The Children of the Crab

by André Lichtenberger

  The Children of the Crab

  by

  André Lichtenberger

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Raramémé, histoire d’ailleurs by André Lichtenberger, here translated as The Children of the Crab, was first published by in Paris by J. Ferenczi in 1921. It was published shortly after Ferenczi had issued a new edition of Lichtenberger’s Les Centaures (1904)1, a novel with which it has strong thematic links. Indeed, the new preface that precedes Les Centaures in the 1921 edition is so much more appropriate to Raramémé that it is very difficult to believe that it was not written to accompany the latter novel, and switched by Ferenczi when he decided to issue the reprint first.2

  Raramémé might well have been written, or at least begun, some time before 1921, perhaps while the Great War was still going on. It could not possibly have been published during the war, in spite of its violent anti-Germanic sentiments, not merely because the censors would never have licensed its vitriolic comments about the fashions and attitudes of the French government, but because they would have judged, quite rightly, that its morose philosophical thrust was incompatible with the all-important project of maintaining morale.

  Whenever it was actually penned, however, the philosophical flight of fancy that the story develops and embodies was very obviously stimulated by the war, whose advent and progress must have prompted Lichtenberger to revisit and reconsider ideas that had previously fascinated him, not only when he wrote Les Centaures but when he wrote his doctoral thesis on 18th century socialist utopias. The latter study, some of whose materials were recycled in Le Socialisme Utopique (1898), inevitably takes a strong interest in the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and writers influenced by Rousseauesque ideas, but employs as its precursory starting-point a consideration of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), in which the indigenes of Surinam are imagined to be living in a Golden Age similar to the one that Rousseau subsequently credited to “natural” humans uncorrupted by civilization.

  It is possible that the title Raramémé was selected as a kind of polysyllabic echo of Behn’s; it is a trifle narrow as a characterization of the project, given that the principal point of the story is that the narrow collective of “Raramémé” is part of a several broader collectives, primarily and most crucially the one that binds the two children thus embodied, in a fashion that is simultaneously remote and intimate, to a complementary pair of “children of the crab.” Whether or not it is the case that Lichtenberger’s title is a faint echo of Aphra Behn, however, the story deliberately picks up the thesis whose crucial seed Lichtenberger’s scholarly work detected in Aphra Behn and then tracked through the tradition launched in France by Rousseau, and it does so in order to bring that train of thought to a kind of elegiac culmination.

  Les Centaures had already provided an elegy for an imaginary Golden Age, but had embedded its parable in the mythological matrix favored by many Symbolist prose writers, depicting a long-lost Arcadia of the Hellenistic variety, in which the ideal existence shared by the sovereign centaurs with fauns and tritons is callously crushed by humans who have mastered the elements of technology and civilization. Raramémé draws its inspiration, as many late-18th and early-19th century Arcadian novelists did, from anthropological fantasies erected on the basis of discoveries made in the Pacific by France’s great navigators—especially the reports of the idyllic life of the Tahitians brought back by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville from his epoch-making voyage of 1766-69. It is thus enabled to integrate the death of its Golden Age into the current of contemporary history, sharpening the tragedy of its loss considerably.

  While depicting a Polynesian island culture as a “missing link” between civilized human life and “natural” human life, Lichtenberger adds a further symbol in the form of a “missing link” of the biological variety, physically intermediate between humans and their nearest animal relatives, the anthropoid apes. It is not impossible that Félicien Champsaur, who published Ouha, roi des singes (1923)3 two years after Raramémé, had read Lichtenberger’s novel, and that it played some part in jogging his inspiration, but whereas Ouha is an obvious precursor of King Kong, Kouang, despite the similarity of his name and his giant stature, is definitely not. He is certainly a tragic figure, like Ouha and Kong, but his tragedy is very different in kind; unlike them, and in common with the Oyas with whole society the plot brings him to co-exist, he is not infected by the slightest trace of hubris. He does not exhibit the slightest trace of Ouha and Kong’s perverse extraspecific lust—and, indeed, provides a striking model of uxorious loyalty to his cruelly slain spouse.

  Although Raramémé does not employ the same narrative strategy as Le Centaures in establishing a coherent and self-contained secondary world, not merely juxtaposing its hypothetical island with actual geography and history but entangling the two in a more complex fashion and most robinsonades, it is nevertheless a staunchly Symbolist work as well as a Rousseauesque philosophical fantasy. The additional complication also creates a certain confusion; whereas Les Centaures was a carefully measured and controlled work, however, relentlessly and majestically painstaking in working out the symbolism of its considered ecological mysticism, Raramémé is a patchwork, and the elements of the patchwork deal in extremes. It is a more reckless and far-reaching work than its predecessor, and might be thought by some readers to be reaching much further than anything it could possibly grasp—but that is an entirely virtuous endeavor, and helps to make the novel into a unique work of art: a masterpiece of sorts.

  Although it is unique, the novel does have certain attitudinal and thematic affinities with earlier novels with which Lichtenberger might have been familiar, in addition to his acknowledged sources. Indeed, there is an entire subgenre of novels that employ remote tropical islands as crucibles for thought-experiments that attempt to weigh the extent and significance of the alienation of civilization from nature. Some of those in the English tradition, notably H. de Vere Stacpoole’s The Blue Lagoon (1908), include motifs that are echoed in Raramémé. Lichtenberger’s analysis is, however, a far more sophisticated and profound study than Stacpoole’s, and very different in its central concerns, having no truck with the erotic issues central to The Blue Lagoon and such English predecessors as Ronald Ross’s The Child of Ocean (1889) and C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The New Eden (1892) or the issues of environmental exploitation central to such novels as Douglas Frazar’s Perseverance Island (1885). Raramémé’s story-line also has certain thematic connections with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1918), which Lichtenberger is highly unlikely to have read, but the same comment applies; in terms of its philosophical ambitions and literary methodology, Raramémé is situated on an entirely different plane. The features that it has in common with the cited works are, however, of some interest as multiple reflections of ideas that were in adrift in the intellectual atmosphere of the period.

  Raramémé is a book that probably could not have been written other than in the midst or the immediate aftermath of a Great War, prompted by the contemplation of a cataclysm. In spite of its Romantic Utopianism, it is a distinctly discomfiting narrative, and that is its purpose; any reader who cannot shed tears, in company with Kouang, while reading the climactic scene is manifestly less human than he is. The story is, in its fashion, a formal tragedy cast in the Classical mold, but it is also a very modern tragedy, which—until the evocation of its deus ex machina, and then only in a flagrantly sarcastic fashion—seeks no refuge in narrative distance, as Classical tragedies and commonplace modern transfigurations thereof usually do. It deals with hypothetical and fanta
stic materials, but it does not treat them as essentially alien, in the way that mythological fantasies—including fantasies that transplant their motifs into a contemporary context—usually tend to do. Lichtenberger’s purpose is to treat its hypothetical constructions intimately and immediately, and he does so with a rare frankness and sensitivity. For that reason, the novel’s philosophical fantasia is no less timely now than it was in 1921, even though the Great War that prompted it has been replaced in our everyday experience by different threats, in addition to the ecological holocaust whose continuation and intensification the story anticipates.

  This translation was made from a copy of the Ferenczi edition. The copy in question is identified as one of the eighth thousand, which was a respectable sale for the time; of the five books advertised on the back cover for which editions are indicated in similar terms, only one—by the very popular Maurice Dekobra—is credited with larger sales to date. It is unclear why the copyright notice in that copy reads “Copyright by J. Ferenczi 192,” as there is no obvious reason why the terminal digit should have been omitted or removed. The pages were uncut when I bought it, so it was presumably a left-over remainder copy rather than one that had been sold at the time of issue.

  One feature of the translation that warrants preliminary comment is the treatment accorded to the songs. Normally, when translating French verse, I would render the literal meaning, discarding the untranslatable rhyme and scansion—albeit reluctantly—on the presumption that they are less important features. In the present case, however, the function of the rhyming and (slightly unsteady) scansion is one of implication—the fact that the doggerel verses rhyme in French can only be an artifice, as the originals are supposedly being sung in a Polynesian dialect. Logically, the French rendering must be sacrificing nuances of literal meaning in order to preserve the rhyme-scheme, so I have done the same. In some instances—most notably the crucial appeal to Kroum—French words are used for their onomatopoeic quality rather than their significance, and I have done likewise with the English words inserted in their stead. I have footnoted one improvisation where it was impossible to approximate a transfer of one meaning that does have an evident significance.

  Brian Stableford

  PROLOGUE

  June 1914. A radiant afternoon.

  Laurette de Vesnage is curled up in her wing-chair near the large bay window, wide open to the pink sky and the waveless ocean. Facing her, Captain de Pionne is turning his képi over and over between his fingers.

  She is blonde, slim and delicately pretty, which melancholy creases in the corners of her mouth. He is tall, thin, brown-haired and well-built; he is a soldier. The family resemblance between them is, however, striking. There is the same bright blue gleam in the sharp and slightly close-set eyes, and there is the same curve, and a similar quiver, in the slightly flared nostrils. Half-turned toward the sea, one might think that they were sniffing the breeze in the same way.

  “Then, this really is your last visit, Hugues?” she murmurs. “Your uniform makes me feel cold.”

  “Yes, Laurette,” he replies. “I embark on Monday in Marseille, after getting my orders in Paris. I no longer have an hour to spare...I mean, to steal… from my duty.”

  She bows her head. “You’ve been very kind, Hugues, to give me this fortnight. I’m so happy that we were able to see one another again in this old house, where there are so many common memories of our childhood. It has been delightful to go for walks together once again, to recognize a few old faces together, to remember the game we used to play, and our arguments, and to take tea every afternoon under the gaze of the Uncle of the Crabs.

  The Uncle of the Crabs… Hugues smiles. Both of them look at the walls, at a mediocre eighteenth-century portrait framed by exotic ancient arms. Luc de Vesnage, whose blood flows in their veins, and whose nose and blue eyes they have, was a thoroughgoing eccentric. A voyager, philosopher and naturalist, he sailed all the seas in pursuit of social and scientific truth, making bizarre observations and formulating ludicrous hypotheses as he went. Having departed with La Pérouse,4 he disappeared with him. What remained of him was the memory of a crackpot, a few exotic objects more-or-less crumbled into dust, some marvelous sea-shells, illegible notebooks and a collection of water-colors, drawings and engravings representing all the varieties of crabs.

  The pincers and carapaces of the crabs exercised a great prestige over the childhood of Hugues and Laurette. With a common accord, they agreed that, in honor of the Uncle of the Crabs, they would maintain amity with his people. Crabs were always exempted from the fishing expeditions in which, at low tide, bare-legged, they hunted in the rock-pools for crayfish, octopodes and fish. And it was doubtless also in memory of the uncle in question, who unites his pretty cousin with him, that the very young Sublieutenant de Pionne of the Colonial Infantry, one evening in Hanoi—many years ago already—permitted a local artist with slanted eyes to tattoo the blue crab on his wrist, which, pushing back his sleeve, he shows to the young woman.

  “Laurette,” he says, “You’ve admired the totem of our childhood on my arm. Before I go, let me give you its double.” He hands her a dainty jade crab, scrupulously carved by a stylet in Yokohama or Singapore. “Look at it sometimes in memory of me—in memory of us.”

  “I’ll never be separated from it.” There is an imperceptible tremor in her voice.

  They both fall silent. They are both reliving the past. Orphans, second cousins once removed, they were brought together by the same old aunt in consequence of premature mourning, and brought up by her. She believed that she was doing her duty when, Hugues having gone to Saint-Cyr, she devoted her final energies—the Vesnages and de Pionnes die young—to marrying off Laurette.

  Oh, if only Hugues had declared himself when he left the École, when Laurette threw herself softly and delightedly into his arms! But timidity retained him, and pride—he was the richer of the two—and doubtless also an obsession with adventure inherited from Uncle Luc. He enlisted in the Colonial Infantry.

  “When I come back, Laurette, I’ll tell you something...”

  By the time he came back, Laurette, perhaps unconscious of her own heart, and perhaps vexed, had yielded to the insistences of Aunt Ermeline. For two months she had been the wife of that brute Paul Sajol, a sub-prefect with good connections, a future functionary of the comrades’ republic. The two cousins scarcely saw one another, and only exchanged a few banal words.

  Hugues left again. From time to time, by the hazard of a newspaper or a conversation with a comrade who had come from France, he caught echoes of the young woman’s wretched life: her husband’s excesses; the death of her daughter; and, finally, in the wake of a filthy scandal, the villain’s disappearance, deported to an outpost in the Far East. Laurette then resumed her maiden name, without divorcing, and took refuge in her childhood home, in order to live there in solitude, or perhaps to die there. Her health had deteriorated considerably.

  This time, Captain de Pionne had been unable to resist an impulse sprung from his utmost depths. He came to knock on her door. And for a fortnight, on twenty-four-hour passes from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, he has crossed the threshold every day.

  Laurette murmurs: “Now that you’re going away again, Hugues, I shall be completely alone again.”

  He shrugs his shoulders, and, with a hint of involuntary annoyance, he says: “Bah! You have friends.”

  She shakes her head. “You know full well, Hugues, that I’m alone.”

  It is true. He does know. Laurette Sajol has passed through so-called Society like a bright meteor that is subsequently swallowed up in the sea. Of her brief trajectory out of the shadows, Laurette de Vesnage has conserved nothing but dismay, and a need to disappear. “Society” has remained, for her, a nightmare of her marriage. She has always been a foreigner there. She was known there, jokingly, as “the feral child.”

  She has remained a “feral child.” Apart from Hugues, she no longer has any family. A few banal and distant relativ
es hardly ever break the silence of her retreat with a visit or a letter. She is entirely pure, entirely alone with the evil that has put a blush on her cheeks and rings around her eyes.

  Hugues repeats after her: “Yes, Laurette, it’s true, you’re quite alone… and it hurts me.”

  She sighs; two tears run slowly down her cheeks. “Oh, Hugues, Hugues! Before, after Saint-Cyr...why did you go away without saying anything to me?”

  He makes an impotent gesture, chewing his moustache.

  “We’ve spoiled our life.”

  If they were different people, perhaps they would attempt, in vain, to repair it, but their heredity of traditional provincial loyalty forbids them the deceptions by which others might seek forgetfulness or revenge. For them, adultery would not be simply adultery, but almost incest. They know that.

  She raises her hand wearily and lets it fall back again. “You have your Tonkin, your jungle and your pirates, Hugues.”

  The officer makes an affirmative gesture with his chin. “Fortunately—and yellow fever too. But Laurette, I shall suffer more in thinking about you. And then again, you see, I’m going away from my country with an apprehension. After three months in France, I no longer have any doubt. I believe there’s going to be a war.”

  She closes her eyes. At the edge of blue-tinged eyelids, the lashes flutter. “That would be terrible. It would be too terrible. It’s isn’t possible.”

  “Nothing is too terrible to be impossible,” he replies; but he immediately goes on: “I beg your pardon. I swore to myself that I would only say cheerful things to you before leaving! Come on, Laurette, it’s time for me to go pack my trunk; I entrust you, in our dear house, to the Uncle of the Crabs. Will you swear to me that you’ll look after yourself?”