Part Three: The Triumph of the Nyctalope
by
Jean de La Hire
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
The Nyctalope vs. Lucifer, which was first serialized in the Parisian newspaper Le Matin from November 25, 1921 to March 30, 1922 is of some historical importance as the first superhero novel, at least in one definition of the term “superhero.”
There had, of course, been many previous literary heroes whose physical prowess had been highly exceptional–Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (1912) is perhaps the most obvious example–but whose abilities were straightforward exaggerations of the capacities of ordinary men rather than specific and explicitly paranormal “superpowers.” There had also been characters who were enabled to play heroic roles by virtue of their possession of some such paranormal gift, including several gifted–like C. H. Hinton’s Stella (1895)–with invisibility. None of the latter had, however, yet become established as a serial crusader for justice who made a career out of using his (or her) superpower to combat evil on a regular basis. La Hire’s Leo Saint-Clair, a.k.a. The Nyctalope, on the other hand, went on to do exactly that, thus laying down a template that was to be adopted by such US pulp magazines as Doc Savage (launched in 1933) before providing the core mythology of US comic books from the late 1930s onwards.
As might be expected from a first step into such exotic territory, Lucifer is tentative and awkward–so tentative and awkward, in fact, that it probably seemed rather weak-kneed and inept even to some of its contemporary readers, let alone modern readers familiar with the flamboyant and highly-developed spectrum of contemporary superheroism. It did, however, strike enough of a chord with its contemporary readers to warrant the extrapolation of a series; in its day, it was a popular success. It is hard to imagine a similar popularity being achievable today, but the novel certainly serves to illustrate the manner in which a remarkable trend first got started, in terms of its generative pressures and narrative temptations. No one nowadays is likely to think territory, Lucifer a good book, but it is by no means an uninteresting one; its naivete is revealing, not only in terms of the primal evolution of its particular subgenre but in terms of the broader evolution of daily serial fiction and the techniques developed to deal with its challenges. Although newspaper serials of that kind are long dead–never having made much impact anywhere but in France–the same narrative challenges and techniques are manifest throughout the world in television soap operas.
Lucifer is, therefore, offered to 21st century English and American readers as a literary curiosity, which casts some light into the murky background of some of the most popular–if least respectable–forms of contemporary fiction. Like many aged ancestors, it is a trifle embarrassing, as much because of its crude attitudes as the clumsiness of its literary technique, but it is, nevertheless, a significant link in the history of modern entertainment. It is a link that has been missing for some considerable time; this translation will hopefully situate it where interested readers will be able to find it.
The creator of the Nyctalope was born in Banyuls on January 28, 1878, into an obscure aristocratic family which had long been impoverished by various social upheavals. His birth-name was Adolphe-Ferdinand Célestin d’Espie de La Hire. His family claimed descent from one of the knights who fought with Jeanne d’Arc, although its most famous member by far was the mathematician and astronomer Philippe de La Hire (1640-1718), who has a theorem and a lunar mountain named after him.
Biographical sketches claim that La Hire’s parents cherished the fond hope that he might embark upon a military career before he yielded temptations of the fin de siècle and set out for Paris, with the intention of devoting himself to livres et l’amour, but that is the sort of cliché that is standard in literary biographies of the period. He arrived in Paris too late to jump on to the Decadent bandwagon while it still had some momentum, but he did manage to associate himself briefly with its dwindling twilight, becoming a close friend of Pierre Louÿs–a chapter in La Hire’s otherwise unpublished Mémoires was extracted and printed by Louÿs enthusiasts as a significant insight into the author’s life.
La Hire began his literary career with high ambitions, selling much of his early work to Fernand Xau, the editor of Le Journal and the humorous periodical Gil Blas. He worked for a while as secretary to Colette’s husband, “Willy,” and wrote a brief memoir of that time in Ménage d’artiste: Willy and Colette, étude biographique et critique [An Artistic Household: A Biographical and Critical Study of Willy and Colette] (1906). The latter was issued by his own publishing imprint, Adolphe Espie, which published numerous novels and volumes of poetry as well as issuing a short-lived periodical, La Revue des Lettres, whose contributors included Paul Adam and J.-H. Rosny Aîné.
La Hire’s two novels in the salacious tradition of Willy’s works, Vengeance d’amoureuses [Lovers’ Revenge] (1905) and Trois Parisiennes [Three Parisian Women] (1906), were both issued under the Adolphe Espie imprint. He also founded the similarly-inclined Bibliothèque Indépendante in 1904, although he handed over editorial control in 1905 to Marguerite Weyrich, who was presumably his sister-in-law; he had married Marie Weyrich–also born in 1878–a short while before. The Bibliothéque Indépendante published La Hire’s non-fiction book L’homme et la societé [Man and Society] (1907) and Marie’s novel Modèle nu [Nude Model] (1908).
Marie de La Hire was also an impressionist painter of some note, and her later works tended to the avant-garde; they included a “Croquis Dada” [Dada Sketch] (1920) presumably inspired by her friendship with the Dadaist poet and painter Francis Picabia. She had earlier tried her hand at popular fiction, though, contributing La fiancée fantôme [The Phantom Bride] to a Tallandier imprint whose chief stock-in-trade was sensational fiction by the likes of Fortuné du Boisgobey, Jules Mary and Arthur Bernède. It was her husband who “sold out” more conspicuously, though, presumably in order to provide a secure financial foundation for his family; he accepted a contract in 1907 to supply one of the most downmarket Parisian periodicals, Maurice Bunau-Varilla’s Le Matin, with serial fiction, thus ruining his literary reputation irreparably.
Serial fiction of this sort was by then in its third generation. The roman feuilleton had become established as the leading vehicle of French popular fiction in the 1840s, when serials by Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue had become key assets in circulation wars waged by daily newspapers catering to the ever-widening audience provided by the march of literacy. After a distinct hiatus caused by the Revolution of 1848 and Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of 1851, feuilleton fiction was firmly re-established, enjoying a new heyday in the 1860s when such writers as Paul Féval and Ponson du Terrail began the formularization of crime and adventure fiction, but that too was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Restored to health again, the native tradition was exposed to significant competition in the 1890s when popular fiction translated from English, German and Italian began to appear in much greater profusion. Although it remained robust in the face of that competition, French popular fiction became markedly defensive, consciously playing to its established strengths and carefully cultivating its own idiosyncrasies even as it absorbed the influence of trends begun in other nations–and, in parallel, saw its own innovations borrowed, copied and extrapolated elsewhere.
In the first decade of the 20th century, this complex pattern of mutual influence was well-set, as was an exaggerated stratification of the marketplace that worked on the not-entirely-justified
premise that popular fiction–especially crime and adventure fiction–was mostly consumed by relatively uneducated male readers unable or unwilling to cope with much literary sophistication. Although Dumas and Sue had certainly not escaped the oppression of having their work regarded by the worthies of the Académie Française as essentially worthless, Féval and Ponson had suffered considerably more. By 1900, the disdain with which writers of feuilleton fiction were regarded in opinionated literary circles had reached an effective maximum.
New recruits to the field had various strategies available by which to armor themselves against that disdain, including the kind of capitulation that allowed writers to disdain their own work while pocketing the money it brought in. It was to this company that Jean de La Hire belonged; not only did he refrain from putting much literary effort into his work, but he deliberately employed methods and devices of which he was scornful. After 1907, he was a bad writer by design, and was glad to be bad by design, because it protected him from the awful possibility that he might still be bad if he tried to be better.
Like several other fellow-travelers of the dead-but-not-quite-buried Decadent Movement–the most conspicuous examples being Théo Varlet, Gustave Le Rouge and “Claude Farrère” (Charles Bargone)–La Hire decided that the kind of popular fiction that offered most scope to his prostituted imagination was what is nowadays termed “science fiction.” Although Jules Verne’s literary career had been started and shaped by a contract to produce works that might be serialized in publisher P.-J. Hetzel’s family magazine, Verne had avoided much of the stigma that feuilleton fiction had attracted during the last three decades of the 19th century, and had gone on to become a beloved national institution.
Vernian fiction had become popular enough to warrant the founding of specialist magazines such as the Journal des Voyages, and although such fiction moved steadily downmarket, it benefited almost as much from crime fiction in the 1890s by the importation of English influences–in this case the enlivening influence of H. G. Wells. By 1907, Wells had given up scientific romance, and that whole genre was in steep decline in England, but its less pretentious equivalent was still relatively healthy in France. La Hire’s first serial for Le Matin was La roue fulgurante [The Fiery Wheel] (1907), the extravagant account of an alien abduction by a spacecraft which appears to anticipate the notion of “flying saucers.” (It was later reprinted under the title Soucoupe volante [Flying Saucer] and helped to popularize that term.)
La roue fulgurante was presumably a little too extravagant for some of Le Matin’s readers, because La Hire reverted to more modestly Earthbound adventure fiction thereafter. (One of the key features of daily serial fiction is its urgent responsiveness to reader reaction, which operates within serials as well as between them.) Most of his subsequent works in this vein retained an element of scientific romance, however–and more than one ventured into space–although they invariably embedded their inventions within the conventional story-arc of crime fiction, thus anticipating the contemporary genre of “technothrillers.” The hybridization of the two genres had become virtually inevitable, by virtue of the pressure of “melodramatic inflation.”
Once crime fiction became formularized, routinely focusing on heroes who operated in the context of long series, the threats faced by those heroes were highly likely be subject to an escalating scale of menace. Unlike real crime-fighters, who have to take whatever cases are presented to them by the whims of chance, in no particular order, fictional heroes are pressurized to outdo their previous efforts in meeting each new challenge, lest their readers become jaded. Sherlock Holmes graduated from trivial puzzles to a climatic confrontation with a “Napoleon of Crime” allegedly responsible for most of the evil deeds committed in London. His rivals often set out from the benchmark he had created, swiftly working their way up from mere Napoleons to veritable Lucifers. By the same token, the heroes themselves had to become larger than life in order to match these escalating threats on more-or-less equal terms. Once Sherlock Holmes had established an unsurpassable paradigm of human deductive ingenuity and Tarzan a similar ideal of natural human virility, the temptation to stray into the realms of the supernatural and the superscientific became considerable. La Hire was part of a group of feuilletonistes–including Gaston Leroux, Arthur Bernède, Gustave le Rouge and Maurice Renard–who began to explore the possibilities of such hybrid fiction with some determination and vigor.
La Hire’s first venture into the proto-technothriller genre was L’homme qui peut vivre dans l’eau [The Man Who Could Live Underwater], serialized in Le Matin in 1908. The eponymous Icthaner is not the hero of the novel, though, being merely the hapless subject of a biotechnological experiment carried out by the villains. The hero is an engineer named Severac, the inventor of a new kind of submarine. One of the minor characters who assists Severac’s cause is, however, a man named Jean Sainte-Claire.
When the arch-villain of L’homme qui peut vivre dans l’eau joined forces with a whole company of evil masterminds for a more ambitious Martian adventure in eccentric megalomania in Le mystère des XV [The Mystery of the XV], serialized in Le Matin in 1911, he was again opposed by a Sainte-Claire, this time forenamed Leo, Jean’s son, a fearless explorer whom we are told is known as the Nyctalope because of his ability to see in total darkness.
Nothing more was heard of the Sainte-Claires in the next decade. La Hire reverted to more orthodox Vernian fiction in the long Le corsaire sous-marin [The Submarine Pirate] (1912-13), which features one of many clones of Verne’s Captain Nemo, but soon thereafter feuilleton fiction suffered one of its frequent bouleversements, its consumption and development being inhibited by the Great War of 1914-18. La Hire was not reduced to inactivity in those years, however; Le Matin continued to appear and La Hire continued to supply it with serial fiction, including the long futuristic fantasy Au-delà des ténèbres [Beyond Darkness] (1915-16), whose protagonists employ suspended animation to escape the woes of the 20th century, awakening in the 30th.
When the war was over, La Hire continued his sciencefictional experiments with a explicitly Wellsian account of Joe Rollon, l’autre homme invisible [Joe Rollon, the Other Invisible Man] (1919)–one of several works he issued under the pseudonym Edmond Cazal–and it was at this point that he apparently became convinced of the viability of superheroism as a device of literary crime-fighting. When La Hire returned to his Sainte-Claire character, he now became “Jean de Sainclair the Nyctalope.” Not only was his alias given much greater prominence, but his surname was shortened, so that it became less a celebration of a key disciple of St Francis of Assisi and more a symbolic combination of sanity (or soundness) and clarity. This did not last, however. In the next volume in the series, the Nyctalope’s name reverted to being “Leo Saint-Clair” without any explanations.1
Nevertheless, it was a significant move, for the new Sainclair / Saint-Clair was opposed by an equally symbolic archvillain, whose alias and character represented a deliberate attempt to reach a new extreme.
La Hire’s “Lucifer” was by no means the first archvillain to be credited with a satanic aspect–Paul Féval had teased his readers with the notion that Colonel Bozzo-Corona of the Habits Noirs might be a literal incarnation of evil in the 1860s–but La Hire was determined to make the most of the parallel in attempting to design a new archetype of evil for a new historical and scientific era. It was not possible, of course, for La Hire to compose proto-technothrillers in and after 1919 in exactly the same way that he had done before and in 1913, because the world had altered very considerably in the meantime.
The Great War had not solved any of the political problems that had motivated it; its net result was to render all the ambitions entertained by the European powers that had started it hopelessly redundant. Europe, which had been the economic and political heart of the world order, smashed itself up so badly that economic hegemony was handed to the United States of America on a chipped plate. The war had been widely advertised as a war to end all wars
, which would centralize and consolidate imperial civilization; yet, it had not only contrived to shatter all imperial dreams but had made future wars more likely–and had established beyond the shadow of a doubt that modern armaments of war had evolved to the point at which the next war was far more likely to obliterate civilization than to save it.
In this ideological context, the ambitions, methods and apparatus of archvillainy were bound to take on a new satanic significance; the real world had demonstrated that it was just as prone to melodramatic inflation as popular fiction, and the melodramatic inflation of popular fiction could no longer be regarded as a merely literary device. The first confrontation between a superhero and villain was bound to be supercharged in more ways than one.
To modern comic book readers and cinemagoers, the Nyctalope is bound to seem rather feeble as a proto-superhero. His superpower consists of being able to see in the dark–absurdly trivial by comparison with the sorts of abilities possessed by the likes of Superman and Spider-Man. Even in the context of a vast ensemble, like the multitudinous mutants whose star players are the X-Men, he would have difficulty nowadays qualifying for a minor role. As a mere practical ability, in fact, Saint-Clair’s nyctalopia plays relatively little part in the plot, and no role at all in the novel’s eventual climax. A contemporary writer’s first priority would have been to engineer a situation in which the Nyctalope’s supreme victory would be predicated on his plunging the final battle into darkness at the crucial moment–which he would have been very easily able to do, given the novel’s obsession with electric lighting–but La Hire could not be bothered.
La Hire forgetfulness in giving due emphasis to his protagonist’s superpower illustrates the primitive nature of his understanding of the literary logic of superheroism, but it also serve to highlight the fact that the heavy and repeated emphasis of Saint-Clair’s alias within the story owes more to its metaphorical than its literary significance. The relatively trivial fact that Saint-Clair can actually see in the dark is less important than his symbolic status as a paragon of moral and scientific Enlightenment. His nickname is primarily an amplification of his surname; his preternaturally sain and clair sight is the antagonist of moral rather than actual darkness.
The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 3: The Triumph of the Nyctalope Page 1
