This situation would have undoubtedly turned into a battle of everybody against everybody, if the nutrition and the food intake of the Unhurried as well as the Dynamic Ones were comparable to the feeding ways here on Earth. But the food wasn’t available on the surface of Venus. The Venusians—the Unhurried as well as the Dynamic Ones—took in their nourishment only once a year: Their hair started growing longer and longer, which made them realize that they were hungry; they never actually felt hungry. Then their body hair rooted itself into Venus’s rubbery skin—and once inside, it grew rapidly several thousand meters into the star’s interior. Deep inside the star, the hair, consisting of the tiniest of tubes, sucked up the nutritional substances and transported them back into the body. When the feeding was complete, the hair broke apart, and the saturated Venusian ran off. If the Unhurried Ones were to cover the whole surface of the planet, the Dynamic Ones would have nowhere to take in their food. But in reality it wasn’t all that bad: there just weren’t enough turtles to cover all of Venus, which had an enormous surface area, after all. There was no room for walking and running around on the hemisphere, but it was sufficient for nutritional purposes. The turtles were very kind and would make room for the Dynamic Ones by piling up into a stack if room was needed for quiet food ingestion. The Unhurried Ones, however, didn’t show even the slightest tolerance for any running and hopping around—since any kind of unrest disturbed their serene philosophical contemplation, which was the most crucial part of their lives.
Knax, the wise one, on the other hand, never stopped contemplating a great deal on the poor freedom of movement and came up one day with the following solution as well as speech: “Fellow inhabitants of the Venusian skin! As you all know, we have countless craters on our side of the star. Very hot air puffs out of them from time to time, rising up with tremendous speed into the heavens, only to cool down when it comes in contact with the cold ether. Couldn’t we use this hot, very light crater air as a balloon carrier? And couldn’t we then create on top of these balloons the freedom of movement we need? What do you think?”
“That’s it! Let’s do just that! We will cut the balloon hulls from our star’s exterior, which splendidly suits our purposes.” The audience found Knax’s suggestion so appealing that they even forgot to thank him for it. All the twenty-handed ones got to work immediately, and the turtles gladly made way when they heard about the plan—they also helped with cutting the Venusian skin. Soon Venus was filled with high-pitched cheers, and everyone was grateful and eagerly shaking the wise Knax’s hands, which became swollen and started hurting badly.
“Gratitude can be quite hard to take!” exclaimed Knax with laughter. Meanwhile the balloons above the craters bulged upwards in the sky. The Dynamic Ones, who were attached to the balloons, climbed the ropes up and down with ease. Many balloons, however, got so tight and firm that their surface became very slippery, which made it hard to move around.
Knax, the wise one, explained: “Fellow inhabitants of Venus! Do produce new balloons quickly and make holes in the old, tight ones—then the main balloon will form small sub-balloons in many different places, and the terrain which we need for us to walk on will have a roughened structure again.” Knax had to elaborate on his plan more than once—and slowly, the fellow Venusians began to understand, and did what he asked them to do.
Soon, the joyfulness on the balloons grew even bigger, and Knax was being celebrated as everybody’s savior and redeemer. And the turtles, now leading awfully quiet lives down below, were also pleased. Unfortunately, the turtles’ joy didn’t last very long, for they soon realized that the huge crater balloons, which grew bigger and bigger every day due to the sub-balloons they produced, were blocking their view of the big sun, so that the turtles had to lie in the shade. They summoned the wise Knax and explained to him the unbearable deprivation of light.
“We aren’t familiar with such abundance of shade,” said the turtles. “After all, it is our nature that we require sunlight at all times for our philosophical contemplation. We don’t know how to deal with darkness, which is something we haven’t yet experienced on our side of Venus before. That’s why we need you, Knax, to crack our nocturnal problem. Otherwise we will perish. And you don’t want that to happen, do you?”
Knax ran his twenty hands through his seven ears and exclaimed with a moan: “How am I supposed to do that? Tell me, how? I don’t know! I just don’t know!”
He ran into a cave and thought hard about the problem—and came up with the idea that one could tie up all the balloons on the crater’s edge and let them rise into the sky. By using longer cords, connection with the ground could be made easily—even if the balloons were to rise several miles high. And that is what happened: soon the balloons were hovering miles above the ground, while at the same time new balloons were forming—populated by many of the Dynamic Ones. There was a large number of balloons in the Venusian skies now, taking on all possible forms. And the turtlish inhabitants on Venus’s surface took pleasure in the busy liveliness of their atmosphere, as did the twenty-armed ones, who never fell down, of course, because they were such good climbers.
“Now all the shadows are gone!” said the chubby, idle ones. “And the restless minds, too!” And Knax let everyone worship him as their savior, while residing on top of the biggest balloon, from which no less than two hundred club-shaped sub-balloons had grown. And the gigantic sun with its protuberances tanned the wise Knax’s cheeks and hands completely brown—that’s how fierce it was burning high up in the sky. Fortunately, the great heat didn’t do any harm to the Venusians. If you happen to live close to a sun, you are used to the greatest of heat—all Venusian bodies are constructed in such a way that it simply can’t get too hot for them.
Elements of Pataphysics
ALFRED JARRY
Translated by Gio Clairval
Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) was a French writer best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896) and for coining the philosophical concept of “pataphysics” (“the science of imaginary solutions”). Jarry is usually classified as a Symbolist but also cited as a prominent proto—as his works can be considered proto-Dada, proto-Surrealist, and proto-futurist (all movements of the 1920s or 1930s). In this regard, he shares affinities with the German writer and artist Paul Scheerbart, not least because Jarry also wrote in a variety of hybrid genres and styles. His play Ubu Roi was considered scandalous at the time of its performance for its savage humor and baffling absurdity, and caused an actual riot. Despite their outré nature and Jarry’s early death (of tubercular meningitis complicated by alcoholism), these works influenced many other writers and constituted a major influence on the Theater of the Absurd. Many critics today consider Jarry as important as Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud before him.
“Elements of Pataphysics,” presented here in a new, definitive translation, the first since the 1960s (when Evergreen Review devoted an entire issue to Jarry’s pataphysics), is an excerpt from Jarry’s other famous work, published posthumously in 1911, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. This almost-novel is about a man who, born at age sixty-three, travels through a hallucinatory Paris and subscribes to the tenets of Jarry’s own system of “pataphysics,” itself a celebration of bizarre logic or even antilogic.
Perhaps editor Judith Merril described the novel best in her introduction to an excerpt appearing in The Year’s Best S-F (1967): “To call Faustroll a novel is rather like referring to a Mariner space probe as a flying machine. Faustroll is a novel, and a rather old-fashioned one, as far as plot is concerned: The learned doctor, dunned for debts, escapes prison by luring the drink-loving bailiff, Panmuphle, into a Marvelous Invention (a copper-mesh skiff—perhaps the first amphibious vessel), in which, with the added company of the doctor’s friend (or familiar), the talking baboon Bosse-de-Nage, a Wonderful Voyage is conducted.”
In a sense, “Elements of Pataphysics” is an absurdist jazz riff on the conte philosophique that, a continent away and in a to
tally different context, Hossain had used in 1905 to advance social justice. What Jarry was advancing instead, influenced by both Wells and Verne, was a contrarian view of human nature, wrapped in the seeming pseudoscience of an experimental philosophy. Cosmological, physical, and metaphysical arguments are advanced in the context of replies to or parodies of the very real Lord Kelvin’s essays and addresses. Certain elements in the novel come right from Kelvin: measuring rods, the watch, the tuning fork, the “luminiferous ether,” rotating flywheels, and “linked gyrostats.”
In the interests of documenting the overlap between science fiction and science fact, it must be noted that Jarry kept readers guessing by appearing in public in a long black cape, in a cyclist’s uniform, or wearing a paper shirt with a painted-on tie (set on fire for dramatic effect).
ELEMENTS OF PATAPHYSICS
Alfred Jarry
Translated by Gio Clairval
PART 1: DEFINITION
To Thadée Natanson
The epiphenomenon is a by-product that arises from a phenomenon.
Pataphysics, the etymology of which should be written ἔπι (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά), and the correct spelling pataphysics, preceded by an apostrophe, in order to avoid an easy pun,*1 is the science that arises from metaphysics, either in itself or beyond its boundaries, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. For example, the epiphenomenon often being an exception, pataphysics will essentially be the science of the particular, even though it is commonly held that the only true science is the science of the general. Pataphysics will study the laws which govern the exceptions, and it will explain the universe juxtaposing ours, which is the one studied by general science. Or, less ambitiously, pataphysics will study the universe that can be seen—and that perhaps should be seen instead of the ordinary, the laws of the ordinary universe being correlations of exceptions as well, albeit more frequent, at any rate the laws studied by traditional science being accidental facts which, reducing themselves to the status of unexceptional exceptions, do not even have the appeal of uniqueness.
[WILSON TAYLOR’S TRANSLATION:
DEFINITION. Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their Virtuality, to their lineaments.]
[MINE, AFTER RESEARCHING THE PATAPHYSICS LITERATURE IN FRENCH: DEFINITION: Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions that symbolically assign to the objects’ descriptive features the properties of objects as they are described in the virtual space.]
Contemporary science is founded on the principle of induction: most observers have seen a particular phenomenon precede or follow another phenomenon, and they infer it will always happen this way. First, the above is only correct in the majority of occurrences, is determined by one observer’s viewpoint, and is codified, depending on the moment, in a convenient way—if that! Instead of formulating the law of the fall of a body toward a center, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to use the ascension from a vacuum toward a periphery, vacuum being taken as a unity of non-density, a hypothesis much less arbitrary than the choice of water as the concrete unity of positive density?
Because water, as a body, is an assumption and a point of view related to the average person’s senses, and for its qualities, if not its nature, to remain stable, it is necessary to posit that the height of human beings will always be perceptibly constant and mutually equivalent. Universal consensus is already a quite miraculous and incomprehensible self-deception. Why does everyone claim that the shape of a wristwatch is round, which is clearly wrong because its profile appears to be a thin rectangular shape, elliptical on three sides? And why the devil would one only notice a watch’s shape solely when looking at the time? Perhaps under the pretext of usefulness? Nevertheless, the same child who would draw a watch as a circle will draw a house as a square, a façade, with no justification, evidently, because, except in the countryside, houses are rarely seen as isolated buildings, and in a street even the façades appear as fairly lopsided trapezoids.
One has therefore to admit that the crowd (comprising small children and women) is far too uneducated to comprehend elliptical figures, and its members are at one in the so-called universal consensus because they can solely perceive the curves with a single focal point, as it is easier to mentally match figures with one point than with two.
They communicate by superposing the outer edges of their bellies, balancing on them tangentially. Now, even the masses have learned that the real universe is composed of ellipses, and even the bourgeois keep their wine in barrels, rather than cylinders.
So that we may not abandon, through digression, our usual example of water, let us meditate on the following sentence, which the crowd’s collective soul irreverently attributes to the adepts of pataphysics:
PART 2: FAUSTROLL SMALLER THAN FAUSTROLL
To William Crookes
Some lunatics repeated over and over
that one was at the same time bigger and smaller
than oneself, and published such absurdities
as if they were useful discoveries.
—The Talisman of Oramane
Dr. Faustroll, if one may be permitted to speak from personal experience, one day willed himself smaller than himself, and resolved to explore one of the elements, in order to study what kinds of mutations might arise from a change in their mutual relationship.
He chose this body, ordinarily liquid, colorless, incompressible, and horizontal in small quantities, of curved surface, of blue depths, and with edges animated with a motion of ebb and flow when stretched; which Aristotle terms of a heavy nature, like soil; enemy of fire and revived by it, when decomposed with an explosion; which vaporizes at 100 degrees Celsius, a temperature determined by this fact; and which, solidified, floats upon itself. Water, what else? And having shrunk to the size of a mite, he journeyed down a cabbage leaf, oblivious to his mite colleagues and the magnified aspect of all things around him, until he met Water, in the shape of a bubble, twice his height, through the transparence of which the walls of the universe appeared gigantic, and his own image obscurely reflected on the wet mirror of the leaves, apparently heightened to the stature he had just renounced. He tapped the sphere lightly, as one raps on a door: the inflated eye of malleable glass “adjusted” itself like a living eye, becoming presbyopic, elongated around its horizontal diameter, reaching the ovoid shape that caused myopia; then pushed away Faustroll with elastic inertia, and was spherical again.
The doctor rolled the crystal bubble by little increments, not without effort, toward another crystal globe, gliding on the rails of a cabbage leaf’s nervures; once in contact, the two spheres inhaled each other until they tapered and fused into a new bubble of double volume, which placidly hovered in front of Faustroll.
He then tested the consistence of the globe with the tip of his boot: an explosion, formidable of brightness and noise, resounded, with projection all around of a bevy of minuscule newborn spheres—a hail hitting with the dry hardness of diamonds—which scattered in all directions around the green arena, each dragging along the image of one tangent point of the universe, deformed as the original sphere expanded, magnifying its fabulous center….
Beneath everything, the chlorophyll, like a school of green fishes, followed its familiar currents along the subterranean canals of the cabbage leaf….
PART 3: ETHERNITY
To Louis Dumur
Leves gustus ad philosophiam movere fortasse
ad atheismum, sed pleniores haustus
ad religionem reducere.*2
—Francis Bacon
CONCERNING THE MEASURING ROD, THE WATCH, AND THE TUNING FORK
—Telepathic letter from Dr. Faustroll to Lord Kelvin
My dear colleague,
It has been a while since I gave you some news about me, although I surmise you did not think me dead, inasmuch as death only concerns ordinary people. It is undisputed, however, that I no longer am on Earth. Wh
ere I am, I have known only for a fairly short time. For we agree on the principle that when one can measure what one is talking about, and express it in numbers, the sole realities that exist, one has a complete grasp of one’s subject. Up to the present moment, all I knew was that I had found myself elsewhere, in the same way as I know that quartz is positioned, in the land of hardness, less honorably than the ruby, and the ruby less than diamond, and diamond less than the callosities on my ape-servant Bosse-de-Nage’s posterior; and their thirty-two skin folds more numerous than his teeth, if one counts the wisdom teeth, than the prose of Latent Obscure.
But was I away relatively to the date or the place, before or beside, afterward or after a fashion? I was in the location where one stands after exiting space and time: infinite eternity, sir.
It was only natural that, having lost my books; my skiff of metallic fabric; the company of Bosse-de-Nage and M. René-Isidore Panmuphle, bailiff; my senses; Earth; and those two old forms of Kantian thought, I would experience the same isolation angst as a residual molecule several centimeters distant from the others, within a good modern vacuum à la Tait and Dewar.*3 Still, the molecule may even know that it is several centimeters distant! For one single centimeter, only valid sign of space in my view, being both a measurable distance and a unity of measure, and one single second of mean solar time, by which the heart of my terrestrial body used to beat, I would have given my soul, sir, however useful it is to me in the endeavor of giving you an account of these curiosities.
The body is more than necessary a vehicle as it supports one’s garments, on which pockets can be found. I had forgotten my measuring rod in one of my pockets, an exact copy of the traditional brass standard, more portable than the entire Earth or even the navigation device called a quadrant, which allows the interplanetary scientists’ wandering and posthumous souls to forget about our old sphere and the CGS*4 as far as measurements of length are concerned, thanks to MM. Méchain and Delambre.
The Big Book of Science Fiction Page 10
