The World Above The World
Page 2
Pont-Jest was, of course, in the majority within the literary community, where suspicion of and hostility to science ran rife. Conteurs in general tended to favor homely morals, and wherever modern apologues strayed into the realms of fantasy and speculation, they tended to take the side of Berthoud’s Stierna or Pont-Jest’s Marguerite against the masculine dreamers who reject placid domesticity in favor of a higher dream. Disenchantment with the direction in which technological civilization seemed to be heading became commonplace among its beneficiaries, and parables in the vein of “Wood’stown” by Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) became increasingly common. I do not know whether it was the first appearance of the story, but it was included in the collection Études et paysages [Studies and Landscapes] (1873).
Daudet went on to become famous as a Naturalist writer in a milder and more nostalgic vein than the Goncourt brothers or Émile Zola, but did retain an interest in more imaginative work; the young writers he welcomed into the salon he hosted in his later years included Joseph-Henri Boëx, alias J. H. Rosny Aîné and Henri Ner, alias Han Ryner, both of whom made significant contributions to French speculative fiction,1 and his son Léon wrote several fantastic novels. He remained poles apart, however, from such visionary writers as Camille Flammarion, who used fiction almost exclusively as a vehicle for popularizing scientific ideas, especially in the field of astronomy. Astronomy was one of the few fields omitted from Berthoud’s list of category headings, although the central character off “Voyage au Ciel” is first and foremost an astronomer. Berthoud knew how difficult it was to incorporate the discoveries of astronomy into a fictional framework if one were unprepared to take the crucial step of trying to devise a plausible means of space travel. Flammarion was, however, unfazed by that difficulty, and quite prepared to lend the visionary journeys undertaken by his characters a supportive logic derived from spiritualism.
The Flammarion story reproduced here, “Un Amour des astres”—translated as “Love Among the Stars”—first appeared in the February 15 1896 issue of the Nouvelle Revue, and represents something of an afterthought to his earlier works in the same vein, most notably Lumen, the first version of which appeared in Récits de l’Infini (tr. as Stories of Infinity) in 1872 before an expanded edition appeared separately in 1887, and the best-selling Uranie (1889; tr. as Urania). An earlier English translation of the present story appeared in the December 1896 edition of The Arena as “A Celestial Love,” but I thought it worthwhile to produce a new one because the earlier one is so difficult to find.
Flammarion is, of course, at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from René de Pont-Jest, but if Pont-Jest ever read this story it would not have upset his prejudices regarding the Faustian tendencies of scientists, and would only have confirmed his convictions regarding their insanity. Even Ludwig Klopstock might have regarded the hero’s voyage into the Heavens as a step too far in terms of plausibility. With opposition so weak and exotic, it is hardly surprising to find far more verve, if not plausibility or moral integrity, in contemporary anti-scientific fantasies like Charles Recolin’s “Le Rayon X,” here translated as “The X-Ray” and initially published in the March 7, 1896 issue of the Revue Bleue, formerly known as the Revue Littéraire et Politique.
“Le Rayon X” is perhaps most interesting historically for the rapidity of its reaction to the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895—a discovery so sensational that it wrought a virtual revolution in the horizons of possibility envisaged by scientific romance, ushering in a new era of quasi-magical rays capable working of all kinds of miracles. Recolin’s story is, however the first to imagine a human equipped with “X-ray vision” and to begin the exploration of the possible utilitarian and psychological consequences of such a faculty. Recolin was a Protestant minister, so it is not entirely surprising that he takes a dim view of the relevant potential, echoing Pont-Jest rather than Berthoud—and it is impossible to imagine that Berthoud could ever have weighed up the imaginative account-books is the same highly unbalanced way. Recolin wrote several novels, all now forgotten (some are missing even from the Bibliothèque Nationale’s collection) and is remembered, if at all, only for a book of essays, L’Anarchie littéraire [Literary Anarchy] (1898), which complained bitterly about the supposedly anarchic condition of contemporary letters and predicted that Edouard Rod would one day be recognized as the greatest literary genius of the day.
The next story included in the anthology, “Le Mystérieux Dajan-Phinn,”—translated as “The Mysterious Dajan-Phinn”—first appeared in two parts in the April 14 and May 15, 1908 issues of Je Sais Tout, one of a new generation of French “middlebrow” magazines, which was specifically modeled on the English periodical The Strand. Like The Strand, Je Sais Tout gladly played host to several flourishing genres of popular fiction, giving pride of place to detective fiction, including stories featuring Maurice Leblanc’s famous Arsène Lupin,2 but by no means scorning scientific romance—although, as with The Strand, its editors soon decided that scientific romance was insufficiently popular and gradually de-emphasized it. The author of the present story, Michel Corday, was a prolific contributor to periodicals of that sort, but he soon learned that it was more profitable to concentrate on more popular genres, although he retained an interest in the genre in spite of the difficulty in marketing it, producing an offbeat thriller in collaboration with André Couvreur, Le Lynx (1911; tr. as The Lynx) and two quasi-Utopian futuristic fantasies.
There is a sense in which “Le Mystérieux Dajan-Phinn” harks back to the 1860s boom in the popularization of science, in that it refers to one of the great controversies of that decade, brought to a head by a presentation made to the Académie des Sciences in 1864 by Louis Pasteur, who claimed to have demolished Frédéric Pouchet’s alleged experimental demonstration of the spontaneous generation of life by a process of “fermentation.” Although it was a spectacular coup in terms of public relations, and is still held up today as a triumphant victory securing the “germ theory” against its inept competitor, the precise extent of the consequences of Pasteur’s demonstration remained questionable, and modern commentators tend to forget that his primary motivation was his hatred of Darwinism, which he supposed to be dependent on spontaneous generation and which, therefore, he thought he had demolished along with the latter.
Corday’s story is interested in the way in which “orthodox science” rejected the theory of spontaneous generation so conclusively that it began to dismiss any argument in favor of it a priori, regardless of any experimental support that such arguments might claim. In developing this theme, however, it is very noticeable that Corday is still working with the same assumptions that underlie Berthoud’s stories, regarding the psychology of scientists and the incompatibility of scientific obsession with the joys of domestic life, and using those assumptions to generate the narrative tension of his melodrama.
The next story in the anthology, “Un Monde sur le monde”—translated as “A World Above the World”—was also announced for publication in Je Sais Tout, in 1907, which implies that a version of it might have been written before “Le Mystérieux Dajan-Phinn.” It is not clear why it never appeared there—one of its authors, Jules Perrin, contributed a similarly cataclysmic fantasy, which began serialization later that same year, “L’Hallucination de Monsieur Forbe”—but it might have seemed a little too controversial, or a little too implausible, for the editor’s taste. It is, at any rate, more reminiscent of garish pulp fiction than the slightly more sophisticated fare favored by Je Sais Tout. It eventually appeared in a more downmarket periodical, Nos Loisirs, in 12 parts, from November 13, 1910 to February 5, 1911.
It seems probably that Perrin was primarily responsible for the writing, as Lanos was a professional illustrator, although the latter did receive a joint by-line with E. M. Laumann for a subsequent futuristic novel and wrote his own text for two illustrated scientific romances for children. Biographical information on Jules Perrin is difficult to locate, partly becau
se it is such a common name, but he appears to have been born in 1862 and published nothing more after the 1920s, most of his work consisting of pulpish adventure fiction.
“Un Monde sur le monde” carries forward the pattern of disenchantment with technological civilization and scientific discovery, but moves it into a more modern industrial context. It features the construction of what might have been a Utopian city, and puts the blame for its eventual ruination on the mad scientists whose work is primarily devoted to the development of sophisticated weaponry, which they yearn sadistically to see in use, but its misanthropy extends much further than that, seemingly considering human nature to be essentially vile and treacherous. It has to be admitted, however, that Aeria is surely the most ineptly-planned Utopia ever envisaged, as well as the most undiplomatic and aggressive—and when a belated attempt is made to repair its most obvious deficit, the strategy adopted is as monumentally idiotic as it is morally reprehensible. The design and fate of the hypothetical society surely reveals more about the psychology of the author than the supposed psychology of his anti-hero, and calls into question the continual suggestion that there might, after all, be something magnificent in the protagonist’s patent insanity.
Despite its manifest logical flaws, however, “Un Monde sur le monde” is interesting as a early example of a subgenre that became surprisingly popular in the early decades of the twentieth century, in which scientific geniuses extrapolate their obsessive antisocial tendencies into the threat of violent opposition to the world that refuses understand them, for motives they consider virtuous, or at least justifiable. As usual throughout the early history of scientific romance, the image held up in contrast to the obsessive objectives of mad science is a preternaturally beautiful girl; the reader who starts at the beginning of the anthology will not be at all surprised, by the time the conclusion of its ultimate story is reached, to discover that, in spite of the extraordinary efforts made to shield her, the dream-girl in question eventually falls victim to the fate usually reserved for characters of her type in fiction of this sort.
Read with the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult not to find all kinds of premonitions of the Great War in “Un Monde sur le monde,” as there are in the entire subgenre of future war stories that gradually became the hard core of the broader genre between 1870 and 1914. Long before the actual war mounted a spectacular demonstration of the manner in which technology had modified conflict and promised go modify it further, countless fictional Jeremiads had been produced in anticipation of that quasi-apocalyptic misery. It is hardly surprising, given this circumstance, that the actual war had such a devastating effect on the ideological and economic development of the genre, seemingly underlining all the anxieties that writers like Berthoud had broached in the early part of the 19th century, which none of their successors had ever shaken off or successfully countered. Scientific romance became almost unmarketable in France the 1920s, those works that did appear being driven to the margins of the genre as well as the marketplace. In slight compensation, however, some of the works that did contrive to appear were possessed of a truly bizarre eccentricity, and the final item in the present collection, Drymea, monde de vierges, first published in volume form in 1923, here translated as “Drymea, World of Virgins,” is surely one of the most bizarre of all.
There is a sense in which the Utopian vision presented in Drymea stands in complete contrast to the image of the world presented in “Un Monde sur le monde,” but in ideological terms, the two stories are in complete harmony, exhibiting a very similar and all-consuming misanthropy that bundles human science, industry and technology together in the same hateful package. Like his predecessors,3 however, Mas sees the things he hates as quintessentially masculine, and, like them, he holds up as an opposing image a woman of preternatural beauty and virtue: his heroine, Hertha Helgar. Rather than leaving Hertha to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that send most of her literary peers to the grave, however, Mas improvises a miracle by which, when she swallow poison after being consigned to a shell and fired from a huge gun, she is allowed to remain dormant during a long interstellar voyage. She finally ends up on the counterpart world of Drymea, in which sex has never been developed as an evolutionary strategy and masculinity, with all its hideous corollaries, is therefore absent.
Mas was by no means unfamiliar with the masculine aspects of scientific romance; before the war, when he was a member of a early rocket society, he had written Les Allemands sur Vénus (1913; tr. as the title story of the Black Coat Press anthology The Germans on Venus), a pulpish adventure story in which obsessive male scientists lead the conquest and colonization of a not-quite-virgin world whose evolution has run more or-less parallel to Earth’s. The war must have chastened him considerably, however (although it is not entirely possible that the post-war works signed with the pseudonym are by a different hand) for his next work was a visionary poem, Sous leur Double Soleil des Dryméens chantent [Beneath their Double Sun the Drymeans sing] (1921), of which Drymea is an expansion of sorts. At least some of the conspicuous lack of narrative drive and coherency exhibited by Drymea is attributable to its origin as an adaptation to a poem, although Utopian fictions in general do tend to be undramatic and rambling. Its transition into prose demanded that more attention be paid to matters of explanation and rational underpinning, but it must be admitted that the author’s attempts in that regard are distinctly weak-kneed, partly because of the logical difficulties involved and partly because of diplomatic difficulties.
The important difference between Drymea and previous account of parthenogenetic human societies, such as Mizora (1890) by the pseudonymous “Princess Vera Zaronovitch” and Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is that the earlier texts describe societies whose ancestors had two sexes, and whose parthenogenetic faculty is a relatively recent modification, while the entire sequence of Drymean animal evolution has been sexless. (Like most Utopias, Drymea is rich in flowers, so its plants presumably still have sex.) How this has happened is not clear, especially as Mas takes the trouble to stress that the general results of Drymean evolution have been milder than the effects of Earthly evolution because its species do not produce the surplus of offspring that gives rise to natural selection. What motor has led to the evolution of a quasi-human species thus remains unclear, although no suggestion is offered that it might have been the result of an arbitrary act of creation by the Drymean deity.
Presumably, Mas could, if he wished, have given more details of Drymean ecology and evolution, and his failure to do so is therefore one of his own imagination or inclination, but he was not in a position, in 1923, to go into much detail about certain other corollaries of his central hypothesis. Fiction still had strict standards of decency to observe; even back in the mid-19th century, S. Henry Berthoud had been able to publish marriage manuals tentatively describing the details of sexual intercourse, but he would never have been allowed to put the same details into his fiction, and things had not changed much in the subsequent decades. The whole point of Mas’s story is the absence of the details in question, but it is an absence of which he cannot speak directly, even though it is the heart and soul of his narrative.
Drymeans, unlike the women of Mizora or Herland, are entirely innocent of sexual passion. No anatomical details can be provided, but we can probably take it for granted that one thing with which Drymean evolution did not equip them is a clitoris. The feelings they have for one another cannot be sexual; they cannot be lesbians, in the sense that the inhabitants of Mizora and Herland are able or condemned to be; nor, in spite of the language of the text, can they be “virgins” in the way that word is commonly defined, since it can have no counterpart in terms of their existence. By contrast, Hertha Helgar, in spite of being the most virtuous woman who ever lived on Earth, apparently not a lesbian by inclination, and very definitely a virgin, cannot escape the fact that she is innately equipped with sexual feelings. She might be able to rechannel those feelings in response
to circumstance, redirecting them toward her own sex rather than the opposite one, but she cannot escape them. On Drymea, therefore, she is faced with a rather peculiar moral dilemma; she is capable of feeling passion for the Drymeans, but any such passion would be implicitly misdirected, because it cannot be reciprocated. How, then, can she conduct herself toward them, and what would be the consequences of her contact with them, if she permitted herself to express her innate passion?
As a personal problem that would be acute enough—although some readers might feel that, given the seeming amenability of Drymeans like Drythea, the problem is not as acute as she makes it out to be—but it is not just a personal problem. Indeed, it is a messianic problem, for the superior scientific and technological knowledge that Hertha brings to Drymea has the potential to transform Drymean society drastically. Can that transformation possibly be anything other than corrupting? Is there any way that the corollaries of masculinity still incarnate in Hertha—which supposedly include both the capacity to feel sexual passion and to develop scientific knowledge—can enhance Drymean perfection rather than undermining it? And if they cannot enhance it and make it stronger, what will happen to Drymean society if and when, however distantly in the future, the Drymeans encounter a human race that is akin to Hertha’s rather than their own, or shaped in some other way by the urgency of natural selection?