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INTRODUCTION

L’Homme qui a perdu son moi by André Beaunier, here translated as The Man Who Lost Himself, was originally published in Paris by Librairie Plon in 1911. That translation of the titular phrase is a trifle oversimplified because English cannot quite reproduce the ambiguity of the French “L’Homme,” which can be construed as “the man” with reference to an individual or “Man” in the sense of humankind. The “a” in the title derives from the second significance, suggesting that the story of the particular individual whose “loss” of himself is described and analyzed can be seen as emblematic of the entire race having, in a sense, lost its “self.”

André Beaunier was born in Evreux in 1869 and educated at the Lycée Henri IV and the École Normale Supérieure. His literary ambitions took time to bear their first fruit, but eventually made him one of the most respected critics of literature and drama in Paris, working in the former capacity for the Revue des Deux Mondes and in the latter for the Écho de Paris. He was the literary critic most esteemed by Marcel Proust, who regularly sought his advice about his works in progress, and he was also a close friend of Paul Bourget—the dedicatee of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi—with whom he wrote a comedy drama in collaboration. After publishing his first novel, Les Dupont-Leterrier in 1900—a reaction to the Dreyfus affair—Beaunier maintained a prolific level of publication until his death in 1925, averaging more than two volumes a year. Although many of those volumes were collections or extensions of his journalistic work, he also produced numerous novels and extended biographies.

In general, Beaunier’s career trajectory seems to have been uncommonly untroubled; he was sufficiently well off while serving his long “apprenticeship” never to have to endure the financial hardships suffered by many would-be writers, and he was not only old enough to avoid conscription during the Great War of 1914-18 but had the rare privilege of being able to keep on working and publishing throughout the conflict. That lack of conspicuous misfortune and strife, as well as a hostility to political radicalism that was not unconnected with it, has undoubtedly contributed to the relative lack of attention paid by literary historians to his life and works, but it is doubtful that he would have considered his life to have been free of difficulty. His fiction strives hard to suggest—presumably sincerely—that he was by no means unfamiliar with suffering, albeit of a strictly cerebral variety, and that he had endured the torments that writers are supposed to undergo in order to fuel their inspiration.

Before his career got off the ground Beaunier had a strong interest in art criticism, and once planned to write an encyclopedic history of art, but eventually reduced his ambition to a more realistic scale, producing a theoretical work on L’Art de regarder les tableaux [The Art of Looking at Paintings] (1906), published in the same year as Souvenirs d’un peintre [A Painter’s Memoirs], based on the life of Georges Clairin. His sweeping general interest in esthetics also embraced music, and his principal claim to fame in the Parisian literary community at the outset of his career was that he was Isadora Duncan’s lover—or one of them, at least—during the interval she spent in Paris in 1900-02; a remarkable circumstance that the dancer felt obliged to explain in her autobiography, where she observed that although he was short, fat and bespectacled, she loved his intelligence.

Given that L’Homme qui a perdu son moi features a spectacular improvisatory dancer in a key symbolic role, it is probably worth noting that Beaunier almost certainly saw performances by the other two famous exponents of that art who were contemporary with Isadora Duncan, and were subsequently reckoned to be her great rivals: Loie Fuller, who had her own tent at the 1900 Paris Exposition and took Duncan away from Paris to tour with her in 1902; and Maud Allan, who was also resident in Paris in the early 1900s, and whose notorious “Vision of Salomé” he would undoubtedly have made the effort to see. (Isadora Duncan remarked that the only time she saw ever Beaunier in tears was when he heard news of the death of Oscar Wilde).

It might also be relevant to a reading of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi that approximately two years before he began writing it, in 1908, Beaunier had married another famously beautiful artiste, the opera singer Jeanne Raunay (1868-1942). She was the daughter of the historical painter Jules Richomme—Raunay was a stage name—and she promptly retired from performance following her marriage and was known thereafter as “Madame Beaunier.” After her husband’s death she took up writing herself, signing herself Jeanne André-Beaunier.

The direction that Beaunier’s career would eventually take was effectively fixed when he obtained his first notable success with his fourth book, La Poésie nouvelle [The New Poetry] (1902), a detailed study of the Symbolist school that was described by Stuart Merrill as the best book on that topic. Although he was only a little younger than many of the Symbolist poets who comprised the school between 1885 and 1900, by the time Beaunier began publishing prolifically himself the bandwagon had passed, and his name is usually associated with Symbolism as that of an observer rather than a practitioner. He was, however, strongly influenced by the school and applied its methods conscientiously in many of his novels, including and especially L’Homme qui a perdu son moi.

Symbolism was primarily a school of poetry, although its philosophy and techniques overflowed prodigally into short fiction via prose-poetry, but the ornate and highly-structured prose favored by the Symbolist method is difficult to accommodate to the novel, whose fundamental narrative technique is naturalistic; wholeheartedly Symbolist novels are scarce and often somewhat misshapen. Many of the leading figures in the field never attempted a novel, and those who did often produced bizarre patchworks like Gustave Kahn’s Le Conte de l’or et silence (1898; tr. as The Tale of Gold and Silence), but symbolism as a device rather than an overriding esthetic philosophy had always featured significantly in serious novels, including those of the most determined Naturalists, and although Symbolism and Naturalism were often regarded as rival Schools in the 1890s there was no real opposition between them. Paul Bourget had also been one of the prominent literary critics to analyze and praise the “poésie nouvelle,” and his novels routinely used symbolic devices, although he became the central figure of a new school of “Neo-Naturalism,” characterized by the intensity and supposed sophistication of its focus on the psychology of its protagonists. The first three chapters of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi have strong affinities with Bourget’s narrative method, and it is only in the concluding chapter IV—which begins, tellingly, with an interpolated fabular narrative—that Symbolist technique takes over, corresponding with a watershed in the protagonist’s descent into madness.

Beaunier’s previous novels had used similar strategies of hybridization, the fabular element being most pronounced in his fourth novel, Le Roi Tobol [King Tobol] (1905), in which the protagonist is commissioned to find the secret of happiness, and is forced by a series of exemplary adventures to conclude that both individual and collective human happiness are impossible of attainment, although parrots might be better situated because of the limitation of their desires. L’Homme qui a perdu son moi is, however, more ambitious than his previous works in its scope and, even more conspicuously, in its passion. Although the protagonist is ostensibly presented as a horrible warning rather than a shining example, only gradually repenting ideas that the narrative voice ostentatiously represents as abhorrent, every sympathy is claimed for him, and the novel has admitted autobiographical elements that confuse its supposed moral and give rise to serious doubts about the narrative voice’s reliability.

Even as an account of a particular individual who “loses” himself, the story of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi has intriguing paradoxicalities, but in vaguely attempting to make that story emblematic of a historical mis-step on the part of the human race (or, at least, its French lapsed Catholic component) the paradoxicality moves so close to manifest absurdity as to become an interesting specimen of psychological eccentricity. The means by which the novel’s protagonist contrives to drive himself to madness and despair is becoming a scientist, and thus forsaking the religious faith of his childhood, gradually retreating from all rewarding human contact into a cold and lonely condition of pure cerebration, from which return eventually proves impossible. That was a story that had been told before, and might even be reckoned to have become something of a cliché, but Beaunier’s attempt to use it as a diagnosis of a more general social malaise, and to make science itself, rather than excessive individual devotion to it, into a dire threat essentially inimical to human life, was much more extravagant than the argument’s routine course.

As a devout Catholic—and, more particularly, as a Catholic whose belief had wavered in adolescence and young adulthood before being reaffirmed, all more zealously in consequence—Beaunier was far from being alone in his resentment of the manner in which propaganda in favor of science had generally been closely interlinked in France with a particular hostility to Catholicism. From Voltaire’s scathing satires through August Comte’s philosophical championship of “positivism” to Ernest Renan’s skeptical analyses of Scriptural history, the two campaigns had marched in step. Renan’s book L’Avenir de la science: pensées de 1848 (1890; tr. as The Future of Science), which is cited as a significant negative inspiration in Beaunier’s dedicatory preface, was so widely considered as an anti-Clerical text that its proto-futurological aspects were largely ignored; the notion that future history would be shaped by progressive developments in science rather than by the moralistic authority of religion was debated as a blasphemy rather than an empirical hypothesis. Most of the defenders of the faith were, however, consciously handicapped by their awareness that the empirical hypothesis did have a good deal of persuasive evidence in its favor. Beaunier was exceptional in being willing to try, at least as an experiment, to reject that evidence and argue that, in fact, science was not only not progressive but not even relevant to human life, and that insofar as it was thought to be progressive and relevant, it was inimical.

It is difficult to believe that Beaunier actually believed that, or even that the narrative voice he adopted in L’Homme qui a perdu son moi really believes it, in spite of its insistent protests, but at the very least he tried it out for size. He was, at least temporarily, prepared to consider seriously the argument that because science calls religious faith into question, it is therefore completely “inhuman,” and thus intrinsically evil. His novel can be seen as a personal thought-experiment conducted to test that proposition, and from that viewpoint, its method and its result are interestingly confused.

What the novel calls “science” it represents as a relatively recent invention, and is, in fact, closely connected with the evolution of the idea of a “scientist”: a specialist professional practitioner of “science.” That notion had emerged along with the idea and evidence of the profession; in English the word “scientist” was coined in the 1820s by William Whewell, but it is arguable that the coinage was slightly belated, the idea dating back to the latter decades of the eighteenth century, when experimental chemistry conclusively replaced mystical alchemy and the modern theory of the chemical elements replaced Classical elementary theory. As soon as there were “scientists,” however, in reality and in literary representation, they quickly acquired a set of supposedly-typical characteristics, partly borrowed from traditional images of wizardy (all the great proto-scientists of the Renaissance tended to be stigmatized as sorcerers and suspected of having made real or metaphorical Faustian pacts with the Devil) but mostly based on wry empirical observation.

The supposedly typical psychology of the scientist was analyzed in France by early proto-psychologists, especially the pioneers of “retrospective diagnosis” François Lélut and François Leuret, who were keenly interested in the supposed relationship between genius and madness, and by scientists themselves, notably Henri Poincaré, another writer cited in Beaunier’s preface and footnotes. It was also, however, a key element of the early development of the French roman scientifique, which rapidly established a kind of standard portrait of “the scientist.” That stereotype is explicitly and carefully delineated in Samuel Henri Berthoud’s “Voyage au ciel” (1841; tr. as “A Heavenward Voyage”) and “Le Second soleil” (c1860; tr. as “The Second Sun”), which are essentially psychological case-studies cast as allegorical fiction, but it was given more relaxed and popular representation in the works of Jules Verne, notably in the characterization of Professor Lidenbrock in Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; rev. 1867; tr. as Journey to the Center of the Earth) and Professor Aronnax in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea).

There is a remarkable unanimity about such fictional images, which represent scientists as people at least distracted and often completed isolated from the cares of social and domestic life by their cerebration, as obsessive in their quotidian habits as in their tireless research endeavors, so inattentive to formal etiquette that everyone around them is liable to regard them as eccentric, if not mad. Such characters are usually well-meaning, and often philanthropic, sometimes even beloved, but they are also seen as dangerous, to others as well as themselves, because of their negligence and lack of “common sense”—and they are seen as sadly vulnerable to more extreme forms of anti-sociality, as exemplified by Professor Aronnax’s bizarre counterpart, Captain Nemo.

Real scientists are, of course, very variable as individuals, and this image is a caricature, but like all caricatures, it does exaggerate something real and fairly typical. Enough actual scientists bear enough resemblance to the stereotype to support it. The literary image of the scientist that became standardized with remarkable rapidity, however, did not assert that the alleged psychological peculiarities of the scientist polluted his science—quite the contrary. Much is frequently made in romans scientifiques of the fact that these strange, inept, rather quaint individuals, who cannot button their waistcoats properly, nevertheless produce something sublime, magnificent and useful, sometimes without meaning to or even being conscious of it. Insofar as the nineteenth-century roman scientifique began to build a myth of science as well as an image of the scientist, that myth is one of beautiful order emerging out of droll confusion, and great boons out of side-effects, the cardinal historical examples being the applications of mechanics, optics and electromagnetism to locomotion, work and both literal and figurative illumination.

In the twentieth century, that dichotomy came to seem less manifest, especially during the Great War, when the applications of science to mass murder became very obvious indeed, and the supposed intrinsic vulnerability of scientists to moral oblivion and outright madness much more dangerous, but in 1911, that tide had not yet turned, and Beaunier was exceptional. His stance was unusual not so much because he was skeptical of the assumption that technological and social progress went hand in hand, but because he made no use whatsoever of the best argument available to support that case: the proposition that, in giving humans more power, the technological applications of science were enhancing the destructive potential of political oppression and conflict. Indeed, he did not even take advantage of the argument that the contributions so far made by science to medical efficacy were largely illusory, which would have seemed far more plausible in 1911 than it does now. Instead, he not only conceded but emphasized the claim that applied science can not only produce effective medical treatments but is potentially capable of producing quasi-miraculous cures.

This concession creates tremendous difficulties for the narrative voice of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi in its apparent assertion that the attempts by the protagonist’s mentor to argue that such effects are irrelevant—a position not even supported by the protagonist while he retains some semblance of sanity—are more than a mere psychological quirk, but somehow reflective of science itself and thus of a threat to the collective sanity of humankind. It is that strange confusion and conflict of ideas that makes the novel uniquely interesting as a specimen of the thought of its era.

Just as he was born a few years too late to participate in the heyday of Symbolism, Beaunier came into salon society a little too late to catch the days when scientists and littérateurs routinely mingled freely in Parisian salons. Even so, it is perhaps slightly surprising that his enormous list of acquaintances does not seem to have included Gustave Le Bon, who was a familiar face in several notable salons in the early 1900s and whose book L’Évolution de la matière (1905; tr. as The Evolution of Matter) is strikingly relevant to the theme of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi; its consultation might have enabled Beaunier to make his account of Michel’s theoretical development of the properties of sirium far less vague and considerable more interesting. Indeed, for a novel that is supposedly about science, in a determinedly serious fashion, L’Homme qui a perdu son moi manifests a remarkable near-total ignorance of what scientific work actually involves, what contemporary scientific theories actually contained, and what the potential scientific implications of the discovery that functions as a pivot of the plot might be. So complete is that ignorance, in fact, that sirium not only becomes a purely symbolic scientific discovery but a symbol devoid of any real significance, and hence of any real force or meaning.

Beaunier’s non-fiction includes several essays on what he was wont to describe as “the Darwinian crisis”—by which he meant the shudder provoked in religious believers by Darwin’s publication of the theory of the origin of species by natural selection. In one of his articles on the topic in the Revue des Deux Mondes he complimented Darwin for saying that what had had advanced was a scientific hypothesis and not a “philosophy,” and then went on to lambast Ernst Haeckel and, more particularly, Félix Le Dantec—not without justice—for trying to elevate “Darwinism” into a philosophy of life. In L’Homme qui a perdu on moi, however, the one thing that is crystal clear about the theoretical edifice that the protagonist builds on the basis of his experiments with sirium is that it is not a scientific hypothesis but a philosophy—an exercise in metaphysics rather than physics. In the same way, the protagonist’s mentor, “the Alchemist,” makes “science” itself into a philosophy of life instead of a compendium of hypotheses—and even though the narrative voice and author are both utterly antipathetic to the Alchemist, to the point of refusing even to give him a name, it seems that they do exactly the same, insisting on considering “science” as a philosophy—merely as a species of atheism—rather than as testable knowledge capable of material application.

If that is a flaw in the novel’s schema, however—and from a purely intellectual viewpoint, it undoubtedly is—it is a flaw that has some interesting results, certainly in an artistic sense, and perhaps in a philosophical sense too. Although the finest exercise in Symbolism featured in the novel—the development of the allegory of Brigitte, and its complication by the introduction of her symbolic counterpart La Métienka, in chapter IV—is actually irrelevant to the argument about science, the earlier symbolic interludes, which are much more closely connected to that argument, are almost as striking. The psychoanalytical allegory of music developed while the protagonist is listening to the organ in the cathedral in chapter I is interesting in this regard, but the real heart of the novel’s symbolism, as it regards science, is the exceedingly strange representation in chapter III of scientific theorizing as the building of solitary towers.

It is the representation of theory-building as essentially isolating—and thus productive of insanity—that would doubtless seem oddest of all to scientists, who imagine successful theorization as means of unification and the creation of productive communal endeavors; and precisely because it is so strange, one is tempted to wonder whether it might be more revealing than intended. Although it is clearly not an accurate symbolic representation of scientific endeavor, it might still be an accurate symbolic representation of something else, wearing scientific theorization as a disguise—something of which even the writer might only have subliminally aware. Given that the protagonist has such obvious affinities with the author, one is tempted to wonder how much of his own bitter experience is being transfigured in the character. Writing is, by necessity, a lonelier business than scientific research, and its obsessive quality can be at least as disruptive of intimate relationships and as conducive to depression and despair. That puzzle, whether it has a solution or not, is what makes the novel fascinating in spite of its seeming absurdity, fueling its undoubted force and verve.

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This translation was made from the London Library’s copy of the 1911 Plon edition, which is advertised on its cover as the “fourth edition,” although that only means that it was the fourth printing of the first edition—each printing probably being a thousand copies. In the context of the time, that would have make the book a moderate commercial success, reflecting the solid reputation Beaunier had built by then.