As to why La Hire made this readjustment, we can only speculate. It might have been pressure from his editor, who felt that a futuristic setting was unsuited to a daily newspaper serial—La Hire’s two previous science fiction stories had both had contemporary settings—or it might simply have been the fall-out from a purely whimsical decision to insert Flammarion into the story. At any rate, the decision had some odd side-effects. First of all, it pushed the tacit date of L’homme qui peut vivre dans l’eau back into the relatively distant past, from 1908 to, probably, 1886.18
More importantly, it pushed the action of the novel out of any plausible simulacrum of the “actual” present into a manifest “alternative present,” in which the Age of Aviation had developed very much faster than it had in the actual year 1911. This is, however, not entirely out of keeping with the nature of the story, which had established itself from the very beginning as being set in a world in which, as I mentioned, the events described in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds really occurred rather than merely being a story. This creates scope for a tentative rationalization and reconciliation of the story’s conflicting time-schemes.
La Hire does not develop this reconciliatory strategy himself, but he does hint at it when Koynos says that lessons learned in the wake of the Martian invasion had enabled the XV to make the rapid technological advances that had given them the means to travel to Mars, with a view to its conquest. This possibility is not mentioned explicitly when the text introduces Klepton and the Condor, but Klepton is an Englishman, and it seems quite possible that the new technologies that have allowed him to design and build an advanced “aeronef” were partly based on scientific study of the debris of the unsuccessful Martian invasion of his homeland. Although the Martian invaders did not use aircraft of any sort, they did use rockets to distribute the poisonous “black smoke,” and presumably had other technologies that had not yet been employed when a convenient and calculatedly bathetic deus ex machina wiped them out.
It is therefore conceivable that, in the alternative history in which La Hire’s story is set, the terrestrial Age of Aviation made an earlier start and accelerated at a much faster rate than it did in our history, because of the inspiration provided by the luckless Martians and the technology with which they unintentionally gifted humankind. It might still be difficult to believe that a Compagnie Aérienne Universelle and a Compagnie Transatlantique Aérienne could have set up commercial air travel throughout Western Europe and regular intercontinental transport via dirigibles by 1911, but plainly—if the evidence of the story is to be taken at all seriously—they must have done.
In considering this change of chronology, it might also be appropriate to re-raise a question that La Hire deliberately ignores in the text: the issue of the changing distance between Earth and Mars. It is conceivable that La Hire initially intended to treat this matter conscientiously, and wanted to be certain that he set his story in the weeks adjacent to an opposition, when Mars and Earth were aligned on the same side of the Sun. There had been a particularly favorable opposition in 1909 (in September) and there was another in 1911 (in November), when Le mystère des XV was actually serialized.
La Hire presumably knew, by virtue of reading Camille Flammarion, that oppositions between Earth and Mars occur every 2.2 years, and would therefore have known that if he set his story 22 years in the future, its action would be bound to unfold around the time of another opposition. That might be why he first used the figure 22, but had to correct it to 25 when he realized that his textual baseline was 1908 rather than 1911. If nothing else, this observation might help to confirm that the replacement time-scale does, indeed, adjust the setting to 1911, not 1913—when the autumnal association of the planets would have been more approximate, the actual opposition falling in January 1914.
Melodramatic Inflation and Deflation
As an early harbinger of superhero fiction, Le mystère des XV is understandably primitive, and its development as a daily newspaper serial—which was brought to an abrupt close just when it was threatening to become interesting, either because La Hire had tired of it, or because his editor felt that it was no longer keeping its readers hooked—certainly did not assist it to make any advance on its primitive nature. Even allowing for its inevitable deficiencies, however, there is something distinctly odd about the way in which the story develops the embryonic seeds of literary superheroism.
The evolutionary pressure that forced 20th century popular fiction, in general, to develop a new mythology of superheroism was basically that of “melodramatic inflation.” In essence, the basic formula of thriller fiction consists of the evocation of an antagonist who/which attacks human society, usually at both an individual and general level, thus incurring a “moral debit” that requires cancellation, usually by the eventual destruction of the antagonist by a heroic protagonist. Although the simplest versions of the formula only involve a protagonist, an antagonist and a community under threat, an elementary complication is often introduced by giving the antagonist an individual hostage who requires salvation in the climactic confrontation between the protagonist and antagonist. The most convenient means of adding extra drama to the basic situation is to make the hostage a female who has, or is potentially capable of forming, a personal relationship with the protagonist. Further complications—the very essence of “story”—are usually added by making the protagonist’s progress towards confrontation slow and troublesome; the construction of such narrative “obstacle courses” is the fundamental craft of authorship. The creation and maintenance of dramatic suspense in the extrapolation of such narratives is mainly a matter of setting deadlines, forcing the protagonist to run the obstacle course against the clock. The formula is, of course, very old, many examples being found in ancient mythologies. Classical mythology inevitably provides such archetypal examples as the story of Perseus, whose complex obstacle course included the salvation of Andromeda from a sea-monster. The reason why its continual deployment has an inevitable inflationary element is easy to understand. Mere repletion is not thrilling; quite the contrary. In order that a sequence of thrillers should continue to thrill, therefore, the moral debits incurred by the antagonists must increase as the formula is redeployed.
Within any definable thriller genre, therefore, the antagonists tend to become more powerful and decidedly nastier as the genre evolves; when they exceed the limit of contemporary plausibility, the genre tends to lose impetus and die. If the sequence is extended to a considerable length, the increasing power and nastiness of the antagonists generally requires the protagonists who oppose them to increase their own abilities, in order to thwart them; as villains respond to the pressure of melodramatic inflation by evolving into supervillains, heroes respond to the pressure of supervillainy by evolving into superheroes. Natural cleverness and physical prowess are limited—though not very, as evidenced by such famous modern heroes as Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan—but antagonism is not, because it can so easily transcend the human in becoming garishly monstrous; thus, superheroism is eventually required to move beyond mere human limitations into the realms of “virtuous monstrosity.”
Melodramatic inflation is, inevitably, as old as the formula; its effects are particularly obvious in Classical mythology, which is replete with superhuman and monstrous antagonists—Perseus is not merely a demigod but has to equip himself, in the course of his quest, with such useful supernatural accessories as a cloak of invisibility, a flying horse and the Medusa’s head. Other myth-systems involve similar supernatural elaborations, mapping out the extent of their evolutionary complication. The progress of melodramatic inflation following the invention of writing was, however, anything but uniform. The excesses to which it had led in oral culture fell into some disrepute as the mythical past was replaced in human calculation by the historical past; such supernatural embellishments came to seem at best quaint, and at worst silly, provoking a compensatory melodramatic deflation. This deflationary process was dramatically re-emphasized in
Europe following the spread of Christianity; when Christendom inherited the tattered mantle of Classical glory, its ideologists added an extra turn to the screw of disrepute by tainting “pagan” silliness with diabolism, although its own legendry of the saints was inevitably subject to a similar inflationary process.
The inflationary effect of mythical license was reduced to virtual impotence when its secular produce was relegated to a relatively minor and not-very-prestigious sector of literary endeavor, but the European imagination did not remain lost in that arid wilderness indefinitely. Medieval romance, which made inflationary effects manifest again in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, always seemed slightly embarrassed in its deployment of bandits, giants and dragons, and for a while thereafter, the general trend within Christendom was once again deflationary, towards antagonists of ordinary human dimensions and essentially petty villainy—with the key exception, of course, of the Christian Devil (who was, by definition, the Ultimate Antagonist) and any human agents he might be imagined to have. It was not until popular fiction began to pick up steam again in the last decades of the 18th century, however, that inflationary pressure began to reassert itself strongly across the literary board, and not until the early 20th century that it broke its previous mythical bounds in fiction of an essentially secular sort.
“Moral debits” are, by definition, threats of harm. In vulgar terms, they are threats of pain and death. In the superheroic fantasies of Classical mythology, threats of death are paramount, although they very often come with various colorful twists, and the redemption of such debits sometimes takes the form of ingenious accounts of tortuous afterlife rather than any mere tit for tat. The long empire of Christendom did, however, have one other marked effect, in addition to its elevation of Satan as the Ultimate Antagonist and his recruitment as a crucial ally in the cause of the Church’s campaign of moral terrorism. The Church’s peculiar dual fascination with sex and martyrdom, and the complex fetishistic inter-relationship between the two, led to the widespread popularization of the notion of undesired sexual intercourse as a “fate worse than death.”
The writers of the secular popular fiction that evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries not only took full advantage of the Devil in renewing the basic formula of the thriller, but scrupulously capitalized on the moral debit-value of the “fate worse than death.” Many, though by no means all, of the “Gothic” thrillers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries refused to employ the Devil as a manifest antagonist, considering him a trifle outdated, but there was no moderation at all in their reconstruction of “moral debit.” The very essence of the Gothic fiction of that period, especially in its non-supernatural variants, was not the threat of death, but the threat of rape: the spoliation of female innocence. To some extent, the development of thriller fiction in the 19th century redressed that balance, by re-establishing the threat of destruction—especially nation- or world-destruction—as the gold standard of moral currency, but, even in the early 20th century, the threat of rape still had a crucial central role to play in the moral currency of thriller fiction, and that is something of which modern readers of the Nyctalope’s adventures, such as The Nyctalope on Mars and The Nyctalope vs. Lucifer, need to be as sharply aware as Jean de La Hire was, if they want to understand the peculiarities of the author’s narrative strategy.
In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the moral currency of thriller fiction underwent further evolution in several ways, all of which were to prove awkwardly problematic for authors, but none were more problematic than the changes associated with the representation of sexuality. Two developments in that respect, in particular, are relevant to the tangles that La Hire got himself into while making a mess of Le mystère des XV. On the one hand, the hangover of the Christian demonization of sex was reflected, especially in the 19th century, in the spectacular evolution of a new species of antagonist: the femme fatale, whose sexual allure provided a threat to male sexual innocence parallel to the one that the Gothic villain posed to female sexual innocence, albeit somewhat perverted in its significance. On the other hand, writers and readers became very tired indeed of the notion that a hero ought to be chaste—to the extent that the quest for the Holy Grail in Medieval romance had required a hero of frankly impossible virtue—and a process of evolution began that gradually imported sexual prowess into the heroic profile alongside other sorts of physical prowess.
By the end of the 20th century, those heroes who had not fallen victim to the Hays Office or the Comic Book Code along the way posed far more of a danger to the virginity of female characters than villains did—and this was no longer regarded by any but an admittedly-loud minority of the literary audience as a Bad Thing.
That victory was not easily won, though, and the battlefield it left behind was strewn with casualties of every sort. Many of the problems that La Hire ran into in constructing and stringing out his story are the consequence of his desire to play a progressive role in that “dirty war,” rather than his own incompetence as a writer, manifest though that might have been. While most early 20th century romans feuilletons at least paid lip service to the standards of heroic chastity observed by their predecessors, Le mystère des XV deliberately, if rather awkwardly, challenged and tested their boundaries.
Another major problem afflicting the evolution of thriller fiction in this period, with which La Hire was also forced to grapple, was the politics of redemption to which “moral debits” were subject. There is a sense in which the emotional accountancy of redemption demands that a human antagonist should not only receive a penalty equal to the magnitude of his crime, but one that exceeds it, in order that his punishment might serve as a deterrent warning to other would-be antagonists. The emotional fervor of the desire for vengeance thus tends to exceed the violence of the crime to be avenged. This fervor is, however, flatly contradicted by the central ethic of Christian religion—whose founder’s principal mission and purpose was to oppose the cruel logic of “an eye for an eye” with the patient heroism of “turning the other cheek.” Post-Christian thriller fiction thus had to labor under the handicap of a demanding censorship, partly tacit and partly explicit, by which the victims and heroes who incurred the “moral debits” of thriller fiction were obliged to exercise saintly restraint in their redemption.
Thus, for instance, John Ridd was permitted to watch Carver Doone drown in the bog in Lorna Doone, but he was not allowed to do what he yearned to do—and every single one of his readers similarly yearned for him to do—which was to stamp on the villain’s head and spit in his eye as he sank. Edmond Dantès was eventually allowed, though not without a good deal of narrative writhing, to procure the death of the worst of the conspirators who had sent him to the Château d’If for the best part of his life before he emerged as the Count of Monte Cristo—but only on condition that he refrained from following his instincts, and the instincts of his readers, by being subsequently overjoyed about it. This limitation, too, was eventually overcome by 20th century writers, but not until Adolf Hitler had done the world the enormous favor of making it perfectly acceptable to set any and all moral qualms firmly aside in prosecuting runaway human antagonism.
At the same time, however, the advancement of psychology increasingly suggested that antagonism might be explicable, and that there might be a sense in which villains were victims too. In 1911, not only was the question of whether a fictitious hero could actually be allowed to kill anyone, let alone take pleasure in it, still a thorny issue that had to be tackled in tentative gloves, but the question of whether antagonists ought to be approached with understanding, with a view to rehabilitation rather than punishment, was also becoming increasingly vexed. Again, Le mystère des XV attempts to be daring in its occasional depictions of violence, and its attitude to the legitimacy of punishment, although not as daring as in its occasional dealings with sex.
As his story progressed, La Hire must have realized, belatedly, just how much trouble he had stored up for himself in terms of
the moral currency of redemption the moment the idea crossed his mind of writing a sequel to The War of the Worlds in which the Age of Aviation would carry men to Mars. The War of the Worlds is not a thriller, but a horror story; it features a new kind of Ultimate Antagonist and victims in abundance, but it has no hero—bacteria, no matter how fortunate the outcome of their actions may be, cannot qualify as heroes, let alone as superheroes. This does not mean that a sequel to The War of the Worlds could not be a thriller—indeed, there would be little point in writing a sequel that wasn’t—but it does mean that a sequel-writer is bound to create a fatal confusion if he gives the job of fighting the Martians to a secret society, whose members are also required to function within his plot as secondary antagonists. Before La Hire’s story even opens, the role that the XV are to play in it is steeped in awkward ambiguity; in order to become antagonists at all, they are required to commit crimes against humanity—the most crucial of which involves the reflection of their definitive number in a series of threatened “fates worse than death”—but they were never going to be entirely convincing in that villainous role, while they also aspired to the essentially heroic role of conquerors of Mars, even if they then intended to use Mars as a base for the later conquest of Earth.
Given this initial confusion, it was inevitable that Le mystère des XV would have to develop as what James Blish dubbed an “idiot plot”: a plot whose levers only operate, and whose threads only delivers traction to the story, because everybody involved in its development behaves like a complete idiot; or, to put it another way, a plot in which the writer cannot possibly equip the characters with a reasonable motivation for performing the actions that the plot requires them to perform. Having been forced to the ridiculous step of kidnapping 15 young women—hardly necessary, even for the crudest of villains, let alone ones as rugged, handsome and ambitious as the XV—it is not in the least surprising that the more prominent members of the organization—Koynos, Alkeus and Kipper—spend the rest of the plot literally dying of embarrassment as a result of their misdeeds, while the minor ones—Oxus, Miniok, Kokeps and all the ones who never get around to acquiring names—gradually lapse into utter impotence, so far do they hang their heads in ignominious shame. The problem is that they were never allowed to be real antagonists at all, but were cursed by their author from the very start with the narrative apparatus required for an essentially heroic mission: the achievement of space travel and the punishment of H. G. Wells’ Ultimate Antagonists.
The Nyctalope on Mars 2: The Triumph of Love Page 23