Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  In a sense, the mention of Moulin-Quignon is part of a script, one already written by science, that the novel’s adventures follow. These scientists are not writing their own exploratory text; they follow the traces of Arne Saknussemm, whose path is marked by ancient runes that they merely decipher. Future voyagers, likewise, will have Axel’s account to follow, which, he tells us in the end, he has published as Voyage au centre de la terre. Moreover, the names these explorers give to places they “discover,” like the Lidenbrock sea, only rename what they think is Arne’s itinerary; they are places future voyagers will rename in turn, creating a palimpsest rather than a terrain of new discovery. Even more deeply preinscribed in their journey is the text of anthropological positivism, written by Cuvier and his followers, and elaborated by the scientific establishment of Verne’s time. As their raft moves offshore, the two explorers observe giant plants that offer “l’aspect de la Terre aux premiers siècles de sa formation” (what the Earth looked like in the first centuries of its formation [186]). However, as they continue, the very nature of their observations reveals that they are not discovering a new evolutionary process but instead describing, category by category, a taxonomy already written down by Cuvier. They view plants, then giant fish, then a battle of sea reptiles, moving in sequence up the ladder of forms, from amphibians to large land animals. Cuvier’s way leads “naturally” to something that fills the human niche. So we are not surprised to find a “man” striding through this predetermined landscape.

  Even so, the reader sees that Axel and Lidenbrock are physically there, in a strange and inexplicable place, among what are admittedly never-before-seen prehistoric specimens. Yet, to avoid the shock of the unknown, they continue to mistake the map for the territory. Instead of taking a fresh look at new life forms before their eyes, they imagine encounters in the flesh with creatures that fit contemporary paleontologists’ theoretical reconstructions: “Peut-être rencontrerons-nous quelques-uns de ces sauriens que la science a su refaire avec un bout d’ossement ou de cartilage?” (Perhaps we will meet up with some of those saurians that science has been able to reconstruct from a piece of bone or of cartilage? [188]) In terms of evolutionary theory, they turn things upside down: instead of locating the origin of species in a natural process, they relocate it in templates that human reason has constructed out of fossil remains. If their voyage proves anything, it is that mind creates matter, not the other way around.

  It does not matter that Lidenbrock does not reach the center of the physical Earth. Verne’s explorers carry that center with them, for the center of Verne’s Earth is the anthrosphere. This is what unfolds from Axel’s famous dream. Bakhoun can write a chapter in the history of humankind because he has led humankind to victory over an evolutionary enemy that, had it prevailed, would have ended humankind’s story right there. In Verne, Cuvier’s “written” history of Earth appears to block all attempts by observational science to expand the knowledge of physical processes. In like manner, the entire history of human evolution appears to be already “written,” physically embedded in Axel’s being, to be summoned forth whole, in his waking “dream,” at his particular moment in humankind’s existence.

  We think here of Carl Sagan’s “dragons of Eden,” which represent the idea that the totality of the evolutionary process from reptile to homo sapiens is wired into the cortices of every human brain, and is accessed in the present by dreaming, which subtends the rational mind.12 Axel exclaims: “tout ce monde fossile renaît dans mon imagination” (the entirety of this fossil world is reborn in my imagination [189]). In the immediacy of his present-tense account, Axel sees his entire being, mind and body, enfolding all of history, bounded by Earth, with mankind at its apex: “Toute la vie de la Terre se résume en moi” (all life forms of the Earth are summed up in me [190]). His dream is a résumé, one that collapses the evolutionary time scale, making it coterminous with his present human form. By quite literally assuming the prehistoric past, Axel ensures that no subsequent discovery will take our knowledge of evolution in any direction other than what culminates in nineteenth-century rational mankind, the prime example of which is Axel. The idea that any example of contemporary mankind contains its entire evolutionary history is everywhere in Verne’s narrative, down to such insignificant details as the description of Hans the Islander: “Son masque effrayant est celui d’un homme antediluvien, contemporain des ichthyosaures et des mégatheriums” (the terrifying mask of his face is that of antediluvian man, contemporary to ichthyosauruses and metatheriums [203]).

  Axel’s dream in a sense preempts any scientific finds he and Lidenbrock will make. In fact, it sets the model for a pattern whereby seemingly incontrovertible facts are captured and enfolded into the human status quo. Lidenbrock and Axel, for example, discover a huge field of fossil remains. It is immediately converted, however, into an “ossuary,” one so vast it must be tended by multiples of an all-too-familiar human scientist: “L’existence de mille Cuvier n’aurait pas suffi à recomposer les squelettes des êtres organisés couchés dans ce magnifique ossuaire” (the existence of a thousand Cuviers would not have sufficed to reconstitute the skeletons of the organic beings lying in this magnificent ossuary [216]). In like manner, the discovery of a human skull among these fossils does not bring Lidenbrock to envision alternate theories, future possibilities. Instead he imagines himself in a university lecture hall, engaging in controversy with fellow scientists. The fact that he has before him tangible proof “que l’espèce humaine eût été contemporaine des animaux de l’époque quaternaire” (that the human species had been contemporary to animals of the Quaternary) leads only to more academic disputations. Even when he comes across an entire human fossil, the professor cannot stop his imaginary, past tense lecture. He taunts his “rivals”: “Les Saint-Thomas de la paléontologie, s’ils étaient là, le toucheraient du doigt, et seraient bien forcés de reconnaître . . .” (the Saint Thomases of paleontology, had they been there, would have touched it with a finger, and would have been forced to admit . . .). Lidenbrock gets so carried away that this fossil, before his eyes, turns into a cadaver his colleagues are invited to see and touch: “Le cadavre est là . . . vous pouvez le voir, le toucher” (The cadaver is there . . . you can see it, touch it [221].) Just as Axel’s dream contracts all evolutionary history to his living present, so Lidenbrock converts his amazing find into a specimen from some contemporary autopsy room.

  Having witnessed Lidenbrock’s fossil resurrection, the reader is less surprised when this “cadaver,” before the daydreaming scientists’ (and the reader’s) eyes, actually comes to life. It might seem that when Axel and Lidenbrock come upon a living version of their “spécimen de l’homme quaternaire” (specimen of Quaternary man), they enter the realm of Rosny’s narratives of alternate prehistory. Indeed, at this moment, Verne comes as close as he ever does to confronting science with the unknown. His protagonists immediately swerve, however, away from scientific analysis to mythic perception. Instead of envisioning a new future, they evoke a perpetual past. Axel describes them as entering a physical realm that, paradoxically, is no longer subject to the laws of physics: “Par un phénomène que je ne puis expliquer . . . la lumière éclairait uniformément les diverses faces des objets.” (Through some phenomenon I cannot explain . . . the light illuminated the various facets of objects in a uniform manner [224]). Instead of writing a new text in the history of science, they fall back on another script already written: that of the fantastic and its famous literary proponent E. T. A. Hoffmann.

  Verne’s scientists, with amazingly new phenomena before their eyes, do little more than pay lip service to the fact that this is a situation “à confondre la raison des classificateurs les plus ingénieux” (worthy of confounding the most ingenious classifiers [225]). Axel’s response is to turn to human cultural convention, to invoke mankind’s endless longing for a Golden Age. Verne’s protagonists, even though in possession of proof that a new past might lead to an alternate human futu
re, seem to take refuge in a literary vision of an unchanging present. There is irony, however, in their evocation of this golden age. For however much the surface glitters, the core itself appears to be fallen. The Latin epithet Axel throws at the giant early man they have found, “Immanis pectoris custos, immanior ipse,” rephrases Vergil’s Eclogue 5:44: “formois pectoris custos, formosior ipse.” Vergil’s speaker is Daphnis, who refers to himself as “herdsman of a beautiful flock, himself more beautiful,” lines that reveal vanity at the heart of the bucolic world. Axel’s corruption of the text, by substituting “savage” for “beautiful,” places this being lower on the ladder of cultural evolution. In the face of the unknown, experimental science—in the guise of his archetypal scientist-apprentice Axel—defers in Verne to a “humanistic” response, and by doing so, avoids the questions Rosny might ask, questions that challenge the myth of humankind’s central position in the earthly scheme of things. For here, at Verne’s prime moment of evolutionary promise, scientific investigation loses itself in a web of intertextuality that only reaffirms the conventional ties between mankind and nature on which Verne’s worldview rests.

  To describe Verne’s difference with Rosny, we need only imagine the various ways Rosny might have presented Verne’s moment of underground “contact.” Axel’s discovery of the underground world could have led to impending struggle between rival evolutionary lines. There could have been an entire “race” of antediluvian giants, poised like the Xipéhuz to reclaim the Earth above. If we take their point of view, the Xipéhuz too lived in Edenic harmony with their world; they too are confronted by Western rationalism. The difference is that while Verne’s scientists are never allowed to engage the other “world,” entering and leaving it without making any meaningful contact with the beings that inhabit it, Rosny’s Bakhoun engages, studies, and ultimately defeats, though not without regret, what is understood as an evolutionary rival. Or Rosny, as in Un autre monde, might have presented the giant as member of a mutant species. He might even have told the story from the giant’s point of view. Surely, in a hypothetical Rosny text, human scientists would not have given in to anthropocentric fears. At the very least, they would seek ways to understand it, and possibly communicate with it. They would hope to make scientific use of its ways of “seeing things,” as, from an evolutionary perspective, its faculties would necessarily have evolved along a different yet parallel track with those of human beings. Or, finally, Rosny could have recast Verne’s explorers as figures like Targ, in La Mort de la Terre, driven by physical necessity as well as scientific curiosity. Their discovery of the subterranean world out of time could, like Targ’s discovery of water, give humanity a reprieve from evolutionary forces like dwindling resources. Or even, if we follow Axel’s reasoning, the bucolic island and ample underground sea might provide, this time, a millennialist reprieve to Rosny’s apocalyptic vision of the Last Man, a place where a parallel human species is living out a moment of calm before its end. What for Axel was a static golden age for Rosny would be an interlude within evolutionary time, itself later doomed to perish in time’s inexorable march.

  These comparisons mark the limits of Verne’s scientific speculation. In doing so, they make his difference from Rosny clear. Rosny’s evolutionary science is able to look beyond humankind and human reason as the culminating life form. Verne’s science, despite his celebration of the promise of experiment, does not move beyond the limits of its essentially anthropocentric Cartesian worldview. In fact, Verne’s literary genius proves a curious one: he makes brilliant and exciting use of science’s promise to engage the unknown, but he does so, ultimately, to celebrate the failure of science to engage that unknown. He takes his adventurers to the threshold of new discovery. They glimpse new natural phenomena, even new forms of human life. Then, invariably, acts of “fatality” intervene to cancel science’s hope of discovery, thus preserving Mankind’s centrality in the order of things. Verne’s positivist science remains in thrall to an anthropocentric vision, whose “evolutionary” ladder is Comte’s ascending stages of man, and at whose apex sits Scientific Man as Verne depicts him. How different is Rosny’s “man”: the new, ecological human, aware of himself as an interactive part of a vaster, interconnected whole of physical forces, organic and inorganic. Rosny’s world is the much vaster one of life in all its possible forms. It is a world where moments of equilibrium are invariably caught up in tides of transformation, where all things, including our sacred concept of humanity, are subject to change and entropy.

  Rosny and Wells

  The Wells-Rosny connection might appear to be easier to define. They are of the same generation. They both show a keen interest in experimental science; both were exposed to the theories of Darwin. But Rosny is not simply a “French Wells.” Though they share common ground, their fictional approaches to the material of evolution differ greatly. Yet because of this shared background, close comparison is possible between the novellas presented in this book and stories Wells wrote during his “scientific romance” period. We will discover that Rosny’s use of science is more uncompromising than that of Wells, his extrapolations bolder. Verne’s famous remark about Wells—“mais il invente!” (but he invents)—seems to denote Wells’s more speculative use of science. In comparison with Rosny, however, the “inventions” of Wells, as well as those of Verne, reveal their anthropocentric limitations.

  Wells wrote at least one prehistoric tale. He envisioned possible human mutations, and wrote short stories in which human beings acquire new senses that allow them to perceive other dimensions or even worlds. His novel The Time Machine envisions the end of the same Earth Rosny presents in La Mort de la Terre. Yet Wells’s treatment of these bold topics, compared with Rosny’s, appears surprisingly conservative. Rosny’s Targ is limited to small areas of the Earth because resources elsewhere will not sustain life. Wells’s Traveler is limited only by his own consciousness: by a theory of time that sees movement only in terms of his mental activity. He goes to 802,701 CE, but remains in terms of space confined to Richmond, and his own laboratory. His scientific investigations in 802,701 display no interest in venturing beyond this narrow area, no curiosity about the unknown wider world. Brought back to his own time and location in the end, the Traveler is oddly out of place in any world but his own. He apparently wore a Victorian day coat and socks (on his return “tattered, bloodstained”) on his travels to the death of the Earth. Later, on the journey to the past from which he never returns, he takes a knapsack and vintage camera, like any tourist of his era. Overriding all else in Wells’s novels and stories are the dimensions of irony and satire, as contemporary mankind faces, in inadequate manner, its past, future, or the possibility of an altered present. In contrast, there is neither satire nor irony in Rosny’s austere extrapolations, whose protagonists are always different from the reader. They are beings of a recreated past, an altered present, or a constructed future. The very nature of their fictional worlds is change, evolution in the broadest sense. Rosny takes a sober look at the irreversible workings of the physical world, seeking to envision how humans and other species might evolve within their dynamic limits. To explore the Wells-Rosny comparison, we will examine analogous works by each writer in each of the three areas represented by the stories in this volume: mutations; prehistory; finality.

  Victorian Mutants: Wellsian Analogues to Un autre monde

  In several stories, all written around the time Rosny was writing Un autre monde, Wells examines the question of mutated or transformed perception. Before we compare these stories with Rosny’s work, however, we must contextualize them. What was Wells’s audience, and how might that audience have influenced the way he depicted science and its workings? Wells published his stories, and serialized his scientific romances, in London magazines during the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign. Their readers were, in large part, the same smug, Anglocentric middle-class citizens Wells satirized, indeed detested. Yet it is their world of polite manners and bourgeois ord
er that provides the context for his tales of strange mutations and astounding events.

  The Parisian milieu in which Rosny’s novellas and novels appeared was not any less bourgeois. But he had several audiences. The audience for his naturalist novels was well defined. The audience for his tales of scientific extrapolation was much vaguer; in fact, as we see reflected in the bafflement of readers like Edmond de Goncourt and others, Rosny was obliged to create his audience. This was the case for “prehistoric” fiction, where an audience soon became familiar with its formulas. But during the first two decades of his literary career, it does not appear that Rosny wanted to write for a particular audience, or to cater to any contemporary frame of values in order to contextualize his scientific tales. On the contrary, estrangement appears to be the effect he sought, an estrangement wherein a phenomenon such as mutated senses could be studied with dispassionate objectivity, outside the barriers of lower-middle-class incomprehension. We see this in Un autre monde. It is a tale of contemporary life, but rather than giving it a Parisian setting, Rosny situates his story in the backwater of Dutch-speaking Flanders, a place so isolated that the protagonist has to specify its location in his first spoken sentence: “I am a native of Gelderland. Our patrimony amounts to a few acres of briar and yellow water.” Spontaneous genetic mutations are certainly less credible in a London drawing room than in this out-of-the-way place, among a forgotten part of civilized humanity. In contrast, Wells’s mutations occur in a milieu of small shopkeepers, middle-class teachers, urban homeowners, amateur scientists. Wells’s narrators belong to this milieu. And, in conformity with their milieu, all of them display a similar skeptical attitude toward these strange or uncanny occurrences, even in cases where science has “plausible” explanations for them. When something unusual happens in Wells’s stories, it begins and ends in this well-mannered world.13