2022-04-23
Ironiquement, la première invasion reptilienne ne vint pas de l’espace extérieur mais de celui, on ne peut plus intérieur, le microcosme sub-atomique d’un grain de sable. Publié dans Weird Tales (véritable sanctuaire des premiers reptiliens) en février 1927, « The Atomic Conquerors » d’Edmond Hamilton présentait cette étrange hybridation entre les théories de Niels Bohr, l’idée théosophique des races civilisatrices préhistoriques, l’imaginaire des mondes perdus et celui de l’invasion martienne à la H. G. Wells (1927 : 171-2). Devançant L’appel de Cthulhu (qui paraîtra dans la même revue un an après), l’on assiste à la découverte d’étranges hiéroglyphes qui racontent l’histoire d’anciens envahisseurs :
« Within a month I had translated and arranged my translations of [the stone], and found that the inscription told a stupendous, incredible story. According to it, these ruins of forts that lay scattered through Scotland had been built ages before by a race of strange folk who had invaded the Earth then. And these strangers had come, not from another planet, as one might suppose, but from a single atom in the Earth. (…) These atomic people could make any object, make even themselves, large enough to dwarf their world or small enough to disappear entirely. It was a chance to relieve their crowding numbers and they seized it at once. Using their discovery to grow in size, they burst up from their own atom into this world, into our Earth, and found that the atom that was their universe was an atom of a simple grain of sand, on Earth. That sand-grain, though, held their world, so they built a great structure around it, in what is now Scotland, so that it would always be there as a refuge for them to flee to, in case of need. That attended to, up from the atom, out of the sand-grain, streamed their people, gigantic masses of them” ( 1927: 168).
Après cette sorte de “terraformation” avant-la-lettre, origine pour le moins surprenante de l’Écosse, ce peuple primordial et sub-atomique se lança à la conquête de l’Univers, provoquant la réaction d’une « super-civilisation » de « supergens » [1] qui envahit à son tour la Terre pour les anéantir, selon une logique d’extermination qui était parfaitement établie dans les pages des pulps, des mondes perdus au space opera [2]. L’on reconnaît dans cette nouvelle cosmogonie paléo-futuriste (et proto-lovecratienne) les germes dont se nourrira abondamment le mythe des Anciens Astronautes (aussi appellé des Anciens Aliens).
Éternel retour moins nietzschéen qu’hiérophanique, l’histoire est sur le point de se répéter. Les créatures sub-atomiques ont à nouveau réussi à sortir de leur grain de sable et menacent de détruire l’humanité, selon un schéma récurrent chez Hamilton (ce qui lui valut le surnom attitré de « World-breaker », surclassant ainsi les nombreux autres adeptes de la chose dans les pages des pulps). Symptomatiquement, ces « conquérants atomiques » sont des reptiliens :
« I had thought of them as being somewhat human, perhaps with different features or coloring, but still essentially human. But these things! They were reptilian, saurian! In height they were a little under the human standard, and their figures were even roughly human in shape, with the head carried erect, a squat, powerful body, two thick, bowed lower limbs, and two short arms, ending in cruel, curved talons. But with that rough travesty on the human shape, all resemblance ceased. To begin with, the things were completely covered with thick, hard scales, like those of a crocodile. Their heads were peaked, instead of round, with gaping, fanged mouths and small, black, glittering eyes, browless and lashless like the eyes of a snake. They were noseless and earless, and their only sign of clothing was a queer sort of metallic armor that seemed more designed to carry their weapons than as clothing” (id: 171-2).
Les voilà donc émergeant de leur grain de sable sur des « disques volants » qui, comme l’a amplement démontré Michel Meurger pour l’ensemble des pulps, préfigure l’imagerie et l’imaginaire des soucoupes volantes [3]. Ces disques détruiront l’aviation britannique avant d’être à leur tour détruits par la super-civilisation extraterrestre, alliés à la cause terrestre dans une sorte d’alien ex machina.
Deux ans plus tard, Hamilton reprend le thème de l’invasion reptilienne, cette fois-ci dans le cadre plus convenu des mondes perdus souterrains (dont le monde sub-atomique était une sorte de miniaturisation), terreau originaire des premiers reptiliens. Ainsi, un mois avant la parution de « The Shadow Kingdom » de R. E. Howard, Hamilton publie dans le même magazine Weird Tales « The Abysmal Invaders » (juin 1929) où une armée souterraine de dinosaures contrôlés par des hommes-lézards s’abat sur une petite ville de l’Illinois. Trois mois avant la panique du Krach boursier, cet écrivain obsessionnel de la destruction apocalyptique reprend donc l’image qui constituait le climax de l’adaptation cinématographique du Monde Perdu de Conan Doyle (et qui trônait sur sa superbe affiche, quelque peu mensongère [4]) : le retour dévastateur des créatures les plus archaïques au cœur de la civilisation moderne.
Par une logique de la surenchère propre aux pulps (microcosme éditorial régi par une féroce compétition darwinienne), Hamilton démultiplie la défamiliarisation et le « sense of wonder » en ajoutant à l’image déjà connue des dinosaures celle (superbement illustrée par Hugh Rankin) des mystérieux hybrides reptiliens qui les chevauchent, semant à leur tour la destruction au moyen de leurs mystérieux rayons :
« The next moment the great monsters had thundered past him, their gigantic tread shaking the earth beneath him, and in that moment he glimpsed clearly the ci’eatures who rode upon their backs. Small and manlike shapes were these, but lizardlike, too, their limbs and bodies green-scaled, their extremities armed with sharp talons, their heads thick and conical and featureless, except for the big, dark, disklike eyes and the wide-fanged mouths. And as they thundered past on their gigantic moimts he saw one raise an arm with a white globe in its grasp, saw a beam of pale and feeble light which flickered out from that globe and struck buildings to right and left, buildings which burst into great masses of flame as the pale beam touched them” (1929: 744).
Comme dans d’autres récits de cette époque charnière hantée par l’accélération de la modernisation, archaïsme et futurisme fusionnent dans leur commune déstabilisation des référents du lecteur de leur temps. Ainsi, cette attaque qui semble venir du fond des temps se fait-elle au moyen d’une technologie supérieurement avancée qui n’est pas sans rappeller les « flying discs » de « The Atom Conquerors »:
« He saw the lizard-men at the pit’s edge stir, look downward, and then suddenly there rose up out of the great shaft’s depths a great, round platform of metal, a mighty, disklike platform fully four hundred feet across which all but filled the mouth of the great pit as it rose, separated from that pit’s edge by a tiny circular gap of a yard or less. Up from the dark depths of the shaft floated this great platform, slower and slower, and he saw that upon it were standing two of the gigantic, bellowing brontosaurs and some half-dozen more of the lizard-men. Smoothly the vast disk and its great burden drifted upward, until it hung level with the edges of the pit, its vast weight and the weight it bore suspended incredibly above the abyss. A moment it hung there, and in that moment the lizard-men on it stepped swiftly out onto the mound, prodding the two brontosaurs on before them” (id: 748-9).
Capturé par un des reptiliens, Rowland est mené dans leur ville souterraine. Ancrée dans l’imaginaire des mondes perdus (plus spécifiquement des « Terres creuses », selon le titre de l’encyclopédie éponyme réunie par Joseph Altairac et Guy Costes, 2006), celle-ci relève à la fois du fantasme « dinotopique » (W. J. T. Mitchell) [5]. Extrapolant l’engouement pour les reconstitutions paléontologiques des muséums naturels (souvent présentées dans un étrange bric-à-brac, comme dans l’ancienne galerie des « animaux disparus » ouverte au Crystal Palace en 1853), cette ville dinotopique combine l’archaïsme primordial des créatures avec l’agencement urbanistique qui donne nom, étymologiquement, à la notion de « civilisation » [6].
Dans sa geôle, Rowland rencontre le professeur Norton, dont il est l’assistant et qui était mystérieusement disparu dans les marais avant l’invasion. Ce dernier lui explique l’histoire de leurs étranges ravisseurs, où l’on retrouve le schéma pseudo-darwinien des évolutions parallèles et l’idée pseudo-théosophique de la paléotechnologie déjà présents chez Burroughs et Merritt :
« They were beings of an age dead for hundreds of millions of years, I learnt, creatures of the Mesozoic age, that period of the earth’s history which we call the age of reptiles. For in that age the races of mammals had hardly begun to arise, and the great and smaller reptiles and lizard-races were the rulers of all earth. And just as man, the creature of dominant intelligence, was to develop later from the races of mammals, so had these lizard-men, the dominant intelligence of their own age, developed from the races of reptiles. They had spread out in great numbers over what is now North America, the mo.st habit- able portion of earth during the Mesozoic age. They had built strange cities, had developed their knowledge and science in myriad ways, and had learned how to conquer and subjugate the great reptilian creatures who swarmed then on earth, to make servants of them” (id: 753).
Reprenant le schéma des Mahars (dinosaures intelligents qui domptent les ptérodactyles et autres races de Pellucidar), les hommes-lézards de Hamilton montrent la complicité reptilienne entre ces deux figures que leur taille diammetralement oppose. Curieusement l’idée de cette évolution possible du dinosaure vers une sorte d’anthropomorphisation, fruit d’une sorte de « mélecture » des schémas paléontologiques tels que celui présenté par B. Waterhouse Hawkins dans une gravure célèbre, Cretaceous Life of New Jersey (1877) rejaillira dans l’imaginaire scientifique des années 1980 avec la figure du « dinosauroïde » avancée par Dale Russell.
L’imaginaire du désastre cataclysmique, hérité lui aussi de ses devanciers, explique l’origine du monde perdu souterrain :
« At last, though, there came that great convulsion of earth which was to mark the end of the Mesozoic age, that vast world-cataclysm in which continents sank beneath the seas and new lands rose from the oceans’ depths. In such convulsions and mighty quakes the cities of the lizard-men were shaken down and annihilated, and across all their world was wild confusion. They knew, then, that they must find some other place of refuge or pei’ish, and so they hit upon the plan of descending to one of the great cavernous spaces which lie scores of miles down in earth’s interior. They had discovered long before that such great caverns exist inside earth’s crust, and so they pierced a shaft down to one of them and descended into it” (1929: 754).
Par un processus complexe et colossal d’ingénierie civile, les reptiliens réussirent à créer le mécanisme qui leur permit de migrer en masse vers les profondeurs [7]. Menacés comme tant d’autres mondes perdus par une sorte d’entropie géologique, ils sont désormais poussés en sens inverse. Par une sorte de théorie magnifiée du « Lebensraum », ils sont donc amenés à « conquérir et annihiler le monde tel qu’on le connaît » :
« They had observed that intelligent creatures, men, now were established on earth’s surface, that one of their cities stood near the swamp itself, and so they planned to send up first a striking force which would annihilate that city, annihilate Brinton, to prevent any possible interference from it. Then that first attacking force would return down the shaft, leaving guards at its mouth, and all the lizard-people and their dinosaur hordes would gather and assemble to pour up the shaft on the great disk and sweep out upon earth to conquer and annihilate the world we know” (id: 755).
Bien entendu, Norton et son assistant réussiront à empêcher ce plan de se réaliser, causant sans sourciller la destruction de ce monde souterrain et l’extinction des créatures qui le peuplent [8]. Cet imaginaire que l’on peut dire à plus d’un titre génocidaire rejoint celui de l’autre grand sous-genre dans lequel Hamilton s’illustra, le « space opera », déjà étudié dans ces pages [9]. Dans les deux cas l’on ne peut que penser à la célèbre analyse foucaultienne de l’extension biopolitique des guerres modernes, faites désormais « au nom de l’existence de tous ; on dresse des populations entières à s’entretuer réciproquement au nom de la nécessité pour elles de vivre. Les massacres sont devenus vitaux (…) Si le génocide est bien le rêve des pouvoirs modernes, ce n’est pas par un retour aujourd’hui du vieux droit de tuer ; c’est parce que le pouvoir se situe et s’exerce au niveau de la vie, de l’espèce, de la race et des phénomènes massifs de population »[10].
Après l’infiltration paranoïaque des hommes serpents au cœur de Valusia, les hommes-lézards de Hamilton prennent une dimension épique de conquérants (potentiels) du monde. Cette même année 1929, véritable annus mirabilis pour les reptiliens des pulps[11], E. R. Burroughs lui-même introduit les Horibs dans l’univers de Pellucidar, au gré d’un insolite cross-over avec la saga de Tarzan (Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, sérialisé dans le Blue Book Magazine). Comme chez Howard, c’est encore l’imaginaire ophidien qui s’impose pour désigner ces créatures menaçantes dont le nom lui-même renvoie à l’horreur (contraction de l’adjectif « horrible »)[12]. Toutefois le type reptilien semble hésiter entre les deux modèles : s’ils sont généralement évoqués comme les « Snake people », la description parfois les rapproche du lézard, montrant l’emprise croissante de ce dernier : « As the boat approached them he saw that the creatures were not men, though they had the forms of men, but were grotesque and horrid reptiles with the heads of lizards to whose naturally frightful mien, pointed ears and short horns added a certain horrid grotesquery” (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601071h.html#ch13).
Contrairement aux Mahar, dinosaures sur-civilisés, ils incarnent une menace barbare, explicitement comparée aux Indiens d’Amérique[13], dont le fantasme hante toujours les fictions de Burroughs, comme l’a montré Richard Slotkin dans sa Somme monumentale Gunfighter Nation : The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America (1998). Dans le monde perdu de la Terre Creuse comme sur la planète Mars, E. R. Burroughs transpose invariablement le mythe fondateur de la Frontière au moment où cette dernière touche à sa fin et doit se réinventer dans un Ailleurs toujours plus fantasmatique :
« The thread that links his preferred fiction to his taste in science and pseudoscience is the theme of the White man’s adventure in the wilderness and his struggle to master savage nature and savage men -the theme of the Myth of the Frontier. Burroughs’ relationship to the work of Grant [The Passing of the Great Race (1916)] and Stoddard [The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920)] (…) reveals the ways in which ideological polemics are received and used by mass-culture artists. Their common sources are the basic books of the progressive myth/ideology, the “Darwinist” social science of Sumner and Spencer, the historiography of Roosevelt, and red-blooded fiction. Grant and Stoddard merged Roosevelt’s historiography with the lingo of Darwinian “science” to project apocalyptic scenarios of worldwide race-war, which were used in their political campaigns for White supremacy, immigration restriction, and eugenics. Burroughs developed similar scenarios from the same material but projected them into a succession of fantasy-worlds and imagined a range of possible resolutions for the apocalyptic course of American and race history ” (1998: 198).
Les Horibs reprennent ainsi, le monstrifiant, le portrait de l’Amérindien en tant qu’antagoniste de prédilection du western selon une esthétique qui fusionne le familier (les armes rudimentaires, les ornements tribaux) et « l’étrangisation » (l’anatomie hybride, la monture préhistorique) :
« Now for the first time Tarzan was able to obtain a good view of the snake-men and their equally hideous mounts. The conformation of the Horibs was almost identical to man insofar as the torso and extremities were concerned. Their three-toed feet and five-toed hands were those of reptiles. The head and face resembled a snake, but pointed ears and two short horns gave a grotesque appearance that was at the same time hideous. The arms were better proportioned than the legs, which were quite shapeless. The entire body was covered with scales, although those upon the hands, feet and face were so minute as to give the impression of bare skin, a resemblance which was further emphasized by the fact that these portions of the body were a much lighter color, approximating the shiny dead whiteness of a snake’s belly. They wore a single apron-like garment fashioned from a piece of very heavy hide, apparently that of some gigantic reptile. This garment was really a piece of armor, its sole purpose being, as Tarzan later learned, to cover the soft, white bellies of the Horibs. Upon the breast of each garment was a strange device—an eight-pronged cross with a circle in the center. Around his waist each Horib wore a leather belt, which supported a scabbard in which was inserted a bone knife. About each wrist and above each elbow was a band or bracelet. These completed their apparel and ornaments. In addition to his knife each Horib carried a long lance shod with bone. They sat on their grotesque mounts with their toes locked behind the elbows of the Gorobors, anomodont reptiles of the Triassic, known to paleontologists as Pareiasuri” (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601071h.html#ch13).
Le parallélisme avec la menace amérindienne mobilise un topos cardinal des premiers récits de la Conquête de l’Amérique (autant dans les Crónicas de Indias que chez André Thévet ou les Relations des jésuites en Nouvelle-France), à savoir celui du cannibalisme :
« There was only a handful of the crew who had not been killed or wounded when the Horibs left their mounts and swarmed over the gunwales to fall upon their prey. (…) The battle over, the prisoners secured, the Horibs now fell upon the corpses of the dead, nor did they rest until they had devoured them all, while Jason and his fellow prisoners sat nauseated with horror during the grizzly feast. Even the Korsars, cruel and heartless as they were, shuddered at the sight. “Why do you suppose they are saving us?” asked Jason. (…) “Doubtless to feed us to their women and children,” said Thoar. “They say that they keep their human prisoners and fatten them.” (id: ibid)[14].
Tarzan, creature liminaire entre la sauvagéité et la civilisation[15], reconnaît dans ces créatures le fruit d’une évolution parallèle qui, loin de contester le schéma darwinien, le confirme paradoxalement :
« As Tarzan gazed in fascination upon the Horibs, whose “blood ran cold and who had no hearts,” he realized that he might be gazing upon one of the vagaries of evolution, or possibly upon a replica of some form that had once existed upon the outer crust and that had blazed the trail that some, to us, unknown creature must have blazed from the age of reptiles to the age of man. Nor did it seem to him, after reflection, any more remarkable that a man-like reptile might evolve from reptiles than that birds should have done so or, as scientific discoveries are now demonstrating, mammals must have” (id: ibid).
Mais le mélange entre le reptile et l’humain est présenté par Jason (et le narrateur omniscient) comme un brouillage des catégories « incroyablement repoussant », rejoignant les catégories de l’impureté étudiées par l’anthropologue Mary Douglas (1966) :
“The general conformation of the creatures, their weapons, which consisted of long lances and stone knives, the apron-like apparel which they wore and the evident attempt at ornamentation as exemplified by the insignia upon the breasts of their garments and the armlets which they wore, all tended toward establishing a suggestion of humanity that was at once grotesque and horrible, but when to these other attributes was added human speech the likeness to man created an impression that was indescribably repulsive” (ibid)[16].
Ce brouillage des catégories, qui obéit aussi à l’esthétique dépaysante de la juxtaposition du familier et de l’inquiétante étrangeté (qui deviendra le propre de la Fantasy -et de la catégorie liminaire de la « science fantasy ») se renforce dans la description du système de reproduction de l’espèce[17]. Janson réussira à s’échapper du bourbier nauséabond où on l’engraissait pour le donner en pâture aux femmes et aux enfants de la horde et Tarzan délivrera la « damsel in distress » ravie par un des Horibs selon le cliché récurrent de la « politique sexuelle » du roman d’aventures, érigé au même moment en moteur narratif des serials cinématographiques.
Comme pour les hommes serpents de Howard, le succès des Horibs sera autant (sinon davantage) iconographique que textuel, à commencer par les superbes couvertures de The Blue Book Magazine (février 1930 illustrant la capture de Tarzan et Jana et mars 1930 la libération de Jana) puis au moyen des différentes illustrations qui jalonnent les innombrables réeditions (avec, encore une fois, l’incontournable Frazzetta). Il en va de même pour leur transmédiatisation dans les nombreuses adaptations, à commencer par les comic strips de Rex Maxon publiés en 1931.
De manière plus diffuse, l’influence des univers burroughsiens contribue à essaimer de figures reptiliennes leurs nombreux imitateurs. Symptomatiquement, l’image tend à se complexifier par une sorte de maniérisme du genre, entré dans sa phase de décadence, et aussi sous l’effet de la concurrence exponentielle des pulps, laboratoire darwinien des fictions toujours avide de nouvelles mutations. Ainsi, peu après la fin de la sérialisation de Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, Ed Earl Repp présente dans The Annihilator Comes (Wonder Stories, août 1930) des étranges Triceratopsiens qui, comme leur nom l’indique, sont des sortes de Tricératops hominisés trônant sur une énième Terre Creuse :
« What they saw on the other side of the pool caused them to recoil and crouch, horror-stricken. Across the swamp, a half-hundred blood-curdling creatures with scaly, human-like bodies and Triceratopsid heads, stood on the fringe of the jungle and watched the crouching officers on the bank. They stood upright on two feet like a man. but their heads were the most frightful things Bob Allison or Bright had ever beheld. With a large bony armor curving down from the tops of their heads and across their shoulders, and savage, cruel eyes inserted above beastly snouts, the creatures sent stark terror surging through the brains of the two officers” (1930: 224).
La parallélisme avec les tribus autocthones allégrement décimées par les héros colonisateurs des romans d’aventures est patent et explicite (« He could not see or understand why such an impregnable craft as the Annihilator II would flee before a lot of old-world savages”, id: 225) [18]. Les aventuriers sont captures pour être capturés à la divinité locale, qui ne saurait être autre qu’un véritable Tricératops selon un topos fréquent des Mondes Perdus hérité de la théosophie : la divinisation des dinosaures survivants à l’extinction (ce à quoi s’ajoute ici une sorte de parodie de l’idée biblique du Dieu créateur ayant fait les hommes à leur image et de l’anthropomorphisme qui s’en suit[19]).
On retrouve aussi le thème hamiltonien de l’humain devenu complice des créatures archaïques, extrapolation de la hantise de la décivilisation coloniale (le fameux « going native ») : ici un évadé qui veut se venger de la civilisation humaine qui l’a injustement condamné[20]. L’éthos exterminateur, déjà évoqué, qui caractérise un pan de ces productions se traduit par l’oblitération de ces créatures au moyen d’un bombardement aérien (écho des raids aériens introduits par la Première Guerre Mondiale). Opéré par la machine fabuleuse dont le nom on ne peut plus explicite donne titre à la nouvelle[21], cette devastation est ouvertement célébrée par le texte comme une victoire de la civilisation et de l’humanité[22]. Trois paragraphes après ce massacre, la nouvelle conclut tranquillement par un mariage en guise de « happy ending ».
Ed Earl Repp revient sur la figure des reptiliens trois ans après dans The Phantom of Terror (Amazing Stories, avril 1933). Cette fois-ci le monde perdu se transforme en univers parallèle de la cinquième dimension, où un gangster s’enfuit après avoir volé l’appareil du professeur Mortenson qui permet d’y accéder. Le professeur et la police l’y chassent (transposition astucieuse de la chasse spectaculaire au gang de Dillinger qui était alors à la une), rencontrant quantité de créatures antédiluviennes, dont une tribu d’étranges hybrides. Les traits reptiliens sont ici pris dans une poétique composite de la monstruosité qui combine tératologie moderne et esthétique classique du « monstrum » [23].
Comme les hommes-lézards hamiltoniens, « les monstres de la cinquième dimension » chevauchent des dinosaures[24]. Encore une fois, les mitrailleuses ravagent ces hordes de « sauvages »[25] non seulement d’un autre temps mais d’une autre dimension (expansion littérale des métaphores souvent employées par les ethnologues du XIXe pour désigner les populations dites primitives)[26]. Les forces de la loi et l’ordre réussiront à chasser le gangster dans notre dimension où il est convenablement abbatu (pour Dillinger il faudrait attendre encore un an).
On voit donc comment le type du reptilien s’était solidement implanté et pouvait désormais transiter vers d’autres genres. De fait, les mondes perdus, emblème de l’ère des Empires qui était en train de se clore dans la tourmente de l’après-guerre (ou plutôt de muter vers celle des totalitarismes), connaissaient leur dernière heure de gloire dans les pages des pulps, bientôt éclipsés par les projections science-fictionnelles qu’ils avaient eux-même inspirées. Comme eux, les reptiliens n’auront d’autre choix que de migrer vers les étoiles…
Notes
[1] « Superpeople », terme et préfixe dont se souviendra peut-être Jerry Siegel pour sa nouvelle « The reign of superman » cinq ans plus tard
[2] « Certain adventurous spirits among them were not satisfied to stop in this universe. They saw the sun and its attendant planets and realized that this, our own solar system, was after all only an atom in a still greater universe. So a number of them, using the same method of changing size, grew again until they had entered the world above this, the universe in which ours is but an atom. Now in that greater universe, in that superworld, as I shall call it, there was civilization, a civilization of beings who had advanced far beyond the crude semi-barbarism of the people of the atom. So when the atomic invaders entered their world, the superpeople knew they had come from beneath, from an atom, for they themselves had long possessed that power of changing size which the atomic people had just discovered. (…) A long while their attacks continued until finally the patience of the superpeople was exhausted and they gathered together all their forces to crush these atomic invaders forever. They poured down from their greater universe to this Earth, and then was a battle such as was never known before, the people of the superworld and the people of the atom locked in a death-struggle, smiting with strange weapons, a colossal war raging over the shuddering Earth that reeled beneath them. The atomic invaders could not stand against the mighty weapons of the superpeople, and soon all of them not slain were fleeing in dread to their own world, that sand-grain that held their universe. They sped back to that grain and down into it, dwindling in size and vanishing, until of all their number, only their dead remained on Earth” (1927: 168-9).
[3] « Even while he spoke, a slight humming sound arose from the pit. The humming waxed swiftly to a loud droning, then up from the pit floated a black disk, some three feet across and swiftly growing. Hovering a few feet above the ground, it continued to grow, and the droning became a loud booming, a tremendous rumbling thunder. Even as I stared at it, lying there, I fathomed the cause of that rolling thunder, knew that it was the sudden expansion of the disk that beat out those thick waves of sound. The disk grew until it was perhaps thirty feet across, then ceased expanding. It slid gently down toward us until it was nearly touching the ground, and I saw that it was crowded with dark shapes that pushed toward the rail to stare down at us.Then down from the edge came a folding metal ladder, and clambering down this ladder came three creatures, shapes grotesque and terrible, three of the atomic people” (1927: 171). À cette imagerie, qui prefigure clairement les futures “rencontres du troisième type », s’ajouteront d’autres éléments proto-ufologiques comme celui de l’amnésie (« How many of the disks streamed up from the atom while I lay there, I can not guess. Their number seemed infinite, but my memories are fragmentary, disjointed. I must have been unconscious for a few minutes at least, for I remember that amid the rumbling thunder of the rising disks (…) a dizzying blackness seemed to descend on my brain, and when consciousness returned the last mass of disks was rising from the pit, vanishing like the others in the sky above”, id: 172).
[4] Cette autre affiche (https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f8/3a/ff/f83aff34c49f5f2cfe871f2bf8a5cf98.jpg ) est plus fidèle puisque le climax du film présente un brontosaure s’attaquant au Tower Bridge et non pas un tyrannosaure écrasant un tramway dans sa chasse éperdue d’une foule en panique (ni, comme dans le roman de Doyle, un simple ptérodactyle égaré dans le ciel de Londres). Toutefois le pouvoir du paratexte s’avèrera ici plus important encore que les images contenues dans le film, et l’on peut dire qu’il aura davantage marqué l’imaginaire et la culture visuelle, préfigurant non seulement les attaques de King Kong (Merian C. Cooper et Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) mais tout le sous-genre des « monster movies » des années 1950.
[5] “There is a powerful strain in dinosaur narratives that treats them (..) as a “master race” or dominant life-form. These alternative worlds or “dinotopias” (…) can be visited in fiction by such pretexts as time or space travel (the journey back in time to the Jurassic era; the journey through space to a “lost world” where that era still survives), or brought to life for tus by the technological re-creation of the dinosaurian world, as in Jurassic Park. Sometimes the dinotopia is dystopic, a vicious, Hobbesian “state of nature” where life is nasty, brutish, and short. Other times it is eutopic, a “happy place” like the CD-ROM world of Dinotopia (..) or the sitcom suburbia of The Flinstones” (W. J. T. Mitchell, 1998: 32-3)
[6] “As he marched down that street between his two guards Rowan all but forgot his own predicament, so intensely interesting was the panorama before his eyes, a shifting pageant of creatures of the world’s youth, enthralling to the eyes of the paleontologist. For through the streets were pouring masses of the lizard-men, bearing tools or weapons, hurrying along on taloned feet or riding huge brontosaurs, who tramped majestically along the street’s center while the walking crowds clung to its sides. Here and there, too, moved other dinosaurs, almost as huge, bearing burdens or ridden by lizard-men, the reptilian beast-servants of a lizard race. Tyrannosaurs there were, moving along in their swift, hopping gait, the fiercest and most terrible of all the dinosaurs, yet servants, like the rest, of the green-scaled lizard-folk” (1929: 752).
[7] “Only a portion of their dinosaur servants did they bring with them, leaving the rest to perish above, Avhose bones, indeed, I had found in the swamp. When this had been done they closed tightly the opening of the great shaft, above, and dis- mantled the great ascending and descending disk for which they no longer had need. Then their hordes set to work to build up their cities anew in their new cavern home. Far above them the surface of earth writhed and twisted gigantically, annihilating all the hordes of dinosaurs above, but the cavern world of the lizard-men remained unchanged, as they had foreseen, and in it they lived serenely on” (id: 754)
[8] “For minutes Rowan stared, unable to credit the miracle which had taken place before his eyes, which had thrust back the lizard-men and all their dinosaur hordes at the last moment, aiiniliilating them in their cavern world far below by the switch they had themselves prepared, by the molten fiery seas of earth’s heart which Morton’s hand had loosed upon them(…) Out beyond the shattered city, out in those other cities beyond the hori- zon, out over all earth’s surfacethere would be ininning men, and the fleeing of panic-driven crowds, and all the fear and horror which the invaders from the abyss had loosed upon the world. But soon would come an end to that. Soon those fear-driven throngs would be drifting back, returning, would be learning how those dark invaders had been thrust back, annihilated, the destiny of their race shattered by a single man” (id: 857-8)
[9] A. Dominguez Leiva, “Star Wars et la refondation du space opera (2) : les premiers topoï », http://popenstock.ca/dossier/article/star-wars-et-la-refondation-du-space-opera-2-les-premiers-topo%C3%AF
[10] M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité. La volonté de Savoir, Gallimard, 1976 : 180
[11] Dont la figure précède et accompagne, comme on l’a dit, le Krach boursier, sans que l’on puisse établir une relation de cause à effet autrement que sur le mode humoristique des corrélations farfelues. Il faudrait chercher ailleurs les causes socio-culturelles de la cristallisation de la figure, qui pour nous relève plutôt d’une combinatoire des topoï des mondes perdus, accélérée par la dynamique économique et fictionnelle des pulps.
[12] Le motif du sang froid devient, comme dans la tradition des bestiaires moralisés, un trait de méchanceté : « “Let us not speak of them. They are horrible. They are worse than the Gyors. Their blood is cold and men say that they have no hearts, for they do not possess any of the characteristics that men admire, knowing not friendship or sympathy or love”, E. R. Burroughs, Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, en ligne sur http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601071h.html#ch13
[13] “Following tactics similar to those of the plains Indians of western America, the Horibs were circling their prey” (id: ibid). Par ailleurs, leur demeure souterraine est associée à une forme de troglodytisme, aux antipodes de la cite des hommes-lézards hamiltoniens: “He saw no signs of a village, nor any indication of arts or crafts other than those necessary to produce their crude weapons and the simple apron- like armor that the warriors wore to protect the soft skin of their bellies” (ibid).
[14] Le motif de l’anthropophagie opère par ailleurs une mutation chromatique qui rapproche les reptiliens des « Peaux Rouges » : « As Jason watched the Horibs at their grizzly feast, he became suddenly conscious of a remarkable change that was taking place in their appearance. When he had first seen them and all during the battle they had been of a ghastly bluish color, the hands, feet and faces being several shades paler than the balance of the body, but as they settled down to their gory repast this hue gradually faded to be replaced by a reddish tinge, which varied in intensity in different individuals, the faces and extremities of a few of whom became almost crimson as the feast progressed” (id: ibid). Là encore le familier et l’inquiétante étrangeté se fusionnent (par ailleurs la couleur continuera à changer selon un mimétisme caméléonique).
[15] V. A. Domínguez Leiva, “Les paradoxes de l’Homme-Singe », http://popenstock.ca/dossier/article/les-paradoxes-de-lhomme-singe-1
[16] Janson tente toutefois de recadrer cette anomalie abjecte dans le schéma de l’évolution darwinienne : « As they rode between the never ending trees he tried to speculate as to the origin of these gruesome creatures. It seemed to him that they might constitute a supreme effort upon the part of Nature to reach a higher goal by a less devious route than that which evolution had pursued upon the outer crust from the age of reptiles upwards to the age of man.” (ibid).
[17] “On the way they passed a number of females laying eggs, which they deposited in the soft, warm mud just above the water line, covering them lightly with mud, afterwards pushing a slender stake into the ground at the spot to mark the nest. All along the shore at this point were hundreds of such stakes and further on Jason saw several tiny Horibs, evidently but just hatched, wriggling upward out of the mud. No one paid the slightest attention to them as they stumbled and reeled about trying to accustom themselves to the use of their limbs, upon all four of which they went at first, like tiny, grotesque lizards.” (ibid)
[18] « From behind massive tree-trunks surged a veritable army of Triceratop-sians. They came forward at once, spears upraised, and the two humans discovered that they were now surrounded on all sides by hideous, beastly beings who screeched triumphantly as they closed upon them.Standing back to back. Bob and Bright shot rapidly into the ranks that slowly closed around them on all sides. They sent slug after slug into them, mangling horribly those who were hit. Bob hoped the others would become frightened and retreat. But the Triceratopsians refused to become fright-ened. Instead, they fitted ivory-tipped arrows into their powerful bows and let fly, but with mighty poor accuracy (1930: 225)
[19] Selon la célèbre boutade de Voltaire: « Si Dieu nous a faits à son image , nous le lui avons bien rendu”, (Carnets, cit. in R. Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire, Nizet, 1969: 188). La critique de ces divinisations de créatures naturelles est aussi à placer dans le contexte de la dévalorisation des croyances des peuples colonisés, présente dès la Conquête des Amériques : « Within twenty feet of the cage the procession halted. From the side came Hokar, followed by Brandt and a double line of Triceratopsian priests. Hokar was adorned in a flowing robe of feathers making him look like some strutting bird with the head of a beast. Brandt was likewise adorned and he grinned evilly as he quick-stepped to the side of the chief. In their rear, the grotesque priests, each carrying a skull-crowned scepter and painted hid-eously in red streaks, maintained a grunting chant that rose and fell with a two-toned menace” (1930: 232)
[20] “I chose this kind of beings rather than to continue living with your kind who drove me here!” (…) “Civilization has wronged me, young man (…) But I escaped! And all civilization is going to pay one of these days when Hokar’s strength increases. He’ll sweep the whole surface clean! But you’re going to be the first on account. Your fives are go-ing toward the settlement of civilization’s debt to me. It will be a pleasure to see two officers of the United States Air Forces die a dozen deaths in one!” (id: 228)
[21] Il s’agit du Annihilator II, faisant suite à un premier protoype qui était au centre d’une nouvelle précédente, « Beyond Gravity ».
[22] “Overhead, the Annihilator hovered like a tremendous bird and spread death into the Triceratopsian town. The world inside of the Earth trembled with each deafening explosion of aerial torpedoes. Then after a time the huge craft dropped lower and the three men, safe in the depression, heard the rattle of machine gunfire The ship’s guns hissed and rattled, sending ex-plosive messengers of death into the Triceratopsians who, without a leader, went mad with fright. (…) Hokar’s horde was broken; his town lay in devastation. Great holes yawned like craters in it where the powerful torpedoes had exploded. Bloody masses lay on every side. The Annihilator had done her work well. Hokar would never increase his strength for a raid on the civilized world! His savage warriors were almost exterminated (…) The Annihilator had played her part for mankind in preventing some future catastrophe. She had played her role, unconscious of the fact that she was wiping out mankind’s most terrible enemies” (id : 234-5).
[23] “The monster of the Fifth Dimension was like an awful nightmare. It had a long, reptilian neck, at the end of which was a venomous-looking head. Its eyes, as large as saucers were deep set in the forehead, like the three corners of a triangle. From its neck spurted streams of greenish-blue liquid, spilling through the wounds made by Barton’s missiles. The enormous head was studded with unnumbered horns and waved back and forth, a long, purple tongue darting from between fang-filled jaws. With a sudden lunge the beast moved toward the men. (…) The beast had the legs of a centipede, but thick and powerful. The feet were four-toed and savagely clawed, Mortenson was astounded to find it a cross between the reptile and the insect and he promptly named it a serpenta insecteana” (1933: 72)
[24] “On each beast rode two or more Fifth Dimension dwellers ! They held primitive bows in their hands and had quivers of arrows hanging across their backs. They looked almost human, astride the racing beasts, their long, skinny legs dangling, equally thin arms of which there were four to each creature, waving above their grotesque, egg-shaped heads. They were dwarfed by the size of the monstrous mounts which needed no urging. As they neared the astonished man-hunters, they appeared all arms and legs. Their bodies, blue in color, were short and thick, like the fat belly of a great ape. Their eyes protruded from their faces and waved like the feelers of a snail. And they were equally as loathesome” (1933: 73).
[25] Le parallélisme est explicite dans le texte: observant une des dépouilles des créatures, ses tueurs trouvent trois dollars pendus à son cou en guise d’amulettes. « That’s how the bandit got into the graces of the Fifth Dimension people”, explique le professeur Mortenson. “Gave ’em presents same as we do in Africa or Borneo to win respect from the natives” (id: 74)
[26] “Steckel picked up the detective’s machine gun and sent death into more of the running beasts. But there was no halting their mad rush. They continued on toward the men in the lush and the creatures on their backs were either tremendously courageous or too stupid to sense their own danger. They stuck to their mounts until they fell. The clearing was littered with dead and dying. Then the last of the beasts went down under a solid barrage of bullets from the machine guns. It was literally torn to pieces. The riders were buried under it as it rolled over on its back” (1933:
Bibliographie
M. Douglas, Purity and Danger : An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge, 1966
M. Meurger, Lovecraft et la SF, 2, Encrage, 1994
W. J. T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon, University of Chicago Press, 1998
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation : The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America, University of Oklahoma Press, 1998
Pour citer
Leiva, Antonio (2022). « D’où viennent les reptiliens? (5) ». Pop-en-stock, URL : [https://popenstock.uqam.ca/articles/dou-viennent-les-reptiliens-5-perdus-dans-les-mondes-perdus], consulté le 2024-11-21.