Journal of Studies in Language, Culture and Society (JSLCS)
Volume 9, Numéro 2, Pages 218-232
2026-06-30
Dialogism And The Crisis Of The “self” In Le Horla: Figures Of The Fragmented “i” From Rimbaud To Maupassant
Authors : Bouazza Merahia .
Abstract
Abstract: This article examines how dialogism illuminates the crisis of the self in Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla by bringing into dialogue Arthur Rimbaud's and Maupassant's conceptions of identity and otherness. While Rimbaud's famous assertion, "I is another," frames the splitting of the self as a creative and transformative experience, Maupassant reconfigures this alterity as a source of anxiety and existential disintegration. The study aims to explore how Le Horla stages a fragmented subjectivity through the interplay of competing voices within the narrative. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and polyphony, this study adopts a close textual and discursive analysis of the narrator's diary. Particular attention is paid to the modes of enunciation, shifts in narrative voice, and the progressive intrusion of alterity into the narrator's discourse. A comparative perspective is also employed to examine the ways in which Maupassant extends and transforms Rimbaud's reflection on the divided self. The analysis reveals that the narrator's identity emerges as a dialogic construct shaped by a plurality of voices. The Horla functions not merely as an external supernatural figure but as the embodiment of an intrinsic and threatening otherness that destabilizes the boundaries of the self. The fractured enunciation that permeates the text exposes a polyphonic structure in which reason, fear, and the voice of the Other coexist and compete for authority. By combining Bakhtinian dialogism with a comparative reading of Rimbaud and Maupassant, this article offers a renewed interpretation of Le Horla as a literary exploration of the modern self in crisis. It demonstrates how Maupassant transforms Rimbaud's poetics of alterity into a narrative of dissolution and psychic vulnerability, thereby contributing to international scholarship on nineteenth-century subjectivity, dialogism, and the representation of otherness in literary discourse.
Keywords
Crisis of the Self ; Dialogism ; Identity Fragmentation ; Otherness ; Polyphony
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