Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
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Like The Time Machine and Olaf Stapledon’s subsequent account of Last and First Men (1930), Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension attempts a comprehensive future history of the human species, extending to a climactic and conclusive fate, but that fate is so very different from the possibilities imagined by Wells, Stapledon and almost all other literary far-futuristic fantasies as to give Pawlowski’s work a blatantly anomalous status. Like most of the kindred works cited, Pawlowski’s straddles an awkward boundary between fictional and non-fictional formats, struggling to fuse them into a strong alloy, but its particular combination of formats is virtually unique. Its fictional elements are brief Swiftian satires, dressed in a scathing sarcasm that exceeds the ironic fervor of such august predecessors as Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire; its non-fictional embellishments range from delicate exercises in mock-autobiography to fervent sermons.
Although Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension is not included in the definitive Dictionary of Literary Utopias compiled by Vita Fortunati and Raymond Trousson it is, in a sense, the ultimate Utopian satire in the 20th century “eupsychian” mode—which, according to Frank Manuel, largely displaced the earlier “eutopian” and “euchronian” modes, locating the ideal state of being in a hypothetical state of mind rather than a different place or a future time. In this respect, it is one of the most insistent works of Utopian fiction ever penned; it employs its flamboyant humor as a lure drawing the reader to an exceedingly earnest conclusion.
Although the “Examen Critique” casually drops the names of numerous scientists of which Pawlowski probably had scant knowledge until he set out conscientiously to research the essay, Voyage itself offers very little explicit acknowledgement of its sources of inspiration. Pawlowski must surely have been familiar, however, with Gabriel Tarde’s “Fragment d’histoire future,” first published in the Revue Internationale de Sociologie in 1896—when Pawlowski was still working on the doctoral thesis he was to submit to the Ecole des Sciences Politiques—and reprinted as a book (translated into English as Underground Man) in 1904. Pawlowski’s future history has enough in common with Tarde’s to be regarded as an extrapolation of its themes, but also sufficient difference from it to be regarded as a defiant ideological reply, calculatedly aimed towards the liberating light rather than the confining darkness in which Tarde regretfully leaves his philosophically-advanced descendants of modern humankind.
Despite its enthusiastic traffic in the absurd, Voyage clearly aspires to outstrip and overshadow such hypothetical progressive histories as Tarde’s, Charles Renouvier’s retrospective Uchronie (1857) and the Comte de Saint-Simon’s account of the future of the human species in the posthumous Oeuvres choisies (1859). It sets out boldly to change minds, change lives and provide the final answer to all the problems of metaphysics. The fact that the book is rarely considered in this context, however, reflects the discomfort induced by its flagrantly bizarre comic elements, which must have seemed to contemporary readers—and still seems to many modern critics—to link it far more closely to two of its other likely influences: Alphonse Allais and Alfred Jarry.
Allais was a humorist whose contributions to periodicals in the 1890s were fairly prolific; they included numerous speculative vignettes based on contemporary developments in science and technology, which are very similar in content and style to Pawkowski’s accounts of imaginary inventions and the vignettes detailing the Scientific Era that make up a substantial part of the Voyage. Had he not died in 1905, Allais would have been a perfect contributor to Comoedia. Jarry, who was considerably younger than Allais, but only a year older than Pawlowski, died in 1907, so Pawlowski never had the opportunity to publish his work in Comoedia either, but he too would have been very welcome in its pages; Jarry and Pawkowlski had more than literary interests in common, especially their powerful fascination with cycling.
Although Jarry discontinued his formal education at relatively early stage, he retained a fascination with science, having been briefly acquainted with Henri Bergson, the theorist of time and consciousness whose ideas form a key part of the philosophical underpinning of Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension. Jarry’s swift Bergsonian response to the French translation of The Time Machine, “Commentaire pour servir à la contruction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps” (1899; tr. as “How to Construct a Time Machine”) was a significant precursor, if not a key model, of the style and the content of Pawlowski’s fictionalized essays.
Jarry became an important contributor to early French science fiction with Le surmâle (1902; tr. as The Supermale), but the posthumous Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien (tr. as “The Life and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician”), issued in 1911 by Fasquelle—who was to publish Voyage a year later—is even closer in spirit to certain aspects of Pawlowski’s work by virtue of its bold celebration of contradiction, its hectic patchwork structure and its marked anticipations of surrealism. Contemporary readers could certainly be forgiven for considering Jarry and Pawlowski as two of a kind, although Pawlowski, unlike Jarry, was very tall—which presumably assisted his athletic endeavors—and enjoyed much better health, at least until he developed the middle-aged spread displayed in various surviving portraits and caricatures.
Pawlowski was undoubtedly familiar with at least some of the many other works of French scientific romance that appeared in the early 1900s, most of which took some inspiration from H. G. Wells. He was a friend of “Willy,” for whom the science fiction writer Jean de La Hire had once worked as a secretary, and the short items incorporated into Voyage include probable derivations from science fiction novels by Gustave Le Rouge, Jean-Antoine Nau and André Couvreur (all of which are footnoted in the text).
In view of these complex and somewhat contrasted relationships with a remarkable variety of other proto-sciencefictional texts, it is no wonder that critics have never known exactly where to place Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension in the generic spectrum, or exactly what to make of it. What is beyond question, though, is that there is no other Utopian, future-historical or dimensional fantasy novel like it—a fact that is surely sufficient to warrant its status as a classic of extraordinary fiction, and certainly makes it well worth reading.
Despite the thematic connections between Voyage and The Time Machine, it is almost certain that Pawlowski initially derived his notion of the fourth dimension from a very different source. The popularization of the idea as a mathematical conceit certainly owed much to Charles Hinton, but there were others avid to make use of the notion once the work of Lobatchevsky and Riemann had emerged from the shadows of obscurity. The book that did most to package the idea in a markedly different way was the third volume of Johann K. F. Zöllner’s Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, known individually as Transcendentale Physik (1878; tr. as Transcendental Physics).
Dedicated to William Crookes, the English physicist who had become an important champion of Spritualism and its associated phenomena, Zöllner’s book attempted to use the concept of a fourth spatial dimension to explain the various supernatural feats carried out by mediums; it is probably no coincidence that the two primary examples cited by Zöllner—tying knots in pieces of string whose ends are held tight or sealed, and importing objects into sealed boxes—are the two primary examples cited by Pawlowski. (Cynics like the American conjuror John Maskelyne pointed out that these were also two standard tricks of stage magic, and Zöllner’s experimental subject, Henry Slade, had been caught cheating even before Transcendentale Physik went to press, but—like most scientists who took a stand on such matters—Zöllner refused to believe that he could have been duped.)
Further evidence that Pawlowski derived his notion of the fourth dimension from Zöllner is offered by his reference to its “German origins.” Although any recent history of mathematics will inform the reader that the prospectus for non-Euclidean geometry was mapped out by Gauss, hardly anyone knew that until Zöllner advertised it prominently, quoting from the relevant unpublishe
d manuscript in the first chapter of his book, which was given extra publicity when it was translated into English for Crookes’ Quarterly Journal of Science in April 1878, entitled “On Space of Four Dimensions.” It was that article rather than the whole text that first attracted attention in France, where Crookes’ own experiments and popularizing endeavors were considered very newsworthy.
Zöllner’s work pioneered the field of “psychic research” and its use of the fourth dimension to explain events that might otherwise be deemed supernatural was taken up enthusiastically by many ardent participants in the 19th century “occult revival.” The fourth dimension and such notional offshoots as “the astral plane” became key explanatory resources of such movements as “Spiritism” (a French vogue invented by “Allan Kardec,” which attempted to supply an underpinning science to Spiritualist religion) and Madame Blavtasky’s Theosophy. It is significant that Marcel Duchamp was not alone in taking considerable inspiration from the Voyage; the novel was also responsible for the occult historian and novelist Jules Bois dedicating his study of L’eternel retour [The Eternal Return] (1914) to Pawlowski.
Pawlowski was personally acquainted with Bois—Walbecq quotes correspondence exchanged between the two—and also seems to have known Bois’ immediate predecessor as the central figure in French occult scholarship, the would-be Rosicrucian magus and novelist “Sâr” Joséphin Péladan. Incongruous as it may seem, Pawlowski published at least one article by Péladan in Comoedia. How close this acquaintance was is difficult to determine, but the main text of Voyage does take the occult aspects of the fourth dimension more seriously than its author was prepared to acknowledge in the “Examen Critique,” which is very careful to concentrate on more respectable affiliations. Although the various chapters dealing with the clichés of spiritism are written tongue-in-cheek, they fully accept the reality of the phenomena, and are perfectly serious in attempting a bold catch-all explanation of them.
It may well be significant that Jules Bois was a regular attendee at the weekly salon hosted by the famous popularizer of astronomy and champion of spiritualism Camille Flammarion, at which Flammarion’s fellow astronomers and co-religionists rubbed shoulders with occult enthusiasts of more a colorful stripe and literary figures of various distinction; Victor Hugo had dropped in occasionally while he was still alive and Arthur Conan Doyle eventually became a regular English visitor. Scientists of many sorts, especially ones considered slightly unorthodox, found a warm welcome at Flammarion’s soirées. Other regulars included Gustave Le Bon, a pioneering social psychologist who compiled a comprehensive history of civilization and produced a landmark work on the Psychologie des foules [Psychology of Crowds] (1905), who was also so struck by the near-simultaneous discoveries of X-rays and radioactivity that he undertook extensive laboratory experiments in physics in order to produce a definitive book on L’évolution de la matière (1905; tr. as The Evolution of Matter). It is from the latter volume that Pawlowski, who certainly knew Le Bon, borrowed his observations on “the dissociation of matter”—taking care to include a rare acknowledgement—and his related examples and statistics, while his depiction of the Leviathan draws heavily on the other thread of Le Bon’s works.
Although Pawlowski does not appear to have been a regular visitor to Flammarion’s salon, he might well have dropped in occasionally, perhaps in Le Bon’s company, and it might have been there that he made Bois’ acquaintance. At any rate, Pawlowski would certainly have been sympathetic to the polymathy of the salon’s interests and the eclectic interplay of diverse ideas that its host encouraged. It was one of the last refuges of would-be Renaissance Men, of whom Pawlowski considered himself to be one of the last endangered specimens.
Although Pawlowski was a neo-Platonist in a much stricter and more orthodox sense than Péladan or Bois, and evidently considered occult phenomena as relatively trivial side-effects of a much more elevated and far-reaching Idealism, it is not entirely surprising that Bois found Voyage stimulating and inspiring, and the same must have been true of other occult theorists who read it. It is arguable that Pawlowski’s work has closer affinities with such flagrantly mystical extrapolations of the notion of the fourth dimension as the works by P. D. Ouspensky translated into English as Tertium Organum (1920) and A New Model of the Universe (1931) and J. W. Dunne's highly successful accounts of An Experiment with Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1934) than it does with any Surrealist fantasy or sciencefictional future history. Like Bois, both those writers were preoccupied with the notion of Eternal Return—a thesis that Pawlowski could not tolerate, let alone accommodate, but to which his version of the fourth dimension is more amenable and adaptable than he probably realized.
As well as these cultural contexts, of course, Voyage au quatrième dimension had a personal context, which was certainly highly relevant to its psychological genesis and contents. Gaston William Adam Pawlowski was born on June 14, 1974, in Joigny. His father, Albert de Pawlowski, was an engineer working in the research department of the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de l’Ouest. He attended the Lycée Condorcet in Paris before going on to the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. Despite the fact that he took care to complete his doctorate, he does not seem to have had any intention of practicing law. Although he did publish one other work of social science before his thesis—the relatively brief pamphlet Sociologie nationale: une définition de l’état [National Sociology: A Definition of the State] (1897), which introduced the notion of the Animal-State redeployed in Voyage as the Leviathan—he was by then already working as a journalist.
Pawlowski first began writing articles for periodicals in 1894, before he graduated from the Ecole des Science Politiques, initially in connection with his chief hobby, cycling. He took a keen interest in the development of racing bicycles, and also in the parallel evolution of the automobile—an interest undoubtedly encouraged and assisted by his father’s involvement in the development of railway locomotives. The first of the three periodicals that Pawlowski was to found, long before Comoedia, was Le Vélo [The Bicycle], the official organ of the Union Vélocipédique de France (the second was the short-lived L’Opinion, which played host to his political writings). By the time he graduated, however, Pawlowski had decided that his true vocation was humor, and the first professional magazine whose staff he joined was Le Rire, an established periodical that he was eventually to imitate when he founded Comoedia in 1907.
Pawlowski’s first “novel” was a serial published in Le Vélo in 1894 while he was still a teenager, Le record de Samuel Humbug [Samuel Humbug’s Record], but it was not reprinted in book form. He did, however, achieve book publication with On se moque de nous [They’re Laughing at Us] (1898), issued under the by-line W. de Pawlowski rather than G. de Pawlowski, which he used on all his subsequent work. By that time, he had already begun writing brief accounts—usually only a few lines long—of imaginary inventions, which were to become a key element of his stock-in-trade. They were published in numerous different periodicals—Walbecq names six before adding “etc.”—before Fasquelle eventually issued a collection in volume form as Inventions nouvelles et dernières nouveautés (1916). Although most are calculatedly silly—for example, a special kind of snail bred for use as a shaving device—some are ideas that have actually come to fruition, like a keyboard whose sounds are fed to a pair of headphones so that only the player can hear them.
In 1906, Pawlowski issued an unbound set of short texts as Les billets de paysages animés [Notes on, or Tickets to, Animated Lands], which were subsequently reprinted in the more substantial Polochon: paysages animés, paysages chimériques. Pierre Versins summarizes two other science fiction stories from that volume: “La faillite de la science” [The Bankruptcy of Science], in which Thomas Edison invents a translating machine; and the more ambitious “La véridique ascension dans l’Histoire de James Stout Brighton” [James Stout Brighton’s Authentic Ascent Through History], whose protagonist journeys back in time by traveling at enormous speed from east t
o west, to the extent that he witnesses the disappearance of humankind. All of this work helped prepare the way for the pieces that formed the bulk of the first version of Voyage, in which their inventive spirit was carefully recombined with and put at the service of the earnest concerns of La philosophie du travail. Pawlowski clearly intended Voyage to be his masterpiece, and presumably considered it as such throughout his life, just as other critics have done.
We can only speculate as to how Pawlowski’s career might have developed had the Great War not broken out and required his conscription into military service, but that service did not slow him down. Although he was not directly employed as a propagandist, he continued writing and publishing throughout the war, including many contributions to such morale-building periodicals as La Baïonnette. Although he certainly did not abandon comedy, he did set aside the phantasmagoric bizarrerie that had become his hallmark, concentrating on humor of an earthier and more naturalistic kind. Many of his sketches and stories were collected in Dans les rides du front [a punning title, signifying, “In the Wrinkles of the Forehead” but also readable as “In the Front-line Trenches”] (1917) and Signaux à l’ennemi [Warnings to the Enemy] (1918). The page in the latter volume that advertises the author’s other works refers to a collection called Contes singuliers, also dated 1918, but no copy appears to exist and it is probably a phantom title—Signaux à l’ennemi was issued in March (although dated April) and the advertisement is presumably looking forward to a planned publication that could not actually be published due to wartime restrictions.
The extent of the personal disillusionment that Pawlowski suffered during the War, and the legacy of mournful bitterness that remained thereafter, is obvious in several of the passages added to the text of the revised edition of Voyage au pays du quatrième dimension issued in 1923, especially the diatribe featured in Chapter XI, which leaves the reader in little doubt as to the identity of the hypothetical writer whose fate the narrative voice bemoans. Gustave Le Bon expressed his own disillusionment very clearly in two books lamenting the break in the history of civilization that the war had caused, the second of which, a collection of aphorisms called Hier et demain: Pensées Brèves (1918), includes some futuristic items very much in tune with the text added to Voyage.