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Article Excerpt
Even the most base schemes of human beings are preferable to the most
exalted tropisms of machines. --Philip K. Dick "How's this!" to ART [NATURE] loudly said, "How's this! ungrateful creature! Profanely thou hast dar'd to tread Thus in the walks of NATURE. "I prithee, base, usurping wench, No more these freedoms take; If thus my province thou intrench-- Thou 'It men and women make." --Anonymous (1) Science fiction constructs a space of accommodation to an intensely technological existence. --Scott Bukatman
In 1977, Philip K. Dick was invited to be the Guest of Honor and provide the keynote speech at the second Festival International de la Science-Fiction de Metz, France. Although Dick hated to travel, and he needed a handful of amphetamines and the shoulder of his companion to get there (Sutin 250), he arrived to find himself treated like royalty. While in the US, science fiction writers belong to a marginalized genre and work in near obscurity, in France, Dick was "regarded by fans and the press as the greatest SF writer in the world" (Sutin 250). While at the Festival, he gave his speech, entitled, "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others," which, due to Dick's mind-altered condition and due to some (compelled) last minute excisions, proved to be a bit of a disaster. Nevertheless, he remained quite popular and was scheduled to return to Metz in 1982, though he died before the trip.
About a century earlier, the U.S. inventor Thomas Alva Edison also made a trip to Paris, to attend the Great Exhibition. He had become world renowned in 1878 after his invention of the phonograph, and his trip to Paris was greeted with great excitement. One of those who looked forward to the trip with great anticipation was the writer Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. He was, at that point, a writer of only moderate success, though the novel in which he casts Thomas Edison as the protagonist would help catapult him into the public consciousness. These two writers, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Philip K. Dick, also share something in common with Mary Shelley, principally the ways in which they speculate and extrapolate their ideas based, not so much on actual science, but rather upon the ideas of scientific inquiry. Despite the fact that they were born ninety years and a continent apart, they were both concerned with artifice and the possibilities of it and the effects upon society. More specifically, in the literary works in question, Villiers's L'Eve future and Dick's We Can Build You and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the authors examine the human being, the conditions of being, and the relationship of being and artifice.
Jean-Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was born in late 1838 into a poor family. Although his father, and later Villiers himself, claimed royal ancestry, the family lived in poverty. Despite his origins, and despite his desperate living and working conditions, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam managed to produce a considerable body of work. Primarily known as a playwright--Elen (1865), Morgane (1866), La Revolte (1870), Axel (1872), and Le Nouveau-Monde (1880)--he also produced poetry (Deux Esais de poesie (1858), Premieres Poesies (1859)), and several collections of short stories (Conte cruels (1883), Nouveaux Conte cruels (1888), Histoires insolites (1888), and Nouveaux Conte cruels et Propos d'au-dela (1893)). (2) While the final two volumes of a prose trilogy begun with Isis (1862) never appeared, other novels were finished. The novel L'Eve future was originally a short story entitled "Miss Hadaly Habal," which was written somewhere around 1878. He then determined to extrapolate the short story into a novel, which he worked on under the title, L'Andreide paradoxale d'Edison. The work was serialized in 1880-6 and, (3) finally, published in book form in 1886 as L'Eve future.
While I don't want to make too much of connections or similarities between the two authors, there is some interesting overlap. Both authors lived under financially difficult circumstances. Villiers lived, in large part, off the largesse of his grandmother, though he also begged and borrowed money from friends and acquaintances. He moved frequently when his rent was due, and he sold off the rights to a number of works for a pittance. Phil Dick famously cranked out story after story for a five cent a word payment. The advances he received for his early Ace paperbacks were often gone before he could crank himself up to even write the book. And he tells of going to the local pet store to buy ground horsemeat because it was cheaper than going to the grocery store to buy ground beef. (4) Both authors struggled to gain acceptance from a larger audience, and, ironically, both gained critical, popular, and economic success just before their deaths. With the publication of Contes cruels, and especially L'Eve future and Axel in 1886, Villiers had finally become famous, though his enjoyment of it was short-lived. Villiers died in 1889, shortly after he'd "made it." Similarly, Philip K. Dick finally began to find the success and recognition of which he had dreamed, though not until the very year he died (1982), with the release of Blade Runner. And since his death, an entire cottage industry has arisen around his work. All the mainstream novels that he could not get published have been released posthumously, and ten films based on his work have already been released (1982-2006). (5)
In addition, both writers struggled with their personal lives. Though Villiers never gave up hope until the very end that a young, beautiful, wealthy woman would present herself to him for marriage, his hopes were never realized. He suffered through a series of humiliating romantic losses. Just before his death, he married an illiterate charwoman and midwife, Marie-Elisabeth Dantine, who had devoted herself to him (and given birth to their child). Phil Dick was married five times, ever in search of his "dark-haired girl." His twin sister had died as an infant, and Dick always surmised that he was in constant search for that missing half. (6) As we will see below, the effects of these thwarted romantic desires manifest themselves in the female characters in the work of both writers.
Perhaps most significantly, they were both concerned with the effects of technological innovation upon society. Despite the fact that they lived nearly a century apart and at a continent's remove, their fictions reflect some similar--and some different--reactions to technology. For example, in the story, "The Glory Machine" ("La Machine a gloire") (1874), Villiers supposes a machine that has electrically-driven bellows that claps, that produces sounds of either approval or disapproval, in order to enhance (and guide) the audience's reaction. "The success (or failure) of the play and the glory (or disgrace) of an author will thus be ensured" (Conroy 83). The machine, obviously, affects the present and future glory, but "past as well [...] the Machine can obtain retroactive results. Pipes of laughing gas, skillfully connected to the leading cemeteries, will in fact force our ancestors to smile in their graves every evening" (Villiers, Cruel 63). Dick was frequently concerned with the ways in which technology swayed beliefs and practices. Consider, for example, the mood organ in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or the Perk Pat layouts in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
In another story, "Celestial Publicity" ("L'Affichage celeste") (1873, 1876), Villiers suggests that we take the sky, which has heretofore been "unproductive," and put it to good use. An engineer, Monsieur Grave, citing the precedent of Benjamin Franklin, "proposes to offer our great manufacturing industries, and even our small shopkeepers, the help of an absolute form of Publicity" (42). By means of "powerful rays of magnesium or electric light, magnified a hundred times [and] shoot into the depths of the sky, between Sirius and Aldebaran, the eye of Taurus, if not right into the midst of the Hyades, the graceful picture of that youth holding the sash on which we read every day, with renewed pleasure: 'Money refunded if not delighted.' Can you imagine the expressions on the faces of the crowd, the lights, the cheering, the general excitement?" (42-3). After enumerating the potential uses of this system of advertising, he concludes that "Heaven will end up by being good for something and by acquiring at last an intrinsic value" (45). In many of Dick's novels and stories, he represents the ways in which advertising technologies infiltrate and permeate everyday life. Consider the homeostatic ads in Ubik or the official broadcasts in Dr. Bloodmoney.
In "The Apparatus for the Chemical Analysis of the Last Breath" ("L'Appareil pour l'analyse chimique du dernier soupir") (1874, 1878), Villiers proposes a machine that vaccinates children and parents against suffering. The machine, the "Schneitzoeffer (Junior)" apparatus, "rids the tender temperaments of our children of any predisposition to excessively painful emotions" (151). It would also comfort parents to know, on their deathbeds, that their children will not grieve excessively. The control of emotion would also affect the arts. For example, "in ten years or so the picture of Tintoretto's Daughter will be remarkable only as an arrangement of colours, and the funeral marches of Beethoven and Chopin will cease to be understood as anything but dance music" (153).
In the fourth and final of the technological stories in Contes cruels, Villiers lists a series of absurd technological inventions, including the three above, as well as the New Eve built by Thomas Edison. In "Doctor Tristan's Treatment" ("Le Traitement du Dr Tristan Chavassus") (1877), the titular doctor is able to cure people who hear voices, people who hear only what they want to, and people who are all ears (226). The doctor speaks the word "reality" (7) into the patient's ear, up to "seventeen times a second, without blurring the syllables. [...] [h]e claims that when he has thoroughly drugged, castrated, and ensnared the patient's mind with this word, the cure is three-quarters obtained" (228). After repeating words for a half an hour, he inserts two specially treated wires into the patient's ears and hits the switch. Since the patient can no longer hear, and therefore not hear the voices in society that would lead one astray, the patient has "become a member of Mankind" (229)....
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