machines of war colored the imagery of French future war fiction even for writers who had no sympathy at all for Robida’s determined pacifism.
Robida was the fastest writer out of the blocks in publishing a reflective imaginative response to the Great War in L’Ingénieur von Satanas (1919), but others inevitably followed his lead. In France, remarkably, future war fiction of a sort had even been produced during the war, apparently as a deliberate propagandistic strategy, albeit within controlled circumstances that did not permit satirical hostility or any thought of ultimate defeat. Thus, such novels as Rouletabille chez Krupp (1917; tr. as Rouletabille at Krupp’s) by Gaston Leroux also helped lay groundwork for the post-war backlash, by introducing imaginary superweapons that could not be used, but nevertheless gave a hint of awesome possibilities to come. The potential destructive capacity of such superweapons was rapidly displayed in such extravagant post-war novels such as Henri Allorge’s Le Grand cataclysme (1922; tr. as The Great Cataclysm).
The most striking and significant reaction to the Great War cast in the form of bitter futuristic fiction was Ernest Pérochon’s Les Hommes frénétiques (1925; tr. as The Frenetic People), and it its possible that it was that novel which prompted Daudet to write Le Napus, not as a copy but as a political correction, Pérochon having strong socialist and pacifist principles, while Daudet was at the opposite end of the political spectrum, as one of the leading lights of the strident right-wing periodical Action Française. Pérochon had the advantage of a certain philosophical consistency in his work that Daudet did not have—it is far easier for a pacifist to represent war as a thoroughly bad thing than for a man committed to uncompromising toughness to make out a case for high-tech war being something with which people simply have to get used to living—but that only made the latter’s task more interesting in imaginative and narrative terms, and encouraged a further tipping of the balance between tragedy and farce.
It is not an exaggeration, nor is it uncomplimentary, to say that Le Napus is the most farcical of all the future war novels of the 1920s. Modern readers will might well find it a deeply troubling book in terms of its political slant, especially its crude and now-discomfiting racism (the publisher who issues most of my translations declined to publish this one on the grounds that “Léon Daudet was not a nice man”—a principle which, if universally applied, would slim down the literary tradition considerably), but that does not detract from its historical significance, nor from its remarkable bizarrerie. Daudet had no sympathy at all for such avant-gardist literary movements as surrealism, but Le Napus makes it clear that he was not uninfluenced by surrealism in his choice of motifs and his methods of deploying them. Like all unique books, it deserves some attention by virtue of that fact alone, but there is also much in its arguments—especially the absurd ones—that is worth taking seriously, if only to strengthen disagreement and disapproval by virtue of dynamic tension.
Along with most of the writers of future war fiction in the 1920s, Daudet suggests that the very nature of war had undergone a fundamental shift during the war of 1914-18, presaging the inevitability that future wars would involve whole populations rather than armies, and that long-range weapons would be routinely used against both military and civilian targets. He names that new kind of warfare after an anecdote first related by the Classical satirist Lucian, who claimed (more than three hundred years after the event) that during the Siege of Syracuse by the Romans in 214-212 B.C., a Roman fleet had been destroyed by a kind of heat ray devised by the city’s most famous son, the great engineer Archimedes. Later writers who mistook this obvious item of fiction for earnest historical truth (a not-uncommon problem with Classical writings viewed from a Medieval standpoint) suggested that Archimedes might have used a parabolic array of metallic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on the ships, thus setting fire either to their sails or—more likely—the tar with which their hulls were caulked, although modern attempts to perform such a feat have all failed. The point is, however, that Archimedes’ “heat ray” entered the mythology of warfare, and assumed a new importance in the early twentieth-century imagination, when the discoveries of X-rays and radium made the idea of “ray guns” of various kinds exceedingly fashionable in speculative fiction.
In Le Napus, a German writer named von Herzius is said to have written a book called Archimedes, setting out a prospectus for future warfare in which enemy nations can be devastated by various kinds of innovative long-range weapons, including ingenious projectiles—missiles and bombs—and scientific devices for causing, earthquakes, floods, violent storms, and so on: a prospectus enthusiastically taken up in the novel by a resurgent German Empire, in spite of the extremely high cost of such weapons. The great bugbear of the era, in terms of actual anxieties, was poison gas delivered by air fleets, but that only plays a minor role in Daudet’s expansive scheme, which is more various as well as more grandiose, also involving economic warfare of an ingeniously ludicrous variety.
Superweapons had long featured in French speculative fiction, which had begun to take aboard in the 1850s the notion that technological progress would eventually permit the invention of weapons so powerful that making war would become “unthinkable.” It is, however, very noticeable in hindsight—and must have been obvious even in the 1920s—that notions of what might constitute a weapon so dreadful as to make its use in war “unthinkable” were forced to undergo a considerable melodramatic inflation as actual weaponry advanced in its destructive potential. Daudet was by no means the first person to realize that there is, in fact, no conceivable weapon so destructive that military men would not eagerly deploy it, even at the cost of destroying civilization, the human race, or the planet, but he was the first to assume that such deployments would eventually become routine, only restrained by their enormous cost and the fact that, being untestable before use, the weapons in question would always be likely to misfire, at least to some extent.
Fortunately for Daudet, that last point dovetailed very well with his general attitude to science, which had been permanently soured in the 1890s when he was thwarted in his first career plan, to become a physician. Although he passed all the necessary examinations, he did not survive his initial training as an intern, being thrown out for a theoretical unorthodoxy that his superiors considered as blatant and gross insubordination (he was a fan of homoeopathy and did not believe that diseases are caused by “microbes”). Following his famous father into a literary career was a fallback position, and although he developed that career very successfully, he never lost the rancor that his initial setback had generated, nursing it so affectionately that it eventually grew into a fully mature obsession.
Le Napus, in building of a future in which scientific knowledge has continued to progress, takes it for granted that much of that science will be intellectually bankrupt, and that the fraction that is not will be largely deleterious to the quality of human life. It is one of very few science-based speculative novels to assume that much contemporary theoretical knowledge is seriously mistaken, and that the theories that replace contemporary ones will be just as arbitrary and liable to supersession. In the world of Le Napus, it is not only the Archimedean superweapons that routinely misfire—while still doing enormous damage and inflicting serious mortality—but all the efforts of scientists, especially and most importantly in confrontation with the Napus itself: a new and utterly mysterious “plague,” which adds an extra dimension of complication to the war.
If the world featured in the novel is perverse to the point of paradoxicality, so is the narrator through whose eyes we see it: the result of an experiment in selective breeding that was supposed to produce idealized humans but—inevitably, in this context—went awkwardly awry. As heroes go—and his notion of himself as a modest hero is by no means entirely mistaken—Polyplast 17,177 is certainly peculiar, but only an unreliable narrator in an unreliable world could stand any chance at all of acquiring a measure of paradoxical reliability. There is a sense in which his is the ideally perverse viewpoint from which to obtain a measure and grasp of the perverse society in which he lives. Even readers who cannot sympathize with him, let alone identify with him, might nevertheless find a certain interest in his gradual evolution towards a more humane humanity—as, indeed, they should.
The specific technological anticipations featured in Le Napus now seem very
