Reading Environmental Apocalypse in J.-H. Rosny Aîné
221
de la Terre under the rubric of Rosny’s romans du merveilleux scientifique.
Rosny’s livre lapidaire
Les Xipéhuz of 1887 recounts the experiences of an early human civilization, situated in time and space “mille ans avant le massement civilisateur d’où surgirent plus tard Ninive, Babylone, Ecbatane”.
6 The
peace-loving, nomadic Zahelal people find themselves under threat
from strange creatures, initially designated in the text as “les Formes”,
made of unidentified mineral substances and assuming regular geometrical forms. Unassuaged by the sacrifices offered up to them, these
mysterious forms exercise complete dominance within the constantly
expanding boundaries of their territory, effortlessly annihilating the
warriors who seek to contain them, and instilling in the tribes, for the
first time, a sense of their own fallibility: “L’homme allait périr.
L’autre, toujours élargi, dans la forêt, sur les plaines, indestructible,
jour par jour dévorerait la race déchue” (author’s emphasis, p. 634).
Rosny thus posits a kind of eschatological consciousness as an
almost innate feature of the human psyche, present virtually from the
dawn of civilization, as if in anticipation of the millennialism of the
Christian theologians and their spiritual descendants. Juxtaposing
“l’an mil des peuples enfants, […] [et] la résignation de l’homme
rouge des savanes indiennes” (p. 634), Rosny views this innate anxiety about our final end as an omnipresent feature of human history,
whether in respect of his own fictitious pre-Mesopotamian tribes as
they fall prey to the enigmatic conical “Formes”, or of the massacres
of Native Americans at the hands of the armies descended from European colonizers which continued until the end of the nineteenth century. Rosny’s evocation of humanity’s consciousness of impending
doom in both historical and contemporary contexts in Les Xipéhuz
also anticipates his subsequent writings dealing with this same theme
in futuristic settings, such as Les Navigateurs de l’infini and La Mort
de la Terre.
___________________________
6 J.-H. Rosny Aîné, Les Xipéhuz. Romans Préhistoriques (Paris: Robert Laffont,
1985), 627-52, p. 629. Subsequent page references to this text will be given in brackets after the relevant quotation.
221
de la Terre under the rubric of Rosny’s romans du merveilleux scientifique.
Rosny’s livre lapidaire
Les Xipéhuz of 1887 recounts the experiences of an early human civilization, situated in time and space “mille ans avant le massement civilisateur d’où surgirent plus tard Ninive, Babylone, Ecbatane”.
6 The
peace-loving, nomadic Zahelal people find themselves under threat
from strange creatures, initially designated in the text as “les Formes”,
made of unidentified mineral substances and assuming regular geometrical forms. Unassuaged by the sacrifices offered up to them, these
mysterious forms exercise complete dominance within the constantly
expanding boundaries of their territory, effortlessly annihilating the
warriors who seek to contain them, and instilling in the tribes, for the
first time, a sense of their own fallibility: “L’homme allait périr.
L’autre, toujours élargi, dans la forêt, sur les plaines, indestructible,
jour par jour dévorerait la race déchue” (author’s emphasis, p. 634).
Rosny thus posits a kind of eschatological consciousness as an
almost innate feature of the human psyche, present virtually from the
dawn of civilization, as if in anticipation of the millennialism of the
Christian theologians and their spiritual descendants. Juxtaposing
“l’an mil des peuples enfants, […] [et] la résignation de l’homme
rouge des savanes indiennes” (p. 634), Rosny views this innate anxiety about our final end as an omnipresent feature of human history,
whether in respect of his own fictitious pre-Mesopotamian tribes as
they fall prey to the enigmatic conical “Formes”, or of the massacres
of Native Americans at the hands of the armies descended from European colonizers which continued until the end of the nineteenth century. Rosny’s evocation of humanity’s consciousness of impending
doom in both historical and contemporary contexts in Les Xipéhuz
also anticipates his subsequent writings dealing with this same theme
in futuristic settings, such as Les Navigateurs de l’infini and La Mort
de la Terre.
___________________________
6 J.-H. Rosny Aîné, Les Xipéhuz. Romans Préhistoriques (Paris: Robert Laffont,
1985), 627-52, p. 629. Subsequent page references to this text will be given in brackets after the relevant quotation.