The Human Arrow
by
Félicien Champsaur
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
Les Ailes de l’homme: Paris à New York en avion [Human Wings: Paris to New York in an Aircraft] by Félicien Champsaur, here translated as The Human Arrow, was initially published in 1917 by La Renaissance du livre. A new edition was hastily prepared in 1927, and published on June 5 of that year by La Nouvelle Revue Critique, a mere fortnight after Charles Lindbergh succeeded in a modified version of the feat attributed to the fictitious hero of the novel.
The 1927 edition of the text was considerably modified, the last fifteen chapters of the 1917 text being removed and the truncated text—whose pagination is identical in both versions—augmented by the substitution of two paragraphs in the final chapter common to both versions and the addition of a single extra chapter. It is, however, very obvious that both these versions contain, by no means hidden but slightly disguised by its extra clothing, an earlier version of the text, which must have been completed prior to August 1, 1914. The reason that Champsaur removed the last part of the 1917 text from the 1927 edition is that it did not belong, having only been added in order to secure the novel belated publication by adding a propagandist element, but the passage of time had made it impossible to revert to the original text, and so an extra fudge had to be contrived in order to contrive some pretence of reconciling its contents with the course of intermediate history.
The result of these improvisations is that Les Ailes de l’homme never appeared as the eccentrically optimistic futuristic fantasy that it was supposed to be, having been transformed by the cruel march of its temporal environment into an inept and unconvincing “secret history” of tragically lost—or recklessly squandered—technological opportunity. Shorn of the crippling adjustments of the published versions, it is a better book, if not altogether a more interesting one, and I have therefore chosen to split this translated text into three parts. The first cannot restore the “primal text” as Champsaur wrote it before August 1914, because he had to introduce some modifications into it in order to accommodate the 1917 supplement, but those amendments were probably trivial, and are unlikely to have extended any further than the interpolation of a series of specific dates giving the revised version a historical location that could only have harmed the original had it appeared as intended, in a world unsullied by the Great War. I have left those dates in rather than removing them, in the interests of fidelity to the published text, but I invite the reader to set them aside mentally while reading the first section of the novel, only recalling them to consciousness when progressing to Appendix I, which constitutes the 1917 supplement, and Appendix II, which constitutes the 1927 supplement.
The hypothetical and actual variations of the text as it passed through its various phases make Les Ailes de l’homme a uniquely fascinating work for anyone interested in the historical development of scientific romance, or the aesthetics of speculative fiction. There are other items of speculative fiction that exist in two, or even three, different versions, including some that were “updated” because their futuristic speculations had been overtaken by the progress of events in the real world, but there is none that was forced to make abrupt adjustments in the manner that Champsaur was obliged to do, initially to obtain publication at a difficult time and then to claim some slight shred of prophetic glory.
In 1917, the year of the first publication of Les Ailes de l’homme, a significant change had recently taken place in the policy of wartime publication in France. Since the outbreak of the Great War on August 1, 1914, fiction publication had been drastically curtailed, but in 1917 the government evidently decided that fiction might be a useful instrument in maintaining morale, and its production was deliberately encouraged, as an instrument of subtle propaganda. Speculative fiction, which had become very thin on the ground, experienced a sudden, if unspectacular burst of activity, which not only included Champsaur’s novel but also J. H. Rosny Aîné’s L’Énigme de Givreuse 1 and the serial version of Henri Falk’s “Le Maître des trois états” (tr. as “The Master of the Three States” in the collection The Age of Lead and Other Fantastic Romances).2
Although the other two works cited were undoubtedly written after the beginning of the war, although perhaps somewhat earlier than 1917, Champsaur’s must have been completed before the outbreak of hostilities, and it must have required a certain measure of desperation—both on his part and that of the authorities desirous of getting such works by popular authors into print—to prompt him to add a new narrative section, which is painfully ill-adapted to the original text and far below the author’s normal standards of literary craftsmanship. Presumably he felt that it was the only way to get a text into print that would otherwise have languished permanently unread. The result was to turn what was already a generic hybrid into a clumsy chimera, whose intended propaganda value could not stand up to a moment’s logical scrutiny—but which is not without interest, if only in revealing the awful difficulty of the implicit task
Henri Rozal, the hero of Les Ailes de l’homme, has been working for years, from 1909 onwards, attempting to overcome the limitations imposed on aircraft by their primitive means of propulsion. Rozal believes that aircraft will become much more useful when they can fly much faster, which will only be possible when they have more powerful means of propulsion, so he is attempting to develop a gas turbine engine for that purpose. This did not seem an unreasonable proposition in 1914, although no gas turbine had yet been invented (the first steam turbine had been invented in 1885 and it was only in the early years of the twentieth century that ships began to be fitted with steam turbines in preference to more primitive engines). Although hindsight now allows us to see that the gas turbine featured in the story would not work, because gases cannot behave in the way his explanation requires, the author makes a conscientious attempt to describe Rozal’s invention in detail as well as in principle, and to make much of the technological endeavor that its production would require—thus producing what would nowadays be recognized as a conscientious work of “hard science fiction.”
It is not unusual for plausible speculative fictions set in such imminent futures to be outdated by actual events—occasionally, if rarely, events occurring between writing and publication—but Champsaur suffered the misfortune of having his entire notion of the imminent future demolished overnight. His tale of aviation pioneering is set in a world at peace, and that is the necessary context of Rozal’s endeavor. When Europe was plunged into war, the entire backcloth of the story was abruptly wiped out. If it was to be published after 1 August 1914, it had to be modified—but not immediately, because publication of such a work was impossible in the latter months of 1914, and was to remain so for three years. As the reader will see, the published narrative begins its internal transformation fairly subtly, the author dating its events specifically (and obviously retrospectively) in order to ensure that the climactic crucial test-flight of Rozal’s new aircraft will take place literally on the eve of the Great War. By the time the novel actually appeared, however, that was already history—not ancient history, to be sure, but nevertheless referring back to what already seemed like a distant other world.
This would have caused problems for any kind of story, but those problems are particularly acute for any work dealing with an invention which is, virtually by definition, potentially world-changing. Proposing, in a story set in the imminent future, that the world might change dramatically tomorrow, is very different from proposing, in a story set three years in the past, that an invention that could have and should have changed the world somehow failed to do
so, in spite of an extremely spectacular demonstration. Precisely because it is so conscientious in its account of the nature, development and eventual deployment of Rozal’s new aircraft, the author was faced with considerable difficulty in trying to consign the invention retrospectively to the essentially-impotent realm of secret history. Very few literary works have ever been faced with a similar problem in reconstruction, and that is what makes the published version Les Ailes de l’homme interesting in the annals of scientific romance, even though the fudged execution of the impossible task spoils the supplementary text and reflects badly on the original text.
I shall offer a more detailed commentary on the nature of this problem, the manner in which Champsaur tried to solve it in the context of Les Ailes de l’homme, and the alternatives he might have considered, in an afterword, but it would obviously be inappropriate to do so here. It might be worth mentioning, however, that he did have several examples available to him of ambitious speculative fictions set in imminent futures that had been rapidly displaced into “alternative near pasts” while still being widely read, so the problem would not have been entirely unfamiliar to him. The most notable French examples are Maurice Renard’s Le Péril bleu (1911) 3 and J. H. Rosny’s La Force mystérieuse (1914),4 although both those writers had taken some inspiration from English examples such as H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), which had also been successful in French translation.
The other aspect of Les Ailes de l’homme that might warrant some comment in advance is the status of its original version—and, in consequence, its final version—as an exercise in genre hybridization. Although the French roman scientifique had been provided with a typical narrative form by Jules Verne, the story-arc in question had severe limitations, especially in a world where the scope for romances of exploration was being rapidly eroded by the progress of geographical science. Subsequent writers in the fledgling genre—which was established as an identifiable genre, and broadly characterized, thanks to the efforts of Louis Figuier, who ran feuilletons under that heading in La Science Illustrée for nearly twenty years, beginning in the late 1880s—were forced to cast around for other formulae. Like English writers of popular scientific romance and American writers of proto-science fiction, they mostly borrowed the basic formulae of thriller and mystery fiction, effectively grafting many early speculative novels on to the outlying edges of crime fiction. Champsaur, however, was best known as a writer of risqué and melodramatic romans de moeurs—overheated fiction about life in leisured society—and he was used to orchestrating his plots by means of their love story component. Les Ailes de l’homme follows this policy, thus qualifying as a fundamental hybrid of speculative fiction and generic romantic fiction: a combination rarely attempted in the twentieth century, and hardly ever with such determined narrative gusto.
A possible reason for the rarity of such hybrids is suggested in a number of nineteenth century stories which make the very positive assertion that dedication to science and intense romantic love are incompatible, because they require very different, if not frankly antagonistic, states of mind. Notable examples of this conviction can be found in S. Henry Berthoud’s “Le Second soleil” (c.1860) and René de Pont-Jest’s “La Tête de Mimer” (1863) 5 and in Jules Lermina’s “Le Secret des Zippélius (1889),6 but there are many others.
It is not obvious, however, that this seeming antagonism needs to be a barrier to literary endeavor, given that the essential method of generic love stories is to manufacture difficulties in the course of true love that can be triumphantly overcome in a climactic denouement, and also given that antagonism in general is a prolific source of dramatic tension and narrative energy. The more likely reason is more mundane: that writers interested in producing love stories are very rarely interested in scientific speculation, and vice versa. In that respect, Champsaur was an exception, if only a partial one; although he wrote several other fantastic novels, a couple of which are on the fringes of speculative fiction, Les Ailes de l’homme is the only one of his works that comes remotely close to qualifying as hard proto-science fiction—a location on the hypothetical literary map which has some bearing on the balance of power in the conflict between love and science as it plays out in his plot.
Félicien Champsaur was born in 1858 in Turriers in the Basses-Alpes, and completed his early education in the nearby town of Dignes before going to Paris in the late 1870s, ostensibly to complete his studies. He published a number of items in Les Écoles: Journal des Étudiants in 1877, and wrote the text for a series of pamphlets on Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui [People of Today], which featured portraits by André Gill, issued in the same year. He rapidly moved on to publishing articles in such popular periodicals as Paris-Plaisir in 1878. In the meantime, he involved himself enthusiastically in the “bohemian” literary life of Montmartre brasseries. He became a core member of Émile Goudeau’s literary club, the Hydropathes, and was sufficiently prominent within it that when the society’s journal, L’Hydropathe made its debut in January 1879, he was the fourth member to be individually profiled in its pages, after Goudeau, Gill and Paul Vivien, and ahead of Alphonse Allais and Charles Cros.
The articles from Le Figaro reprinted in Champsaur’s critical collection Le Cerveau de Paris, esquisses de la vie littéraire et artistique [The Brain of Paris: Sketches of Literary and Artistic Life] (1886) suggest that he disapproved of decadent style in literature—though not in visual art—and his novels often strike a pose of disapproving of decadent lifestyles. He was, however, by no means exclusive in his literary associations. He knew Edmond de Goncourt and Émile Zola, and became a champion of Naturalism in lavishing prose upon the latter, while deeply regretting the death of Victor Hugo, the one-time doyen of Romanticism—his memorial to Hugo, reprinted in Le Cerveau de Paris, imagines God welcoming the great writer to Heaven as a peer. His own periodical, Le Panurge, however—which published some thirty issues in 1882-83—leaned conspicuously toward the burgeoning Decadent/Symbolist Movement, featuring early work by Jean Lorrain, Rachilde and Jean Richepin and late work by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, among others, so Champsaur might well have been adapting his stance to the readership of Le Figaro in his disapproving pieces.
Champsaur’s swift success as a popular journalist did not entirely endear him to his fellow Hydropathes, some of whom regarded such work as what would now be called “selling out.” Like any prolific critic—especially one inclined to casual irreverence—Champsaur soon began to raise hackles, fighting the first of his numerous duels with René Stoll in February 1879, over a piece in Le Figaro. Unlike most literary duels, which were conscientiously artificial and bloodless, that one only ended when Stoll was wounded. Champsaur’s subsequent opponents included the painter Jean-Louis Forain, another victim of a bad review, and Maurice Bernhardt, with whom he had quarreled publicly in a theater foyer, but the only fatal damage he did was secondary; after the novelist Robert Caze refused to fight Champsaur when called out in 1886 he was accused of cowardice by Charles Vignier and had to fight him instead, suffering a fatal wound in consequence.
Champsaur was sufficiently disliked in some quarters for the American periodical The Forum to describe him in 1889 as a “detestable journalist,” but he seems to have maintained most of his friendships successfully. Although Goudeau, passing judgment on Champsaur in Dix ans de bohème [Ten Years in Bohemia] (1888), sadly regretted the fact that “the journalist killed the poet at a stroke,” he dutifully recognized that a novelist of note “emerged from the ashes” thereafter, and Champsaur remained one of the regulars in Rodolphe Salis’s café Le Chat Noir, which had become the Hydropathes’ general headquarters. The resentments Champsaur had stirred up were, however, further exaggerated when he published his first novel, Dinah Samuel (1882), a roman à clef whose eponymous central character is based on Sarah Bernhardt, and in which Goudeau appears in caricature as Kardac.
Although he continued to publish prolifically in newspapers and other periodicals throughout the 1880
s, Champsaur appears to have found his true vocation during that decade as a novelist, and he concentrated his efforts in that direction after the turn of the century. He also dabbled extensively in the theater, but the most successful of his early ventures, the pantomime Lulu (1888), attained even greater success when he novelized it as Lulu, roman clownesque [Lulu; a Clownesque Novel] (1901), and by far the most successful work for the stage to which he contributed, the “lyrical drama” La Danseuse de Tanagra [The Dancing Girl from Tanagra] (1911), for which Paul Ferrier assisted with the libretto and Henri Hirschmam wrote the music, was based on his lurid historical novel L’Orgie latine [The Roman Orgy] (1903), featuring the emperor Claudius’ notorious wife Messalina.
Champsaur’s novels were so exceedingly various that literary critics and historians never seemed able to get a grip on him, but Miss America (1885) was the first to develop the features that eventually came to be seen as most characteristic of his work: ostensibly disapproving but avidly fascinated depictions of the opulence and decadence of fashionable Parisian society, and flamboyant analyses of the enormous difficulty of pursuing, finding and maintaining true love in such a hostile environment. He wrote numerous others in the same vein, although he was careful never to settle into a rut. Strive as he might to vary the characterization of his output with such boldly subtitled works as L’Amant des danseuses, roman moderniste [The Man Who Loved Dancing Girls; a Modernist Novel] (1888) and Le Semeur d’amour, roman hindou [The Sower of Love; a Hindu Novel] (1902), however, and to cultivate a reputation for seriousness with such critical social studies as the three-volume L’Arriviste [The Social Climber] (1911) and the four-volume L’Empereur des pauvres [The Emperor of the Poor] (1920-22), he never shook off the reputation he acquired as a writer of “light” risqué romances—and in all fairness, he never managed to set aside his own preoccupation with such matters for long, no matter how exotic the subject matter was that he decided to tackle; it intrudes into all of his ventures into fantastic fiction.
The Human Arrow Page 1