Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  Scientific marvel fiction is, in fact, the form of contemporary literature that embodies the most philosophy—which is philosophy set on a stage, logic dramatized. Born of science and reasoning, it attempts to advance one with the aid of the other, and it appears to us, in fact—with its noble instructive and moralistic tendencies, and its immediate or eventual educative effects—to be one of the finest creations of the human mind: a great work of art, which only seems small to those who are to distant from it by virtue of an optical illusion, and which can only appear childish to puerile minds.

  It is impossible for us to follow every author through every one of his works here; I shall therefore take it as my task to indicate the general principles that such an inspection would obtain in the final analysis, the results of which might almost constitute a sort of manual for the writers of scientific marvel fiction, ridiculous as that idea is, if emulating Poe did not require some unspecifiable stroke of luck or instinct to arrest a mind that is in search of a treasure’s location in a labyrinth, through which logic can only guide it without being able to say: “there it is.”

  If we consider the universe as being divided into three parts, corresponding to the three Classical degrees of assent, there are three sorts of things: those of which we are ignorant, those that we doubt, and those that we know. The first two categories—whose field shrinks as our science evolves, but which will doubtless always exist, because we shall never know everything, and whose field, moreover, appears to us to be incessantly increasing, because science has less effect in informing us of the nature of things than in making new discoveries on the subject of which it can tell us nothing—form the domain of the scientific marvelous. It is from the world of things unknown or doubtful that it must extract the substance of its various realizations, and not from the world of things known and certain. For science is incapable of showing us any marvel, in the proper sense of the word. Far from it; it is the great assassin of miracles. There is no marvel save in mystery. Every prodigy ceases to be one as soon as we penetrate its actual causes and its true nature, as soon as it passes from the province of ignorance or that of doubt into that of science.

  We are, therefore, forced to seek our Romantic themes in the unknown and the uncertain. As we are concerned with scientific marvels, however, how can we reconcile the seemingly contradictory demand that we take our subject matter from both within science and from that which is not science? We act exactly as the scientist does who wishes to tackle the problems of the unknown; we apply the methods of scientific investigation to the unknown and the dubious.

  But how, then do our imaginary solutions differ from the veritable solutions of science? In other words, since we do not know for sure how to make true discoveries, what distinguishes the reasoning of the scientific marvelous from scientific reasoning? It is the voluntary introduction, into the chain of propositions, of one or several false50 elements, whose nature is to determine, in consequence, the appearance of the marvelous being, object or fact—“marvelous” meaning that which seems to us to be presently marvelous, for the future might demonstrate that the supposedly defective element was not defective at all, and that our scientific marvel was purely and simply scientific, as involuntary as Monsieur Jourdain’s prose.51 The advancement of science might demonstrate that our fallacy is not false at all; but, for the moment at which we are writing, it is. Let us observe, in passing, that the passionate interest and disquieting verisimilitude of a story is in inverse proportion to the number of false elements that are insinuated into it. The fewer false elements there are, the more secure logic lends an effective air of verity to the work. The majority of scientific marvel stories, therefore, limit themselves to breaking one only natural law and thus exposing, by its modification, its relationship to the other, uninjured, laws.

  This general procedure for constructing the framework of a scientific marvel story accommodates infinitely various forms. For example, we can assume certain scientific hypotheses as certainties, and deduce their consequences rigorously. The habitation of Mars taken for granted and combined with what study of the planet tells us or suggests to us: The War of the Worlds. We can also confuse two ideas, lending certain properties of one to the other—a subterfuge that permits us to apply to the latter some system of investigation impracticable in reality but which would help us solve a problem by supposing it to be solved. Qualities of space lent to time: The Time Machine. We can also apply methods of scientific exploration to objects, beings or phenomena created in the unknown by rational methods of analogy and calculation, by logical presumption. Study of an extrahuman population: Le Peuple du pôle.

  Here I shall open a new parenthesis. It is a matter of launching science into the heart of the unknown and not of imagining that it has finally accomplished some project or other that is in fact in the process of execution. It is a matter, for example, of having the idea of a machine for exploring time, not of supposing that a fictional character has constructed a submarine at the very moment when authentic engineers are on the track of that discovery. If I insist on this point it is because that is exactly where the difference lies between Wells and Jules Verne, who are so often confused. Jules Verne has not written a single word of scientific marvel fiction.52 In his time, science was pregnant with certain new discoveries; he limited himself to supposing them delivered before they actually were. He merely anticipated discoveries in the process of gestation. The most one can say of his problems is that there remains one single unknown to be extracted. And while we are on the subject, let us hollow an even greater gulf between Wells and Albert Robida—who, in his excessively famous Le Vingtième siècle, has only supposed that some of our least redeeming and most superfluous desiderata have been fulfilled, without bothering to obtain that result in a coherent fashion, or to draw the slightest consequence therefrom.53

  Such, therefore, is the elementary structure of all works of scientific marvel fiction, whether or not it preserves an appearance of literary elegance, even when it seems to be the dramatic development of a paradox, or the concrete transposition of a metaphor. And if we take our analysis further, the passage from the known to the unknown, the perpetual coming-and-going between science and ignorance—so rapidly executed that the to antinomies seem to melt into a single supernatural whole—appears to us most frequently in the form of a syllogism, one of whose premises is voluntarily false.

  A scientific marvel story is always supported by a fallacy,54 and, most of the time, it only requires a single fallacy placed at the beginning of the work, an initial deviation of the maternal idea, to conserve its double character of the marvelous and the scientific, without the author being obliged, in order to obtain that result, to commit any other fraudulent reasoning in the course of his endeavor. Often, the most rigid mathematical demonstration is capable of adaptation to a long procession of facts that are linked together by a forceful logic, while drawing further and further away from the point at which the intentional error was perpetrated.

  Oh, that weak point, that phantom link between the world of certainty and the world of conjecture—it would be interesting to study the ruses employed by writers to dissimulate it! There is nothing more specious than their stratagems for concealing the equivocal idea’s entrance on stage and for succeeding in presenting, with axiomatically fallacious evidence, the most amazing propositions, and nothing more curious than the patient skill with which, little by little, they twist a chain of reasoning and falsify a judgment, with imperceptible thrusts of doctored common sense. There are also trickeries of that sort in which pleasure is obtained from allowing oneself to be drawn into them, and which we gladly pardon in gratitude for the interest of the work and its flagrant utility.

  There is no need to demonstrate that scientific marvel fiction provides salutary reading when it involves the development of a social theory, however utopian it might be, or when it constitutes a satirical romance. Those sorts of works always have self-evident reformist or moralistic intentions, and th
ey are the immediate beneficent effects of scientific marvel fiction—to which one might adjoin the indubitable instruction acquired from it, given that every work of that sort contains a veritable course in paleontology, optics, chemistry or surgery, etc., and a rather unusual course, since, while recalling the elements of a science, the author goes into one part of it in depth and indulges himself, in addition, in the metaphysics of that science: a matter too often neglected.

  There is another profitable consequence, however. Having noticed in a large number of people, after reading such a work, a sort of meditative astonishment, having interrogated them about the cause to which they attribute it, and having questioned by own sentiments, I had been led to this conclusion: that, after reading The Invisible Man or “In the Abyss,” for example, we no longer see things from the same angle. And, having asked what relationships have been modified, what proportions changed, I have perceived that the confused disturbance of our judgments comes, in the final analysis, from the effect of the scientific marvelous on the consciousness of progress.

  In using the term progress here I am referring to the popular idea of progress. What is it? What idea of progress does the majority of human beings have? Setting aside any amelioration of the moral and political order—which rids us of a host of divergences of opinion with regard to questions that the great majority of minds never even ask and which, in consequence, have nothing to do with the spontaneous notion of the concept immediately evoked by the word—I think that what is commonly meant by “progress” is: the sum of human acquisitions considered at a particular moment, by comparison with another moment. This definition is loose enough to content the majority—which is the main thing, in this instance—and it seems to me an appropriate expression of the kinetic representation that the average person means by progress when he uses the word: it is the continual enrichment of human knowledge.

  But where does humankind obtain its consciousness of progress? From the material realization of its goals, and by the practical manifestations that are its apparent criteria, which constitute the only indices of it perceptible to the masses. In the popular mind, therefore, progress is an essentially utilitarian notion. Ordinary people demand that the sciences should be fecund in useful discoveries. Any science that has furnished all that it seems able to give in this respect, appears to them to be sufficiently developed; they do not see the necessity of pursing its study further. Any science that does not give the appearance of leading to an augmentation of our power or wellbeing appears to be superfluous; it is gently mocked, like a poem—sometime in the not-too-distant past, astronomy began to be nothing but the pleasant pastime of dreamers.

  We have, however, contented ourselves with rather limited ambitions. If one thinks about it, it is a matter of only wanting discoveries that protect us from some material diminution, or which procure us some physical or physiological augmentation. These inventions thus abolish something harmful or produce something good; some are negative, like the cure for rabies; others, like the telegraph, are positive. Anything that is capable of intensifying our activity or extending our sphere of action in time and space, and anything that can oppose its restriction, engenders the conclusion in the popular mind that “this is progress”—progress of a more or less considerable magnitude.

  Indeed, still with respect to the popular mind, the “benefactor of humanity” is the chemist of genius who finds a remedy for a reputedly-incurable infection; the hero, however—the almost-divine human continuing the work of the God of Genesis—is the engineer who equips our body with some kind of extension, whether it be an artificial augmentation of our muscular power or an artificial extension of our perceptive faculties. Such an item is a kind of orthopedic reinforcement of our physique, or a prosthesis ameliorating our physiology.

  The fabrication of the first axe was the first discovery marking a progress in the eyes of primitive troglodytes, because, with its flint blade and wooden shaft, he brandished a deadlier fist at the end of a longer arm. The successive dispositions of the sling, the bow, the crossbow, the arquebus and the rifle formed stages of the same progression, in the course of which our fists became heavier and heavier and our arms were incessantly extended. Humans have realized their dreams, have seen the tales expressed by their desires become history, since climbing into an automobile is to don the ogre’s boots, and firing a cannon is to put on seven-league gloves.

  We similarly consider as evidence of progress, along with that class of machines summoned to the aid of our muscles, those which, having the objective of correcting the weakness of our sensory organs, are to those organs what stilts are to legs: the microscope, heightening sight; the telescope and the telephone, amplifying the power of our retinas and eardrums immeasurably and suppressing distance for them; the phonograph, which annuls time and distance in auditory matters; the cinematograph, a machine for the ocular exploration of the past; and other resounding discoveries whose consequence is to endow us, according to our pleasure, with the eyes or the ears of Titans. Among other dynamic contributions, our greatest desire has been to be allocated immeasurable legs, for the rapidity of transportation is as important to us as the multiplication of means of transport.

  Ultimately, the addition of wings, realized by the invention of dirigibles, and especially of airplanes, seems to us to be the acme of progress, because its introduces an entirely novel means of displacement—more of a novelty, perhaps, than it seems to be at first glance. In fact, all the positive discoveries anterior to that one resulted in the further development of one of the ancestral abilities that we have possessed since the bestial origin of our species, and, in consequence, only ameliorated in humans certain faculties whose monopoly was shared with various other animals. Using a telescope is seeing further, to see very far—which are merely the comparative and the superlative of seeing; it is seeing better than an eagle, whose normal sight is nevertheless better than ours. Diving in a submarine, or a diving suit, or even naked, is still diving, as our lake-dwelling ancestors dived; and is not rolling around in a hundred-horsepower automobile simply traveling along the ground, even if it is traveling faster than a pithecanthropus along the pathways of a pliocene forest? Some of our most admired machines are thus limited to the refinement of swimming, and others to the refinement of walking.

  Aerial navigation, by contrast, projects us into an element previously inaccessible, for whose access we have no natural motor, our arms being capable of becoming fins, but not wings. It makes us masters of an immense virgin territory, ardently coveted since the most distant era, since we first understood that it was free, that it was open to our maneuvers and offered nothing to the assault of human beings but the rampart of their impuissance. It finally answers our millennia-old desire, exacerbated by the eternal temptation exerted above our foreheads and the feverish expectation of a more profound knowledge capable of its satisfaction. It makes us sovereigns of a space vaster than the surface of the globe, so beautiful in its blueness and purity—further enhanced in being a zone forbidden but promised, in that our ancient myths already celebrate the flight of mortals through the sky—that we have lodged our divinities and our paradises there, and the shoulders of our seraphim and the ancient genies of Egypt deploy the wingspans of a swan or an ibis.

  Wings! For centuries on end we have been uttering that cry, which had become tiresomely mundane by force of repetition. Aerial navigation has given us wings, and thus made us completely equal to the birds, the only animals which, in the opinion of our pride, remained superior to jus in some respect. It therefore symbolizes the acme of progress—and the brief meditation we have just undertaken in this respect shows us, better than twenty paragraphs of mental analysis, what it is to which people give that name.

  Certainly, the more a thing has been long and fervently desired, the more its realization will seem to us to be progress. Conversely, certain important discoveries—like those of X-rays or radium, whose need was unfelt, which were scarcely imagined, and which were made
within a category of ideas foreign to the public—have appeared, by virtue of that fact, much less progressive, in spite of the immense amazement that they generated. Röntgen and Curie have not enjoyed the sudden and explosive popularity of a Wright or a Blériot because of the foregoing reasons, and also because their discoveries do not seem at first glance to be susceptible to practical application.

  Thus, without taking much account of the extension of speculative knowledge, we are habituated to consider science as submissive to our desires. We routinely consider that it only increases its patrimony in order to satisfy our demands more competently and satiate our various appetites more completely, within the framework and in the conditions in which we have been accustomed to live since humans became human, and that is all we admire in it. For, even if the Earth is no longer the center of the universe, humankind will, at least, always be crawling upon it—and can any one of us do otherwise than believe himself to be the center of everything?

  The influence of scientific marvel fiction on such a conception of progress is considerable. With a force of conviction drawn from reason itself, it brutally unveils for us everything that the unknown and the doubtful might perhaps hold in reserve, everything in the depths of the inexplicable that might become disagreeable or horrible to us, everything that the sciences are capable of discovering and extrapolating beyond the accomplished inventions that seem to us to be the terminus, all the lateral consequences, all the unexpected and possible consequences of those same inventions, and also all the new sciences that might emerge for the study of previously-unsuspected phenomena, which might create new needs for us in creating in advance the means to nourish or pander to them. It shows us our petty way of life upset by the most natural and yet the most unexpected cataclysms. It reveals to us, in a new and gripping clarity, the instability of contingencies, the imminent menace of the possible. It infects us with the nauseous malaise of doubt. Finally, by its means, all the horror of the unknown appears to us with a terrible intensity. It uncovers for us the incommensurable space to be explored outside our immediate wellbeing; it pitilessly detaches from the idea of science any afterthought of domestic usage and any sentiment of anthropocentrism. It breaks our habits of thought and transports us to other points of view, outside ourselves.