Popular Culture Review 30.1
that rise up and walk amongst them as before ? ( 172 )
Scientific demonstrations hence only demonstrate the inadequacy of our epistemological apparatus , which echoes the doubts repeatedly expressed by the narrator of “ The Horla ” regarding our understanding of reality .
Some sciences tend to exhibit their own limitations more than others , and hence remain objectively mysterious , paradoxically functioning as links between reasonable comprehension and what remains incomprehensible . Among them , psychiatric medicine occupies a place of choice , for it deals directly with one of the areas of human understanding that remains irreducible to rational terms by definition , madness , and is logically a recurring theme in the fantastic mode . Although the last version of “ The Horla ” eliminates all direct mentions to psychiatrists and lunatic asylums , it still retains the constant interrogations of the narrator vis-à-vis his sanity , as madness is the most evident and rational explanation for the irruption of the impossible in real life . In Dracula , the character of Dr . Seward , director of a lunatic asylum , represents the rational view of madness , which allows the supernatural to exist by opposing it to the most extreme manifestations of the human psyche ; as a physician , Dr . Seward constitutes a privileged witness of the incomprehensible for he is professionally trained to distinguish the strange possibilities of mental illness from the true manifestations of the supernatural .
One medical practice in particular , hypnotism , which in the nineteenth century used to be regrouped , along with telepathy , thought transmission and such , under the loose category known as “ magnetism ,” allows both “ The Horla ” and Dracula to represent the reality of the incomprehensible in an
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