The Bacchantes. Leon Daudet

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY LÉON DAUDET

      The Bacchantes: A Dionysian Scientific Romance

      The Napus: The Great Plague of the Year 2227

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2012 by Brian Stableford

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      INTRODUCTION

Les Bacchantes, romain contemporain by Léon Daudet, here translated as The Bacchantes, was originally published in Paris by Ernest Flammarion in 1931. It was the third of four novels by the author venturing on to the terrain of the roman scientifique, following a satire on the medical profession (to which the author had been refused permanent entry after failing his internship), Les Morticoles [The Morticoles] (1894), and a story of catastrophe, including but not restricted to a future war, Le Napus, fléau de l’an 2227 [The Napus: The Great Plague of the Year 2227] (1927). It was followed in 1934 by another future war story, Ciel en feu [Sky on Fire] (1934). The author also wrote several speculative short stories, four of which are included in the posthumous Quinze Contes [Fifteen Stories] (1948).1

      Léon Daudet’s literary career, like those of his mother Julia (née Allard), his Uncle Ernest and his younger brother Lucien, was inevitably overshadowed by the enormous reputation of his father, Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), one of the great French writers of the nineteenth century. Alphonse Daudent made his initial reputation as a Naturalist of a considerably milder and more sentimental stripe than Émile Zola, Edmond Goncourt or Joris-Karl Huysmans, many of his works being autobiographical, although he scored his greatest popular success with the more extravagant Tartarin of Tarascon (1872), whose protagonist was established as a comic type-specimen of flamboyant but fake Provençal bravado, and featured in several sequels by popular demand.

      Léon Daudet (1867-1942) might not have followed in his father’s footsteps had he not taken umbrage when his quest to qualify as a physician ran into a snag, but fate apparently took him in hand, and he soon became very prolific as a novelist, journalist and critic. His first and second novels, L’Astre noir [The Black Star] and Les Morticoles, both published in 1894, sold well and provided his alterntive career with a solid basis. In 1891 he had married Jeanne Hugo, Victor Hugo’s granddaughter, and had thus been welcomed into the upper echelons of Republican society, but that ran into a hitch as well when the couple divorced in 1895. Again, Daudet’s reaction to the hitch brooked no half-measures, and he appears to have turned against the entirety of Republican endeavor, and also to have adopted a rather reckless lifestyle, which generated a certain amount of scandal, including a notorious affair with the Opera singer Lucienne Breval.

      In 1903 Daudet married again, this time to his cousin Marthe Allard, who was also a writer—she signed herself “Pamphille”—but that does not seem to have calmed him down entirely. She did, however, encourage his political sentiments. His stance became gradually more reactionary, reaching a climax of sorts when he helped to found and then became the editor and leader-writer of L’Action française, which became a source of strident anti-Republican propaganda. His campaigning briefly won him a seat in the Chamber as a député, where his eloquence obtained further exercise, but he never stopped writing, and continued to write a certain amount of fiction alongside his journalistic work and memoirs. He was always billed by his publishers, once the fact was established, as “Léon Goncourt de l’Académie Goncourt,” but everyone knew that he had won that position by inheritance rather than by election, his father having been named in Goncourt’s will but dying before the will was belatedly proved and its provisions activated. Although his hatred of Germany prevented him from lending the same vocal support to Nazism that he lent to Mussolini’s Fascism in the early 1930s he collaborated with the Vichy government in World War II until his death, which completed the job of demolishing the remnants of his personal reputation. In the meantime his gourmand appetite, coupled with his distaste for physical exercise, gradually inflicted a morbid obesity upon him.

      Les Bacchantes was written shortly after Daudet’s return to France from a two-year exile in Belgium, to which Daudet had fled to avoid a prison sentence (for defaming the driver of a taxi in which his son had mysteriously died in 1923). The story is, to some extent, provocative merely for the sake of being provocative, and can be read as an unrepentant but oddly nostalgic defense of his once-turbulent private life, but the manner of its provocation and defense is interesting in its originality and method. That method seeks to combine mythological allegory with distinctively modern imagery in order build a philosophical scheme that links all kinds of creativity, including scientific creativity, to the erotic impulse. In developning that thesis the novel shows an awareness of the ideas of Sigmund Freud—the narrative features one of the most flamboyant instances of deliberate Freudian symbolism ever given literary form—and those of Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically his contrast of “Apollinian” and “Dionysian” styles of creativity and his extravagant plea for the reconstitution of a synthesis of the two styles that had been found and then lost again in the heyday of Greek drama.

      From the perspective of the historical development of speculative fiction, Les Bacchantes is interesting as a participant in a set of stories examining the hypothesis of a technological device that allows imges of the past to be recaptured and replayed. First introduced in Eugène Mouton’s comedy “L’Historioscope” (1883; tr. as “the Historioscope”), such an instrument was occasionally used as a facilitating device in stories exploring the past, including John Taine’s restoration of the Age of the Dinosaurs, Before the Dawn (1934), but obtained far more interesting consideration in a series of contes philosophiques investigating the possible social consequences of such a discovery, beginning with the intriguing Christan fantasy The Vicarion (1926) by Gardner Hunting and continuing with such deftly pointed analyses as T. L. Sherred’s “E for Effort” (1947) and Isaac Asimov’s “The Dead Past” (1956).

      It is probably safe to say that no one other than Léon Daudet, on imagining such a device and asking himself “If I had a means of calling up images of the past, how would I make use of it?” would have come up with the answer deployed in Les Bacchantes, but that only adds to the originality, not merely of the story, but of the philosophical aspects that are tangentially treated therein. At least one of the machine’s odder side-effects is probably included simply to facilitate the plot, but the general theory of transtemporal influences underpinning the hypothetical machine, although it is only vaguely sketched out, does have some interesting implications and corollaries worthy of further contemplation. There is, however, a sense in which the speculative element of the story is merely a technical convenience assising the author to embellish and activate its mythological recapitulation.

      In order to introduce that aspect of the story it might be as well to summarize the strange career of its cenral mythological character, Dionysus. The author renders the name in question as Dyonisos—which is a variant spelling sufficiently common in nineteenth-century French texts, though rarely found elsewhere, to be regarded as an authentic variant rather than a mere misspelling—presumably as an affectation, but perhaps also to emphasize that his Dionysus is not quite the same as any other representation, including Nietzsche’s, although it necessarily embodies all the essential features of the myth, as well as a few of its more eccentric embroideries.

      Early Classical writers record that Dionysus was fathered by Zeus on Semele, the daughter of the king of Thebes, thus annoying Hera, who was famously jealous of her husband’s infidelities. Hera persuaded Semele to demand that Zeus show himelf in his true majesty, which she tricked him into doing—and was, inevitably, struck dead by the revelation. Zeus, however, snatched the unborn Dionysus from her womb and implanted the fetus in his thigh, eventually removing it when it came to term, thus justifying Dionysus’ frequent epithet, the “twice-born.” Dionysus was also known as Bacchus, that alternative also being of Greek origin rather than merely a Roman equivalent, although the convenional spelling is Latinized (from Bakchos).

      The infant demigod still required protection from Hera’s wrath, and was hidden; accounts vary with regard to where and how, but it always among women or nymphs,