Edmond Haraucourt (1856–1941)

You are going to die.

Your works will be forgotten.

The human race will vanish.

Those are the primary themes of Haraucourt.

You’d think that he’d be a downer, a slit-your-wrists-after-reading author. Instead, Haraucourt is a delight to read.

He puts the “fun” in “funeral”.

“Immortality: A conte philosophique” is, as the name suggests, not science fiction but philosophy couched in terms of a fantastic story with, apart from the narrator, no distinct characters. It was inspired by show more Haraucourt’s personal experience in not living up to your advance publicity. It wittily assaults the notion that an artist’s creations can provide a sort of metaphorical immortality when real immortality is lacking.

The story opens with the narrator, a writer, on his deathbed. After death, his soul wanders for a while until he is admitted to the Garden of Letters. There he is promised a land of his intellectual peers and freedom from the worldly impotence that is so often the author’s lot. He won’t even had to pretend to blush over compliments. It’s an exclusive club. Writers seeking popular appeal aren’t allowed in. They didn’t follow pure art.

The inhabitants of the Garden act out their creative obsessions. (Haraucourt’s theory was that all great writers have one obsession they return to in varied forms.) Of the talent of the writers we are told “they are full, not of talent but of their own talent.” The story’s gag is that these writers, supposedly indifferent to popular acclaim, are constantly consumed by their reputation back on Earth. They constantly bug newcomers about how their worldly reputations are faring. When they aren’t going well, popular acclaim is despised and the world is full of fools who can’t appreciate them. When their reputation is high, well, that’s the way it should be.

To Haraucourt, no amount of talent will insure figurative immortality. The question of just how talented the narrator of “Immortality” really is doesn’t come up nor does his worldly life of creation.

That’s not the case of “The Madonna” (1890). This is a realistic tale about the futility of artistic obsession – regardless of talent. A talented and unworldly painter works in solitude, but, one day, he sees a young girl going to a well. He becomes obsessed with her, thinks her the embodiment of the Virgin Mary. With her father’s permission, he sketches her. He eventually marries her. All during this time, he sketches her but never captures the quality he seeks. What happens to his final creation is where the tale’s sting is.

“The End of the World” is a doomsday variation on a similar theme as a painter goes off to paint the end of the world. But it is also a well-done piece of social and psychological extrapolation. The multi-part story opens with an exact prediction: the moon will crash into the Earth at an exactly specified time 3,748 years in the future. The story then jumps to a time five years from that predicted end. The frission and drama of extinction has become god for this “atheistic world” Thrift is gone, sexual license abounds.

Creation of the scientific kind is the concern of “Doctor Auguérand’s Discovery (1910). Auguérand has discovered a life extending drug. (It only gives humans back their normal life span which the nervous and sexual strains of modern life have shortened.) It’s cheap, easily made, and he’s is going to turn the secret over to the French government at specified hour.

Chaos ensues. Are the old and rich going to make way for the young and poor? Who will pay their pensions? How is everyone going to get fed? Should the drug be destroyed or distributed? France divides into two parties. Foreign nations think France should be forced to hand over the drug.

Besides giving a plausible set of reactions to such an announcement, Haraucourt avoids two narrative clichés that showed up early on in science fiction tales of inventions. First, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Second, Auguérand is no bad and mad scientist. He is reasonable and up front in his dealings with society. It’s society that goes mad.

The weighing of scientific ethics is also done in “A Christmas Gift” from 1906. Here a horse is given voice by a visit from Father Christmas, but this is no pleasant talking animal story. Father Christmas visits a vivisectionist lab where the horse is being dissected while unanesthetized. The horse relates the horrors the lab to a reporter. The second part of the story is a dialogue between a reporter and Father Christmas with the latter being accused of holding up medical progress by publicizing the horse’s pain.

Two stories of racial and species extinction framed as future histories show up in “A Trip to Paris” (1904) and “The Gorilloid” (1906).

“A Trip to Paris” is set in 6983 with tourists from Oceania visiting a sunken Paris and, on the way, meeting a lighthouse keeper exhibiting atavistic sexual jealousy on the way. We get treated to some bad historical interpretations by the Oceanians which, of course, is an indirect mocking of our attempts at reconstructing the past. We also hear how whites were supplanted by Orientals who were supplanted by blacks. The latter’s triumph enabled by the “religion of Humankind” which supplanted Christianity and aided the eventual victor with unreciprocated notions of charity and pity. Haraucourt actually is rather detailed in his geological extrapolations as well.

“The Gorilloid” is nothing less than the antecedent to Pierre Boulle’s The Planet of the Apes. It’s a long story framed as a gorilla giving a lecture. In this world, ice sheets extend as far south as Africa. Man is extinct – or, at least, it was thought so until an expedition to the Alps found a small group left.

Haraucourt presents a sort of ballistic metaphor for evolution. A specie’s evolution pushes it beyond its natural “limit of development” and further evolution only “accelerates the fatal and inevitable disorganization” of that species. That happened with man. Like all intelligent species, it lived to excess and killed itself.

Professor Sffaty’s description of the morphological evolution of man reminded me of H. G. Wells' essay “The Man of the Year Million” from 1893 on the future of man’s evolution. Human bodies wither with the brain and hands hypertrophied. Mechanization required no more. When geological upheavals changed the environment, man was no more.

“The Antichrist” is the least interesting story of the book. It’s a parodic recapitulation of Christ’s life in Haraucourt’s France. He even re-uses some of the biblical names.

The story that drew me to the book was “The Supreme Conflict” from 1919. Set far in the future when Earth is gripped in a new ice age, many stars have burned out, energy is scarce, and only two groups of humans exist. Both are dependent on machines, have degenerate bodies of huge heads and eyes, and enormous joints. Their societies have no mores, no abstract idea. They are emotionless and egotistical. Haraucourt tells us that when we speak of the barbarism of war, we only mean the methods, not the act. He details the 132 minute war that finally wipes out humanity in the far future. show less