The Germans on Venus Read online

  “I could not see that there was anything much from which to profit on Jupiter, where secondary nature was still in its infancy and brutal state. Everything there was very different, then, from things as they stood on Mars, and infinitely far from Earthly existence. By virtue of what I had seen, I calculated that the inhabitants of Jupiter would require a further 200,000 years to reach the same level of development as us.

  “I went down then in my fish-tub, wanting to see the large square masses that I had perceived in the watery depths, which I had taken for animals because they had eyes and were watching. I came very close to them. Their gazes turned towards me. ‘There is intention here,’ I thought. Then, I was bold enough to quit my fish-tub and seek to enter the monstrous animal by way of the eyes. I succeeded in that. Lodge in its brain, my soul was able to act upon its organs freely, as usual. I found them torpid and obtuse; all its ideas were chaotic. I wanted to move, but to my astonishment I realized that I was attached to the crystallized seabed by an umbilical cord! By stirring myself, however, and by force of intention, I gave the heavy machine a few ideas, and I found that it was capable of containing a reasoning soul. I had an intuition that the animal, fixed in that manner to the ground at the bottom of the sea was the embryo of the animal that would one day seize the scepter of the animal kingdom on Jupiter.

  “After these reflections I thought about leaving aqueous Jupiter, being eager to see Saturn—but then I thought that it might be appropriate to visit some of the Jovian satellites.

  “I let myself down on the first of the four, and found that everything there was much more advanced than on Jupiter. It appeared that the satellites, although planetized later than the principal planets, crystallized much more quickly, doubtless because, their rotation on their axes being much slower, centrifugal force there is much reduced; the centripetal, on the contrary, is very considerable and, in consequence, deposition or crystallization is more prompt.”

  IV

  “I arrived on Mercury in the evening of its day of eight hours—which is to say, a third the length of ours—at a latitude which the daylight only illuminated for two,” Multipliandre continued. “I had not wanted to land on the planet beneath the equator, nor in the part that was then in summer. I was in a climate fairly similar to that of Earthly France in the environs of June 25. Before taking a Mercurial body from one of the beings that corresponds to the humans of Earth—which call themselves Oa, incidentally—I wanted to find out what the temperature was on Mercury during its winter.

  “To do that, I introduced myself into the body of an animal corresponding to our serpents, called Ii—for the Mercurial language has very few consonants, only including six—b, l, m, g, r and s, and almost all its words have only vowels. Now, the Ii of Mercury are only active in winter. I mastered the reptile’s sensations as best I could, and found that the heat of the winter solstice on Mercury could be very similar to that of Earth’s Senegal in summer. It might have been much greater if the day had not been so short and the night six hours long.

  “I quit the animal’s body after this preliminary investigation. Afterwards, I attacked the soul of an Oa that I saw on a river, whose flow was somewhat reminiscent of volcanic lava. It had no boat, and was walking on the surface as if on solid ground or ice. I observed that I had not seen ice or snow on Venus, that the Sors there have six senses, of which the sixth advertised that a Sors remembered something that it had to do—but what I forgot to say is that they had three hands: two like ours and one on the rump, stronger than the other two, which as very useful in defending the against Sorseaters and Sorsrippers, two species of animals that they had finally annihilated, which corresponded to our lions and tigers.

  “On Mercury, where the Oa are even smaller than the Sors, being only one and a half feet tall, they have four hands, two like ours and as on Venus, and two on the hindquarters, whose fingers are linked by membranes as if for swimming—but that was not the only difference. The Oa that I examined had two faces, one black like those of our negroes and placed like ours, the other on the buttocks, with the difference that what is in relief on the ordinary face is hollowed out on the posterior one—but both have eyes, ears, nostrils, and especially a mouth. The posterior one does not even lack taste, but it only serves for defecation, and, if it sometimes drinks, it is by order of the superior face, in circumstances where we would wash ourselves. It is not that the posterior face is destitute of judgment; it has a great deal, if, for instance it has a sore throat.

  “Until tomorrow, Hortense,”

  This is absolutely mad. Why conform these poor Oa thus. But Fillette interrupts me to say, naively: “Do you want him to lie? If that’s the way they are, shouldn’t he say so?” You see, my dear husband, that there is nothing to say in reply to that. I embraced her.

  If the posterior face has a sore throat, it tells the superior face—or, rather, the mouth—to eat the Mercurial equivalent of prunes, cucumber, etc. It looks after itself with a great deal of discretion. The head is in charge of all important affairs, occupying itself with them without thinking of corporeal needs; it is the posterior that has that responsibility, especially the commission of taking tobacco. It sneezes and wipes its nose very properly with the aid of its hindward hands, which are especially devoted to its service. Behind it, in the usual place, are the reproductive parts, which it directs—but it is the superior head that chooses the object, and which appreciates the beauty of the face and the throat, eyes, mouth, lips and hair. The choice is never consummated, however, until the virile posterior has been consulted as to the beauty of the feminine posterior face and its indentations, which are the projections relative to the superior face; often, the repugnance of the posterior for the relevant posterior causes the failure of liaisons that the superior, and the heart itself, have regarded as very well matched. It is the posterior that decides enjoyment and delights. Thus, while the two upper faces caress one another nobly and the mind, in accord with the heart, makes them say charming things, the two posteriors often say very obscene things to one another or snarl at one another, and project very disagreeable things from their noses—but the two superior heads, provided that the pleasure comes, only laugh at them.

  “The Oa have only one soul to govern the two brains, and that is sufficient, but with the condition that, when it abandons one head, that one continues to act in a dream, while the other acts consciously. Thus, an Oa always has a double enjoyment: that of reality and that of dreams, which is not a mediocre advantage.

  “The Oa have seven senses: our five, that of Venus and counter-taste—which is to say, the taste by which an Oa knows that it is time to surrender the aliments it has taken. By this means, it avoids constipation, colic, etc.

  “After this description, let us return to the man that I saw walking on a river, dragging his boat instead of being inside it, as I discovered subsequently. The waves served as wheels.”

  Ah, that idea is too funny! It’s a long time since I’ve seen honest laughter in our society. As for me, I laughed less and I admired the variety of Nature. We believe that we are very important, very reasonable, with our single brain, but here’s someone who has two, and doesn’t think that too many! I rather like the distinct functions of the two faces, but I’ll leave my reflections at that, and business matters will fill the rest of my piece of paper.

  “He had four feet, four arms with their hands, his two faces, etc. He was on all fours, his postface turned towards me when I perceived him. ‘There’s a singular face, and singularly placed,’ I thought. ‘How various living beings are!’ He turned round, and I saw an entirely different individual, with a face like ours, and very spiritual. ‘They’re two men, perhaps even a man and a woman,’ I thought.

  “At that moment, I attacked the soul via the posterior, which I believed to be the man, and introduced myself into the brain. A slight noise made me direct my attention to another creature that was running up. That one was much prettier and more delicate. The first creature embrace
d it—which is to say that the two faces kissed in the ordinary way. Then I saw them turn round and similarly make their posteriors kiss. I understood then that the two faces, the one in relief and the one hollowed out, belonged to the same individual, which redoubled my surprise.

  “I seized the opportunity to attack the Oa’s soul and chased it out of the superior brain. I usually had a great deal of difficulty dislodging a soul, but in this case I had none. That was because I took the Oa at the moment when it was embracing the female Oa by means of its posterior face. It appeared that all the soul had hastened into the brain of the other head in order to preside over the pleasures of love.

  “I wanted then to follow the traces of the Oa’s brain, and I succeeded in that with much less difficulty, the fibers not having suffered any violence by virtue of the combat of the two souls—but that which had been set aside was not lost. I followed the memory-traces of the superior head. Ah, my love, what sublime knowledge, and much purer because the superior head was absolutely detached from carnal and coarse ideas! It is, as I told you, the posterior head that is charged with all details of that sort. I found myself endowed with a perfect knowledge of the Divinity; I knew all of Nature, the composition of living beings, the principle and the motive power of life.”

  The development of the two faces corresponds perfectly to the beginning, and we are very content with this idea. For myself, I have another reason for joy: it is that so much gaiety testifies to a perfect state of health. Courage, my dear husband! Divert yourself by amusing your wife and all her friends—who make my amusement all the more animated, for intellectual amusements have the admirable quality that, the more they are communicated, the more they are augmented. They share a common property with fire, which inflames and grows by communication. I shall do as you do.

  Until tomorrow…

  Charles Nodier: Perfectibility

  (1833)

  Charles Nodier (1780-1844) was the son of an active Jacobin, and thus, in effect, a child of the Revolution. Although he was living in Besançon during the Revolution rather than Paris, he was deeply affected by it, particularly the nightmare of the Terror—which led to an extreme disenchantment, not merely with the Revolutionaries but other ideologies that he considered partly to blame for it. He was no more charitably inclined towards the Empire that followed in its train, which he considered to be a natural extrapolation of the same ideologies; when a satirical poem he wrote about Napoleon bought down the wrath of the authorities on his head, his animosity was further intensified. The ideology that he considered most culpable of all, however, was not specifically political but more abstractly theoretical: the idea of progress and its utopian corollary, the ideal of social perfectibility.

  Nodier made several unsuccessful attempts to find a congenial means of earning a living before turning to professional writing, and struggled to make ends meet during the early part of his literary career. His first novel, Le Peintre de Salzbourg, journal des emotions d’un Coeur souffrant (1803) was a chronicle of anguish strongly reminiscent of J. W. Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774; tr. as The Sorrows of Young Werther). While Goethe initially refused to recognize himself as a member of the German Romantic Movement, however, and had to be persuaded against his will that he was one, Nodier was a wholehearted Romantic from the outset, and became one of the chief propagandists for a French Romantic Movement. He continued to lead by example with Jean Sbogar (1818), a novel about a noble Illyrian bandit, and the lachrymose love story Thérèse Aubert (1819), but it was his fantastic stories—examples of what the Germans call kunstmärchen [art-folktales], most notably Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit (1821; tr. as “Smarra; or the Demons of the Night”) and Trilby, ou le lutin d’Argyll (1822; tr. as Trilby, the Goblin of Argyll) that set more memorable and enduring examples.

  It was also in a fantastic vein that Nodier worked in collaboration with Jean Toussaint Merle, the director of the Porte-Saint-Martin theater in the early 1820s, working in collaboration with other writers on stage melodramas loosely adapted from John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.9 In a classic anecdote recorded in his autobiography, Alexandre Dumas recalled that he went to the first night of The Vampyre when he had not been in Paris very long, and found himself seated next to an irascible gentleman who expressed his continual displeasure with the script loudly enough to be ejected at the intermission; he subsequently discovered that the gentleman in question was Nodier, taking offence at the way in which his contributions to the script had been mangled by Merle.

  In 1824, Nodier finally obtained a salaried post that suited him when he was appointed librarian of the Bibliothéque de l’Arsénal. There he initiated a series of what he called cénacles—which bore more resemblance to seminars or writers’ workshops than Parisian literary salons usually did—in which he proselytized Romanticism relentlessly, becoming the effective leader of the French Movement until the younger members of the group, tired of his irascibility and authoritarianism, started their own cénacle at Victor Hugo’s house. The latter meeting soon took over as the beating heart of the Movement, while Nodier’s health deteriorated significantly. His own work became increasingly sparse and eccentric as he grew older.

  Félix Bodin named Nodier in one of the appendices to Le Roman de l’avenir as the man best suited to write a novel of the future, but did not mention that Nodier had published a two-part satirical novelette set in the future a year before, in 1833—probably because the supplements had been written some time before the fragment of a roman that supplied the book’s main text, and Bodin, scribbling furiously during a parliamentary recess, did not have the time or any inclination to update them.

  As might be expected, Nodier’s satire is an unusually wholehearted assault on the idea of progress—or, at least, the ideal of perfectibility, which Nodier considered both dangerous and absurd. His original intention was presumably to publish the whole story in one go, but it actually appeared in two parts, probably because, as the last few paragraphs of the first part declare, he sat up into the early hours attempting to finish it in one go—and then suffered a writer’s block when he tried to pick it up the following day. At any rate, it appeared in two parts, as “Hurlubleu Grand Manifafa d’Hurlubière ou la Perfectibilité” and “Léviathan le long Archikan des Patagons de l’île savante ou la Perfectibilité, pour faire suite à Hurlubleu” in the August and November 1833 issues of the Revue de Paris.

  The story is significant not merely in its temporal range and acerbic assertions, but also in its depiction of the strange ecology (or non-ecology) of the isle of the Patagons, where all food is synthetic. The notion of synthesizing food directly from the relevant elements rather than using plants and animals as middlemen crops up again in Jules Lermina’s “Quiet House,” where it is similarly treated as a hideous absurdity, but both stories might ultimately prove more prophetic than their authors intended, as modern food technology continue to advance apace in the 21st century. Nodier used a deliberately esoteric vocabulary in his story, which I have replicated as best I can while preserving my version’s readability, and strewed it with contemporary literary and scientific references, some of whose sources I have not been able to identify and have, therefore, been unable to footnote

  Part One

  Hurlubleu, Grand Manifafa of Hurlubière

  “To the Devil with you all!” cried the Manifafa.

  “Does that include the Chief Jester of your Holy College of Buffoons?” asked Berniquet

  “No,” Hurlubleu said. “I’m talking to that rabble of kings and emperors who murder me every evening with their salaaming and who insist on caressing the soles of my slippers with vile kisses. I like you, Berniquet; I like you, Chief Jester of the Holy College of Buffoons, because you have no common sense and you don’t lack wit, without which everything is humdrum. I must have a high opinion of your worth, to have conferred upon you one of the most eminent dignities of my empire, for I remember that you fell into my house
like a bomb.”

  “Absolutely,” replied Berniquet. “I arrived in a cannonball at the foot of Your incomparable Majesty’s glorious divan—and the vehicle is still there, encrusted, so to speak, in the marble on which he deigns to set his sublime feet when he is tired of lying down all day.”

  “That’s not the half of it, Berniquet! Your arrival—which was unexpected, and even a trifle brutal—passed for miraculous, because it delivered the land from a frightful schism that had already cost the lives of 100 million of my subjects, the reason for which I no longer recall. Stuff my calumet so that I can refresh my thoughts.”

  “Eternal and immutable Manifafa,” Berniquet continued, while stuffing his master’s pipe with all the customary ceremony associated with that noble office, “the buffoons affiliated to the cult of the Divine Bat, from which your imperial dynasty is descended, and which has the infallible pleasure of covering the Sun with its wings every night to procure Your Most Perfect and Most Adored Highness a cool darkness favorable to his sleep, were divided into two stubbornly-opposed parties, commanded by two pitiless jesters, with regard to the question of whether the Sacred Bat had hatched out of a white egg, as Bourbouraki proposed, or a red egg, as Barbaroko maintained—Bourbouraki and Barbaroko being, of course, the two greatest philosophers that had ever illuminated the world and other dependencies of the Empire of Hurlubière with the light of science.”

  “Why remind me?” replied the Manifafa, sighing from the depths of his soul. “It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t reconcile Bourbouraki and Barbaroko, or all those damned jesters. I myself, practically on my own initiative, proposed a compromise to the council of my chibicous10 by which it could have been amicably agreed that the egg of the Divine Bat was white outside and red inside, or vice versa—I couldn’t give a hair of my moustache, myself—but the red buffoons and the white buffoons would never accept it, so obstinate and reckless were they in their resolve, with the result that the bitch of a question would still be hanging in suspense if you hadn’t descended abruptly from the clouds to settle it.”