“Am I guilty or a victim? I wouldn’t know…” (chapter “Childhood”) – this sentence at the beginning of the nearly 500-page novel is not a casual doubt, but the keynote of a narrative that refuses moral certainty. The form, a “journal en désordre,” is not merely an aesthetic choice: memories are not linear, they are eruptive, repetitive, and jump between time periods. The narrative is embedded in the First World War, which destroys not only the social fabric of Besançon but also the protagonist’s intimate world. The first half of the novel depicts a comparatively sheltered childhood, marked by minor losses (an absent father, Mariette’s displacement), but nevertheless offering continuity and familiarity. Here he lives with his mother, here he plays with Mariette, the neighbor's daughter, whose presence he outlines in laconic scenes – the cycling together, the quiet touching of a hand, the lack of a promise at parting.
Oriane Jeancourt's excellent review for Defector (September 2023) gave me crucial clues that this book can be read not only as a post-traumatic, borderline experience, but also playfully; she initially calls the protagonist a perfect Candide in Dreyfus's slightly perverse world. (Read Dreyfus's previous books to understand what she means by this suggestion, for example, the Journal sexuel d'un garçon d'aujourd'hui (From 2021, an autobiographical work of over 2.300 pages, a mixture of diary, literary experiment, sexual log, self-analysis, and social portrait, which documents five years of his life in a radically open form—almost exclusively through meticulous descriptions of his sexual encounters with men, supplemented by reflections, everyday observations, conversations with friends, and literary references.) In her review, Jeancourt emphasizes the metamorphosis, the constant disguise of himself as a monster, a libertine, and a magician. Jeancourt feels reminded of Günter Grass and some of his books while reading it. The Tin Drum until turbot, where one never knows whether he borrowed from Central European stories or his own satirical imagination. The hand that grows onto our Paul Marchand is, of all things, the hand of a German man named Hans, in a fantastical wax museum of 19th-century horror. Is this book therefore doubly coded?
With the war, the continuity of childhood is shattered, not only through patriotic indoctrination and social upheaval: the father's death marks the definitive break in the family and indirectly leads to the mother's alcoholism. The father's death in the First World War—not as a heroic battle, but as a sudden absence—creates an initial void. Under Brother Robert, the school becomes a military training ground: "Everything at school turns to war, war, war" (chapter "Brother Robert"). Here, the novel begins to draw the parallel it completes in Gottschalk's laboratory: the human being as malleable material, shaped either through drill or surgery. The child's perspective registers these changes without moral commentary—a method that Dreyfus combines with precise neutrality: the recording of the absurd, as if this end of childhood were self-evident. The city fills with refugees, men disappear, supply gaps emerge – the narrator, at 15, is forced to become the family's breadwinner. The war is not portrayed heroically, but rather as a mechanism for the destruction of bodies, relationships, and identities. It lays the groundwork for the later "scientific" horrors.
The central motif is the body, both as the bearer of identity and as a manipulable, vulnerable object. An explosion severely wounds the narrator, but the injury is not only physical, but also identity-related: his body is alienated from him. The explosion, which tears Paul from his everyday life, occurs during an errand for a farming family—not a heroic effort, but a casual, almost trivial action. Here, one senses the affinity with Kafka's The Trial: the catastrophe occurs without reason, the protagonist is suddenly trapped in an incomprehensible event. After the explosion, Paul awakens in a windowless cellar: “Three gray walls, chauvinistic color… no light entered the space of the cellar where I found myself” (chapter “Towards My Entrails”). Is this space no more a hospital than Kafka's courtroom is a place of justice? Is it a space of control, of deindividualization, a space where a different law applies? Or is it a place of freedom for transgression?
Awakening with severe abdominal injuries, Paul encounters Camille Gottschalk, an androgynous figure whose medical fantasies are boundless, conducting cruel experiments on humans and animals in a hermetic laboratory. A foreign arm—the titular "third hand"—grows from the protagonist's abdomen, the result of a grotesque transplant. The discovery of this alteration becomes an experience of radical alienation from his own body, which no longer appears as an autonomous entity but as a battlefield bearing the marks of alien intervention. The third hand embodies medical transgression and the loss of bodily autonomy. Gottschalk's experiments illustrate how, in war (and in the name of science), the body is treated like material, interchangeable and malleable. The narrator remains torn between revulsion and pragmatic acceptance: the hand saves his life but is also a monstrous stigma.
The description is surgically precise, almost matter-of-fact, and all the more disturbing for it: “un ourlet de peau rosâtre, luisante et potelée… ne m'appartenaient assurément pas” (chapter “Tout le long de ma panse”). The “third hand” here symbolizes a radical hybridity—not only physical, but also moral and existential. It belongs to him and it doesn't, it saves him and it makes him an alien in the world. This ambivalence is reminiscent of Shelley's monster, which is simultaneously the child and the scourge of its creator: an existence in the in-between, defined by the paradox of belonging and alienation.
Does Gottschalk, the "doctor" who saves Paul's life, embody scientific madness disguised as progress? He joins a literary tradition stretching from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Bataille's grotesque figures: researchers who are not deterred by moral scruples because they believe they are acting in service of a higher truth. Gottschalk's laboratory is an ark of the monstrous: "a snarl truffle smothered in the anus of a rat... two inanimate cats, one's paw crossing the other's mouth" (chapter "The Triumph of Death"). In this parade of chimeras, the baroque aesthetics of the cabinet of curiosities resonate, combined with the cruelty of modern vivisection. Here, Bataille's fascination with the "forme informe" shines through: the physical, which is torn from its form and reassembled, loses its original meaning and becomes raw material.
Camille Gottschalk can be interpreted as a consciously androgynous self-presentation – not only in his outward appearance, but also in the way Dreyfus allows the character to shift between genders, roles, and symbolic fields. On the one hand, Gottschalk stages his appearance as an excess of gender markers: rosy lips and cheeks, long purple scarves around his hips like a toga, a boater's hat, a hundred clinking shell bracelets – attributes that are neither "purely masculine" nor "purely feminine" connotations, but rather represent a conscious blurring of categories. This fits with the described fascination with hybridity and transplantation: Gottschalk not only tinkers with bodies, he also tinkers with himself, making his own body an experimental field. On the other hand, his vocal delivery (“au mitan du timbre des deux sexes”) and his behavior are also ambiguous: maternal care tips into sadistic-paternal surveillance, coquettish self-adoration mingles with fanatical faith in science. In this liminal space, he appears as a living embodiment of the “in-between stages” in the sense of Magnus Hirschfeld – a figure who positions himself outside the binary gender order, but who theatrically charges this “in-between” in order to exert power and attraction. It is precisely in the grotesque exaggeration of the text that this androgyny takes on a burlesque quality: Gottschalk is not simply “ambiguous,” he is a kind of total work of art, performatively composed of exaggeration, ambiguity, and a delight in transgressing boundaries.
The second half of the novel unfolds a dual theme of monstrosity between Gottschalk and the narrator: Gottschalk is a "monster" not only because of his eccentric appearance, but also because of his radical disregard for moral and natural boundaries. His "laboratory kitchen" is a mixture of anatomical cabinet, torture chamber, and slaughterhouse. The narrator, as a "monster," is no longer purely human; his body bears a foreign, living organ. The text asks: Is monstrosity a matter of appearance, origin, or intention? Gottschalk is not only a monster in a moral sense, but also a mirror for the narrator, who himself becomes the bearer of a monstrous characteristic. Here, monstrosity is not simply a matter of appearance, but touches upon the boundary between human and non-human, self and other. In war, as in the laboratory, the body becomes material that can be shaped, combined, and instrumentalized at will. While the narrator wavers between disgust and pragmatic use of this third hand, the horror shifts from the trench to the operating room without losing any of its brutality.
But Dreyfus takes the motif further: the hand is not passive. In one scene, it frees Paul from his bonds and shows him the escape route: “m'indiqua d'un doigt la direction de l'escalier” (chapter “Un geste inexplicable”). Later, the third hand fatally attacks Gottschalk. This autonomy transforms the body part into an actor, wavering between guardian angel and demon. Freud would have recognized the uncanny in this: the formerly familiar—the hand—becomes alien, animated, independent. It is the reversal of the loss of limbs in war: here, something is added that is not “missing” but superfluous—and precisely because of this, it threatens the integrity of the self. At this moment, the question arises whether the narrator himself is the perpetrator or merely the instrument of an alien willpower anchored within him. Survival, which in a classic escape narrative appears as a purely positive resolution, is here inextricably linked to guilt and uncertainty. The hand becomes an ambivalent ally, savior and murderer at the same time.
Fleeing through the forest, naked and with only half a cape for makeshift protection, he encounters a butler who takes him in but suspiciously questions his identity. The maxim of not resolving ambiguity becomes his new life strategy: the narrator conceals the truth to ensure his survival. This silence marks the beginning of a second existence, based on secrecy and the conscious concealment of his physical and biographical differences. After escaping Gottschalk's clutches, the narrator is confronted with the question of who he truly is. "Qui êtes-vous?" – This question from the butler becomes an existential test. The answer is fragmentary, tied to biographical milestones, not to any inner certainty. The maxim "On ne sort de l'ambiguïté qu'à ses dépens" (one only leaves ambiguity to one's detriment) becomes a survival strategy: The narrator conceals his monstrous transformation and maintains silence as a shield. The new identity takes shape from a balance between concealment (of the physical deviation) and continuation of life (despite the knowledge of one's own "other").
Survival in the novel is never purely positive: The narrator feels like a "miracle" because he escaped Gottschalk's experiments—but this rescue comes at the cost of integrating a stranger's body. The "third hand" becomes an ambivalent ally: It liberates him, but also through murder. This raises the question of guilt—is the narrator a perpetrator, a follower, or a tool? Survival means not recounting what has been experienced, or revealing it only selectively. Silence becomes the price of freedom. In parallel, Dreyfus develops a motif of seeing and not recognizing. Paul doesn't know whose arm the person was. "Where one sees how easy it is to leave humanity, the person without a face" (chapter "Let's Leave Humanity"). Without a face, the body part becomes an anonymous object, like the animals in the laboratory cages, like the soldiers' corpses in the trenches. Gottschalk continues the dehumanization wrought by war, employing surgical techniques. Here, the novel touches upon Kafka's technique of the "disappearance" of identity: characters lose their names, their faces, and thus their distinctiveness.
The title La troisième main It represents the physical alien, the hybrid, and forced transformations—simultaneously a tool, a stigma, and a lifesaver. Brueghel's "Triomphe de la Mort" serves as a visual frame of reference for Gottschalk's laboratory, where humans and animals merge into grotesque, lifeless collages. Biblical and religious motifs are ironically subverted (Gottschalk calls the narrator "Jesus"), thus creating a tension between "redemption" and "mutilation."
The sexual dimension of the third hand can be understood as a radical intensification of the central motif of alterity within one's own body—as a metaphor for intimate invasion and inescapable proximity. The hand belonging to Hans develops, over the course of the narrative, not only into a parasitic but also into a sexually active part of the protagonist. Paul experiences pleasure through a body part that does not belong to him, and does so in a doubly alienated way: physically, because it is anatomically foreign, and psychologically, because the source of the pleasure is a semi-autonomous personality. This negates his sexual autonomy; he loses control, as Hans forces him to prostitutes and takes the initiative himself. Paul is thus simultaneously perpetrator and victim—he makes his body available without actively participating, yet still experiences pleasure. This sensation of pleasure transcends the boundaries of self and other, for when Paul feels Hans's desire, their emotional worlds merge. This creates an intermediate identity in which sexual experience can no longer be clearly attributed to a single person. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this reflects a blurring of boundaries between self and other, which is both liberating and threatening. Sexuality in the novel does not appear as a romantic fusion, but rather as a physical, coercive community in which pleasure becomes an ambivalent binding agent: it reinforces dependence because it also finds gratification in this enforced proximity. At the same time, Dreyfus subverts traditional bodily and gender boundaries by having a male body part, simultaneously dead and autonomous, generate pleasure in the protagonist. The source of this pleasure is a fragment that cannot be definitively categorized as either heterosexual or homosexual, but rather embodies a hybrid, queer bodily experience. Thus, sexuality becomes the central stage for an exploration of the foreign within the familiar, in which pleasure becomes the driving force behind a progressive dissolution of identity.
If we take Oriane Jeancourt's initial reading suggestion to its logical conclusion, a different color spectrum emerges for the book than the somber earth tones of war and trauma: Arthur Dreyfus' The Third Hand It can be read in its traumatizing twist with the uncanny third arm, but also as a grotesquely opulent dance of death that elevates the physical not only to the absurd but also to the pleasurably perverse. The narrator staggers into a world where the rules of anatomy and morality burst like soap bubbles: a third hand grows from his stomach, an androgynous figure in purple scarves and shell bracelets tends to him with a mixture of sadistic care and narcissistic creator pose. As with Grass's Oskar Matzerath, there is an unwavering, almost childlike, cheeky gaze upon the catastrophe, transforming the horrific into burlesque scenes—the laboratory as a cabinet of curiosities, the surgical anomaly as a bizarrely intimate extension of the body. The erotic repeatedly intrudes upon the text, but in a displaced and alienated way: the touching closeness between narrator and "third hand" bears the hallmarks of a physically intimate complicity, in which dependence and desire blur. Gottschalk himself, between incantations of "maman" and meticulous lip painting, appears as a travesty of the sexological liminal spaces as conceived by Magnus Hirschfeld—a figure who deconstructs gender and desire while reassembling his victims. The scenes oscillate between delicate homoerotic undertones and freak-show-like exaggeration. Dreyfus's text dances on the border between macabre parable and sexualized carnival spectacle, in which the body is simultaneously victim, actor, and attraction—and it is precisely in this dazzling excess of perversion and play that it gains its anarchic freedom.
Mariette, the childhood friend, is the counterweight to all of this. She represents a time when touch was still innocent, when the body wasn't defined by external factors. Her wordless departure, the leaving of her bicycle against the house wall (chapter "Le vélo de mon amie"), is an image of almost biblical simplicity: the abandoned becomes a monument to loss. In the constellation of characters, Mariette is a reminder that there was a "before"—and that it will not return. The novel alternates between linear memory (childhood, Mariette, war) and unsettling present-day experiences (captivity, escape). The narrator's tone fluctuates between matter-of-fact reporting, ironic detachment, and lyrical imagery. The past is repeatedly revisited with commentary, creating a space for reflection that doesn't conclude the experience but leaves it open. The novel's ending is marked by a quiet resignation. The chauffeur, Joseph Prudhomme, hears Paul's story, doesn't believe it, or doesn't want to believe it, and offers him silence as a solution. "On ne sort de l'ambiguïté qu'à ses dépens" (chapter "Sortir de l'ambiguïté"). Paul accepts. This agreement with silence is not a betrayal of the truth, but an acknowledgment of its ineffability. Bataille would have recognized in this the "silent excess": the experience that cannot be expressed because it lies outside the realm of language. Thus it ends. La troisième main Not with a return to society, but with a self-positioning in the in-between space. Paul lives, but he lives as a hybrid, defined by an experience that can neither be fully communicated nor forgotten. The "third hand" remains his secret, his stigma, and also his salvation.
La troisième main is a hybrid novel situated between war narrative, body horror, and existential storytelling. War provides the context of injury, medicine the tool of monstrosity, and escape opens the space for questions of identity and guilt. The protagonist survives, but this act of survival is inextricably linked to the loss of a definite humanity. The text thus explores how body, violence, and alienation interact to irrevocably alter a life. Like Kafka's Gregor Samsa, Paul awakens in a body that is no longer his own; like Shelley's Frankenstein's creature, he is the product of a hubris disguised as progress; as with Bataille, the body is a site of transgression where the human tips into indeterminacy. Brueghel's "Triomphe de la Mort" serves as a visual echo for Gottschalk's laboratory, which is described as a perverse mixture of anatomy lab, slaughterhouse, and torture chamber. Religious motifs, presented with irony, underscore the ambivalence between supposed salvation and actual mutilation. The narrative remains permeated by a dual tension: the need to confess one's own story and the necessity to conceal it in order to survive. Thus emerges the portrait of a survivor who sees himself not as a hero, but as an accidental miraculé – saved, but irrevocably changed.
Pradelles review emphasizes Dreyfus's stylistic eccentricity: The text is exuberant, contradictory, full of formal experiments, and deliberately improbable. It cannot be clearly categorized into a single genre or theme and oscillates between war narrative, grotesque fable, coming-of-age novel, psychological portrait, farce, and philosophical text. Dreyfus's familiar themes—history, memory, sexuality, norms, monstrosity—merge here into a literary "kaleidoscope" that reminds him of Frankenstein, Hugo, Marcel Aymé, or surrealist prose. – Dreyfus's text is edited by Juliette Einhorn in The world of books Described as a picaresque, formally exuberant "carnet" that mixes a wide variety of genres: aphorisms, moral and libertine fables, adventure and war novels, and Gothic narrative material. The typographic design (interjections like "Stop," italicized insertions, digressions, breaks) reveals the literary "seamless" construction and structures the abundance of impressions. In terms of content, the book alternates between the grotesque and the emotional, for example, when Paul meets Hans's biological parents without speaking their language. – L.-HLR finally suggests for Read more In November 2023, a similarly exuberant reading to Oriane Jeancourt's was presented: “One must also know how to untangle the ball of yarn – which Dreyfus brilliantly manages here in almost 500 picaresque pages, often hilariously funny, then darker and more touching as we approach the end. This hand is unbearable! It makes Paul shine in a bolt factory, then as a magician, it plays Bach divinely, draws wonderful Japanese engravings; on the other hand, it can also want to strangle a passerby or be thwarted by offensive ideas… Paul will experience everything with women: A wild fiancée will leave him, frightened by his peculiarity, a more experienced courtesan will find unparalleled pleasure in his company. Without ever being ponderous, the novel, as we have understood, is a reflection on our more or less suppressed impulses, on our subconscious, on the alternately luminous and dark part that stirs within us despite everything.” 1
Dreyfus's achievement lies in not presenting this figure as a mere curiosity, but as a model of human existence under extreme conditions that is as uncanny as it is burlesquely excessive. The grotesque ultimately becomes a mode of survival: the monstrous aspects that others see in him are not only endured by the narrator, but used as his own stage. In this world of caged animals, body parts, and theatrical gestures, identity is always a hybrid of self and other, desire always a game with danger. The novel asks: What remains of the self when it is fused with the other? The "third hand" is an unsettling part of the self and remains a foreign body that never disappears. It is the most visible scar and at the same time a tool for survival. In it, the central themes of the novel—hybridity, ambiguity, corporealism, and the uncanny—converge in a figure that defies easy categorization, caught between alienated bodily horror and opulent pleasure in the third hand.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- “II ne suffit pas d'être touché par la grâce de l'inspiration: encore faut-il savoir ensuite dérouler la pelote - ce que Dreyfus fait ici avec brio pendant près de 500 pages picaresques, souvent tordantes, puis plus sombres et touchantes alors qu'on s'approche de la fin être traversée d'idées scabreuses… Avec les femmes, Paul connaîtra tout: a fiancée farouche le fuira effrayée par sa bizarrerie, a cocotte plus expérimentée trouvera en sa compagnie un plaisir inédit. Sans que cela ne pèse jamais, le roman est, on l'aura compris, une réflexion sur nos pulsions plus ou moins refoulées, sur notre inconscient, sur la part tour à tour lumineuse et noire qui s'agite en nous malgré nous.” L.-HLR, Read more, November 2023.>>>
