Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  In truth, we have a strong intuition that the eventualities that really threaten us are not even those whose story we are reading, but we sense that similar surprises await us, or our children, and that events will produce, in the human world, upsets analogous to those produced among the populations of Medieval Romance by the curious or sinister marvels invented there. We sense that and we know it from experience, because the present results of science would have been similar prodigies and equally evident sophisms for a subject of Sesostris,55 if he were to return, and because recent and unexpected discoveries, like those of X-rays and radium, would be no less surprising and marvelous to us than that of the “New Accelerator.”

  I shall not say any more here about one of the numerous questions engendered by the birth of scientific marvel fiction. The summary fashion in which I have treated it spares me a resumé that would only result in the extension of the study without further clarification. Nevertheless, as the preceding reflections on this new literary genre appear to me to contain all the elements of its definition, I shall conclude—and I do not think that one could better serve the cause of Wells and his peers, nor better recommend their works to the attention and respect of all—by saying: “A scientific marvel story is a fiction based on a fallacy, whose purpose is to lead the reader to a contemplation of the universe that is closer to the truth, and whose means is the application of scientific methods to the comprehensive study of the unknown and the uncertain.”

  Afterword

  There is little need for any additional comment here on “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont,” save to reiterate that it was the best dinosaur story yet published when it first appeared in 1905. The melodramatic attractions of dinosaurs had led several previous writers to feature them in works of fiction, most notably Jules Verne, who populated his hidden world within the Earth in Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864; tr. as Journey to the Center of the Earth) with various survivals from prehistoric eras, but employed them merely as items of decor. Other interested writers usually did the same, but on a lesser scale. The most important precedent for Renard’s story had been set in two stories by Robert Duncan Milne featured in American regional newspapers, “The Iguanodon’s Egg” and “The Hatching of the Iguanodon” (both 1882), of whose existence Renard could not possibly have been aware, but they too are considerably less adventurous than Renard’s extrapolation of a similar premise.

  Because “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont” would have been almost as esoteric outside France, as Milne’s stories were outside California, its potential influence on other writers was severely limited, but Charles Derennes advertised the fact that he had read it before producing Le Peuple du pôle two years later. Arthur Conan Doyle’s publication of The Lost World in 1912 presumably required no further influence than Verne’s, and its success inevitably established it as the key point of reference for later authors of dinosaur fantasy. Science fiction writers eventually found cleverer ways of resurrecting dinosaurs in the present—most notably the cloning technique extravagantly featured in the abundant spinoff of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)—which put the blithely absurd logic of Renard’s method in the shade, but it is arguable that Renard’s cleverness in making narrative use of his resurrected dinosaurs can easily stand comparison with the vast majority of modern fantasies in that vein.

  Le Docteur Lerne invites more elaborate commentary in several ways. It clearly owes much of its fundamental inspiration to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1897), but it is worth noting that, although Renard must have been as conscious of the phonetic resonance of “Lerne” and “Learn” as Wells was of that between “Moreau” and “Morrow,” the proper name Lerne would have been primarily familiar to French readers as the place of origin of the Hydra, one of the monsters slain by Hercules. The particular nature of the Hydra—which grew more heads every time one of them was cut off—is wryly significant with respect to the new technology developed by Dr. Lerne and carried to further extremes by the transfigured Dr. Klotz.

  This central echo helps to emphasize the powerful resonances of Greek mythology that Renard incorporates into his plot; while Moreau is a distinctly imperious Jehovian “subgod,” Klotz-Lerne is much more like a member of the Classical pantheon, given to playing with the kinds of chimerization and transfiguration that are extravagantly featured and foregrounded in the summary account of Greek myth contained in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Le Docteur Lerne, science is engaged in a process of recapitulation and realization of ancient dreams and nightmares—a suggestion that Renard was to reiterate in several of other scientific marvel stories, and which provided a key element of the theory of literary hybridization that he was to set out in the preface to Le Voyage immobile suivi d’autres histoires singulières, which supposes that all modern literary works dabbling in “the marvelous” are participating in an evolution in which the magical is being tempered and transformed by the logical.

  The history of the kinds of biotechnology, whose rapid advancement Renard anticipates in Le Docteur Lerne, extends back to the 17th century, as exemplified by one of the supportive anecdotes he reports (the apocryphal status of which does not entirely destroy its significance). Some 30 years after William Harvey first demonstrated the circulation of the blood in the 1620s, his friend Christopher Wren—better known as an architect—borrowed some equipment from him in order to carry out a pioneering series of experiments in animal blood transfusion. A series of injections of lamb’s blood into human patients was carried out in Paris a few years later by the natural philosopher Jean-Baptiste Denis (1625-1704), but one of the four experimental subjects died in consequence, and Denis was sued by the widow. Although the court decided that he was not guilty of negligence, he was ordered to desist from further experiments, and this set a key precedent. Blood transfusions were outlawed in France until the 1800s, although tentative experimentation had by then been revived in England by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather).

  In spite of the cautionary anecdote attributed to Job van Meekeren, to which Renard makes passing reference in his story, there were very few recorded attempts to carry out such grafts between the 16th and 19th centuries, although it seems plausible that some failed attempts went unrecorded. No one knew why grafts between species, or even between individuals of the same species, were invariably rejected, but it was a matter of common knowledge that they were. As the novel reports and conscientiously documents, however, interest in solving the problem had increased considerably in the late 19th century, encouraged by the success that gardeners and agriculturalists had enjoyed in vegetable grafting, especially in grafting the stems of fruit-bearing trees on to sturdier roots borrowed from other varieties.

  Although Renard does not cite the relevant research—because no one had yet realized its significance—the question of tissue compatibility had entered into a new phase shortly before Le Docteur Lerne was written, when Karl Landsteiner began the investigation that led to his categorization of the A/B/O blood groups in 1909. That began a slow but inexorable revelation of the nature and extent of the problems of xenotransplantation, which quickly paved the way for successful blood transfusions and eventually for the many kind of surgical grafting and organ transplantation that are now routine aspects of modern surgical treatment. Renard’s fictional extrapolation of the possibility goes far beyond that, of course, in calculatedly nightmarish directions, but the fundamental hypothesis that technologies of “grafting” were bound to make progress in the 20th century was quite sound.

  Fiction, inevitably, ran far ahead of fact throughout that history, always taking considerable inspiration from the mythical models on which Renard draws so extensively. The Belgian Symbolist writer Georges Eekhoud produced the apocalyptic fantasy “Le Coeur de Tony Wandel” (tr. as “Tony Wandel’s Heart” in the Black Coat Press anthology News from the Moon and Other French Scientific Romances) in 1884, in which serial rejuvenation by heart transplantation is routinized in a manner not far removed from t
he scheme with which Klotz/Lerne attempts, unsuccessfully, to make his fortune in America. (Eekhoud’s millionaires are less scrupulous and less pusillanimous than Renard’s, although the particular beneficiaries of the eponymous organ suffer an unwonted and unwanted moral transformation as a result.) As with dinosaurs, most subsequent speculative stories employing “grafting” as a motif were content to with lurid accounts of the creation and fate of single monsters; very few, even among those written at a much later date and subject to the customary pressures of melodramatic inflation, had the same prolific range as Le Docteur Lerne, and even fewer attempted similar kinds of philosophical extrapolation.

  It is, of course, arguable, that the philosophical pretensions of Le Docteur Lerne are absurd, and can no more be taken seriously than the calculations supporting the survival of the iguanodon’s egg in “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont”—and nor is it obvious that Renard intended them to be. If one considers the novel in the broader context of his work, however, they do slot into a pattern that is by no means simply absurd, if considered in its entirety.

  The specific narrative move that is bound to seem to many readers to remove Le Docteur Lerne from the realms of scientific possibility into the manifestly absurd is the displacement of Klotz’s consciousness into the narrator’s automobile, without the need for any actual removal of brain-tissue. Renard’s arguments about the way in which contemporary machines were becoming more akin to living organisms, and the possible future consequences of that evolution, had, however, been put forward before, most extravagantly in the chapters of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) grouped together as “The Book of the Machines.” Erewhon is a cheerful satire, which makes abundant use of the calculatedly absurd, but Butler had cited similar arguments in articles related to the logic of Darwinian natural selection, which troubled him deeply. Nowadays, the notions that machines are evolving, that they might soon began evolving independently of human-directed design, and that one of the key directions of their evolution is the development of “artificial intelligence,” are not merely commonplace but almost accepted as truisms. Although Renard’s record as a short-term anticipator leaves something to be desired—his guess that automobiles’ pneumatic tires would be replaced within two years by steel-rimmed wheels like those of railway trains looks trifle silly 100 years later, although his suggestion that wood might soon be replaced in their make-up by metals and plastics fared better—his general anticipation of contemporary thought regarding the potential of machinery is not unperceptive.

  The weaker part of the argument is obviously the notion of mental transplantation without any corresponding material transplantation, although it might be noted that modern science fiction is by no means short of similar images of mental “software” being “uploaded” from the “wetware” of organic brains to the silicon hardware of computers by processes that are no less magical in character and no less Cartesian in their fundamental inspiration. Renard, as an educated Frenchman, was well aware of René Descartes’ representation of the relationship of the mind/soul and the brain in terms parodied by unsympathetic 20th century philosophers as “the ghost in the machine.” Such skeptics as Gilbert Ryle have attempted to make logical mincemeat of Descartes’ contention that the “mental substance” of the soul could somehow interact with the more evident substance of the body without itself being substantial in the same way, as if it were “pulling levers” in the brain from an imagined bucket-seat in the pineal gland. The compensating problem is, of course, that it is difficult to imagine the mind/body relationship by means of any other analogy—and whether Renard was able to believe in the Cartesian model or not, he was at least prepared to take it seriously for the purposes of argumentative speculation.

  If we view Le Docteur Lerne as a conte philosophique in the same spirit as the tales devised by Plato or Voltaire to illustrate and dramatize philosophical questions—many of which are explicitly cited by Renard in subsequent works of scientific marvel fiction, most prolifically in Un Homme chez les microbes—it seems perfectly reasonable for him to raise therein the question of whether the Cartesian model of the mind might permit such a mind to displace itself into another individual, if it could master the trick, and, if so, how far the range of potential transfers might extend. In the other afterwords in the series, Renard’s extrapolations of some further corollaries of Cartesianism will be briefly discussed, and their coherence with the particular corollary featured in Le Docteur Lerne given appropriate consideration.

  Although the unusually frank eroticism of Le Docteur Lerne was probably included primarily in order to develop Renard’s cynical personal view of the relationship between the human sexes (which is also further illustrated in his subsequent works), as well as indulging a straightforward desire to be shocking (which is not), it is worth noting that the Cartesian model of the mind/body problem also has corollaries in that respect too. Renard’s depiction of all three of his main characters as ultimately-helpless captives of their carnal desires, especially the startling exemplifications of that captivity in such explicit scenes as Emma’s intercourse with the “Minotaur” and Nicolas’s experience of being “possessed” by Klotz while engaged in similar intercourse, and such inexplicit references as the suggestions relating to Nicolas/Jupiter’s relationship with his harem of cows, reflect other definite possibilities arising from the relationship between body and soul as conceived by Descartes, as well as discovering new extremes of perversity. (The Symbolist Jean Lorrain, some of whose works Renard had probably read, spent a substantial part of his literary career dramatizing every sexual perversity he could imagine, without being able to get remotely close to the multiple kinds of bestiality described and suggested—with a surprising lack of reserve—in Le Docteur Lerne.)

  Renard never went anywhere near as far again in his consideration of sexual matters—and, indeed, never went much further than occasional innuendo—but the surprising thing is that he ever did so at all, given his conservative ideological views. There is, however, no doubt as to the philosophical propriety of his moves in that direction, however indecent they might have seemed to many of his readers—although Guillaume Apollinaire, who had to retain considerably more orthodoxy in his ventures in commercial pornography, and rarely went any further in his more pretentious literary work, probably envied that aspect of Le Docteur Lerne’s “subdivinity” as much as any other.

  Although Renard had not written down the manifesto for “scientific marvel fiction” that he subsequently produced for Le Spectateur when he wrote Le Docteur Lerne, there is no doubt that it was latent in his mind from the novel’s inception, and that it may be viewed as a illustration and embodiment of that manifesto, to at least as great an extent as Le Péril bleu. It offers an archetypal example of the determination, lauded in the essay, to extrapolate a hypothesis in various directions, with robust ambition. It is considerably constrained by its format, which ultimately requires that the status quo of the known world be left more-or-less undisturbed, in order that the reader can imagine the events of the story as something that might already have happened, and further constrained by the obligation that Renard felt—or was imposed upon him by his editor—to maintain “potential deniability” by representing the whole narrative as a possible or probable hoax perpetrated by a table-turning trickster. Such apologetic devices were still de rigueur in French fiction at the time—Charles Derennes similarly felt obliged to use one in his own near-contemporary scientific marvel novel—and one of the things that Renard doubtless envied H. G. Wells was the latter’s willingness and apparent freedom to do away with, or at last minimize, such craven improvisations. Given the limitations within which it operated, however, Le Docteur Lerne was an undoubted tour de force.

  About the essay itself there is little to add, although it ought to be observed that he did expand somewhat on the ideas introduced therein in an essay published in La Vie 16 (15 Juin 1914), “Le Merveilleux scientifique et La Force Mystérieuse de J. H. Rosny aîné,” which is a
n extended review of a short novel by Rosny that had probably taken some inspiration from Le Péril bleu. I hope to produce a five-volume series of Rosny’s scientific romances to complement this series, and intend to translate that essay there for use as an appendix to the volume featuring the translation of the novel, but there would be little point in doing so before an English version of the relevant text is made available. That essays reiterates most of the points made in the earlier one, but also pays more attention to the evolutionary model suggested in the prologue to Le Voyage immobile suivi d’autres histoires singulières, elaborating the analogies and historical links that exist between the traditional “mythological” or “magical” literature of the marvelous and the modern “logical” or “scientific” literature of the marvelous.

  We now know, of course, that the terminology of le roman merveilleux-scientifique did not catch on in France even to the extent that the terminology of “scientific romance” did in England or Hugo Gernsback’s first attempted label, “scientifiction,” did in America. Renard’s subsequent attempts to find a better replacement also failed—but it is not obvious that the ultimately-victorious term, “science fiction,” is any more satisfactory in English, let alone in French, to which it was imported by a process of “coca-colonization.” Like the horrid abbreviation “sci-fi,” it has always been a term liked better by the genre’s detractors, who use it as a term of abuse, than by the its champions, who often prefer (as I do) to use such terms as “speculative fiction” when referring to its more serious ambitions and potentials.