Homo-Deus
by
Félicien Champsaur
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
THE INVISIBLE SATYR 14
KILL THE OLD, ENJOY! 363
Afterword 581
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 587
Introduction
Homo-Deus, le satyre invisible by Félicien Champsaur, here translated as “The Invisible Satyr,” was first published in Paris by Ferenczi et fils in 1924. The eponymous protagonist was featured again, albeit in a minor role, in Champsaur’s next novel, Tuer les vieux, jouir!, issued by Ferenczi in 1925 and here translated as “Kill the Old, Enjoy!” for the sake of completeness in the examination of an inordinately strange invention.
The former book is advertized in the latter as Le Satyre invisible, which was presumably its original intended title, unchanged in the ad because of an oversight. The second is even more confused in its titling, having two different title pages, the first of which describes it as a “roman narquois” [a mocking novel] and the second as a “roman vache,” which has more or less the same implication in vulgar parlance—the latter subtitle is the one reproduced in bibliographies, and both descriptions are supplemented with “moeurs du temps” [contemporary mores]. The designation is slightly odd, because the novel is not a satire but an angry indictment of the supposed effects of the Great War on the survivors of the generation who fought in it, although the introduction of the subplot in which Homo-Deus features does give it a strange twist akin to the more wholehearted bizarrerie of its predecessor.
Given that the composition of the first book set out with the title Le Satyre invisible, it was probably initially planned as an exercise in eroticism, and there is indeed a set of chapters which, if abstracted and run together, would constitute a distinctly steamy erotic novella. One cannot, however—not, at least, without lapsing into pure and simple pornography—make an entire novel out of a series of scenes in which a man takes advantage of a technology of invisibility to introduce himself into various women’s bedrooms in order to play the voyeur—and, when the opportunity presents itself, to commit a curious kind of ambiguous rape, obtaining his victim’s “consent” by encouraging her to believe, since what is happening is clearly impossible, that she is dreaming. Presumably, therefore, Champsaur thought it advisable to integrate those scenes, probably a trifle belatedly, into a broader and more complicated plot. In order to achieve that synthesis, however, the author was forced to improvise, moving into literary territory that was largely uncharted.
He elected to do so, not unnaturally, by developing two corollaries of the notion of a technology of invisibility. On the one hand, he attempts to explore the other possibilities for which it might be useful, giving the protagonist the opportunity to become a kind of crime-fighting superhero—in an era, of course, when there were no obvious models for that kind of character, although a curious fictional subgenre developed subsequently, which has flourished very abundantly since. On the other hand, he appears to have posed himself the speculative question of what other technologies might be possible if the theoretical basis of the hypothetical invisibility technology is taken for granted—again in an era where few literary models for that kind of exercise existed. Although neither of these other two plot strands is developed with any conspicuous logic, and both eventually dissolve into incipient chaos when they eventually embrace the later erotic scenes, the reckless mixing of the three aspects of the story produces something quite unique, and by no means devoid of interest, in terms of its groping toward narrative effects that were new at the time.
The notion of technologies of invisibility was, of course, by no means new. Indeed, the story that might be entitled to consideration as the very first conte philosophique, the parable of Gyges related in Plato’s Republic, posits exactly such a technology in order to dramatize the question of whether a man with the ability to commit transgressions with total impunity would be likely to observe conventional moral rules. Although countless folkoristic and fakelorist deployments of cloaks of invisibility and similar devices subsequently used the notion as a narrative lever in entertaining plots, that philosophical question was bound to make a comeback as soon as the issue was addressed with any degree of seriousness, as it was in such moralistic fantasies as James Dalton’s three-decker novel The Invisible Gentleman (1833) before being recruited to speculative fiction in a consistently prominent fashion, in such stories as Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Crystal Man” (1881), C. H. Hinton’s “Stella” (1895), H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897) and Jack London’s “The Shadow and the Flash” (1903).
The Wells novel was very popular in France, and helped to inspire a number of variations on the theme, including Jules Verne’s Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz (written 1902 but published 1910; tr. as The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz), Paul Besnard’s “L’Épouse invisible” (1910), Louis Boussenard’s Monsieur… Rien, adventures extraordinaires d’un homme invisible (1910), Henri Falk’s “Le Maître des trois états” (1917; tr. as “The Master of the Three States” 1) and Joe Rollon, l’autre homme invisible (1919) by “Edmond Cazal” (Jean de La Hire). Champsaur was presumably aware of at least some of these earlier works when he decided to do what most of his predecessors had delicately avoided doing, by suggesting that the first use for such a technology that would spring to the mind of many men would be to exploit its voyeuristic potential. It is unclear whether he was also familiar with Maurice Renard’s mild admonition to Wells, “L’Homme qui voulait être invisible” (1923; tr. as “The Man Who Wanted to be Invisible” 2), which points out that an invisible man would be blind because his invisible retinas would be incapable of sensation; Homo-Deus’ eyes are visible in isolation when he first appears in his invisible guise, but subsequently appear and disappear at the convenience of the storyline—always a more powerful motivator than logic in fanciful fiction. At any rate, Champaur’s novel was extending an established sequence, but consciously taking it in a new direction in order to transcend mere imitation.
Homo-Deus, le satyre invisible also extends a short sequence within Champsaur’s own works in which he dabbled with speculative materials, following in the footsteps of Les Ailes d’Homme (written 1914; published in revised form 1917; tr. as The Human Arrow) and hot on the heels of Ouha, roi des singes (1923; tr. as Ouha, King of the Apes).3 The first of those two novels, which had the misfortune to be set in a near future whose possibility was torpedoed by the outbreak of the Great War and had then to be expanded in order to serve as a propaganda piece, and was twisted completely out of shape in the process, was relatively orthodox in both its speculative component, which deals with a new kind of ultra-fast aircraft, and its romantic component, in which the course of true love fails tragically to run smooth. Ouha, roi des singes, by contrast, is an account of a curious “missing link,” resulting from a human/orangutan hybridization, which is intermediate, both temporarily and thematically, between Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and Edgar Wallace’s script for the movie King Kong (1933), and its “romantic” component is much more striking and uninhibited, featuring several graphic scenes of extraordinary interspecies intercourse.
Although Homo-Deus is far more personable than Ouha, the two do have certain elements in common, which might help to explain the imaginative genesis of the latter book, and which earn both works a special place in the history of speculative sex. The latter topic has precious few examples prior to the general relaxation of the literary standards of prissiness in the 1960s, and most of them are French, but Champsaur’s contribution to the tradition was notably distinctive and original, e
ven though the notion of superheroic satyriasis had been previously broached in Alfred Jarry’s proto-surrealist speculative fantasy Le Surmâle (1902; tr. as The Supermale). The kinship between Ouha and Homo-Deus, which embodies assumptions about fundamental human psychology and “bestial instincts,” is highly significant in terms of the conte philosophique aspect of Champsaur’s plot, which seems to want to be taken seriously—although whether it can be is a matter of opinion.
The hypothetical metaphysical basis on which Champsaur constructs his imaginary technology of invisibility, as well as the other pseudoscientific notions featured in the plot, is a straightforward modification of Cartesian dualism, of a kind that had been used very extensively in both literary fantasy and occult lifestyle fantasy to “explain” various “psychic phenomena.” Indeed, Champsaur takes those previous justifications entirely for granted, wanting to take the argument further, not only in terms of imagining an “alternative psychic fluid” conferring invisibility on the flesh, but in hypothesizing an innovative employment of the standard “soul-fluid” in shoring up a technology of resurrection, described and detailed in a fashion as strikingly melodramatic as the various manifestations of the invisible satyr. Some readers might feel that far more could and ought to have been made of that second notion—and probably would have been, if Champsaur had started from that point rather than merely incorporating it into a complicating subplot—and its extrapolation is rather odd, for reasons that are best left for discussion in a brief afterword in order to avoid spoilers.
The other subplot, which eventually expands to fill up more narrative space than either of the two strands introduced in advance of it, now seems far more familiar than it did in 1924, because crime-fighting superheroes, following in the mighty footsteps of the comic book characters Superman and Batman, have become a spectacular archetype of modern literature, amenable to enormous replication, variation and melodramatic inflation—to the extent that it is now very difficult to retreat, imaginatively, to an era when no such archetype existed. It is, however, necessary to do that in order to understand how innovative Homo-Deus was in that nascent role, and hence, perhaps, to understand why the manner in which he fulfilled it now seems so mind-bogglingly wrong.
Technically speaking, Homo-Deus was not the first mysterious avenger in French popular fiction to be equipped with a “superpower.” Indeed, in the matter of his minor powers of mesmerism and fakirism, he had numerous predecessors, including the downmarket Sâr Dubnotal, whose adventures were chronicled anonymously, some say by Norbert Sévestre, in 1909-10.4 In terms of more adventurous superpowers, he was not only foreshadowed by previous invisible men who dabbled in vigilantism, but also by the “Nyctalope,” a creation of Jean de La Hire who eventually became a series character very much in the mold of American pulp and comic book superheroes. Although variants of the Nyctalope had been featured in two newspaper serials of 1908 and 1911, however, his ultimate incarnation as a serial battler of exotic evil only found its definitive mold in Lucifer (1921-22; tr. as The Nyctalope vs. Lucifer),5 not long before the advent of Homo-Deus. Homo-Deus clearly had potential to be developed in the same fashion, had Champsaur wanted to do that—and his subsidiary role in Tuer les vieux, jouir! is almost a feint in that direction—but Champsaur did not consider himself to be that kind of writer, deeming himself to be cut from finer literary cloth.
Even without such extension, however, Homo-Deus, in his crime-fighting role, represents an interesting precursory phase in what we can now see, retrospectively, as the evolution of superhero fiction. Because his superpower is so much more radical than the Nyctalope’s ability to see in the dark, it inevitably engages the fundamental problem that superhero fiction necessarily inherited, at least tacitly, from Plato: to what extent is a person who can act with impunity likely to admit constraint by moral regulation? Again, though, the specific problems raised by Homo-Deus’ actions in that regard are best left for consideration until the afterword, in order not to give away the plot of the novel in advance.
Tue les vieux, jouir! is much more focused in its conte philosophique aspect than Homo-Deus, le satyre invisible, but it too formulates the bulk of its actual plot as a story of crime and punishment, and also features a protagonist whose fundamental psychological impulses have something in common with Ouha the sovereign ape. It is interesting, however, that the vigilante role that ultimately stands up in opposition to his apelike tendencies is not played by Homo-Deus, in spite of his recruitment to the plot by one of the protagonist’s henchmen, but by two very different characters. The brief subplot involving Homo-Deus is, however, nakedly speculative, developing another corollary of the version of Cartesian dualism underlying the speculative contents of the first novel, this one of much older provenance and much wider deployment since its first spectacular advertisement in Camille Flammarion’s Lumen (1872; expanded 1887; tr. as Lumen). It is presumably because he was aware of its previous elaborate extrapolation that Champsaur did not feel the need to elaborate the notion in Tuer les vieux, jouir!, into which it is introduced primarily to provide an “alternative viewpoint” of the moral quagmire about which the novel complains, loudly and repetitively, and to which the last word can be given, in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense.
Champsaur obviously felt strongly about the “message” that he was trying to drive home in Tuer les vieux, jouir!, as he not only has most of his major characters recite it, one after another, but also includes an interlude mid-novel in which he reiterates it in his own voice. That interlude mentions in passing that Champsaur did not actually write his books, in the strictest sense of the word, but dictated them to a copy typist. That was not an uncommon practice at the time, when typing was widely regarded as menial work, and it had, in fact, been fairly common practice for many years before the invention of the typewriter, when even handwriting was often thought to be something with which high-minded (and sometimes clumsy) composers of fiction could safely leave to minions. The habit does have certain typical consequences, however, which are particularly obvious in Champaur’s work.
The most significant consequence of dictating a story rather than actually writing it is an oblique corollary of the old Latin proverb verb volent, scripta manent. It is a lot easier to forget what you said yesterday, or five minutes ago, than what you wrote yesterday, or five minutes ago, so if you are dictating—and thus composing considerably faster and at a steadier pace than you would normally write—you are more likely to make continuity errors and accidental repetitions, and you are far more likely to lose the underlying thread of a complex plot by following the momentum of immediate improvisation. Many gaffes resulting from continuity errors and unnecessary repetition can, of course, be eliminated when the work is read over and referred back to the amanuensis for correction, but some writers are remarkably lax about that kind of afterthinking, either out of consideration for the extra (paid) work that the copyist will have to do, or for reasons of simple laziness (also known as “having better things to do”).
Naturally, most writers addicted to that kind of procedure adapt themselves to it, and get better with practice. Those who are genuinely expert are sufficiently fluent in production for it not to be obvious that they are working that way rather than writing or typing their work themselves. Champsaur, in fact, was normally very good at it, and it required unusual circumstances for such flaws to become as glaringly obvious in his work as they are in the two works under present consideration. In the case of Tuer les vieux, jouir!, the excessive manifestation of such flaws is probably due to the pitch of indignation that he felt as he mouthed off, again and again and again, about the fundamental argument of the novel. The fact that Homo-Deus, le satyre invisible suffers so much from it, however, has a different and more fundamental cause, which applies to speculative fiction in general, and helps to explain the oddity and unevenness not just of the novel in question but many other speculative novels produced by the same procedure.
Speculative fiction is, by defin
ition, fiction dealing with the abnormal and the unprecedented, and are in direct contrast with fiction that is “mimetic” in the sense that its fictional worlds pretend to be identical to the real one and in which the fictional course of events, however exceptional it might be, is nevertheless “ordinary” in the sense that it is mundanely plausible. Because mimetic fiction deals, at least most of the time, with commonplace situations, those situations have, ipso facto, an innate momentum of their own, which the creative writer merely has to steer or modify. Whenever speculative fiction introduces innovations however—especially radical innovations such as invisibility and resurrection—that innate momentum is lost. The improvised situations still have, or ought to have, an innate logic that assists in mapping out their potential development, but the synthesis and extrapolation of that logic is an intellectually challenging business of an entirely different order of magnitude to the steering processes of mimetic fiction.
That challenge is particularly hard to meet if a writer is dictating, and thus attempting to work at the velocity of speech rather than the more modest and variable velocity of handwriting or typing. In those circumstances, the temptation to neglect the speculative aspects of a plot in order to devote the bulk of one’s wordage to those aspects possessed of a more comfortably innate momentum—metaphorically speaking, to freewheel rather than pedaling uphill in high gear—is inevitably immense. The challenge is less difficult to deal with if there is only one innovation in hand, and hence a single linear process of extrapolation, but where there is more than one—as there is in Homo-Deus, le satyre invisible—the task becomes far harder, and the temptation to shirk it proportionately greater. Composing chapters out of sequence and fitting them together retrospectively like a kind of jigsaw, as appears to have been done with the novel in question, adds a further dimension of potential confusion.
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