The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  The Wing

  A Romance of the New Age

  by

  Jean Richepin

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  L’Aile, roman des temps nouveaux, here translated as The Wing: A Romance of the New Age, was first published in Paris by Pierre Lafitte in 1911. It was the last novel written by Jean Richepin, who was better known as a poet and lyricist, and then as a dramatist, and then as a short story writer, his novels generally being held to be the least impressive sector of his oeuvre. L’Aile was published more than ten years after his previous novel, so it may be regarded as an exceptional break from an abandonment that otherwise extended over a quarter of a century—the final third of his life, Given that circumstance, it perhaps is not surprising that that L’Aile is a very eccentric book, even by the standards of a markedly eccentric writer—but that is more of a recommendation than a defect nowadays, and the text warrants more interested attention than it received at the time.

  In particular, L’Aile can now be seen as a significant text in the history of French scientific romance, being one of several—but perhaps surprisingly few—immediate literary responses to a uniquely exciting moment in the history of science and technology, which embraced the development of wireless telegraphy, the discovery of radioactivity and the first adventures in aviation, the heady combination of which was, indeed, suggestive of the dawning of a “new age.” L’Aile cannot count as a well-informed response to those developments, Richepin having little understanding of science, but the quality of his naivety in struggling to comprehend the essence of the theoretical and technological revolution opens an interesting window into the general consciousness of the era.

  The author of L’Aile, Jean Richepin was born in Medea (now Lemdiyya) in Algeria in 1849. He was the son of a military surgeon, and lived a somewhat peripatetic existence in his early years, before the family settled in northern France, where Richepin went to school at Douai before going to Paris in 1868 to study at the École Normale Supérieure. According to the accounts he gave when he became an habitué of the “Bohemian” cafés of Montmartre, he had been a brilliant student who graduated from the École in 1870 with flying colors, but with a severe dose of disenchantment; other accounts suggested that he left without taking a degree. Either way, he made no attempt to obtain the teaching post for which students at the college generally aimed, and later claimed to have embarked on a career of adventure instead, serving with distinction during the Franco-Prussian War as a sharpshooter.

  Although not directly involved in the Paris Commune, Richepin appears to have been infected with revolutionary ideas at around that time by the Communard propagandist Jules Vallès, of whom he subsequently wrote a biography. He left Paris shortly thereafter, but not to return home; he seems to have split permanently with his parents, who were then living in Nancy. When he reappeared in Montmartre again in the mid-1870s, where he rapidly became well-known for his flamboyant style of dress and behavior—he evidently cut a fine figure, being tall and robust, with a bushy black beard—he explained that he had been wandering and adventuring in the interim, having gone to sea for a while and, more crucially, having undertaken a kind of pilgrimage in search of his roots by traveling with a band of Romani to Italy.

  The latter claim reflects the fact that Richepin, unlike most of the poseurs in Montmartre, was not content to have a colorful personal history, however exaggerated; always determined to go the extra mile, he wanted a colorful prehistory too. In his reckoning, he was a descendant of a nomadic tribe that had arrived in Gaul in pre-Roman times from Central Asia (the Romani, who probably came from northern India, did not reach France until the 15th century), and the atavistic echoes of that distant ancestry were still rumbling away within him, unconsciously at least. He sometimes referred to the hypothetical tribe in question as “Turanian”—a term borrowed from contemporary anthropology, referring to hypothetical ancestors of the Turks—but he referred to their French offshoot as “Thiérachian.”

  Geographically, Thiérache is a region in the foothills of the Ardennes massif overlapping the border between France and Belgium. Like most of the one-independent provinces gradually gathered into the nation of France, it still retained its own dialect and culture in the late 19th century. How much time Richepin spent there, and to what extent his ancestry was really rooted there, are unclear, while the notion that it had been invaded 2000 years earlier by mysterious nomads from Central Asia is almost certainly false—but the myth became a significant element of Richepin’s self-representation, and it had a powerful effect on the sympathies and loyalties expressed in his literary work. No more needs to be said about the detail of the fantasy here, because it is described and developed in considerable detail in the text of L’Aile—which is, in a sense, its ultimate elaboration.

  Although he was acquainted with the literary club known as the Hydropathes, and frequented Le Chat Noir, which eventually became their base—where he made a contribution to the retrospectively-famous Album Zutique put together by the café’s regulars—Richepin was never really seen as a member of the club. Indeed, Frédéric Champsaur once remarked that Richepin was the club’s most important precursor and inspiration, far too important to be merely one of its crowd, although Champsaur was probably being a trifle sarcastic. Richepin certainly wanted to remain distinct from any group, having the same mania for standing out from the crowd as his principal literary idols, Charles Baudelaire and Petrus Borel, alias “the werewolf.” Thus, although Richepin developed his writing career in the context of a perceived contrast between the Decadent/Symbolist Movement on the one hand and Naturalism on the other, he made every effort never to belong to either camp, but to plough his own furrow. He could not avoid being categorized as a latter-day Romantic, but he never wanted to be a Romantic—he wanted to be the Romantic, taking over where Victor Hugo eventually let off as a literary helmsman.

  Few people acquainted with Richepin or his work ever thought that he came anywhere near to living up to his own self-billing, but he certainly tried, and he got off to a flying start when his first collection of poems, La Chanson des gueux [The Song of the Vagabonds] (1876) was successfully prosecuted for obscenity, just as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal had been two decades earlier—a punitive oppression that gleaned angry protests from Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, among others. The gain in notoriety was, however, balanced out by the financial penalty of a heavy fine of 500 francs, on top of a month’s imprisonment, which left Richepin in dire straits for some while.

  The censored passages of La Chanson des gueux were not to be restored to the affected poems until 1964, long after Richepin’s death in 1926. Not unnaturally, however, the author’s reaction to their excision was resentfully combative, and the themes and language of his poetry became increasingly extreme in the years that followed, from the erotically-charged Les Caresses [Caresses] (1877) to the aptly titled Les Blasphèmes [Blasphemies] (1884). Having reached that offensive apex, however, he had little alternative but to retreat to deeper and more thoughtful consideration of his concerns. La Mer [The Sea] (1886) is by no means as nostalgic as many collections on that theme, but is mild by Richepin’s standards. He gave freer vent to his bile, however, in Mes Paradis [My Paradises] (1895), and took his celebration of the life of contemporary nomads further in La Bombarde [The Bombard] (1899).

  Richepin published his first short story collection, the provocatively-titled Les Morts bizarres [Bizarre Deaths] in 1877, and his first novel, Madame André in 1878, although he had a much greater success in 1881 with a second novel based on one of his poems, La Glu [Birdlime—here used metaphorically to refer to the adhesive capacity of a femme fatal
e]. The longer version of La Glu was adapted for the stage in 1883, further adapted as an opera, with music by Gabriel Dupont, in 1910, and it was filmed several times, while the poem was adapted as a song by more than one composer—one of many of Richepin’s verses to be so adapted (including, of course, “La Chanson des gueux”). He liked singing them himself, often regaling the clients of Le Chat Noir with them, and many still survive on CD in versions by Eric Mie, Remo Gary and others.

  Richepin’s short fiction tended to the Decadent, especially his contes cruels; those in Les Morts bizarres include the delightfully extreme “La Machine à métaphysique”1, but the later ones in Cauchemars [Nightmares] (1892) are mostly sharper, and those in Contes de la décadence romaine [Tales of the Roman Decadence] (1898) more colorful. Although La Glu has a cruel thrust too, its novelistic method had more in common with the psychologically-analytical “neo-Naturalism” that Richepin’s friend Paul Bourget practiced with great success, and Richepin retained that interest in psychological analysis through all his novels, even when they dealt with such exotic subject-matter as that featured in the gypsy romance Miarka, la fille de l’ourse [Miarka, the She-Bear’s Daughter] (1883).

  Perhaps inevitably, Richepin’s interest in contemporary psychological science was always subject to a marked temptation toward the offbeat and the unorthodox—as is very obvious in L’Aile. The effects of that temptation on his treatment of his various themes meant that the novels that found the most immediately sympathetic reaction from critics and the public alike were those in which it was muted—as, for instance, in Braves gens [Brave Men] (1886), a quasi-autobiographical account of Bohemian life in Paris. From a modern viewpoint, however—especially that of literary archeologists interested in the development of imaginative fiction, it is the more extraordinary effects that are the most interesting. It is safe to say that those effects were never more extraordinary than they are in L’Aile.

  Although he had collaborated with the Hydropathe caricaturist André Gill on a dramatic piece in 1873 it was not until 1883 that Richepin’s big breakthrough as a dramatist came, when the stage adaptation of La Glu was rapidly followed by Nana-Sahib, in which the central role was played by Sarah Bernhardt. When the actor playing opposite Bernhardt fell ill, Richepin insisted on taking over the role himself—to enormous public acclaim, at least in his version of the anecdote. Bernhardt did, however, pay him the immeasurable compliment of saying that he was “even odder and hammier than I am—that’s why I love him.” He continued to produce work for the stage in greater profusion than volumes of poetry or prose, some of it for musical accompaniment. His greatest popular success in the theater was Le Chemineau [The Vagabond, in a slightly less insulting sense than gueux, but not much] (1897), which was the first of his works to be adapted for the cinema, in 1906; three further versions followed. He did not take the central role in any of those films, but did appear as a screen actor along with Sarah Bernhardt in Mères Françaises [French Mothers] (1919), and played one of the key roles in the film version of Miarka (1920).

  Richepin was a very prolific writer between 1880 and 1901—the two years in which the first and last of his numerous children were born—but he also found abundant time to travel, often subsidizing his excursions by giving lectures, and invariably reported on his travels in articles for the Parisian newspapers. After the turn of the century, however, he slowed down somewhat, in more ways than one. His fame had been primarily based on the violence of his themes and the colorfulness of his language, including his very extensive use of argot—not merely the popular argot of the Parisian streets but the argots of provincial peasants and nomadic gypsies. Over time, however, the effects of melodramatic inflation increased the popularity of violent themes, and many other writers began to use argot more freely, so the mere fact became less interesting—and other users of argot employed a careful restraint that allowed them to remain easily readable, whereas Richepin’s multiform argot began to seem stubbornly esoteric. That tendency to difficulty was further increased by his frequently-convoluted syntax, his lavish use of metaphor, his often-bombastic rhetoric and a marked fondness for making up new words, often by means of twisting existing ones into new derivatives. The vitriolic quality of his writing eased, as his politics shifted from the extreme left toward the middle-ground, and that probably lost him the support of many of his admirers, while not winning many new ones, and certainly reduced his opportunities to indulge in critical diatribes.

  Ironically enough, this relative decline in Richepin’s reputation as a heroic rebel against authority and orthodoxy reached a kind of peak in 1909, when the great individualist not only took it into his head to put himself forward as a candidate for election to the Académie Française, but actually won (beating Edmond Haraucort and Henri de Régnier), and thus joined the literary Establishment in no uncertain terms—after which his views and opinions became evenly more conservative, especially during the Great War, when his name was often coupled with that of Maurice Barrès, whose “treason” against his earlier radical views was considered so extreme that he was the subject of a mock trial by the Dadaists. Richepin did not change his spots entirely—he continued to turn out such contes cruels as those in Le Coin des fous: histoires horribles [The Lunatic Asylum: Horrible Stories] (1921), which contains most of his other exercises in proto-science fiction—but he was a shadow of the determined outsider he had been in the 1870s by the time the war ended in 1918; the final poetry collection he published during his lifetime, Interludes (1923), tended far more toward nostalgic sentimentality than his early work.

  Within this context, L’Aile’s publication-date—eleven years after his previous novel, Lagibasse (1900)—places it firmly in the “Academic” phase of the author’s career, if only in its early days, but it is not obvious that it really belongs there. Although the internal chronology of the novel is sufficiently evasive to be a trifle difficult to pin down, the best inference that can be taken from the clues it offers (as detailed in the footnotes) is that the “imminent future” in which it is set might be as early as 1904 and is unlikely to be any later than 1907—implying that it was at least begun, if perhaps not completed, before the fatal election. It is, in fact, possible that it had languished unpublished for several years, and that it was the author’s elevation to the Académie that prompted the publisher to take a chance on it.

  In any case, and however paradoxical the fact may seem in a “romance of the new age,” L’Aile is a rather backward-looking book, in which a murky imaginary prehistory plays a much larger and better-defined part than the bright future that is perpetually promised by the narrative. Indeed, that future is subjected to an exercise in procrastination so determined and seemingly perverse as to make the book unique, not only in its insistence on avoiding its own plot—an avoidance that it eventually begins to celebrate boastfully—but in the torturing of tenses required by the artifice of consigning most of the narrative to a flashback and then refusing to move forward in time even when the text appears to have caught up with itself.

  There might be several explanations for these eccentricities, more than one of which probably had a role to play. Richepin apparently made the narrative up as he went along, and does not appear to know, for long sections of the text, exactly where it is going; eventually, he seems to have abandoned any attempt at real progress and to have torn up whatever vague plan he had made before starting. This uncertainty is partly based in the circumstance that he had very little knowledge of and no understanding at all of contemporary science—a severe handicap when one is supposedly producing a psychological analysis of scientific genius and its potential results. Another, not unrelated, factor is his reluctance actually to bite the bullet and take his story beyond the tacit present into the hypothetical future into which the narrative is yearning hopelessly to leap.

  By way of compensation, the problems that Richepin set himself did produce some literary effects that are interesting in their sheer perversity, and the story does provide
considerable insight into his own eccentric psychology while it is treading water. The most remarkable aspect of that insight is perhaps to be found in the characterization of Blaise Yvernaux—surely one of the most bitterly unsympathetic partial self-portraits ever attempted by an author, astonishing on the part of one who never publicly lapsed into doubting his own genius, and who certainly produced far more real evidence of creative flair than the impotent Yvernaux. Equally interesting, however, is the characterization of Aunt Aline, a surpassingly strange hand of destiny gifted with highly idiosyncratic psychic powers.

  Together with the ultra-disciplined but emotionally-challenged Thibaud Gasguin, those two characters form a highly distinctive triangle of influences around the heroine whose strange genius the narrative sets out to describe and analyze, instituting a unique literary geometry that maintains its fascination in spite of the occasional laboriousness of its development. As for the climactic scene, in which the heroine gathers the triangle around her for protection when fate insists on her reunion with the predestined hero of her personal narrative, suffice it to say that there is nothing else like it anywhere in the annals of literature, and that it definitely warrants reading, if only to gain a better appreciation of where the highly elastic limits of literary eccentricity lie.

  It is worth noting that, as well as its own peculiar merits, L’Aile was not an uninfluential book, in that it very probably prompted Frédéric Champsaur—who had known Richepin since they used to hang out together in the cafés of Bohemia in general and Le Chat Noir in particular—to write his own account of an impending advent in aviation technology in Les Ailes de l’homme,2 which was written before August 1914 although not published until 1917, and then in a distorted form. Champsaur’s novel, surely not by coincidence, sets out to do exactly what L’Aile conspicuously fails to do, in specifying the nature of the new aircraft and actually putting it into operation within the plot, while also providing a very different account of the supposedly essential, but evidently problematic, relationship between Eros and scientific creativity.