REVIEW-ARTICLES
- Daniel
Gerould. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Science Fiction
(Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Tomorrow's Eve. Trans. & Ed.
by Robert M. Adams)
- Herbert Sussman. Victorian Science
Fiction (Darko Suvin. Victorian Science Fiction
in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power)
- Donald Watson. Doomsday--And Beyond
(W. Warren Wagar. Terminal Visions: The
Literature of Last Things; Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, & Joseph D.
Olander, eds. The End of the World)
BOOKS IN REVIEW
- Science
Fiction and Philosophy (Robert E. Myers, ed. The
Intersection of Science Fiction and Philosophy. Critical Studies) (John Fekete)
- The
Mechanical God (Thomas P. Dunn & Richard D. Erlich, eds. The
Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction) (Patrick A. McCarthy)
- Entertaining
Science (Amit Goswami, with Maggie Goswami. The Chronic
Dancers: Exploring the Physics of Science Fiction) (Charles Elkins)
- Griffin
and Wingrove on Aldiss (Casey Fredericks)
- Urania's
Daughters (Roger C. Schlobin. Urania's Daughters: A
Checklist of Women Science-Fiction Writers, 1692-1982) (Susan L. Nickerson)
- Female
Protagonists (Betty King. Women The Future: The
Female Main Character in Science Fiction) (Linda Leith)
- Pop.
Lit. Crit. (Tom Staicar, ed. Critical
Encounters II: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction) (Linda Leith)
REVIEW-ARTICLES
Daniel Gerould
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Science Fiction
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Tomorrow's
Eve. Trans. & Ed. by Robert M. Adams.
Urbana, IL: Illinois UP, 1982. 222 pp. $17.95.
Count Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1828-89), an impoverished French aristocrat and disabused late romantic living in an age of positivism and
technology, is best known for his grandiose symbolist drama, Axel. But he is also
the author of many fantastic and macabre stories (collectively titled Cruel Tales),
several of which can be considered SF in that they provide a supposedly scientific basis
for imaginary inventions, and also of a full-fledged SF novel, Tomorrow's Eve, about
the fabrication of an ideal female android. Largely a cult figure until recently, Villiers
has been rediscovered in France by a new generation of readers as a result of the
popularity of fantastic literature and its intensive study by modern scholars who no
longer regard it as marginal and out of the main stream.
Acclaimed by some as Villiers' masterpiece (the author himself called it his Don
Quixote that would make his name and avenge his neglect at the hands of the critics),
Tomorrow's Eve has been reprinted in France in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and in
the present edition appears for the first time in English translation. It is now possible
to place this major work within the SF tradition and to appreciate its originality.
Written between 1877 and 1879, appearing in periodical form in 1880, and published in
final version in 1886, this strange and fascinating novel is remarkably contemporary in
its sardonic tone and skeptical sensibility, despite its slow pace and ornate, overblown
manner of presentation. Viewed as a total structure, Tomorrow's Eve conforms to a
familiar SF pattern in stories of man-made creatures: that of the creator who loses
control of his creation--in this case, happily so, since the android acquires a soul from
contact with mystical powers from beyond. But philosophical discourse, not plot, dominates
the novel, and Villiers ironically twists the basic story of the creation of the android,
renders it equivocal, and adds layer upon layer of parodistic dimension in his exploration
of what for him is of prime importance: the problem of how we perceive the material world
and how we represent it, given the newly discovered technical means of recording,
reproduction, and duplication. Epistemological questions about the limits of our ability
to know reality come to obsess the twin protagonists of the novel, representing opposite
sides of the human psyche: the rationalistic and the spiritual. Since illusion ultimately
proves to be indistinguishable from reality, the solution to the dilemma proposed by
Villiers in Tomorrow's Eve through his two alter-egos is to will one's own
superior illusion and impose it on the world as a subjective reality, with the aid of
modern technological artifice. Such radical solipsism can be sustained on Earth only
briefly; because the Ideal cannot co-exist with reality, death becomes the sole realm
where the dualities of spirit and matter are to be resolved.
As the novel opens, Lord Celian Ewald--a wealthy, handsome, 27-year-old English
nobleman--is ready to blow his brains out because Miss Alicia Clary, the beautiful
actress he loves, has a crass, banal soul that fills him with revulsion and destroys his
desire. Enamored of the absolute and the infinite, Lord Ewald is appalled to discover that
the body of a Venus de Milo can be inhabited by a foolish materialistic bourgeoise who
typifies the soulless mechanical world of the 19th century. This degenerate age does not
repress commonplace sexuality, but denies fulfillment to longings for the transcendent.
Aspiring to the religious and moral beliefs of an earlier time, a fastidious idealist and
esthete like Lord Ewald feels himself an alien in a culture given over to commerce and
rationalism, and seeks a way out--to another world--through suicide.
In New York with his attractive but vacuous fiancée, the English nobleman pays a
farewell visit to his old friend, Thomas Alva Edison, at the inventor's home in Menlo
Park, New Jersey. Learning of the young man's desperate decision, the "Wizard of
Menlo Park" offers to provide Lord Ewald with an Android that will be an exact
replica of Miss Alicia Clary but without her offensively vulgar soul. Spokesman for
scientific pragmatism, the American inventor sets out to demonstrate the superiority of
artifice over nature and the necessity of illusion in the face of an unknowable external
reality.
Inclusion of the historical Edison in the framework of fantasy was Villiers'
masterstroke. It gave the novel topicality when it first appeared. The inventor had moved
to Menlo Park only in 1876, and the following year was made a member of the French Legion
of Honor. Recent inventions, such as the telephone, microphone, and phonograph, figure
prominently in Tomorrow's Eve; and since the principles upon which the Android is
constructed are possible extensions of what has already been discovered, the author is
able to give a scientific rationale for the creation of such a marvelous being and induce
belief in his readers that perhaps it could someday be realized. For this purpose, the
novel has been projected a few years into the future; we are told that Edison is 42,
making the time of the action 1889. Inventions still to come--the loudspeaker and the
cinema (in color and with sound!)--are included among Edison's accomplishments and
described in detail.
It is sometimes said (by Maxim Jakubowski in Anatomy of Wonder, for example)
that Villiers in Tomorrow's Eve was a follower and imitator of Jules Verne. But
if Villiers has a French precursor, it is rather his friend Charles Cros (1842-88),
Bohemian poet and inventor, who in 1869 wrote treatises on the means of communication with
the planets and on color photography, and in the Spring of 1877 submitted a description
of a phonograph to the Academy of Sciences. For his conception of Edison, the author of Tomorrow's
Eve may have drawn upon Cros and his bizarre tale, The Science of Love (1874).
In any case, the inclusion of the historical Edison results in a curious mixture of
fact and fiction that gives the novel its modern sensibility and disturbing resonances.
Combining facetious jokes, erudite digressions, satire, sarcasm, farsighted predictions,
and long Wagnerian arias (Villiers was an early French pilgrim to Bayreuth), Tomorrow's
Eve presents a grotesque and prophetic picture of a commercial culture of mechanical
duplication, deceptive publicity, and manipulated appearances. The tone is at one and the
same time playful, operatic, and ironic. (In Against Nature, Joris-Karl Huysmans,
one of Villiers' first admirers and disciples, refers to his "savage raillery, cruel
jeering, and gloomy jesting" and likens it to Swift's black rage against humanity.)
The crux of the matter lies in Villiers's ambivalent attitude towards Edison, his
technological feats and showmanship, and at the same time in the extremely ambiguous role
that both the "Wizard of Menlo Park" and his magical "science" play in
the novel. Edison, the apostle of reason, the very embodiment of the new, becomes the
agent for reinstating the Ideal, as he himself re-enacts the old religious and cultural
mythologies in modern scientific guise. The rationalistic world-view which has killed the
Absolute now offers to manufacture a perfect replica as a substitute. This is the paradox
at the heart of Tomorrow's Eve and of Villiers' attitude to science.
Doubly dedicated to both dreamers and derriders, Tomorrow's Eve maintains an
unresolved duality in all its aspects. Edison's perfect Android, showing the superiority
of artifice over nature, is praised to the point of mockery, and Lord Ewald's lofty Ideal
of womanhood, which makes him prefer his own imaginings to any living human being, emerges
as an extreme form of narcissism and autoeroticism. As an aristocratic poet, Villiers is
filled with hatred for a scientific-technological age that worships progress and material
success, and yet at the same time he is fascinated by its machines which can copy and
forge with such skill that, in a world of impoverished nature and cheapened feelings, he
is tempted to choose the reign of artfully calculated illusion over that of vulgar
reality.
In his Cruel Tales, Villiers portrays an inauthentic world in which illusion
and artifice are replacing life; genuine emotion no longer exists or has been driven
inward to the realm of solitude and silence. But publicly everything can be brilliantly
staged and given striking shape by simulated words and gestures. The theatre and the
theatricalization of life become images of this process for Villiers, an ardent playgoer
and playwright, who recognized the centrality of the Parisian stage (with its newly
acquired technical means of dazzling illusion) for French social life in the second half
of the 19th century and saw its broad metaphoric implications.
"I hope that there will soon be four or five hundred theatres in every capital,
where the ordinary events of life are acted far better than in reality, so that nobody
will take much trouble any more over living for himself," Villiers declares in one
tale, where the suggestion is made that whenever we feel a strong emotion we should hire
an actor to express it for us. In another story, "The Glory Machine," canned
applause is produced in the theatre by newly perfected automata. In other tales,
advertising slogans are projected into the sky (where heavenly signs and portents once
appeared), and a device is patented for chemical analysis of the final sighs of the dying.
What was formerly the expression of the supernatural will or the individual soul is now
subject to recording and duplication. Since the reality of the phenomenal world is an
illusion, each human being is imprisoned within his or her own consciousness and lonely
dreams; the only communication possible with others is via a limited number of programmed
words and gestures which can be better produced by duplicating machines, actors, or
automata.
Accordingly, it is not inappropriate that Tomorrow's Eve opens with Edison
alone in study, lamenting that it was not possible to record great "noises of the
past" or to recapture for an audio-archive "lost sounds"--such as the sound
of the trumpet at Jericho, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Tidings brought to Mary. He
then thinks how it would have been possible to verify the supernatural happenings in the
Bible if photographs could have been made, for example, of the Deluge taken from the top
of Mount Ararat, or the crossing of the Red Sea (with subsequent issuing of postcards).
These seemingly irrelevant and jocose reflections actually establish Edison's (and
Villiers') primary concern in the novel: the retention, recording, and reproduction of a
"reality" that will always remain uncertain and problematic.
The method by which the Android's speech is produced is an instance of the novel's
concern with the ingenuities of dubbing and doubling. All the words pronounced by the new
Eve are those of her model, Alicia Clary, as she recited the works of the greatest
poets--recorded, recombined, and played back on a golden phonograph in the Android's
chest. When Lord Ewald objects that his ideal love will have only a limited number of
possible responses, Edison points out that "real" conversation is infinitely
more restricted in its narrow circle of clichés.
The novel's recurring theme of replication is carried one step further by the author in
that the old gods, myths, and beliefs--seemingly vanquished by science --are repeated in
new technological modes; even the great poetic works--the Bible, Paradise Lost, and
Faust--become synthesized and replayed. Science is mythologized. Returning from
exile, the occult, otherworldly, and transcendent infiltrate the stronghold of
materialism, where they are re-animated and reinstated. Brandishing a perpetual cigar and
offering his friend lights from strange electrical devices, Edison is a modern Prometheus
attempting to bring humankind freedom. He is also a daring rival of God the father,
proclaiming "Fiat lux" with electricity and creating the new Eve in his
underground laboratory, which is "our lost Eden, rediscovered," in America;
formerly it was a cave used as burial grounds of Algonquin tribes. In this Avernus to
which the questing heroes must descend in a special electrical elevator, there is an
"artificial paradise" with counterfeit vegetation, breezes, flowers, and
birds--some with human voices and laughter--featuring a recorded nightingale's song and a
mechanical hummingbird which can recite all of Hamlet. Here the influence of Verne's Journey
to the Center of the Earth (1864) is discernible, as well as the example of the
bizarre inventions designed for King Ludwig of Bavaria.
Legendary and epic analogues abound, but it is the Faustian theme (so prominent in
fantastic literature) that is the most fully deployed after the fundamental biblical and
Promethean motifs. In the second section of the novel, entitled "The Pact," Lord
Ewald, in pursuit of the absolute, enters into a demonic bargain with Edison, even though
he knows the experiment to be mortally dangerous. But the "Wizard of Menlo Park"
is a white magician, a compassionate modern devil, whose mocking laugh contains all human
sorrows. Edison's creation of the Android, Lord Ewald senses, is a "violent shriek of
despair, " expressing his love for humanity. The heavens are vacant; "on this
stellar speck, lost in a corner of the boundless abyss," Edison is a rebellious angel
using the old forbidden knowledge to fashion solace for man. "Since our gods and our
aspirations are no longer anything but scientific, why shouldn't our loves be so
too?" asks the American inventor.
Daughter of the Zeus-like Edison's mind, the magneto-electric Android (named Hadaly) is
the Ideal made material, corresponding to Lord Ewald's deepest desires, a radiant
priestess and envoy from a land beyond, recalling her lover to heaven.
"Photosculpted" on the body of Alicia Clary, the copy will be more like the
model than the original itself, because reality is mediocre and everchanging, whereas the
Android has the eternal beauty of the dream. The young English lord, who despises the
woman he loves because she is a sphinx without an enigma, merely an ordinary mortal
exuding animal spirits, is anti-human and therefore rabidly anti-woman. The novel's
misogyny is part of its ideological thesis (the triumph of thought over matter) and based
on a hatred of life and of the life-giving. It is significant that Lord Ewald first
experiences true passion for his fiancee in what he imagines to be his last interview with
Alicia Clary, but what is in fact his initial meeting with the Android, who is "a
superlative machine for creating visions" and a consummate actress capable of playing
many different women. In her he finds his own soul reduplicated.
Villiers' future Eve would seem to anticipate the Dadaist bachelor machines and
mechanical brides, if it were not for the fact that she is utterly chaste and serves to
neutralize any low and degrading desires that her lover might have had for the original
living model. The only women whom Lord Ewald can accept are martyrs and consolers, and it
is essential that the Android will remain an eternal virgin. In this, the future Eve
resembles the second Eve, Mary. In all the detailed technical discussion of the
construction and functioning of the Android, there is never any mention of sexual organs.
The novel is concerned with reproduction as replication by artificial (that is to say,
artful and artistic) means, but turns its back on reproduction as procreation, which is
natural and life-continuing. Tomorrow's Eve moves relentlessly towards
renunciation of all that is earthly--and finally of life itself.
Through telepathic communication and psychic current from a mysterious being, the
Android acquires a supernatural essence. "A soul which is unknown to me has passed
over my work," Edison is forced to admit. The secret voice of Sowana, a consoling
woman who has suffered greatly and become a spiritual medium of thought transmission, has
guided the "Wizard of Menlo Park" and now directs the Android on her
transcendent journey. Edison, who starts the novel as a ruthless and pragmatic technician,
is revealed to be a creative artist and the director of a theatrum mundi controlled
by higher powers.
Since the ability of mind to rise above matter and of consciousness to mold reality is
transient, and perhaps itself an illusion, Lord Ewald's desire for union with the absolute
can be accomplished only in death. Thus the novel moves to an ironically tragic
denouement. Resolving to live in happy isolation with Hadaly on his ancestral estate, the
young lord has his Android bride shipped to England in a large crate--after she has first
climbed into the black ebony coffin, lined with black satin, in which she travels
(ominously recalling tales of vampires), and then been disconnected. Edison packs the
instruction manual in the coffin, telling Lord Ewald how his new Eve is to be activated by
manipulating the rings on her fingers, to be fed on special pills, and to have her joints
oiled once a month with an extract of roses.
During the crossing of the Atlantic on the liner Wonderful, a storm strikes
and fire breaks out in the hold--the Promethean flame now turned destructive. Despite the
young lord's superhuman efforts to reach his love, the Android is immolated as on a
funeral pyre; and when the ship goes down, she sinks back into the non-being of the
waters. The natural elements express their fury after being downgraded in favor of the
artificial; the Deluge is come again, in vengeance for Edison's challenge of the deity.
The despairing English nobleman is forcibly saved against his will, whereas the real
Alicia Clary, coincidentally on the same voyage, drowns when her lifeboat overturns. From
his castle in England, Lord Ewald telegraphs Edison a few final words before blowing his
brains out (as he had originally intended at the start of the novel). Tomorrow's Eve ends
with a Wagnerian Liebestod in which love is linked to death; only suicide enables
one to rise superior to a detestable world where life is inherently vile. (The poet Paul
Verlaine called the catastrophe devastating in that a soul is forever annihilated and
Edison, its creator, crushed. Noting that when Villiers died in 1889 [the year the novel
takes place], the real Edison was in Paris, Verlaine wonders if the American inventor was
aware that he was the hero of such a splendid symbolic work.)
Epic in its ambitions, Villiers' novel has been called the French Faust. In
the chapter on "Robots and Humans" in his theoretical study Futurology and
the Fantastic, Stanislaw Lem makes a somewhat less favorable estimate. He judges Tomorrow's
Eve as proto-SF, touchingly anachronistic in its naive technical descriptions of the
mechanism of the Android (lacking even any indication of how her sight functions) and
inept in its inadequately justified attribution of a soul to Hadaly, but farsighted in its
satiric analysis of linguistic cliches, which anticipates the plays of Ionesco. The Soviet
critic, N. Rykova, on the other hand, considers Tomorrow's Eve as an SF utopian
fantasy which by the end--given Villiers' belief in the power of the dream--becomes
transformed into a fairy tale, but nonetheless remains prophetic in its exploration of the
motif of the automaton that acquires independent existence and free will. Here the Soviet
writer sees a bond between Villiers' work and modern SF; indeed, he compares it to Lem's Solaris,
where the heroine created by powers unknown to man has more than a little in common
with the Android Hadaly.
We have reason to be grateful to Robert Martin Adams, who has made Tomorrow's Eve available
in an excellent English translation, to which he has provided a lucid and informative
introduction about Villiers. My only quarrel is with Adams's rendering of the title, which
I believe would be both more accurate and resonant as The Future Eve.
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