Nora, The Ape-Woman Read online

  Nora, The Ape-Woman

  by

  Félicien Champsaur

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  NORA, THE APE-WOMAN

  Notes

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Nora, la guenon devenue femme by Félicien Champsaur, here translated as Nora, the Ape-Woman, was first published by Ferenczi in 1929. It is a sequel to the earlier novel Ouha, roi des singes (1923)1 and also gives a major role to the central character of Homo-Deus: Le Satyre Invisible (1924)2, who had also been given a minor role in Tuer les vieux! Jouir! (1925)3.

  The list of the author’s previous works included in the preliminary pages of Nora includes sales figures to date, which claim that Ouha had sold 95,000 copies and Homo-Deus—recorded as Le Satyre invisible, which was presumably the author’s intended title, as—50,000. Although some earlier works had racked up sales much more considerable than those, the figures are considerably higher than those for any of the other titles Champsaur published in the 1920s, and the provision of a sequel to both must therefore have seemed an attractive proposal. The resultant text did not do nearly as well, however, and might have been thought by contemporary readers to have taken the evident bizarrerie of the two earlier novels a step too far.

  All three of the novels making up the peculiar triad completed by Nora, as well as the other novel featuring Homo-Deus in a cameo role have been largely eliminated from modern awareness, along with their author. Nora, however, has attracted some belated critical comment of an entirely negative kind, having been explicitly condemned by some recent critics as an offensively racist text. Brett A. Berliner, for instance, in “Mephistopheles and Monkeys: Rejuvenation, Race and Sexuality in Popular Culture in Interwar France,”4 begins his article with the statement;

  “In 1929 Félicien Champsaur, a Rabelaisian author of much pulp fiction, published Nora, la guenon devenue femme. The cover illustration of Champsaur’s book featured a svelte black woman wearing nothing but a banana skirt, looking not unlike the African-American entertainer Josephine Baker, who, just a few years earlier, had taken Paris by storm.” Having explained Nora’s genesis by means of the transplantation of “the ovaries of a Russian ex-princess,” Berliner concludes his first paragraph with the judgment that: “Nora evolved into a brown-skinned woman—symbolically, Josephine Baker.”

  The subsequent commentary on the plot of the novel, including various quotations, suggests that Berliner had read it and had access to a copy of the book, but it is worth noting that the front cover (attributed to “Endré”) actually depicts a white woman who does not resemble Josephine Baker, save for her hair-style, and although there are two internal illustrations by Charles Naillod that are reminiscent of Josephine Baker, neither of which features a banana skirt, the other internal illustration and the back cover (by Lucien Jaquelux) also depict a white woman. The text initially describes Nora as having “bronzed” skin in the first chapter, but offers a somewhat confused account thereafter in which several different colors, including black, are deliberately confused. The most significant datum to emerge from that confusion, in fact, is that her complexion has a faint bluish tint that licenses description of her as “la danseuse bleue” (the blue dancer)—a phrase whose repeated use suggests that the character owes at least part of her inspiration to one or both of two famous paintings featuring that formula in their titles, one by Edgar Degas and the other by the futurist Gino Severini.

  In addition, although Nora’s mother was an orangutan, there is a strong possibility that her father is the white American scientist who has adopted her and given her his surname, Abraham Goldry; he sometimes denies the biological kinship (with a furious blush) but his closest associates have no doubt of the fact, and attribute his reaction to shame, or, more generously, to his being “in denial.” Nora’s counterpart within the plot, Narcisse, is the son of a native black woman and the part-human orangutan Ouha—but he is the only character in the plot to have any such relationship, and he is treated far more sympathetically by the author than any other character.

  The first chapter of the novel, in which Nora is introduced, features a minor character whose sole purpose is to make a speech arguing that “we are all apes,” thus summarizing the moral of the tale, which is the very opposite of the xenophobia that Berliner tries to foist upon it. The plot continually draw comparisons between the hybrid apes Nora and Narcisse and the “fully human” characters—every single one of whom is white—always suggesting that the supposed “superiority” of the latter is false, and consists largely of a hypocritical denial of their animality, particularly in respect of their sexual impulses. If evaluated in accordance with its own assertions, therefore, the story is anything but racist, and conspicuously refuses even to be “speciesist” in its evaluation of the claims of civilized white men to be superior to other races.

  Having said that, it is necessary to agree with Berliner that Nora’s first appearance on the stage of the Folies Bergère is, indeed, strongly reminiscent of Josephine Baker’s debut there in 1925 (following earlier performances at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées), when she performed a so-called “danse sauvage” wearing a skirt made from a string of artificial bananas. One reference in the description of the dance to Nora being in the midst of “the other negroes” forming her supportive chorus suggests that Champsaur did see that performance, and is adapting a journalistic description of it, in a somewhat slapdash fashion, for his own description of Nora’s “ballet nègre.” It is vital to realize, however, that in doing that, Champsaur had not the slightest intention of insulting Josephine Baker or the chorus, and that Nora’s actual symbolism within the story is in no way relevant to the career of the American dancer, or to black people in general. The fact that Nora’s performance is a ballet nègre is attributed in the story to the fact that she learned to dance in Cuba, and it is useful for modern readers to bear in mind that the phrase ballet nègre was a general term for a style of dancing, which was not intended to be pejorative (it was subsequently used as the title for the African-American modern dance company founded by Katherine Durham in 1930).

  Josephine Baker did cause a sensation when she appeared at the Folies Bergère, but it is worth remembering that the reason she took that job (breaking her previous contact in order to stay in Paris rather than continue touring) was because she found far less racism in the French capital than she had encountered elsewhere, especially in her homeland. She was not the first part-negro dancer to appear on the Parisian stage wearing an extremely scanty costume and dancing ballet nègre. She had been preceded by Aïcha Goblet, who appears in a cameo role in a scene in Tuer les Vieux! Jouir! set in the Café Rotonde, where Champsaur used to hang out with Picasso and Modigliani, both of whom used her as a model; the scene not only establishes that Champsaur knew her, but that he was entirely sympathetic to her, and it serves to allow the narrative voice to defend her against unjustified moral suspicions; it illustrates that racism was by no means absent from the Parisian social scene in the 1920s, but also that Félicien Champsaur was a fervent opponent of it rather than a collaborator.

  Perhaps, viewed in retrospect, it was a faux pas for Champsaur to borrow aspects of Josephine Baker’s dancing to characterize Nora’s, but it ought not to occasion the blanket condemnation of the book—which is otherwise totally innocent of any accidental racist suggestion—or of its author, who was one of the least xenophobic of his generation. It is, admittedly, difficult for a reader who has not previously read both Ouha and Homo-Deus: Le Satyr invisible to get a grip
on the text, but that does not excuse the kind of gross misrepresentation of which Berliner is guilty. Champsaur would have been deeply mortified to know that the work had given rise to such criticism—all the more so because there are many so aspects of the book that really are intended to shock and offend, albeit in a very different cause, fiercely attacking the hypocrisy and folly of the arrogance of supposedly-superior “civilized” (white) humans.

  In order to understand Nora’s actual symbolism it is helpful to refer back to two of Champsaur’s earlier novels, both published in 1888: the two that did more than any others to make him famous and to establish his narrative method and style. The first, L’Amant des danseuses, roman moderniste [The Man Who Loved Dancing-Girls; a Modernist Novel] is a relatively earnest psychological study of the erotic attraction of the world of the theater in general, and dancers in particular, which uses a painter as a central character, clearly based on Edgar Degas, although the fascinations credited to him are largely the author’s own, and insofar as the narrative is critical of the character’s obsession, it is a kind of self-criticism without any intention to insult Degas. The second, Lulu, roman clownesque [Lulu; a Clownish Novel] is a study of a dancer, couched as a sentimental comedy, in which the dancer explicitly becomes a symbol not merely for the eroticism of her art and the fickleness of womankind, but for the essential spirit of the city of Paris. The narrative goes even further than that in its extravagant climax, when the lover that Lulu finally chooses from among her various suitors is revealed to be an incarnation of the divine “Eros-Bacchus,” who subjects her to a metamorphosis described in the relevant chapter-title as an apotheosis, represented by the illustrator Louis Chalon in an image entitled “L’Assomption de Lulu” [The Assumption of Lulu], which transforms her into the “ange d’acrobatie” [angel of acrobatics].

  Nora brings Lulu’s lyrical symbolism back down to earth, making the dancer an ape rather than an angel precisely in order to fit her into the context of evolutionary history and the true nature of the simian and human species, as suggested by modern science—a long-term fascination of Champsaur’s, as illustrated by his early short stories “La Légende du singe” (1876; tr. as “The First Human” in The Human Arrow 5 and “Le Dernier homme” (1885; tr. as “The Last Human” in the same volume). As with Lulu, Nora’s principal function within the plot is to be an object of sexual desire, and an archetypal embodiment of the very essence of sexual desire; amour, however, is no longer imagined in the present novel as something intrinsically divine, but as something intrinsically animalistic, and so deep-seated that even a scientific genius like Homo-Deus, let alone a litterateur whose trade is romance, cannot hope to escape it entirely. Nora is a story of the triumph of that animality, but it is also a story that attempts to argue, very fervently, that it is a triumph of which we ought not to be ashamed, and which even scientists ought not to regret.

  Insofar as Nora has a plot—and, like many of Champsaur’s later novels, it is something of a slapdash hotchpotch, thrown together at the whim of a mind that has more than a hint of butterfly about it—that plot is concerned with the scientific modification of species by means of surgery, and the possibilities inherent within that surgery of the enhancement of the human condition, ultimately extending as far as the creation of the superhuman and conquest of death. In that respect, the story takes a great deal of inspiration from the contemporary exploits of Serge Voronoff, who is one of its leading characters, forming a quartet with Abraham Goldry, the anthropologist earlier featured in Ouha, and Marc Vanel (alias Homo-Deus) and Jean Fortin, the two biologists and psychic scientists featured in Homo-Deus: Le Satyre invisible.

  Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) was born Samuel Abrahamovitch in Russia, but went to Paris at the age of eighteen to study medicine, and was eventually naturalized as a French citizen in 1895. As a student he worked for a time under one of the leading physiologists of the era, Charles Brown-Séquard (1817-1894), the pioneer of xenotransplantation, who claimed shortly before his death to have injected human subjects with extracts from the testicles of guinea-pigs and dogs, that the injections had resulted in observable rejuvenation, and that he hoped they might also result in an extension of longevity. Subsequently, Voronoff also worked in collaboration with a younger student, Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), who was similarly interested in the possibility of xenotranplantation, and whose work was eventually to help pave the way for actual organ transplantation, although he became far more famous in the short term for his work on tissue cultures, enabling cells to develop in vitro.

  Voronoff was independently wealthy, but he also attracted considerable research funding in 1917 from a wealthy American socialite, Evelyn Bostwick, who worked as his laboratory assistant at the Collège de France before they married in 1920. Her connections in high society helped Voronoff to become famous—or at least notorious—and to reap massive publicity for the hopes that he based on the possibilities of xenotransplantation, taking up exactly where Brown-Séquard had left off. After several scientific publications of a more general kind he published Greffes testiculaires [Testicular Grafts] in 1923 and a report of Quarante-trois greffes du singe à homme [Forty-Three Grafts from Monkeys to Humans] in 1924, and then followed them up with Étude sur la vieillesse et la rajeunissement par le greffe (1926; tr. as Rejuvenation by Grafting), which is an exercise in self-publicizing futurology rather than a scrupulous report of his research findings. Those findings were never published in a form that would be considered today to be full and adequate scientific reportage.

  In consequence of their somewhat equivocal reportage, there is little hard information as to how many animal experiments Voronoff carried out between 1917 and 1929, or what the results of those experiments might have been, let alone how many experiments he carried out on human beings and what their effects were. Hindsight, judging by the example of further experiments, suggests that the claims he made about the success of his grafts must have been wildly exaggerated, reflecting his optimism rather than his evidence, probably because he fell for his own patter rather than because he was a calculated charlatan. How many grafts of simian testicular material he had carried out on human subjects prior to 1929 remains unclear, but what is perfectly certain is that by that date, everyone in Paris believed that he was doing such operations on a regular basis, and people were eagerly searching high society for signs of youthful behavior in aged individuals who might—behind a shield of strict confidentiality, of course—have been his clients.

  Voronoff’s work obtained a vast amount of press coverage, and provided the basis for several works of speculative fiction, almost all of them mocking or grimly hostile. Of all the writers of such speculative works, however, Félicien Champsaur was probably the only one who not only knew Voronoff well—he met him socially not merely in Paris but also on the Riviera, where they both had second homes (one on either side of the Italian border)—but might well have contemplated seriously the possibility of becoming one of his clients. Born in 1858, Champsaur had edged into his seventies by 1929, and as a relentless lifelong debauchee, he was probably painfully aware of the declining effects of age.

  Obviously, Champsaur must have had Voronoff’s consent to use him as a character in a book, and Voronoff, well aware of the potential publicity value of an account that was not overtly hostile, might well have encouraged him to do so fervently. As to whether or not he offered Champsaur a free rejuvenation treatment in return—and whether, if he did, Champsaur accepted the offer—we can only speculate. All we know for sure is that Champsaur died in 1934, no younger than he had been in 1929, and all we can really deduce from the pages of Nora is that if he did think seriously about acquiring such a graft, he was very hesitant about it, not merely because he was squeamish on his own account but because he would have felt extremely guilty about the cost of such a sacrifice to an innocent ape. Unlike most of Voronoff’s clients, Champsaur believed sincerely that the brotherhood of man ought to extend to the great apes, and that employing them for the p
urposes described and practiced by Voronoff was morally dubious in the extreme.

  The character featured in Nora who is faced with the decision as to whether to risk the rejuvenation treatment is, like Champsaur, a famous writer and a relentless but discreet debauchee, but Champsaur went out of his way to avoid the possibility that readers might identify the author with his character—so far out of his way, in fact, that he explicitly based the character in question on another writer, in such a way as to make the representation unmistakable. Even before the supplementary details began to accumulate, the mere name of the character—Ernest Paris—would have been highly suggestive to contemporary readers, who would immediately have drawn an analogy of nomenclature with “Anatole France,” (Jacques-Anatole Thibault, 1844-1924) who had worn the mantle of his country’s leading novelist for at least two decades before his death, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. In the novel, Edgar Paris is 80, the same age as Anatole France had been when he died; he lives at the address at which Anatole France was then living; and many other calculated similarities are dropped into the plot before it reaches a climax that is a straightforward account of Anatole France’s funeral—until the moment when Nora and Narcisse get involved in the obsequies, in their own distinctive fashions.

  Although no sensitive reader could sincerely believe that Champsaur’s portrayal of Nora was intended as an attack on Josephine Baker, it is difficult not to see the portrayal of Edgar Paris as anything but a scathing assault on the late Anatole France; it is, in its way, quite savage. What is more, Champsaur had form in that regard. The same chapter of Tuer les Vieux! Jouir! that leans over backwards to be sympathetic to Aïsha Goblet contains a remarkably bilious speech—presumably written almost immediately after the great man’s death—made by the heroine of the novel, attacking Anatole France’s morals with a great deal of aggression and contempt. That speech is, however, elicited by a question as to whether she would ever contemplate marrying a artist, and follows critical comments on the morals of various other men of genius who number among her literary heroes. Significantly, however, the last word in curled-lip contempt and implied unthinkability comes in the brief sentence with which she concludes her tirade against artists: “Why not Félicien Champsaur?”