Vamireh
Page 27
“I consent to that,” said Amreh, and, at a signal from the priest, he was left alone. His joy was as vast as the lake and the mountains. He was possessed by a confused and marvelous adoration. He yearned for Nomaï like dry ground for rain.
He was as glad to have obeyed the woman as to have won the victory. He sensed confusedly that his murder was a nobler deed than the murders of the men of his time, and less cruel. An instinct of justice, of defense of the weak and thoughtful, was palpitating in his breast—and his love deepened by virtue of these obscure things.
He could not sleep, though—and he saw many stars glittering in the depths of the lake, and many others rising over the mountains. He thought about Nomaï’s blue stone and wondered whether the stars might not be comparable to it—for they plunged into the lake and did not lose their brightness there.
Dawn silvered the horizon. The constellations became dull in the red twilight; they fled the copper Sun. He heard birdsong, and the breeze changed direction over the waves.
Then Amreh cried to the Sun: “Eye of Fire, joy of the world, gaze of the god who dried the Earth and gave it the trees, leave me the heritage of Rochs and the possession of Nomaï—I will offer you amber, aurochs, horses and long-horned rams!”
Zamm, meanwhile, brought his daughter to Amreh’s house.
Around her neck and shoulders she wore a leather thong, the sign of servitude. In her right hand, she held a millstone. Arrowhead, iris and meadowsweet flowers sparkled in her hair. And Zamm led her through the midst of the Sons and Daughters of the Wolf, until he saw Amreh, when he cried: “Zamm, son of Wor, does not have two faces. He brings you, as he promised, the one who will bear your children. Remember your own promise.”
In his turn, Amreh said: “He who breaks his promise is, among men, like a poplar without roots. Here is the amber, the lances, the engraved stones that quell the invisible powers, and the horns of paint.” Then, indicating the crowd, he added: “May you all be witnesses!”
Zamm, full of joy, replied: “That is just.”
And the witnesses shouted: “We have seen!”
Taking a piece of jade from his breast, the father made Nomaï open her mouth. Then, with an accurate blow, he broke one of her canine teeth, as was the rule. Blood sprang forth; the young lacustrian woman offered her shining tooth to her master with her own hands.
“Thus have done the Sons of the Wolf for ten times ten generations,” said Zamm. Handing over Nomaï, he said: “I no longer have a daughter!”
Then, according to the custom, everyone went away.
Amreh stood before the young woman, full of anxiety. Into his amorous soul, pity slipped like a subtle flower from the moist ground. It had been hard for him when the blood flowed from Nomaï’s charming mouth—and he said something so sweet that no man, since the beginning of time, had ever said its like to a woman: “I would rather, Nomaï, that my blood were flowing instead of yours!”
She threw himself toward him, ardent with gratitude—and, leaning over, he steeped his mouth in the blood that was running over her red lips. It was a strange sensation, dissolving and delicious.
Their veins and their flesh seemed confused, and there came to them, obscure but profound, an intuition of the future caress of Love: a presentiment of the Kiss.
Afterword
Although Vamireh was not the first prehistoric romance produced in France, it had far more narrative energy than its lackluster documentary predecessors. Berthoud and Berthet had done little more than add a light fictional gloss to a description of life as they imagined it to have been lived in prehistoric times. Rosny did far more than that; he animated his picture, not merely with a lavish ration of violent conflict, but with a great deal of strangely-mixed emotion.
In their survey of Rosny’s prehistoric romances, Morel and Massé likened Vamireh to the images of primitive existence featured in two of the classics of French Romanticism: Jacques Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788), and René de Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801). Although the comparison is not entirely apt, it is a great deal more perceptive than René Doumic’s attempt to co-opt Vamireh into the Naturalistic straitjacket in which several contemporary critics attempted to confine Rosny (for their own convenience rather than his). Vamireh is, indeed, an unrepentantly Romantic work, and its Romanticism is quintessentially French, owing a great deal of its inspiration to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s friend and inspirer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although Rousseau never used or approved of the term “noble savage,” it nevertheless described a significant archetype in his work, and that was the archetype that Rosny set out to embody in the character of Vamireh, which owes far more to Rousseau’s speculations about the freedom and nobility of men untainted by civilization than it does to anything he can have found in the works of John Lubbock, Nicolas Joly or Gabriel de Mortillet.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s own study of savage innocence, Paul et Virginie, was initially published in the third edition of the fourth volume of Etudes de Nature, as an illustrative dramatization of its principles. It is worth noting that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre went on from that work to produce the far more lyrical Harmonies de la Nature (1815), a partly-speculative essay that is one of the most significant precursors of Rosny’s “La Légende sceptique.” Paul et Virginie is an elegy for the lost paradise of innocence—here symbolized by a tropical childhood that is bound to be spoiled by adulthood—and an indictment of the corruption of civilization. Atala, similarly formulated as a tale of doomed love, is more specifically concerned with the morality of Christianity—the story was integrated into the author’s Le Génie du Christianisme as an illustrative text, presumably in imitation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s use of Paul and Virginie—but displays a similar powerful nostalgia for the primeval in its celebration of the lush North American forest. Vamireh, written in a different era by a casual atheist, embraces a much less rose-tinted image of Nature than its predecessors, because Rosny’s view of Nature invariably protests stridently and poignantly against its intrinsic violence—as in the entirely superfluous passage in Eyrimah describing Tjandrinahr’s walk in the wilderness—and pays no heed to Christianity, at least overtly.
In Vamireh, the first and worst corruption of civilization is the development of religion, which Rosny sees as the parent of genocidal persecution and sadistic human sacrifice. Vamireh’s own nobility of sentiment is entirely spontaneous. In this sense, Rosny’s Romanticism is closer to Rousseau’s than Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s or Chateaubriand’s, and even more combative. The text of Vamireh is also more combative than its predecessors in tackling the question of propriety involved in its matching of lovers. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand are both sympathetic to the bonds of affection their characters form, but feel obliged in the end to break them by means of authorial murder. Not only does Rosny refuse that breakage, but he extends his sympathy to the union of Vamireh and Elem to the point of hypothesizing an “instinct of miscegenation” that brings them together. This invention is all the more remarkable given its origin in 19th century race theory, which often embraced a quasi-phobic horror of miscegenation. Rosny occasionally seems to subscribe to that horror in the identification of some of his minor characters as “half-breeds,” but such thoughtlessness is far outweighed by the assumption of the innate attraction of different races in Vamireh—echoed, albeit less assertively, in the two central relationships featured in Eyrimah. Xenophobia is reckoned as another of the corruptions of civilization and religion.
From the viewpoint of modern paleoanthropological chronology, the most glaring “fault” in Vamireh is its juxtaposition of its two contending fully human races with two other semi-human species: the “men of the trees” and the “worm-eaters.” It is, however, Vamireh’s instinctive fellow-feeling for these distant kin, in contrast with the Orientals’ murderous disgust, that marks him out as morally superior. His defense of the mammoth calf also displays his generosity, but that altruistic act is repaid in full, with ab
undant interest; his defense of the worm-eaters brings no reward, and holds out no possibility of any. His abrupt abduction of Elem might be held to count against him in that regard—and cannot be entirely excused on the grounds of her eventual consent—but Rosny clearly has an idea of innocence rather different from his predecessors, and it is worth noting that both Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand eventually felt it necessary to kill their heroines in order to protect them from the implications of passion. Rosny evidently developed doubts about his assumption that the nobler sentiments of primitive humans might include a version of romantic love similar in all essential respects to the modern mythology of romantic love, and took care to provide a counterweight in his parable of the bloody origins of the first kiss—and he eventually carried those doubts to their logical conclusion in Les Compagnons de l’univers (tr., in vol. 6 as “Companions of the Universe”)—but in respect of such sentiments, Vamireh is noticeably less compromising than Eyrimah, and makes fewer concessions to conventional literary expectation.
The presence of the men of the trees and the worm-eaters contributes greatly to making Vamireh a more interesting work than Eyrimah and “Nomaï”—both of which are exclusively concerned with human affairs—not only because they provide the hero with opportunities to demonstrate the particular pattern of his virtue, but also because they provide a fascinating illustration of Rosny’s evolutionist ideas. Similar alternative species were to crop up in many of his later works, not only in such prehistoric romances as La Guerre du feu but also in many of his lost land stories, most notably “Nymphaeum” (in vol. 2), “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure” (in vol. 3) and “Adventure in the Wild” (in vol. 5), but none of those later manifestations matched the peculiar nostalgic affection with which the two relevant species are viewed in Vamireh.
As I pointed out in one of the footnotes, Rosny evokes a concept that I translated as “organic potential” as a means of explaining the evolutionary predicament of the men of the trees and the worm-eaters, both of which species are scheduled for extinction (and are dimly aware of the fact, though quite reconciled to it). In essence, Rosny is suggesting that the two species in question have suffered a crucial loss of evolutionary impetus, which has condemned them to a slow but terminal degeneracy. He sees this as part of a curious process of “selection,” in which the impetus preserved by the fully human species destined for dominance and glory is, in some mysterious sense, counterbalanced by a loss of impetus in its cousins—almost as if there were some kind of “law of conservation of evolutionary energy” at work, in which one species’ gain is compensated by another’s loss.
This kind of notion is a straightforward, if slightly peculiar, extrapolation of Lamarckian evolutionary philosophy, which imputed an innate progressive impetus to all living organisms, at both the individual and specific level. In Lamarck’s view, all organisms and species were perpetually in a state of gradual and progressive evolution toward “higher” states of being—a thesis whose most glaring flaw, in the early 19th century, was not so much the assumption of the inheritance of acquired characteristics but its failure to account for the decline and extinction of so many past species. Not only did Rosny have far more fossil evidence to contemplate than Lamarck, but he lived in an era when ideas of decadence and degeneration were exceedingly fashionable, and much discussed, especially in their infection of literary philosophy. It is not surprising that Rosny should have thought that there was now abundant evidence in the data of biology and anthropology to support the notion that evolution was not always progressive, or that he should have imagined the phenomenon of evolutionary decline and eventual extinction in terms of the imagined loss or surrender of evolutionary impetus, whether conceived as “organic potential” or “vital spirit.”
Although the phrase itself does not often crop up, the notion of “organic potential” tacitly or explicitly underlies not only the bulk of Rosny’s prehistoric fiction, but also his various representations of relationships between humans and alien beings. In “The Death of the Earth” (in vol. 1), for example, the Last Men have lost all their organic potential along with the water that sustains Earthly life as we know it, and have become as resigned to their fate as the worm-eaters of Vamireh, while the inorganic “life-forms” fated to replace them, the ferromagnetals, still have a progressive impetus, whose ultimate effects are not yet calculable. The Martian Tripeds of “The Navigators of Space” (in vol. 1) are in a similar situation relative to the Zoomorphs and Ethereals, whose future is similarly uncertain in scope but nevertheless assured. Indeed, one could probably make a case for the covert presence of a notion of organic potential in his naturalistic accounts of contemporary human manners and mores, even if it is only manifest there by virtue of his incessant use of animal analogies rather than by virtue of any explicit philosophical commitment.
A further example of this way of thinking is provided in Vamireh in its peculiar depiction of dogs, which are seen as social creatures living in “villages” with a capacity for hierarchical organization; although it is not explicitly stated, the implication is that they might have gone on to develop intelligence had they not surrendered their organic potential by permitting their domestication by humans. Rosny may not have meant this entirely seriously; although he usually maintained a tone of deadly earnest in his writings they are not without wit and a certain sly humor—as “Nomaï” clearly illustrates. Although there is far less trace of satire in Rosny’s prehistoric fantasies than many other examples of the subgenre, there is a certain malice in his unemphasized revelation that the “worms” the “worm-eaters” eat are, in fact, mollusks, and that escargots [snails] are specifically mentioned at one point as an element of the diet that has awakened such contempt in their persecutors.
The fact that Rosny followed Vamireh so rapidly with Eyrimah probably resulted from his enthusiasm to take advantage of the publicity generated by Dubois’ discovery of “Java Man,” and it is not surprising that it seems to have been composed in a hurry; it provides one of the most glaring examples of the author’s tendency to wander from his initial prospectus, eventually shoving the love story of Eyrimah and Rob-In-Kelg to the sidelines in favor of the rather different love story of Tholrog and Eï-Mor. In the process, the villain Ver-Skag is entirely forgotten—a fate shared by numerous characters in Rosny’s work, who are introduced as if they will have an interesting role to play but vanish into the wings, never to return to the stage. This gradual but excessive drift in the narrative does no favors to the novel’s plot, but does serve to illustrate the strength of an undertow continually effective in Rosny’s creative flow, which drew him inexorably away from the partly-civilized lake-dwellers toward the nobly barbaric mountain men, so that the celebration of their innocent world-view eventually displaced the initial concern with lacustrian politics.
In spite of the fact that his early reputation was partly founded on a study of nihilists, anarchists and revolutionary socialists, Rosny was never much interested in politics, and whenever he embarked upon a story in which imagination was to guide him he was magnetically drawn, whether he initially intended it or not, to hypothetical lands in which politics were drastically simplified. The fact that the elementary battle between Nature and Culture was fated to be settled in favor of the latter was, to him, bittersweet knowledge, because it seemed obvious to Rosny that if only Nature had done a better job of organizing herself, then Culture would never have been forced to develop the excessive complications of advanced civilization, and most or all of its horrid corruptions might have been avoided.
Given its actual context, Rosny was well aware of the fact that organic potential had to imply strength and violence—that the noble savage’s savagery was as essential as his nobility—and he could not entirely regret that fact, because he was well aware of his own authorial delight in detailing battles of every sort. He knew that the intimate association between sex and cruel violence that he found everywhere in Nature—and never tired of point
ing out in his fiction—provided a context for human life, as for any other, no matter how our myths might strive to obscure the configuration of the linkage, and the fact that the current of his imaginative works drew him repeatedly and incessantly to the theme of abduction is surely evidence of the extent to which he found that linkage deeply problematic.
Notes
1 Le Félin géant (The Giant Cat a.k.a. Quest of the Dawn Man) and Helgvor du fleuve bleu (Helgvor of the Blue River) will be reprinted in their original English translations in a seventh volume.
2 Morel, Jean, with Pierre Massé. “J.-H. Rosny et préhistoire.” Mercure de France November 15, 1923. pp. 5-25.
3 19th century scientists attempting to classify different human types often made use of the “cephalic index,” a number derived by dividing the maximum breadth of the cranium by its maximum length and multiplying by 100. A cephalic index below 80 was generally reckoned to signify “dolichocephaly,” and one above 80 “brachycephaly,” although there were variant schemes with additional subcategories.
4 Felis spelaea was a fossil cat first identified by Georg Goldfuss in 1810. It was often called the “saber-toothed tiger” or the “cave lion” before paleontologists settled on “saber-toothed cat.” It seems reasonable to maintain Rosny’s slightly awkward but entirely typical preference for the Latin term here, although I have occasionally substituted common names for other Linnean terms in the interests of reader-friendliness (i.e. “cowries” for Cyprea lucida and “periwinkles” for Littorina) when the references are merely casual.
5 Rosny inserts a footnote: “That is to say, a tree chosen by the nomads in which to suspend the skeletons of their dead.”
6 Rosny inserts a footnote: “The second major period of the Stone Age, also called the Age of Polished Stone.”