Homo-Deus

by Félicien Champsaur

  When Homo-Deus finally does do something that might be construed as a virtuous action, in belatedly agreeing to save his beloved Jeanne from oblivion—after initially turning down her desperate plea—even that action seems a trifle peculiar, given that neither he nor anyone else has given a moment’s thought to the glaringly obvious alternative. In a novel not short of amazing narrative moves, surely the most amazing one of all is the fact that when the inventor of a technology of resurrection is under threat of death, no one—including her—mentions the possibility of employing that technique, and quite simply bringing her back to life. Perhaps it could not be done, given that all the scientists in the plot seems to be far too paranoid to have made any reliable record of their work in order that others might duplicate it, and it would have been easy enough for the characters or narrative voice to discount the possibility as soon as it was brought up, but not even bringing it up is surely a massive dereliction of imagination on the part of the characters and the author alike.

  In fact, the author does more than simply forget his/Jeanne’s invention; he actually goes to the trouble of eliminating its consequences from the story in the single most inexplicable and morally atrocious action in the entire lot, when Marc Vanel—with no conceivable human motive or justification, and every possible reason for not doing it—murders the man that his beloved has worked so tirelessly, ingeniously and dangerously to resurrect. Why on Earth does he do that? No explanation is given at the time, and only one vague reference is subsequently made to an angry impulse, but that absence from the scheme of the story is surely a remarkable failure on the part of the creative hand that is, or ought to be, guiding and shaping the scheme in question. The simplest explanation is, once again, the probability that Homo-Deus is satanic, given to committing evil deeds for evil’s sake, but neither he nor the narrative voice ever says that explicitly. Still, actions speak louder than words, especially when the words are content to remain unwritten.

  Another way to look at that particularly bizarre plot-twist, of course, is to consider it as a natural consequence of the author’s inability to cope with the challenge outlined in the introduction, of extrapolating the logic of his innovations. Having worked so very hard to describe the scientific miracle of a resurrection, it seems that the author simply did not know how to continue that plot strand. He had no idea what to do next with his resurrected character, or with the unsentimental genius who had proven her theory by means of the experiment, so he took the coward’s way out: he simply killed the resurrected man and forced the hapless heroine to keep the secret of what she had discovered, effectively rendering it useless even to combat her own death.

  One could argue that the failure of imagination in question qualifies as a massive moral and intellectual failure on the author’s part, but it is one that cannot be held excessively against Félicien Champsaur, because it is a kind of failure endemic to the entire genre of speculative fiction as it has evolved under the double pressure of overdemanding extrapolative logic and the pattern of editorial demand. The latter has always strongly favored “normalizing” endings in which speculative innovations are destroyed or neutralized, in order that the typical conclusion of works of fiction can effectively and essentially restore the status quo. The pattern of imaginative, moral and intellectual failure is, therefore, far more widespread than the whimsy of one particular author, and there is a sense in which Champsaur might be complimented rather than reproved for making it so starkly obvious, thus highlighting a suppurating sore that most writers cover up cosmetically by all manner of authorial chicanery.

  In any case, “The Invisible Satyr” does not have a normalizing ending, in that it ends with a peculiar kind of apotheosis, in the fusion of the souls of the two leading characters, who then set off on a messianic quest to save the world, even though theirs is not so much a marriage of heaven and hell as a marriage devoid of any detectable heavenly element at all. Although the mundane component of “Kill the Old, Enjoy!” is far more conventionally normalizing, even that novel, thanks to the involvement of Homo-Deus, concludes with a deliberate and transformative expansion of perspective, as well as leaving a clutch of plot-threads ominously dangling. It is not obvious that Aline, Ulette and Antoine have really achieved a “happy ending” in merely having escaped being raped and/or murdered while being left contemptuously off-stage, but it is obviously better than the alternative.

  As for the mystery explicitly left unsolved in the second novel, of what happened to Sans-Liquette, we can, alas, be certain, that whatever did become of her, she, too, failed in her manifest moral duty. We must, of course, take it for granted that she found out that her little sister was in Marc Vanel’s custody, and that he was keeping her in a coma—presumably for the benefit of the censorious extraterrestrial who was longing to be free of the carnal habitation she considered too disgusting for words. Given that, even if Homo-Deus could not simply have shifted the trapped soul himself, he definitely knew a man who could (Jean Fortin), and his failure to tackle that problem—a failure that, while liberating the extraterrestrial, ensured poor Berthe’s death—should surely have prompted Sans-Liquette to play the avenging angel and administrator of justice, and borrow a revolver and blow the satanic bastard’s brains out.

  Obviously, she didn’t—and she, not being in the least satanic, in spite of her loose morals, has no excuse at all.

  Notes

  1 Included in the Black Coat Press edition of The Age of Lead, ISBN 978-1-935558-42-2.

  2 Included in the Black Coat Press edition of The Doctored Man, ISBN 978-1-935558-18-7.

  3 The introduction to the Black Coat Press edition of The Human Arrow (ISBN 978-1-61227-045-6) contains a synoptic overview of Champsaur’s career and literary production, which there is no need to repeat here. The Black Coat Press edition of Ouha is ISBN 978-1-61227-115-6.

  4 Available in a Black Coat Press edition as Sâr Dubnotal vs Jack the Ripper, ISBN 978-1-934543-94-8.

  5 ISBN 978-1-932983-98-2. Other Black Coat Press books featuring the Nyctalope include The Nyctalope on Mars, Enter the Nyctalope, The Nyctalope Steps In and Night of the Nyctalope.

  6 Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-156-9.

  7 The Rue des Sablons no longer connects with the Avenue Henri-Martin because the name of a section of the latter thoroughfare was changed in 1941 to the Avenue George-Mandel, and it is in that section of the avenue that this scene is set.

  8 The neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) and Jules Bernard Luys (1828-1927).

  9 This notion of the cosmic liberation of the soul was popularized by Camille Flammarion in Lumen and several other works of speculative fiction and speculative non-fiction, although the notion had earlier been broached by Louis-Sébastien Mercier in “Nouvelles de la lune” (1768; tr. as “News from the Moon”)

  10 The verb renaniser [to Renanise] was derived from the name of philosopher Ernest Renan (1823-1892), most famous for his account of La Vie de Jésus (1863; tr. as The Life of Jesus), which dismissed all the supernatural and miraculous elements as embellishments; the term was therefore used to describe similar arguments reducing the seemingly-supernatural to the natural.

  11 The term “Nid Rouge” (Red Nest) had been used in newspapers before and during the Great War to refer to various locations searched by the police in search of seditious materials, all of them the residences of reputed anarchists.

  12 This passage is strongly reminiscent of an earlier classic of French literature which makes use of invisibility as a literary device: Les Diable boîteux (1707; tr. as The Devil upon Two Sticks) by Alain René Lesage, in which the amiable limping demon Asmodée [Asmodeus] takes the protagonist on a nocturnal trip to reveal to him the hidden vices of a great city. That, rather than any of the recent stories about technologies of invisibility, might well have been the text that Champsaur had central in his mind while planning his own variation on the theme, and the phonetic similarity of the Latin “Homo-Deus” and “Asmodeus” is probably not co
incidental.

  13 There is an untranslatable pun in this sentence relating cornues [retorts] to cornes [(cuckold’s) horns].

  14 Natürlichte Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868; tr. as The History of Creation) was a popularization of the theory of evolution by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), which became a controversial best seller in France as well as Germany. French speculative fiction refers more frequently to Haeckel than to Charles Darwin, Darwinian theory being known to most of its writers (in a modified version) via Haeckel’s popularization.

  15 Michel Georges-Michel (c1886-1985) eventually became more famous as a painter than a journalist and novelist, but his fame was still nascent in 1924. His novels of Parisian social life—most famously Les Montparnos (1924)—have much in common with Champsaur’s, who might have thought him an imitator; indeed, Champsaur’s next novel, translated along with this one, features his own appreciation of “the Montparnos,” which surely has Georges-Michel’s in mind.

  16 A denier à Dieu [literally, God’s penny, derived from the Latin Denarius Dei] is a French legal formality, whereby someone renting a property gives the other party to the contract a token sum as evidence of a provisional agreement, which either party can still annul within twenty-four hours.

  17 i.e., reminiscent of a “Tanagra figurine”: an ancient Greek terracotta statuette, simulacra of which were manufactured in Paris as contemporary objects d’art.

  18 The formulation conventionally used in French letters to refer to Helen of Troy.

  19 The notorious courtier and soldier Antoine Nompar de Caumont, Duc de Lauzun (1633-1723).

  20 Claude Barsac is the protagonist of a trilogy of novels by Champsaur first published in 1895-6 under the collective title Le Mandarin and subsequently reprinted in an omnibus as L’Arriviste, which describe the rise to fame and fortune of a corrupt politician. He crops up in several of Champsaur’s later novels in the same archetypal role, usually in the more distant background than in the present instance.

  21 Louis Barthou (1862-1934) was a real politician, who served a brief term as President of the Council in 1913 before acquiring a reputation as a hero during the Great War and being elected to the Académie Française. He was still active in politics in 1924 and was surely annoyed by the snide remarks included in the present novel (this one is not the last or the worst), if he was aware of them, but must have been battle-hardened by the relentless maulings of the opposition press.

  22 Étienne-Marie Falconet (1716-1791), the foremost of the French rococo sculptors.

  23 Lucien Jaquelux was the illustrator of several of Champsaur’s books, although he became far more successful in the 1930s and 1940s as a designer of stage and cinema sets.

  24 The psychologist Georges Dumas (1866-1946), the physiologist Charles Richet (1850-1935) and the physician Charles Féré (1852-1907) all carried forward Charcot’s work on hypnosis, the latter two extrapolating it into the field of psychic research.

  25 The French maquereau [mackerel] is a slang term for a pimp.

  26 The dramatist Maurice Donnay (1859-1945) had begun his acquaintance with Parisian literary life as a habitué of the Chat Noir, in the days when Champsaur used to hang out there.

  27 The Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925) was only in America briefly during his years of exile, but spent some time in San Francisco in 1910, where he published a newspaper; it is presumably during that interval that Homo-Deus supposedly encountered him.

  28 A joke, playing with the name of one of the leading Parisian dailies, Le Matin [The Morning]. Malin, of course, is the equivalent of the English “malign.”

  29 The Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein (1885-1960) appeared in Léo Staats’ ballet set to the music of Vincent d’Indy’s Istar at the Paris Opéra in 1924, where Champsaur presumably saw her while writing the present text.

  30 The 1835 play Angelo, tyran de Padoue [Angelo, Tyant of Padua], the basis of three operas written prior to 1924 and a fourth afterwards, plus a movie.

  31 The Greek arms dealer Basil Zaharoff (1849-1936), notorious for making money from various conflicts by selling weapons to both sides, and reinvesting his money in banking and oil, made a vast fortune in the Great War. He subsequently took over the company that owned the casino in Monte Carlo, the chief source of income of the principality of Monaco, where he took up residence. Champsaur spent a lot of time on the Riviera and undoubtedly knew Zaharoff by sight as well as reputation, which doubtless helped Zaharoff become a particular target of his loathing.

  32 The time-scheme of the novel has gone seriously awry here; both this observation and Simone d’Armez’ subsequent remarks imply that this scene is taking place only days after the afternoon tea at which Vanel caused Madame Vauclin to see the inscription informing her that Julien de Vandeuvre was not dead, whereas, in terms of the Invisible’s eccentric pursuit of the criminals, more than nine months have gone by; the author has literally lost the plot, presumably because its various strands were composed separately—it seems likely that the point of origin of the story was the prologue featuring Simone d’Armez, and that the soirée described in Book Two chapter V was the original opening, with the subplot concerning the Fortins being filled in subsequently, and never really marrying up, even before the spur-of-the moment decision to kill off Julien for a second time and then follow the subsequent fate of the body threw the whole scheme into utter chaos. By this point, of course, the author/dictator’s only priority is to get the whole exercise wound up as rapidly as possible, although he presumably still had two steamy scenes of invisible satyriasis to slot into the sprint finish.

  33 “Eugen Sandow” (Friedrich Müller, 1867-1925) was a German body-builder who became a showman, founded the magazine Physical Culture and marketed exercise equipment, including the apparatus indicated here, which consisted of a system of rubber straps intended to be stretched by the arms and legs. His career was the model for that of the American bodybuilder who called himself Charles Atlas.

  34 Again the time-scheme is awry; it was March only yesterday—but this scene was obviously not composed, in the first place, immediately after the preceding ones.

  35 This scene appears to be based on the famous Michel Fokine ballet, based on music by Hector Berlioz, La Spectre de la rose, first performed in Monte Carlo in 1911 and first staged in Paris in 1917, with Nijinsky in the leading role.

  36 The author appears to have forgotten that it was Albert Baruyer, not Georges, who was an advocate.

  37 The Quai de Javel is now known as the Quai André-Citroën, after the car manufacturer whose factory actually stood on the site attributed to the fictitious Aubert-Coutan factory in the present novel.

  38 Paul Souday (1869-1929) was a noted literary critic; he fulfilled that function at Le Temps from 1912 until his death.

  39 I have left Sangsue [leech] untranslated in order to conserve the scabrous pun.

  40 Victor Libion founded the Café de la Rotonde in 1911. He often accepted paintings as pledges by impoverished artists unable to pay their bill and hung them on the walls; he could, indeed, have made a fortune if he had known which ones to keep; Picasso and Modigliani were among his regulars.

  41 Aïcha Goblet was painted by several of the artists who frequented the Rotonde, including Modigliani and Tsuguharu Foujita. She appears as a character in André Salmon’s novel La Negresse du Sacré Coeur (1920), and published her memoirs in the magazine Mon Paris. She danced on stage, sometimes naked, but also acted in serious dramas and did retain an impeccable reputation.

  42 The psychiatric hospital de Sainte-Anne, established by Napoléon III, had established a free Centre de Prophylaxie Mentale in 1922.

  43 The French cône [cone] is also the term used to refer to the mouth of a volcano.

  44 The “word of Cambronne,” falsely attributed to the general of that name when he was surrounded at Waterloo and invited to surrender, was “Merde,” which could be construed, depending on the way it was said, as the equivalent of either “Oh, s
hit!” or “Fuck off!” Victor Hugo started the literary fashion for using “the word of Cambronne” as a euphemism for any unprintable expletive.

  45 The cited three-act tragedy by Paul Raynal (1885-1971) had its première at the Comédie Française on 1 February 1924, so this reference is slightly anachronistic

  46 The painter Fabio Canti appears as a minor character in several of Champsaur’s novels, rarely playing as significant a part as he does in this one. It is possible that the “Fabio Danti” mentioned once in the previous novel was intended to be him, but suffered a misprint.

  47 Eau de Javel is a kind of bleach.

  48 Anatole France had died in October 1924, shortly before the present text was published, so Champsaur was running no risk of being sued for libel in offering this extremely uncharitable and unwarranted assassination of his character.

  49 Le peril bleu [the blue peril] does not refer, in this instance, to the classic Maurice Renard novel but to a well-known cartoon from 1910 signed T. Bianco, entitled “Le Péril Bleu: Le Papier Timbré,” in which the phrase refers to the deadly effects of official paperwork in much the same way as the Anglo-American phrase “red tape.” It can still be purchased as a poster.

  50 The fact that “Thomas” is a Parisian argot term for a chamber-pot or lavatory, much like the American “John,” crops up repeatedly in references to this character, sometime obliquely.