The Humanisphere Page 2
The imaginary history is then obliged to progress, however, to account for the bizarre society described in the opening chapters, which, although it contains numerous comical episodes, is by far the angriest and most detailed account of a comprehensively wrecked society produced in the nineteenth century, and a much closer analogue of the many twentieth-century anti-socialist dystopia than Souvestre’s Le Monde tel qu’il sera.
Giraudeau did not embark upon any further ventures in speculative fiction after La Cité nouvelle, perhaps working on the principle of once burned, twice shy, but the rapid falsification of his hypothetical future history did not cause him to modify his opinions; he spend the rest of his literary career—having, of course, lost the plum government job that the emperor had given him after the publication of his propaganda piece—writing eulogistic accounts of Napoléon III and deeply regretting the fact that the great man had been unjustly robbed of the opportunity to complete the program laid out in his own imaginary history, and that the entire human world was worse off in consequence.
Lettres de Malaisie by Paul Adam, here translated as “Letters from Malaisie” was originally published in Paris by Éditions de la Revue Blanche in 1898. Although Malaisie could, and perhaps should, be translated as “Malaysia,” I have left the French spelling in place in the present translation because it preserves a deliberate reflection of the word malaise, which would be lost by substituting the English spelling. The “Malaise” from which the letters come is not so much the geographical Malaysia as the Land of Unease.
Paul Adam (1862-1920) was a prolific novelist explicitly affiliated to both the Naturalist and Symbolist schools, which were often considered to be opposed rivals in the French fin-de-siècle. Several of his Naturalistic novels contain digressions into utopian speculation, and he had written a brief futuristic fantasy constituting propaganda for pacifism Le Conte futur (1893) before embarking on the far more complicated and sophisticated examination of the central ideas of the French eutopian tradition in Lettres de Malaisie, which adopts the hypothesis that a disciple of Étienne Cabet, disillusioned by the fate of Cabet’s Icarian colonies in the U.S.A., had set out to carry out a similar experiment in the isles of the Indian Ocean, under the collective influence of the Comte de Saint-Simon, Fourier and Cabet. The preface is, however, careful to emphasize in advance, that the society depicted by the letters is not an ideal, and puts that statement in capital letters to make sure that the reader gets the message. In fact no other work more clearly justifies the utility of differentiating between utopias and eutopias.
The preface to the letters refers to all the utopian writers of the early nineteenth century, in whose ideas the narrative is rooted, and also likens the exercise explicitly to More’s pioneering exemplar, but the main text also has an extensive series of footnotes consisting of long quotes from François Fénelon’s Aventures de Télémaque (1699), drawing comparisons between the advice offered therein by Telemachus’ tutor Mentor on how to construct a wisely-governed society and the society described by the letters, although the contrasts are much more striking than the similarities. I have considered those footnotes to be superfluous to the present translation, and have omitted them.
The conspicuously prim Fénelon, a devout Catholic clergyman, would certainly not have approved of the reprinting of his words in a book that he would undoubtedly have considered to be obscene, and which must have seemed pornographic even to many of the readers of the fin-de-siècle, who had grown accustomed to a much greater degree of license in fiction than would have been permitted two centuries earlier. Fénelon would probably have been appalled, too, by the horrific aspects of the text’s lubricity. Evidently bearing in mind what actually happened to the communities that Cabet, Victor Considerant and others of their ilk tried to establish in various parts of the world, Adam describes a society that has been forced by circumstance to become extremely authoritarian in order to maintain an ostentatious philosophy of liberty that really does not extend much beyond the orgiastic application of complete amorous license.
Joseph Déjacque would also have been horrified by Adam’s account of the likely consequences of amorous anarchy, which make a striking contrast with his own estimation of what the results of such a liberation would be. Déjacque would, however, have found much that was similar to his own ideas in the advanced electrification and mechanization of the cities of the new society. Although the complete community of property and the corollary absence of money are strongly reinforced by law in Adam’s hypothetical society rather than purely voluntary, as in Déjacque’s, they are supported and sustained in much the same way, and just as necessarily, by technological sophistication and the resultant abundance of food and physical comforts.
Unlike Déjacque’s “humanispheres,” the cities of Adam’s new society are carefully specialized, each symbolized by the name of a Roman deity, although the founder of the colony has rejected Déjacquian atheism is favor of a functionally and philosophically redesigned Catholicism, complete with a the new catechism, of which even Fénelon—a flexible and tolerant theologian, unlike many of his contemporaries—might have approved in part. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of that specialization is the different character of the orgies that take place in the various cities. Even the one described by Théa as having taken place in Diane, and the one in Minerve in which the narrator is a participant horrify and sicken him, but as he witnesses others in Mars and, perhaps surprisingly, in Mercure, the city of science, the pitch of his nausea is markedly increased as the screw of perversity is relentlessly turned—although the sequence eventually acquires a strange twist in the final erotic scene set in the industrial city of Vulcan; once again, I shall leave it to the reader to decide exactly what attitude the author is inviting the reader to take to Pythie’s final declaration, and what attitude ought to be adopted, rationally considered.
Lettres de Malaisie is perhaps the most interesting of all nineteenth-century utopian satires, in the way it gathers so many threads of eutopian thought together, in order to expose their supposed paradoxicality and potential perversion, while simultaneously allowing the voices of the imagined society to argue, forcefully and cogently, that the societies of Europe are far worse and far more absurd than theirs. It is certainly the most sophisticated and ingenious of the century’s ambivalent dystopias, and it really does provide a significant series of dispatches from the psychological realm of Unease. No other work is as conscientiously nightmarish in amalgamating eutopian ideals with their nightmarish underside.
Adam scrupulously includes in his survey all the imagery of technological advancement that roman scientifique had enabled to become conventional by the end of the nineteenth century, combining the relevant wonders, hopes and anxieties in a more insidious but no less effective fashion than Albert Robida’s classic skeptical account of La Vie électrique (1892; tr. as Electric Life). He illustrates, more graphically than anyone had previously done, the clash of Déjacquian optimism with an insidious disenchantment that was to make further progress in the early years twentieth century, even before the Great War and its aftermath seemingly abolished the optimism of such thought permanently. His work therefore makes a fitting conclusion to the collection, in terms of the comparisons and contrasts it offers with the other three works.
The translations of Publication complete des nouvelles découvertes de sir John Herschel dans le ciel austral et dans la lune and La Cité nouvelle were made from the versions reproduced on Google Books. The other two translations were made from the copies of the relevant texts reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale gallica website.
Brian Stableford
Victor Considerant: The Complete News from the Moon
(1836)
First Fragment: ASTRONOMICAL NOTIONS
An attentive observation of the Moon does not take long to conclude that it is animated by a proper movement in the celestial sphere. If, at a certain moment, it is found in the sky near a star, one sees it draw away therefrom i
ncreasingly, and, in one night, travel a very obvious arc through the vault of the heavens. Thus, the Moon independently of the movement of rotation that it appears to have in common with all the stars in the firmament, possesses a particular movement in the sky. We know that the common movement is only apparent, and that it is the Earth that, rotating on its axis, permits an observer placed on its surface successively to embrace the whole of the infinity of luminous globes dispersed in space.
Our satellite traces an elliptical curve around us that hardly differs from a circle. The Earth occupies one of the focal points of that ellipse. It takes the Moon about twenty-eight days to complete its orbit—which is to say, to return to coincidence with the same star in the sky. During that revolution, the Moon sometimes presents itself to us in the form of a crescent with horns, sometimes in the form of a semicircle and subsequently in a complete circle; then it re-passes through all its phases of grandeur, gradually diminishing to the extent of disappearing completely. It is the passage through those different periods that constitutes the “phases” of the Moon.
When the Moon, in its motion, places itself between the Earth and the Sun, the half that faces the Sun is illuminated and the half the faces the Earth is in darkness; the Moon is new and we do not see it. On the other hand, when, after half a revolution, the Moon is placed behind the Earth, the half that faces us is illuminated; the Moon is then full. When the new Moon, the dark disk that is facing us, receives light reflected by the Earth, it is sufficiently illuminated by that reverberation to be easily visible to the naked eye if the sky is cloudless. The kind of light that the Moon has when it is between three and five days old is known as “ashen light.”
Our satellite, as is proven by observation of certain ever-apparent and well-defined points of its disk, constantly presents the same hemisphere to the Earth, and, in consequence, rotates on its axis in the same time as it travels its entire orbit. In that the Moon is like a person who departs from one point of a round table and goes all around the perimeter with his face turned to the center; it is evident that when the person reaches his point of departure he has made a complete rotation of his body.
The result of that fixity of position in relation to our globe is that only half on the Moon cam be studied by us, and that it is not given to humans to know the other hemisphere by direct observation. However, although we cannot see the second half of the Moon, the phenomenon known as libration permits perception of the polar regions and the parts close to the edges of the hemisphere turned toward us. The librations are, in fact, merely an effect of slight vacillations of the heavenly body in the directions of its axis and equator. One can easily visualize these small derangements by comparing them those a person makes with his head to affirm or deny, indicating yes or no.
The librations are due, firstly, to the fact that the Moon’s axis is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit and, secondly, to the fact that the velocity of our satellite in the orbit it travels is not uniform. The first of these causes will be easily understood if one applied to the Moon what happens on Earth. We know that the line around which our planet turns is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit; otherwise there would be no seasons on our globe; the days would be equal to the nights for all its points, throughout the year. As the axis of the Earth remains constantly parallel to itself as it moves through its orbit, the Sun sometimes illuminates one pole and sometimes the other; hence the six-month-long day and nights that are the prerogative of the circumpolar regions. In the same way that an observer of the Sun would see the Earth’s axis going up and down, we see the Moon’s axis sometimes inclined toward us and sometimes tilted away; that kind of movement is called latitudinal libration.
In order to visualize the second kind of oscillation, known as longitudinal libration, it is necessary to imagine a straight line drawn from the center of the Earth to the center of the Moon. That line encounters the surface of the sphere at a point that would obviously remain invariable if our satellite, while rotating uniformly on its axis, also circled around us at a uniform velocity. Because that is not the case, it is obvious that the point of that encounter on the Moon’s surface is mobile: that it travels in one direction when our satellites accelerates, and in the reverse direction with its velocity diminishes. The Moon therefore oscillates indefinitely around a median position, and allows the sight of several degrees of extent either to the east or the west of the visible hemisphere.
Intelligence of the preceding information is sufficient to comprehend the greater part of my observations. Before giving a description of them, however, I shall cast a glance at the ensemble of those that have been made before, with regard to the physical constitution of the Moon, and I shall say a few words about the consequences that have been drawn therefrom, as well as the different theories that scholars, both ancient and modern, have established to proved that our satellite is either provided with or deprived of living beings.
It has been observed that the Moon sometimes disappears from a clear and serene sky, in such a fashion that it cannot even be seen with instruments endowed with the strongest magnification. Kepler witnessed the phenomenon twice in 1581 and 1583. It was observed by Helvetius in 1620, by Riccioli, other Jesuits of Bologne and many other people in Holland on 14 April 1642. On 23 December 1703, another total disappearance of the Moon occurred. The heavenly body, which appeared to be yellow-brown at Arles, was red and transparent, as if the sun were shining through it, in Avignon; at Marseille, one of its sides seemed red and the other very obscure; in the end, it disappeared completely, although the weather was perfectly serene. The astronomer of the last century claimed that these strange phenomena could only be produced by a substance enveloping the Moon and disposed to give passage to rays of a particular color.1
Helvetius reports that he has often found, when the atmosphere is perfectly clear, that the Moon and its patches are not always equally clear and visible; that they are brighter, purer and more distinct at times than at others. Thus, that astronomer, along with Lalande, d’Alembert and many others, affirm that it is necessary not to seek the reason for the phenomenon in question either in the air that surrounds us or in the substance of the moon, but in something else that surrounds the body of our satellite.
Cassini has observed that Saturn, Jupiter and the fixed stars, when they are hidden behind the Moon, appear to take on close to its rim, whether light or dark, an elongated shape, but in other observations he has not found any alteration. The same phenomena are sometimes presented on the Earth for the Sun and the Moon; they are due to the refraction of luminous rays in atmospheric layers of different densities, Cassini his therefore concluded from the similarity of the two phenomena that he Moon is sometimes surrounded by a dense matter, which is sometimes only found in a state of excessive rarefaction.
During a solar eclipse, one sees the Moon surrounded by a luminous ring parallel to its circumference. That is what was observed in London in 1715; in Leipzig, by Wolff, in 1706; in Antwerp, by Kepler, in 1695; and finally, long ago, at Geffa, six or seven miles from Cairo, in 978 by the astronomers of King Abu-Haly-Almanzor, ruler of Egypt. The observations of the later astronomers are recorded in a very curious manuscript of Ibn Yunus. Wolff, in his Acta Eruditorum,2 observes that the brightest part is that closest to the Moon; he hastens to conclude that the atmospheric layers are weaker in density as their distance from the lunar surface increases.
I shall also cite the total solar eclipse of 16 June 1806. It was observed by Ferrer, a skillful Spanish astronomer, who went for that purpose from New York to Kinderhook. Ferrer reports that the lunar disk appeared to be illuminated seven minutes before the conclusion of the obscurity; that seems, he says, to be the effect of a small lunar atmosphere. He also observed a concentric luminous ring around the Sun about 45 or 50 degrees in diameter; the edge of the Moon was indistinctly terminated; small columns of very thin vapor were departing from it, which dissipated in the luminous ring. I shall explain these phenomena, as curious as the
y are bizarre, in due course.
I ought also to say that in the last century, the duration of the occultation of a star having been calculated by reference to its mean velocity before and after its passage behind the Moon, it was found that the time was exactly equal to the observation made directly, from which it was concluded that the Moon had no atmosphere, for if the luminous rays had traversed a gaseous milieu they would have been refracted; in consequence the duration of the occultation furnished by observation would be less than the duration given by calculation. I shall return later to that conclusion, which I have enunciated in my elementary work on astronomy.
As it is the nearest heavenly body to the Earth, the Moon has been submitted to observation more than any other planet in our vortex. With the aid of powerful astronomical binoculars or good telescopes, certain principal points have been recognized that are brighter than all the others, and others more obscure, and finally, large dull gray patches. These points being sufficiently distinct to be completely definable, it has been possible to project them on to a plan surface; hence maps of the Moon, and therefore selenography.
If one directs the axis of an astronomical instrument at the disk of the Moon when it is entirely illuminated by the Sun, the eye, struck by the glare of the light, has difficulty at first in distinguishing the objects that are in the field of view. After a few seconds, however, pronounced undulations are easy to recognize; the observer can follow long veins much brighter than the surrounding areas, and perceive immense plains dimly lit and variable in brightness. In addition to these differences in the intensity of the light, he can also, through a very favorable atmosphere, remark specifically different colors, notably green, sometimes ruddy and yellow-brown; the later hues are, however, less pronounced. The most considerable of the greenish surfaces form the interior of the Mare Serenitatis.