Daâh: The First Human

by Edmond Haraucourt

  Daâh:

  The First Human

  by

  Edmond Haraucourt

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  The sketches making up Edmond Haraucourt’s saga of Daâh first appeared in the Parisian daily newspaper Le Journal in 1912-14. They were initially reprinted, in an expanded version, as the book Daâh, le premier homme, published by Ernest Flammarion in the summer of 1914, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Great War. The book was somewhat eclipsed in consequence, and might be far better known today had it had the time and space to create more discussion and controversy after its publication. The contents of the Flammarion volume were eventually reproduced in 1988, together with some supplementary materials external to the text, by Arléa, Libraire des Fruits du Congo.1 That version was reprinted in 1996. It is the book version that is here translated as Daâh: the First Human.

  The sketches in Le Journal did not follow the chronological order in which their materials were arranged in the book version, and were offered as two distinct sequences. The first sequence began with “La Première larme” (corresponding to the section forming chapters XIII-XV in the book version) in the 26 December 1912 issue of the newspaper and concluded with “Le Flambeau” (corresponding to the final chapters of the book version) in the 10 April 1913 issue. The second sequence bore the collective title “Daâh, le premier homme: Scènes de la vie préhistorique” and began on 5 May 1914 with an episode corresponding to sections of chapters I-VI of the book version, continuing until 4 June 1914, when it concluded with an episode corresponding to chapters LXIII and LXIV in the book version—those dealing with “L’Amour.”

  As noted in the introduction to the previous Black Coat press volume of works by Haraucourt, Illusions of Immortality (2012)2—which also contains a biography of the author and an overview of his career, the details of which do not need to be repeated here—Haraucourt was a frequent contributor for many years to the regular feuilleton slot employed in Le Journal for short stories, although many of the items he contributed to it were too long to be presented in their entirety and thus appeared as short serials of between two and half a dozen episodes. Because of the heavier burden of explanation required by speculative fiction, all of the items of speculative fiction that he produced for the slot were serialized in that fashion, and even the naturalistic contes cruels that he produced for it in some abundance were often split up, in contrast to those produced by other regulars, including Octave Mirbeau and Jules Richepin, who became past masters at the art of stripping stories down to the typical length of a feuilleton episode (1400-1700 words).

  The Daâh series was, in effect, a curious kind of compromise, easily permitting the author to work in slices of the requisite length, but also enabling him to stack up those slices gradually into something far richer and more complex. It is arguable, in fact, that the episodic narrative form forced on Daâh by its initial adaptation to the feuilleton format is ideally suited to a story whose innate continuity is essentially problematic. Because it is an account of the early evolution of thought and technical discovery, Daâh is necessarily an account of a series of loosely-connected incidents and sub-climactic leaps, and although something is definitely gained by collecting the episodes together in a book, there is also an element of loss as well. The account of the early development of sexual mores—which was ground-breaking and extremely daring at the time—is slightly reduced in its impact by its intermediate location in the book version, whereas it must have provided an appropriately startling and highly provocative conclusion to the sequence of newspaper stories.

  Although other writers for Le Journal’s slot and the similar ones featured in Le Matin and La Lanterne’s weekly fiction supplement occasionally constructed series by using the same central character repeatedly, those series usually remained haphazard and “segmental,” but the Daâh series is a cumulative endeavor with a much more complicated narrative arc. Although the sum total is not quite a novel, just as the original versions were not quite a serial, the ultimate work has a coherency that renders it very distinctive, not only among Haraucourt’s works and the multitudinous products of Le Journal’s fiction slots, but also within the subgenre of prehistoric fantasy. Although some of the author’s contemporaries, who thought of him as a neo-Naturalist writer, regarded it as an item of eccentricity ineligible for consideration as a major work, Haraucourt thought very highly of it, and he was not wrong to do so; it is certainly one of the masterpieces of its subgenre, quite unique in its method and its achievements, and it is definitely one of the finest works of a highly distinctive and greatly underrated writer.

  The subgenre of prehistoric fantasy developed alongside the burgeoning of the science of physical anthropology, based on hominid remains discovered by paleontologists, popularized in such non-fictional works as John Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times (1865; tr. into French as L’Homme préhistorique, 1876), Nicolas Joly’s L’Homme avant les métaux [Humans Before Metals] (1879) and Gabriel de Mortillet’s Le préhistorique [Prehistory] (1882). These non-fictional works inevitably contained a strong narrative component, and it was only natural that works taking that narrative element a step further, adding characterization and plot, should appear in parallel with them. The first substantial exercise in the subgenre was an exercise in the popularization of science aimed at a juvenile audience by S. Henry Berthoud, “Les Premiers habitants de Paris” (in L’Homme depuis cinq mille ans, 1865; tr. as “The First Inhabitants of Paris”)3.

  The subject matter was controversial and sensitive at the time because many believers in the Biblical account of human origins, whose commitment of faith was all the more fervent because they were defending a ridiculous myth against steadily-accumulating evidence, resented its contradiction. Jules Verne, who inserted a brief vision of an exotic hominid into the second version of Voyage au centre de la Terre (1867; tr. as Journey to the Centre of the Earth) in response to the publication of a revised edition of the book he had employed as a primary source for the first edition in 1864, Louis Figuier’s La Terre avant le deluge (1863; revised 1867; tr. as The World Before the Deluge)—in which Figuier decisively rejected the Biblical chronology he had treated with diplomatic respect in the first edition—carefully left the passage as a possibly-hallucinatory vision, in order to conserve “potential deniability” of any challenge to religious faith. There was, therefore, a certain amount of courage involved in a popular feuilletonist like Elie Berthet tackling the theme robustly in Le Monde inconnu (1876; rev. as Paris avant l’histoire, 1879; tr. as The Prehistoric World.)

  Although that controversy had weakened considerably by 1912, by which time the Biblical account of human origins was no longer defensible except by the willfully stupid, the broader Disraeliesque question of whether man ought to be reckoned, in essence, as an ape or an angel had not gone away, and still remained sharply contentious—as, indeed, it still does. It is partly for that reason that there was, and is, no other field of advancing scientific discovery that not only invites but requires narrativization. Although the discoveries of hominid remains in various places became steadily more prolific in the half-century separating Berthoud’s pioneering science-fictional endeavor from Haraucourt’s, the items were inevitably fragmentary and difficult to relate to one another, especially in the absence of any reliable chronology. Scientists were obliged to leave a wide margin of uncertainty as they attempted to build up their own stories of the prehistory of humankind, and inevitably disagreed as to the manner in which the jigsaw of the data ought to be fitted together. Novelists interested in producing elaborate accounts of the life of prehistoric humans, e
mploying them as viewpoint characters, and superimposing a hypothetical sociology and psychology on the paleontological data, thus had more than one scientific account from which to choose, and great deal of latitude in the matter of its extrapolative embroidery.

  Of the writers who tackled the challenge before Haraucourt, the one who did so most assiduously and most effectively was J.-H. Rosny Aîné, beginning with Vamireh (1892) and Eyrimah (1893)—both translated in the Black Coat Press collection Vamireh and Other Prehistoric Fantasies (2010)4—and continuing, after a considerable gap, with La Guerre du feu (serialized 1909; book 1911; tr.—very inadequately—as The Quest for Fire). The considerable success of the latter-named work encouraged Rosny to produce two more novels of a similar kind in 1918 and 1930, and was surely responsible for prompting Haraucourt to produce his own account of early human evolution, or at least for opening up hospitable market space for its publication. Although not compatible with Rosny’s account of prehistory, Daâh is not really a rival to it, because it deliberately takes the exercise further back toward its fundamentals, not only temporally but philosophically.

  All of Rosny’s prehistoric fantasies, along with Berthoud’s pioneering novella and other works in the same subgenre, deal with human societies that are already formulated and already possessed of a considerable assembly of mores, even if their technological resources and languages are restricted. The same is true of the earliest English-language exercises in the subgenre, which include Stanley Waterloo’s The Story of Ab: A Tale of the time of the Cave Man (1897), H. G. Wells’ episodic “A Story of the Stone Age” (1897) and Jack London’s Before Adam (1906). Haraucourt, however, deliberately goes back to a supposed earlier phase in human development, commenting more than once that Daâh is living before the time of “cave men,” when the ancestors of humankind were allegedly still forest-dwellers.

  Haraucourt’s account of human prehistory begins with its hypothetical proto-humans living a solitary existence, having not yet begun to form societies, and his account is as much an account of the origins of living in association as it is of technological discoveries and the development of language. In parallel with that, and as a connected aspect of the same process, it offers an account of the primal evolution of consciousness—a much more difficult endeavor in narrative terms. In consequence, as well as being a substantial work of fiction, Daâh is an authentic exercise in existential philosophy: a conscientious and fascinating attempt to strip human consciousness down to its fundamental elements, and to explain the dynamics of its origins. That is what made the story of Daâh unique at the time, and establishes it as the masterpiece it is. It is, in fact, highly improbable that our ancestors ever lived the kind of solitary forest-dwelling existence initially credited to Daâh, and it must have seemed unlikely even in 1912, but its adoption as a hypothesis favors the philosophical aspects of Haraucourt’s account of the elements of consciousness, and is justifiable on those grounds.

  The enterprise did not meet with universal approval at the time, either in its results or its method. The 1988 edition of Daâh includes a letter from Haraucourt to “Waldeck-Rousseau”—presumably a son or grandson of the famous statesman who had died in 1904—replying to several harsh criticisms of Daâh, one of which was “the perils of the inductive method and my pretention to logic.” The perils are, of course, real, and the precise pattern of logic employed in Daâh is certainly open to debate in the light of subsequent discoveries in physical anthropology, but Waldeck-Rousseau’s complaint that such intellectual endeavor is illegitimate in itself in a literary work is clearly absurd. He seems to have suggested, snidely, that Haraucourt was like his hero in taking it upon himself to explain the world, and Haraucourt replies to that accusation at length in his own letter, admitting that he is, indeed, like Daâh, because we all are, and that that is the whole point of the exercise: to analyze the fundamentals of human nature, that being interesting and worthwhile not just as an abstract intellectual exercise but because we are still possessed of them, even though we might have spent hundreds of thousands of years trying to modify and suppress them. Haraucourt is rightly unashamed of the fact that his attempt to strip human nature back to its original essence has involved intense introspection as well as reference to paleontological evidence, and that the logic of the endeavor involved the ingenious combination of the two.

  Haraucourt was, of course, correct in arguing in response to his critic that we still have reason to be interested in the origins of human nature, and that there is still something for us to learn and gain by thinking about it seriously. It is partly for that reason that his account of human prehistory has not become “obsolete,” even though we now have a much clearer picture, based on more elaborate geological evidence, of the actual pattern and time-scale of proto-human evolution. Perhaps ironically, however, the point on which Haraucourt’s account differed most obviously from the then-conventional scientific account—another object of Waldeck-Rousseau’s criticism—still remains debatable, and it is by no means established that Haraucourt’s unorthodox contention was mistaken. That point is the relationship between the two kinds of skeletons then identified as “Neanderthal Man” and “Cro-Magnon Man,” which the conventional account represented as competing species, the former of which was superseded—and perhaps wiped out—by the latter, so that the “Cro-Magnons” became ancestral to contemporary humankind. Haraucourt takes the view that contemporary humankind is the result of interbreeding between the two types, and hypothesizes that the critical evolutionary advances were made by the Neanderthal Daâh with assistance from the children he has with the Cro-Magnon female Ta, and other progeny of their cross-breeding with those born to him by the Neanderthal female Hock.

  Waldeck-Rousseau’s other specific criticism, that it is implausible to collapse such an elaborate history of change into the lifetime of a single individual and the adventures of a single “horde,” is obviously rational, but Haraucourt’s dismissal of it on the grounds of poetic license and narrative convenience is perfectly legitimate; Daâh is a work of fiction, no more intended to be taken in a crudely literal sense than the story of Adam and Eve, but nevertheless aspiring to a kind of truthfulness in its depiction of the psychological and social processes involved in the pattern of change and discovery. Daâh is a kind of archetype of primordial human being, and his story is not so much the hypothetical life-story of a particular individual as a distillation of the “collective biography” of a nascent species. As such it is deliberately provocative—Haraucourt was not a man to let conventional opinion go unchallenged, and was possessed of considerable artistry in devising such teasing arguments as the reason why the notion of property would have proceeded logically from the invention of the loincloth—and it is all the more compelling, as well as more entertaining, in consequence.

  As a “collective biography,” Daâh is highly effective, and if individual readers find much therein with which to quarrel, and a certain amount at which to take offense—the incestuous sexual communism and carefree cannibalism were blithely calculated to ruffle feathers—that is part and parcel of the exercise, and perhaps its true literary essence. The narrative does not intend or aspire to produce final and definitive answers to enigmas of human nature and human evolution, but to undertake the much more reasonable and far more necessary task of dramatizing the questions in such a way as to reveal their sharpness and their complexity. In that it succeeds, in no uncertain terms, and that is why the endeavor remains a tour de force, still highly provocative and still well worth reading.

  This translation has been made from a copy of the Arléa edition of 1988.

  Brian Stableford

  DAH: THE FIRST HUMAN

  PART ONE: THE NOMAD

  I. Her

  At the top of the chalky cliff, the branches of the thicket parted. A brutal and bronzed face appeared amid the foliage, and then the flesh of a shoulder, an arm and a breast—and the crawling woman stood up, naked and hairy.

  She was a short,
thickset female with a massive torso and sturdy limbs; everything about her was broad and abrupt except the pelvis: the height of an adolescent and the amplitude of a street-porter; short legs, low-set knees, flat feet, thick hands and spatulate fingers; her muscles, as knotty as an oak, clinging to a rocky skeleton, and her belly protruding; on the ruddy blackcloth of her skin, a flexuous fleece was designed in a symmetrical décor, the point of which narrowed over the sternum and descended in two curves from the throat all the way to the crease of the groin, while from behind two other volutes departed from the armpits to join up with the dorsal spine and slide over the loins, where they broadened out like a fan.

  A mane of coarser hair, which garnished the skull with tresses and hanks, framed the face with a somber russet-tinted halo, the last flames of which reached the nascence of the shoulders. Within that thicket, the neck was even more massive, beneath a solid jaw. The vast mouth, with fleshy lips, projected its redoubtable dentition forwards, and it was as if the entire face was crushed beneath the slab of a sloping forehead; the nose, squat and broad, stood up level with the cheekbones and extended the double flare of the mobile nostrils to spire the revelations of the wind.

  In the shelter of the low forehead, consumed by the hair, the violently emphatic eyebrows were indented to form two grottoes, in the depths of which the eyes were agitating like skittish animals. Those eyes were brown and narrow between the wrinkled eyelids, which only allowed a narrow stripe of cornea to be seen; by virtue of the habit of watching for multiple and incessant perils, they expressed anxiety, and moved restlessly.

  Standing on the edge of the cliff, the woman lowered her gaze stupidly into the gulf, and the images entered into her: in the location where Paris would one day be built, the Seine, four leagues broad and yellow between the green forests, flowed beneath the stormy sky. From the depths of the horizon the river was racing furiously, and it covered the whole region like a tumultuous lake; on the shore of its waves, the woman saw the black dots of hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses moving, and in places, emerging from long grass, the round backs of elephants marching in single file. Over that morose immensity, the rain was falling hard.