Brian Stableford: Speculative Sex: The First Gropings

In English-language speculative fiction, the possibility of sexual intercourse as topic of speculation was more or less ruled out by prevailing standards of literary diplomacy until the 1960s, and it was a subject that required a certain amount of daring to be broached even in France. Nevertheless, the scope and the incentive were there for anyone unafraid of grasping the nettle, and a number of writers did so in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Those first attempts are worthy of attention and comparison as enterprising attempts to move into uncharted literary and philosophical territory.

There are, of course, a wide range of questions that speculative fiction might potentially have addressed by way of introduction to the topic, but they can be broadly divided into four categories relating to the differences that might be made to the experience of sexual intercourse by new social organizations, new technologies, new developments in human physiology or anatomy, and interaction with alien beings. The four categories are not entirely distinct, of course, particularly with respect to the first, which could overlap with any of the others, and there is a considerable gray area at the boundary between the second and the third. Nor were all four equally available for investigation, given that the taboos governing mentionability were relaxed in a somewhat patchy fashion, chronologically speaking—as a consideration of particular examples will easily exemplify.

Of the handful of works that I want to employ as examples, only one was translated into English during the quarter-century in question, and its English translation was strictly bowdlerized, thus nullifying its possible contribution to the argument, and only one other was translated in the course of the entire twentieth century, although all of them are available in English now, mainly thanks to the heroic efforts of Black Coat Press.

Before proceeding to a brief, clinical examination of the specimens in question, however, it is probably appropriate to say something about their literary precursors because the development of speculative sex did not occur without a certain amount of necessary foreplay. Before there was speculative sex as well as alongside and inextricably associated with it, there was fantasy sex, not simply in the quasi-tautological sense that all sexual experience is to some extent fantasy, the imagination routinely playing a larger part in it than mere organ-grinding, but in the more specific sense that supernatural literature as it developed through the nineteenth century—more so in France than anywhere else—was often intensely eroticized, very frequently dealing, with varying layers of diplomatic veiling, with the potentialities of sexual desire and fulfillment.

That situation was complicated, of course, by the fact that all the veiling of discussion of sexual intercourse in common parlance as well as naturalistic literature typically employed symbolic and often frankly supernatural vocabulary. The complication in question, however, was a crucial element of the eternally elaborate negotiation between fictional representation and real experience, and it made supernatural fiction especially in the context of the Symbolist movement the ideal vehicle for addressing such issues indirectly.

Given the role played by the imagination in sexual experience, in fact, it is not at all surprising that sexual attraction and the problematics of its fulfillment are central topics of what Alexander Baumgarten, the founder of modern esthetic theory, called “heterocosmic creativity”: the secondary creation of worlds within texts that differ in some respect from the world as experienced. This is not the place to discuss the question of whether there is, in fact, any artistic creativity that is not heterocosmic, although anyone wishing to contend that there is not would find the task much easier by adopting the treatment or avoidance of sex in “naturalistic fiction” as a test case. It is only natural, however, that readers whose experience of actual sex is woefully unsatisfactory—which might or might not be everybody; what do I know?—might be interested to read fictitious descriptions about satisfactory sex, including and perhaps especially, symbolically reconfigured and supernaturalized sex.

The erotic supernatural fiction of Théophile Gautier is particularly useful in this regard as an exemplar, firstly because it is so variable and partly because it is so consistent, in spite of that variability in its fundamental conviction that the only authentically fulfilling sexual intercourse would be forced almost as a matter of tautology to reach beyond the mundane. In his fiction, amour is essentially unsatisfactory while it is limited by the satisfactions that an actually accessible partner can provide because the ideal of optimism must necessarily exceed mere grasp, and only the exotic and the supernatural can fill in the gap. The variability with which Gautier expressed and extrapolated that instruction took in politely clad sex with living legends (“Une nuit de Cléopâtre”), ghosts (“Arria Marcella”), and vampires (“Clarimonde”); sex assisted by quasi-supernatural charisma (“Fortunio”) and supernatural time-twisting (“Avatar”); and—climatically, in the sense that it was his last literary gasp—sex between disembodied spirits (“Spirite”).

Because much speculative fiction is merely supernatural fiction rejargonized, we might expect to find the fundamental erotic charge and the fundamental assumption of such fantasies as these replicated in stories of speculative sex, and modern readers familiar with post–New Wave science fiction would probably have no difficulty thinking of a few Gautieresque “clones” of that sort. Any writer working seriously with a vocabulary of ideas drawn from scientific speculation rather than supernatural tradition, however, and, more importantly, importing a measure of the philosophy of science into his endeavor is compelled to adopt a change of attitude. The alteration in question is neatly illustrated by the first significant literary work of the twentieth century that attempted to bring sexual intercourse squarely into the sights of the speculative imagination: Alfred Jarry’s Le Sûrmale (1902; tr. as The Supermale).

The first chapter of the novel describes a conversation at a house party at André Marcueil’s château, sparked by his remark that “the erotic act is unimportant, since it can be performed indefinitely.” Marcueil’s argument is that sexual intercourse in the past has only retained human interest and fascination precisely because of the problem addressed in such detail by Gautier: that it was forever reaching hopefully for something essentially beyond its grasp, thus remaining in permanent suspense. As Marcueil puts it, it was an “acte en puissance” [a potential act], and it was that unfulfilled potentiality that was the engine of what one of his questioners calls “sentiment,” embracing both erotic desire and all the froth of love.

The past tense is appropriate to that description because, as Marceuil suggests, he is now in a position to transcend the limitation. Also present at the house party is the American chemist William Elson, the inventor of what is described in the text (in English) as a “Perpetual-Motion-Food,” a dietary supplement that dramatically enhances the physical fortitude of the human body. Marcueil believes, although he has not yet tried the experiment, that the compound in question will enable the suspended potential of the human sexual act finally to reach a complete fulfillment rather than the essentially unsatisfactory climax that only provides temporary relief and long-term disillusionment: a situation that Elson describes as “Mithridatism,” after the mythical king whose gradual ingestion of poisons ultimately renders him immune to them all.

The remainder of the novella tracks various effects of the Perpetual-Motion-Food, taking in some of Jarry’s other fascinations—he was, for instance, a keen cyclist—in his characteristic, buoyant style. It is, of course, no coincidence that he had begun his career as the most dedicated experimentalist of the Symbolist movement and that he ended it as the precursor of Surrealism; Le Sûrmale is one of the pivotal works in the contrivance of that transition. Given its fundamental premise and first line, there is only one way the novel could ever end, and that is with a genuine climax. The logic of storytelling being what it is, there is a certain inevitability about the fact that when Marcueil enthusiastically volunteers as guinea pig for the ultimate test of the invention, it is partly because he is enamored of the scientist’s daughter, Ellen, who becomes his partner in what the relevant chapter calls “The Discovery of Woman.” The discovery in question, partly by virtue of being a scientist’s daughter and partly by virtue of a charisma unique to herself, Ellen is able to make the test exceptionally challenging, although Marcueil rises to the greatly extended occasion in no uncertain terms.

Elson was not, however, the only technologist present at the initiating house party; the electrical expert and manufacturer of aircraft and automobiles, Arthur Gough, was also there, and he too has taken inspiration from the discussion to construct his own technical contribution to the discussion: “la Machine-à-inspirer-l’amour” [the love-inspiration machine]. Jarry had recently written an enthusiastic essay on the new genre of roman scientifique, choosing as one of his key examples the Comte de Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s account of L’Eve future (1886; tr. as Tomorrow’s Eve) in which Thomas Edison builds the perfect mechanical woman for a disillusioned French aristocrat, but Jarry naturally wanted to go at least one better both in terms of the imagination of the device and the outcome of the ultimate confrontation between human and technological love machines. The love-inspiration machine bears more resemblance to an electric chair than a feminized robot—the comparison is explicitly made—and the result of the encounter is that love is indeed inspired in its full and explosive potential, not in the supermale, who is already emotionally committed, but in the machine.

Because it is a surreal, sarcastic comedy (like human life itself, according to some observers) Jarry’s novel can be regarded simply as a joke and discarded with a muffled titter, but it is definitely one of the proverbial true words that are, less often than one might wish, spoken in jest. The argument might be developed flippantly and its climax farcically, but the argument that the novella poses and develops raises and refuses to answer, a real question. A closely connected question, corollary to the notion of sexual activity and its associated sentiments as a process of modified Tantalization, in which sips and bites only serve to emphasize and perpetuate the fundamental torment had long ago hovered, more-or-less veiled, in utopian fiction. To put it crudely: can any society really be reckoned perfect unless it provides guaranteed sexual satisfaction as well as political satisfaction?

Most utopian fiction, of course, simply dodges the question, tacitly assuming that once the politics of society are optimized, the disruptive problems currently generated in actual societies by sexual desire—jealousy, adultery, prostitution, etc.—will simply disappear as if by magic. The proposition put forward in Gabriel de Foigny’s classic La Terre Australe Connue (1676; tr. as The Southern Land, Known), that the only credible egalitarian society would be a society of hermaphrodites in which sexual differentiation would no longer be an agent of inequality and disturbance, had been largely ignored. Soon after Jarry had set a new standard of mentionability, however, the Naturalist writer, André Couvreur, decide to tackle the question of sex in utopia head-on in the lurid satire, Caresco, surhomme, ou le voyage en Eucrasie (1904; tr. as Caresco, Superman; or, A Voyage to Eucrasia), which reproduces the flippant melodrama and surreal tinge of Jarry’s novel and fuses its striking Symbolist decoration with a Zolaesque hard-headedness.

In fact, Couvreur developed his utopia as a sequel to a Naturalist novel, Le Mal nécessaire (1899; tr. as The Necessary Evil), which had offered a character analysis of a brilliant surgeon, Armand Caresco, who triumphs over the disapproving forces of feeble conventional morality in no uncertain terms when forced to use his skills to destroy the evidence of a rape he has committed in a moment of distraction. In the sequel, Caresco has become fabulously rich and has bought an island newly thrust out of the sea by volcanic eruption where he constructs the closed and heavily defended utopian society of Eucrasia (i.e., “good health”): a society in which everyone is beautiful thanks to the assistance of his advanced surgical techniques, and easy sexual fulfillment is permanently available to everyone, although only a select few males and a larger but still limited population of fertile females are allowed to breed; in the interests of eugenics, most of the population has been contentedly sterilized.

Various sexual inclinations are abundantly supplied in Eucrasia thanks to the provisions of entire classes of highly trained and very versatile female “courtesans” and male “gitons” [catamites], who supplement the wide-open marriages between sterile males and fertile females. Pedophilia is routine, and even necrophilia is given appropriately sensitive technological support. Anyone in need of artificial assistance—as the few breeding males routinely are, being required to fertilize a much larger population of females—has access to sophisticated aphrodisiac technologies. Possible political resentments due to the stratification of the society, which extends as far as slavery, are soothed by a carefully designed religion that offers compensation for present status deficiency in the promise of reincarnation: a religion of which Caresco is the prophet and—in the eyes of the subjects to whom he has delivered perfect health and happiness—the incarnation of God.

The plot of the novel describes the arrival in the utopia of two new recruits, the exceedingly handsome and romantically inclined but deeply disillusioned Marcel Girard and his mentor, the neo-Stoic philosopher Zéphirin Choumaque, and a visitor, the political activist, Mary Hardisson, who has come to implore the assistance of Caresco’s awesome military technology to save her African homeland from annexation by imperialist colonial powers. Inevitably, Marcel falls in love with Mary before the bizarre flying machine ferrying them to the mysterious island even touches down, but she is completely uninterested in amorous matters and utterly immune to sexual arousal—a situation that becomes extremely dangerous for both her and Marcel when the Superman, Caresco, also becomes obsessed with her. Caresco is forced to refine his aphrodisiac technologies even further in the quest to break down her resistance, and he also has to go to considerable trouble to ascertain that her resultant, gradual arousal does not get deflected in the direction of the amorous Marcel.

In the meantime, Choumaque provides a skeptical eye that tries hard to pass scathing judgment on the supposed falsity of the utopia, although he is by no means immune to its seductions, especially when he discovers that his own long-lost first love, an ex-child prostitute, is now applying her old expertise to training Eucrasia’s courtesans. Marcel, selected as a male breeder, is even more distracted, although his determination to escape with Mary, if her resistance can ever be broken down, is dramatically increased when Choumaque discovers that Caresco’s particular sexual fetish—in which he naturally intends to indulge with Mary—is surgical in nature and drastic. Caresco, of course, remains aloof from his utopia, still continuing his own progressive scientific endeavors—which include attempts to perfect transsexual surgery, to create human hermaphrodites, and also to perfect “the human Monad”: the surgical reduction of human being to the minimum of flesh, coupled with a complementary enhancement of the power of the mind.

Given that the island of Eucrasia is scrupulously designed in the form of a human body with Caresco’s secret lair situated in its loins, inside the cone of the volcano that gave birth to the island, few readers familiar with Symbolism would have been surprised, even in 1904, by the nature of the climactic eruption that brings the entire thought experiment to a close. It is conceivable, however, that not all of them would have been convinced by the subsequent postapocalyptic discussion in which Choumaque offers a conspicuously weak-kneed championship of his pseudo-Stoical doctrine and his principle of philosophical equilibrium. The latter insists that the satisfactions provided by a utopia, even one as physically satisfying as Eucrasia, can only be temporary because “happiness” becomes meaningless once there is no unhappiness to sharpen it by comparison, and desire once entirely fulfilled is bound to disappear—but even Choumaque is unconvinced that he is really doing Marcel and Mary a favor by returning them to the awful pressures and frustrations of mid-twentieth century society.

Post-Eucrasian utopian fictions such as Han Ryner’s Les Pacifiques (1913; tr. as “The Pacifists” in The Human Ant and Other Stories) and Marcel Rouff’s Voyage au monde à l’envers (1920; tr. as Journey to the Inverted World) did not grasp the nettle of providing their utopians with sexual satisfaction quite as robustly as Couvreur had done in Caresco, surhomme, but there is a sense in which they could hardly let it alone once it had been so strikingly broached. Ryner’s solution to the problem is symbolically prettified as well as unrepentantly romanticized, but Rouff’s is less inhibited and considerably bolder. Both writers took the resolute step of refusing the kind of drastic conclusion provided by Couvreur’s volcano and leaving their utopias unscathed, although both took advantage of the conventional narrative escape clause of removing their protagonists therefrom.

Caresco’s technologically assisted pornotopia and the more subdued images of sexual freedom provided by Ryner and Rouff are, of course, by no means the only conceivable solutions to the problem posed by Foigny, and another was suggested in a similarly surrealized fashion, decked in a far more portentous and melodramatic Symbolism, by Fernand Kolney in L’Amour dans cinq mille ans (1905 or 1908; tr. as Love in Five Thousand Years). Kolney’s novel is set in a utopian enclave in the wake of a global catastrophe in which the problems corollary to amorous desire are sternly canceled out by a system of technological castration which obliterates the consequent impediment to complete social equality. In a society devoid of sexual desire and sexual intercourse, everyone is able to devote themselves to quests for purely intellectual satisfaction, which do not seem so implicitly frustrating in their outcomes.

That premise, of course, has the inevitable corollary of posing problems for the reproduction of society, but that is where the speculative imagination really comes into its own, permitting the author to construct an elaborate technology of what J.B.S. Haldane would later call “ectogenesis”: the creation and development of embryos in vitro, in artificial wombs subjected to much more sophisticated and delicate control than those provided by nature. The novel opens in the “Artificial Fertilization Laboratory” in question, with the hero, Sagax, hard at work pursuing his sacred task as a “Creator of Humans,” carefully providing the next generation of superhumans with the prenatal potential necessary to produce not only appropriate numbers of males and females but of mathematicians, physiologists, pedagogues, etc.

The process of artificial fertilization has not quite eliminated all human involvement, but what remains has been religiously ritualized in a public ceremony in which Sagax employs a golden syringe to inseminate a selected Reproductress who is to supply the next batch of artificial wombs with the fruits of her own. In the particular instance described in the novel, however, the ritual described in the second chapter is disturbed by the unexpected phenomenon of the Reproductress Formosa’s apparent sexual arousal by the ceremony—something that ought to be impossible. Although subdued, however, all the potentials of the sexual act still remain and now begin to make an unwelcome reappearance in the supposedly ideal society.

That, of course, is the logic of fiction; there can be no plot without catastrophe, and Kolney’s plot maps the unfolding of the apocalyptic breakdown of his utopia as it is invaded, slowly at first and then uncontrollably, by a irreparable breakdown of the technology of technical castration, which brings the force of erotic desire back into a society that has no social and psychological apparatus for coping with such an urgent disruptive force. Sagax watches as others are gradually overtaken with lust and observes with equal horror as it invades and takes possession of his own flesh until its general unleashing rips the utopian society apart. In a sense, what happens to the characters in Kolney’s story is no different from what happens to Mary Hardisson in Caresco, surhomme as a result of Caresco’s aphrodisiacs, but the altered context makes all the difference in the world to the chances of adaptation and hence to the nature of the reaction.

The large-scale thought experiments of Couvreur and Kolney arguably extrapolate the possibilities of speculative sex to an extent that robs it of an essential intimacy, and alongside that development there was also a development of descriptions of intimate encounters modified by the intrusion of some new element licensed by the speculative imagination. One of the most striking is to be found in Maurice Renard’s Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), although it was ruthlessly excised from the translation published in the USA as New Bodies for Old (1924), thus rendering the plot of that version rather difficult to understand. An unexpurgated translation can, however, be found in the Black Coat Press translation, Doctor Lerne, Subgod (2010).

The story is a much more direct adaptation of a theme already developed in supernatural fiction involving a kind of mental transmigration. The hero, Nicolas Veermont, goes to visit his uncle, Dr. Lerne, who has long been carrying out experiments in the interspecific “grafting” of various bodily organs. He finds his uncle much changed but requires an understandably long time and numerous encounters with the bizarre results of the relevant experiments to realize that the man now wearing his uncle’s body is, in fact, his former assistant, Dr. Klotz, who has taken possession of it by means of a brain transplant.

Inevitably, given the logic of fiction, Nicolas falls in love with his uncle’s ward, Emma, kept virtually imprisoned by Klotz, who naturally has evil designs on her himself. Klotz eventually gets rid of his rival by means of a reciprocal brain transplant with a bull—a plot-twist that permits the author to examine, albeit discreetly, the hero’s experience of the bull’s sex life, which his human intelligence allows him to appraise in terms that bulls presumably never do. Circumstances, however, force Klotz—whose long-term intention is to take possession of Nicolas’s body—to reverse the switch.

Emma naturally prefers the younger man and is in too much of a hurry to give Klotz time to complete his plan to adopt Nicholas’s flesh prior to the consummation of her desire. By the time she and Nicolas get around to slaking their long-frustrated passion, however, Klotz has taken his research a step further and is able to transmit his mentality independently of the flesh of his brain. The result is that when Nicolas has sex with Emma, his consciousness is invaded and partly displaced by that of Klotz—which, inevitably, alters his experience of the act quite considerably and in a fashion quite different from any run-of-the-mill sexual fantasy. The scene in question is quite remarkable, the pseudoscientific context giving it an edge much sharper than accounts of confused identity contained in supernatural fantasies with an erotic component and not merely because of its unusually explicit nature.

Equally inevitably within the context of the plot, the experience precipitates the suspended climax of the story in which the villain has to be eliminated so that the lovers can flee—but doing away with Klotz, given his newfound abilities, is inevitably difficult, and it proves insufficient merely to dispose of his body. Then, too, in a hard-headed work of speculative fiction, unlike a magical fantasy, the question of whether the lovers really can find a microcosmic eupsychia of their own where they might live happily ever after has to be addressed in a quasi-realistic fashion that reiterates the resigned cynicism of the first chapter of Le Sûrmale.

As a Naturalist by nature who had been temped into the wilderness of speculative fiction by the pressure of imaginative lust as well as the romance of philosophical curiosity, André Couvreur was unable to let the themes that he had introduced into Caresco, surhomme rest, and he was unable to let Caresco’s ghost rest in peace, either. He ventured into a more orthodox kind of speculative melodrama in Une Invasion des Macrobes [An Invasion of Macrobes] (1909) which introduced a markedly different mad scientist in the biochemist, Professor Tornada, but then fused the two characters under the latter’s name by injecting Caresco’s surgical talents along with his interest in sexual transformations into Tornada’s wayward personality in two heavily eroticized fantasies of biological experimentation. The first to be published, although the other was probably written earlier, was “L’Androgyne” (1922; tr. as “The Androgyne” in volume 1 of The Exploits of Professor Tornada) in which Tornada kidnaps individuals who have carelessly expressed the wish that they were members the opposite sex and swaps their sex organs around with consummate skill. He also uses his vast financial resources to set up new identities for them in order that he can track the progress of his experiment, curious in particular to see how his adapted females will cope with pregnancy and motherhood.

Georges Sigerier, the painter who wakes up in Tornada’s secret clinic to find himself transformed into a woman, is not, of course, in the same situation as modern transsexuals, who undergo the relevant operations because they have always felt that they had been assigned the wrong sex by nature and that they are therefore liberating their true identities. Psychologically, he remains completely masculine and now finds himself trapped in the “wrong” body, masquerading as his sister while pretending that Georges has made a sudden voyage to India—much to the distress of his mistress Rolande, who had been planning to leave her husband and run away with him. The novella tracks the relationship that develops between Rolande and “Georgette,” which becomes gradually more intimate as Georgette becomes the conduit of love letters supposedly sent by Georges from India, and Rolande begins to confide in Georgette all the aspects of her personal history and feelings that she could never have confided to Georges.

In the meantime, however, the frustrated eroticism of Georgette’s feelings for Rolande is complicated by the curious mixture of extreme repulsion and perverse attraction she feels for the fiancé with whom Tornada, in arranging her new identity, has carefully supplied her. Although the reader will probably guess immediately, it takes the not-very-bright protagonist a long time to figure out the reason for the curiously mixed and paradoxical magnetism that draws the two together while the plot moves inexorably toward the moment when Georgette’s privileged voyeurism in regard to Rolande finally reaches the brink of physical expression—and, perhaps inevitably, given the logic of fiction, a severe case of narrative coitus interruptus.

“L’Androgyne” was rapidly followed into print by “Le Valseur Phosphorescent” (1923; tr. as “The Phosphorescent Waltzer” in volume 2 of The Exploits of Professor Tornada) although the latter was probably written some years earlier before the 1914–18 war and only belatedly adapted as a Professor Tornada story. Its protagonist, Made (i.e, Madeleine) Ribaire, is an orphan brought up in relative luxury, now facing the exhaustion of her resources and a plunge into poverty. She thinks that the fate in question might be bearable because she expects her devoted friend, a biologist named Marcel Grimaud, to propose marriage to her, although he is reluctant to do so in spite of being in love with her because he is keenly aware of his inability to support her in the manner to which she is accustomed.

Made is offered another way out of her predicament when the handsome but utterly bizarre Adam Danator, who is a fine physical specimen of manhood, an uncannily brilliant swimmer and an efficient if overly mechanical waltzer, becomes smitten with her, prompting the exceedingly wealthy scientist who claims to be his father to make every effort to arrange a marriage by means of bribery. Although repelled as well as deeply confused by Adam’s behavior, which is a curious admixture of seeming obliviousness and outrageous lewdness, Made is bitterly chagrined by the fact that Marcel not only declines to offer her an alternative but urges her strongly to marry Adam. She consents and, in spite of the increasing peculiarity and sexual aggression of the Danators’ conduct, goes through with the wedding, conducted at the professor’s Villa of the Immaculate Conception by his mute servant, who happens to have taken Holy Orders as well as being a highly skilled laboratory assistant.

The wedding night, described in luridly explicit detail, does not go well—unsurprisingly for the reader, who along with Marcel will by then have figured out what Made has not: that Adam is the product of a scientific experiment in accelerated evolution, not born of woman but a far more immediate offspring of the sea. Although handsomely human in outward appearance, his physiology is eccentric, which makes it very difficult for him, in spite of extensive training in mechanical masturbation, to perform the sexual act that his “father” is so desperate for him to achieve in order to continue his experiment by means of impregnation. Indeed, Adam has no mind of his own and is a mere automaton when his father is not controlling his speech and gestures Klotz-fashion—which is, of course, not the kind of discovery that a virgin hopes to make on her wedding night and one that inevitably makes her yearn for the mercy of a narrative coitus interruptus that on this occasion the doubly disguised Professor Tornada has no intention of providing.

Professor Tornada’s literary career continued in three further novellas, but his obsession with sex, although it did not entirely disappear, was very considerably toned down thereafter. Indeed, the same is true of the entire genre of roman scientifique, which, after that brief, erotic flowering between 1900 and 1925, then eased up considerably on its attempts to explore and analyze the mysteries of speculative sex. The quest was not abandoned, but it did go through a period of relative quiescence. Perhaps, if one thinks back to the argument of the first chapter of Le Sûrmale, that is not entirely surprising; had the investigation become indefinite, it might have lost interest.

At any rate, there does seem to be have been something of a let-down effect—a post-coital triste in the wake of la petite mort—that not only inhibited André Couvreur and Maurice Renard but others who might have followed the example set by Alfred Jarry in trying to apply the speculative imagination to intimate experience in a straightforwardly intrusive manner. (Fernand Kolney, after a period in the literary wilderness, eventually became a writer of more orthodox erotica but never attempted anything else with the imaginative scope of L’Amour dans cinq mille ans.) The foundations had however been laid—and, indeed, well and truly laid. Signposts had been put in place for future writers in search of narrative paths to follow in the investigation of speculative sex.

In the event, those signposts proved a trifle difficult to find as well as to follow. Caresco, surhomme and L’Amour dans cinq mille ans both became exceedingly rare books, although the rarity of the latter was somewhat ameliorated by a 1928 reprint, and even Le Sûrmale, in spite of the prestige of Jarry’s status as an admitted literary genius, was not a very easy book to find during the first half of the century. The guidelines were there, however, and they remain, now that the relevant paths have been much more thoroughly beaten. Perhaps they are no longer necessary, and perhaps they seem in retrospect a trifle naïve, but that is only to be expected of the initial groping in a field of literary experience that had been surrounded in the past by such elaborate and insistent taboos and was not to be entirely freed from those taboos for a long time.

Even today, in fact, one cannot say that the arena has been entirely freed of embarrassments, and it could certainly be argued that the progress made in the literary discussion since 1904 is of lesser dimension than the imaginative erections achieved between the first and last pages of the two pioneering exercises on which Alfred Jarry and Alfred Couvreur embarked. If both Le Sûrmale and Caresco, surhomme remain slightly frustrating texts in their ultimate failure to get to grips with the argumentative issues thrust forward in their pages, that is hardly surprising when one considers that the vast majority of subsequent exercises could not even match their reach nor the intensity of the concentration that they brought—albeit in a spirit of naked jest—to the mapping of the fundamental problem. As in other areas of human experience, although the first experiments are never the most skilled, the most sophisticated, nor the most successful, they are nevertheless capable of leaving a deeper imprint on consciousness.

Although there is no shortage of more recent works that exhibit the same frankness in regard to the description of sex acts that one finds in Caresco, surhomme and Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu, it is worth noting that very few of those works actually deal with speculative sex. Most of them, no matter how much they alter the sociotechnological context of the act, are reluctant to examine the consequences that new technologies might have on the nature and experience of the act itself. There is a near-limitless extension of the Gautieresque game of partner swapping, in which aliens and androids play a considerable part but usually as mere understudies for imperfect humans.

In consequence, the interesting, fundamental problem identified by Jarry is generally permitted to remain unmentioned and unaddressed, the tacit assumption being that the suspense and its associated sentiment will and perhaps ought to remain eternal. Indeed, amazing as it might seem, this is one arena of technological advance where chemistry and surgery might be evolving faster than speculative fiction. Or perhaps it is merely one more instance of the old adage that plus ça change plus c’est la même chose: that this particular corridor of exploration is a dead end and that in this context the science-fictional imagination, like Adam Danator, the mindless phosphorescent waltzer, simply can’t perform.

Brian Stableford lives in Hadleigh, Essex. For now.