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INTRODUCTION

Les Bacchantes, romain contemporain by Léon Daudet, here translated as The Bacchantes, was originally published in Paris by Ernest Flammarion in 1931. It was the third of four novels by the author venturing on to the terrain of the roman scientifique, following a satire on the medical profession (to which the author had been refused permanent entry after failing his internship), Les Morticoles [The Morticoles] (1894), and a story of catastrophe, including but not restricted to a future war, Le Napus, fléau de l’an 2227 [The Napus: The Great Plague of the Year 2227] (1927). It was followed in 1934 by another future war story, Ciel en feu [Sky on Fire] (1934). The author also wrote several speculative short stories, four of which are included in the posthumous Quinze Contes [Fifteen Stories] (1948).1

Léon Daudet’s literary career, like those of his mother Julia (née Allard), his Uncle Ernest and his younger brother Lucien, was inevitably overshadowed by the enormous reputation of his father, Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), one of the great French writers of the nineteenth century. Alphonse Daudent made his initial reputation as a Naturalist of a considerably milder and more sentimental stripe than Émile Zola, Edmond Goncourt or Joris-Karl Huysmans, many of his works being autobiographical, although he scored his greatest popular success with the more extravagant Tartarin of Tarascon (1872), whose protagonist was established as a comic type-specimen of flamboyant but fake Provençal bravado, and featured in several sequels by popular demand.

Léon Daudet (1867-1942) might not have followed in his father’s footsteps had he not taken umbrage when his quest to qualify as a physician ran into a snag, but fate apparently took him in hand, and he soon became very prolific as a novelist, journalist and critic. His first and second novels, L’Astre noir [The Black Star] and Les Morticoles, both published in 1894, sold well and provided his alterntive career with a solid basis. In 1891 he had married Jeanne Hugo, Victor Hugo’s granddaughter, and had thus been welcomed into the upper echelons of Republican society, but that ran into a hitch as well when the couple divorced in 1895. Again, Daudet’s reaction to the hitch brooked no half-measures, and he appears to have turned against the entirety of Republican endeavor, and also to have adopted a rather reckless lifestyle, which generated a certain amount of scandal, including a notorious affair with the Opera singer Lucienne Breval.

In 1903 Daudet married again, this time to his cousin Marthe Allard, who was also a writer—she signed herself “Pamphille”—but that does not seem to have calmed him down entirely. She did, however, encourage his political sentiments. His stance became gradually more reactionary, reaching a climax of sorts when he helped to found and then became the editor and leader-writer of L’Action française, which became a source of strident anti-Republican propaganda. His campaigning briefly won him a seat in the Chamber as a député, where his eloquence obtained further exercise, but he never stopped writing, and continued to write a certain amount of fiction alongside his journalistic work and memoirs. He was always billed by his publishers, once the fact was established, as “Léon Goncourt de l’Académie Goncourt,” but everyone knew that he had won that position by inheritance rather than by election, his father having been named in Goncourt’s will but dying before the will was belatedly proved and its provisions activated. Although his hatred of Germany prevented him from lending the same vocal support to Nazism that he lent to Mussolini’s Fascism in the early 1930s he collaborated with the Vichy government in World War II until his death, which completed the job of demolishing the remnants of his personal reputation. In the meantime his gourmand appetite, coupled with his distaste for physical exercise, gradually inflicted a morbid obesity upon him.

Les Bacchantes was written shortly after Daudet’s return to France from a two-year exile in Belgium, to which Daudet had fled to avoid a prison sentence (for defaming the driver of a taxi in which his son had mysteriously died in 1923). The story is, to some extent, provocative merely for the sake of being provocative, and can be read as an unrepentant but oddly nostalgic defense of his once-turbulent private life, but the manner of its provocation and defense is interesting in its originality and method. That method seeks to combine mythological allegory with distinctively modern imagery in order build a philosophical scheme that links all kinds of creativity, including scientific creativity, to the erotic impulse. In developning that thesis the novel shows an awareness of the ideas of Sigmund Freud—the narrative features one of the most flamboyant instances of deliberate Freudian symbolism ever given literary form—and those of Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically his contrast of “Apollinian” and “Dionysian” styles of creativity and his extravagant plea for the reconstitution of a synthesis of the two styles that had been found and then lost again in the heyday of Greek drama.

From the perspective of the historical development of speculative fiction, Les Bacchantes is interesting as a participant in a set of stories examining the hypothesis of a technological device that allows imges of the past to be recaptured and replayed. First introduced in Eugène Mouton’s comedy “L’Historioscope” (1883; tr. as “the Historioscope”), such an instrument was occasionally used as a facilitating device in stories exploring the past, including John Taine’s restoration of the Age of the Dinosaurs, Before the Dawn (1934), but obtained far more interesting consideration in a series of contes philosophiques investigating the possible social consequences of such a discovery, beginning with the intriguing Christan fantasy The Vicarion (1926) by Gardner Hunting and continuing with such deftly pointed analyses as T. L. Sherred’s “E for Effort” (1947) and Isaac Asimov’s “The Dead Past” (1956).

It is probably safe to say that no one other than Léon Daudet, on imagining such a device and asking himself “If I had a means of calling up images of the past, how would I make use of it?” would have come up with the answer deployed in Les Bacchantes, but that only adds to the originality, not merely of the story, but of the philosophical aspects that are tangentially treated therein. At least one of the machine’s odder side-effects is probably included simply to facilitate the plot, but the general theory of transtemporal influences underpinning the hypothetical machine, although it is only vaguely sketched out, does have some interesting implications and corollaries worthy of further contemplation. There is, however, a sense in which the speculative element of the story is merely a technical convenience assising the author to embellish and activate its mythological recapitulation.

In order to introduce that aspect of the story it might be as well to summarize the strange career of its cenral mythological character, Dionysus. The author renders the name in question as Dyonisos—which is a variant spelling sufficiently common in nineteenth-century French texts, though rarely found elsewhere, to be regarded as an authentic variant rather than a mere misspelling—presumably as an affectation, but perhaps also to emphasize that his Dionysus is not quite the same as any other representation, including Nietzsche’s, although it necessarily embodies all the essential features of the myth, as well as a few of its more eccentric embroideries.

Early Classical writers record that Dionysus was fathered by Zeus on Semele, the daughter of the king of Thebes, thus annoying Hera, who was famously jealous of her husband’s infidelities. Hera persuaded Semele to demand that Zeus show himelf in his true majesty, which she tricked him into doing—and was, inevitably, struck dead by the revelation. Zeus, however, snatched the unborn Dionysus from her womb and implanted the fetus in his thigh, eventually removing it when it came to term, thus justifying Dionysus’ frequent epithet, the “twice-born.” Dionysus was also known as Bacchus, that alternative also being of Greek origin rather than merely a Roman equivalent, although the convenional spelling is Latinized (from Bakchos).

The infant demigod still required protection from Hera’s wrath, and was hidden; accounts vary with regard to where and how, but it always among women or nymphs, some of whom served as his nurses. Dionysus apparently developed a talent early in life for driving people mad, whch he was forced to use on a frequent basis when he grew up and began traveling the world, in company with a strange entourage that included a group of bacchantes, or maenads, who had apparently started out as his nurses but were now his sexual partners; they were prone to frenzy and to tearing people apart. His entourage also included the satyr-like Silenus, who later achieved fame in the singular as a protagonist of the farcical “satyr-plays” that provided early comedy relief from theatrical tragedies, although some Classical accounts refer to sileni in the plural and have difficulty distinguishing them from satyrs or fauns, although they were generally imagined as older, fatter and generally more repulsive. While being harassed by Hera, Dionysus was allegedly aided by the mother-goddess Cybele, who had a similar retinue of male followers, the Corybantes, similarly famed for dancing and wild behavior.

Exactly how Dionysus the demigod was awarded his promoton of full godhood, as the god of wine, is unclear, but he appears to have been in an ambiguous position in many of the tales of his wanderings, which mostly involve hostility on the part of mortal kings, either by virtue of disputes relating to Semele’s family or insults leveled at his supposedly-effeminate costume, and usually end with mass epidemics of madness and people being torn apart; the best-known of those stories is, inevitably, the one dramatized by Euripides in the tragedy The Bacchae. His travels apparently took him to many remote parts of the world before he finally took up his permanent abode in Olympus.

Anthropologists tend to account for this “original” account of the mythical Dionysus by hypothesizing that he was originally a Thracian or Phrygian god whose worship spread into Greece and whose native properties had to be accommodated into the Greek traditions by means of mythical invention, along with explanations for the conflicts associated with the ideological invasion. There was, however, a drastic transformation of the idea and image of Dionysus when his name became associated with the Orphic Mysteries, a new cult that emerged in the sixth century B.C., whose beliefs and rites were kept secret. Scholarly opinions vary widely—as they usually do in the absence of any reliable information—as to what the Orphic Mysteries actually involved, and how important they were as inflences on the burgeoning philosophy of their era, but whatever view is taken, the citation of Dionysus and his hectic rites in association with the new cult by late Classical commentators, who were probably also working in an informational void dusted and cobwebbed with rumor, is not only odd but intriguingly paradoxical.

Orpheus was a Thracian minstrel famous for his musical acumen; his patron deity was Apollo, who was said to have taught him to play the lyre. He features in some of the best-known stories of Greek myth, including his participation in the voyage of the Argo and, most famously of all, his ill-fated descent into the realm of Hades in the attempt to recover his lost love Eurydice. Orpheus died by virtue of being torn to pieces by women, for reasons that remain unclear, although one of the explanations offered in that they were bacchantes annoyed by some insult to Dionysus. The Orphic cult that developed to honor him—even though he was never promoted to godhood—presumably had a heavy emphasis on music, and is thought by some anthropologists to have been a considerable influence on Pythagorean philosophy, whose theory of numerical wisdom is said to have been initially based on the observation of mathematical relationships in music. That association suggested to some scholars that the cult might have been inclined to thoughtful asceticism, but the reputation it developed in the latter part of the Classical Era was very different, alleging that its rites were Dionysiac—albeit involving a considerable revison of the history of Dionysus.

The “Orphic” version of Dionysus’ life-story is mostly derived from Nonnus’ forty-eight-book epic Dionysiaca, written in the late fourth or early fifth centuy A.D. The story told by Nonnus identifies Dionysus with another, previously obscure, god named Zagreus, supposedly fathered by Zeus on the Underworld goddess Perspehone, who was torn to pieces by Titans. In order to conflate the two, Zagreus/Dionysus was said to have subsequently reincarnated by Zeus via Semele (thus being twice-born in a literal manner). Persephone, the daughter of the fertility goddesss Demeter, was sometimes included in rites addressed to her mother, specifically those celebrated at Eleusis, in which Persephone was known as Kore [the Maiden], and which became famous as the Eleusian Mysteries. Converting Dionysus into the child of Persephone/Kore and involving him in the Orphic Mysteries thus forged a link of supposition between the two sets of rites, of a kind typical of attempts to compile all-embracing “secret histories” of mysticism and magic, enthusiasm for which does not seem to have wavered over the last three thousand years.

Whatever the Orphic cult might have amounted to in its Hellenic origins, subsequent “revivals” of it in the Roman Empire were, in essence, lifestyle fantasies akin to those used to dress up many orgiastic instutitions, typified in English history by the so-called Hellfire Clubs of the eighteenth century. It was, obviously, the supposed Dionysiac associations of the Orphic Mysteries that recommended them to Romans (and, later, to Frenchmen and Englishmen) desirous of ennobling their drunken and licentious revels with some kind of antique and quasi-mystical gloss, thus adding to their piquancy. If, therefore, there had been any echoes of the Orphic Mysteries in Pompeii in 79 A.D. other than merely decorative wall-decorations, they would undoubtedly have adopted the Dionysiac form.

The association of Dionysus with the Orphic mysteries forged an unlikely link between Dionysus and Apollo, two gods that would seem to have so little in common as to be intrinisically antagonistic—a thesis and antithesis crying out, as it were, for an explanatory synthesis. As to whether or not the odd couple in question played any significant role in inspiring Pythagorean philosophy (and thus, by extension, Platonic, neo-Platonic and Gnostic philosophy, and, by further extenson, the entire tradition of modern occultism) we can only speculate. Inevitably, people have—and no one in modern times took up that invitation more determinedly and elaborately than Friedrich Nietzsche, who reshaped the myth of Dionysus yet again, for his own imaginative purposes.

In Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Muzik (1872; tr. as The Birth of Tragedy [from the Spirit of Music]) Nietsche proposed that there is a crucial dichomotmy between Apollinian and Dionysian modes of thought, the former superimposing an element of formal differentiation on sensory experience while the latter seeks to receiver its allegedly-ecstastic rawness. Life, according to Nietzsche, involves a perpetual struggle between the two tendencies, in which either may get the upper hand, either individually or culturally. In his view, Greek tragedy was the highest form of art becuae it contrived to fuse the two quests into a seamless synthesis, exposing its aficionados to the full range of the human condition. Nietzsche hypothesized that the Dionysian element was represented by the chorus, originally consisting, in this conjecture, of satyrs, and the Apollinian element by the actors, whose performance he views as a kind of dream vision, involving the ecstatic ritual dismembering of Dionysus by the Bacchantes. In Nietzche’s proposed historical schema, however, this synthesis withered and died after the era of Aschylus and Sophocles, under the baleful influence of Euripides and Socrates, and the advent of rationality, whih suppressed the Dionysian element and detached the Apollinian from its dream compponent—a suppression that lasted into the modern era, when music, especially that of Richard Wagner, began once again to offer some hope for a redemption of the synthesis.

By 1886, when a new edition was issued, Nietzche had changed his mind about the book, and all-but-repudiated it argument in a new preface, but he subsequently went back, at least partially, on the recantation. In his later works his references to the Dionysian seem to refer to the synthesis or resynthesis of the Apollinian and the Dionysian rather than to the separate and antithetical Dionysian—perhaps understandably, since the latter was the element in need of recovery following the victory of narrow rationality and the primacy of “differentiative” experience over “raw” experience.

In Les Bacchantes Daudet is clearly following in Nietzsche’s footsteps in his depiction of the Master’s attempts to recover a new synthesis that will marry (or at least couple) the creative aspects of science with what he considers to be the ultimate source of all creativity. Having one been “killed” by jealousy of his talents, and then miraculously reborn, he still requires a dramatic resynthesis of his creativity, which is conceived, in an ecentrically elaborate fashion, in terms of Orphic/Dionysian initiation. Although the two painings by Gustave Courbet cited in the story (the second of which appears to be fictitious) do not include the famous image of “The Origin of the World” (1866) there is a sense in which Daudet clearly has the double import of that painting it in mind. Daudet’s version of Dionysian impetus is not identifical to Nietzsche, and is calculatedly confused with other ideas, but he is clearly attempting to follow a similar trajectory, albeit in the context of a novel aimed at general readers rather than a critical and philosophical essay.

Needless to say, this is an eccentric quest, and there is no resn to be surprised by the fact that Les Bacchantes is a unique book, but it is interesting for that reason. It might be reckoned an awkwardly-flawed book, just as Léon Daudet might be reckoned an awkwardly-flawed man, but it is an intriguing book that is abundantly supplied witth a certain wry eloquence and keen vision, just as Léon Daudet was in the various facets of his career. It is, at any rate, well worth reading for any connoisseur of the unusual.

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This translation is taken from a copy of the 1931 Flammarion edition. I have retained the author’s eccedntric spelling of “Dyonisos” and a few other eccentricities of usage and improvisation. I have attempted to provide adequate explanatory footnotes for most of the esoteric motifs that he introduces into the story without any explanation of his own but I have not repeated information already given in the introduction when reference is made to Zagreus, Kore etc.

1. I hope to translate most, if not all, of this other material in the future.