Thoughts on, and Murders of, Simpering Muggles and their Analysis of Maupassant

The idea of splitting one’s soul is a rather delicious concept available for those who are strong enough to seek power. However, according to the scholarly authors who study Maupassant’s short story, “The Diary of a Madman”, it is one to be feared and desperately avoided. According to their minds, this “romantic doppelganger” of a split personality, is not one created in a bid for power but instead as a reaction to the helplessness of a Muggle’s capacity to understand the inner workings of their mind. They are destroyed by the systems they create and their inability to understand their inferior nature. Muggles are therefore not power-loving, having sought the right path, but weak beings who can’t understand and come to terms with the true gift of an easily separated soul they have been given.

The idea that Muggles are clearly the inferior race, and therefore ought to be eradicated for the betterment of wizard-kind, is fully supported in the text, The Rhetoric of Pessimism and Strategies of Containment in the Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant. The simple Muggle who wrote the text obviously thought himself to be of a superior nature for I could have killed a good four Muggles in the time it took me to read the title. Nevertheless, hidden amongst the simpering “highbrow” wordings of this pathetic creature’s academia, there lies a true gem. Mr. Dave Bryant, the source of my annoyance (and that irritating screaming coming from the basement of Lucius’ Manor that I now occupy), made the most intriguing discovery. In Maupassant’s story “the hero is prey to his own mind... limited in his ability to contain and understand the source of the anguish because of the imperfection of his senses” (pg. 94). Bryant, a Muggle himself, acknowledges that Muggles are inferior beings, their senses not being as in tune as their society and their brains demand. They can’t even riddle out the musings of their own mind! It’s no wonder that poor sod in “The Diary of a Madman” fell into the realm of carnivorous madness. His weak senses, his weak perceptions, didn’t allow him to see that murder is no reason to anguish. It’s quite simple actually. However the magistrate gave into his darker nature for he was awash with the fabricated idea of murder being wrong and unable to fully understand the ideas his brain was trying to formulate.

Not all Muggle authors are fools though, as W.G. Moore, editor of Maupassant: Short Stories, proves. For this, he gets the presidential cell instead of being thrown in amongst the other animals. Whilst I skimmed his argument to the sounds of his screams, I noticed that he managed to concur and build off of the ideas of Bryant. He concludes that “[The source of fear] is not the realm of the occult...but the sense that reality is even far worse than appearance if only we could see it; and even more disturbing is the knowledge that our sense are constantly deceiving us” (pg. 33). What genius from such a filthy tongue! I almost feel bad for having it sliced out. But no matter, for he knows! A Muggle actually breached through their hazy realm of existence in which they believe themselves to be the all superior being and have nothing to fear, and acknowledged that something they cannot grasp is at large and actively seeking to possess their souls. Now, whether or not he realized that such a world that lay beyond their sense was actually the superior wizarding race forced into shameful hiding, and that the one actively seeking to possess them would be me wanting nothing more than to turn them into a fresh batch of Inferi, is up for debate. But it almost gives a tug at your heart, if I had one of those useless things, to read of their ability to try and understand their ignorance. It’s also highly ironic that in their quest to avoid this unknown world, Muggles have created a rigidly structured society which produces these lapses into the dark reality they so desperately try to hide from. This I can appreciate more fully for it is much more enjoyable to laugh at the disgusting things.  

Now I’m not usually a Dark Lord to play favorites. It gets too messy. But of Harris’ Maupassant in the Hall of Mirrors I am rather partial for the sheer humor he manages to extract from the realm of Muggle life. He pulls from Maupassant’s story the idea of the “romantic doppelganger” or the “theme of the ‘other’, the terrifying double who haunts the narrator” (pg. 169). Oh I cackled at this very line so loudly that Nagini stopped her evening feast on Harris’ flesh to give me a reproachful stare. I implored her to see the humor in the entire ordeal. Muggles are the weakest creatures. Whiny, pathetic, unable to cope with their own minds to point of falling into a pitiful madness, mostly unaware that something more macabre stirs at the edges of their flimsy reality, and yet, they possess the greatest gift and complete it with such an ease that Maupassant connects this happening to an everyman, a nobody. They can split their souls! Armed with nothing more than their feeble minds and their growing paranoia (although that could be the after effects of my new terror campaign), they are able to create this other dark entity that splits off from themselves. They are a race of beings who are haunted by Horocruxes and have no idea the power of the gift they have been given! If they ever managed to harness that ability, to choose the path of power instead of weakness, the great things they could accomplish I dare not even dream. But as Bryant and Harris elaborated on before, they are completely without the means to understand what they possess.  

From a simpleton’s point of view, pathetic Muggles could almost be pitiable creatures. They are blessed with the greatest gift, born with the expanse of the oceans at their disposable and are, at the same time, given a fork to consume it with. They have no control over their own minds, falling prey to the complex workings and going mad. They are unable to fully identify the occult reality beyond their own, falling prey to paranoia of the unknown and going mad. And they are haunted by a gift turned terror, falling prey to their inability to recognize what they have been given or at least reconcile the two sides of their personality and going mad. I’m starting to note a pattern. Maupassant’s story is one that is more than just the diary of a single madman, but rather it is a prophecy to his own race about their doomed nature. All Muggles are ensnared in this web with no means out. Madness is not something to be feared or to be scorned, but rather embraced for all Muggles are mad, every last filthy one, and because of their societal constructs, their scorn of the unknown, their constant fear and paranoia, they shall never rise from the pit of madness into which they have fallen. 

Works Cited:

Bryant, David. The Rhetoric of Pessimism and Strategies of Containment in the
     Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant. Lewiston: Mellen, 1993. Print. 

 Harris, Trevor A. Le V. Maupassant in the Hall of Mirrors. New York: St.
     Martin's, 1990. Print. 

 Sullivan, Edward D. Maupassant: The Short Stories. London: Arnold, 1962. Print.