The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 3: The Triumph of the Nyctalope

by Jean de La Hire

  In this respect, too, the Nyctalope is bound to be found wanting by modern readers. The particular brand of sanity and clarity he aspires to represent and embody is obsolete now, irreparably tarnished by its nasty racism, its silly sexism and its confusedly hypocritical attitude to violence. While the racism and sexism might conceivably be excused as typical products of their era, largely taken for granted by all popular novelists of the day, Saint-Clair’s prevarications in regard to the legitimacy of murder and torture are more difficult to forgive, because of the blatant inconsistency of his conduct–whose inadequacy even he and his creator occasionally notice and shamefacedly admit. This moral confusion becomes increasingly obvious as the novel’s plot unfolds, exemplified by the uncomfortable manner in which the hero gets through his first confrontation with Lucifer’s extended family, when he only escapes being crushed with casual and contemptuous ease by virtue of the implausible and morally dubious intervention of another character–whose subsequent treatment by author and hero alike might easily be reckoned abominable, and whose belated recognition in the novel’s final lines might be seen as adding unctuous insult to casual injury.

  Although it certainly qualifies as a narrative flaw, the moral confusion of the novel is one of its most interesting aspects from a purely historical viewpoint. Mature exercises in superhero fiction, precisely because of their relative sophistication, handle such issues much more dexterously–which is to say that they dodge them with far greater skill and grace. La Hire, pioneering the territory, did not know enough in advance to be able to dodge them, and ran right into them. Had he been able to plan his work more elaborately, he would probably have done much better, but the very essence of daily serial writing is that it cannot be planned in advance. The writer of such fiction is obliged to make up his story as he goes, not only because he does not know at the beginning how long it might be required to last, but because he does not know what running modifications he might be forced to make to its plot in response to reader response. He must start, and remain, infinitely adaptable–despite the fact that, once he has published an episode, he is bound by its limitations forever, unable to cancel out errors or steps that turn out to have been taken in the wrong direction, let alone readjust his groundwork to support new ideas and reactive editorial instructions.

  All serial fiction tends to be messy, but the more successful such fiction is in the course of serialization, the messier it is bound to become–and Lucifer, whose serial version eventually extended to some 200,000 words, became very messy indeed. One of the effects of that messiness, however, was to strip bare the inherent problems of the nascent genre to which the serial belonged, and Lucifer exposes the problematics of superhero fiction in no uncertain terms. Anyone who aspires to create a paragon of moral clarity, a writer of newspaper serials or comic books no less than an academic philosopher or the founder of religion–has either to tackle essentially contentious issues head on, matching seemingly-immovable obstacles with hopefully-irresistible forces, or fudge those issues as best he can. La Hire would undoubtedly have fudged them if he could, but he was unable to lay the groundwork properly, and had to do things the hard way. In consequence, his scheme fell apart–but that is not at all surprising. How much better do the writers of modern television soaps do, with a century of accumulated experience to draw on?

  La Hire went on to pen many more accounts of the Nyctalope’s crime-fighting exploits, but I shall leave the description of those later works to Jean-Marc Lofficier’s account of the character’s career in the Afterword. La Hire interspersed the Nyctalope’s adventures with other items of popular fiction, including scouting adventures and other science fiction thrillers. He attempted to continue working through World War II just as he had worked through World War I, but the cost proved much higher. In January 1941, he was given joint editorial control of J. Ferenczi et fils, the publishing company that had issued paperback editions of many of his serial novels, and in April of that year. the company was renamed Editions du Livre Moderne, in which guise it was “Aryanized” by the occupying Germans. La Hire was fired in December, but the association returned to haunt him in September 1944, when Paris was back in French hands.

  La Hire and his co-editor, André Bertrand, were among a number of publishers blacklisted by the Syndicat des Editeurs for collaboration with the Nazis. He was arrested in May 1945 and tried in December; the judgment confirmed his permanent exclusion from the world of French publishing. He escaped from custody in February 1946 while being transferred to a hospital, but was condemned in absentia in 1948 to ten years’ imprisonment and the loss of his citizenship rights. He never returned to serve the sentence but was still in disgrace when he died on September 6, 1956. He was, however, survived by the Nyctalope, the penning of whose adventures were taken over by his son-in-law, according to a pattern that was to become normal in respect of successful superheroes.

  The central presence within it of a proto-superhero is not the only feature of Lucifer that recommends it for attention as a historical artifact. It is very much a product of its time in several ways, of which two might be singled out for special attention: its occultism and its futurism.

  La Hire’s use of occultism may seem a trifle belated, given that the “occult revival” of the 19th century, assisted and guided by such movements as Spiritualism and Theosophy, had been as much a product of the fin-de-siècle as literary Decadence, and had suffered a similar fade from fashionability after 1900, although one element that proved more robust than most was hypnotism. The literary mythology of hypnotism had been given a considerable boost by George du Maurier’s account of Svengali in Trilby (1894) and the notion had been readily observed into such popular thrillers as George Griffith’s A Mayfair Magician: A Romance of Criminal Science (1905). The paperback edition of the latter novel (issued under the title The Man with Magnetic Eyes) carried an advertisement inside its front cover offering to sell readers a “simple method that anyone can use to develop the powers of personal magnetism, memory, concentration [and] will-power... through the wonder-science of suggestion”.

  Although many of the references La Hire drops into his plot are to such 19th-century figures as Allan Kardec and Eusapia Palladino, it is significant that that they are juxtaposed and interwoven with another set of references, to Pierre and Marie Curie and other discoverers of the scientific mysteries of radioactivity. The combination is not as incongruous as it may seem nowadays, and was certainly not untimely. One of the less obvious of the Great War’s many effects was to bring about a temporary renaissance of certain aspects of the occult revival. An entire generation of young men had been slaughtered on the battlefields of northern France and Belgium, leaving behind a generation of grieving mothers and fathers, very many of whom clutched at the straws of solace offered by Spiritualism.

  The most prominent British victim of the renewed craze was Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the archetypal master of criminal detection, Sherlock Holmes, and the bombastic scientist Professor Challenger. Holmes was spared explicit degradation, but Challenger was not, being forced to capitulate with the forces of unreason in The Land of Mist (1926); Doyle went on to prove that relentless logic applied to dodgy premises can produce spectacularly ludicrous results when he became a vociferous champion of the Cottingley fairies. In this intellectual climate, La Hire’s revivification of “occult science” and his attempts to support that revival by simultaneous reference to hypnotism and radioactivity was likely to strike a sympathetic chord with many of his readers.

  Although scientists had been much more successful in debunking Spiritualist delusions once the early gullibility of William Crookes and Oliver Lodge had been replaced by a sterner skepticism, the general intellectual thrust of occult science had always been to absorb rather than repel. The cardinal philosophical difference between occultism and natural science is that the former is expansively holistic, while the latter is painstakingly reductionist in its method. Occultists seek mysterious echoes and murky equivale
nces of meaning everywhere, and are obliged by their most fundamental assumptions to interpret all new scientific discoveries as resurrections or extrapolations of ancient esoteric wisdom. Such discoveries as electromagnetic waves–especially radio waves and X-rays–inevitably seemed glorious to occultists, not because of their technological potential but because they seemed so utterly and intrinsically magical, echoing powers of telepathy and clairvoyance attributed to ancient magicians. Of all such discoveries, none seemed more significant or so beautifully symbolic as the discovery of radium, which was immensely difficult to purify but, once isolated within a test-tube, glowed in the dark!

  It is entirely apposite–and, indeed, was probably inevitable–that the satanic archvillain opposed by a superheroic nyctalope in 1921 should be an hypnotically-talented occultist, and that his apparatus of putative world domination should be fuelled by radium; the combination is an entirely natural process of syncresis. A few years later, of course, no such association would have been possible, and the precautions taken by Professor Lourmel and the Nyctalope to insulate themselves from the magical power and mystical significance of radium would have been unthinkable. Lucifer was published within a narrow window of opportunity, which was gradually curtained as post-War enthusiasm for Spiritualistic solace foundered on the rock of practicality, and shuttered with a brutal slam when it was realized that the workers charged with exploiting the luminosity of radium in painting the hands of watches were dying in droves of oral cancers because they licked their paintbrushes to give them finer points. In 1921, no one knew how slyly lethal radiation would prove to be, or how profoundly the symbolism of the radium glow would have to be altered.

  La Hire’s futurism was equally timely. Although modern terminology would categorize Lucifer as science fiction, and the terminology of its own day would probably have identified it as Vernian romance, it might perhaps be most aptly described as a futurist fantasy. It is certainly not a futuristic fantasy, because it is very insistently set in the present day, but it is very obviously preoccupied with themes that were central to the futurist manifesto issued by Filippo Marinetti, which had been published in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro in February 1909, where La Hire presumably read it. The three central themes of Marinetti’s futurist–speed, technology and violence, with the primary emphasis on speed–are all conspicuously fetishized in Lucifer

  The story told in Lucifer is particularly intoxicated with calculations of speed, the narrative being constantly preoccupied with the velocities attainable by new cars, aircraft and express trains. It is similarly obsessed with technological applications of electricity to lighting, means of communication and the provision of motive force; all of La Hire’s interior descriptions are careful to include information regarding the positioning of the electric lights, and most of his interior settings are equipped with neat arrays of electric switches. Although such inclusions became a favorite means by which La Hire routinely padded his prose, there is no doubt that he was trading on a genuine fascination that he expected his contemporary readers to appreciate and share, because it reflected and magnified the ongoing transformation of their own domestic and industrial environments. Once the inhibiting effects of the Great War had been removed, there was a dramatic increase in the perceived pace of social life as a cataract of technological innovations previously reserved for military use burst into the commercial and domestic arenas; 1921 was the year in which this process generated its greatest excitement, putting the roar into the “roaring twenties.”

  The use of violence in Lucifer seems far less striking to the modern eye than its idiosyncratic uses of speed of technology, but that is because standards have shifted so dramatically in the interim. In this respect, more than any other, melodramatic inflation has raised the stakes across the board within the whole spectrum of action/adventure/thriller fiction, and anything written in 1921 now seem pathetically tame in the scope and detail of its violence. What Lucifer and Saint-Clair actually do to their various victims, on stage and off, was to be far outshone when American pulp fiction and Hollywood movies initiated an accelerating process of positive feedback in the 1930s, whose products were exported to the rest of the world in the wake of World War II. Within its own tentative context, though, the story told in Lucifer does aim to fetishize both the threats and the actual assaults trailed in the first few chapters and periodically reiterated thereafter.

  Differences between the use of parallel terms in the French and English languages caused some difficulty in the translation of Lucifer, the most obvious being the fact that “nyctalope” has almost opposite meanings in the two languages. The Latin term nyctalopia is quite unambiguous in meaning “night-blindness”—i.e., an inability to see in the dark–but English dictionaries conscientiously note that the term is sometimes mistakenly used in English to signify the complementary phenomenon of “day-blindness,” for which the correct term is hemeralopia. In French, this confusion had proceeded to such an extreme by 1921 that nyctalopia was not only mistakenly used to refer to day-blindness but to the ability, rather than the inability, to see in the dark–the 1924 edition of the Petit Larousse makes no reference to the etymological confusion, simply defining nyctalopie as “Maladie des yeux, dans laquelle la vision, très faible pendant la jour, augmente notablement avec le déclin de la lumière.” [A disorder of the eyes, in which vision that is very weak in daylight is considerably increased with the decline of light intensity.]

  Even in French, therefore, the Nyctalope’s ability is not exactly in accordance with the dictionary, but it does tend in the same direction. In English, calling someone a Nyctalope would imply the opposite–someone whose night-vision is reduced rather than enhanced. I have, however, retained the name on the grounds that it is sufficiently esoteric in its implications not to cause readers any significant difficulty.

  Difficulties of a not-dissimilar sort also arise in association with the powers attributed to Lucifer. These are subject to subtle modification in the course of the story, but they are introduced in the early chapters by the description of their effects on three victims. In each case, the term La Hire initially uses to the condition of the afflicted is envoûtée–a word that has no direct English equivalent.

  It is unclear exactly how the significance of envoûtée in French differs from that of ensorcellée, which is transposable into “ensorcelled,” “spellbound” or “bewitched.” Enchantée, whose English transposition, “enchanted,”, is very similar in its English implication to “bewitched,” is used rather differently in French, but bilingual dictionaries usually feel free to offer “enchanted” as a makeshift English equivalent of envoûtée–a substitution that has to be reckoned problematic in the particular context of Lucifer, where La Hire seems to be using envoûtée because it is more easily investable with pseudoscientific implications than ensorcellée–although he soon broadens out his own terminology to take in such terms as maléfice, which refers to malevolent spells cast by witches.

  Had La Hire so wished, he could have employed the ready-made pseudoscientific jargon of Mesmerism or hypnotism, but he evidently made a deliberate decision not to do so in the opening of his story, where he attempts, via Louis Mattol, to draw a sharp contrast between Lucifer’s envoûtement and conventional hypnotic phenomena. That distinction is significantly eroded in the course of the plot, but it would be wrong nevertheless for a translation to employ that kind of terminology from the outset. I, therefore, decided to translate envoûtée as “under a spell” to begin with, broadening my terminology as La Hire broadens his to take in such alternative terms as “bewitchment,” and sometimes referring to Lucifer as an “sorcerer” as well as a “spell-caster.” This seems to me to be as close as the English language can get to the intended implications of La Hire’s terminology, although it is, admittedly, slightly unsatisfactory.

  The text posed few other problems in translation, but I have made several slight modifications to it. Although the repetition of information–including the ver
batim reproduction of entire paragraphs–is a deliberate device employed by La Hire to pad out episodes whenever his inspiration runs thin, it occasionally becomes unbearably tedious, and I have cut about a number of substantial passages in which the unnecessary repetition of information seemed inordinately excessive and numerous individual sentences or subclauses. Although it seemed inappropriate to conceal the author’s flagrant racism by relentless censorship, I have modified its expression in several instances by cutting terms that had no function other than gratuitous insult. I have also corrected a few of the author’s trivial “continuity errors,” although I have let some of them stand (usually calling attention to them in footnotes) in order to retain the flavor of the original.

  The version of the text that I translated is that of the first paperback book edition, published by Ferenczi in 1922, which was divided into two volumes titled Lucifer and Nyctalope contre Lucifer. The sections of the text are numbered separately in the two paperback volumes, but I have amended the numbering to restore a single sequence.

  Brian Stableford

  CONTINUED FROM:

  PART ONE: ENTER LUCIFER!

  PART TWO: DRAMA IN THE BERMUDAS

  Part Seven: The Final Flourish Crowns the Work

  I. Active Organization