Investigations of the Future
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
Théophile Gautier: Future Paris 15
Arsène Houssaye: Future Paris 31
Victor Fournel: Future Paris 37
Alfred Franklin: The Ruins of Paris in 4875 52
Maurice Spronck: Year 330 of the Republic 81
Jean Jullien: An Investigation of the World of the Future 130
Pierre-Simon Ballanche: Hebal’s Vision 277
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 338
Introduction
In his prospectus for Le Roman de l’avenir (1834)1 Félix Bodin argued that early futuristic fiction had consisted exclusively of utopias or apocalypses: designs for hypothetical ideal societies that used the future as a convenient imaginative frame or religiously-inspired visions of the end of the world. He suggested that it was both inevitable and desirable that a different kind of futuristic fiction would eventually develop, in which the future would be described in a manner more akin to the way that Walter Scott had set fiction in various eras of the past, thus producing a kind of fiction that might seem to belong to the future, as if it were contemporary fiction written at a future date.
When he wrote that prescription, Bodin was probably only vaguely aware of the difficult of the task he was proposing, but he must have been much more sharply aware of it by the time he had attempted, as any brave man would, to practice what he preached; the bulk of Le Roman de l’avenir consists of a fragment of exactly such a novel, which was eventually abandoned, at least in part because it was failing miserably to live up to his manifesto, being drastically corrupted by utopianism, shaping up as if its denouement were going to be an apocalypse of sorts, and quite unable to achieve any trace of apparent narrative realism.
Almost three generations later, Anatole France, in Sur la pierre blanche (1905; tr. as The White Stone), observed that, with only one conspicuous exception, writers of futuristic fiction had used the future merely as a canvas on which to paint their hopes and fears, and that it was only very recently that anyone had set out to explore its possibilities with an open and curious mind. The exception he cited was H. G. Wells—rather ironically, as Wells, after a brief exploratory period, had already stopped doing that and had begun to focus as narrowly on his hopes and fears as anyone else. France was, however, correct; by 1905, it was possible for writers of imaginative fiction to examine future possibilities in a distinctly different way, viewing them as a fan-like spectrum generated by ongoing developments in science and society and making judgments of desirability secondary to questions of rational plausibility. Fiction of the kind envisaged by Bodin was at last becoming feasible.
It was, in fact, possible by 1905 for a writer tacitly to adopt the stance of an investigative reporter, interrogating the future in terms of endeavors that people might attempt to undertake with more or less success, according to the degree to which science and technology could support their projects. That was, in fact, what the playwright and dramatic theorist Jean Jullien pretended to do explicitly in Enquête sur le monde futur (1909) and here translated as “An Investigation of the World of the Future,” in which the author poses as a reporter dispatched to America to interview the men whose projects and discoveries are in the process of laying the foundations for the future development and transformation of human society. If Anatole France read the book in question, he would probably have dismissed it as a relatively insignificant text because it does not take its quest very seriously, offering a series of sarcastic fantasies that eventually takes care to undermine its own dubious authority comprehensively, but if one looks at it in the contexts of previous attempts to explore the future with attitudes that have something in common Bodin’s proposal, it can easily be seen that it reproduces and extrapolates features typical of many, if not all of them—most particularly its convoluted rhetorical strategy—and is more significant than a casual glance at its frothy surface might suggest.
Classic rhetorical analysis divides strategies of persuasion into three: ethos, pathos and logos (which one might be tempted to describe as the three musketeers of oratory had Alexandre Dumas not broken the apparent pattern in naming Aramis). Logos refers to the logical and factual substance of an argument, while pathos refers to appeals to emotion—attempts to “push the buttons” of the hearers or readers, thus exciting indignation, compassion etc. Ethos refers to the manner in which speakers or writers attempt to establish their own credentials entitling them to the trust of hearers or readers, including the establishment of their own moral and political stance. Any argument inevitably involves all three components, but they vary considerably in the manner of their deployment.
Logos—the heart and soul of any argument, although its routine mistreatment and occasional cunning clouding by ethos and pathos is what got rhetoric a bad name in post-Socratic philosophy—is awkwardly problematic in any exploration of the future, because we have no way of knowing what the future might actually bring, and can only base our speculations of hypothetical arguments of an essentially dodgy nature. Given that attempts to calculate future possibilities and then to alter the balance of apparent probabilities are the basis of all rational behavior, however, the difficulty of weighing up such possibilities ought not to be construed as a prohibition—which is the principal reason why utopias and apocalypses seem attractive as imaginative projects. If, however, one attempts an investigation of investigations of the future, especially those undertaken with something of the spirit of Bodin’s prospectus, what is most striking about them, and arguably most interesting, is not the inevitable dubiousness of their logos, but the extraordinary contortion of their ethos.
As Jean Jullien was obviously aware in planning Enquête sur le monde futur, there was something of a tradition, imported to France from America, of newspaper “hoaxes,” in which fictitious reportage would present series of fanciful inventions. The most famous of all was the “moon hoax” perpetrated by the New York Sun in 1835, which offered a series of supposed telescopic discoveries made by the astronomer John Herschel about life on the moon, which became gradually more extravagant as the series progressed, ultimately extending into the realm of the absurd. Reproduction of the moon hoax stories in European newspapers caused a sensation, and gave rise to numerous parodies, including four by Joseph Méry (tr. as “The Lunarians” in The Tower of Destiny).2 The most notable French example was a series of articles in Le Pays in 1864 reporting on the alleged discovery of a Martian mummy enclosed in a meteorite buried in the rocks of Colorado and the proceedings of the scientific commission appointed to examine it, which turned out to have been written by Henri de Parville and was reprinted in book form as Un Habitant de la planète Mars (1865)3.
These two endeavors not only helped to establish that the press was the ideal medium for the continuation of the great tradition of “tall stories” that had always been inherent in oral discourse and had taken advantage of the apparent authority of the written word to insert some of its most outrageous examples into scripture and history, but also demonstrated that fake reportage was a useful medium for speculative fiction. Parville, in particular, wanted to exploit the possibility of a “double bluff” in practicing a kind of reverse psychology. His serial was a hoax in the sense that it was a lie pretending to be true, but the lie was a convenient vehicle for raising and exploring serious questions of possibility relating to the nature of the universe, the distribution of life within it and the relationships between Earth and other worlds. There is, of course, a popular saying which holds that “there’s m
any a true word spoken in jest,” and that refers not merely to accidental instances but to a deliberate rhetorical strategy by means of which serious allegations are disguised as jokes, often in order to give the speaker or hearer “potential deniability” if accused of insult, slander, dishonesty or insanity.
The relevance of these observations to Bodin’s prospectus for a new literature of the future is that—as he discovered himself—one cannot simply sit down and launch such a tradition from scratch. While the very idea of setting the future seemed so unusual as to be absurd in itself, the rhetoric of such fictions was problematic, and the fact that there was an existing tradition of apocalyptic visions, which saw the future in terms of a fixed, divinely determined destiny was not a help but a hindrance. The futuristic utopias to which Bodin also called attention were a relatively recent development in 1834, having been pioneered by Louis-Sébastien Mercier in L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; tr. as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred) only half a century before—previous utopian designs having been located for narrative purposes in remote locations of the globe—but they too were no help, especially in France, whether the trivial noun utopie was widely used to mean something inherently impossible and hopelessly naïve.
The simple fact was that, in the beginning, exploratory fiction about the future required some kind of apologetic strategy, and the most attractive one available was the kind of double bluff inherent in newspaper hoaxes, which loudly proclaimed their non-seriousness in order to create the imaginative space necessary to raise questions and examine ideas that could, in fact, be as serious as the author cared to make them. Because newspaper hoaxes posed as contemporary reportage, however, they could not be straightforwardly adapted to futuristic fiction. The most fundamental problem of narrative strategy involved in constructing hypothetical futures was, in fact, the problem of narrative access, which was initially limited to visionary experience—a means of access that carried an inevitably stigma of implausibility.
This problem of access not only compelled a strategy of apologetic non-seriousness in the ethos component of futuristic fiction explicitly represented as visions, but those which attempted to by-pass that artifice. Bodin must have written the bulk of Le Roman de l’avenir some time before its publication date or else he would certainly have called attention to the fact that his friend Charles Nodier, perhaps partly under his influence, had published two futuristic stories in the Revue de Paris in 1833 that disposed of any such frame—“Hurlubleu” and “Leviathan Long” (combined in translation as “Perfectibility”)4—but the consequence of that highly unusual innovation was that Nodier had to strive even harder to establish that he was joking.
Over time, the necessity of that apologetic strategy diminished, partly because the more it was practiced, the more familiar and less bizarre the idea of narratives set in the future became. A crucial literary watershed was reached in the late 1880s, when H. G. Wells, in order to facilitate the endeavors of his brief exploratory phase, invented a time machine for the use of “The Chronic Argonauts” (1889; revised as The Time Machine, 1895): a facilitating device that could shift a narrative viewpoint into the future “bodily,” in such a way as seemingly to evade the inherent unreliability of visionary experience. Relatively few subsequent narrative excursions into the future employed an explicit time machine, but the device itself became unnecessary almost as soon as it was invented, having done the essential work of establishing that the future could be regarded as a habitable narrative space, into which a writer could stop without having to issue a preliminary potential defense of sanity, effectively denying ridiculousness by admitting it. On the way to that watershed, however, and in the years that followed it, there was unsteady process of evolution, illustrated by the sequence of stories reproduced in this anthology.
Théophile Gautier’s “Paris futur,” first published in Le Pays in December 1851 and reprinted in 1852 in Caprices et zigzags, here translated as “Future Paris,” was not the first essay-cum-fiction to bear that title, as Gautier’s friend Joseph Méry had published one several years earlier, but Méry’s was far less interesting, and is best seen as a tentative preliminary to two far more extravagant adventures in futuristic fiction, “Ce qu’on verra” and “Les Ruines de Paris” (tr. as “What We Shall See” and “The Ruins of Paris” in The Tower of Destiny), both dating from the mid-1840s. Gautier’s piece was, however, the direct inspiration of Arsène Houssaye’s “Paris futur” (1856; revised 1889 as “En 3789”), with appeared in a collection of essays to which Gautier was also a contributor, and probably of Victor Fournel’s “Paris futur” (1865), although the latter also had the more proximal inspiration of Baron Haussmann’s remodeling of the city of Paris during the latter days of the Second Empire. The side-branch of the sequence begun by Méry’s “Les Ruines de Paris” eventually became prolific in its own right, provoking Alfred Bonnardot’s “Archaeopolis” (1857; tr. in Nemoville),5 which in turn provoked Alfred Franklin’s Les Ruines de Paris en 4875 (1875), here translated as “The Ruins of Paris in 4875”).
The rhetorical strategies of the earlier items in this group of stories is relatively straightforward, although Gautier’s shows the relative sophistication one would expect of a writer of his genius, but Franklin’s, extrapolating and capitalizing on the extra twists introduced by Méry and Bonnardot, is noticeably more convoluted in its exploitation of the moral and political stance adopted by the various signatories of the letters sent by the explorers of ruined Paris to their base in New Caledonia. The essence of the joke is that those notional narrators are in earnest, although the true narrator, Franklin, is a committed satirist who expects his readers to see the unstated truth shadowing their errors. The story deliberately opens up a considerable “distance of stance” between the actual and notional narrators, and it is the reader’s appreciation of the width and depth of the gap in question that gives the work its particular appeal. The strategy is in some ways demanding, requiring the reader to keep in mind two distinct narrative threads—that of the story’s surface and that of its buried core—as well as to draw inferences from hints of varying delicacy, but it is correspondingly rewarding, augmenting the conventional double bluff of the humoristic contemplation of the future in such a way that it become, in effect, a triple bluff.
It would be overstating the case to say that such triple bluffs eventually became routine; they remained an exception rather than the rule—but Maurice Spronck’s L’An 330 de la République, first published in 1894, deserves special attention as a work that makes particularly clever and telling use of that kind of “ethical distance,” carefully and seductively varying its width and depth to considerable effect. The variance in this case makes the story’s underlying rhetorical strategy even more convoluted than Franklin’s or Jullien’s; the latter attempts a similar effect, but suffers slightly from its fragmentary nature, thus being unable to contrive the kind of crescendo effect that Spronck develops so forcefully. It is Spronck rather than Franklin or Jullien who contrives most effectively to manipulate ethos into pathos, producing a truly remarkable work. H. G. Wells probably did not read it, but must surely have heard a report of its crucial arguments, because the Utopian design set out in A Modern Utopia (1905) seems specifically designed to counter and neutralize the deadliest of Spronck’s sly but devastating criticisms of socialist utopianism.
In presenting this sequence as an example of the slow progress made by literary attempts to follow the broad philosophical lines of Bodin’s prospectus, it must not be forgotten that the literary endeavors that such attempts were supposed to supersede did not and could not disappear, and were not entirely absorbed into it. Utopianism and apocalyptic writing survived in their pure forms as well as becoming components of a more generalized futuristic literature. I thought it worthwhile, in presenting this “evolutionary sequence” to illustrate by contrast the very different rhetorical strategy associated with one of those other literary strands, so I have added as an appen
dix La Vision d’Hébal (1834; here translated as “Hebal’s Vision”) by the philosophical historian and Academician Pierre-Simon Ballanche, who spent his entire life laboring on a comprehensive account of human history as an alleged reflection of cosmic history, embodying the principle of “palingenesis.” He never finished it, of course, and hardly started, because the task was simply too large, but he did publish this summary vision of it—supposedly extracted from the incomplete third volume of the project, La Ville des expiations [The City of Expiation]—which remains a pure apocalypse in spite of its infection by scientific ideas and the author’s attempts to adopt Catholic dogma to a philosophical frame that cannot logically accommodate it.
“Palingenesis,” which, in its most general sense, means regeneration, is a term that eventually came to have a more specific relevance in the context of 19th century French speculative fiction when the notion of “cosmic palingenesis”—serial reincarnation on different planets scattered throughout the universe—was popularized by Camille Flammarion, but the devout Ballanche would have been far more familiar with its appropriation by theologians to dignify Christian baptism, and it was from that starting point that he developed his own eccentric notion of the history of the human race as a series of regenerative ordeals imposed by virtue of the Fall, in which the vicissitudes of individual life not only mirror the iterative emergence and collapse of civilizations and cultures but the entire story of Creation.
The merest glance at La Vision d’Hébal is sufficient to illustrate the differences of its rhetorical strategy from those of the other authors featured in the anthology, which are even more obvious in its ethos than it logos, but it is worth noting that it is driven by the same perceived need for apology, which Ballanche feels far more keenly than Gautier et al. simply because the very last thing he wants to be taken for is a joker. He is ardently desirous of importing the whole force of revelation into his arguments, and must therefore employ a very different argument to support his employment of the visionary method, and there is a certain irony in the fact that the rhetorical weapons he takes up in order to do that are, if one looks through the ethos and the pathos, logically fatal to his case. One suspects, considering the excess of his protestations, that he knew that only too well. There is no doubt, however, that he got carried away by the surge of his own rhetoric, to the point of becoming the only devout apocalypse-monger in history who almost contrived to forget that, when the Day of Judgment comes, it is us, not God, who are supposed to be in the dock.
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