Les sens sous la loupe. Le rapport cognoscible - incognoscible dans deux contes de Maupassant : Lettre d’un fou et Le Horla
Directions under the Microscope. The Knowable – Unknowable Report in two Stories of Maupassant: Letter from a fool and The Horla

Summary/Abstract: We intend to trace the way in which Maupassant puts in discussion the human senses and their limits and imperfections. The human subject’s sensorial imperfection and mostly visual imperfection creates the sensation of the unknown, mysterious, tenebrous in rapport with the veiled infinite of the world. The supernatural is legitimated precisely through the perception of the unknowable which gives birth to anxiety and fright. What we see is only an infinitesimal part of what there is, so that the mystery remains impregnable and even invisible beings are detectable around us, deceitful and harmful powers, born of loneliness and fear. It is about such a subtle, insidious monster, about such a sensorial and mental hallucination in two texts between which there is a perfect continuity: Lettre d’un fou andi Le Horla, the diary variant. In both texts Maupassant interrogates the senses through the narrator-character, prey to the invasion of an invisible being, born of solitude and fright (mostly from terror of incapacity of perception) and generating insanity. The similitude between the two texts is also visible due to the presence in both of them of an episode in which the narrator is hindered from seeing his own image in the mirror. Therefore, the sight of the invisible is the awareness of his perception through the absence of the reflection in the mirror; however, the terror of the discovery attracts the insanity which the narrator is fighting with all his might.

• Details
• Contents