Caresco, Superman
Page 1
André Couvreur
Caresco, Superman
or, A Voyage to Eucrasia
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
Caresco, surhomme, ou le voyage en Eucrasie: Conte humain by André Couvreur (1865-1944), here translated as Caresco, Superman; or, A Voyage to Eucrasia, was originally published by Plon, Nourrit et Cie in 1904. It is a sequel to Le Mal nécessaire (1899)1, and is a rare example of a boldly speculative sequel to a grimly naturalistic work, all the more exceptional because the author had previously published two naturalistic sequels to Le Mal nécessaire in Les Mancenilles [a noun improvised from the specific name of Hippomane mancenilla, a highly toxic shrub] (1900) and La Source fatale [The Fatal Source] (1901), which make up a trilogy collectively entitled Les Dangers sociaux [Social Dangers].
When he published Caresco, surhomme, Couvreur was interrupting a second naturalistic trilogy collectively entitled La Famille [The Family], which he had begun with La Force du sang [The Strength of the Blood] (1902) and La Graine [The Seed] (1903), and was due to complete with La Fruit [The Fruit] (1906). The last title is advertized in Caresco, surhomme as en preparation [forthcoming], but the belated publication date suggests that the author was struggling with it, and might have set out to write a utopian fantasy in the hope that a change might be as good as a rest.
As things turned out, the move established a signpost to things to come; Couvreur went on after publishing Le Fruit to produce many more works of satirical speculative fiction, most of them featuring a protagonist markedly akin to the superhuman version of Armand Caresco, in his ambition to take practical biology to new experimental extremes. When Couvreur eventually returned to naturalistic fiction, late in life, it was not to the earnest naturalistic didacticism of Le Mal nécessaire and its immediate sequels, but to social comedy with a light satiric edge in “Hymen & Co.” (1928).
Caresco, surhomme therefore represents a crucial watershed in the evolution of Couvreur’s literary method, if not his deeply skeptical and ironic outlook on the problems of human biology and their potential solution or possible intensification. It is, in one sense, a straightforward extrapolation of the “moral” to which Le Mal nécessaire appears to point, emphasizing that kinship by concluding with a last line that is a virtual repetition of the last line of its predecessor. In its substance and narrative strategy, however, it is a very different book, and there is a sense in which it is not a sequel at all, in that the matters deliberately left unclarified by the refusal to provide the first novel with any kind of explanatory epilogue are also left without the slightest comment here. Apart from Caresco himself, there is no mention of any character featured in the earlier novel, and no explanation is offered for the fact that the nature of the erotic obsession that caused the surgeon so much trouble in Le Mal nécessaire has somehow been replaced by a very different but equally damning perverse obsession.
Although only five years separated the publication of Le Mal nécessaire from that of Caresco, surhomme, a good deal had happened in the interim, including the publication of several works whose ideative content and narrative methods probably had a considerable influence on the decision to write the further text, and on the form it took. The boom in medical fantasies to which the first novel had made a significant contribution had continued in some profusion, but one fictional surgeon who must surely have attracted Couvreur’s special attention was the anti-hero of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, which he had presumably not read in English when it first appeared in 1896 but must have come to his attention when an abridged version was serialized as L’Île du docteur Moreau in the Mercure de France in 1901.
Wells was by then beginning to have a considerable influence on a number of French writers, including Alfred Jarry, one of the forefathers of surrealism, who published Le Surmâle: Conte moderne (tr. as The Supermale) in 1902. If Caresco can be seen as stepping into Dr. Moreau’s shoes in developing godlike ambitions and a similarly symbolic role, he also takes aboard some of the surreally comedic aspects of Jarry’s protagonist.
The inspiring possibilities in those two novels might seem a trifle at odds with the Naturalistic allegiance of Couvreur’s early works, in that the Mercure was still firmly associated in 1901 with the Symbolist movement, and Jarry was very obviously in the vanguard of that movement. However, the dedication of Caresco, surhomme to Paul Adam, who made a deliberate attempt to synthesize Naturalism and Symbolism, which included taking aboard futuristic and utopian themes, proves that Couvreur was not the kind of Naturalist who defined himself in opposition to Symbolism; as a well-read man, he was undoubtedly familiar with contemporary works in the Decadent and Symbolist vein.
The content of Caresco, surhomme suggests that another novel that Couvreur probably read in the interim between the two Caresco novels was Les Aventures du roi Pausole (1901; tr. as The Adventures of King Pausole) by Pierre Louÿs, which carried forward an intense erotic sensibility initially put forward in the best-selling Aphrodite (1896), offering a sympathetic portrait of a libertine utopia. Although Couvreur reacts sarcastically against that notion of utopia in Caresco, surhomme he was obviously intrigued by it, and perhaps fascinated by it. Although less explicit than contemporary pornography, which was undergoing something of a boom (to which many Symbolist writers contributed pseudonymously), Caresco, surhomme nevertheless employs a license unseen in utopian fiction since Rabelais, and hitherto unknown in roman scientifique. In that respect, the novel might well have been influential, being rapidly followed by Maurice Renard’s Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908)2, which has some graphically perverse sex-scenes, and Fernand Kolney’s extravagant exploration of L’Amour dans cinq mille ans (undated but probably 1908)3.
As well as translations of H. G. Wells, the press associated with the Mercure de France also published the first full translations of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, as Ainsi parla Zarathustra, initially in 1898 and then in a revised version in 1903. Although the German original had been published in the 1880s, and excerpts had been published in French translation in 1892, it was until the two Mercure editions appeared that the book’s extravagant advocacy of the übermensch—rendered into French, of course, as surhomme—began to excite fervent controversy. Although Nietzsche is not mentioned in the text of Couvreur’s novel, the use of the term surhomme is clearly intended to refer to that controversy, and Caresco obviously considers himself to be an “overman,” reproducing many of the features that Nietszche (albeit rather inconsistently) attributed to such hypothetical individuals.
The main thrust of Nietzsche’s philosophy was the attempt to move beyond the traditional concepts of good and evil—which, according to him, defined good in a purely negative sense as the absence of evil—and to formulate a positive notion of good as creativity, so that his evolved “overmen” would be innovative artists committed to the improvement of life, having abandoned the infantile imagination of a posthumous paradise in which the evils of this world might receive recompense. Caresco is a different kind of Superman, with megalomaniac ambitions that a Nietszchean übermensch would have thought puerile, but his creation of Eucrasia is a deliberate extrapolation of the “ethics of the herd” that Nietzsche so despised, in which a supposed state of ideal happiness is achieved by the elimination of evils and the substitution of a more psychologically satisfying notion of posthumous recompense than the judgmental Christian model. The objections posed to that ideal by Couvreur’s philosophical critic, Zéphirin Choumaque, are very different from Nietzsche’s, but the playing field on which the contest takes place is very similar to the one marked out by Nietzsche, licensing the somewhat-unsympathet
ic adoption of one of his key terms.
Given the recent publication or translation of these various other works, Caresco, surhomme can be seen very much as a product of its time, taking up themes that were on the contemporary table of literary discussion in Paris—especially in the pages of the Mercure de France, one of the capital’s principal literary magazines and the one that seemed most conspicuously to be in the forefront of literary evolution. In reacting against all of them, Couvreur can be seen as a conservative—as he certainly was, philosophically and politically—but in his adoption of a new literary method, he was arguably as avant garde as any of his contemporaries, and ahead of his time in certain significant respects.
Even in Paris, Caresco, surhomme must have seemed to many readers to be an exceedingly risqué text. Kolney was not the only author to follow in its wake by considering the question of erotic relationships in futuristic utopian settings, but the others waited for the more relaxed social atmosphere of the post-war decade, when Marcel Rouff produced Voyage au monde à l’envers (1920)4 for the Mercure and Victor Margueritte wrote Le Couple [The Couple] (1924), and none of those successors is quite as shocking in the lubricity of its inventions, or anywhere near as flamboyantly scathing in its satirization, as Caresco, surhomme. Couvreur’s novel is deliberately old-fashioned in its explicit citations as well as its choice of models, taking its ostensible philosophical stance from Seneca, its basic literary template from classic utopian fiction and its rhetorical method from Voltaire, but it is a thoroughly modern work in terms of its imagery and unashamed melodrama, and in the flamboyant absurdist excess of its symbolic climax—which would surely have made Sigmund Freud laugh, had he ever had the opportunity to read it.
It is possible that the extent and manner of the novel’s dealings with eroticism did not do much for Couvreur’s reputation, and that its risqué nature is largely responsible for the fact that it is now an exceedingly rare text. It might be significant in that regard that although Couvreur, like Rouff and Margueritte, took advantage of the post-war relaxation to write two more erotically-charged texts in L’Androgyne (1922; tr. as “The Androgyne” in the first volume of The Exploits of Professor Tornada) and “Le Valseur phosphorescent” (1923; tr. as “The Phosphorescent Waltzer” in the second volume of The Exploits of Professor Tornada), all his subsequent works were subjected to a relatively rigorous self-censorship, answering to a much sterner sense of literary decency. At any rate, the flagrant eroticism of Caresco, surhomme is a significant component of its ground-breaking originality, as well as going a long way to making its flawed utopia seem a great deal more attractive than many earnestly uptight models.
Choumaque, the philosopher provided by the author as a viewpoint for the evaluation of the utopia cannot regard its erotic component as a mere distraction, and finds it very difficult indeed to abstract himself from its temptations in order to maintain his conscientious Stoicism. It would be wrong to say any more at this point about the manner in which that intellectual contest develops, because it would function as a spoiler, but I will add a brief afterword to the text commenting on the nature and value of Choumaque’s specific opposition to the Eucrasian utopia, and his own solution to the supposed problem of “the necessity of evil.”
It is possible that contemporary readers who had found the conclusion of Le Mal nécessaire direly uncomfortable might have found the conclusion of Caresco, surhomme more satisfactory, and it might well be that Couvreur orchestrated his conclusion with exactly that possibility in mind. The fact that the book is now exceedingly difficult to find, however, implies that if the move was an attempt to curry favor, it failed. The novel is, nevertheless, one of the evident classics of French roman scientifique, and one of the most interesting works of the brief boom in “scientific marvel fiction” assisted by the translation of H. G. Wells’ works into French.
In spite of its more conventional story-arc, many readers might still find it a slightly discomfiting and rather irritating story, as well as a highly improbable one, but it is as well to remember, in this case as in the case of Le Mal nécessaire, that Couvreur was always far more interested in raising interesting questions than providing definitive answers, and was exceedingly well aware that cavalier sarcasm can be a very useful strategy, in philosophy and literature alike, when the intention is to prompt thought rather than close it down.
The present translation will be followed by three volumes collecting a sequence of stories written by Couvreur between 1910 and 1939, featuring an anti-hero who took over several of the projects initiated by Caresco, and eventually began to term himself “the Superman” when he acquired control of his own mini-utopia; the three volumes are collectively entitled The Exploits of Professor Tornada. Together with The Necessary Evil, and the present translation, the five volumes make up a very unusual and intriguing set, in the context of which Caresco, Superman becomes even more interesting and thought-provoking than it is in isolation.
This translation has been made from a photocopy of the Plon, Nourrit edition kindly made by Marc Madouraud from the copy in his collection. I am very grateful to him for his generosity in supplying it, and to Jean-Marc Lofficier for acting as intermediary in securing it.
Brian Stableford
CARESCO, SUPERMAN
or, A VOYAGE TO EUCRASIA
Letter to Paul Adam5
This is a tale for the grown-up children that we all are, and if I have thought of dedicating it to you, it is because I would have liked you to write it. Accept it nevertheless as it is—which is to say, as a canvas that will lack the rare and sparkling ornamentation of your style, the magnifying fantasy of your imagery and the prodigious resources of your deductive mind: all qualities that would doubtless have transformed a modest philosophical story into a solid work of art.
Do not reproach me, however, for having risked this fable. I have the excuse of having amused myself in inventing it, even if my invention does not interest others. To take the principal character of Le Mal nécessaire, the surgeon Caresco, from brutal modern reality, in order to transport him into a pure fiction, had the attraction for me that all dreams have, when one gives them wings and lets them take flight toward the infinity of hypotheses. Who among us has not demolished Society completely in order to construct another, marvelous one, endowed with all the attributes of happiness? Everyone, if he has not striven to do so, has certainly thought about thus employing the best choice of its philosophical elements, whether they are humanitarian, political or religious.
I have, therefore, attempted to edify an Eldorado on the foundations of Science, and more particularly the science of Life, putting science in the service of pleasure. After having undermined so much and built so much, it has not seemed to me that the new community ought to be better portioned, from the point of view of a definitive result, in the coin of Happiness, than the one in which we are agitating so painfully. Perhaps I will be criticized for arriving at that conclusion. I pray, however, those who will look further than the décor in which I have set my tale, will not cry paradox, and will not doubt my gratitude for the innovations and ameliorations due to human genius. No one has more respect for them than I do.
Although I put on trial existences that are too soft and felicities that are too easy, I concede that they are the indispensable salary of Effort. But it is also necessary that the beneficent Effort in question does not find itself canceled out by the results that follow in its wake, and our mores do tend to reduce it singularly. That is what I have tried to prove in this little parabolic tale. Forgive me, my dear Paul Adam, if I have not succeeded as well as you would have done.
CHAPTER I
The negro orchestra—they were all the rage in the great restaurants of Paris in 1950—was concluding the frenzied andante rhythm of the first act of Yolulu, a Chinese opera that was said to surpass the most beautiful French works, and which, in any case, manifested for alert minds the long-foreseen realization of the yellow peril. One of the musicians—the one who had be
en blowing an ophicleide with the greatest force—detached himself from the group of black contortionists and slipped between the tables to pick up the gold coins earned by the noise with which he had just stunned the customers.
He was a superb fellow, who might have been thought to be made of bronze. His primitive legs, clad in narrow bright red trousers and his orangutan back, espoused by his tight green waistcoat, excited the covetousness of all the bejeweled young female diners. What amused them the most, however, was his skill in catching the coins that they threw in his mouth. He collected them with such a flash of his white teeth that the generosity of the women, spurred by a competitive ostentation, went beyond measure. Fifty louis were engulfed in that natural alms-box.
At one of the tables at the back, two men indifferent to the banal spectacle were smoking and chatting. One of them, the older, looked slight out of place in the elegant milieu. Dressed, as was his companion, in a heliotrope suit with a square-cut shirt-front, according to the latest fashion, he appeared to be about fifty years of age, of medium height, with a protruding abdomen and massive short and slightly twisted legs. His face, lustrous with acne, was hidden behind a bushy gray beard, so abundant that the luminosity of his large nose was scarcely visible, while a bald spot, encircled by a crown of hair that was still black, seemed astonishing, like a desert succeeding the vegetation of a fecund plain. In spite of that hirsute appearance, however, one immediately experienced a sympathy for his physiognomy, simultaneously wild and humorous, his rubicund complexion, the delicacy of his cloudy and weary blue eyes and the more accentuated brown bushiness of his eyebrows.