The Ark Read online

  The Ark

  by

  André Arnyvelde

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  THE KING OF GALADE 15

  THE ARK 157

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 334

  Introduction

  This is the first of two volumes containing translations of all four of the original novels that André Arnyvelde published during his lifetime. Although each of the four is complete in itself, the four narratives form a coherent sequence tracking a single theme, and they gain considerable interest from being read as a set, in the order of their composition. This first volume contains the first two, Le Roi de Galade, conte bleu (1910), here translated as “The King of Galade; a Fantastic Story” and L’Arche (1920), here translated as “The Ark.” The second, entitled The Mutilated Bacchus,1 contains the other two, Le Bacchus mutilé (1922), translated as “The Mutilated Bacchus,” and On demande un homme... ou L’Étrange tournoi d’amour (1924), translated as “Man Wanted; or, The Strange Tournament of Love.”

  “André Arnyvelde” was the anagrammatic pseudonym of André Lévy, who was born in Paris in November 1881. He completed his education at the Collège Saint-Barbe, whose alumni included Gustave Eiffel, Alfred Dreyfus, the socialist leader Jean Jaurès and Louis Blériot. Already committed to literature before that completion, he then hung around with young writers of the Symbolist school, including Guillaume Apollinaire, and lived a conventionally unconventional Bohemian existence for a while, doing odd jobs, singing in Montmartre cafés, and writing for the radical press, as well as poetry, until he achieved a strange celebrity in 1902, at the age of twenty. Having written a comedy in verse, La Courtisane [The Courtesan], he submitted it to Jules Clarétie, the director of the Comédie Française—a gesture of bravado and seemingly-impossible ambition. Improbably, however, Clarétie accepted the play immediately after having read it, and the publicity generated by that decision made Arnyvelde suddenly famous within the Parisian literary community.

  The text of L’Arche—whose autobiographical sections are deliberately vague but undoubtedly accurate—describes what happened next in a harrowingly ironic fashion, as the author, entirely in the grip of the conviction of his own genius, was interrupted in his quest to express that genius by his compulsory military service, which rudely shattered many of the illusions that he had sustained at Sainte-Barbe and in Montmartre, but only enhanced his determination to produce a world-changing work, for which purpose he isolated himself in Ascain, in the far south-west of France, thinking that solitude would enable him to gather and organize his ideas. It did not—and time dragged by while he suffered a massive writer’s block, which was brought to a deeply humiliating conclusion when Clarétie finally got around to staging La Courtisane, four years after accepting it. It turned out, in spite of all the pent-up expectation, to be a resounding flop, was assassinated by the critics, and closed after five performances.

  Arnyvelde picked himself up from that disappointment, throwing himself ardently into a career in journalism, with enormous determination, and soon became enormously prolific, writing for a wide range of periodicals on every subject under the sun, including all the arts and sciences as well as politics and current events. His interviews are still a rich source for contemporary historians, his interviewees including Marcel Proust, Claude Monet, Filippo Marinetti, Edmond Rostand, Colette and Jean Giraudoux. The interview with Marinetti followed a futurist exhibition in Paris on which Arnyvelde reported enthusiastically, unsurprisingly, given that the ideas expressed in the 1909 Futurist Manifesto—translated into French a fortnight after its first appearance and published in Le Figaro, one of the many papers for which Arnyvelde worked—dovetailed reasonably well with his own ideas about the new ways of seeing permitted, and perhaps demanded, by modern knowledge and the dynamism of modern life.

  Arnyvelde continued writing for the theater as a sideline, sometimes writing librettos for musical compositions by his younger brother Michel-Maurice Lévy (1883-1965), who used his own name on more serious works, including the opera Psyché (1910), but wrote more frivolous material, including operettas and comic songs, under the pseudonym Bétove. The most successful of Arnyvelde’s later plays was the drama L’Autre nuit [The Other Night] (1921). Eventually, he was also to do a good deal of writing for the cinema, too, but that was never the principal focus of his literary endeavor, or at least the fraction of it in which he strove to develop his own philosophy of life and his own prospectus for the future. That quest, and its personal development, was committed to his four novels, which are partly an attempt to popularize his ideas and partly an attempt to work them out in more detail and weigh them more carefully. Their propagandist purpose is continually undermined by the difficulties he had in the latter task, which became more intense as the quest went on, not only because of the difficulty of the ideas themselves but because an interval of severe disenchantment suffered after he returned home from active service in the Great War seems to have temporarily obliterated his faith and conviction.

  The ultimate result of that tangled agenda was to produce a unique document of personal hope, desire, anguish and desperation, in which the four texts form a somewhat tormented but deeply fascinating ensemble. There is a singular irony, perhaps extending to paradox, in the fact that such anguish—visible in the first and second texts, although it does not reach its crisis until the end of the third—was generated and fuelled by an obsession with joy, that being the central theme and analytical focus of the series.

  In order to understand Arnyvelde’s particular obsession with the idea of joy, it is useful to consider not only the kinship of his ideas with Marinetti’s futurist manifesto but also the roots it has in the ideas of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Although the novels only mention Nietzsche obliquely—L’Arche only refers to his notion of “the will to power” in passing, and no comment is added to the fact that his portrait is one of the iconic in-ups in room where the protagonist of Le Bacchus mutilé reaches a key turning-point in his life—there are continual subtle echoes not only of Nietzsche’s notion of the advent of the übermensch but also the arguments employed in his castigation of Christianity as an essentially “life-denying” philosophy.

  As the passage in L’Arche points out, Nietzsche’s notion of the “will to power” is a sequential development of Arthur Schopenhauer’s notions of “will and idea,” and Arnyvelde’s vocabulary of joy is partly an attempt to substitute for awkward feature of the earlier terms that lent them, especially in translation, to misinterpretation. Put very crudely, Schopenhauer’s argument is that the world is full of evils and misfortunes that make the success of all human endeavor highly improbable, but that humans are sustained in their struggle against the odds by a fundamental blind and unconscious “will to survive”—a phrase that is slightly unfortunate, in that “will” usually refers to conscious determination and its use thus tends to obscure the fact that Schopenhauer is referring to something that is essentially and by definition unconscious.

  Schopenhauer observes that the blind urging of the “will to survive,” which, by virtue of the calculus of probability, produces far more failures than successes as humans struggle against the vicissitudes of life, engenders numerous problems for consciousness, which inevitably finds the resultant anguish problematic and seeks a solution ardently. Schopenhauer’s suggested solution is that humans ought to strive to substitute the force of a sighted conscious “idea” for that of the blind unconscious will, which can not only provide them with an objective in life but a reason to pursue it. His specification of that “idea” is vague, to say the least, but he is fairly
certain that the best model of it that we have is the creative fervor at the heart of endeavor in the arts and sciences.

  Nietzsche took up his predecessor’s idea of “idea,” attempting not only to make it more distinct but to make it much more positive, as a recreation of human being itself, and a quest for a psychological transcendence of the essentially troubled human condition, and the anguish inflicted upon it by the probabilistic miscalculations of the unconscious “will.” That quest he labeled “the will to power,” thus further compounding the confusions inherent in Schopenhauer’s stretching of the meaning of the term “will”—something to which the German language is presumably more hospitable than French or English.

  The crusade that Arnyvelde found at the age of twenty and took up with such fervor was that same quest for psychological transcendence, but, being unsurprisingly unsympathetic—at least to begin with—to the terminology employed by his philosophical forbears, he found a new label for it, defining his notion of the quest to transcend the iniquities of the human condition as a quest for joy—or, rather, Joy, because what he means by the term is, by definition, a transcendent kind of joy ampler, nobler and more rewarding than the relatively trivial and petty things that we normally think of as “enjoyments”: eating, drinking, playing and—most significantly and most problematically—sexual intercourse.

  Nineteenth century philosophers were, of course, by no means the first thinkers to observe the iniquitous features of the human condition, or to seek psychological solutions to it. Religions had long been in the business of that supply, followed, usually in a docile fashion but sometimes in a spirit of opposition, by litterateurs. Some of the former, including Christianity, and most of the latter, had come up with a solution not dissimilar to Arnyvelde’s, although they rarely called it joy or Joy, generally preferring love or Love, routinely emphasizing that what they meant by the latter was a kind of Love ampler and nobler than the everyday kinds of love—most significantly and most problematically, sexual love.

  Arnyvelde, like many predecessors among philosophers, litterateurs and even religionists, thought that there was something direly askew, not to say perverted, about the attitudes of the Christian Churches to love (ideas arguably very far from those of Christ himself). That was one of the reasons why he thought that a new idea of Joy and the means of attaining it was direly needed. The other was that he was convinced that the new ways of seeing, experiencing and living permitted by modern science and modern life had opened up a path to the practical attainment of transcendent Joy, which had never been available before, but of which the vast majority of people were unaware, precisely because it had never been available before, and they were still stuck in the old ruts. In his four novels, he set out to post signposts to that pathway, and to explore it himself in experimental thought while doing so.

  Le Roi de Galade follows in the great Voltairean tradition of French contes philosophiques by adopting a fantastic standpoint in order to look back at reality and see it more panoramically, more objectively and—hopefully—more clearly. It describes itself as a conte bleu—a label generally used in France to describe what are generally known in English as “fairy tales”—not because it is full of supernatural devices, but simply to avoid the bother of having issues of crude probability hamper the necessities of the narrative. With an unusual bluntness, the text actually cites that literary license on two of the occasions that it is employed. Like Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, the eponymous hero emerges from his idyllic homeland to explore the world and investigate its wonders and vicissitudes, but the “happy valley” of Galade is much more elaborately described than the one from which Rasselas came, being equipped with an elaborate history, and its happiness is carefully qualified, its limitations mapped out like the seemingly-insurmountable mountains that surround it. The world outside is not mapped so elaborately, partly because the reader is assumed to be familiar with it already, but mostly because it is so much more complex that a full elaboration would be impractical, but it is subjected to appropriately fervent analysis as the naïve king discovers its wonders first, and then—rather horribly—its iniquities.

  The story is relatively straightforward until it reaches its climax, which is exceptional not only for the fervor that the author was able to put into its strident crescendo, but also the manner in which an abrupt sidestep permits that very fervor to be subjected to scrupulous skeptical criticism, weighed and, if not exactly found wanting, at least found in need of further thought. It is traditional for contes bleus to reach closure, whether the closure in question takes the form of “and they lived happily ever after” or “we have to go work in the garden,” but Arnyvelde, while conscientiously making both suggestions, leaves no doubt that they can only be beginnings and not endings, and that the problems raised by the story have been deferred rather than solved.

  The first to be published of the works in which he took up the theme again was composed in circumstances that might be considered the ultimate challenge to any philosophy of Joy, but that only made his attempt to take such a philosophy to its ultimate extreme more interesting, more heroic, and, as it turned out, more fervent. The text of L’Arche takes the trouble to make it abundantly clear that the novel was begun shortly after the author was conscripted during the Great War and was eventually finished—when the fragments composed during the war were collated, and perhaps smoothed over—after he was demobilized in 1919. It is not the Great Work that Arnyvelde had tried unsuccessfully to pen in the early years of the century, but it certainly attempts to substitute for it, and there is no doubt that, although it is a deliberately extravagant visionary fantasy, he took its fundamental arguments very seriously.

  The substance of the vision experienced by the narrator of L’Arche—Arnyvelde himself, although the circumstances of the real Arnyvelde’s own vision are simplified and stylized for the literary purposes of the novel—is a dramatic expansion of ideas introduced in Le Roi de Galade, repeating many of the same key images, sometimes placing them in the actual autobiographical context at which the earlier novel only hinted. The narrative is framed as a letter to the author’s wife, whom he had married not long before the war began, the radical feminist and pacifist poet Henriette Sauret (1890-1976). Obviously, it is not an actual letter, although the first few pages might have begun that way, but he presumably did send her sections of the work as it progressed, and the text always retains an awareness that she is its first, though certainly not its only, addressee. The title of the work is derived from the notion that the writing of the text was planned to constitute a kind of psychological Ark to carry the author through the figurative Deluge of the war, permitting him—so long as he avoids being killed—to endure the devastation of his personal happy valley and the greater world constituted by the conflict.

  It is worth noting in that context that the word arche has two meanings in French, signifying “arch” as well as “ark.” Although the opening of the novel leaves no doubt that, as a title, it means Ark, the word is used at another point in the text in a context that makes it perfectly clear that it is there to be construed as “arch.” That ambiguity extends much further when the central motif of the story is introduced, under the improvised label arcandre—a term that I have left as it appears in the original rather than subjecting it to any transcription. Its Greek roots encourage the term to be construed as “arch-human,” or “superhuman,” and there is some reason to suspect that the author intended it as a more accurate translation of the German übermensch than the surhomme used in the standard French translation of Nietzsche, but the arcandre is by no means a straightforward depiction of the new being to whose advent Nietzsche’s Zarathustra looked forward. The name could, in fact, be construed as “arch-human” in all three of the common significances of the English “arch”—ultra-, over and bridge—and also, in a sense peculiar to the novel, as ark-human, in that it is the vision of the arcandre, rather than the original amorous ark that the narrator initially intended to construct
, that actually helped to bring the author through the war. L’Arche was by no means the only novel written by a soldier on active duty during the Great War, nor was it the only one written partly as a psychological crutch to sustain the soldier in question through dark hours, but there is no other Ark of that sort as self-conscious or as far-reaching as Arnyvelde’s.

  L’Arche seems far more conclusive, in a purely literary sense, than Le Roi de Galade, but that is because the end of the Great War really did present itself—falsely—as one of history’s great conclusions, which would have to be followed by a new world because the old one was dead: a new world, therefore, in which a general discovery of Arnyvelde’s path to Joy, and a willingness to follow it, might be more feasible than it had been in 1910. With the aid of historical hindsight, we know that things did not turn out that way, and that the abject failure of the post-war world to escape the toils of the old one were tragic in every possible way. That same hindsight informs us of the rapid disillusionment of the people who had lived through the war and had come out of it hoping for a new beginning, and the most powerful information of that disillusionment is contained in novels written, especially but by no means exclusively in France, in the early 1920s. Le Bacchus mutilé turned out, perhaps expectably, to be one of the most extreme expressions of that anguished disillusionment, and perhaps the most anguished of them all, but that, too, was not the end of the story.

  The story of that disillusionment and its aftermath will, inevitably, be taken up in the commentary attached to the second volume in this series, but it is worth noting here that Arnyvelde also continued to express and explore his notion of Joy in some of the articles he penned in the twenties and thirties, and that the metaphysical theses of the novel were eventually summarized in “Introduction à la métaphysique d’un deuxième univers” [Introduction to the Metaphysics of a Second Universe] (1939 in the Mercure de France), which was apparently based on previous non-fictional explorations, some dating all the way back to the early 1900s, which he had never managed to publish. Some of the many scientific articles he produced for periodicals had a futurological twist, and he published at least one further item of far-reaching roman scientifique once the sequence of four novels was complete in “Dix siècles de progrès médicaux, ou Le Triomphe du docteur Knock” [Ten Centuries of Medical Progress, or Dr. Knock’s Triumph”] in the special “Thirtieth Century” Christmas 1933 issue of Le Revue Mondiale.