THE SUPERMALE (5)
By:
November 26, 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.
In a paroxysm of painful effort, Marcueil snapped the straps pinioning his forearms and raised his hands to his temples. But the crown on his head — later, Elson would bitterly reproach Gough for the crown’s defective construction; the glass plate wasn’t sufficiently thick, or else too fusible — warped, then reared up above his brow.
Like tears, drops of molten glass flowed from the dissolving crown down the Supermale’s face. Upon hitting the ground, several exploded violently, like the glass beads known as “Batavian tears.” (It is well known that glass, liquefied and tempered under particular conditions — in this case, tempered by the acidulated water of the device’s contact sponges — can resolve into droplets characterized internally by high residual stresses. Although strong, the droplets can exhibit explosive disintegration.)
The experiment’s observers watched aghast as the crown sagged forward and, having morphed into something resembling a skeletal jawbone, sank its incandescently hot teeth into the subject’s temples. Screaming, Marcueil burst his remaining bonds, leaped out of his seat, and tore off the electrodes whose wires writhed around him.
As Marcueil bounded down the stairs, the three observers were reminded of how comical yet lamentably tragic a dog with a pan tied to its tail can be.
Rushing out to the chateau’s front steps, all they could discern in the dusk was the man’s herky-jerky silhouette. Galvanized into a frenzy by pain, he rushed at tremendous speed down the driveway and seized the front gate with a grip of steel. Driven by a fight-or-flight instinct, he began to twist the massive gate’s heavy iron bars.
Meanwhile, in the vestibule, the broken wires continued to thrash about, electrocuting an unwary servant and setting fire to a curtain — which was devoured, without flame, with an insidious slowness, looking as if it were being kissed by a red lip.
As for Marcueil? His body, naked and spot-gilded with reddened gold, remained wrapped around the gate’s bars, or perhaps its bars were wrapped around his body.
Thus the Supermale breathed his last.
*
Ellen Elson has since recovered, and was married.
She imposed just one condition before agreeing to wed: that her spouse be capable of containing his love-making within the prudent limits of human capabilities. Finding a suitable man for the job was all too easy….
Having commissioned a jeweler to swap in one of the Supermale’s glass tears in place of the large pearl of her favorite ring, however, Ellen wears it faithfully.
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.