Norman coast surrounded by the ocean during high tide, surrounded by land during low tide. I am first struck by the fact that this Norman gentleman has never visited the nearby world-famous site. Why ? Why visit it now ? And what does it reveal to him ? He has not visited it because its symbolism would disturb his I-am-plane-tree earthly and rooted identity-fantasy. Yet, he is now drawn to the hauntingly aquatic cathedral, which partially mirrors his new identity, because, though he wants to escape Horla, the resistance to the question/phenomenon is slowly dissolving; and, after all, if the existential proximity of Horla could be displaced into a metaphor, perhaps it could just be quarantined in speculation about the religious, the symbolic, maybe even the epistemological and medical. Having been disturbed, the narrator now wants to know—but still from a distance, as if what is in question or at stake here, the ce dont-ness, concerned exterior forces and not a force constitutive of his own being.

30Maupassant could not have chosen a more topographically and religiously encoded symbol : the rock/cathedral, ‘a granite jewel’(conscious Will) entertains a relationship of ebb and flow with the liquid miasma of the ocean (unconscious desire, drives, alienation); ‘When I got there, I uttered a cry of astonishment. An enormous bay stretched out before me as far as the eye could see, between two widely separated coasts which dissolved into mist in the distance. In the middle of this vast yellow bay, beneath a brilliant, golden sky, there rose amid the sands a strange, dark, pointed mountain. The sun had just set, and on the horizon, still aflame, appeared the outline of that fantastical rock, with a fantastical structure upon its summit.’ [20] Conversing with a monk the next day, the narrator observes the ‘incoming tide which raced across the sand, covering it with a breastplate of steel.’ [21] Next ensues a conversation with a thoughtful monk, spurred by the tale of an old shepherd roaming about on the dunes at night ‘leading a he-goat with the face of a man and a she-goat with the face of a woman, both with long white hair chattering incessantly and quarreling in a strange tongue, then suddenly interrupting themselves to bleat with all their might.’ [22] Explicitly and implicitly the legend encapsulates the narrator’s predicament. The implicit (and repressed) question here concerns the analogy between the positions and burden of the narrator and the shepherd : just as the narrator has to balance the conflicting pull between his old ego and the Horla, the shepherd has to master the quarreling goats. Both are assigned the same Sisyphus-like existence. But this disturbing question shall be quarantined for the moment for the sake of the more obvious question : ‘Do you believe in all of that ?’ the narrator asks the monk, followed by another question : ‘If there are other beings than ourselves living on this earth, how is it that in all this time we have never come into contact with them; how is it that you have never seen them ? How is it that I have never seen them ?’ The monk : ‘Can we see even a hundred thousandth part of what exists ? Take the wind, the greatest force in nature, which can knock men down, shatter buildings […]. Have you ever seen it, can you see it? Nevertheless, it exists.’ [23] Then the narrator seemingly reconsiders his crude materialism : ‘This simple logic reduced me to silence. This man was either a seer or a fool. I was not entirely sure which—but I said not a word. What he had just uttered, I myself had often thought.’ [24] The next excursion, this one to Paris, will clarify the scientific and empirical status of what the narrator has ‘often thought,’ especially, I imagine, what he often thought since Horla became his cannibalizing and terrorizing guest.

31Without solving the problem of Horla, the Mont-Saint Michel experience goes a long way toward the weakening of the narrator’s identity. This can be best seen on the metaphorical level. The two core metaphors here, ‘I am jewel granite submerged periodically by water’ and ‘I am a shepherd mastering two mad goats’ are already indeed a far cry from the ‘I am a deeply rooted plane tree’ identity-fantasy of the beginning. Yet, upon the narrator’s return to his estate, Horla manifests itself ever more violently, as if the weakened identity of its victim made it all the more permeable to Horla’s intrusions. A master in the genre of horror, Maupassant excels in conveying Horla’s nocturnal reign of terror, including vampirism. Another solution must be sought after, since the recognition of ‘invisible forces’ did not abate the Horla. Metaphorical and cognitive distancing failed as answer/solution to the question/problem posed by Horla. Unto Paris, then, where other forms of repression, of distancing and quarantining, would be possible, at least at first.

32After two days in Paris, where he feels much better, the narrator opts for the most tempting solution. He attempts to displace Horla from an existential and ontological category (‘I am also Horla’ or ‘I am also an hors-là vis-à-vis myself’) to the category of a temporary symptom of excessive imagination, somnambulism or being the victim of a temporary hypnotism. Notice in the following quote the urgent will to repress at all cost, most notable in the glee of the tone, the glee of someone who received a reprieve, which he takes for a permanent cure : ‘July 12. Paris. I really must have been out of my mind these last few days ! I must have been the victim of my excited imagination, that is, unless I really am a somnambulist, or have fallen under one of those well-documented but so far unexplained influences that we call hypnotic suggestion.’ [25] Next, the narrator dines with his cousin whose friend is a doctor specializing in the rapidly emerging field of clinical psychiatry. In the conversation that follows the doctor explains in triumphal terms that modern science is ‘on the point of discovering one of the most important secrets of nature […]. Ever since man began to think, […], he has felt himself in the palpable presence of a mystery that is impenetrable to his crude and imperfect senses, and he has tried to compensate for the feebleness of his sense organs by the force of his intelligence.’ [26] Rationalism and empiricism had no category for this invisible secret of nature and in the popular imagination these realities gave birth to the ‘supernatural, legends of wandering spirits, fairies, gnomes, ghosts, I might even say the legend of God.’ [27] But all these exteriorized entities, the doctor explains, are in fact constitutive of the psyche, a fact that is then dramatically illustrated by the elaborate and effective hypnosis to which the doctor subjects the narrator’s cousin. In other words, the solutions the narrator has been seeking by means of distancing and quarantining the phenomenon, the doctor suggests to him, are futile, for the real question and the real answer are interior to and constitutive of our psyche, threatening our crude identity when it lets down its guard. We are here getting closer to the solution, no matter the resistance and repression.

33Which brings us necessarily to the scientific paradigmatic shift found explicitly at the heart of Le Horla, referring to the late nineteenth-century incipient recognition of the limits of a strictly rational, positivist and mechanistically empirical understanding of mental processes in favor of the recognition of what the narrator of Le Horla terms ‘invisible forces,’ by which he means the unconscious and irrational dimensions of the real. It bears mentioning in passing that Maupassant himself attended a number of clinical lectures on hysteria given by Professor Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in 1885, exactly at the same time as Sigmund Freud. [28] As we saw above, the narrative begins with a monstrous trauma, the encounter of Horla, a particular phenomenon (question) which the narrator cannot link to an idea (answer). Monstrous it is indeed because of its radical enigmatic nature : Horla is a particular that functions as a purely disorienting difference precisely because it is not (yet) quarantined by an idea, not yet even quarantined by a name, and thus not yet (and not ever in this short story) plugged into an ideological matrix and thus domesticated, repressed. Another metaphorical manner to quarantine this disorienting difference is to displace it into the apocalyptic imagery of the New Man, the Successor to Man, which is at once another displacement of the question and also, as we shall now see, the occasion for a perplexing historical aside—itself of one cloth with the disorientation and disintegration of the Norman gentleman.

34There is a particularly puzzling episode in this Parisian visit which complements well, but in a very paradoxically antithetical manner, the theme of the Age of the New Man. Here the New Man is historical and political, rather than epistemological and scientific. He is the obedient yet excitable modern democratic citizen of the Republic, this citizen toward whom Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Maupassant (to name just a few) had ambivalent feelings, oscillating between contempt and fascination—and probably much more contempt than fascination in the case of Maupassant. Here is the first part of this jarring political entry, clearly at variance with the tone and content of all previous diary entries :

35

July 14. Bastille Day. I strolled through the streets. The fireworks and the flags filled me with childish delight. Still, it is ridiculous to rejoice on a fixed date, by government decree. The populace is an ignorant herd, at times stupidly docile, at times fiercely rebellious. When it is told, “Be merry,” it is merry. When it is told, “Go and fight your neighbor,” it goes to fight. When it is told, “Vote for the Emperor,” it votes for the Emperor. Then it is told, “Vote for the Republic,” and it votes for the Republic. [29]

36Whereas in the very first diary entry we have symbiosis with the other, here pure alienation dominates. To be sure, this could be due to the generic opposition between countryside and city and to a more generalized Schopenhauerian pessimistic disgust with all things human from which Maupassant was not free, to say the least. All the same, this passage is not just the usual fare of atopical and atemporal misanthropy, for everything here points toward specific historical markers. First, of course, the emblematic date and name : ‘July 14. Bastille Day.’ These markers function as contextual meaning coefficients for the whole paragraph. The Revolution of 1789 intended to bring about precisely…the New Man by a process of revolutionary purification. Evil was to be once and for all solved as a problem/question. Reason was to be the permanent answer to evil. Incarnated by the state and its institutions as well as incarnated in the daily practice of each and every citizen, Reason was to morph into empirical reality, a reality whose origin is the revolutionary answer to the problem/question of evil; a political answer to an anthropological question which, if things went right, could no longer be posed or even imagined. That which is, reality, would replace once and for all the question-answer difference with respect to evil. Such is at least the Rousseauist version of this fantasy from which the Revolution draws much of its rhetorical effect. In short, the Republic represents the advent of the New Man, the doing-away with the dogged questions implied for example in the Augustinian and Pascalian anthropologies of original sin.

37Yet, the revolution did not do away with evil. Adult exercise of reason did not replace childish obedience (Kant), it just gave it a more flattering alibi. The syntax of the July 14^th entry, with its comic and ironic usage of quotation marks and repetitive parallel construction, conveys childish imbecility coupled with the violent potential of the crowd of citizens. Democratic bêtise, stupidity, became to Maupassant even more insipid than its previous versions. What is really at stake here then (the ce dont element of the question) is neither a particular permutation of the naiveté of simpletons nor the vulgarity of crowds. Maupassant fears that the larger question here might escape the unsuspecting reader—this is one of his very few weaknesses as a fiction writer. No need to worry, though, since in the second paragraph of the same diary entry of July 14, the implicit inference is made explicit : ‘Those who lead it [the crowd] are also fools, but rather than obeying men, they obey principles, which can only be inane, barren, and false by the very fact that they are principles, that is to say, ideas thought to be certain and immutable in a world where one can be sure of nothing, since light and sound alike are but illusions.’ [30]

38Just as the citizen remains an obedient and volatile child, the priestly class of the Republic remains archaic for it believes in principles, meaning that it has a set of a priori beliefs which it confuses with real thinking. Just as the citizens obey their superiors, the superiors obey their principles because they take them to be ‘certain and immutable’ in a world that is in fact in constant flux. In other words, modern a priori thinking coupled with Rousseauist anthropology mirrors archaic thinking : in both the problematological difference is strongly repressed, only answers remain, and these answers (principles) calcify themselves into an implacable real.

39Notice how at variance this political arrangement is with respect to the scientific paradigmatic shift discussed just above. At the same time that empirical materialism is challenged by the invisible forces of the unconscious, i.e., the irrational, the world of politics continues to function ideologically, animated by what it fancies are rational principles and oblivious to the fact that ‘light and sound themselves are but illusions’; oblivious to the real questions posed by the empirically invisible, the unconscious; oblivious thus to the very questions which arose from the Parisian hypnotist séance discussed just above. It is indeed not surprising that the two sections are directly juxtaposed to each other.

40The second part of the July 14 entry jars with the rest, for the voice of the narrator here is incongruent with the tone of his previous utterances, even as he relates his learning of ‘new forces.’ It is as if the narrator of the second paragraph of the July 14 entry were not that country gentleman writing his intimate diary we met at the beginning, but an acute philosopher of science and history. There is, after all, something paradoxical about the affirmed problematological imperative to think about change coming from a narrator who lived just shortly before in total resistance to change, in an identity fantasy of smug self-sameness. Author and Narrator seem to work here at cross purposes. This author/narrator juxtaposition abounds in the dialogism of the novel, but is incongruent in the monological context of an intimate diary. The reason I mention this purely literary point in this highly conceptual discussion is because I would like to show what is so politically urgent in this text, so urgent, in fact, that it even interferes with sound narrative technique in the hands of a master in the genre.

41Be that as it may, the political dimension echoes throughout Le Horla, especially when it comes to the final holocaust scene. We recall that the initial identity~fantasy was centered on the plane tree and its protection of the house, and more generally around the Norman estate and its immediate environs forming a universe with which the narrator exists in perfect symbiosis. We also recall that Horla hails from a Brazilian three-master, metaphor for both the archaic (collective psychosis, cannibalism) and the modern (global commerce). When considering the meaning of the final burning scene, the first obvious interpretation is that the narrator wanted to physically burn Horla, to do away with it once and for all. But the ce dont-ness in this scene is more disturbing—and, coheres much better with both the structure of the short story and with its deeper problematological matrix. At the end, the metaphorization of identity runs its course; the plane tree perishes, so does the house with the beloved servants. The narrator loses all things in the world that defined his identity, yet Horla continues to haunt him until his identity will be reduced to nothing, psychosis. Literally and figuratively matters go up in smoke. But is this not also a political allegory for the ultimate futility of the dreams implicit in ‘July 14. Bastille Day’? Just as Horla cannot be gotten rid of, evil cannot be eliminated by revolutionary fire combined with just the right sort of social engineering based on the anthropology of the original and ultimate goodness of man. That much will be learned not too long after Maupassant’s death (1893), in the Great War (1914–18) that obscenely coupled abstract principles with the irrational in a macabre orgy of death. Nothing would have confirmed Maupassant’s pessimism as much as the Great War, and it is not coincidental that Freud’s reaction to that war, namely his revision of the theory of drives to account for the Death Principle, is prefigured so strongly in the invitational wave toward the Brazilian three-master and in the final paroxysm of fire around which the whole short story is woven.

42In Maupassant the problem of the implicit and the explicit is more complicated than in more conventional narrative, such as Flaubert’s short story A Simple Heart. Convincingly underwritten by the first-person narrative whose subjectivity is compounded by the proximate rhetoric, the intimate diary, Le Horla narrates a journey from the explicit, where repression is at its highest, to the recognition of the implicit with its correlative diminution of repression. This results also in a diminution of identity, leading eventually to the dissolution of identity altogether. Since the narrator and protagonist are the same and the story is told in the present tense leading to dissolution, no ironic distance is allowed and the interpellation of the reader is much more intense, abolishing the distance for the reader in the same manner that the protagonist/narrator has in the end no possible escape into ‘fantasy.’ The reader dissolves into the narrative, whence the perennial power of this short story. The interiorization of the fantastic phenomenon constitutes Maupassant’s signature contribution to the fantastic genre. This interiorization is best seen as the dialectics of the literal and the figurative, explicit and implicit, distance and proximity, the illusion of stability and the reality of History, of stability and psychosis. It is my contention that the meaning of these multi-layered dialectics is best analyzed and understood in terms of Michel Meyer’s problematological method of discovering meaning through the act of teasing out the repressed content of forgotten questions.