THE SUPERMALE (1)
By:
October 19, 2025
We are pleased to serialize an excerpt from Alfred Jarry’s proto-sf novel The Supermale (1902), translated by Josh Glenn, for HILOBROW’s readers. This excerpt first appeared in Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age (MIT Press, 2025), an anthology edited by Josh Glenn.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
NOTE: Prior to the events of this, the final chapter of The Supermale, we’ve witnessed a fantastical 10,000-mile contest between cyclists fueled by chemist William Elson’s “perpetual-motion” food and engineer Arthur Gough’s new high-speed train. But André Marcueil, the titular “supermale” — a cold-hearted gentleman scientist capable of prodigious feats of endurance and sexual athleticism — miraculously wins the race. Later, the physiologist Dr. Bathybius acts as an observer for an impossible three-day bout of love-making between Marcueil and Elson’s daughter Ellen — who, concealing her identity, has substituted herself for the prostitutes who’d been engaged for this bio-experiment at Marcueil’s laboratory-equipped estate, the Château de Lurance.
“I adore her,” Marcueil exulted — but Ellen could no longer hear him. She wasn’t dead; she’d merely fainted or swooned. Women don’t actually expire from such adventures.
Astonished by the exhausted, yet exhilarated, joyous, wised-up daughter who’d returned to him, Ellen’s father hastily summoned Dr. Bathybius. Disregarding the female subject’s anonymity, and without regard for professional confidentiality, much less for his own pre-experiment bias, Bathybius babbled: “I saw it myself — as clearly as if I had held it under a microscope or speculum. What did I see, with my own eyes? The impossible.”
Alas, when the prostitutes were set free, they pettily sought revenge. Virginie — so beautiful, miraculously made-up, her forehead so pure and her eyes so candid that she seemed Truth itself — called upon Elson. “The doctor is an old fool,” she prevaricated. “We were on the scene the entire time, and didn’t see anything at all impossible. By the second day they hadn’t done a thing. Finally, in order to impress everyone, they made love three times while we watched. After which the woman didn’t want to do it anymore.”
Asked for her side of the story, Ellen would only say: “I love him.”
“But does he love you back?” demanded her father. However greatly the Supermale might have dishonored their family, for the pragmatic American the only possible outcome of this scandal was that André Marcueil must marry his daughter.
“I love him,” is all that Ellen would say.
“So he doesn’t love you, eh?”
Were it not for Elson’s rash presumption, our story’s outcome might not have been a tragic one.
A particular figure of speech of Bathybius’s, who was still dazed by what he’d witnessed, helped inspire Elson to seek a scientific solution to the problem: “He is not a man, he is a machine.” Another phrase that the doctor kept repeating, to anyone who would listen, was: “This automaton refuses to feel human emotions.”
“Then he must be induced to love my daughter,” insisted Elson, in a simultaneously overwrought and practical-minded mode. (As we’ll see, he was prepared to be practical to the point of absurdity.) “Surely, Doctor, science can provide a means!”
Thanks to his recent experience, however, Bathybius’s scientific reasoning had gone topsy-turvy, like a compass whose magnetic needle spins in this direction and that — like a bakery’s automatic macaroon-bundling machine — until it ends up pointing anywhere but due north. To use another mechanistic analogy, the doctor’s brain was in much the same state as the dynamometer shattered earlier by the Supermale’s efforts.
Thus it was left to Elson — who was, after all, a brilliant chemist — to come up with his own plan, which was as follows: “Antiquity had its love potions. Why shouldn’t we be able to rediscover the methods, as old as human superstition, of forcing a soul to love?”
FRENCH PROTO-SF TRANSLATIONS BY JOSH GLENN: Raymond Roussel’s LOCUS SOLUS [excerpt] | Noëlle Roger’s THE NEW ADAM [excerpt] | Alfred Jarry’s THE SUPERMALE [excerpt] | Jean de La Hire’s THE MYSTERY OF THE XV [excerpt].
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.