The Napus, page 4
As a member of the Aristotle Foundation I easily acquired from the municipal council the placement of a marble plaque at the location of the first case of the Napus officially recorded, with the date 3 May 2227. It was a historic and scientific souvenir of the first order. When it came to the inauguration of the plaque the following July, however, there was a superstitious retreat. I solicited, successively, the Ministries, the Constitutional Bodies, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie Française and the Académie de Médecine, but in vain. Everyone found a pretext to refuse me his collaboration, and I foresaw the moment when I would have to conduct the ceremony on my own, with the groundskeeper and the man with the lifting-tackle. At the last moment, however, a few highly-placed individuals, fearful of ridicule, changed their minds, including an immortal by the name of Bachelard, who had written a small treatise on the metaphysical significance of “the Disease.” A podium had been set up on the very place where the little girl had pronounced the famous phrase: “a grand pé a pati, n’a pus.” I had ordered a brass band, which was to play one of those military marches of which we Polyplasts are so fond.
Then something implausible happened: at the moment when Bachelard, dressed in green like a giant frog, unfolded his notes and opened his mouth to begin his speech, a dry click was heard…and the Academician disappeared.
“Impossible to show more tact,” said the lovely Tastepain, who had lost a fiancé the same way a few months earlier. The discovery of a fifth magnetic center in the cell had rapidly consoled her.
I like Catholic Theology a lot. It is the only science that does not vary and its centuries-old subtlety puts to shame the sketchiness of the other research to which our intelligence has devoted itself. The rumor went around that the appearance of the Disease, which no mystic had foreseen, disconcerted the austere and religious scientists who had saved—once again—humanism and civilization two hundred years before. Not trusting the rumor-mongers, who are the dust, and then the mud, of life in society, I resolved to clarify the matter.
I went to see Père Estève in his convent at Richefort in the Cévennes. The great Benedictine received me with his customary generosity and affability. He knew nothing about the Napus except what he had read in the newspapers. None of his monks had disappeared—but had such an event occurred, it would not have caused him any more emotion than a death with remains.
“Death, my dear boy, is still death, and if Providence has decided that this new form of cessation of life should exist, it’s evidently for our greater good.”
“But Father, one can be surprised by the Napus outside of a state of contrition.”
“It’s the same with any kind of sudden death. As for the absence of remains, that might either be an artifice of the Demon or a privilege of Providence, and it won’t be long before theologians and synods can issue a reasoned opinion on that delicate point. But tell me what effect this unexpected event is producing on the Century, and how it is being taken and accepted by the frivolous and by scientists?”
I told him what I knew. Père Estève did not know the origin of the word “Napus.” He laughed wholeheartedly on learning it, and made the remark that once again, an innocent child had been the first witness of the prodigy. “For it is indeed a prodigy, which might lead to extraordinary changes. I can’t remember any similar upheaval of ideas or habits. But tell me, my boy, what impression you felt before that extraordinary annihilation, comparable to the extinction of a fire?”
I was obliged to confess that the impression had been primarily comical, and that the majority of Polyplasts had reacted and were reacting to the Napus in the same way. The issue of successive interbreedings, and destined, in the ideas of the legislators, to propagate the ideas of peace and humanism through our shaky societies of the twenty-third century, our reaction had been the inverse of the one expected of us. The complexity of our temperaments had given one of them—the national—sway over the others, and reinforced the warrior instinct. Under the cover of pure science, we were dreaming of domination and battles, and that psychological inclination combined with the economic and industrial inclination that pushes ever harder for the intensive manufacture of improved arms, gases, heavy artillery, electrical weapons, and so on.
While I was speaking, Père Estève shook his head, doubtless ruminating the words of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.…”
2. Joseph Görres (1776-1848) was a leading member of the German Romantic Movement whose activities as a journalist made him a leading critic of Napoléon, who thought his Der Rheinische Merkur a particularly significant ideological enemy. He also became a significant Catholic mystic, publishing a five-volume account of Christliche Mystik between 1836 and 1842.
3. The prophetic quatrains published by Nostradamus in 1555 and divided into ten “centuries” were greatly elaborated after his death, although most fakes did at least observe the four-line format that is neglected here. In the same way, the most famous set of prophecies credited—falsely—to a twelfth-century monk were attributed to the Irish Saint Malachy, not to a “Moldavian” (Moldavia had not yet come into existence at that time), so Daudet appears to be deliberately playing up the falsity of the entire prophetic tradition.
4. Various characters of this name featured in French literature trace their origin back to one of the stock figures of the Théâtre du Guignol de Lyon, a marionette theater related ancestrally to the Italian commedia dell’arte and in terms of its descendants to British “Punch and Judy” shows. The word “sarsifie,” approximately equivalent to the English slang term “sauce” [pugnacious impertinence] was invented to describe the particular character of his irreverence.
5. Grégeois-la-Grège translates as “raw Greek fire.”
6. Élie Metchnikoff was a leading researcher at the Institut Pasteur, who received the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his studies of the immune system and the activity of phagocytes. The scornfully sarcastic reference is presumably to his commercial promotion of an ointment of calomel (mercury chloride) as a prophylactic against syphilis. The use of mercury to treat syphilis—which, if it ever worked at all, was severely undermined in its utility by horrid side-effects—fell into disuse after the discovery of better antibacterial treatments, eventually capped by antibiotics.
CHAPTER TWO
THE FORCE OF IMAGES
It was about the year 2100 that popular libraries of “cinetexts” or “cinebooks” with moving images were established. Immediately before that era, a certain number of scientists, notably in Japan, had attracted attention to the psychopathic modifications made to the human mind, particularly in young people, by the immoderate usage of the old cinema. It is alleged today that the toxicity of high doses of alcohol, opium and peyotl—and, in general, all substances capable of poisoning the intelligence, vision or will, as well as hearing and touch—involved the uncoordinated release of images. Each of them, in fact, has an organic and cellular respondent; and the state of judgment and reason, which is that of the equilibrium and order of images, is also that of the health of our tissues. In the same way, the state of disequilibrium or of unreason, raging from simple light-headedness and the partial collapse of common sense to characteristic alienation, has its physical correspondences and symptoms.
What is an internal image? It is a phantom, or, more exactly, a fragment of a hereditary phantom, of that which we call a personimage.7 Do we not say that we “evoke” an image, just as we say that one “evokes” a phantom? Whether it comes from within, from the depths of ancestral memory, or from without, an image is never indifferent, but it is much more active when it is artificially provoked.
Desirous of taking account of the influence of the cinebook on our organism and evaluating the thesis of Professor Eustache, I went to the municipal library during the initial ravages of the Napus and asked for two works: the account of the battle of the Marne in 1914 by Dominé, with moving illustrations by Courtille, which is a masterpiece of that particular genre and whose establishment in 2200 required the expenditure of three million francs; and the cinebook of Shakespeare’s Othello featuring Cawfort and Helen Harvey. I will tell you now what I experienced, and what any individual, even a Polyplast, handling those two admirable successes of cinetypography, would doubtless have experienced too.
The first moving image in Dominé’s classic work represents an episode, reconstituted in bookish film, of the famous retreat of Charleroi, when the French armies recoiled, harried by the German troops. There is a long file of infantrymen, artillerymen, field pieces, ammunition boxes and wagons, in the landscapes of the Pas-de-Calais, the Somme and the Oise, which have obviously not changed since the last Franco-German War, and which have recovered their ancient character after so many devastations. There is the same life, the same confused, tragic, ingenious life of the retreat and its alarms.
There results, in the spectators of all these faces and horizons, an exaltation that cannot be procured in any fashion by the immobile illustrations of old, which now seem like dead things, desiccated leaved, regardless of the artistry of the illustrator. When one thinks that even the prints and etchings of a Rembrandt have taken on a cadaverous aspect!
Yes, but when five or six animated plates have passed successively before my eyes, nervous fatigue intervenes, an oculo-cerebral fatigue of a particular quality, in which it seems that the entire intellectual system is impoverished by the articulation or conjunction of the illustration and that which it invokes. The mental depression is the same as that of a runner who, having prepared for a jump of several meters, has only to surpass sixty centimeters in one bound. That is because the illusion increasingly ceases to deceive us as it becomes stronger.
If such an impression grips me, habituated as I am by science and the laboratory to resist all kinds of shocks, what must it be like for simple folk, or people who are young, and therefore excitable and malleable! There is nothing extraordinary in the fact that after some four generations—from 2100 to 2227—these defects of personality have led to an internal corrosion, susceptible to degenerate into aphanasia, or death without remains, if one adds to it the effects of electromagnetic wear and tear alleged in parallel by Sidoine.
With regard to the cinetext of Shakespeare’s Othello, the fatigue or nervous corrosion procured by the contemplation and mediation of that fine work is of a more complex type, doubtless even more redoubtable. In fact, the convoluted composition that is characteristic of Shakespearean genius had embodied in the settings and dialogue of that celebrated drama passionate seeds that had not borne all their flowers and fruits until the moment when the art of the cinetextualist permitted them to develop.
There is no doubt in my mind, especially since the mental shock of recent events, that the acting, already so subtle, of Cawfort and Helen Harvey is further multiplied in efficiency and depth by the transposition of their attitudes and physiognomies into the films of animated illustration. We grasp all the perfidy of Iago, all the voluptuous tenderness of Desdemona, all the roots of the cruel jealousy of the absurd Moor—but that perfection of the rendering, that restitution and renaissance, in our souls, of the overwhelming imaginative labor of Shakespeare—a demon posed at the intersection of centuries and the mysteries that surround us—all raises us to a height where we lose our breath, and from which we fall disabled and exhausted.
In other words, before the invention of moving illustration, the eye only gave the mind a excitation in rapport with its tonus or capacity; instead of which, since the advent of cinetext, the eye informs the mind superabundantly, to the point of making it exceed its limits, which are rather narrow in the common run of mortals, especially in young people and children.
Once again, I grasped the falsity of the principle—which has become a dogma—by virtue of which every scientific advance is necessarily beneficial. Humans have adapted, over the ages, to a certain proportion of ignorance and a certain variation, or variance, of knowledge, which cannot be exceeded without damage, either in one direction or the other. All we terrestrials are, in a certain measure, the barrel of the Danaides; as novelties, complications and so-called progress fill us on one side, we empty on another; and that which flees from us, or through us, is often more important that that which we acquire. Then again, in the domain of acquisition, there may be excess and abuse, even without ulterior particular toxicity, and then it is the mental machine itself that gives way, dragging the corporeal machine with it.
At least, that is my opinion, ripened in the society, or confronted with that, of my colleagues.
While I was at the cinetext library I saw an amorous couple arrive, young and well-matched, doubtless fiancés, who asked for a copy of Manon Lescaut, with the moving engravings of Valruve d’Agen. I pretended to be absorbed in the study of the battle of the Marne, after having returned Othello, the choice of which would have put them on the alert.
In writing his masterpiece long ago, amid a host of unreadable novels, Abbé Prévost had had a multitude of amorous images within him, regulated according to a certain cadence, which, giving the impression of sensual fatality, gave rise to the exquisite merit of his book. Beneath those images, and the words designed to render them sensible, there were others—as in Shakespeare’ Othello—supporting or accompanying them, which the mobile illustrations of Valrive d’Agen render manifest and gripping to us. It is as if the poem of love were enlarged and vivified beyond its written and printed disturbance. That augmentation of a work already beautiful appeared in the gazes of the two lovers, who sometimes contemplated the delicate and nuanced films and sometimes sought one another and exchanged glances charged with a renewed ardor.
I waited curiously to see what would result from such a nervous tension: an abandonment to the excessively intoxicating book, as in Dante’s immortal verses, or a drowsiness, or a quarrel. It was the soporific effect that carried them away. After having looked at four or five figures, which restored for them the burning and bitter life of the inconstant beauty and her cavalier, their faces leaned over the table, doubly radiant by virtue of their features, and what their mutual love added to their features, and they went to sleep in delight beside one another.
The librarian said to me, smiling: “It’s not the first time that’s happened. I certainly won’t wake them up. They’re enjoying the dreams of gold; the dreams of lead will come soon enough.”
I asked him, laughing, if he was personally familiar with all the treasures of his animated library. He gave me this typical reply: “Certainly, when I first came here, I had a great curiosity regarding the cinetextual works of which I heard so much talk, and as soon as library closed—at six o’clock in summer and four o’clock in winter—I took out a book and started the illustrations moving. What delight! But I soon perceived that my pleasure, which sometimes approached happiness—yes, Monsieur—was having a deleterious effect on my health. At night, I dreamed that the figures were dancing once again before my gaze, and by day, they were superimposed on the external spectacle and even upon my humble reflections—I mean those related to my job. Soon my lassitude was such that, after the passage of a vitalized engraving, I remained as if petrified, incapable of closing the library or of preparing my meal. That’s why I stopped.…”
As he pronounced those final words, I heard a little click, similar to the click of a badly-greased lock, which was unmistakable once one’s eardrum had registered it. At the same time, the amorous young man disappeared, as if snatched by avid eternity in the midst of tenderness.
“Oh, oh, oh!” said the librarian, in three different tones, which ranged from surprise to terror.
The young woman woke up, thought that her companion had left her there, in front of the exemplary movement of the perfidious Manon, and went pink with shame—but a pink like the flower. The sparse expression on the face of the worthy librarian gave her no suspicion of an event that she had never experienced before. She got up with an adorable gesture of confusion and simply said, but with an intonation quite different from that of the little girl in the Champs-Élysées: “He’s gone. That’s not polite.…”
At that moment I imagined that she was about to start searching vainly in all possible directions, alarming family and friends, for someone she would never see again; that she would consume her young and delicate existence in the alternation of hope and despair—and thought that it was not permissible for me to conceal from her a truth that the librarian also understood, to judge by his distressed features. The latter, who was not a Polyplast, and thus subject to the dream of destruction, witnessing a Napus for the first time, experienced a disturbance of grimacing form that altered his features in a particular way.
“Mademoiselle,” I said. “I’m Polyplast 17,177 of the Aristotle Foundation. That title, which might not mean anything to you, is that of a biologist specializing in cases of aphanasia, or Napus. Your friend has just disappeared. We witnessed it, this gentleman and myself.”
“Disappeared…?” she said. “But how? And what do you mean by aphanasia, or Napus?”
I was taken aback in my turn; it was difficult for me to conceive that the fuss made about the new plague had not reached the ears of a person who, to all appearances, belonged to an excellent family. The cinetext librarian seemed as astonished as me by that blissful ignorance.
I tried to explain briefly to the poor child what the death without remains was. She doubtless mistook me for a madman, because, in the middle of my explanation, she ran away on her agile legs, leaving behind an odor of carnation and jasmine. It might be that at the time of writing, she is still searching for her gallant canoodler—unless she has found another.
I was preparing to leave the library, but the functionary drew closer to me, as if to impart a confidence. “Since you are from the Aristotle Foundation, Monsieur 17,177, I will confess to you that I would prefer, after what has just happened, to exchange my present uniform for the coat of a technician in your laboratory. It seems to me that I’d be safer. These things attract the lightning.…”
