The Napus, page 19
Finally, it was decided, as in the old song, that those who wanted to go would go and those who wanted to stay would stay—but that decision did not work, for it resulted in a total disorganization of the Aristotle and its complicated services, in particular its dirtiness. In the end, it came down to tossing a coin: heads, open air; tails, underground. The coin came down tails, and I can still hear Cortenaz’s sigh of relief. I went toward him as if to remind him that he had forgotten something. Already, extending his hand forward with an expression of keen gratitude, he was saying a final: “Good, good, my lads, all right!”
21. The reference is to the Duchesse d’Orléans, the daughter of the Elector of the German Palatinate, whose letters provide an insight into the court of Louis XIV, and included an oft-quoted comment about seeking “a little religion of my own.”
22. Because the term “Battle of Poitiers” is commonly used to refer to a major battle in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, the earlier Battle of Poitiers, in 732, in which the Franks under Charles Martel defeated an Arab army, is nowadays more often called the Battle of Tours. Poly 17,177 seems to subscribe to the long-held view that it was a crucial historical turning-point, saving Europe from Islamic conquest, although many modern historians dispute that view.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE TACIT ARMISTICE
At the time when the singular literary and artistic reaction about which I am about to talk became manifest throughout the world, particularly in Europe and America, aphanasia was continuing its ravages, increasing incomprehensible in its essence and causes. The Germans’ invisible war was suspended by a tacit armistice. The analgo was no longer having any but a weak effect on dolor, and had been caught up by the dollar. It was, in any case, a fact that the new kind of paper money, founded on persuasion, had never enjoyed any success in France, where Boche suggestion has very little leverage. The ruins accumulated by the Archimedes over our territory and in our cities were covered over by vegetation, the exceptional growth and extension of which was noted. The mushrooms had begun it, but now, under the influence of an obscure force, certainly linked to the Napus, trees were following the trend and acquiring gigantic proportions in a matter of months. It was thus on the quays of the Saône in Lyon, in the immediate environs of Paris, on the banks of the Loire and the Doubs, and on the Black Mountain in Brittany.
The beginning of that singular Renaissance was the discovery, by a bibliophilic Polyplast at the Foundation, of a work more than three hundred years old, which appeared from a publisher by the name of Champion and was entitled La Légende de la Mort en Bretagne. The author, a certain Le Braz, had collected therein, from the mouths of the peasants of old, admirable and simple stories that were appropriate to the general sentiment and sensibility.23 The book, re-edited as a cinetext, with well-chosen characters and landscapes, full of movement, went rapidly from hand to hand. At the Aristotle everyone seized upon it, in spite of Eustache’s protests, threatening us all with aphanasia; people looked within it, and found, concordances with our precarious and menacing situation, and consolations by means of the beyond—a refreshment of the soul. It was more than an infatuation; it was a frenzy.
From our scientific and gossip-ridden environment, the vogue spread into the general public, amid the ignorant and the semi-ignorant and even as far as socialites and idlers. Like a beneficent nepenthe, Le Braz’s poem—for it was one, albeit in mosaic—bandaged the wound opened in each of us by the apprehension of death without remains and initiated the almost mystical reverie that is our only recourse and refuge down here, apart from humble prayer before a crucifix. Even the natural hardness of Polyplasts, for which they had been so frequently reproached, was attenuated and softened if not, in some of us, annihilated. Everyone participated to some degree in the state of mind and heart that had thrown Henriette and myself into one another’s arms in the woods of Meudon.
That same month of May—the month of flowers, particularly perfumed in 2228, and the reawakening of nature—saw the sudden appearance of a young female Polyplast poet, Marie de Félan, fresh in her inspiration and delightful in her rhythm, whose volume Occidentales was inspired by Le Braz, and also by Chénier, Moréas and Virgil; a sculptor worthy of Greek antiquity, Jeanne Ronsin, who had previously been occupied with work in comparative embryology; and a Flemish painter, Van der Seen, in whom was revived, with a more ardent coloration, the great tradition of his compatriots of old, notably the splendid Rubens. A month before taking up the brush where the joyous possessor of the beautiful Hélène Fourment had laid it down, in a ray of blonde light, our Van der Seen had been manufacturing precision instruments and calculating diopters.
The most astonishing case, however, was that of the pharmacist Lehuppe, who, abandoning the drugs to which he owed his immense fortune, wrote, out of the blue, a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, amorous and philosophical, leaving far behind all other enterprises of the same order—a biography that was a perpetual delight, like a revivification, in a clear, fluid, faultless language, which inaugurated the Transparent School, with its enchanting perspectives.
Thereafter, the son and heir of the great company of Spague et Cie, the largest manufacturer of explosives in the Garonne valley—from which a hundred thousand shells an hour emerged in times of war, loaded with toxic gases—Ludovic Spague, at the age of thirty-one, wrote his aphanasic symphony, which recalled, for all eternity, all the terrors, all the anguish, and also all the illusions that had accompanied the debut of the plague. Who would have believed that that young man, trained since childhood for business by a despotic mother and a father of lead with nickel eyes, would exhale, in the most ethereal and idealistic art, the aura of an entire epoch, its mysterious malaise, its moral variations, its frisson?
With Henriette, I witnessed the first performance of Ludovic Spague’s masterpiece in the great chemistry hall of the factory, transformed for the occasion into a concert-hall. After an initial moment of glad surprise, which must have been that of the first hearers of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, the entire enthused audience stood up and acclaimed the author, weeping with joy. Tears flowed, charged with genius, over that little simian face, green-tinged and grimacing, whose possessor everyone had mistaken for a degenerate burdened by a celestial curse, crushed by his immense fortune and his sinister exterminator of a father.
There was more to come; everyone knew Madame Tougourte, the widow of the celebrated financier who had raided half the public fortune and sown France with comfortable but onerous establishments, veritable nets cast over savings. When she tossed her forelock over her face of a bourgeois Gorgon, the Academicians of oakum, straw, dung and sound, invited to her magnificent manger, bowed, smiled and prostrated themselves. She had cultivated a reputation for wit by maltreating and bullying the unfortunate wives of functionaries and employees dependent upon the House of Tougourte, telling each of them her “home-truths” and applauding, with her two short sausage-like arms, outrageously bare, the actors and actresses of her “artistic soirées.” Well, that undomesticated Megaera, moved by an epistolary whim, began overnight to write letters worthy of Madame de Sevigné, of a more banal but equally fantastic bent, which were passed from hand to hand and plunged her friends of both sexes, the parasites and spongers of the rich house, into a stupor.
“It isn’t possible that that old cow wrote this! She’s been napusified and replaced by a double! There’s magic behind this! Someone’s playing a joke on us!” Such were the amenities that were mingled with the compliments, the former overt, the latter covert, as usual.
One would have thought that, along with the infatuation, individual tendencies, hereditary penchants and moral and mental affinities had passed abruptly from science, mathematics or biology to art, letters and pleasure. Either the metamorphosis was the result of a decomposition of terror, or the necessity of change that universal nature requires, and which humans resist as best they can by means of the image they make of permanence and eternity. Perhaps, too, the hybrid organism, placed between the body and the soul, which permits them to communicate with one another, took account of distant possibilities to escape aphanasia by means of an extension of interior liberty and its adjuncts: poetry, painting, music and sculpture.
Science—who knows it better than me?—is not an escape; it is a chain, whose iron is riveted by reflection. Art, by contrast, liberates the love from sugared lips, warm arms, and tears almost as delicious as laughter. Henriette and I compare it to a beautiful bare-headed girl who opens her window and thrusts back her shutters to the dawning day, displaying her perfect breasts and round shoulders. Undoubtedly, there exists a morose and learned art, which comes in all epochs to cover the gilded fabric of true art with a weave of grey filaments—but that counterfeit cannot diminish the emancipatory role of the sons of the Muses, fecundated by Apollo.
From art, that renewal extended into other crafts, which are the inseparable and indispensable companions of painters, musicians, sculptors, writers and architects. For how could painters and fixers of light and color, extract the admirable forms of nature, and the more admirable ones of womanhood, if they had neither canvases nor easels, nor tubes filled with that special paste that Velasquez, Rembrandt and Goya manipulated? What would become of musicians, without instruments and the makers of instrument, of the reeds of rustic oboes, which are like whistles modulated in water? What would become of the sculptor without his assistant, his rough-hewer, without the person who pours the matter transformed by his genius into the bronze? What would become of architects without masons, writers without typesetters, and without the constructors of the machines at which typographers sit?
When inspiration pulls upon the artist, invention pulls upon the artisan. One is linked to the other by that ardor for improvement and perfection, for beauty and the vanquishing of difficulty, which is half way between amity and love, and no more. It is the passionate conjunction of the master and the thought that permits masterpieces, in every domain, to survive the centuries by means of excellence and the skillful disposition of matter. Thanks to art, the community resumes the appearance of a great family, which would be quickly lost in industry, uniquely directed to the emulation of speed, precision and war.
Sidoine being no longer there to preach hatred and dread of waves, telegraphic instruments, and so on, we used all those means to launch the good news to the world and propagate our artistic renaissance in as many countries as possible. Humans prey to any intoxication, noble or vile, always tend to suppose that their neighbors will share it. It seemed to us that the reaction around us, in response to our appeal, was various.
Strung up by the Germans with analgo, America had conceived a certain respect for those who had temporarily duped and ruined them. Many, on finding that their old ills could no longer be cured by the magic banknotes, murmured: “All the same, it did me good.” Doubtless the Napus had sorely tested the populations situated between the Atlantic and the Pacific, but their habituation to non-artificial cataclysms and their taste for fantasy had attenuated the impression of terror and driven the survivors to treat the matter as a joke. People out there use “nevermore” ironically. So the need for artistic reaction was not as violent as it was in France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Spain and England. Le Braz’s book had little success in translation, nothing being more distant from the American temperament and spirit than the Breton temperament and spirit. The United States has replaced the phantom by the medium and the table-turning spiritualist, once and for all.
In England, by contrast, La Légende de la Mort, skillfully translated, caused the appearance of a constellation of dramatic authors, of a richness and variety almost equal to that of the Elizabethan period. All of them took some inspiration from aphanasia, and mingled it with adventures and songs of the sea, the colonies, and the open sky, teeming with veritable birdsong. Neither in music nor in sculpture was anything extraordinary observed, or even merely original. Nevertheless, the Scottish painter Southbridge discovered and applied a new color, nap, intermediate between the pale green of napusified negroes and Havana brown, which he employed to represent the London sky during the most tragic bombardments of the Archimedes. That pictorial conjunction of the two scourges was so much appreciated that Southbridge became an overnight success.
As for the dramatic authors, the most famous—I might even say the most illustrious—of the group was Charles Esbott, who, without making any sacrifice to the baroque, was able to combine irony and emotion in an exquisite and expansive measure, which is generally the privilege of the Latin masters. Without it being possible to equal Shakespeare, the highest and inaccessible summit of the stage, along with Molière, of all countries and all times, one finds in him the mixture of the Celtic and the Latin, the unlimited choice of subject-matter, the complex and brilliant subtexts, and the sure rhythm of dialogue that ensure permanence.
As Shakespeare drew from Scottish and Italian chronicles, from Plutarch, Montaigne, Bandello and others, the substance that, revised by him, would create an imaginative world, so Esbott drew from the work of Le Braz a new type of society, intermediary between reality and dream. He plays with fairies and angels, and thus enchants the earthly sojourn. In replacing us once again with a forward-looking viewpoint projected back in time and equilibrating anticipation, one may wonder what ulterior darkness will be remedied by a ray of light like Charles Esbott.
The German storm, although it had not lasted long on this occasion, had rendered Germany aspirational and porous. During the tacit armistice—for hostilities were never officially suspended—it imbibed Le Braz, translated by Hermann Körper, to the point of extracting a metaphysics from him. It is through metaphysics that the ponderous ingenuity of that belliferous race is exhausted, slicing meaty masses of treatises and dissertations with a sword, as far as the eye can see. That it is a nation of blatant lies can be seen merely by reading Kant, who denies the universal adequation of thought and sense. On that trumpery it has edified a system that turns the world upside down and unleashes chronic war in the name of eternal peace.
The Gespenstmetaphysik, or phantasmal metaphysics—which cannot be denied a certain rebellious and brutal originality—thus dated and flowed from the resurrection of a bard and folklorist: a Breton-speaking Breton of the twentieth century. There is in the arts something akin to the fertilization of flowers by the insects, as the poets, the prose writers, the painters and the musicians transport the impalpable pollen of beauty, rhythm and intelligence from one genre to another, from one sense to another, from one category of a sense to another—for there is more than one vision and more than one hearing in the same individual—from one epoch to another and from one nation to another.
In Spain, “Brazism,” having become “El Brazio,” acted in a fashion that was no longer direct, but indirect, reanimating the legendary foundations that have created, in all ages, the particular savor of a language simultaneously endowed for external life and mysticism, which shines with the same fire in Saint Theresa and Cervantes.
It was, in sum, in Italy, the most original, coldest, most enterprising and firmest people in twenty-third-century Europe, that the impregnation was weakest, not to say non-existent. There was not even a reaction there, nor what we call, for the sake of brevity, a semen contra. Italian literature and art pursued their particular involution, in the same way that China had its special and national form of Napus.
The brevity of that Renaissance was to be equal to its intensity. In her third volume of verse, it appeared that Marie de Félan had nothing more to say than what she had said, and that she had exhausted her delicate resources.
Jeanne Ronsin, released by the agile demon of sculpture, returned, after eighteen months, comparative embryology.
The pharmacist Lehuppe, having written a sequel of sorts to his Leonardo, or rather, a resuscitation thereof—something one should never do, non bis in idem24—lost his prestige over the young, the middle-aged and the old at the same time and was considered to be a failure and a has-been.
Charles Esbott, after ten years of resounding success, numerous translations and a few meritorious flops, as savorous and fecund as his successes—for they did not result in concessions by the public, or any diminution of enthusiasm—gave up the dramatic art, and writing in general, without anyone knowing why, and devoted himself to trading in cereals and playing tennis. Having retired to Alexandria, warming his bones in the sun, he never offered any explanation or any response to the journalists who harassed him except an invariable: “It (meaning his art) disgusted me, and I left.…”
Southbridge was napusified in the company of his host Ludovic Spague, after a somewhat orgiastic feast to which they had invited a few friends. It was one of the very few recorded cases of double, or twin, aphanasia. The protestant preachers of the neighborhood lost no time in affirming that it as a punishment for their bad conduct and indecent partying—but the most prominent and most eloquent of those preachers was napusified himself shortly afterwards, which lessened the weight of his affirmation.
And what about you and your wife, you ask?
Henriette and I were vigorously touched by that literary, poetic and esthetic epidemic. We dared not admit to one another at first that the cell and its magnetic centers had lost its interest in our eyes since the dawn of our love. That love itself had opened the doors of sensibility and art to our souls, as the aurora opens those of the Orient. Our professors had come to disgust us by virtue of the absolutism of their doctrines, whose ineptitude we suspected or observed. Remorse, a sentiment hitherto unknown, had entered into me after the experiments carried out on the murderer, however execrable, of Sidoine, without my being able to discern whether the said remorse was a consequence of my new internal dispositions or whether it had determined them.
I think, too, that subterranean existence had excited in all of us—the inhabitants of Underground 7, that is—a voluptuous appetite for light, which the most focused and disinterested science could not satisfy. The best-equipped and the best-oriented laboratory remained a penumbra, whereas a simple distich of Virgil or Horace literally inundated us with light—not to mention a painting by Rembrandt!
