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Ana I. Oancea, "Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
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Gina Stahm
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gina Stahm, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama, and with me today is Professor Anna Wandja to discuss her Dangerous the Inventor novel Infanticle France, out in 2025 from the University of Toronto Press. Ana Wancha is Associate professor of French at the University of Delaware. Her research. Research interests include the intersections of science and literature, adaptation studies, and visual culture. She has recently published articles in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Science Fiction, Film and Television, and French Screen Studies. Professor Wanja, thank you for joining me.
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Professor Anna Wandja
Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to chat with you this morning.
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Gina Stahm
Can you tell us how you came to this project?
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Professor Anna Wandja
Yeah. So I had been a fan of Jules Veins since childhood, but pretty much forgot about him as I pursued higher education in French studies until I began working on a project on Baudelaire's Reception in Decadent Literature. And I stumbled upon Villier, Dolly l' Adon's Le Futurist. And I absolutely loved Thomas Edison. It was such a bold inventor narrative. It kind of reminded me a little bit of the stories I had read in Vergne, but they were nowhere near as flamboyant. They were a lot more restrained, even when the inventors were evil and they did outstanding things. So I went back to the Voyage Extraordinaire, and the more I read, the more it seemed to me that, yes, there was something going on with the inventors because they were achieving the desired leaps and bounds of progress that the fictional universe wanted, but they were repeatedly destroyed.
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Gina Stahm
And could you tell us you've evoked this already A little bit, but could you tell us how you developed your corpus and chose to structure the book?
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Professor Anna Wandja
Yeah. So again with the Voyage Extraordinaire, the series is absolutely full of fantastic machines, and there was already really great scholarship by Arthur Evans, Jacques Noir, and Timothy Unwin that had explained where these machines fit as far as the core themes of the Voyage Extraordinaire. So scientific education, geographic exploration, and so on. So I wanted to narrow in on the novels that portrayed uses of electricity, because it seemed to me they also were the ones that really got to the issue of scientific creativity. So once I had that focus, I started looking at other 19th century texts where brilliant technology was really important. And I found naturalist examples, decadent examples, all of which engaged with the things that were on Verme's mind, such as intellectual property, creative freedom, ethics of technological growth, and so on. So that was the corpus in terms of how I structured the book roughly, I just went by literary current. So the longest section is dedicated to novels in early science fiction, we have Verne and Robidat in that area. And then for the naturalist section and the dagadent section, I write about Emile Zola and Villiers de l', Iladan, but I look at the novels as not as yet another example of science fiction, but I read them within their regular genres because I think they import the inventor figure into the type of narrative and literary expression that was already common for that genre. So basically, the question I'm asking is, what does the inventor figure do for naturalism once Emine Zola seizes upon it? And as I developed the draft, it also seemed to me that there were important connections to Explore between the 19th century texts and contemporary, contemporary popular fiction. So I looked at television series, at movies and video games, some comic books. So really popular, contemporary popular culture rather than contemporary science fiction literature. And I pursued the main themes of each chapter in this type of source.
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Gina Stahm
And to go back up to the start of your book, how does. How did Julevan's novels portray the realities of official science at the time, including the public understanding of science? Because this is a major distinction that you make in your work between the official science and the independent inventor.
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Professor Anna Wandja
Yeah, so Van really stands out from among the other authors I discuss in my corpus because he's the one who's really, really focused on accurate research. He wants the novels to teach science, to get French people to think about what wonderful things might come in the future, if only we all worked a little bit harder in this domain. So this is a distinctive writerly approach that his editor absolutely loves because he thinks it's new. And he actually helps them draft a preface for the series in which the two of them present the novels as, you know, being able to turn science into entertainment. The novels provide instruction that amuses. So they're kind of a way for Veon to mediate between actual scientific discourse that wouldn't really be accessible to the majority of the reading public and, you know, the time and space that the reading public has to dedicate to scientific education. So this sort of, like, this publishing and production constraint is also reflected in the content of the novels. So the reading public vein's contemporaries, they do show up throughout the narratives. And I guess there are two main aspects to their representation. The first one is that they are keenly, passionately interested in all of the scientific mysteries at the heart of the novel. So, for example, in 20,000 leagues under the Sea, once Professor Arronax, the protagonist becomes involved in the scientific mystery, all of the French papers, no matter their audience, they also start hotly debating this issue. So that's a reflection of the popular interest in science, but there's also a darker side to this, because the same public that is fascinated by science also has to be terrified. And they're generally terrified of the inventor's machine that is this very disruptive force in whatever society it appears in. So there are some great illustrations for this. For example, in Verne's Robert Le Conqueran, in which you see the flying machine go over Paris and its immediate public is trying to run out of the frame of the illustration. So it's those two aspects we also see. All of the official scientists teach a lot. Even when they're traveling away from their institution, they're always paired up with people who are eager to learn about whatever their domain is. So they're given this opportunity to teach whoever will listen, as far as the official scientists themselves. What Vern ends up reproducing again, because he's so focused on accurate research, is the sort of centralized and bureaucratic reality of 19th century French research. So all of his protagonists will be introduced through their institutional affiliation, kind of like we did today. And they're generally associated with prestigious bodies like the Museum du Solair naturale, again for 20,000 leagues under the Sea, other people are related to the French Academy of Science and so on. And this kind of reflects, again, it's not that there wasn't science coming from the provincial academies at this time, it's just that it was the contribution of those research institutes were downplayed and Van ends up doing the same thing. The official scientists will also be very proud of the methodology they employ and of the fact they're super specialized. And this is interesting because the domains in which they specialize are not always cutting edge. And we already see this in 20,000 leagues under the Sea. Our next. His specialization is in classification. And the Museum d' Histoire Naturelle was very important in the development of classification, but at the beginning of the 19th century and end of the 18th. So in fact, the specialists, like when Ahonax is reviewing his academic family tree, he'll cite people who are already long gone, whose contributions really date from a very long time ago. So, you know, so you have, you know, so official science is what Verne believes in, but it's not necessarily the cutting edge science of the. Of the novels.
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Gina Stahm
And you also highlight the relationship between this vision of science and colonialism. Could you speak a little bit to that?
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Professor Anna Wandja
Yes. So colonialism and exploration are, you know, historically have operated hand in hand. When Verne is so dedicated to what science can do, he's kind of representing this quest as a yearning for totality, the expansion of human Empire to understand the whole map and or possess the whole map. Rosalind Williams writes about this as well. So official scientists are always envoys of the government. And the scientific gaze they cast upon the new territories they discover is very much politically oriented. It's very much a French gaze. As far as examples of the colonies of colonialism in the novels, I can think of two. So in the mysterious island, which is the sequel to 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, we have American characters, but they operate pretty much the same way that the French official scientists had operated. So the nationality is less important here. They're on a desert island and their immediate thought is, okay, we need to convert this to our standards. We need this to be an extension of our nation. So even though Verne cheats a little bit in that he makes sure this is an uninhabited island, you can see very much the colonial project and the colonial gaze being being applied in the Biggums Millions Les cinxs millions de l' abbay gum There's a much clearer example. There's an actual colony set up and it is scientifically based. So there's a French researcher that gets a lot of money to establish a colony in the United States. He calls it Franceville. It's a utopian hygienist establishment. It makes sense because of the timing. Obviously, there are many real world French concerns that are reflected in this. Cholera and smallpox were a huge problem in France at the time because of overcrowded cities. So here we have a model city that gets rid of all of those issues. But this very city that is so correct as far as the health of the inhabitants is also slightly eugenicist because they invite a lot of foreign workers, particularly Asian workers, to help build the city. And once it is established, they make sure to expose them because they think they would be a negative influence upon the population. And this is all the more striking because the rival city to the French city in this novel is of course a German city that is out of right eugenicists. And they are particularly concerned with wiping out the French colony and perhaps France itself. So this is an uncomfortable similarity. So those would be sort of the negative examples of science and colonialism working hand in hand. I also wanted to mention that Captain Nemo is a strong anti colonial example. So in the published version of the novel that we have today, we know that he uses the Nautilus to disrupt trade, European trade, but actually Vannes wanted Nemo to be focused on disrupting British trade. And this is because, as it is revealed later on, he's A former Indian prince. And he has, you know, the whole history of British colonialism in India that has helped him develop very strong anti imperialist sentiments. But again, Vernon's editor thought that was too much, so it got toned down to Nemo being an anarchist and just being on the side of oppressed people everywhere.
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Gina Stahm
And not necessarily in terms of the colonialism, but you see this view of official science being reflected in contemporary science fiction in something like the Martian. How do you see that connection working?
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Professor Anna Wandja
When I was starting to write the Jeanne and I was thinking about what in contemporary fiction sort of approximates this Vernian divide between inventors and official scientists, it was a lot easier to find contemporary inventors that were still, you know, rogue recluses. But I found that once I had settled on the theme of NASA themed fiction, it was easy to find Vernian inspired narratives. So what I mean is that, for example, like Andy Weir's the Martian, there are stories in which institutional affiliation, patriotic duty and rigorous scientific methodology, or the protagonist's application thereof, are still very important. So the Martian is a great example because as we all know, the main character, Mark Watney, is alone on Mars. And even though this screams of the affirmation of personal ingenuity, what we actually have is all of his work is repeatedly institutionally framed. So, for example, he'll talk about how, in order to survive, he's merely applying his professional training, so he's never tempted to really affirm his singular genius. And even as he's frustrated with the pace with which he's able to communicate with NASA, which is very slow, in part because of the technology and in part because NASA insists on having meetings and following their usual administration and methodology, he still defers to them. He still thinks that the way they have organized knowledge, the way they operate is superior. They are a bunch of geniuses, and he's all alone. He does refer to himself also as my own little NASA. So the other. So I thought when I was reading the Martian, I was thinking of the Mysterious island in the sense that they're both lost in this unknown and perhaps hostile territory. But it occurred to me that the difference was that in the Mysterious island, it's just a natural place, whereas in the Martian, yes, he's on Mars, but he's actually in the world that NASA created for him. He has all of the material fittings that NASA thought would be necessary. So that's another way in which he's trapped in the NASA universe rather than being free to do whatever he wants.
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Gina Stahm
So you've already evoked this tension between the inventor and the official scientist. So how do you see Verne opposing these two figures? The inventor and the official scientist?
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Professor Anna Wandja
The more I thought about it, the clearer it occurred to me that it's actually a very, very neat division. So the inventors are basically the opposite of the official scientists. They're reclusive, they're stateless, they're fiercely independent. They don't teach, they don't publish, they don't patent. So they don't want any sort of involvement with the organization of science or with the protections offered to scientifically creative people that were available in the 19th century. So basically they just don't want any sort of institutional or government oversight. I call their type of science a private science, in part because it is privately funded. So they're all wealthy, but also because they don't have any. They have secret laboratories and unknown methodology. And this issue of the unknown methodology is actually very important because when I defined the master narrative of the inventor in Fondestaire le French literature, I said that he's a negative exemplar of, you know, he's an anti national hero. Let's say he has the potential to help the nation advance through his outstanding intelligence, but he is profoundly uninterested in doing so. The other half of this is that official science also comes across as profoundly uninterested in the inventor's science. And we notice this in the fact that within the fictional universe, the protagonists accounts of their experience with the inventors are basically adventure stories. They're not scientific treaties. So Arronax, when he comes back from the Nautilus, he just writes about how fascinating a guy Nemo is and how what wonderful things he saw under the sea. He doesn't accompany this with any sort of scientific pamphlet on how the Nautilus functions, even though this information was given to him. So official science doesn't seem interested at all in co opting the inventor's science. And that makes it all the more private. I can actually think of a better example than the one I just gave with the Nautilus. And it has to do with the last or second to last novel, Inventor novel that verde facing the flag. So Werme wrote the voyage extortion over a period of 40 years. And there are about seven novels that I discuss. There are increasingly higher stakes associated with the inventor's discoveries as Vernes revisits the plot and the characters. And this last one, Fasseau Drabeau, the inventor and actually works on weapons. And Vaughn also gives a very specific example of or codifies the statelessness that was always uneasy for everybody else in the fictional universe into a very specific threat. So this inventor is unhappy with how he's being treated in France and runs off with the pirates. Of course, the pirates are not real pirates. They're actually rogue engineers. So Van raises the specter of an organized, stateless, high tech enemy that, you know, can turn, that can rival a nation. And of course, there's a French engineer as well who is disguised as a caretaker for the. For the French inventor because they want to preserve this intelligence. They keep hoping that at one point he will be cured of his madness and come back and help Franz. And he is so consumed with his duty that even though he spends every day in the lab with the inventor and knows everything about the secret, he remarks that this information is useless to him. So he's moral to a fault. He's an official scientist, even when that means not actually doing any science.
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Gina Stahm
And specifically, you see the inventor as embodying the idea of postmodernity. And so could you tell us a little bit how you arrive at that interpretation and also how you see this reflected in popular portrayals of Nikola Tesla?
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Professor Anna Wandja
To distinguish between official science and the inventor science, I use Lyotard's the Postmodern Condition. And I write that official science is modern because it's primarily interested in reaffirming, reinforcing existing practices, and it legitimates itself through grand narratives, the usual ones being, you know, the unity of knowledge or the importance of human emancipation. And obviously, I note that Verne's novels themselves are yet another means of legitimizing French science because they're about, you know, recommending the right way of doing things over the necessity of achieving fantastic results, which is what the inventors have. The inventor science I classify as postmodern because it relies on paralogy. So it is specifically interested in new ideas that are achieved by challenging whatever the established rules or norms of official science are. So the inventors are interested in moments of instability in the intellectual and, of course, practical organization of science. So they look for the cracks in the official system. And one way that Verne gets at this is by having all of his official scientists be very specialized, but having the inventors be polymaths. So, you know, again, Nemo is the greatest example, and he gets recycled pretty much into all of the other inventors. But, you know, he's an artist, he's a philosopher, he's a statesman, as well as somebody who's able to extract from the same resources available to official science, completely new results.
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Gina Stahm
So, and how do you see this reflected in the Nikola Tesla figures that we've seen proliferating?
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Professor Anna Wandja
Sorry, I forgot to answer that part. So I thought of the Tesla narrative in popular Science because it's also very commonly structured as brilliant, marginalized, outsider versus. I'm not going to say official science, I'm going to say establishment science, because the person who most frequently incarnates Tesla's enemy is Edison, who is obviously also a private inventor, but he's more on the side of the establishment because he's already wealthy, he already has public acclaim, and he has a very organized and mercantile approach to science. And the example I discussed in my book is a comic book called the Five Fists of Science, which does a really, really good job of synthesizing this, this opposition in the common Tesla story that we see in popular culture. Just like the inventor, he is represented through his transgressive creativity. And the best example I have found of that is the Prestige, which tells a story of rival stage magicians, one of whom cheats by using Tesla's machine to achieve real magic. That is science. And I thought that was a really beautiful metaphor for transgressive creativity. It was very different than what we had seen in Yvonne or the other 19th century texts. There's also Jean Echenot's Des Eclairs so Lightning, which is a fictional biography of Tesla that draws a pretty straight line between the idiosyncrasies of his personality and his creativity, pretty much says that this personality is what produces the unique non institutionalized scientific imagination or scientific research program of Tesla's. And finally, the reason I thought Tesla was a ready made avatar of the inventor in popular fiction is because his story keeps getting retold. All of the sources act like this is a story that everybody already knows, except the facts are very sparse. There are just a handful of qualities that get repeated and the story itself gets adapted for the specific needs of whatever narrative popular fiction is trying to tell.
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Gina Stahm
And you depart from your discussion of Jules Verne in chapter three, and you dedicate that chapter to Albert Robidat's Levantiam Siecle trilogy, which I think is probably a bit less well known among our listeners. Could you contextualize this work for us?
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Professor Anna Wandja
Yes, it is a satirical and technopessimist response to everything Jules Verne ever wrote. So Robidat is. He's a sci fi author, but he also works as a journalist. He edits a satirical illustrated newspaper. He also illustrates other people's books and so on. So he's a very busy person. He's a very well read person. His very first novel is a parody of the Voyage extraordinaire. He invents his own character and has him go into the worlds that are unknown even to Jules Verne. It basically argues that the voyage now have a formula, they have a handful of stock characters, and that you can get rid of all of the accurate research and still produce fantastical fiction. So, yes, he pokes fun of Velln, but he's also actually read him very well and he understands what the novels are all about. So once he starts writing his own trilogy, Leventime Siegle, he basically says, okay, let's picture a world, a world in which the 19th century has completely bought into Jules Verne's vision of the world and see where we end up in the 20th century. And the answer, the very brief answer, is it's a dystopian consumer society that runs on technology and has absolutely no culture. So, rather sad. Rather sad. The three novels, very briefly, the first one, they're not as structured as Jules Verne's Voyage Extollinae. There's very little thought that went into planning the trilogy as a trilogy. So that accounts a little bit for the fact that he gives various explanations as to why the 20th century is dystopian hell. The first one, Leventime Siecle, is set in 1952 and basically establishes that the future is completely dedicated to efficiency and speed. And I use Jacques Luld concept of technique to sort of explain why everything functions the way it does. The second novel is about war in the same setting in the same 20th century. And it's much grimmer, even though obviously he's trying to be funny. Basically, it's a world of automated technological war in which the contributions of people are minimized. And the lesson is that living this type of lifestyle completely devalues the individual. So it's not just culture that goes away, it's also the importance of people. And finally, the last novel is perhaps the most interesting for my overall thesis, for my study of inventors, because whereas in the previous two novels Robide had just blamed the consumer's appetite for technology for the shape of the future, this time he settles on celebrity inventors. And he argues that they are sort of the unofficial leaders. They're the ones pulling the strings behind whatever political organization there still is behind the government. And they only want to keep selling new versions of their technology in order to sort of enslave people and to keep them buying everything they produce.
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Gina Stahm
So in addition to this critique of consumerism and the novelty that is being presented by these inventors, you also point out a specific attitude towards literature and in particular towards Emile Zola in Robida's work. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
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Professor Anna Wandja
Yes. So, as I mentioned, technology has completely enslaved people. They're dependent, they can't do their jobs, and they can't live in any aspect of life without engaging with technology. This means that they have very little free time. So literature has had to be adapted to the limited attention span and limited available time of this population. And basically there's now a formula for concentrating literature and people can read the Iliad in four lines. More troubling than the actual four lines is the idea is the narrator's commentary that, oh, this process that functions so well and is so beloved by the population has made literature inoffensive. So basically he's saying that literature no longer has any sort of critical power. It can no longer point out what's wrong with its contemporary society, or raise any sort of question about the organization of society or, you know, the way people live. So it basically cannot criticize anything. And the purpose of these literature based products is to cultivate an unthinking public. Zola comes in because Rabida's other great aim is to say that all of these negative aspects of the 20th century that are ridiculed in his book are actually anchored in the 19th century. So he thinks of Zola, because he was already considered du cent vivant from the 19th century, as having dragged literature through the gutter. So obviously everything bad that happens in the 20th century descends from this version of degeneration. So we see Isola is one of the other authors who is cited as having been condensed and it he just comes down to the description of vegetables from Le Ventre de Paris. Sure. We also see echoes of Zula in Robide's representation of how the experience of the art museum has degraded in the 20th century. We have the main characters go to the Louvre where people no longer have to walk. They sit on a little train that takes them through different exhibits and they have these recordings that yell out at them digested versions of what the painting means. And of course they're all really funny and really silly. The idea being nobody understands art anymore. This is pretty much a parody of the wedding party in l' Assoumoir going to the Louvre because they're not terribly educated people and they're being guided by a person who also doesn't really understand the paintings. He only knows a little bit more than the people who are accompanying him. And they are absolutely amazed by everything they see. In addition to being amazed by the paintings themselves that are being explained to them in a very reductive manner, they're also very taken with a copiste. So the people who are producing reproductions of the paintings, and that's what we see in the background of Robide's visits to the Louvre. So the same people that are sitting on the train, they have the recordings playing at them on one side of the illustration, and on the other, they have people using very fantastical and complex machines to also produce reproductions. And, of course, Robilla pushes everything further. Now, the Louvre is primarily sustained by these reproductions. It's like the mega museum store. People can have famous paintings as wallpaper and all sorts of other things in their house. So basically, the idea is that in Zola, you had a bunch of vulgar people going to the Louvre, not understanding things. In the 20th century, everybody will be like that.
- [37:46]
Gina Stahm
And you also point out the elevated but still limited role of women in the technological world in Robida's work. Could you explain this a bit? And as well, is that the line that you draw between this element and women in contemporary dystopian literature?
- [38:02]
Professor Anna Wandja
Le Vential Sicle is pretty unique in the sense that it does actually represent women characters, unlike in Vennes, where there are barely any. And it also imagines complete, what is written up as complete equality between men and women. I say that it's written up as complete equality between men and women, because it seems to me that Robbita didn't actually think very hard about what actual equality or actual emancipation would mean for women. It's just there in the background of what is otherwise still a pretty traditional organization of society. So monogamous marriage is still the rule. There are still only two sexes. Everybody is heterosexual. So from that point of view, society is pretty much what it was in the 19th. What has changed is that women are present in all professions, including science. They do end up politics and hold political functions, and they aren't necessarily any better people than their male counterparts. And Obida, again, because he's a caricature, he works in caricature. He conveys this by showing that, okay, women notaries are still lazy. Women scientists are still devoid of empathy. So I guess emancipation has shown that flaws are pretty equally divided. Now, some critics say that you can sense a certain. Ooh, you can sense that bemoans the loss of traditional 19th century femininity that his female characters aren't really thought out to be any different than the male characters. They just imitate them. So there's no distinct feminine identity. There are masculine and feminine political parties that seem to want different things, that seem to have different social goals, but they're not explained. So we get a sense that, okay, yes, there's visibility of women, yes, there's integration, but it's not complete. So that's Robide's version of things. Contemporary popular culture. Again, I just looked at dystopias, and what's great is that we have more richly constructed female characters. They are fascinating, generally complex villains, but once you look at what they specialize in, at what they work in, things are a bit more reductive. So basically, they're all obsessed with reproduction and motherhood. My three examples are Claire Denis, High Life, Hideo Kojiba's Death Stranding, and Capcom's Resident Evil Village. And so the movie high life has Dr. Dibs working on a prison spaceship where she, you know, in True Inventor fashion, she questions ethics and does all sorts of, you know, abuse. She engages in all sorts of abusive medical practices as part of an artificial insemination program, because her one goal in life is to rebuild her family. In Death Stranding, we have quite arguably the. We have arguably the most important scientist of the fictional universe, the inventor of the Novum. So the thing that the makes this fictional universe hold together, it's called the Chiral Network. She has a name, Mollingen, but she is repeatedly referred to as Mama because that is her one defining function. And she's, you know, even though she has this amazing discovery behind her, she's now trapped in an improvised laboratory in a parking lot, basically because that's the one place her undead baby can live. So again, she's tied to the lab because of motherhood and not because of the actual research that she pursues. And finally, in Resident Evil Village, the main villain, Mother Miranda, she's also obsessed with resurrecting her lost daughter. And this obsession kind of trickles down to the secondary villains of the narrative, who are also obsessed with some other version of rebuilding the family. And I find this very surprising for Resident Evil because it's a very long series of games. This is the eighth installment, and Mother Miranda is clearly, to me, a degraded version of her male predecessors. They're all bent on world domination and things like that, whereas she just works on something that is super localized and very particular to her. So, yes, we can criticize Obida for not actually thinking about women, villains. But contemporary fiction still has a little bit further to go, because all of these, my three examples at least boil down to Barbara Creed's archaic mother archetype.
- [43:26]
Gina Stahm
And you return to Zola in chapter four. How does he innovate on the figures of the inventor and the machine?
- [43:34]
Professor Anna Wandja
I mentioned early on that for the naturalist and decadent works, I read them as part of the current to which their authors belonged, rather than purely as science fiction. And that's what I do with Zola. I look at how the inventor figure allows him to sort of revolutionize the key concerns of his Rougou Macquart series. So this is a series of 20 novels that are very much about the living and working conditions of the working class. They're pretty grim. There's no hope for the future. And Travail, the novel that features the inventor, is a lot more utopian and open toward the future than the previous. The technology itself, and I can talk about this in greater detail in a minute, the technology itself is also reinvented because as part of the abuses suffered by the working class in the Rougon Marquard, the representation of technology was, you know, was monstrous and made to look like oppression, made to look like the technological, like a machine expression of the greed and, you know, power of the factory owners. So when Zola actually goes to develop his inventor figure, he looks a lot like the inventor from the Voyage Extraordinaire. He's wealthy, he is reclusive, he has a lab at the margin of the model city that's being built, and he works there in this sort of isolation on his electrical experiments. The specific innovation that Zola comes up with, and was never quite there for Verne, was that Zola imagines a sort of a socialist prophet that manages to take this invention that Jourdaan was working on basically for the purposes of intellectual satisfaction, and make it work for the community. So he gets to reform labor through the inventor's work, but without actually changing who the inventor is. It's also very clever of Zola to have fixed another issue. Well, to have fixed another aspect of the inventor narrative that wouldn't have worked in naturalism, which is the fantastical Promethean punishment of the Vernian inventors. So he gives Jordan, his inventor, a sort of built in obsolescence because he makes him already quite old when the story starts, and sickly. And in part, this is because what's troubling about Jourdan is that he too is a member of the factory owning class that's how he made the money that allows him to pursue his research program. So that's what happens to the inventor. As far as the machines themselves, well, I talk about novels like Germinal, La Bitumene and La Sommoir where machines were not just noxious, they enslaved people, they ate up their lives and so on. They were also monstrous and evil and sort of mythologically represented. The machines that we see in Travail are really all purely technological devices. They're all nuts and bolts. And we hear a lot more about the mechanical details. Again, it's not a full description. There's no desire to make the machine sound like it could actually work, but it is repeatedly described as pure machine. So Zola wants to demystify technology. He also really wants to show that, okay, these new machines are tools that anybody can use. And he really likes buttons as an expression of how easy this machine is to use. And so you hear a lot about buttons as part of, like, oh, easy to manipulate. There are also clean machines. Well, to the extent to which, in the sense that they are solar powered, they're electrical. So there we go versus everything in the previous novels that was coal powered and dirty and polluting. His final word on what the machines do for society is also very interesting because insofar as they are very efficient machines and they are clean machines and easy to use, they also end up freeing the workers in the sense that they have a lot more leisure time. And that had never been present in another Israeli novel before. It was all about the workers being exhausted, both literally and figuratively, by the machines. And what the workers do in TRVAI with this newfound time is to work on their education so they are able to, you know, there's more social development, more social ascension and so on. So it's a much brighter future in which workers are not merely workers, but they can become fuller, more rounded people, and they can also participate in scientific research. So it's a very hopeful final scene. It's a little bit the city. The former factory town ends up looking a bit like Francis Bacon's been Salem in the sense that it has a library and a research lab at the center.
- [49:24]
Gina Stahm
And how do you see this worldview involving machines and inventors mirrored in the recent series Westworld?
- [49:32]
Professor Anna Wandja
I have to say that's one of my more unusual pairings. I agree that, you know, like. Like many Android fictions, Westworld is about how machine humanity can rival plain old humanity. But I chose to look at it in terms of. In Zolian terms. So I looked at the oppressed proletariat and generally labor relations in the amusement park that is Westworld. My basic point was that Zola wrote about workers versus machines. Here the workers are the machines. And I thought that Westworld was. Once you choose to look at Westworld for labor relations, I spotted that it too had this couple of inventor and socialist profit type. A lot less socialist because we're not in the 19th century anymore, but still these two, a technocrat and somebody who tries to free the workers. And these rules keep getting reopened. Assigned over the various seasons of Westworld. I'll just talk about the first one now, the first couple because it's the one that is most closely related to the 19th century. So I have the inventor as Robert Ford. Again, well chosen name, much like Zolaaz Jourda. He's a brilliant, reclusive, primarily technical mind in terms of. He's played by Anthony Hopkins on the show. In terms of costuming, he wears old fashioned 19th century outfits. So he looks the part of the 19th century scientist in terms of mise en scene. His office has like curiosity cabinets. Again, the items we had seen throughout the Vernian narratives. And. And in terms of his focus, he can't see beyond the technical application. So he's just focused on mechanical control of the host and of the narratives which are basically the lives that the hosts live in the park. His partner, Andrew Weber is a lot closer to Luke, the socialist prophet from Travail. He's within the fiction of Westworld. He is revered by the androids as some sort of prophet. And whereas Ford is focused on the machine essence of the androids, Weber wants them to develop autonomy and decision making and have freedom from their repetitive cycles. So all the everything that Luc eventually achieved for the workers in Travail, it's what Webber wishes for the androids.
- [52:37]
Gina Stahm
So in your fourth, sorry, your final chapter, Villiers de l' is in his El Futur centers the figure of Thomas Edison who's appeared in the background throughout yout Corpus, as has been mentioned a few times. How does Vivier de l' Isadon blur the line between reality and fiction with this portrayal of Edison?
- [52:59]
Professor Anna Wandja
Edison stands out among the other inventors because obviously he's an actual historical figure and he was Villier's contemporary and he is pretty much ripped from the headlines. It's impossible to find out exactly which newspapers Villiers read in order to document himself on Edison, but I surveilled a whole bunch of 19th century newspapers predating the Villier's writing of the novel. And it was interesting to see that there was extensive coverage of Edison. It was a bit patchy and uneven. There were different aspects of his personality, of his work ethic, of his actual discoveries that were taken up by the different journalists. It was clear that very few had actually traveled to New Jersey or had actually spoken with Edison. And they were either building off each other or plain old making stuff up about him because there was such a thirst, there was such a desire to know about Edison. So when Villier writes in his preface to the reader, in his notice to the reader that he is not writing about the historical Edison, but the character of the legend that is being developed, yes, I could totally see what he meant, Right. There were already all of these rumors sifting about. So his novel just fits in, in that general rumor mill. It's, you know, he's saying that he's not pushing too far when he depicts an Edison that has invented an Android. And I think the best example of him being right in the notice is what happened when Le Gaulois, which is a fairly conservative French newspaper, started publishing one of the early drafts of Le Futur. It didn't run for very long, it was only a few weeks time. But during this period, Le Gaulois stopped its other coverage of Edison. So the, the fiction ended up playing the part of reality. So what's more consistent, that's the variety of newspaper coverage of Edison. What is more consistent is everybody's interest in the phonograph. In part, this is because it was exhibited in France at the World's Fair and there were, you know, it was exhibited after its arrival, having been greatly anticipated through a whole bunch of journals. And consistently the journals picked up on, or couldn't pick up on because it wasn't actually accurate. They consistently represented the phonograph as being able to chat, to carry on a conversation with people, even though everybody understood that the machine just recorded and reproduced sound, and particularly the early versions, when they reproduced sound, they weren't faithful to the vocal temper of the people speaking, so everybody sounded really squeaky. So conquering that technological flaw to come up with the conclusion that the machine is chatting really shows how much faith people had in Edison's ability to create. So in the novel, this is really important because even though there's no consideration of artificial intelligence just yet, Edison does have to produce, because what his client has required, Edison does have to produce a machine that can carry on a conversation. The problem is that he is very good at the technical part. So he has produced a fantastic body that is well articulated, that can walk on its own and he thinks can be shown in society as though it were a real person. But he doesn't understand anything else that goes into making a real person. So he doesn't understand human nature. He really just. He's a fantastic technician and he wants to make money off of the technological part. He doesn't want to waste time speculating on how do I make this thing actually sound human?
- [57:31]
Gina Stahm
And specifically, what does the creation of an Android do that other kinds of technology may not? And how do we see this reflected in cinematic adaptations of the inventor and Android pairing?
- [57:43]
Professor Anna Wandja
Well, unlike a train, a submarine or a spaceship, the Android immediately makes us think about the limits of science because it seems to imply approximating, it seems to imply a reflection on human exceptionalism. So we're immediately thinking about the limits of science and what makes us human. For Villiers, again, because his client is a decadent aristocrat and is operating in that realm of the imagination and sensibility, he they end up talking about humanity in terms of the soul. So not intelligence yet, but something even harder to grasp, harder to define. Whereas in contemporary fiction there are different answers to what makes us human. So we talk about intelligence, we talk about self awareness and assorted other sensibilities. For example, we talked about Westworld. Well, there I think again, we're closest to the 19th century answer because eventually it will be revealed that eventually the androids will take over the world and they will enslave humanity. And they can do this because they have observed and collected data on the behaviors that people exhibit in the park and outside in society. So they have a very sophisticated technological, you know, data model of what makes humans human. Right, so this is, again, it's closer to what Edison was doing because we have a technological answer to human exceptionalism. But in Ex Machina, for example, we have a much more complex answer. Their sentience depends on, yes, intelligence, but also artistic sensibilities. So Eva, I read this film as an adaptation or an expansion of Les Futur because of a whole bunch of similarities. But what is new is that and contemporary as far as the definition of what makes us human is that Eva is able to not only produce very beautiful art that is both representational when it needs to be and non representational when it needs to be, but it's art that is adapted to the intellectual needs or intellectual capabilities of the person she's speaking with, and it's art that communicates. There's also, you know, a very clear rivalry that develops between Ava and her own inventor that posits her as sue has the superior intelligence. And we're left wondering at the end of the movie, okay, if the original inventor came up with Eva, who is so capable and of autonomous decision making and capable of navigating social situation complex social situations with humans, what will she create?
- [61:05]
Gina Stahm
Thank you so much for your thoughtful answers today. And as we come to the end of our time together, do you have any other projects the readers should look out for?
- [61:13]
Professor Anna Wandja
I'm currently working on a translation critical edition of Robidez La Guerrero Ventime Siegle this is the second volume of the trilogy. It's the only one that's not yet available in English, so I thought it would be really nice to have the full set. I feel like in the current book I shared most of what I had to say about the content. So for the translation, for the prefatory materials, I want to focus on how this book fits into future war fiction, which was very popular at the end of the 19th century. And I really want to talk a lot more than I was able to about this volume as a proto comic book. There are very interesting connections to draw between Rovida's experience in caricature. I mentioned that he edited esoterical newspaper and his work in illustration that inform the way he uses text and image to develop the story in La Garden Siegle. He also has some illustrated literary criticism which I thought was very interesting.