The Martian Epic Read online

  The Martian Epic

  The Titans of the Heavens

  The Agony of the Earth

  by

  Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet

  Translated by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  The work here translated as The Martian Epic, L’épopée martienne, was originally published in Amiens in two volumes, as Les Titans du ciel and L’agonie de la Terre, in 1921 and 1922, by Edgar Malfère. The published versions were the work of Théo Varlet, an author already well-known for his poetry, literary criticism and translations from English, who had previously published short fiction but was making his first excursion into the novel. The works appeared as a collaboration, however, with Varlet’s name in second place because they were based on two previously-written manuscripts by Octave Joncquel, “Les derniers Titans” and “La fin des mondes.”

  Little is known about Joncquel, although an article signed “Alfu” appended to a 1996 reprint of the portmanteau Epic reproduces a colorful description of him recorded by Jean Garel in the Bulletin de la Societé Jules Verne in 1983, which represents him as a well-known “character” in Amiens. Garel describes Joncquel as a “Bohemian,” tall and strong, but also child-like, who dressed strangely and earned a living of sorts by doing odd jobs, especially working as a sandwich-board man. He appears, however, to have been a knowledgeable man and a voracious reader; he thought very highly of Jules Verne, who had once been Amiens’ most famous citizen. Indeed, he may well have relocated to Amiens in honor of Verne, having been a Picard by birth. He seems to have been an enthusiastic lover of the entire genre founded by Verne, which would later be called “science fiction;” his Bohemian affectations extended to writing numerous novels, most, if not all, of a bold sciencefictional stripe, for which he sought in vain for a publisher for many years.

  When Edgar Malfère first set up shop in Amiens, in 1920, Joncquel gave him all his manuscripts, approximately 15 in number, for consideration. Malfère declared them unpublishable, but not uninteresting; he volunteered to look for someone who might be able to knock them into shape. Malfère then gave one of the manuscripts to Théo Varlet, with whom he had previously worked on other projects, and whose short story collection La Bella Venere [the name is that of a boat] (1920) had been one of the first books he issued after moving to Amiens. Varlet was then resident in the small southern coastal town of Cassis, but he took annual summer holidays in the village of Saint-Valery, on the Somme estuary, not far from Amiens; it was probably there that he began work on the collaborative project.

  Whether Joncquel knew Varlet is unclear, but they had both been born in the same region and might conceivably have been old acquaintances. The London Library’s copies of Les Titans du ciel and L’agonie de la terre are both inscribed—to the writer Edmund Gosse—and both inscriptions are signed “Octave Joncquel and Théo Varlet,” but the entire signature is rendered in the same hand, which must be Varlet’s. (The first inscription reads “Hommage à Monsieur Edmund Gosse, en souvenir de feu La Plume, ce livre parti de Wells” [A tribute to Edmund Gosse, in memory of the late La Plume, this book based on Wells]. La Plume was a short-lived periodical and publishing imprint, operated by Colette’s husband “Willy,” to which Varlet and Gosse had both contributed. The London Library, unusually, has a run of La Plume, which was presumably also donated by Gosse.)

  The arrangement between Malfère, Joncquel and Varlet lasted long enough for the former to publish both parts of the Martian Epic and for Varlet to complete an adaptation of a third Joncquel manuscript, “La terre océane” [The Ocean-Covered World], but at that point, it broke down. Alfu suggests that the cause of the breakdown was that Varlet spent his 1922 summer holiday in Saint-Valery working on a text with another author, André Blandin, in preference to revising one of Joncquel’s, and that Joncquel took extreme offense, but I do not know what the evidence is that supports this interpretation of events. What is on record, however—carefully summarized, in detail, by Alfu—is that Joncquel initiated a lawsuit against Malfère, on the grounds that Malfère had made an oral agreement with him to pay him a royalty of five per cent (half the conventional amount) on copies of the books that were sold, which the publisher had failed to honor. Joncquel claimed that this had ruined his “literary career” and demanded damages of 30,000 francs, as well as the royalties he was allegedly owed.

  Malfère, who had copyrighted the two published volumes in his own name, presumably having paid Varlet a fixed fee for the revision work, defended the case on the grounds that what Théo Varlet had done with the manuscripts Joncquel had provided, was to write entirely new texts recycling the fundamental ideas, while retaining hardly any of Joncquel’s actual text—so that, in effect, Varlet, not Joncquel, was the actual author of the two published books.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the relative social status of the two men, the court sided with Malfère. Joncquel lost the case, and it was he who was ordered to pay damages to Malfère, to the modest but doubtless deeply wounding extent of 500 francs. Malfère was, however, forbidden to publish the third volume already completed by Varlet, or to proceed with a fourth, “La guerre des microbes” [War of the Microbes], whose manuscript had also been forwarded to Varlet. These, along with all Joncquel’s other manuscripts, were returned to their author, and nothing more was heard of any of them. What became of them—and, for that matter, of Joncquel—remains unknown. This loss must be regarded as unfortunate; however inept Joncquel might have been as a writer, he certainly seems to have possessed an imagination that was somewhat ahead of his time.

  As a typical science fiction fan, long before there was any such thing, Joncquel presumably believed, passionately and perhaps justifiably, that the essence of such fiction is the ideas it deploys, and that matters of narrative method and literary style are secondary issues of no great significance. He presumably went to his grave believing that he had been cruelly ripped off, and that it was his ideas, rather than Varlet’s literary polish, that rendered the Martian Epic interesting. There is, of course, no way for modern readers to assess the relative contributions of the two writers, but it seems likely, given that the narrator, Léon Rudeaux, is so obviously a stand-in for Varlet,1 that the latter was introduced, along with his “love interest,” by Varlet to make a text that might have started out as a conspicuously distanced imaginary history far more intimate and more readable. The second volume, into much of whose action Rudeaux is very awkwardly intruded, although that does not inhibit his narrative’s dogged self-obsession, does read as if the intrusion might have been a daring improvisation.

  Alfu notes that Malfère stated in court that Varlet had thoroughly altered the plots and modified the sequence of events of both published volumes, specifically observing that Varlet had only taken “a single amusing scene” from “La fin des mondes” in compiling L’agonie de la Terre. As well as the narrator, Varlet probably contributed the anti-Soviet rhetoric, and certainly added some of the settings—including his home-town of Cassis, with which Joncquel can hardly have been familiar. There are, however, several significant elements in the portmanteau text with which Joncquel and Varlet must have been equally familiar, and in which both must have been keenly interested, including its rapt fascination with astronomical science, its extrapolation and theorization of the pattern of contemporary technological development, its intricate relationship to previous scientific romance, and its complex attitude to war. In these respects, the books are surely a true collaboration, reflective of an authentic and productive meeting of minds.

  Given that Joncquel handed over some 15 manuscripts to Malfère in 1920, we cannot be entirely sure when “Les derniers Ti
tans” and “La fin des mondes” were written. It is possible that they might have been penned closer to the date of the text that inspired them—H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898)—than to the date of their eventual publication, but that seems unlikely. No matter how carefully one strips the narrative flesh back to its bones, however, the two stories told in the portmanteau novel seem to be very obviously, and quite painfully, based on the recent experience of the Great War of 1914-18, which had not yet acquired the name of World War I. Indeed, there is a sense in which the imaginary history of the two volumes can be seen as a repeated echo of that war, attempting to dramatize, in no uncertain terms, the nowadays-oft-quoted dictum that “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it, first as tragedy and then as farce.”

  It is not impossible that Joncquel already had the requisite attitude of mind before 1914, given that one of the authors whose work he seems to have admired was Albert Robida, the pacifist author of the parodic illustrated future history La guerre au Vingtième siècle (1883; text tr. as “War in the Twentieth Century”), but the likelihood is that the two published volumes were based on the most recent, and least Vernian, of Joncquel’s abundant stock of manuscripts. At any rate, the Martian Epic is, in its most fundamental essence, a “Martial Epic,” its epic dimension echoing as well as subverting the central concern of all epics of warfare, from the Iliad onwards. All such works, arguably, depict brutish men striving to sustain the absurd pretense that there is something noble and moral in human warfare, which makes it worthier than a mere egomaniac preference for behaving like rabid dogs, but Joncquel and Varlet attempt to take that principle to its ultimate extreme, as well as breaking it down by cynical analysis, and certainly achieve a success of sorts.

  In this respect, there is no doubt that Les Titans du ciel and L’agonie de la Terre were the product of the deep disenchantment that was the immediate emotional aftermath of World War I. They are saturated with the awful shock of that war, and the moral desperation that it engendered. Whatever the initial internal dynamic of Joncquel’s manuscripts might have been, the thrust of Varlet’s reconstituted narrative is a gradual but implacable movement towards the absurd and the surreal; a bitterly inexorable transformation of clinical descriptions of destruction into sarcastic black comedy, groping towards extremes that imaginative fiction, even in France, had not attained or even attempted, before.

  Although there is nothing quite like the Martian Epic in the Wellsian fiction that was written in Britain, Varlet’s text does have some clear and definite affinities with two near-contemporary apocalyptic romances, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins (1920) and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (1922; revised for US publication as Lest Ye Die). Both of those novels partake of the same dumbfounded cynicism and the same resentful nihilism, although they retain a typically British dignity that prevents them from embracing the typically French surrealism and black comedy of the absurd that comes quite naturally to Varlet, as it presumably had to Joncquel.

  There are also parallels to be drawn between English and French reactions to the war in terms of an urgent revival of interest in spiritualism, to which literary men were particularly vulnerable—especially if they had lost sons in the war. H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling were three high-profile victims to hopeful spiritualistic delusion, all of whom incorporated such delusions, fervently and poignantly, into their post-war fiction. In France, however, the relationship between “spiritisme” and speculative fiction had much deeper roots and a much more robust supportive tradition, with which Joncquel and Varlet were both familiar, at least via the works of Camille Flammarion and his more recent successors.

  The French literary tradition in question is far more elaborate than the tradition of Spiritualism itself, regarding the mere fact of survival after death as trivial and being more concerned with the manner in which afterlives might be organized into some kind of cosmic plan. In particular, French speculative fiction in this vein became fascinated with the notion of “cosmic palingenesis:” the idea of serial reincarnation on different worlds. The notion had first been mooted by the 2nd century Christian apologist Origen, but his insistence on “the plurality of worlds” became unorthodox when it was opposed by St Augustine and was out of fashion for more than 1000 years, until it was revived in the wake of the Copernican Revolution, which reduced the Earth to the status of one planet in a solar family, which then numbered six (or seven, if the Moon was included as a “world”).

  The idea of cosmic palingenesis was strongly revived, in a specific form that was reproduced in many subsequent French scientific romances, by the astronomer Christian Huygens, in his posthumously-published Kosmotheoros (1698; tr. as Cosmotheoros), which was rapidly translated into French. A minor literary boom began some 70 years later with the publication of Marie-Anne Roumier’s Voyages de Mylord Céton dans les sept planètes [Milord Seaton’s Voyages to the Seven Planets] (1765) and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s “Nouvelles de la lune” (1768 in Songes et visions philosophiques; tr. as “News from the Moon” in the Black Coat Press anthology of that title), assisted by Charles Bonnet’s philosophical tract Palingénésie philosophique [The Philosophy of Palingenesis] (1769).

  Other works in this same vein include Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne’s Les posthumes (written 1788; published 1802), the dialogues making up Camille Flammarion’s Lumen (1866-1869), Flammarion’s best-selling Uranie (1889; tr. as Urania) and the first winner of the Prix Goncourt—published by Willy under the La Plume imprint—Force ennemie [Hostile Force] (1903) by John-Antoine Nau (Eugène Torquet). Joncquel and Varlet were probably familiar with the entire sequence at second hand, because of the elaborate summary of it provided in Flammarion’s Les mondes imaginaries et les mondes reels [Real and Imaginary Worlds] (1862), which had been revised for a new edition in 1905. Varlet and Joncquel may well have differed somewhat in their attitudes to the fundamental thesis of cosmic palingenesis—Joncquel’s second title suggests that he must have been responsible for the notion of the Solar System as a sunwardly-oriented cosmic scale, which comes under threat by virtue of the Martian Mechanists’ vulgarization of their own religious creed, while Varlet must have been the author of the sequence describing the more expansive cosmic voyage undertaken by Léon and Raymonde as disincarnate souls—but they certainly seem to have been singing from the same hymn-sheet.

  This is, of course, this aspect of the Martian Epic that is bound to seem most alien to modern English and American readers, but it is worth noting that it does crop up in English fiction as well, in such novels as Mortimer Collins’ Transmigration (1874), which features a series of incarnations, one of which takes place on Mars. That particular notion was further popularized by Theodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars (1900), a report by a psychologist of accounts of past lives “experienced” by a medium, which included an incarnation on Mars. Joncquel and Varlet were not the last writers to use the notion productively in French scientific romance; Varlet’s friend, J. H. Rosny aîné (Justin Henri Boëx)—one of the judges who had awarded the Goncourt to Nau—was to develop it in all seriousness in Les autres vies, les autres mondes [Other Lives, Other Worlds] (1924) and provided a literary dramatization of it in his own Martian fantasy, Les navigateurs de l’infini [Navigators of Infinity] (1925).

  It is not only as an anti-war story that the Martian Epic echoes the work of Albert Robida; the story also carries forward another significant tradition of French imaginative fiction with which Robida had involved himself. The tradition in question had been initiated by Léon Gozlan in Les émotions de Polydore Marasquin (1856; tr. as The Emotions of Polydore Marasquin, A Man among the Monkeys and Monkey Island); Robida carried it forward in spectacular style in the first part of his parodic homage to Jules Verne, Voyages très extraordinaire de Saturnin Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du monde et dans tous les pays connus et même inconnus de M. Jules Verne [The Most Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul in the 5 or 6
Continents, in all the lands known, and even unknown, to Jules Verne] (1879; available from Black Coat Press). This deeply sarcastic, manifestly absurd and incipiently surreal tradition involves the use of various real and imaginary species of monkeys, especially anthropoid apes, to conduct a sarcastically satirical investigation of the relationship between human beings and the residues of their animal ancestry. Although L’agonie de la Terre is not as witty or as focused as its predecessors, in this regard, it certainly takes the tradition forward into new and interesting territory, by virtue of what must surely be a close combination of Joncquel’s and Varlet’s efforts.

  Other works of French scientific romance echoed in the Martian Epic include Gustave Le Rouge’s two-part Martian adventure comprising Le prisonnier de Mars and La guerre des vampires (1908-1909; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as The Vampires of Mars). The description of the native Martians—represented in the Martian Epic’s plot by the Magi—as winged creatures, who are explicitly likened to bats on several occasions, strongly recalls Le Rouge’s Erloor, while the second-volume invasion of psychic vampires is more faintly reminiscent of the invasion sub-plot in Le Rouge’s second volume. It is, however, quite likely that Varlet had not read Le Rouge (although Joncquel probably had) and that the echoes retained in the final text were carefully muted. Both men, however, are very likely to have read Guy de Maupassant’s brief “L’Homme de Mars” (1888; tr. in News from the Moon as “Martian Mankind”), which similarly features winged Martians and offers a supposedly-rational argument for the likelihood that humanoid inhabitants of Mars might have wings.

  Another writer with whom Varlet was undoubtedly familiar and Joncquel may also have read was Claude Farrère (Charles Bargone); Varlet loved Farrère’s book of drug stories Fumée d’opium (1904; tr. as Black Opium)—the self-based protagonist of his story “Messaline” declares that he has “Farrère in his soul”—and had presumable read some of the short metaphysical fantasies later collected in Où? [Where?] (1923). The Farrère book whose imagery and sentiments are most likely have influenced the writing of L’agonie de la Terre is Les condamnés à mort (1920; tr. as Useless Hands), a hymn of hate against the inexorable pragmatism and ultimately-brutalizing effects of excessive automation, whose rhetoric is echoed in Varlet’s complaints about Martian “machinisme” (Mechanization). The groundwork for this rhetoric must, however, have been laid in Joncquel’s original texts.