Jim Click Read online

  Jim Click

  or, The Wonderful Invention

  by

  Fernand Fleuret

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Jim Click, ou La Merveilleuse invention, roman d’aventures by Fernand Fleuret, here translated as Jim Click; or, The Wonderful Invention, was originally published by Gallimard in 1930. It is one of the later additions to a long series of French fantasies featuring human automata, the theme having been given particular impetus in France by the examples of actual automata produced in the 1730s by Jacques Vaucanson, which caused a sensation at the time, although no one took the trouble to preserve them—a disappearance that only enhanced their subsequent legendary status.

  Early stories in which Vaucansonesque automata are mistaken for human beings, such as “Mademoiselle de La Choupillière” (1832; tr. with the same title) by Jacques Boucher de Perthes, inevitably use the notion as a plotting gimmick, but—equally inevitably—dress the essentially farcical idea with a satirical commentary on the “mechanical features” of ordinary human behavior, in terms of individual psychology and social interaction.

  That satirical element became sharper as the exploration of the theme advanced, becoming more scathingly critical in such works as L’Automate, récit tiré d’un palimpseste (1878; tr. as “The Automaton: a Story Translated for a Palimpsest”) by Ralph Schropp, initially published in 1878 and reprinted as a booklet by A. Ghio in 1880, which takes up an older legend relating to the manufacture of an artificial human being, crediting the achievement to the 13th century scholar Albertus Magnus.

  The scale of the manufacturing enterprise, and hence the baroque imagery, became much more lavish in Ignis (1883)1 by Didier de Chousy, while the psychological analysis associated with more extensive uses of the theme even became more intense, the fundamental error taking on a hallucinatory dimension, in the most famous work in the sequence, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1886; tr. as Tomorrow’s Eve).

  Jim Click, coming after all these works and several more, aspires successfully to a new level of sophistication in the relevant literary contexts, not merely in its satirical reflections and its carefully-crafted commentary on various tendencies to automatism is natural human beings, but also in its handling of the farcical aspects of the plot. The novel employs the familiar apologetic device of the “madman’s manuscript,” offering its central narrative as an autobiography written in a lunatic asylum by a patient who might be saner than his imaginatively-blinkered physician believes, but takes the device a step further by embedding the central madman’s manuscript in another, equally uncertain, and even adding a third hypothetical interpreter in the form of the supposed translator who renders the story into French. Within that nest of deliberate complications and ambiguities, the tone of the narrative veers smoothly between the overtly comical and the poignantly tragic, and between scrupulous observation of naturalistic detail and dramatic improbability, maintaining a consistent narrative suspense as well as a heartfelt account of human folly in some of its most discomfiting aspects.

  Fernand Fleuret (1883-1945) was a poet, humorist and historian of the unusual, who made a living as a journalist, frequently writing under fanciful and flippant pseudonyms. His closest associates in the Parisian literary world were the symbolist and pioneer of surrealism Guillaume Apollinaire, the militant socialist Louis Perceau, with whom he wrote a good deal in pseudonymous collaboration, Rémy de Gourmont, Max Jacob and André Salmon; he must also have been acquainted with other journalists who produced extravagant fantastic fiction, most notably André Arnyvelde—another close friend of Apollinaire—and Jules Hoche. With Apollinaire and Perceau, Fleuret wrote an account of L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale [The Closed Section of the Bibliothèque Nationale] (1913), offering a survey of the books that the national library was obliged to keep locked away, accessible only to selected scholars, and his own ambitions as a writer were always to be contentious, challenging and controversial. He only published two novels, the other being Histoire de la bienheureuse Raton, fille de joie [The Story of the Blissful Raton, prostitute] (1926), which proved (unsurprisingly) much more popular, but both are as artful as they are determined in their pursuit of those ambitions.

  Although it has not retained the celebrity of L’Ève future, mainly because Fernand Fleuret has not retained the same personal legendary status as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, it is a better novel, more rounded as well as more pointed, if that oxymoronic combination is permissible, and also more complex. It was written at a time when androids were much in fashion throughout Europe, thanks to the widespread continuing distribution of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1920) and Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), and like those works, it is both a significant reflection of the spirit of its era and a work of enduring appeal and value, as readable and as effective today as it was in 1930. Like all great historical fantasies, it offers an account of history that makes more sense than the one offered by orthodox historians, precisely because it is both absurdly farcical and deeply tragic.

  This translation was made from a copy of the Gallimard edition, marked “fourth edition” on the cover and the title page.

  Brian Stableford

  JIM CLICK

  or THE WONDERFUL INVENTION

  NOTICE

  In 1810, an English writer, J. H. D. Robertson, issued in Edinburgh, without a named publisher, a curious work entitled Jim Click, or the Wonderful Invention. While passing through London I found it in the shop of a second-hand book dealer, who was unable to tell me anything about the author or the book, although he had consulted all possible catalogues and bibliographies and appealed to the critics and men of letters among his clients—for it appears that in London, such gentlemen do read books.

  In addition, he assured me that he believed his copy to be unique and that the others must have been pulped, unless just Posterity, represented by grocers and housewives, had destined them for the preservation of jam, butter and mustard. So saying, my bookseller seemed to be suggesting that those destroyers were absolutely justified. I thought I could read in his thoughts that he would have done the same had his profession not obliged him to respect printed matter. I paid a modest price for the book, and the bibliopole received my money with disdain. If I did not fear offending him by what he might judge to be an impertinence, I would dedicate my translation to him.

  I have not found that work entirely despicable. Without the satire that it contains, the English bookseller might perhaps have affected less intolerance, but I do not have the same reasons for disapproval as him, and I believe, on the other hand, that it is not necessary to attach overmuch importance to the ravings of a madman. I also think, with J. H. D. Robertson, that something might be gleaned from it. In any case, I shall leave the latter to speak for himself, in the prologue with which he precedes Jim Click and the rather singular epilogue that concludes it.

  As for myself, I have limited myself to translating very exactly, leaving aside the identity of J. H. D. Robertson, which might not be as impenetrable as the bookseller claims, and without worrying any more about the historical accuracy of the story. I am not familiar with Admiral Gunson, and I have never heard of the Battle of Barajar, but it might, after all, be the case that both are renowned in the world under other names, as that is often the case.

  F. F.

  PROLOGUE

  In the course of a long fatigue caused by study and toil, I was cared for last year in the house of Dr. Vilkind at Danish Camp in Norfolk.2 It was an establishment that, by virtue of the respect for silence observed there and the solicitude with which you are surrounded, could offer a rest cure to overworked individuals, but most o
f the patients treated there are afflicted in their reason. To tell the truth, Dr. Vilkind had graciously urged me to stay there for a while, for it would not have occurred to any other physician to send a patient there whose faculties remained sane.

  I had made the acquaintance of Dr. Vilkind at the British Library, where I was working on utopian writers of the stripe of Thomas More, Bacon, Campanella, Cyrano de Bergerac and Gabriel de Foigny, and other ancient and modern dreamers, who could fill a bookcase of huge dimensions on their own.

  Dr. Vilkind, who had the seat next to mine, took an interest in my studies. In addition to being highly literate, he found that kind of philosophy particularly interesting, not because he was a utopian himself, but because he claimed that many of his patients had a bee in their bonnet of wanting to correct or regenerate the world. He classified their madness in accordance with the situation of their utopian realms.

  Men who imagined such realms beyond the sea, like More and Harrington, were afflicted by a particular lesion of the brain, and that lesion was distinct from the lesion of men who placed their chimeras among the stars, like Cyrano the Lunarian and Campanella the Solarian, and different again from those who established it in subterranean depths, like the novelist Ludvig Holberg in The Voyage of Niels Klim. Finally, he differentiated from all of the preceding those who dreamed of austral lands, like the Bishop of Exeter, Joseph Hall, who, Vilkind sustained on the basis of his experience, had been afflicted by a chilling of the marrow engendered by a rheumatism of venereal origin.3

  I do not know exactly from what Plato was suffering to have dreamed of Atlantis, nor what multiple lesions obfuscated the brain of Jonathan Swift and provoked in him an entirely mental ambulatory mania, all the sharper because it was never satisfied.

  “I would have treated Swift,” he said, “firstly by making him walk five miles every morning, and I would have constrained him to dress in wool, in order that an abundant sweat would purge the acridity of his humors.”

  When I reached the end of my work—or, at least, nothing more remained than for me to draft it in accordance with my notes—I gave evidence of a need for rest, which, as I have said, Dr. Vilkind offered to satisfy in the best possible conditions. I think that he was counting on indoctrinating me at length and introducing his psychiatric conclusions into my book. I therefore accepted, glad to be able to maintain with him a fire that, thanks to his care, would not consume me.

  I found beautiful shade in Dr. Vilkind’s establishment, in which I passed part of the mornings, usually drowsily lying on the mossy at the foot of the trees, sometimes distractedly reading a book from the communal library. That library was the doctor’s pride. Not only did it contain the wherewithal to occupy the leisure hours of a cultivated man but also to fortify the meditations of a scientist like my host. What rendered it even more precious was the relatively large number of manuscripts and drawings due to the pen or pencil of inmates, which had been piling up for some thirty years.

  “You cannot measure,” Dr. Vilkind said to me one day, “the interest that there would have been for you in riffling through these works instead of applying yourself to reading that can be found anywhere. Some have an appearance of rationality and are not without kinship with the lucubrations of the majority of your utopians. They are also written with more disinterest and conviction—I might even say seriousness—for among professional philosophers and writers it is advisable to look for the element of mockery, paradox, rancor or the desire to do someone a bad turn. You are not unaware that the resentment of old misfortunes was resident in Swift’s heart, and that it was to lay waste to the optimistic philosophy of Leibniz that Voltaire wrote Candide.”

  My host went on: “Look, here are two works of a so-called inventor. The first is a scientific paper with detailed plans and designs in a hand so masterly that one could believe in the reality of the invention. The second is a long novel that he wrote himself, which relates to an incredible adventure. He pretended, however, that it was a true story, and was bold enough to sustain that to my face. His madness consisted of wanting to identify with reality the fiction that he had conceived while straying into satire. There reigns within it, I tell you, a tone of sincerity apt to render the book dangerous if it were ever published as the brainchild of a writer. Compared with your utopians, it isn’t inferior. At least he was locked up, although yours were free to be a danger to society.”

  I leafed through the first work that Dr. Vilkind handed me. It was indeed a collection of drawings in aquatint, of an artistry so perfect that one might have thought them engraved, and which bore, for the most part, their scale of reduction or enlargement. There were about fifteen hundred items therein, which testified to a dogged patience, and, so far as I could judge, a profound knowledge of mechanics and anatomy, because the levers, cog-wheels and crank shafts were mingled with human articulations, bones, muscles and an entire vascular system. An explanatory text, in perfectly-formed handwriting with no crossings-out, was legible at a glance. That folio treatise was dedicated to His Majesty King George III “by his very humble and very obedient servant, Doctor Click.”

  “Was he really a doctor?” I asked.

  “Yes,” my host replied, “And a doctor of almost all the sciences. It is his universal knowledge that is imposed here—but he lacked reason,” Vilkind concluded, with a little snigger.

  I set aside the treatise in order to take up the pseudo-novel, which interested me more, judging it more within my range and worthy of satisfying my professional curiosity.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll read it this evening, since I have your permission, Doctor. It appears to me to be written with very good penmanship.”

  “Huh!” said Vilkind. “An educated man who has forced leisure can, strictly speaking, pass for a writer, even if he has no common sense—that isn’t a professional requirement…but I beg your pardon for that.”

  I laughed at his at his joke, and took my leave, impatient to make the acquaintance of the manuscript, which solicited reading by virtue of the nervous elegance of its calligraphy.

  PART ONE

  I

  I was born at Danish Camp in Norfolk in 1759, the only child of my honorable father William Click, who was reputed to be an excellent clockmaker. By that entitlement, he regulated the clocks at Norwich Observatory. My mother lost her life in bringing me into the world. I was brought up by my nurse until the day I was able to do without her milk. Then my father divided his time between his watches and my little backside.

  The cradle was on the left hand side of his work-bench, next to a stove where things were warmed up for my usage; he dried other things on it, the odor of which cannot have been pleasant. When I cried, my father reached out his arm and imprinted me with a few cadences that threw me back into sleep. If the work was not pressing, he took me on his knees. Without taking the horn-rimmed magnifying glass out of his left eye, which was weak, he sang the Mallard song to me in a bucolic falsetto voice.4 It doubtless seemed to him to be appropriate to my young age, at which no one ought to be able to understand anything:

  O, I have avut, O what have I yut?

  I’ve ayut the voot o’my mallard.

  A voot voot, a toe toe nippens and all,

  O, so goodum it was, my mallard.

  I was less astonished by that than the sound of the watches that my father applied to my ear. He wanted, by that means, to give me a precocious taste for the mechanics that had nourished his life, and which was to be the bane of mine. I was also suspended, eyes haggard and drooling, before various pendulum clocks of his industry, which he made me admire. Among others, there was a cutter navigating in a bowl around a lighthouse with a clock-face; the hour, the quarter and the half were incessantly announced by a mariner in a white waxed cap, who glided around the lantern agitating a hand-bell and applying a loudhailer to his mouth.

  That masterpiece, mounted on a mobile pedestal, was placed in the shop window. Several times a day, the scapegraces going to school or coming back
pressed their noses—as ill-wiped as mine—against the window in order to admire the mysterious evolution of the little ship on veritable water and look out for the emergence of the lighthouse-keeper, whom my father had nicknamed Jack Tar.

  However inconvenient the presence in the shop of an infant of my age might seem, it attracted the housewives of the neighborhood, with the result that my father received assistance and benefit from it. The natural consideration that he already had was increased thereby, and it even brought him some good opportunities for remarriage. In addition to the fact that he was no longer young, however, he preferred to spend his evenings playing the sonatas of Boyce5 on his viola da gamba, or philosophizing in front of a pint of ale with a churchwarden pipe in his lips, rather than get to grips with a new wife, in the ineluctable disputes that are the ransom of matrimonial pleasures, if it is true that they exist.

  However, in order to display their aptitude as housekeepers, each of them did her best, as I have said, to make herself useful. One of them taught me to walk, another to talk, a third to eat without splattering the surroundings with the spoon, which I was obliged to raise to the level of my lips and not my ear or my eye. A fourth, finally, taught me to read the Bible, which is why I know so little of it and have such a mediocre grasp thereof.

  I ought to add that, in truth, neither my father, who was not a handsome man, nor his situation, which was no more elevated than those of his suitors, was sufficient to earn so many precious attentions. It was known that his brother, who was devoid of marital burdens and notoriously intemperate, had accumulated a considerable fortune in India. Thus, our neighbors never failed to ask for news of his establishment and his health when the post brought some from time to time.