Michel Jeury and the Writing of Time Natacha Vas-Deyres Translated by Natasha Quiring and Chris Berne Natacha Vas-Deyres holds an “Agrégation de Lettres modernes”, has a doctorate in Francophone and comparative French literature, and teaches at the University Bordeaux Montaigne. She has published L’Imaginaire du temps dans le fantastique et la sciencefiction [The Imagination of Time in Fantastic and Science-Fiction Literature] (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2011), Régis Messac, l’écrivain-journaliste à re-connaître [Régis Messac, A Journalist-Writer to Rediscover] (Ex nihilo, 2011), as well as Ces Français qui ont écrit demain. Utopie, anticipation et science-fiction au xxe siècle (Champion, 2013) [Those French Who Wrote about Tomorrow: Utopia, Anticipation and Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century] (Champion, 2013), which obtained the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire 2013 in the essay category. ABSTRACT: In Michel Jeury’s narratives, time travel is done by way of the psychic universe. The depiction of this mentalized time is influenced by quantum physics, which undermines time and thus corrupts the narration. These processes come with the denunciation of totalitarian systems while questioning historical time. The latter translates into a particular stylistic use of colors, which also takes on a political meaning. This poetics is coupled with a utopian dimension in Jeury’s work, a quest for “subjective eternity”. December 22, 2013 Michel Jeury and the Writing of Time Michel Jeury, who started his career at the end of the 1950s, is regarded today as a great French science fiction novelist. Since the publication of Le Temps incertain in 1973 [Uncertain Time, trans. as Chronolysis in 1980], published in Gérard Klein’s “Ailleurs et demain” series (Paris: Laffont), scholars of French science fiction have perceived a metamorphosis of the representation of time travel in his work. According to this essential author of French science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, time travel is not made possible through the machine, a classic science fiction theme since 1880, but through the psyche.1 The psyche is helped either artificially or naturally by the ingestion of chronolyse, a drug. The time traveler then incorporates one or more foreign personalities from his past or his future. The interest of the imaginary Jeuryan traveler is primarily of a literary nature: in any event, the unfolding narrative does not provide a logical continuity according to conventional standards of romance, and temporality is represented by the destructuration of causality. This imploded and subjective time, like the time of Philip K. Dick’s heroes, generates a dreamlike space where “les rêves rejoints sont joués sur une scène véritable”2 [“dreams are played on a real scene”]: this is an opportunity for Michel Jeury to create a galaxy of motifs, characters, poetized places that return repeatedly throughout his work, gradually developing a paradoxical temporal mental space capable of binding subjectivity and utopia. The writer revealed in confidence that it is a sentence in Raymond Abellio’s novel Les yeux d’Ezéchiel sont ouverts [Ezekiel’s Eyes are Open, 1949] that provoked his reflexion on time: “Le plus grand malheur de la vie est de ne pas savoir dilater assez le temps aux instants essentiels pour l’abolir”3 [“the biggest woe of life is not knowing enough of time to expand critical moments in order to abolish it”]. For Jeury, time, the “ventre mou de l’univers”4 [“soft underbelly of the universe”], is the biggest human fantasy, be it awaken or asleep. Dream and the mental universe can achieve subjective eternity. Only literature is capable of proposing this imaginary vision of a perceived subjective time. Writing a Psychic Time To understand Jeury’s science fictional universe, it is necessary to set some literary prolegomenon. Simultaneously fascinated by quantum physics and the narrative avantgardism of the Nouveau Roman,5 the writer uses in his practice of writing what he calls himself today "fictions quantiques" 6 [quantic fictions], namely a staging of the amplitude of probabilities for the characters. In Jeury’s work, there is no hard science fiction, but rather parallel worlds implied by the concept of quantum physics and presented to the readers (notably in the “trilogie chronolytique” of novels, Le Temps incertain in 1973, Les Singes du temps [Time’s Monkeys] in 1974 and Soleil chaud poisson des profondeurs [Hot Sun, Abyssal Fish] in 1978) by narrative sequences unrelated to each other by a causal consistency. In interviews that I conducted with him in Alès in 2011, he explained that in the early 1970s, while writing Le Temps incertain, he had a great and “grand public” appreciation of quantum physics,7 he kept the general principle of a possibilistic or probabilistic appreciation of the world. He was most influenced by Louis de Broglie’s theories, including that of the “double solution,”8 which was looking to preserve the reality of waves and particles in wave mechanics. His ambition as a writer was to find a purely verbal variation of this theory. Gérard Klein, Michel Jeury’s editor at Laffont, initially underlined this founding principle of Jeury’s writing because “aucun déroulement événementiel n’assure une continuité logique selon les normes classiques du romanesque”9 [“no event sequence can guarantee logical continuity according to the conventional standards of storytelling”]. Narrative linearity explodes. It becomes difficult for the readers to distinguish the time of fiction and the time of the narration because the latter does not have benchmarks. When it does, it multiplies them. The same passage is read and reread, each time with slight variations. This narrative device triggers the readers’ perception of time as a loop and not as an artifact designed to account for an obsessive state of mind. Michel Jeury uses syllepsis, allowing aggregation of separate time segments. This narrative technique promotes continual budding of new narrative sequences, reminding the reader of a film editing and its possibilities of illogical simultaneities. In Les Singes du temps, the initial sequence of the character Magic-Joe, an old circus cowboy, who is taken, tortured and left to die of thirst in a dry well, appears in the following chapters, with minute variations. This traumatic scene is actually a reference point for the hero in a universe of uncertain time: “Ah c’était l’enfer.Tu peux pas savoir […] Ils m’avaient attaché les mains et les pieds ces salauds et il me semblait que ma tête allait flamber comme une torche. Et soif, soif, soif, tu peux pas savoir!” [“Ah it was hell. You cannot know [...] They tied my hands and feet the bastards, and I felt that my head was burning like a torch. And thirsty, thirsty, thirsty, you cannot know!” ] (Jeury, 1974, p. 8) Michel Jeury’s writing can be linked to certain principles of quantum physics. The uncertain time is also called “l’indéterminé” [the indeterminate], meaning a dimension where many events that have happened to the protagonists at different times can interpenetrate. However, the notion of quantum superposition is the consequence of a mathematical postulate10: “la superposition […] stipule qu’une particule, à un moment donné, peut, pour chacune de ses caractéristiques physiques (position géographique, spin, quantité de mouvement…), avoir plusieurs valeurs différentes, donc être dans plusieurs états différents”11 [“layering [...] provides a particle at a given time, may for each of its physical characteristics (location, spin momentum...) have several different values, therefore be in several different states.”] The author constructs narrative or descriptive sequences called “états superposés” [layered states], to pursue the analogy, the invention of neologisms12 or the poetic description of a character from his onomastics: Dès Le temps incertain son bonheur à créer termes, sigles et acronymes éclatait dans toute son ampleur. Il suggérait par là un monde inquiétant et révélateur, à la fois éloigné et proche par son opacité de celui que nous étions en train de découvrir. Un terme comme celui de chronolyse, linguistiquement incontestable est en lui-même un pur joyau.13 [ “From Le temps incertain on, his eagerness to create time terms and acronyms broke in all its fullness. He suggested there by a disturbing and revealing world, both distant and close by its opacity from what we were discovering. A term such as Chronolyse linguistically indisputable is itself a gem.”] We must note the strong convergence of Michel Jeury’s writing style with, for example, Claude Simon. Simon used the collage technique to develop La route des Flandres in the early 1980s: “Dans l’écriture de Claude Simon, cette architecture est faite de combinaisons, de chevauchements, de procédés de tuilage, l’évolution de l’écriture montrant une grande invention de la part du romancier qui fidèle au début à des procédés narratifs relativement traditionnels tels que l’analepse et la prolepse, va progressivement s’en éloigner pour entrer véritablement en création par le biais de la syllepse” [“In Claude Simon’s writing, this architecture is made of combinations of overlapping, tiling methods, the evolution of writing showing great invention from the true novelist who at first uses relatively traditional narrative methods like analepsis and prolepse, will gradually move away to get truly creative through syllepsis”] (Bonhomme, 2008, p. 251). It is from these unconnected written sequences that Michel Jeury constructs a posteriori his novel: it is for the writer the sine qua non condition for the fictitious understanding of time, an essential concept–almost obsessive–of Jeury’s body of work. Its scriptural experiments are expected to account for the complexity of such a science fictional subject, able at once to propose new definitions of time and its apprehension by the psyche. The writer’s experience of procedure is representative of his personal conception of temporality and especially his ambition to have it perceived by the readers, who are also immersed in fiction, and thus trapped in the same situation as the character. The novels of the “cycle chronolytique,”14 le Temps incertain, Les Singes du temps and Soleil chaud poisson des profondeurs, were influenced by the schizoid novels of Philip K. Dick,15 such as Ubik or Counter-Clock World, in which the sequential conception of time impacts the very structure of these non-chronological stories. In a critique of Singes du temps in 1974, Boris Eizykman humorously remarks that: “le livre de Jeury part en guerre précisément contre le récit linéaire avec une violence qui devrait combler d’aise William Burroughs lui-même” [“Jeury’s book goes to battle with the linear narrative with a violence, which would delight William Burroughs himself”] (Eizykman, 1975a, p. 73). The readers are thus invited to laboriously reconstitute the separated fragments of the time frame without being capable of assembling them. The temporal uncertainty destroys the notion of point of view, thereby disorienting the reader. The reader’s reference points then vary over the narrative parcourse, causing the readers in their discomfort to accept any solution as long as it leads them to understanding. In 1980, Theodore Sturgeon evokes a “jonglerie avec la conscience et le temps [pour le lecteur]”16 [“juggling with [the readers’] consciousness and time”] in the preface to the American edition. The science fictional pact of reading is settled with the subjects of the three novels, envisaged as a trilogy although the three stories have nothing in common apart from the concept of chronolyse. Le Temps incertain initiates this founding cycle: in 2060, men have developed a method to overcome the linearity of time with phordaux17 computers and the chronolyse drug. The psychronauts are then thrown into a state called “temps incertain” (temporal uncertainty), which permits them to contact people from the past and to take control of their personalities. Hypersystem denunciation and chronolyse are still present in Les Singes du Temps and Soleil chaud poisson des profondeurs, but the characters and the plots vary. Robert Holzach, a psychronaut from the Garichankar hospital, is sent a hundred years into the past, into the brain of Daniel Diersant, a modest employee of the industrial empire (Le Temps incertain). Simon Clar is a “singe du temps”, a time traveler–or psychronaut– seeking to escape a totalitarian history and its torturers (les Singes du temps). Yan Nak is a scriptwriter of virtual worlds, and also a victim of a fratricide struggle between two computer systems and a double schizophrenia, the disease of Hood (“Soleil chaud”) and the Boldi syndrome (“poisson des profondeurs”). These characters are essential to understand what Michel Jeury aims to demonstrate about time. In 1984, Roger Bozzetto attempted a precise approach to determine the temporal issue in Jeury’s work: Chez lui le temps n’est plus à saisir comme cadre dont les variations ludiques serviraient à situer des intrigues de type roman d’aventures : il a et engendre une épaisseur, une opacité, une valeur existentielle – liée comme chez Proust – à une démarche de ressourcement. [“For him, time is no longer grasped as a frame whose playful variations would be used to set plots similar to the adventure novel: it has and generates a thickness, an opacity, an existential value - bound as in Proust – to a resourcing approach.”] 18 The speculative dimension of time in Michel Jeury’s work leans on subjective data: time can only be manipulated/manipulable or controlled in a mental space, an interior space (with or without taking chronolytique drugs – a singularity compared to Dick’s novels). Hence we observe this narrative play of superimposition and echoes of scenes already experienced but subtly revised whenever the spirit of the character launches into his past or his future, a possible prisoner of the time loop. This mental maze plunges the character into a state of confusion that the author also imparts to the readers by breaking the narrative linearity through alternate descriptions of each narrator’s consciousness of his personality. By highlighting Philip K. Dick’s quote, “J’ai le sentiment profond qu’à un certain degré il y a presque autant d’univers qu’il y a de gens, que chaque individu vit en quelque sorte dans un univers de sa propre création” [“I have the deep feeling that to a certain degree, there are almost as many universes as there are people, and that every individual lives in some way in a world of his own creation”] (quoted from Klein, 1982), in Le Temps incertain, the French author manifests his will to replace the usual diegetic coherence by a phenomenological consistency of the subjective experience of time. For Boris Eizykman, who re-names Dick, Ballard and Jeury’s science fiction “l’inconsciencefiction”, “[d]ès qu’on entre dans la chronolyse, dissolution du temps qui caractérise l’inconscient, on s’aperçoit que ça n’est que la poursuite échevelée de toutes les expériences possibles, la transformation et la fusion des événements dans une réalitémémoire mouvante, déréglée […] » [“[When] you enter the chronolysis, the dissolution of time which characterizes the unconscious, we see that it is only the frenzied pursuit of all possible experiences, processing and event fusions in a reality-shifting disturbed memory […]”] (Eizykman, 1975a, p. 73). Thus, a seemingly innocuous event of the story can tip the consciousness of a character and his reality to another: “le deuxième [homme] braqua sur Renato un pistolet à long canon, en disant d’une voix rude, étrangère : « Ne bougez pas ! » Le verre ne se brisa pas mais se fendit […] Daniel éprouva une sensation de froid intense et retira aussitôt sa main. [“Do not move! "The glass did not break but cracked [...] Daniel felt a sensation of intense cold and immediately withdrew his hand. “] (Jeury, 1973a, p. 160.) In this scene, the readers jump from Renato Rizzi’s reality, where he is assaulted in the basement of a bar by the henchmen of the HKH Empire, to Daniel Diersant’s, who is locked in a hospital room without doors, touching a bay window. For Gérard Klein, this destruction of the paradigm of narrative reality introduit à une perception des lacunes du paradigme historique. […] Le sujet véritable des romans et nouvelles de Michel Jeury, c’est une définition introuvable de l’histoire. Aux deux sens du terme. L’histoire comme narration, l’Histoire comme processus collectif interprété par un narrateur.19 [introduces the reader to a perception of historical paradigm gaps. [...] The real subject of Michel Jeury’s novels and short stories is an untraceable definition of history. In both senses of the word. History as a narrative, history as a collective process interpreted by a narrator.] This analysis by Gérard Klein sheds light on a possible interpretation of the narrative experiments that Michel Jeury conducted in the 1970s: the fragmented perception that individuals have, like their characters, of the social system in which they evolve, of their difficulties with becoming aware of a possible role in the progress of historical time. A Poetic Expression of Time Beyond this mentalization of time perceived by the individual–and not collectively–the uniqueness of Jeury’s writing is paired with a poetic dimension. Michel Jeury’s imagination is constructed by a specific writing practice. In a series of interviews in August 2011, he enlightened me on his writing techniques, often experienced during writing workshops with Jacques Goimard’s Ph.D. students in 1975.20 Besides the collage, which we saw earlier, certain characters, places, and scenes were developed from lists of words confronting one another to create images: this is how the surprising character of the fox speaking Ujling was created, a “sac-téléphone”, an instrument of communication between different universes in the novel L’Orbe et la roue [The Orb and the Wheel], published in 1982. For Sylvie Denis, this method is the author’s hallmark: “En SF, décrire ce n’est pas montrer le connu, décrire, c’est créer. Mais Jeury décrit beaucoup moins que ses collègues : il nomme, et cela suffit à créer son univers” [In SF, to describe is not to show the know; to describe is to create. But Jeury descriubes much less that his colleagues; he names, and that suffices to create his universe”] (Denis, 2009). Another specificity of Jeury’s universe is, surprisingly, the types of clothes with which the characters are dressed: it is a powerful visual marker for the readers who will find these elements appearing a priori as secondary in different novels when they form a significant network, from the great novels of the Ailleurs et demain series to the more accessible stories published by Fleuve noir. In Les Singes du temps, the narrative is placed under the aegis of the colours red and black, “Magic-Joe allait mourir et entrer avec tous ses amis dans la grande fête rouge et noir du temps” [“Magic-Joe was going to die and enter, with all his friends, into the great red and black festival of time”] (Jeury, 1974, p. 12) and these same colours are used in the description of clothes that change according to the protagonist Simon Clar’s visions: “ La mode du pyjama de ville et du silence hostile triomphait chez les garçons et les filles de vingt ans […] Au-dessous, on s’en tenait encore aux jeans rouge et noir […]” [“The city’s pajama fashion and hostile silence triumphed among boys and girls of twenty [...] Below, we still kept the red and black jeans [...]”] (Ibid. p. 61). These visual signifiers represent an ambivalent issue for Michel Jeury: they are on the one hand the source of a poetization of the narrative with the colour pattern, thus fertilizing Jeury’s imagination with science fictive autoreferentiality. On the other hand, the use of colour is symptomatic of the way Jeury contemplates time. A single formula summarizes his existential quest (and those of his science fiction characters) to master time and to reduce it to individual will: “Le passé a pour moi une couleur verte”21 [“The past for me has a green color.”] Ever since his childhood, Michel Jeury has been fascinated22 by the French comic books Coq Hardi, notably the cycle of “Guerre à la terre” between 1946 and 1947 by Jacques Dumas (a.k.a. “Marijac”) and Auguste Liquois, then by American pulp fiction novels that had colorful (sometimes garish) covers. The characters’ colors and outfits, often peculiar (a distinctive feature of science fictional writing until the 1980s), are integrated into Jeury’s narrative: “Il existait une certaine variété dans l’accoutrement. Tuniques blanches très courtes, robes longues, saris…” [There existed a certain variety in their dress. Very short white tunics, long dresses, saris...”] (Jeury, 2010a, p. 147.) Moreover, clothing diversity has a political meaning in the narrative and plays the role of a visual “marker” for the readers. Time travelers, sometimes lost in sequences where History has developed democratic or autocratic regimes, can only locate themselves and affect the course of time by identifying their antagonists or political groups by their bright uniforms: in Poney-Dragon, the political police of the dictator Joseph Poney is composed of officers dressed in black, gold and purple. In Les Singes du Temps, Simon Clar’s torturers, the “Flipos” of the Staline Plan, a political group which hunts down time travelers to force a distortion in history capable of imposing for good a communist ideology, wore “uniformes jaune et noir, très moulants, qui leur donnaient l’air de guêpes géantes ou de super-héros de bandes-dessinées. Ils avaient sur la poitrine un grand S noir, une ceinture jaune, des bottes noires et un serre-tête jaune” [yellow and black uniforms, very close-fitting, which made them look like giant wasps or cartoon super-heroes. They had on their chest a big, black “S,” a yellow belt, black boots, and a yellow hairbank”] (Jeury, 1974, p. 232). This colorisation of the text through descriptive passages becomes a stylistic element of Jeury’s writing, amplified, for example, in his Fleuve noir novels. In Quand le temps soufflera, published in 1983, they become prevalent and mostly constituents of the mental universe of the time traveler, a hero whose sensory perceptions are disturbed: Tout est dans votre mémoire, continua Van Boden. Ce qui est pour nous l’avenir est déjà arrivé pour vous […] sa voix éclata en fines écailles bleues, fondit en mille gouttelettes laiteuses, s’éleva dans le ciel nuageux où elle se changea en vapeur colorée. Le ciel, qui était le plafond, se mit à bouillonner et tomba en pluie sur le sable doré où se tordaient de longues chevelures noires. Des serpents écorchés, ruisselants de sang orangé, fouettèrent l’espace autour de Simon…23 [“Everything is in your memory,” continued Van Boden. “What is our future has already happened to you” [...] his voice broke into thin blue scales, burst into a thousand milky droplets, rose in the cloudy sky where it changed into a coloured vapor. The sky, that was the ceiling, began to bubble and rain fell on the golden sands which were writhing long black hair. Skinned snakes, dripping with blood orange, whipped the space around Simon ...] These colored visions are also symptomatic of the utopian/counter-utopian dimension in Jeury’s work. In L’Univers Ombre indeed, Syris, the hero, wakes up on a planet that turns out to be a utopia come true: his first contact with utopia comes with the discovery of multicolored clothes and he will dress himself, just like the inhabitants of the utopian planet, like Variana (the utopian space of the novella “La fête du changement”, 1975), in tight violet trousers with orange stripes. The connection we make between the recurrence of these clothing constituents and the creation of a utopian space is achieved through the dissolution of time. This remark makes us question the very nature of Jeury’s utopia. In 1974, Boris Eizykman attempts to define this singular utopia in light of his theories on connections between SF and capitalism: “Cette SF bouleverse le temps que nous connaissons […] [elle] est en rapport direct avec une mutation qui commence à prendre corps dans les sociétés actuelles, mutation du désir par laquelle les valeurs du capitalisme, c’est-à-dire la valeur d’échange et le type de travail soumis à cette loi sont désinvesties. Il y a le désir d’autres modes de rapports entre les individus, avec les choses, l’univers, ces rapports […] non assujettis à des codes sociaux et susceptibles de déboucher sur les mutations psychiques et somatiques qui définissent la SF” [“This SF shatters time as we know it [...] it is directly related to a mutation that is beginning to form in today’s societies, a mutation of desire by which the values of capitalism—in other words, exchange value and the type of work governed by this law—are dismantled. There is a desire for other kinds of relationships between individuals, things, and the universe, relationships that do not follow the social codes and that are able to express themselves through the psychic and somatic mutations defined by SF” (Eizykman, 1974a, p. 7). At that time for Michel Jeury, the abolition of space and time appears as the free realization of the unconscious energy, without space or time, where flux flows in a simultaneous chaos. As previously discussed, the story of individuals in history is foremost the struggle of the individual against a power allied to a system: in PoneyDragon, on the eve of the 2010 European elections, time travels announce that there will be a totalitarian state in 2025. In this novel, Michel Jeury defends the idea that the political future of a state cannot be saved by the secret, or the replacement of a system by another. In this story, the system is Eurocommunism instituted by an environmental organization based on irrationality. Individuality should dissolve in a mystical dogma. This political position, where the individual in history seems thrown from one counterutopia to another, belongs to the Jeuryan context of the 1970s-1980s. From 1990 onwards, when Michel Jeury begins his creative shift towards regional literature and a return to his roots,24 the bushy, poeticized writing of time in his science fiction novels reveals a dual quest: the process of rejuvenation (drawing on country roots in order to enrich the literary work) of existential origin that unfolds into a hallucinatory exploration of time. For Michel Jeury, the presence of soil, his native Dordogne - he was born in Razac d'Eymet – runs through the science fiction text and gives it a utopian dimension. Nevertheless we can see that the writing of time in his work is itself a utopian attempt: beyond the literary premise, i.e. the narrative representation of the quest of a mind and the poeticized colors of a decaying mental universe transformed into words, the French writer attempts to reach immortality through the dissolution of time, as if the imagination had the power to alter reality and create a universe. For Jérôme Lavadou, Le temps n’est plus un liant qui maintient une réalité séquentielle, il s’efface pour laisser la place à un non-temps infini […] qui dévoile l’une des obsessions de l’auteur : l’immortalité. Arriver dans un univers où le temps est infini (ou inexistant, ce qui revient au même), c’est atteindre l’éternité [et avoir] ainsi une chance d’échapper à l’avenir, bien plus effrayant que la mort.25 [Time is no longer a binding agent that holds a sequential reality, it is cleared to make way for an infinite non-time [...] that reveals one of the author’s obsessions: immortality. To arrive in a universe where time is infinite (or non-existent, which is the same thing) is to reach eternity [and have] a chance to escape the future, which is even scarier than death.] In his novels, Michel Jeury applies “une dilatation les plus extrêmes de ce motif”26 [the most extreme expansions of this theme] through the speculative exploration in order to galvanize the utopian stasis. If utopia is a priori to him what he calls the subjective eternity, his narrative choices operate a reversal of the literary utopia often static and descriptive. Temporal utopian spaces are in the diegesis moments of possible and recurrent outcomes, energy points of the story, whose reading requires permanent refocusing from the readers: “Le futur n’est pas seulement un lieu où l’on accède mécaniquement, mais une structure d’accueil à construire, afin de conserver ou de retrouver, une identité d’homme, un Territoire humain27 [The future is not only the place to which one has mechanical access; it is also a place of welcome that must be constructed in order to conserve or refind man’s identity, a human territory.] Conclusion The writing of time in Jeury’s work places the author in an unclassifiable esthetic and literary dimension. By developing subtle superimposition mechanisms for strata of the past and the future, this writing comprises three major elements that allow the readers to feel temporality almost concretely: a narrative approach that reflects the progression of a psyche subject to sequential distortions of time, a poetization of the narrative texture through the colorization of images and an introduction to the utopian dream of eternity. Science fiction becomes catharsis for Michel Jeury because abolishing fear from the future is simply a way to abolish fear of an existential unknown. Joëlle Wintrebert accurately expressed this literary and metaphysical project by turning the slogan “Changer la vie” [Change life] into “Changer la mort” [Change death] or even “Changer le temps” [Change time] (Wintrebert, 2010, p. 599). In the twilight of his life, Michel Jeury bequeaths to us this philosophical as well as science fictional legacy: “Le Temps m’a tué. Enfin, pas tout à fait, mais c’est en bonne voie. Le temps, il me semble, doit hanter tous les auteurs de SF (les autres aussi d’ailleurs, d’une certaine façon). Dans la moitié au moins des histoires de SF, surtout les romans, le temps est exploré, désarticulé, pris à rebrousse-poil, uchronisé ou Dieu sait quoi encore. La SF est avant tout une machine à explorer le temps”28 [“Time has killed me. Not quite yet, but it’s on its way. Time, it seems to me, must obsess all SF authors (and other ones as well, in one way or another). In at least half of all SF stories, and especially novels, time is explored, broken down, turned backwards, uchronicized, or God knows what else. SF is above all a machine to explore time.”] NOTES 1. The term “chronotic” refers to time travel, while chronolyse, in Jeury’s work, is the name of the drug used to time travel. Refer to Vas-Deyres, 2011. 2. Wintrebert, 2010, p. 596. 3. Abellio, 1949, p. 96. 4. Eizykman, 1974. 5. Philippe Curval reveals in 1977 this similarity with the principles of the Nouveau Roman: “Michel Jeury: accordant à sa propre personnalité certaines techniques du Nouveau Roman, a écrit, avec Le temps incertain et Les singes du temps, deux superbes réflexions sur l’être et la durée.” [“Michel Jeury: adding to his own personality some techniques from the New Novel, wrote with Le temps incertain and Les singes du temps, two superb reflections on being and time.”] Le Monde, April 15, 1977. 6. Interview with Michel Jeury, Alès, March 2013, online at: http://webtv.ubordeaux3.fr/culture/michel-jeury-entre-futurs-et-terroirs . The term is also used by Alexis Blanchet in the context of transmediality studies and notably in his book Des Pixels à Hollywood, 2010. 7. One of the definitions of quantum physics used by Michel Jeury could be the following: “Lois de la physique applicable aux échelles atomiques et subatomiques, où les changements d’états ne se font pas de manière continue mais discontinue, par sauts ou quanta”[“Laws of physics applicable to atomic and subatomic scales, where state changes are not made in a continuous but in a discontinuous manner, by jumps or quanta”], La physique quantique, collection “Focus science”, Pearson éducation France, Paris, 2007, p. 68. 8. What Michel Jeury calls the double solution comes from the conjunction between atomic theory and electronic theory developed by Louis de Broglie in his thesis: “la théorie atomique d’abord puis la théorie électronique ensuite nous ont appris à considérer la matière comme essentiellement discontinue et cela nous conduit à admettre que toutes les formes d’énergie contrairement aux idées anciennes de la lumière, sont sinon entièrement concentrées en des portions de l’espace, tout au moins condensées autour de certains points singuliers.” [“atomic theory first and then electronic theory then taught us to consider the matter as essentially discontinuous and this leads us to recognize that all forms of energy unlike older light ideas are otherwise entirely concentrated in portions space, at least condensed around some singular points.”] Broglie, 1925, p. 37. We usually attribute (and this includes Louis de Broglie himself in his later writings) the concept of dual solution to the work de Broglie published in May 1927 in the Journal de physique and exposed to his colleagues of the Solvay congress in October 1927. The excerpt of 1925 cited here prefigures this disposition that attempts to conserve a “real” existence (describing a condensation of energy around a singular point, in the mathematical sense, that corresponded to the corpuscle) and the purely probabilistic solution of Schrödinger’s equation. This theory precedes (and inspires?) the theory of the pilot signal developed by David Bohm after World War II. 9. Klein (ed.), 1982. Preface by Gérard Klein and accessible on http://www.quarante-deux.org/archives/ klein/prefaces/jeury.html 10. “La superposition quantique est la conséquence directe du fait que nous pouvons, grâce à Louis de Broglie, associer à une particule une onde, ou mieux encore à un paquet d’ondes représentant la superposition des ondes d’un électron, révélant tous les mouvements potentiels de celui-ci. […] Ainsi avant toute mesure, un objet quantique ne revêt aucune réalité physique; il est l’incarnation d’un formalisme mathématique probabiliste, essentiellement prédictif.” Gavet, 2011. P. 172. [“Quantum superposition is the direct consequence of the fact that we can, thanks to Louis de Broglie, associate a particle with a wave, or better still a wave packet representing the superposition of waves of an electron, revealing all potential movements thereof. [...] So before any measurement, a quantum object is of no physical reality, it is the epitome of a probabilistic mathematical formalism, essentially predictive.”] 11. Ibid, p. 171. 12. To give a few examples of the complexity of Michel Jeury’s lexicographical universe, the range of invention goes from neologisms like "Boam"(“Océan-baume chronolytique de la planète Gogol” in Les Singes du Temps), the “phords” (“ordinateurs photoniques organisés en réseau”), the “kakuphares” or giant holograms in Soleil chaud poisson des profondeurs, to essential acronyms such as “HKH” (acronym of a private industrial empire with a malicious power: Harry Krupp Hitler the First, Hannibal K. Himmler in Le Temps incertain) or “AMEC” (“Ancienne et Mystique Eglise Cathpro” in Soleil chaud poisson des profondeurs). 13. Klein, 1989, p. 10. 14. One must note however that these three novels are not a trilogy in the sense of an initial plot in the first novel being pursued in the following two novels. In the case of Michel Jeury’s work, the three novels are independent from one another, even if there is for him a “homogénéité d’inspiration, d’état, d’humeur et d’écriture […]” [“homogeneity of inspiration, state, mood and writing”], “Entrevue avec Richard Comballot”, in Solaris n. 107, p. 49. 15. In an interview with Phillipe Curval, Michel Jeury declared: “Je suis toujours aussi dickien, même si j’évolue aujourd’hui dans une direction vraiment différente. Le moindre Dick que je lis, même le plus ancien me procure toujours un choc” [“I'm still Dickian, although I now operate in a very different direction. Any Dick I read, even the oldest, still gives me a shock”] in Futurs [1st series] n. 5, November 1978, p. 41. 16. Sturgeon, 2008, p. 483. 17. Photonic computers that circulate data in software at the speed of light. 18. Bozzetto, 1984, p. 12. 19. Klein, 1982. 20. The short story “Voici les coupables” [Here Are the Guilty] was even developed during this same occasion: « Cette nouvelle a une histoire. Elle a été imaginée en 1975, devant une vingtaine d’étudiants, lors d’un séminaire organisé en faculté par Jacques Goimard. La règle du jeu était simple — mais l’idée géniale — : une séance de deux heures ; pendant la première, l’auteur présent devait inventer et bâtir une nouvelle de Science-Fiction ; pendant la deuxième heure, il devait répondre aux questions des étudiants. Pour moi, ce fut éreintant et passionnant. » [“This short story has a story. It was conceived in 1975 to twenty students at a seminar organized by Faculty Jacques Goimard. The rule of the game was simple - but the idea, brilliant -: a two-hour session, during the first, this author had to invent and build a new Science Fiction, during the second hour, he had to answer questions from students. For me, it was exhausting and exciting.”], Jeury, 2002, First publication in the Programme du quatrième congrès national de la Science-Fiction française, Limoges, 16-22 May 1977, p. 19. 21. Cited by Roger Bozzetto, 1984, p. 12. One of his last short stories, “L’adieu à la verte Prairie” [Farewell to the Green Prairie] is “ une sorte de palimpseste jeuryen, un codex qui donne certaines clés pour déchiffrer son univers. L’imaginaire d’un écrivain reste souvent opaque pour le critique. Dans ce récit fantastique cependant, les éléments autobiographiques, les références littéraires, les personnages s’entrecroisent pour créer des motifs jeuryens. Le héros Guillaume Jallas, professeur agrégé de philosophie n’est-il le double de l’écrivain, toujours passionné par l’histoire de l’école et la pédagogie, rêvant d’une carrière d’enseignant ? Michel Jeury dit toujours que « le schéma général de son œuvre est sans doute né au long de mon enfance paysanne et solitaire : les pieds dans la glaise du Périgord et la tête perdue au “plafond du ciel”, ce plafond que j’aurais tant voulu percer.” [“a kind of Jeuryan palimpsest, a codex that gives some keys to decrypt his universe. The imagination of a writer is often opaque to the criticism. In this fantastic story however, autobiographical elements, literary references, the characters intertwine to create Jeuryan patterns. Isn’t the hero William Jallas, an associate professor of philosophy, the writer’s double, always fascinated by the history of the school and education, dreaming of a career in teaching? Michel Jeury always said that "the general scheme of his work is probably born during my peasant and lonely childhood feet in the dust of the Périgord and the lost" sky ceiling "head, the ceiling as I could wanted to break.”] (« Michel Jeury, un monde à part », interview with Hervé Pijac, http://www.autour-des-auteurs.net/magazine/new_mag.html, 2013), Natacha Vas-Deyres, Preface of L’Adieu à la verte prairie, collection « Entre Futurs et terroirs », edited par Natacha Vas-Deyres et Emmanuel Dubois, Issigeac : Éditions L’AM-J, 2013, p. 6. 22. To Richard Comballot who questioned him about his path as a reader, Michel Jeury responded: « Sinon, entre La fin d’Illa et Guerre à la terre, j’avais lu une histoire qui racontait l’invasion de la Terre par des conquérants venus de la Lune, ainsi que Le Conquérant de la planète Mars d’Edgar Rice Burroughs […]. » [“Otherwise, between The End of Illa and The Earth War, I read a story that told the invasion of Earth by conquerors from the Moon, and The Conqueror of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs”], in Comballot, 2010c, p. 52. During an interview in Alès in 2013, Jeury confirmed the influence of these readings on his writing. 23. Jeury, 2003, p. 28. 24. The first “terroirs” novels (Le vrai gout de la vie [The true taste of life] 1988, Une odeur d’herbe folle [The smell of wild grass], 1988, Le soir du vent fou [The evening of the mad wind] 1991, all published by Robert Laffont) focusing on the character Vincent Lerouge, Jeury’s double, are “peasant novels” for the author: « Rien n’est facile. […] je songeais depuis longtemps à cette « reconversion ». […] Pour moi cela revient à écrire sur le monde où je suis né, où j’ai vécu une bonne moitié de ma vie. Autrement dit : à parler de ce que je connais. ».[Nothing is easy. [...] For a long time I had been thinking about this ‘reconversion.’ [...] For me, this comes down to writing about the world where I was born, where I have lived a good half of my life. In other words, to talk about what I know.”] « Un homme de la terre fait son métier d’écrire » , Marie-Claire Bézineau, rubric « Rencontres », Déclics, February 1990, p. 15. 25. Lavadou, 2010, p. 83. 26. Warfa, 2010, p. 68. 27. Ibid. 28. Comballot, 2010b, p. 95. Selected SF by Michel Jeury Le Temps incertain [Uncertain Time]. Paris: Laffont «Ailleurs et demain», 1973. Translated as Chronolysis by Maxim Jakubowski. Tarzana, CA: Black Coat Press, 1980. Soleil chaud poisson des profondeurs [Hot Sun Abyssal Fish]. Paris: Laffont «Ailleurs et demain,» 1973. Les Singes du temps [Time’s Monkeys]. Paris: Laffont «Ailleurs et demain,» 1974. «La Fête du changement» [Changing Party]. Utopies 75 (anthologie placée sous la responsabilité de Michel Jeury), Paris: Laffont, 1975. Poney-Dragon. In Escales en Utopie, Paris: Bragelonne «Les trésors de la SF,» 2010. L’Univers-ombre [Mirror’s Universe]. In Escales en Utopie, Paris: Bragelonne, «Les trésors de la SF.» 2010. Quand le temps soufflera [When Time Will Blow]. Paris: Fleuve Noir, «Anticipation,» 1983. Nancy: Imaginaires sans frontières, « Science-fiction, » 2003. La Vallée du temps profond (nouvelles) [Deep Time Valley, short stories]. Lyon: Les moutons électriques « La Bibliothèque voltaïque,» 2008. Critical Bibliography Abellio, Raymond. Les Yeux d’Ezéchiel sont ouverts. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Blanchet, Alexis. Des Pixels à Hollywood, Paris: Pix’N Love, 2010. Bonhomme, Bérénice. «Pour une narration cinématographique de l’histoire». Aude Déruelle et Alain Tassel (dir.), Problèmes du roman historique, Paris: L’Harmattan, «Narratologie,» 2008. Bozzetto. Roger. «L’Enjeu temporel dans les œuvres de Michel Jeury.» Métaphores n° 910, Images de l’ailleurs - espace intérieur - Actes du premier Colloque International de Science-fiction de Nice, Presses universitaires de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, avril 1984. Broglie, Louis (de). Recherches sur la théorie des quanta, Annales de physique, 10ème série, tome III, janvier-février 1925. Comballot, Richard. «Michel Jeury, Le destin d’une étoile», postface d’Escales en utopie, Paris : Bragelonne, «Les trésors de la SF,» 2010. ———. «Michel Jeury, retour gagnant.» Galaxies nouvelle série, n° 9, « Dossier Michel Jeury, 50 ans de SF », juin 2010. ———. Voix du futur, Lyon: Les moutons électriques, «Bibliothèque voltaïque,» 2010. ——— et Serge Lehman. Avant-propos et préface de La Vallée du temps profond, Lyon : Les moutons électriques, 2008. Denis, Sylvie. «La Chronolyse: voyage en pays jeuryen», Bifrost, n° 54, avril 2009, [en ligne], <http://www.noosfere.com/icarus/articles/article.asp? numarticle=789> Dupont, Jean-Pierre. Encyclopaedia Jeuryalis, Bordeaux: Académie de l’espace, « Orion » 1989. Eizykman, Boris. «Entretien avec Michel Jeury», Horizons du fantastique, n° 29, EKLA, 3ème trimestre 1974. ———. «Nouvelles de l’inconscience-fiction», in Opus international, janvier 1975. ———. «Ronge et dérange», Les Nouvelles littéraires, 1er avril 1974. ———. «Les Singes du temps, le Cirque du rêve, Les Cercles de la mort de Michel Jeury.» Marginal, n° 6, 1975. Gavet, Guy-Louis. La Physique quantique, Paris: Eyrolles, «Eyrolles pratique» 2011. Jeury, Michel. «Cheval mort» (1977), Quarante-Deux, août 2002, [en ligne] URL : <http://www.quarante-deux.org/recits/jeury/conspiration/cheval.html > ———. «Pour une science-fiction à dimension humaine», La Quatrième dimension, Paris : Presses de la cité, 1985. ———. «Science-fiction phase IV», in Science-fiction, n° 3, Denoël, mars 1985. ———. «Les vieux rêves sont toujours jeunes», Yellow Submarine, n° 113, Lyon, janvier 1995. Klein, Gérard. «Une vue sur l'histoire», in Le Livre d’Or de Michel Jeury, Paris : Presses pocket, «Le livre d’or de la science-fiction», 1982. [en ligne] URL : <http://www.quarante-deux.org/archives/klein/prefaces/jeury.html > ———. «Des mots pour l’avenir», Encyclopaedia Jeuryalis, Bordeaux: Académie de l’espace, «Orion» 1989. Lavadou, Jérôme. «Les mondes multiples de l’univers jeuryen», in Galaxies nouvelle série, n° 9, « Dossier Michel Jeury, 50 ans de SF », juin 2010. Nicot, Stéphane. «Michel Jeury, rêveur d’utopies. Idéologie et science-fiction: pour une lecture politique de l’œuvre de Michel Jeury», Imagine, n° 38, février 1987. Sturgeon, Theodore. «Introduction à Chronolysis», préface écrite pour l’édition américaine du Temps incertain, première parution française in Yellow Submarine, n° 113, 1995, reprise dans Michel Jeury, la Vallée du temps profond, Lyon: Les moutons électriques, 2008, coll. «La Bibliothèque voltaïque». Vas-Deyres, Natacha. « Du Temps incertain au temps ralenti: variations temporelles françaises», L’Imaginaire du temps dans le fantastique et la science-fiction, Natacha Vas-Deyres et Lauric Guillaud (dir.), Eidôlon, n° 91, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2011. Warfa, Dominique. «Michel Jeury, un univers indéterminé.», Galaxies, n° 9, « Dossier Michel Jeury, 50 ans de SF », juin 2010. Wintrebert, Joëlle. «Du Temps incertain au Territoire humain, ou le gnosticisme contre “le mur noir de l’avenir”», postface d’Escales en utopie, Paris : Bragelonne, «Les trésors de la SF», 2010. Première parution dans Univers 18, Paris: J’ai lu «SF», 1979, 123-34.