Villiers, Tomorrow's Eve

[Dave Monroe]

... from the "Translator's Introduction" to Villiers de L'Isle-Adam.
Tomorrow's Eve, Trans. Robert Martin Adams (Urbana: U of Illinois P,
2001 [1886]), pp. ix-xxv ...

At least in the mind of Villiers de L'Isla-Adam, it seems likely that
the idea of a mechanical woman did not grow directly from previous
instances of mechanisms resmbling people, but indirectly, from people
resembling mechanisms, and rather vulgar mechanisms at that.  Life, as
we know, was getting more mechanical, as mass production and mass
populations reacted on one another all across the Western world.  (xvi)

In addition, a variety of intellectual strains amde this fact appear
particularly painful and oppressive to the author of Tomorrow's Eve.
Most agonizing of these strains was that generated by Catholicism in
crisis.  The revolution of 1789 had completely shredded the French
church .... (xvi-xvii)

Progress, liberalism, and modern civilization were represented at teh
moemnt by the regime of Louis Napoleon, devoted to industry and
technology, business and money, socialism, imperialism, and religious
indifference.  This was, obviously, a mixed bag of social values, but it
left little room for the conservative Catholic aristocrat like
Villiers.  (xvii)

... a supreme insult to the old church was the creation of a new one,
deliberately based on the hateful principles of progress, liberalism,
and modern civilization....  Positive philosophy ... Auguste Comte ...
(xviii)

Hence, no doubt, the relsih with which Villiers seized on the idea of a
frankly mechanical human being as the fulfillment of a Positive world
and, in a special dialectical sense, an antidote to it.  The sacred
horror with which he contemplates making love to a machine closely
resembles that which penetrates the soul of Des Esseintes when (in
Huysmans' 1884 novel, A rebours) he reagrds the universal corruption of
a business civilization which has adulterated even the scared bread and
wine of the sacrament.  (xviii)

How could the Son of God be expected to enter such a nauseous mixture?
Much teh same set of feelings among the beleaguered
ultramontanists--fears that they were being robbed of tehir religion by
the corruptions of a secular world--created widespread paranoid
suspicions during the late reign of Leo XIII, pope from 1878 to 1903....
the very texture of normal life seemed to the ultras erosive of their
faith.... The normal and the sensible would henceforth be merely gauzy
veils for the diabolic.  (xix)

Doctor Jacques LaMettrie's L'homme machine (1750) ... seriously proposed
the view of man as a collection of what we would call conditioned
reflexes.  (xix)

We should not overlook a tendency of extreme Catholicism, toward the end
of the nineteenth century, to develop a mystical streak and a
fascination with the occult ....  these dark cross-currents, where faith
in extremis flowered into superstition....  For this entire development,
mingling spiritualism with a kind of sympathetic magic, there was
literary precedent in the semi-occult fictions of Balzac (Seraphita,
Luois Lambert) and the quasi-scientific religiosity of Victor Hugo.  But
the real force authenticating all nineteenth-century occultism was of
course reactive; it was the response to those waves of mechanical
materialism, philosophic as well a spractical, in which Europe seemed to
be sinking.  Since teh days of the gnostics, witchcraft and spiritualism
have regularly been invoked as antidotes to a too-confident,
too-deadening materialism.  (xxiii)

The spectacular violence of a Liebestod, whereby a couple fulfill and
die to their social rational appetitive selves, in order to live (if at
all) in the cold flames of spiritual affinity, falls within the range of
teh Hegelian dialectic.... it was the ultimate, unanswerable hauteur, a
negation which negated once and for all the negatives of existence.
Diminishing spirals are the pattern imposed by the Liebestod: the ego
finally fulfills itself by destroying itself.  Materlinck, D'Annunzio,
and Villiers are at one in this respect with their master Wagner.
Deepening obsession is the theme, fixation the process,
self-annihilation the end.  Instead of displaying the successful
working-out of a problem, the literary work ripens a fatal condition
given from the beginning.  (xxiii-xxiv)

A parody Tristan und Isolde with the heroine personified by an
assemblage of circuits and solenoids?   (xxiv)

... which sounds not unlike both V. and Gravity's Rainbow.  See also
Michel DeCerteau, "Mystic Speech," Heterologies: Discourse on the Other
(trans. Brian Massumi.  Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) and, more
extensively,  The Mystic Fable, Vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (trans. Michael B. Smith.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), on
the tendency towards mysticism amongst disenfranchised Catholic nobility
(Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, et al.), and note as well the
gothic perhaps in its emergence, at least, as an anti-Catholic genre of
sorts, with its Protestant iconoclastic associations of Catholicism and
mysticism, decadence and, ultimately, evil ...