Although there are problems with the hypothetical scientific foundations cited in “L’Homme truqué,” resulting from the mistaken allegation that electricity is a form of electromagnetic radiation, it might only require a slight adjustment to the jargon employed to rescue the possibility that is envisaged there. Renard had, after all, based the fundamental assumption of his story, and the fundamental analogy of his scientific marvel, on the functioning of “electroscopes”—presumably referring to gold-leaf electroscopes—which were manifestly capable of reacting to electrical charges at a distance. He probably did not fully appreciate the difference between static electricity and electric currents, although Jean Lebris’ altered vision does seem sensitive to that difference; however confused his knowledge might have been, though, he was not incorrect in recognizing that electromagnetic phenomena are associated with detectable “fields of force,” and his confidence in the possibility of their sensory perception cannot be ruled out a priori.
Nowadays, of course, it is a matter of general knowledge—rather than the esoteric theoretical opinion of a group of physicists whose views were not uncontroversial—that an electric current consists of a flow of electrons. Any modern science fiction writer ought to be aware—although the routine and unrepentant idiocy of much television and movie “sci-fi” makes the issue debatable—that vision depends on the interception by the retina of photons emitted directly by light-sources or reflected from surfaces, and that no parallel method of information-transfer exists with respect to distant flows of electrons. This only means, however, that a sense of “electroscopic sight” would have to be shored up by another sort of hypothetical reasoning.
It is arguable that, in searching to imagine, characterize and describe a sixth sense different from the one imagined in Un Homme chez les microbes, Renard was being a little too conscientious in giving his character the ability to “see” something as specific and already well-defined as electrical activity. Most of his predecessors and successors took freer advantage of the inherent psychological plausibility of Cartesian dualism by making the nature of their hypothetical “energy beings,” and the objects of their imaginary predation, something much more closely akin to the alternative “substance of the soul.”
Given Renard’s willingness, in the Le Péril bleu, to imagine vast macrocosmic entities compounded out of alternative matter, he could easily have extended that same line of thought to the potential complexities of the human microcosm and its possible relationships with external entities invisible to the five senses with which humans are routinely under-equipped. Indeed, although the brief story is inevitably vague, that is what he seems to do in “Eux.” In “L’Homme truqué, however, he seems to have been trying to avoid such an imaginative leap of faith, for conscientious reasons, and deliberately attempting to stick more closely to scientifically-recognized phenomena. Alas, his attempt to characterize electroscopic sight, further confused by Prosope’s allegation that electricity is the fundamental component of matter—which may be a misunderstanding of the Einsteinian equivalence of matter and energy—revealed his limitations in that regard.
As suggested above, it is possible that a belated realization of the fact that he was ill-equipped to work so closely with actual scientific theory was one of the reasons why Renard decided to abort the novel that “L’Homme truqué” was originally intended to be. What is not in doubt, however, is the fact that the novel clearly reflects the general disenchantment with the social role of science that had occurred as a result of the Great War. Even the maniacal villain of Le Docteur Lerne is a less sinister figure, in some ways, than Doctor Prosope, who speaks to his colleagues in an unintelligible language and operates in a strangely hostile moral environment, in which Science is a demanding and arbitrary god addicted to mysterious ways. It is not obvious why Prosope behaves as he does—there seems to be no real reason for his utter disregard for the principle of informed consent—but in so doing, he is merely representing the manner in which people had come to see science in the wake of the horrible contributions that scientists had made to technologies of human destruction in the Great War.
Whether or not the novel was originally planned to end on the neat but direly downbeat note with which the novella reaches its conte cruel conclusion we cannot know, but it is tempting to assume that the extant ending reflects something of Renard’s own disillusionment at the time, with respect to his intimate personal life as well as his recent military service and continuing writing career. It was not the first time he had treated the subject of love in a despairingly cynical manner, but it was to be the last, as he bowed to conventional demand, and he might have added an extra kick to it in consequence. On the other hand, since the general paranoia of the story so obviously reflects the fact that it was written in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, the specific treatment of the romantic subplot might simply reflect the same state of post-traumatic distress.
“L’Homme truqué” remains the weakest of Renard’s five major scientific marvel stories, as his effective abandonment mid-way through clearly recognizes, but it is certainly not without interest as a further step in the particular exploration that Un Homme chez les microbes had begun. Given that Renard could not have known at the time he set out to plan and write “L’Homme truqué” that the earlier work would ever be published, he might have thought of it merely as a more reader-friendly way to introduce the fundamental notion of senses other than the familiar five, in order to prepare the way for the much more elaborate description of the operation and corollaries of the Mandarin tuft, but it really might have been a significant expedition into unknown territory in its own right. In spite of its faults, it still qualifies as a significant experiment in the amalgamation of scientific marvel fiction and detective fiction, even though it eventually turned out to be less successful in that respect than Les Mains d’Orlac, or even—in an admittedly perverse fashion—Le Péril bleu.
It is hardly surprising that “L’Homme truqué” ran into difficulties of rational plausibility; indeed, it is arguable that very few such stories contrive to avoid that fate when subjected to keen scrutiny—as Renard was enthusiastic to point out when he found a flaw in the logic of The Invisible Man. It might appear at first glance that the story in the present collection worst afflicted by such difficulties is “L’Homme au corps subtil,” in that it is not at all obvious how Bouvancourt’s stratagem of shielding his feet from saturation by Y-light could save him from the same fate as Morand. Why does his superirradiated upper body not simply fall through his untransformed feet as well as the ground beneath? This apparent error might, however, be more easily salvageable than the one afflicting “L’Homme truqué.”
The answer to the enigma, if it is treated as such, is presumably not unconnected with a corollary problem, which is brought into its clearest focus in the story in Bouvancourt’s description of what must have happened to Morand as a result of his fall. Why is Morand’s oscillation as he moves continually back and forth through the Earth’s center of gravity subject to a progressive diminution of velocity? Obviously, in spite of the ability that bodies transformed by Y-light have to pass through untransformed material object, they are still subject to some form of friction—a fact confirmed by Bouvancourt’s observations of his own experience of having things pass through him. How does this mysterious friction arise? Presumably, the phenomenon must be linked to the mysterious integrity of Bouvancourt’s partly-transformed body, which prevents him from falling through his own feet.
This can be tentatively explained by further recourse to the fundamental thesis of Cartesian dualism: the notion that the soul, or mind, consists of an alternative kind of matter, which interacts with the ordinary matter of the body via some kind of interface. Presumably, it is an interaction of this admittedly-mysterious nature that is responsible for the fact that ordinary matter still exerts a “frictional” drag on matter transformed by Y-light, and for the fact that the integrity of Bouvancourt’s person—maintain
ed if not actually constituted by his soul—takes precedence over the tendency of his superirradiated legs to part company with his untransformed feet.
Another objection that might be raised to the logic of “L’Homme au corps subtil” is the question of how permeable individuals can breathe, even in the open air. Why do the untransformed oxygen molecules in the air not pass through their lung-tissue rather than being absorbed into the blood-stream? (If a similar thought occurred subsequently to Renard, it might conceivably have prompted his objection to The Invisible Man.) The story’s central hypothesis is, however, strictly concerned with the permeability of solids, and the question of the relationship of a Y-light-saturated object with respect to gases—or, for that matter, liquids—remains tantalizingly unexplored. A gas is, in effect, already an “alternative state of matter,” whose potential interactions with other such states remain speculatively unexplored in the story, but evidently do not prevent a permeable individual from breathing.
If Renard did begin to develop a greater sensitivity to such logical flaws after the war, and if that realization did play a part in his decision to cut “L’Homme truqué” short, it might help to explain not merely the form and nostalgically sentimental tone of “L’Homme qui voulait être invisible,” but also the two parables of disillusionment that follow it in this collection: the article “Depuis Sinbad” and the story “La Grenouille.” The conclusion of the article may be the clearest and most explicit indication Renard gave of why, in spite of his own tastes and inclinations, he had given up writing “parascientific” fiction by 1923 (save for two subsequent “salvage missions” undertaken in respect of previously-completed but as-yet-unpublished works), devoting himself instead to popular crime fiction and conventional fantastic fiction that never attempted to offer any serious competition to Edgar Poe.
As the article indicates, although Rosny had not quite given up on scientific marvel fiction—he contrived to publish “Les Navigateurs de l’infini”50 in 1925—his work in that vein had always been rare, and it became rarer. It is significant that the sequel to “Les Navigateurs de l’infini,” “Les Astronautes” [The Astronauts], remained unpublished until long after his death, finally appearing in 1960. Although he published a further handful of the largely marvel-free prehistoric fantasies for which he was already well-known, he only published one further story with any significant scientific marvel content, “Dans le monde des Variants,”51 which might well have been written long before its first appearance in 1939. It is also worth noting that the prolific Jean Ray, who was at the beginning of his career when he interviewed Renard and asked him to write the article in 1923, very rarely strayed into the “parascientific,” always preferring the comfort zone of the fantastique.
However explicit the article might be, however, its impact pales into insignificance by comparison with the careful description of the narrator’s disillusionment contained in “La Grenouille.” It is tempting to believe that Renard is talking about his own childhood fascinations when the narrator describes his early state of mind, especially when one considers the possible resonance of the reference to “tempting the hydra:”:a monster whose traditional location—Lerne, in French—gave a name to the villainous scientist of Renard’s first novel. Not unlike “L’Homme qui voulait être invisible,” although in a very different way, “La Grenouille” is only a “parascientific” story in a marginal sense; it is eager to make much of its own ambiguity and flatly refuses to consider any further possibility attached to what the significantly-named Mourgue might have accomplished except for the single purpose imagined.
None of the subsequent items in the collection make any determined attempt to go beyond that sort of marginality, even if some of them do include token suggestions of broader implication. Like the narrator of “La Grenouille,” their author is a man who no longer cared to dabble in that sort of speculation—except by way of salvaging work he had already done, when he was younger and in a more adventurous frame of mind. The brief article on “Hypothetical Fiction,” the brief story “The Discovery” and—most of all—the exceedingly brief account of “The Truth About Faust,” all continue in the same gradually-weakening vein of disillusionment, tinged with nostalgic regret. There is a certain wry propriety in the fact that the last item of all—the last item of “parascientific” or “hypothetical” fiction that Renard was ever to write—is a valedictory vignette in which a young entity receiving advice from an older and wiser one decides that it might be better, after all, to deny the existence of anything that might trouble the harmony of the blissfully ignorant imagination. We, of course, are not obliged—or even intended—to agree with the nebulous individual in question.
Notes
1 Léo Larguier (1878-1950) was a prolific poet and novelist who contributed the same periodicals as Renard in the years preceding the Great War and was one of the younger writers in regular attendance at his salon.
2 Outremont signifies “beyond the mountain” whereas Outremort signifies “beyond death.”
3 Jean-Baptiste Carrier (1756-1794), the instigator of notorious atrocities in that city before he was guillotined himself.
4 The reference to Heppeneff remains obscure, but Corbus is a castle featured in the section of La Légende des siècles entitled “Eviradnus,” which offers an account of heroic knight errantry. Hugo was an inveterate sketch-artist, whose innovative work anticipates numerous later schools of painting; he used such endeavors as a method of imaginative stimulus and as a means of showing off. He often finished off sketches he did for an audience by sprinkling them with coffee to provide a sort of sepia finish. The images available for viewing on the internet include one of a Rhine valley castle, which might well be the one that Renard had in mind when concocting his description of Outremort.
5 Like Outremort, Bourseuil is significant, roughly translatable as “the threshold of the Stock Exchange.”
6 Louis Cochet is quite a common name, and there were several notable people of that name when the story was written; the one most likely to be the intended dedicatee is the architect Philip-Louis Cochet.
7 Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) was world famous by the time this story was published, but in the 1890s, when it is set, he was still singing in provincial Italian theaters; he did not make it to La Scala until 1900 and his recording career did not begin until 1902.
8 Lakmé (1883) and Mignon (1866) are both light operas. The former has words by Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille and music by Léo Delibes; it is based on a work by Pierre Loti and set in India; the latter has words by Michel Carré and Jules Barbier, inspired by Goethe (Mignon is a character in Wilhelm Meister) and music by Ambroise Thomas.
9 “Seagulls Villa.”
10 The Italian exclamation “Perbacco!” is an approximate equivalent of the English “Wow!”
11 This Greek-derived adjective does not appear in the English dictionary any more than the French one, but it signifies “buttock-shaped.”
12 The term I have construed metaphorically in substituting the English “sea-dog” is loup de mer [sea wolf], which is applied more literally to several different fish and marine mammals, nowadays most commonly to the sea bass. It is conceivable that Renard might have a comparison of that genre in mind.
13 René Martin-Guelliot (1879-1962) was the editor of Le Spectateur, one of the periodicals to which Renard contributed before the outbreak of the Great War, and the one in which he published his manifesto for “le roman merveilleux-scintifique” [scientific marvel fiction].
14 The literal significance of the French coupable, of which “culpable” is the nearest English equivalent, is “strikeable”—the pun does not translate.
15 This was not the first time this kind of oscillation had been envisaged, although it is unlikely that Renard had read Clément Fézandie’s “Through the Earth” when it was serialized in the American periodical St. Nicholas Magazine in 1898. Fézandie’s story features a temporary hole penetrating the Earth from periphery to p
eriphery rather than an alternative state of matter.
16 J.-H. Rosny Aîné was the pseudonym employed in 1913 by Joseph-Henri Boëx, who had signed his earliest works “J.-H. Rosny” but had then allowed his younger brother, Séraphin-Justin, to share that pseudonym, with the result that they eventually began to distinguish themselves as “Aîné” and “Jeune.” The elder Rosny, the foremost writer of scientific romance in France, had a particular interest in prehistory; in addition to prehistoric romances, he wrote several romances of exploration in which exotic survivals from the remote past are discovered, including an account of “La Contrée prodigieuse des cavernes” [The Amazing Cave Country] (1896), which proves to be inhabited by intelligent giant bats. The works of Rosny Aîné are available in translation from Black Coat Press.
17 Renard’s wordplay refers to Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamesques (1884) by Albert Giraud; he probably wrote the story before the 1912 première of Arnold Schoenberg’s musical accompaniment to a selection of the poems in the cycle, which is nowadays better known.
18 The French mer [sea] and mère [mother] are phonetically similar. The next phrase (Voici la mer mère des hommes…) inevitably loses some of its elegance in translation.
19 “Transformism” is the specific thesis that species are transformed by evolution into new species; in the Darwinian evolutionary theory that had become commonplace by the time Renard was writing, only a few species were imagined to be thus transformed, the great majority becoming extinct under the pressure of natural selection, but in the Lamarckian schema that had preceded Darwin’s—which had recently been revitalized to some extent in France by Henri Bergson’s L’Evolution créatrice (1907)—all species are considered to be in transition, ceaselessly in the process of becoming something else as a result of some innate progressive impulse. As the central speculative thesis of this story will eventually make clear, Renard still harbored Lamarckian sympathies.
The Doctored Man Page 27
