What is it? What was it?

In "The Horla," by Guy de Maupassant, one of the narrators asks, "What is it?", this invisible being that has afflicted him. His question echoes the title of Fitz-James O'Brien's earlier short story "What Was It? A Mystery," originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in March 1859. "What Was It?" was reprinted in Weird Tales in December 1925 as No. 6 in a series called "Weird Story Reprints." It was reprinted many times before that and has been many times since.

As in "The Horla," the invisible being in O'Brien's story first falls upon the narrator while he is in his bed. The being tries to choke him, but that's where the similarity ends. Fitz-James O'Brien was an Irish writer, but he wrote his story while living in America, and his story is set in America. In crossing over from the Old World to the New, O'Brien seems to have become an American, and his hero is one, too, for he triumphs over his invisible attacker, whereas Maupassant's narrators fall victim to theirs, especially in the second version of 1887. I have written before about the difference between the American hero and his European counterpart. Maupassant's narrators are defeated in their encounters with the Horla. The first is hospitalized. The second is driven nearly insane and decides he must kill himself. O'Brien's narrator subdues his tormenter and keeps it captive until its tragic death. Although it was written in Antebellum times, "What Was It?" is very much like an American science fiction monster movie from 1950s.

There are imperfect parallels between the American hero and the triumphant science-fictional hero versus the European protagonist and the defeated, humiliated weird-fictional protagonist. O'Brien's narrator is an example of the former. Maupassant's narrators are examples of the latter. I have written about that before, too. You can read part of what I wrote in "Weird Tales & Weird Fiction-Part Two," from January 24, 2023, by clicking here. It's one of my favorite entries in this blog. We'll see what you think of it. Anyway, I find the difference between these two stories and their authors to be striking. They are, I think, a simple distillation of the difference between the American and European ways of looking at the world and a simple example of why America remains the indispensable nation. Without us, the world would be overrun by invisible monsters, including the invisible monsters of the mind.

An illustration by Lawrence for "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien, from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1949.

P.S. Fitz-James O'Brien died by violence in our Civil War. Guy de Maupassant died by self-destruction. There are of course Americans who destroy themselves. It's a way of life not only for us but also for all people everywhere. This is just a too-obvious example of the difference between an American writer and his European counterpart. Ernest Hemingway combined these two ways of dying, for he died by violent self-destruction. Will Rogers famously said, "We'll be the first nation in the world to go to the poor house in an automobile." We're probably also the first people to go the morgue along the barrel of a gun.

I should point out that American literature began in part with a discussion of the invisible, with Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, published in 1693. Here is a passage from Chapter II that reads like the attacks of the invisible beings in O'Brien's and Maupassants' stories:

An Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the Center, and after a sort, the First-born of our English Settlements: and the Houses of the Good People there are fill'd with the doleful Shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural. After the Mischiefs there Endeavoured, and since in part Conquered, the terrible Plague, of Evil Angels, hath made its Progress into some other places, where other Persons have been in like manner Diabolically handled. These our poor Afflicted Neighbours, quickly after they become Infected and Infested with these Dæmons, arrive to a Capacity of Discerning those which they conceive the Shapes of their Troublers [. . .]. 

That sounds like O'Brien's narrator and his friends making a plaster casting of his invisible attacker: he discerns and conceives the shape of his troubler.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley