The Humanisphere

by Brian Stableford

  The consultation of a physician and all of medical science consisted of observing one, two or three symptoms, of searching in the book called Medicine for the malady to which the isolated symptom or the combined diagnoses responded, and prescribing the treatment—masculine, feminine, juvenile or senile—indicated in its regard. Every word of the book was numbered, in such a fashion that if one had symptoms 921, 453 and 72, that indicated malady number 10,044, which was treatable by the same number and you said: “Have prescription 10,044 made up.” After which one sent someone to the pharmacist to ask for remedy number 10,044—and one was cured…or got worse, by the mercy of God.

  “So,” I said, “that’s the whole of the science? No more theories, no more principles, no more research: a formula.”

  “Exactly,” said Graymalkin. “No more verbiage, no more pedantry, no more boring and obscure treatises laboriously engendered by some and laboriously studied by others, no more studies, no more schools—but the result of the experience of centuries condensed in a portable manual of which everyone in the world has the right and the capacity to make use. How simple it is! How practical it is! Oh, it’s a great utility! A child could treat two hundred people in a day; he only needs the time to transport himself from one to another. Oh, what a great people we are!

  “When I think that all careers are as free as those of bootmaker and physician, that anyone, from one day to the next, without being tyrannically summoned to furnish proofs, without having been enclosed within the narrow limits of a program and an examination, can be by turns, at his whim, a general, a domestic servant, an engineer, a street-porter, a painter, an architect, a cook, a notary, the proprietor of a hotel-theater, a judge, a banker, an acrobat, a gendarme, a writer, dancer or professor, I’m enthused! No more shackles on talent! A universe blossoming. Utilitarianism! Utilitarianism! That’s what makes us so great, great, great, great, great!”

  “Great! Great! You mean to say greatly ignorant. What! Anyone, if he ‘s clever, a good talker, if he knows how to impose himself, can contrive to be given responsibility for building a house, provided that it doesn’t collapse, or to pierce a railway tunnel, on the same condition. Is there, perchance, also a manual for constructing bridges and highways?” (Graymalkin nodded affirmatively.) “Can one exploit mines by means of a collection of formulae of which the key, the meaning, the scope, the principles and the demonstration have been lost?” (Graymalkin repeated the gesture.) “Can one judge without knowing the law with the aid of a few order numbers whose ensemble is called Justice?” (Again.) “Can one teach if one doesn’t know the meaning of the word education?” (Still the same.) “Well, you’re following a ridiculous path. Oh, you call that great, great? Servitor.

  “What about the scientific bodies? The Observatoire, the Institut, the Facultés? And History, and Philosophy, and Pure Science? Finished, all that, no doubt; suppressed, the books, the great monuments of human thought—paper, paper, isn’t it? And you think that applied science can continue to exist without having pure science alongside it, which sustains it every day, animates it, amends it, transforms it, enriches, renews and develops it, which puts it in confrontation every day with new needs that are born every day? You think that Science reduced to practice won’t deviate and perish more rapidly? You don’t know that the higher the viewpoint, the more one can see? In sum, that one only understands the detail when one possesses the ensemble? You’re unaware, finally, that the most elevated theories and laws are the framework of which practices are only the temporary and changing vestments, and that everything crumbles irredeemably if one neglects the interior edifice? Well, you’re just barbarians!”

  I had spoken. I made a signal to the shoemaker to go away. He informed me first that I had the symptoms impatience and anger, and malady 15,302: cost, 300 francs for the visit.

  The empiricist having gone, Graymalkin explained to me, in order to close the incident, that malady 15,302 was one of the two thousand new afflictions that had been added to the ancient ones in the last hundred and thirty years for humans to experience. Those novelties derived from the way of life people led: from the depths, the obscurity and the dampness of the street, to the perpetual glare of gaslight inside and outside houses, to the feverish activity of diurnal life, to the pleasures of the evening and a multitude of inventions that flourished—artificial meat, for existence.

  (A word of explanation here: agriculture being much neglected and livestock being in short supply for many years, meat had been replaced in the butchery by a composition of old leather and softened and depilated hides, which were not essentially healthy or nutritious.)

  Chapter VIII

  Science and rationalism, the full development

  of industry and industrialism, have killed

  art and poetry.

  The Arts and Letters were not flourishing any more than Science. The description I have provided of the hotel-theater and the amusements that are encountered there, should have given a foretaste of the state in which they are found in the seventh city. An account of a visit that Graymalkin enabled me to make to a factory making paintings and statues and one manufacturing books will complete that summary notion.

  The factory making paintings and statues was immense, and to see the multitude of people working there, and the activity they were deploying, one might have thought that one was in a city fanatical about art. That was not exactly the case.

  The paintings were manufactured by steam-power, like cloth, footwear and bolts. Powerful machines produced thousand of paintings every day on canvas, wood and textiles of all kinds: silk, calico and batiste for women’s dressing-gowns, chemises or handkerchiefs.

  Those compositions were all conceived in the same order of ideas. One did not see those great epic pages, of sublime scenes borrowed from Religion, Fable, History or War, which transport the spectator into a superior sphere and put them in the presence of superhuman actions, and divine or heroic characters who elevate, enlarge and purify the soul, at the same time as they console it and extract it from the realities of this base world.

  One did not encounter those marvelous combinations of grandiose palaces, dazzling fêtes, magnificent fabrics, golden vases of flowers, men full of strength, women radiant with youth and beauty and children like cherubim, which show us life not as it is but as it might be, which remake our desires at will, which give substance to our most cherished but least plausible dreams and render them verities.

  There were none of those vast views of the sea and mountains that show infinity, woods and fields, which bring calm and repose; none of those episodes of spring verdure, foliage reddened by autumn, cheerful streams, melancholy lakes or somber torrents that make one pensive.

  The joys of the family were absent too: young mothers did not cradle their infants; laborers did not trace furrows while thinking of the evening to come; there were no oaths of love, betrothals or baptisms.

  Even animals were proscribed from that strange domain; the horse, with such elegant forms and its coat so rich in colors; the dog, with its intelligent and noble physiognomy; the ox, whose mass harmonizes so well with the broad lines of the plain; the lion with its warm and tawny hues; the bear with the silvery fur.

  No, none of that which, in the ideal or the real, the plastic or the moral, the simple or the complex, once formed one of the innumerable sources, one of the motives, one of the pretexts of art; nothing touched by the magic wand of the imagination, charming and enchanting; nothing had been excepted from the abandonment.

  The subjects delivered to commerce by the factory were all borrowed from antiques in the Museum of Naples.21 And that is understandable: works of art never went anywhere but into the private rooms of the hotel-theaters. As, everywhere else, people were only occupied with business, paintings would have distracted them from work and wasted too much time; in the day-time, they were rejected.

  The execution was not marvelous. It was well below the level of the Épinal prints that had been the delight of my c
hildhood. The color was brutal and the design gross. By dint of being copied by ignorant hands, the models were deformed and no longer bore any trace of anatomy. The prices varied according to the number and size of the characters. Figures of natural size were the most expensive; those were imprinted on wood cut along the contours and posed on feet like little lead soldiers. That last species of works of art was intermediate between painting and statuary.

  The statues did not have the aim of reproducing the real, idealized or typified features of heroes or great men; nor were they designed to recount some great event and perpetuate its memory; they did not even have the objective of the representation of physical beauty. The subjects were the same as those I have just mentioned, except that here, thanks to the round swelling, an attempt had been made to approach nature more closely, and it must be said that if the work had been less imperfect, the illusion would have been possible.

  The statues, generally of natural size, were made by galvanoplasty, a procedure that permits the same group to be repeated infinitely; they were also polychromatic, not lightly tinted as was seen in the middle of the nineteenth century—which is to say, sufficiently to remain ideal, but enough to lose the coldness, albeit noble, of marble. Here color imitated flesh very closely; they eyes were in glass with implanted lashes; the teeth were enamel, the nails gelatine, and every head was coiffed with a well-fitted wig. In sum, I had before my eyes something like a Tussaud Museum formed in a lascivious spirit.

  I went out hastily in order to go into the book factory, the spectacle of which desolated me in its turn. However, it was only what I should have expected.

  In the main, only utilitarian books were fabricated there. Works of science, technical treatises and educational books had been replaced by the formularies that I have mentioned: Medicine; Education (a teaching manual); Justice; Pontification, etc. As for philosophy, economics, law, history and poetry, anyone who had had the idea of publishing an old or new work on any of those subjects would not only have failed to sell a single copy but would have got himself imprisoned as an anti-utilitarian.

  There was, however, one department of the factory from which works of the imagination emerged. Some were the plays that were performed in the hotel-theaters, simple scenarios with neither head nor tail, which the set-designers filled to their taste, and in which the actors on stage improvised whatever passed through their heads every evening. The others were works of fiction. These were the titles most in vogue—I beg the reader’s pardon for reproducing them, and beg female readers to turn the page and pass on to the next chapter, but they are too characteristic for me to remain silent, and in any case, I shall only list four: The Doting Drunkard; The Twenty-Two Rotting Corpses; I Rape my Daughter; and Incubus and Succubus.

  I shall renounce transcribing, as I had intended to do, a page taken at random from this mire; the French public desires to be respected. I shall only say that, so far as I could judge without remaining any longer subject to the impure contact of those filthy productions, nothing in the form redeemed the subject; on the contrary, they were in perfect accord. There were a series of absurd, flat but revolting episodes emerged without linkage from diseased brains; there was a phantasmagoria of hideous crimes and horrible maladies, photographed in the slightest detail; there was a danse macabre of cheats and murderers, of odious characters, monsters of physical and moral ugliness. As for dialogue, written in the language of prisons, it differed little from the style of the book in which the author spoke for himself. Finally, rhetoric and grammar had been abolished, and a lax liberty tempered the rules of syntax and orthography. In brief, they wrote as they spoke, in telegraphic argot.

  Here are two of the most intelligible lines, the closest to French and the least cynical—be brave, it’s necessary!—from Twenty-two Rotting Corpses:

  “Wen 15 arived at the seventh rotten corpse, he sat down disapointed for a snak...”

  It was the ultimate in filth. But what did I expect? Art had been ruined, books had ceased to be monitored, and most importantly, the family had been destroyed; poisoned mushrooms naturally flourished. Letters deteriorate progressively as the family and taste lose their authority.

  Chapter IX

  The social condition that is, for certain “progressives,”

  the last word in civilization, is nothing but the

  most primitive barbarity.

  On returning home I found a piece of paper informing me that I had to present myself the following day to the judge of the circumscription in order to defend myself against citizen 17, who had a claim for damages to have pronounced against me. I recalled the individual whose smashall had run over a child and whom I had arrested—unduly—at the cost of a fist fight. I answered the summons eagerly, desirous of seeing how justice was accommodated among these savages of a new species.

  I went into a low room at the back of which a man with his head covered was sitting on the arm of a chair. Around him, people were jostling fuming, laughing, shouting and asking him questions, to which he responded with coarse gibes. That fellow was a magistrate; he was my judge.

  “Let’s get on,” he exclaimed, after have pulled a citizen’s hat down over his ears as a sign of amity after the latter had wittily broken and egg in his pocket. “Midday, let’s work. 17 against 42.

  My adversary and I cut through the crowd, which did not interrupt its racket.

  17 spoke; he recounted the facts briefly, and, I must say, with exactitude; then he concluded and demanded an indemnity of a hundred thousand francs.

  “To you,” said the dispenser of justice. “True or false?”

  “My adversary has told the truth,” I replied. “However, as a stranger to this country, its laws, its procedure, its jurisprudence, and above all its spirit and its mores, I need to be assisted by a counsel and defended by a voice habituated to judiciary tactics; in consequence, I request a postponement of a week in order to choose an advocate.

  “Don’t understand a single word,” said the judge, while 17 seemed bewildered. “Laws? Jurisprudence? Procedure? Advocate? Postponement? What’s all that? If 17 has told the truth, pay the hundred thousand francs.”

  It was my turn to be surprised, and I was protesting when Graymalkin explained to me that I had been talking about things that had ceased to exist so long ago that the words themselves had been generally forgotten. Civil cases were judged without delay, with no other procedure than a summary assignation and on the simple contradiction of two parties appearing in person; the judgments were all equitable and discretionary, without appeal, to be executed immediately. Having admitted the exactitude of the facts, I no longer had anything to do but contest the level of the demand for indemnity.

  I did so, animatedly. I argued that the blows I had struck had not caused any incapacity for work on the part of my adversary; I added that the combat, in which he had given evidence of as much strength as me, had been interrupted without having had the slightest result. In any case, the struggle having only lasted a quarter of an hour, I only owed an indemnity for what 17 would have earned in that space of time.

  The judge, having become attentive, had begun by distributing a few blows of his stick right and left, accompanied by a “Shut up, animal!” which had procured me a commencement of silence. Then he sat down on his curule chair, in the fashion of certain compact Egyptian statues, folded in three with his ankles in his hands and his chin on his knees.

  “Let’s see if true that of equal strength,” he said.

  We set about that investigation, of a genre new to me, and a profound silence fell in the audience. The fight did not last long, because 17, having an interest therein, allowed himself to be beaten easily. I denounced the ruse.

  “Begin again,” said the judge who seemed to have taken a keen pleasure in our exercises. “17, if you let yourself get beaten, I’ll convict you.”

  The combat resumed, more seriously, and after a quarter of a hour, when there was a shout of “Enough!” I had not obtained any sensib
le advantage over 17. My first argument was demonstrated!

  As for the second, 17 protested that the fifteen minutes I had retained him had caused him to arrive late at a meeting and miss an affair of 90,000 francs.

  “The proof,” said Minos.

  Two ragged drunkards advanced at a sign from 17. Those gentlemen exercised the profession of witnesses at 16 francs an hour.

  “No other witnesses?” said Minos, who knew them.

  “No,” replied 17.

  “42 acquitted.”

  Scarcely had those words been pronounced than 17, white with fury, approached the magistrate and, waving his fist in his face, heaped him with insults: “Thief, brigand (etc.)...it not enough, then, to have robbed the public when you were a tailor? Three months you’ve been a judge, and you maltreat us even more. How much have you been given to condemn me? (etc., etc.)”

  During this violence, I noticed that the tailor gradually extended his limbs, uncoiling, as it were, like a snake waking up. First, he had silently placed the palms of his hands on the edge of his seat, then put one foot on the ground, and then the other. Suddenly, he stood up and knocked 17 down; then he seized his stick and lashed out forcefully at the witnesses, who had intervened. 17 got up; I took a position beside the judge; the public divided into two camps, and a brawl in the Irish fashion was engaged, with brio. A good number of blows was distributed, until the moment when 17, exasperated, took a revolver from his pocket and fired three shots at the judge, which missed, so little mastery did he have of his senses. That incident soon put an end to the fight, and 17 was condemned by the magistrate to pay him ten thousand francs in damages.