An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Page 14
Assuredly the most devoted of your colleagues,
Henri de Parville.
My signature—my own signature!—no doubt about it!
This letter….
Have I, then, written it myself? The ink is still fresh.
What about my American correspondent, though?
What? He has sent me the inhabitant of Mars? But reader, I swear that I have received nothing from him; I declare that I have never seen it with my own eyes.
Then…?
I must have been my own correspondent for six months; all the letters must be from me to myself. Unknown to myself, I must have written to myself by night what I read by day….
Come on, that’s impossible!
I’m dreaming.
And what about the drawings deposited in my desk?
Let’s see, reader, enlightened reader…is it really the case that no one has found a man in an aerolith anywhere on Earth?
Can it be the case that Mr. Greenwight the astronomer does not exist? Can it be that Mr. Newbold the geologist…that Mr. Rink…that Mr. Ziegler…???
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.62
April 1, 1865.
Afterword
Parville, Hetzel and the Origins of French Scientific Romance
The idea to expand Parville’s hoax articles into a book might conceivably been the publisher’s rather than the author’s; Hetzel was always an entrepreneurial publisher, who routinely approached authors with proposals rather than waiting for them to come to him. Whether that was the case or not, though, it is interesting that Un habitant de la planète Mars was issued by Hetzel, at a time when the publisher was actively promoting a variety of what would now be called “science fiction.”
Hetzel’s first major project as an editor, Le Nouveau Magasin des Enfants [The New Magazine for Children], which he had stated for Hachette in 1843, had become remarkable by virtue of his powers of persuasion, which drew such influential writers as George Sand, Charles Nodier, Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Musset and Alphonse Karr into a field into which they might not otherwise have strayed. Hetzel had been exiled to Brussels in 1851 after Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état—like many other fervently Republican literary men he had accepted a government post after the 1848 revolution—and had not returned to Paris until 1859, but he had remained active in the interim, publishing several important works by his fellow exile Victor Hugo. In the early 1860s, however, he was setting out anew to rebuild his career, more determined than he had been before to make a real impact in French publishing, despite the ever-vigilant eyes of the Emperor’s censors.
Although Hetzel had retained a strong interest in the publication of children’s fiction—and in writing for that audience, as P.-J. Stahl—he was in the process of spreading his wings, and his experimentation with fiction celebrating the joys of technological progress was part of that expansion. In 1863 he had persuaded Alexandre Dumas’ struggling protégé, Jules Verne, to develop a series of newspaper articles that he had written about ballooning—alongside the unsuccessful poetry and drama that he then considered to be his true vocation—into an adventure story. Hetzel subsequently signed Verne up to write works on a regular basis for serialization his new periodical, Magasin d’Education et de Récréation [The Magazine of Education and Recreation]—which, unlike his Hachette venture, was intended to provide entertainment for the entire family rather than simply providing material for parents to read to their children—and subsequent publication in volume form. Although much of the fiction Verne subsequently produced for Hetzel was straightforward action-adventure fiction featuring expeditions into remote regions of the globe that were then being explored for the first time, Hetzel encouraged him to make the most of the technological means that were facilitating real exploratory ventures and providing a substantial part of their motivation.
Verne followed up Cinq semaines en ballon (tr. as Five Weeks in a Balloon) with the even more adventurous Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864; tr. as Journey to the Center of the Earth). Hetzel sent a copy of Voyage au centre de la Terre to George Sand, who was inspired by it to write Laura ou le voyage dans le cristal (1865; tr. as Journey within the Crystal) and Verne also followed it up in 1865 with De la Terre à la Lune (tr. as From the Earth to the Moon). In the same period, Camille Flammarion, who had recently published a speculative account of La pluralité des mondes habitées [The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds] (1862) and a fascinating comparative survey of Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels [Real and Imaginary Worlds] (1864) began to use semi-fictional frameworks in his own exercises in popularization, in the works subsequently collected in Récits de l’infini (1865-69; book 1872; tr. as Stories of Infinity). Parville’s work thus took a significant place within the flurry of activity that lent French scientific romance its first significant impetus, creating a thriving genre whose products were routinely responsive to one another where there had previously been little more than a smattering of disconnected works.
The credit due to Hetzel as a founder of the Vernian tradition ultimately came to seem slightly tarnished, partly because his publication of many of Verne’s works in a “family magazine” resulted in his being widely regarded as a writer of juvenile fiction, and partly because he was known to have Verne’s rejected futuristic fantasy Paris au XXème siècle (written 1863; published 1994; tr. as Paris in the 20th Century). It seemed, therefore, that he had initially encouraged Verne’s imagination only to subject it to an unreasonably tight rein thereafter. Voyage au centre de la Terre remained Verne’s most imaginatively ambitious work, and after writing Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) and Autour la Lune (1870; tr. as Around the Moon), he mostly settled into the writing of more conventional adventure stories, with only occasional excursions into science fiction.
When Verne’s futuristic fantasia was finally published in 1994, however, it turned out that Hetzel had been quite right to reject it, in spite of the striking quality of some of its technological anticipations, because it was so relentlessly downbeat and peevishly hostile to technological progress. No matter how carefully confined Hetzel’s notion of scientific romance was, he was certainly an enthusiastic advocate of exploration and progress, and he judged—correctly—that what was, in essence, a blatantly self-pitying reaction to Verne’s earlier literary failures would not assist his future career in the slightest. Parville’s stratagem for dealing with the possibility of life on Mars, on the other hand, fitted in reasonably well with Hetzel’s restrained prospectus, and Hetzel might well have entertained considerable hopes for it, until he actually saw the complete manuscript. Parville, alas—like many scientists—turned out to be profoundly uncomfortable with the narrative techniques of fiction, and simply could not do what Verne was able to do so brilliantly in transmuting the substance of popular journalism into the substance of popular fiction.
Even with the residual publicity of the successful hoax to assist it, Parville’s profoundly awkward book had no chance of scoring as big a hit with the contemporary audience as Verne’s adventure stories—but that does not make it uninteresting, especially to modern readers; in addition to the originality of its central idea, which establishes it at the very head of a long tradition of fabular discourses on life on Mars, it provides a remarkable panoramic snapshot of a particular world-view that seemed perfectly viable in mid-19th century France, and was tacitly to underlie and shape the distinctive development of French scientific romance. It was probably not an influential book in itself—indeed, it probably had less influence on subsequent writers of French scientific romance than Parville’s non-fictional writings, some of which appear to have been used as source-materials by Albert Robida—but the ideas it summarizes certainly retained their influence. It was, therefore, a significant foundation-stone of the nascent genre, and fully deserves to be recognized as such.
Parville, the Popularization of Science and the Plurality of Worlds
In the late 1870s
, the relevant volume of the first edition of Larousse did not hesitate to say that Parville was already the most highly-esteemed vulgarisateur [popularizer] of science of his generation, but he was not the most popular then or thereafter; that accolade always belonged to his eternal rival, Camille Flammarion. Flammarion’s reputation and esteem within the scientific community were, however, somewhat undermined by his insistent Spiritualist faith, which routinely intruded into his heroic efforts to popularize the fruits of the science of astronomy. Parville permitted a similar intrusion, briefly and somewhat unexpectedly, in Un habitant de la planète Mars, but he construed “spiritualist” in its philosophical sense—as the antithesis of “materialist”—rather than with reference to the newly-fashionable religion imported from America, for which Flammarion served as an advocate and propagandist. Parville was careful not to allow any confusion to arise thereafter between his modest version of spiritualism, as summarized by Mr. Ziegler, and Flammarion’s, in which communication with disembodied souls via mediums was a matter of routine. In spite of his somewhat archaic faith in “magnetic somnambulism”, therefore, Parville thus preserved his reputation as a scientist much more securely.
Oddly enough, even though Flammarion was much more given to producing cosmic visions than Parville, he never managed to produce anything quite as succinctly thorough as Parville’s brief foray into fiction. The longest of the Récits de l’infini, Lumen, which was expanded for publication as an independent book in 1887, uses a dialogue form that is just as awkward as Parville’s, and eventually covers more narrative ground, but it is considerably more long-winded and the greater part of its bulk in devoted to a narrower range of problems. The heart of Flammarion’s cosmic vision, and his primary narrative concern, was the notion of cosmic palingenesis—the possibility that immortal souls might be serially reincarnated on different worlds—but Parville was careful to stop short of any such assertion, or even the serious consideration of any such possibility, and it was therefore unnecessary for him to attempt any narrative description of the cosmic odysseys of questing souls. Parville did, however, share Flammarion’s considerable fascination with the debate about the plurality of worlds, which had always held a particular significance in French intellectual history, and the separation of their views took place against a substantial common background.
Parville’s interests and ideas also had some significant points in common, and equally significant contrasts, with those of the leading English popularizer of science in the mid-19th century, Robert Hunt. Hunt had made an earlier start, and he died some time before Parville, but he was heavily involved in the founding and development of England’s first dedicated mining school and he played the same role with respect to the English Great Exhibitions as Parville played with respect to the French Expositions Universelles. Hunt, too, dabbled in fiction in the early part of his career, producing the novel Panthea: The Spirit of Nature (1849); like Parville, however, he decided that he was unsuited to such work and gave it up in order to concentrate on more earnest endeavors.
Panthea employs a more orthodox narrative form than Un habitant de la planète Mars or Lumen, but its core is a cosmic vision, albeit one that relies far more on geology and biology than astronomy. Like Flammarion, Hunt had been influenced by Humphry Davy, who had also included a cosmic vision in a collection of philosophical dialogues, Consolations in Travel (1830), but Hunt refrained from the kind of extraterrestrial flight of fancy featured in Davy’s work, preferring to concentrate on the composition of the Earth and its biology. When he wrote Panthea Hunt was—like Davy—a confirmed Creationist, although he subsequently read The Origin of Species and became a fervent admirer of Charles Darwin. To an even greater extent than Camille Flammarion, however, Parville continued for some while after 1859 to think of evolution in strictly Lamarckian terms; there is no trace of the notion of natural selection in Un habitant de la planète Mars, in spite of its sympathy for Pouchet’s ideas and Mr. Ziegler’s insistent contradiction of Pasteur’s supposed disproof of them.
Hunt was not alone in refusing to follow up the extraterrestrial aspects of Davy’s vision; the genre of British scientific romance that got under way in 1871 remained mostly Earthbound for 20 years, obsessed with future wars and extrapolations of anti-Darwinian anxiety. The fact that Parville, in spite of having no interest in cosmic palingenesis, was nevertheless drawn to consider extraterrestrial possibilities was undoubtedly due to the fall of the Orgueil meteorite, but the fact that the Orgueil meteorite had such an imaginative impact in France, as well as a literal one, is itself symptomatic of the fact that the question of the plurality of worlds seemed much more important in France than it did in England. It is worth noting that even Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka, which is primarily concerned with the imaginative impact of astronomical discoveries, has very little to say about the possible population of other worlds—and American scientific romance similarly remained Earthbound until the 1890s.
What Parville’s cosmic vision does share with Poe’s is its entrancement by analogies between the macrocosm and the microcosm and images of harmonic eternal recurrence. It is possible that Parville had read Charles Baudelaire’s French translation of Eureka, which was published in 1864, before writing Un inhabitant de la planète Mars, and, if so, might have taken some inspiration from it—but whether he did or not, the most significant precursor of Parville’s book was undoubtedly a much earlier work, already established as a classic of French scientific literature and still regularly reprinted in the 19th century: Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686; tr. as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds).
The debate about the plurality of worlds had begun as an abstruse theological dispute. The early church fathers tacitly accepted the Ptolemaic model of “the world” endorsed by Aristotle, which placed the Earth at the core of a sequence of concentric spheres containing the Sun, the Moon, the planets and—at the outer circumference—the “fixed stars”. This was widely accepted as the whole of Creation, but some theologians—most notably Origen (c185-254) in his pioneering attempt to compile an encyclopedic account of theology, De Principiis—felt that it was an insult to God’s omnipotence to asset that he had only created one world, and that he might, if not must, have created many more. Because Origen was opposed in this matter by the ultimately more prestigious St. Augustine, the idea of the plurality of worlds was set aside and largely forgotten for more than a thousand years, but it was revived in 1440 by Nicholas of Cusa in De Docta Ignorantia, which proposed that the universe ought to be as infinite as God Himself, and therefore ought to contain an infinite number of worlds of equal status, of which the Ptolemaic world-system would merely be one.
The renewal of the argument was initially regarded as an arcane item of scholastic controversy of no practical import, essentially akin to such notorious hypothetical questions as that of how many angels might be accommodated on the head of a pin (another question to which Parville makes oblique reference, with his tongue in his cheek). Its nature and significance were transformed, however, when Copernicus popularized the heliocentric model of the solar system, which relegated the Earth from the center of Creation to the status of one of several planetary bodies, all of which might qualify as “worlds” in their own right. Nicholas of Cusa had not been accused of heresy, but the followers of Copernicus were soon declared unorthodox, and when astronomical evidence began to mount up that Copernicus was right, the debate became ferocious.
Giordano Bruno, who suggested in 1584 on the basis of “the principle of plenitude” that God must not only have populated all of the worlds in our solar system but all the worlds in all the other solar systems in the infinite universe—because their creation would otherwise have been pointlessly wasteful—was burned at the stake, although his reputation as a martyr to science was soon eclipsed by Galileo, who had actual telescopic discoveries to oppose to the Church’s technologically-unaugmented faith. John Kepler and Christian Huygens added further astronomica
l observations favoring the new version of the plurality of worlds; significantly, both of them attempted to use fictional frameworks to dramatize their idea and make them more readily understandable, thus launching a parallel literary tradition. Kepler’s posthumously-published Somnium [Dream] (1634) and Huygens’ Kosmotheoros (1698; tr. into both French and English as Cosmotheoros) provided the foundation-stones of a genre of cosmic visions, to which Humphry Davy, Robert Hunt, Edgar Allan Poe, Camille Flammarion and Henri de Parville—not to mention Félix-Archimede Pouchet—were eventually to make their significant contributions.
The plurality of worlds debate was further popularized in the French language by Pierre Borel in Discours nouveau prouvant la pluralité des mondes [A New Discourse Proving the Plurality of Worlds] (1657), but it was Fontenelle’s much more elegant Entretiens that put the issue firmly on the national cultural agenda. The “conversations” are actually a series of educational lecturers delivered by a savant to a curious young lady, and the arguments they set out are as clever as they are succinct; their conscientiously light-hearted and witty surface provided a polite mask for their highly controversial subject matter, which was still likely to attract condemnation from a Romanist Church sufficiently powerful in France to place its proponents in danger.
Fontenelle’s best-seller was followed shortly thereafter by the fragmentary publication of an expurgated version of Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’autre monde (1662; tr. under various titles, most definitively as The Other World, although the individual parts are far better known as A Voyage to the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun), a far more flamboyant work of fiction championing the same ideas and subjecting opponents thereof to scathingly sarcastic criticism. Unfortunately, the work remained fragmentary, most of its second part and all of the third being lost, although the parts that were published were eventually reissued in unexpurgated versions. Both Fontenelle and Cyrano drew extensively on Le monde [The World] (1632), a relatively informal work by René Descartes, which presented a more thoroughgoing opposition to the Church’s Aristotelianism than Copernicanism provided in isolation—but Descartes had abandoned the popularization of science after writing it and retreated from publishing in French to orthodox scholarly publication in Latin of more abstract philosophical notions.