Love in Five Thousand Years
by
Fernand Kolney
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
L’Amour dans cinq mille ans by Fernand Kolney (1868-1930), was initially published by the author in an undated edition. Pierre Versins’ Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972) gives the date of that edition as 1905, and most on-line sources appear to have copied that, but a footnote in the 1928 edition gives the date of the original publication as 1908, and there does not seem to be any reason to doubt the author’s word. The version translated here as Love in Five Thousand Years, is taken from the copy reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website of the edition published by A. Quignon in 1928 as L’Amour dans 5000 ans; the Bibliothèque Nationale does not have a copy of the earlier edition, which is exceedingly rare.
I have not had the opportunity to compare the two editions of the novel, so I do not know how extensive the revisions to the text might have been, although one difference that is certain is that Kolney removed an entire paragraph referring to the work of H. G. Wells from the preface, which is quoted in full in Patrick Parrinder and John S. Partington’s book The Reception of H. G. Wells in Europe (2005). In that paragraph Kolney criticizes Wells for both his social theory and his literary method—rather churlishly, given that L’Amour dans 5000 ans clearly belongs to the brief surge of ambitious French romans scientifiques that followed the enthusiastic promotion of Wells’ scientific romances in the Mercure de France around the turn of the century. At any rate, Kolney obviously changed his mind about the attack and deleted it from the later edition.
The paragraph quoted by Parrinder and Partington also makes it clear that Kolney was familiar with J-H. Rosny’s early work in the genre as well as Jules Verne’s, and he was undoubtedly aware of the rich tradition of “ruins of Paris” stories as well as having some familiarity with the sparse but intriguing tradition of Anarchist roman scientifique. Kolney was, therefore, apparently well aware of his own work’s situation within the tradition of French speculative fiction, as well as being desirous to take the speculations of the genre into new territory and to new extremes.
The most obvious additions to Kolney’s 1928 text that cannot have been present in the 1908 text are a handful of references to the Great War of 1914-18, a couple of contemporary politicians, and the Russian Revolution of 1917. It is unlikely, however, that those inserts necessitated any corollary revision of the existing text; the account Kolney gives of the inevitable corruption, decay and collapse of Communism forms part of a general scheme in which it is followed—perhaps surprisingly on the part of an Anarchist author—by a similar account of the inevitable corruption, decay and collapse of Anarchism, and it is unlikely to have been influenced by any observation Kolney might have made of the way things seemed to be going in pre-1928 Russia.
Kolney dedicated L’Amour dans cinq mille ans to Jonathan Swift, who is named as the author’s principal “master” with regard to his education in “the satire of ideas,” but anyone starting the book expecting to find something in the vein of Swift’s straight-faced “modest Proposal” or steadfastly earnest Gulliverian travelogues will quickly realize that it is a caricature of a rather different kind, every bit as grotesque in its narrative style as in the bizarre image it provides of a future “ideal society” that runs into deep trouble with astonishing rapidity. Given that one of Kolney’s generic predecessors was Nicolas de Restif de la Bretonne, chronicler of the cosmic adventures of Lord Multipliandre in Les Posthumes (1802), it might be stretching a point to describe L’Amour dans cinq mille ans as the most bizarre roman scientifique ever penned, but it easily outstrips most of its competitors for that title, striving in every possible way to boggle the mind and frequently succeeding.
Kolney’s excess is both deliberate and uncompromising; he was utterly uninhibited about going over the top in developing his themes and narrating his story. Few other authors have ever made such reckless use of exotic words, many of them improvised, nested in conscientiously peculiar and overblown descriptions, assertions and speeches. Although that riot of verbiage does make the book a trifle difficult to read (and made it more than a trifle difficult to translate), it is a strategy not inappropriate to the task the author set himself, which necessitated an extremely ambitious imaginative reach and a baroque narrative style.
Such books as this one do not, of course, spring up entirely unheralded, and the various excesses of the project are, in part, a response to the reception of Kolney’s previous endeavors in both literature and social crusading; he was a militant atheist as well as an anarchist, loathed all politicians, especially the ones currently in power, and was deeply disappointed as well as extremely annoyed by the fact that no one took any conspicuous notice of his strident attempts to persuade the French people and government to institute a policy of national birth control on Malthusian grounds. He was already an angry man before he published his first novel, Le Salon de Madame Truphot (1904), and the reception of that novel must have made him even angrier, although he cannot have been entirely surprised by the reaction it produced.
Le Salon de Madame Truphot is a satirical roman à clef in which the various members of the salon in question, and Madame Truphot herself, are clearly recognizable. R. L. Doyon’s biographical study of the poet Jehan Rictus, Jehan Rictus, devant lui-même [Jehan Rictus, According to Himself] (1943) alleges that Rictus, parodied in the novel as “Modeste Glaviot,” had the copies of Kolney’s book seized and destroyed, and demanded twenty-five thousand francs in damages. It is unlikely that Rictus ever collected the damages, and the lawsuit did not prevent the book from being reprinted once Rictus was dead, but it presumably inflicted a mortal injury on the sales of the first edition. In a way, the surprising thing is that Rictus was the only man to sue, although the others parodied probably thought that silent disdain was a better strategy of self-defense.
Madame Truphot is based on Henriette Maillat, a would-be occultist and literary muse who is nowadays most famous as the principal model for Hyacinthe Chantelouve in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Là-Bas (1891), in which several letters written by Maillat to Huysmans while she was his mistress are quoted almost verbatim. She had previously been the mistress of the pseudo-Rosicrucian occultist and prolific novelist Joséphin Péladan, and was also said to have seduced the outspoken Catholic polemicist and fiction-writer Léon Bloy, both of whom are pseudonymously featured among Madame Truphot’s associates, along with the flamboyant dandy Comte Robert de Montesquiou, the Symbolist writer Frédéric Boutet, then best-known for his Poesque horror stories, and the Socialist writer and journalist Jean Jaurès.
How well Kolney actually knew Henriette Maillat and the various writers pseudonymously featured in Le Salon de Madame Truphot is unclear, but his contemporaries certainly seemed to take the view that he must have had another source of scandalous information on which to draw, if, in fact, he had written the book at all, and they pointed the finger of suspicion squarely at Kolney’s brother-in-law, the noted Symbolist poet Laurent Tailhade (1854-1919), who had married Kolney’s sister Eugénie Pochon in 1901.1 Although Tailhade was fourteen years older than Kolney, the two were friends for some years before the marriage, both being ardent polemicists with strong anarchist sympathies. Tailhade also had a reputation as a prolific duelist—in spite of a lack of expertise that resulted in him being wounded on several occasions—and it is possible that some of the many duels he fought with people who took offense at his outspokenness were occasioned by Le Salon de Madame Truphot; whether Kolney was prone to similarly violent extravagance is unclear,
but it would be surprising, given his penchant for reckless abuse, if he had not been called out on occasion.
Even if Tailhade did make some informational contribution to The Salon de Madame Truphot, as seems highly likely, Kolney’s subsequent work strongly suggests that he really did write the book himself. The author’s alter ego in the novel, Eliphas de Béothus, crops up in three of Kolney’s later novels, including L’Amour dans cinq mille ans, although he eventually became known simply as “Monsieur Eliphas.” His next appearance was in Les Aubes mauvaises [Evil Dawns] (1905), which was published by Ambert, but it is worth noting that three other books listed in the two commercially-published volumes as forthcoming—including the intriguingly-titled L’Androphobe [The Man-Hater] and La Bacchante des noires ivresses [The Bacchante of Black Intoxication]—failed to materialize at the time, and any ambition that Kolney might have entertained then to build a literary career seems to have been derailed at that point.
It is possible that L’Amour dans cinq mille ans was circulated to commercial publishers and rejected before Kolney decided to publish it himself, but it seems more likely that he knew before he set pen to paper that no commercial publisher would touch it at the time of writing, and always planned to issue it himself. It was not his first venture into self-publishing, being preceded by La Grève des ventres [The Womb-Strike] (1907), a more straightforward exercise in Malthusian propaganda. Kolney founded the monthly periodical Le Malthusien in 1908, although it did not last long, and L’Amour dans cinq mille ans was probably printed on the periodical’s press; the latter is credited as the publisher of the pamphlet Le Crime d’engendrer [The Crime of Breeding] (1909), which mostly consists of quotes from Le Salon de Madame Truphot and La Grève des ventres.
Kolney attempted to relaunch his literary career after the Great War, and published a fourth novel featuring Monsieur Eliphas, L’Affranchie [The Liberated Woman] (1920), which might be the novel he had previously advertised as L’Androphobe. If it is, then La Bacchante des noires ivresses might well have turned into his next published novel, L’Institut de volupté [The Sensuality Institute] (1926), which, together with the recycled anecdotes in Les Plus belles nuits d’amour de Casanova (1927; tr. as The Lusts of Casanova) and Les Plus belle nuits d’amour au temps de Bien-aimé [The Best Nights of Love from the Times of Louis XV] (1928), won Kolney a reputation as a writer of erotica, which he subsequently exploited by penning Les Amours du Beau Chevalier de Biron, l’émule de Casanova (1931; tr. as The Amorous Adventures of a Gentleman of Quality) and—more importantly, from the viewpoint of the present work—persuading the publisher of the Casanova volume to reissue L’Amour dans cinq mille ans. It is possible that some of the scenes in L’Amour dans cinq mille ans were made more sexually explicit for the reprint, but the basic scheme must have been entirely in place in the early version, and the novel was manifestly designed from the outset to be shocking, within the limits of publishability permissible in 1908.
Kolney did not, however, restrict his later efforts to the erotic sphere. His most popular book by far was probably his collection of Les Plus beaux contes de Jean de La Fontaine, transposés en prose (1930; tr. as Some Merry and Delightful Stories and as Tales, Wise and Otherwise) and he also wrote a critical study of his brother-in-law, Laurent Tailhade: son oeuvre, étude critique [Laurent Tailhade: His Work. A Critical study] (1922), and two further novels, Marianne à la curée, roman de moeurs politiques [Marianne (the personification of the French Republic) in the Rat Race, a Novel of Political Mores] (1928) and La Citoyenne Guillotine, roman d’un aventurier sous la Révolution [Citizeness Guillotine; The Story of an Adventurer during the Revolution] (1932) as well as numerous endeavors in scathing political journalism—including articles for La Presse Anarchiste, which published the only significant eulogy he received following his death.
Because the idea of artificial fertilization, as applied to human reproduction, is now perfectly familiar to us, it may be a trifle difficult to imagine how shocking it might have seemed in 1908. It had, however, been treated in French literature prior to that date, albeit with kid gloves, most notably in Les Faiseurs d’hommes (1884), which bore the highly unlikely joint by-line of Yveling Ram Baud and Dubut de Laforest but was probably written by the signatory of its preface, Georges Barral. The novel is a sentimental melodrama in which a husband who initially believes that his pregnant wife must have cheated on him eventually has difficulty deciding whether that explanation might have been preferable to the truth of her technologically-determined conception. The gap between that tentative approach to the notion and Kolney’s depiction of a society whose sole mode of reproduction is based on artificial fertilization is, however, an exceedingly wide one, further widened by the supportive logic of the hypothetical institution.
That logic too was not unprecedented. One of the classic French Utopian novels, the anonymous La Terre australe connue (1676; tr. as The Southern Land, Known), allegedly by Gabriel de Foigny, had used a remote island society of androgynes to argue the case that true equality between human beings was impossible while the sexes were differentiated, and that utopian harmony would therefore only be available to a society devoid of any such differentiation. Kolney takes a different and more brutal approach to the “solution” of the same problem in depicting a society of castrati, whose immunity to the erotic impulse is supposed to permit them to live in the anarchistic harmony that their sexually-endowed ancestors had tried but failed to maintain. His lurid account of the eventual breakdown of that society is highly implausible in every respect, and also strikingly unpleasant, not merely in its garish violence but in its flamboyant homophobia and misogyny, but it would perhaps be wise not to take the superficial implications of the relevant scenes too seriously, given the novel’s satirical method.
In judging the ironic depth of the narrative, it would probably also be wise not to take the assertions that Kolney allowed to remain in his preface, after removing the assault on Wells, at face value. Although he claims in that preface to be embracing a new kind of Romanticism, having judged its descendant schools of Naturalism and Symbolism dispirited, his narrative is, in fact, heavily influenced by Zolaesque quasi-scientific analysis of social ills, and repeatedly calls attention to its own inherent and extravagant symbolism. Kolney must have been well aware of the difficulties of addressing questions of sex within a publication desirous of avoiding prosecution for obscenity, and knew that when Zola had addressed the question squarely, in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; tr. as The Sin of Father Mouret) he had blithely abandoned any pretence of naturalism in favor of extravagant and elaborate symbolism. There had, of course, been one French writer who had taken a Naturalistic approach to sex, not merely in terms of explicit description but in terms of intense psychological and sociological analysis, but the writings of the Marquis de Sade were still banned in 1908, and even the great pioneer of flamboyant satirical euphemism, François Rabelais, was not an example that could yet be followed wholeheartedly. For all its ambition, L’Amour dans cinq mille ans was a book that had to be written coyly, unable to avoid modesty, euphemism and sly symbolism in couching its eroticism—although that could, admittedly, be considered a wry definition of “Romanticism.”
In fact, the ambition expressed in L’Amour dans cinq mille ans to be forerunner of a new post-Romantic school proved more justified than might have been expected; in retrospect, the narrative can be regarded as a significant precursor of Symbolism’s own descendent school of Surrealism; the images it deploys are manifestly better regarded as the raw substance of nightmarish dreams than the products of rational extrapolation, disciplined speculation and considered opinion. Many of the inconsistencies in the text, whether blatant or covert, are explicable in terms of the fact that the author obviously made up the story as he went along, changing his mind in regard to some points and being unable to make it up in regard to some others, but there is also a manifest and insistent dream-illogic about some of his narrative shifts, which has deeper psyc
hological implications.
As well as expressing a qualified residual allegiance to Romanticism, Kolney’s preface represents his text explicitly as a Nihilist text, and although French Anarchists typically regarded Russian Nihilism—with reason—merely as an alternative term for the same political philosophy, there is an important sense in which Kolney is using the term to map out a further philosophical dimension. An Anarchist he certainly was, but he was obviously a disillusioned Anarchist, and his insistence in L’Amour and cinq mille ans that an Anarchist utopia would be doomed to collapse just like every other supposedly-ideal society might well have been regarded as intellectual treason by some of his associates (but not the editor of La Presse Anarchiste, whose eulogy confesses that the book had once seemed a revelation to him). There is undoubtedly a tongue-in-cheek element both to Kolney’s assertion that Nihilism is the only viable philosophy and the studious development of the novel’s narrative as an alleged exemplar of that philosophy, but while not taking it too seriously, it would also be a mistake not to take it too unseriously. A serious point is being made, albeit in lurid jest.
As L’Amour dans cinq mille ans seems to have been marketed, when it was reprinted, as an item of erotica, it is probably worth noting, too, that its situation within that fugitive genre is as bizarre and exceptional as its situation within the genres of roman philosophique and utopian fiction. That is not because it is set in a world of castrati—given that they do discover sex, with explosive consequences, and that their preliminary innocence is a topic of lubricious exploration by a knowing narrative voice—but because it gives urgent voice to an intensity of sexual anxiety and panic that pornographic texts generally strive to palliate, tame or deny. As well as being conscientiously exotic in attempting to take the imagination into previously untrodden territory, it is a genuinely weird book in psychoanalytical terms, and all the more precious in consequence. It is arguable that the translation of the title that I have used is anodyne, and that Sex in Five Thousand Years or Lust in Five Thousand Years might have been more appropriate, both being within the range of the French concept of Amour, but the book is, in fact, primarily about emotion, and the manner in which emotion can be undermined and betrayed, as well as shaped and directed, by physical drives.
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