DR JUN.-21

 

When Nicolas Vermont entered the greenhouse, he encountered a spectacle both grotesque and unfathomable. In the early 20th century rural France, Vermont had arrived at the estate of his uncle, Dr Frédéric Lerne, a figure revered as both surgeon and scientist, whom he had not seen for fifteen years. Despite the warmth expected of familial reunion, Nicolas quickly grew perturbed by the doctor’s eccentric comportment. Compelled by a mounting sense of unease, he resolved to traverse the estate’s grounds under the veil of darkness in pursuit of truth.

Within the greenhouse, he stumbled upon the manifestations of a scientific nightmare. At first glance, the amalgamations appeared vegetal: a cactus bizarrely flowering into a geranium, and an oak tree issuing forth cherries and walnuts. But curiosity turned swiftly to visceral revulsion. ‘It was then that I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two treated leaves, so like ears, I felt them warm and quivering,’ he later recalled. The “plant” had grafted onto its stem the ears of a dead rabbit, evoking not botanical ingenuity but rather an abominable transgression. ‘My hand, clenched with repugnance, shook off the memory of the contact as it would have shaken off some hideous spider.’

The grim revelation intensified. Dr Lerne was not who he claimed to be. His assistant, Otto Klotz, had usurped the doctor’s very being via a ghastly cerebral exchange, relegating the original uncle to oblivion and imposing a reign of perverse experimentation. As punishment for Vermont’s trespass, the impostor planned a retribution as surreal as it was cruel—transplanting Nicolas’s consciousness into the body of a bull.

Maurice Renard’s Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), later translated as New Bodies for Old, was no mere horror story but the avant-garde announcement of a genre hitherto unrecognised in France—merveilleux-scientifique or “scientific-marvellous.” Endorsed by poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a ‘subdivine novel of metamorphoses,’ it departed deliberately from the then-dominant paradigm of scientific adventure popularised by Jules Verne. Renard's genre did not pursue the certainties of future prediction, but instead contemplated what might plausibly exist just beyond the margins of our sensory domain—what he termed ‘the imminent threats of the possible.’

In his 1914 declaration, Renard asserted that the genre’s true purpose was ‘to patrol the margins of certainty, not to acquire knowledge of the future, but to gain a greater understanding of the present.’ In contrast to Verne’s more adventurous narratives like Around the World in Eighty Days, Renard imposed upon his fiction a stringent rule: only a single physical, chemical, or biological law might be contravened. This intellectual austerity, he argued, allowed the narrative to become an instrument of philosophical inquiry. Dr Lerne, for instance, was modeled on the actual Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel, whose work in transplantation and surgical grafts—though controversial—was real enough to imbue Renard’s fiction with a disturbing plausibility.

The genre’s reach was wide, encapsulating Martian invasions, psychic energies, solar cataclysms, and metaphysical speculations. It embodied the fervent cultural interplay between science and pseudoscience prevalent in the Belle Époque. In a 1909 essay for Le Spectateur, Renard—self-styled ‘scribe of miracles’—outlined the philosophical underpinnings of merveilleux-scientifique. This text, Du roman merveilleux-scientifique et de son action sur l’intelligence du progress, aimed not to claim invention but to codify the genre’s structure and ensure its intellectual legitimacy. He viewed this not merely as a literary innovation but as a symbolic rupture—a patricidal break with Verne himself.

Difficult Words – Definitions

• Grotesque: Repulsively distorted or unnatural

• Comportment: Behavior; conduct

• Grafted: Surgically joined (in biology, combining tissue from different organisms)

• Repugnance: Intense disgust

• Usurped: Taken over without authority

• Transgression: Violation of a moral or legal boundary

• Avant-garde: Ahead of its time; innovative

• Metamorphoses: Transformations

• Oblivion: The state of being forgotten or unknown

• Plausibility: The appearance of truth or reason

• Austerity: Extreme simplicity or strictness

Word Count: 594
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 16

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