The Game of the Same and the Other: Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla, a Twofold Story in Two Versions

Abstract

The Horla, written twice, is considered as a masterpiece of a short horror story. Its two versions are still objects of critics’ arguments : some of them see in the second text an amplified and revised version of the first one, whereas others consider the two texts as two separate stories. The paper tries to consider the two Horlas as two complementary parts of the same story ; the first is told by a completely ‘normal’ person who has asked to live in a lunatic asylum, and the second, full of striking, strong emotions, is given by someone who gives up more and more to mental troubles caused by his fear of the unknown, the unnamed, the invisible. Considered in this way, the texts of the two versions of The Horla become one “autoscopic” story, which means that it is its own reflect; two narrative lines and two different endings deal with two sides, one rational ant the other irrational, of the narrator’s personality. This dualism comes as well from the writer’s biography (his gradual insanity) as from his time’s fascination of mental illnesses and anomalies.