Rosny manifesto 1887

A friend did a somewhat rough translation of the preface by J.H. Rosny to his first collection of storiies, L'Immolation (1887), which included his first sf story "Les Xipehuz" (translated 80 years later by Damon Knight as "The Shapes"). No doubt Brian Stableford will do a better translaton of the preface as part pf his Rosny projecft for Black Coat Prss. But even in this version, it strikes me that it anticipates the attitude, as opposed to the dialectic of Zamytain's "On Synthetism" (1923).

--J.J.P.

PREFACE

(Response to an anonymous letter regarding Le Bilateral)

It is a banal truth to all that when the inferior animals are concerned, perfection, very limited in the Individual, is much less in the Species; that one can draw from the horse all the qualities that one will ultimately obtain from its heirs. This law, while not applying quite so mathematically to man, is no less verified by the great historical eras. In these conditions and until it is proven that our race has finished progressing, that it has nothing more to expect from the future, that we are doomed to exhaustion, all pretention to making a final judgment could only come from the brain of an ignoramus, a fool, or a charlatan.
To consider only literature, no past production can be an obstacle to a future production, no subject, no technique, no language will resist the test of time. Chateaubriand, Balzac, Hugo, and all of us who write today, will someday be barbarians, and only the retrospective benevolence of our great-nephews will prevent them from shrugging their shoulders over our wretched creations, our rudimentary techniques, our pitiable style.
Conceding this, one is moved to ask those who are of this second half of the century and in whom the philosophy of our epoch has penetrated, if it would not be time to come to a new wisdom, to rid ourselves of the mania of playing God Himself, to get used to the idea that later we will have to step aside before the rising tide of our heirs; to the idea of being the friends of our successors and not their worst enemies. For the grotesque vanity of ruling the centuries, one would substitute the pleasure of acting effectively in the one in which one lives. One would lose an empty illusion in favor of a well-filled reality. And it is not the future that will suffer from it; it will suffer even more if we persist in wishing to confine it within the narrow limits of our inferiority.
But we are not there. We are not yet resigned to evolution, to the inevitable laws of progress; we have not yet renounced the vain pride of gaining the admiration of all the centuries, of building indestructibly. It is that pride that repels the innovator, living negation of the illusion that one cherished; it is that which provokes the cries of furor for the classics against the romantics, for the romantics against the naturalists, for the last of the scribblers against the next to the last of the scribblers; it is that which does not want one to change subjects, techniques, the language; it is that in a thousand forms, in the name of a thousand sentiments each more sacred than the last, which deters Homer, Racine, Shakespeare, that which sagely fabricates the immutable dictionary of the immutable Academy. And nothing corrects us, not the comparison of the language of Rabelais with that of ours, not the battles of Sects against Sects, Philosophies against Philosophies, Literatures against Literatures.
At the end of the day, the clearest benefit of all this is for the mediocrities, who will always be delighted by having someone behind them who will follow in their footsteps, finding a ready-made rhetoric, a sure rule for producing novels, and, entrenched behind the opinion of the masters, overwhelming the lesser innovators with their foolishnesses.
In our battle of end of the century, the newly arrived must therefore expect actual hatreds, extremely intense antagonisms. They must convince themselves that the enemy is none other than the Sectarians, and, instead of fighting with one another, they must unite in order to combat that enemy. These Sectarians will inevitably scorn any artist who develops Psychology, who seeks amongst coarse instincts for manifestations that are finer, more astute, more ingenious, who discovers the coordinates of an order more distant than that comprised by superficial observation, struggles hard to extract the profound and confused thoughts that contribute to the exterior determinations of the person.
Scorned all the more will be he who, in the general domain of human progress, in the attainments of Science and Philosophy, attempts to find the elements of the most complex beauty, more in relation to the developments of a high civilization, who believes that the great discoveries of our end of the century are susceptible to the highest degree of being transformed into literary materials.
Scorned will be he who, profiting from making observations, will want to make them serve a work of synthesis; who, without claiming to draw a scientific lesson from it, will believe that works of literary invention are of immense interest for art.
Scorned will be he who (in this respect only following the example of all the centuries) thinks to perfect the language, loves the form being adequate for the idea, persuaded that observations of complex or ingenious beings can be expressed in a manner perfectly clear in itself, with the condition that the style be as complex or ingenious as the idea itself...
But what consequence are these excommunications! Such are blown away by the wind! The scorned of today will be the victors of tomorrow! No procession of Apostles will prevent the Prophets from succumbing to the assault of the rising generation!