Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension Read online

  JOURNEY TO THE LAND

  OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION

  by

  Gaston de Pawlowski

  Translated by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension by Gaston de Pawlowski was initially published in volume form by Fasquelle in 1912, in an edition of 2000 copies; a further 1000 were printed in 1913. The same publisher issued an expanded version of the work in 1923, augmented by striking illustrations by the Dutch Symbolist artist Léonard Sarluis, and prefaced by an elaborate “Examen Critique” [Critical Analysis], which proclaimed that version to be a definitive text. It is the expanded version that is here offered in translation as Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension.

  The genesis of the work was a little more complicated than these dates imply, many of its chapters having previously appeared from 1908 onwards as short stories or brief exercises in speculative non-fiction—or hybrids of the two—in the periodical Comoedia [Comedy], of which Pawlowski was the founder and editor-in-chief. Some might be earlier in origin; in the “Examen Critique,” Pawlowski states that he wrote his first futuristic short story in 1895 and was continually preoccupied with the book’s subject-matter thereafter. Although he does not say whether any material from the 1890s is reproduced in the book, it is entirely possible that some individual items in the Voyage predated 1908. Although his earlier collection of fanciful vignettes, Polochon: paysages animées, paysages chimériques [Polochon, here used as the name of a person, is a slang term for a bolster; the rest of the title translates as “animated and chimerical landscapes”] (1909) contains some speculative material—including a story reproduced as Chapter XXI of the Voyage—it is highly unlikely to have used up the entire supply of such available material.

  Whether or not any stories from the 1890s were recycled in Voyage, we can be certain that the 1912 text carries forward and elaborates a set of arguments first put forward in La philosophie du travail [The Philosophy of Work], the thesis that Pawlowski wrote in order to obtain the degree of docteur en droit in 1901, which was published in the same year. (It is the only text by Pawlowski currently available for consultation of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Gallica website.) There is a sense in which Voyage is no more than a dramatic expansion and extrapolation of that thesis, lavishly decorated in parts with gaudy fictitious footnotes.

  La philosophie du travail not only introduces the arguments about specialization, mechanization and the likely effects of the future advancement of science on human life that serve to generate the images of future history glimpsed in Voyage, but also the broader philosophical arguments regarding the limitations of materialism and the superiority of Platonic Idealism, the particular notions of the Atom and the Monad, and—most significantly of all—the fundamental thesis that the essential purpose of “forced labor” is to liberate time for freely-chosen activities, including physical cultivation though sport as well as mental cultivation by means of the arts.

  Although Voyage is episodic and somewhat haphazard, it has a very definitive goal and destination, and that objective is to extrapolate to its logical conclusion the philosophy of human nature exemplified in La philosophie du travail. Given that Pawlowski was presumably working on the thesis during the late 1890s, in parallel with his early endeavors as a pioneering sports journalist, it is surely in that period that the text’s origins are rooted, although numerous important modifications were introduced into the chapters penned between 1908 and 1912, and several others in those added in 1923.

  The new material added to the body of the text in the 1923 edition consisted of additional pieces that had appeared in Comoedia between 1912 and 1914—Pawlowski was conscripted thereafter for the duration of the Great War to serve as an engineer in the “auto-service” and had to give up the editorship of the magazine—and between 1919 and 1923, following his release from military service. These new chapters were inserted at various points in the text, according to their approximate internal chronology—many of them, inevitably, in the relatively dour section dealing with the present day and the supposed development of the “Leviathan.”

  Pawlowski’s wartime experiences inevitably affected his view of contemporary developments, and the chapters written between 1919 and 1923 are noticeably darker in tone than those written before 1914; this has the slightly unfortunate effect of making that early phase of the narrative more repetitive as well as more ill-tempered, but the resultant exaggeration of the patchwork is by no means inappropriate.

  The 1923 edition employed the “Examen Critique” as a preface, as did a further edition published in Brussels by La Boétie in 1945, which was illustrated by Jean Tauriac. I have, however, placed it after the text of the novel in this translation, because that seems to me to be a far more appropriate location. It was certainly the last item actually to be written, and it reiterates a good deal of the homiletic material in the book, much of which had already been repeated more than once in the text—an inevitable side-effect of the “novel” being cobbled together from previously-published stories and essays. Reading the “Examen Critique” first, therefore, robs the text of some of its impact; although the future history mapped out in the book is not particularly suspenseful, it does have a developmental pattern that is better followed without too much forewarning. Furthermore, the heavy emphasis that the “Examen Critique” places on the role of the fourth dimension in Einsteinian relativity theory—an emphasis entirely absent from the text—would be bound to color the reader’s perceptions if it were supplied in advance, in a manner that seems to me to be likely to distort the text’s internal argument about the nature of the fourth dimension.

  Pawlowski went on to write at least one more magazine piece referring to the future history sketched out in the book—Pierre Versins’ Encyclopédie de l’Utopie et de la Science Fiction records an item entitled “Où allons-nous, ou le Savant Hydrogène du Voyage” [Where Are We Going; or, the Savant Hydrogen of the Voyage], which appeared in Les Annales in 1925—but that was presumably a reflective commentary rather than an addition to its substance; he does seem to have regarded the 1923 edition as a definitive version. In consequence, no further text was added to the La Boétie edition, or to any subsequent reprints of the book, of which several more were issued after 1962.

  Although Pawlowski was a very prolific writer—in an article in the February 1998 issue of Le Visage Vert, Eric Walbecq estimates his total production as the equivalent of 60 volumes—by far the greater part of his production consisted of unreprinted journalism. He published approximately a dozen actual books, of which Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension is by far the best known. This reputation is partly due to its recognition as a highly significant example of early French science fiction; Versins reckons it a masterpiece of that genre. More significantly in the eyes of most literary historians, however, it was explicitly acknowledged—along with Pawlowski’s many articles about imaginary inventions—as a significant inspiration of one of the masterpieces of Surrealist art, Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre [The Big Glass] (also known as La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même [usually translated, with deliberately excessive literalness, as “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even”]).

  The latter acknowledgement has given Pawlowski a considerable reputation as a precursor of Surrealism, and the credit is certainly well-deserved, but he certainly did not see himself as a Surrealist. Although the “Examen Critique” proudly proclaims that Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension is “manifestly anti-Naturalist,” the text itself declares that such anti-Naturalis
t movements as Impressionism and Symbolism—the evolutionary predecessors of Surrealism—were merely the other side of the same coin, and that the whole point of the author’s imaginary journeys in the fourth dimension is to find a new stance outside the whole methodological complex. Although Léonard Sarluis’ illustrations for the 1923 edition are certainly handsome, there is a sense that Sarluis’ earlier association with the Decadent Movement put him somewhat at odds, philosophically speaking, with the author.

  Pawlowski was proud to call himself a humorist, and justified the calculated bizarrerie of his work as a philosophical tactic—definitely a means, not an end in itself. He was as proud to be conservative in some respects as he was to be revolutionary in others, and his assault on Naturalism in the Voyage–which dismisses it as the literary arm of an excessive materialism—has the explicit purpose of restoring a much better sense of the true reality of things. Although, like the Surrealists, Pawlowski regarded our perceptions of “three-dimensional reality” as a kind of prison from which it is necessary to escape, his notions of both the means by which that escape might be made and the goal toward which the escapee ought to aim were much more distinct than those guiding the Surrealists.

  What Duchamp found inspiring in Voyage was only a fragmentary aspect of the whole—essentially, the idea of the fourth dimension as an altered state of consciousness, a vital artistic resource and a stern mental challenge—and the use that he made of what he borrowed in Le Grand Verre is very different from the use to which Pawlowski put the notions in question. That is not to say that Voyage does not have other surreal touches; the laconic literary method of the early chapters has a deftly surreal quality about it, and the satirical vignettes describing the Second Scientific Era are also grotesquely inventive; its deliberate confusions of the organic and the inorganic were to be echoed in a good deal of surrealist art. Pawlowski recognized these elements of kinship himself, and his own art and literary criticism—some of which was contained in introductions to books and catalogues—is sometimes eager to acknowledge them, but when he commended Surrealist works it was because he thought they offered evidential support to his own thesis about the way the world was going, not because he thought his own work offered support to the Surrealist Manifesto.

  The passage of time since the publication of Voyage has, however, emphasized its surreal features. Even a reader sympathetic to philosophical Idealism of the purist stripe that Pawlowski champions is unlikely to find the text’s underlying argument convincing, and the feverish Platonism of the final chapters is likely to seem as bizarre, in its fashion, as the satirical vignettes parodying the potential excesses of science. The essential eccentricity of the whole exercise has, therefore, become further exaggerated in a seemingly-surreal manner. Pawlowski would probably have regretted this—because he was, in fact, only being wildly funny in support of deadly serious contentions—but it cannot be reckoned injurious to his work, and it has helped to maintain its modernity.

  Much primitive futuristic fiction now seems so banal and unadventurous in its anticipations as to seem irredeemably quaint, but there is nothing banal about Pawlowski’s future history. One advantage of attempting to extrapolate trends to surreal absurdity is that it encourages imaginative boldness, and the advancement of science and technology have been so much more rapid than early anticipators dared to imagine that only the boldest of imaginative leaps stood any chance, in 1895, 1912 or 1923, of accidentally discovering the big surprises that lay in store. The surreally hallucinatory quality of some of Pawlowski’s futuristic vignettes—especially those dealing with “atomic dissociation” and future biotechnologies in the Scientific Era—has been given an extra edge by actual advances in 20th century science, which give the contemporary reader additional scope for appreciating their strangeness and wit.

  Although it is more secure than its relevance to the history of surrealism, the importance of Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension as a classic item of speculative fiction is also oddly problematic. As its title suggests, the book continues a chain of thought that first crossed over from speculative non-fiction to exemplary fiction in the work of the English schoolmaster and amateur mathematician Charles Howard Hinton, whose essays on the fourth dimension and exemplary fables extrapolating the idea inspired his fellow schoolmaster Edwin Abbott to write Flatland (1884; initially issued with the by-line “A Square”) and supplied H. G. Wells with the jargon supposedly underlying the theory of The Time Machine (1895). Pawlowski’s notion of the fourth dimension is, however, not only markedly different from but significantly opposed to the notions developed by Hinton, Abbott and Wells.

  The idea of the fourth dimension already had a complex history before it was introduced into speculative fiction. There is a sense in which the “dimensionality” of time was posited as soon as time began to be analyzed and measured by clocks and calendars, but clocks and calendars emphasized the cyclical repetitiveness of time and it was not until counting years began to map out history in a conspicuously linear fashion that duration became something that cried out for representation as a graphical axis. The development of co-ordinate geometry by René Descartes in the 17th century encouraged such mapping, although explicit description of time as a “fourth dimension” did not become commonplace until the 19th century, by which time the notion of further spatial dimensions had emerged from non-Euclidean geometry.

  The prospectus for non-Euclidean geometry was first mapped out by Christian Gauss, but its actual development in the first half of the 19th century was undertaken by Nikolai Lobatchevsky and James Bolyai, whose work remained stubbornly obscure while they were still alive, as did the early work of Bernard Riemann in the same vein. The field became abruptly fashionable, however, in the late 1860s and 1870s, when it was taken up by Eugenio Beltrami, Félix Klein and Henri Poincaré and the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz began to apply the new mathematics to physical phenomena and the actual geometry of space.

  The breezy popularization of the mathematical idea of a fourth dimension was then undertaken by Hinton in an article published in the Dublin University Magazine in 1880 entitled “What is the fourth dimension?” which was subsequently reprinted as a pamphlet, before being combined with other essays and stories in Scientific Romances (1886). Hinton had emigrated to the USA by 1886, and he continued his popularizing efforts there, with even greater success; he had also attempted a further dramatization of the idea of a fourth spatial dimension in the story “A Plane World,” also reprinted in Scientific Romances, which describes a two-dimensional world and invites the reader to imagine the difficulty that a two-dimensional being might have in imagining our three-dimensional world. This notion was taken up by Abbott, who extrapolated it in his classic satirical account of Flatland before Hinton produced his own novel-length An Episode of Flatland (1906). In the interim, Wells’ Time Traveler borrowed Hintonian jargon to explain the movement of his time machine as displacement in a fourth dimension.

  To modern historians of science fiction, Pawlowski’s Voyage seems, by virtue of its title alone, to be a continuation of this train of thought, but it actually had a different starting-point and constitutes a radically new departure. Hinton and Abbott both use fictional rhetorical devices to invite their readers to try to imagine that our three-dimensional world might only be an element of a larger four-dimensional one, but that is where they stop; they make no attempt to describe that four-dimensional hyper-world, which they regard—by definition—as essentially imperceptible, and thus imaginable only in abstract conceptual terms. Pawlowski, by contrast, only mentions hypothetical flatlands in a cursory fashion, because his primary purpose is actually to explore and attempt to come to terms, philosophically and psychologically, with a hypothetical four-dimensional reality.

  Wells, having defined time as the fourth dimension, then sets out to explore future history by moving his time machine along its axis, constructing a sketchy but complete future history from a series of brief snapshots. Pawlowski—who is lik
ely to have read The Time Machine (which was translated into French in 1899) but very unlikely to have read either Hinton or Abbott—does construct a complete future history of his own, but he does not do so by representing time as a fourth dimension; indeed, he regards time as an aspect of the deceptive mode of perception characterized by three-dimensional space. His fourth dimension is an extra spatial dimension, but it is also, and essentially, the dimension of the mind, of the imagination, of art and—fundamentally, in his definition—of quality.

  By drawing a fundamental distinction—indeed, a crucial opposition—between the dimensions of quantity (time and space) and a hypothetical dimension of quality, Pawlowski is actually rejecting the essentially quantitative extra dimensions suggested by Hinton, Abbott and Wells. His extra dimension allows him imaginatively to move out of both time and space, so that he can look back on both from a new angle. This not only allows his narrative voice to compile a future history by looking at time from without, but—more significantly, in that voice’s stridently-expressed opinion—to see what inert matter, living matter and human existence really amount to, and what potentials they contain. Nobody had attempted that before—and nobody has attempted it since. Whatever one thinks of the accuracy of Pawlowski’s assessment, its originality and adventurousness are undeniable.

  Even if the critical field of view is more narrowly focused on the phases of the future history developed in the course of the protagonist’s fourth-dimensional excursions in Voyage, that too seems to be formed more in opposition than to than by continuation of previous examples. It does seem probable that some of the vignettes making up Pawlowski’s future history owe some inspiration to the example of The Time Machine, although the only real clue in the text is the decision to name a future factory-worker—who serves no real purpose as a character—HG28, but the sum of that future history is very different from Wells’ vision of the future in the pattern of its development.