Men, Machines, and the Modernity of Knowledge in Alfred Jarry's Le Surmâle

Abstract

It would be difficult to speak of the modernity of early twentieth- century French culture without considering its frenetic interest in machinery, and especially in modes of transportation. The first decade of the twentieth century in France produced numerous emblems of this craving to develop more powerful machines, to observe them at work, and to interact with them in new ways: the initial Tour de France cycling race took place in 1903; the internal-combustion engine, invented in the 1880's, was developed for use in the project to establish a rail network throughout France; and numerous automobile races were inaugurated in the years preceding and following the turn of the century. 1 What differentiates this period from the latter part of the nineteenth-century is not merely the increased presence of mechanical or motorized devices in the functioning and organization of the social sphere, but also the dramatically altered roles that machines begin to play in shaping and (re)defining relationships between consciousness, the human body, and notions of subjectivity. Insofar as literature dramatizes the systems that bind the body to consciousness and to subjectivity as part of its ongoing efforts to make the body readable as a culturally intelligible sign, it tends to concentrate on obdurate stages in this process. In late nineteenth-century examples, literature's interest in machinery is often oriented around the endeavor to express knowledge of the sexed body. For Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, this project partakes of the prevailing logic of nineteenth-century French thought: L'Eve future(1886) conveys an overreaching male curiosity resulting in and from a newly invented female body; in this sense, it reprises thematics of male interest in woman's body as a place of special knowledge, as reflected in many major works of nineteenth-century French literature (Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Zola's Nana, the Goncourts' Germinie Lacerteux, and so forth). Tales such as Maupassant's Le Gueux might be cited as more challenging or