The beginning of the scientific romance L’Ève future (1885–6), by Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, finds its protagonist, a fictionalized Thomas Edison, “in the darkest corner of his personal laboratory” in Menlo Park.¹ “Seated in his American armchair, leaning on his elbow … with a cigar at his lips … a remote and vacant eye, his legs crossed, enveloped in his loose gown, already legendary, of black silk with a violet sash … lost in a profound reverie,” Edison laments the belatedness of his great invention, the phonograph.² If only his device had been there to preserve the conversations of God and Adam in Eden, to record the Judgment of Paris, or even simply to set down the correct pronunciation of ancient names and languages. Alas, now these are nothing more than “dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss … too distant to ever to be recaptured!”³ All of the nineteenth century’s great inscriptive media technologies should have arrived sooner: “photography too has come along very late,” he complains, launching into a litany of long-vanished sights.⁴

The tinfoil phonograph made the real Edison internationally famous, and his early demonstrations of it at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he won a gold medal, must have inspired Villiers to go to work that year on the tale he initially called L’Andréïde paradoxale d’Edison. A few years later, as L’Ève nouvelle, it would be partially serialized twice, petering out a few months before the actual Edison’s electric lights dazzled Paris at the first Exposition Internationale d’Électricité in 1881. But in a prefatory note to L’Ève future, Villiers assures readers that the Edison of his tale is “not the engineer, Mr. Edison, our contemporary” but rather a “personage” based on his “legend,” a figure who “belong[s] to the world of literature.”⁵ This literary Edison’s extended opening monologues establish him as less the inventor and businessman looking to the progress of technology than a figure haunted by loss and historical belatedness. The setting, the costume, the soliloquy, the elaborate catalogues of lost events: all of these demonstrate how Villiers has recast Edison as a decadent archetype. The striking transformation of the relentlessly entrepreneurial inventor into a solitary monologist filled with ennui will make sense, and will fit into a larger pattern of cultural and technical meaning, when L’Ève future moves on to the project that inspires this Edison and becomes the book’s donnée: using late nineteenth-century technologies to build what the novel calls an “Android” (Andréide), an artificial woman or female automaton, as a superior replacement for the biological original.

Decadence – as a movement, sensibility, or aesthetic – has always provoked questions of naming, definition, and scope, including the distinction or the putative schism between the symbolist and decadent movements of late nineteenth-century France. “The latest movement in European literature has been called by many names, none of them quite exact or comprehensive: Decadence, Symbolism, Impressionism,” notes Arthur Symons, its most important English explainer and exponent, in “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893).⁶ Yet when Symons revised and expanded his discussion into a book, it ultimately appeared under the refocused or bowdlerized title The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), with Symons now dismissing decadence as a distraction created by “young men” hoping to gain an unearned air of depravity in order to shock the bourgeoisie, a literary sideshow that took place while “something more serious was in preparation … Symbolism.”⁷

In France, Jean Moréas published a Symbolist Manifesto in Le Figaro (1886) that anticipated Symons’s attempt at distinction and dismissal. But to little avail; the terms decadent and symbolist have remained “hopelessly symbiotic.”⁸ In any case, Villiers had little fondness for such labels (or for Moréas).⁹ Yet by any name, the sensibility shared by Villiers and his great allies and contemporaries such as Stéphane Mallarmé or Joris-Karl Huysmans emphasizes the pursuit of the ideal, the cultivation of the outré – and often the confusion between them – as a means of rejecting the pedestrian realities of nineteenth-century culture. A loose collection of traits can characterize late nineteenth-century decadence as an aesthetic, a mood, or an epithet of condemnation by its detractors: a sense of modernity as belatedness, decline, or decay rather than as progress; the valuing of the artificial over the natural; an attraction to recondite subjects, sentiments, and language; a rococo elaborateness in style, typically expressed in extravagant descriptions; an attitude of willful perversity against the supposedly practical or normal; a self-consciousness that can slide into satire, parody, or burlesque – or which can make those modes hard to distinguish from sincerity.¹⁰ As L’Ève future confirms, to that standard list we should also add a misogynistic propensity to treat female bodies as preferred sites on which male writers and artists can display these attitudes.

This chapter begins by reading the novel’s gynoid project in light of both Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), the work that Symons called a “breviary” of the decadence, and classic nineteenth-century discussions of decadence by Symons and Paul Bourget.¹¹ But I will also suggest how this work of decadent speculative fiction both clarifies and expands our sense of the contexts and scope of decadence, as well as taking its place in “the long history of imaginary beings.”¹² For L’Ève future exemplifies the imaginative reach of the automaton into ideas about subjectivity and agency, a phenomenon I will call automacy. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the English word automacy functioned as an occasional synonym for related abstract nouns such as automatism and automaticity; the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “now rare” and, appropriately for this chapter, “probably a borrowing from French.”¹³ More than its cognate expressions, automacy suggests oblique connections to intimacy and autonomy as well as to animacy, the term under which Mel Y. Chen has analyzed the interplay between the animate and inanimate in present-day productions of the human, including in the biopolitics of race, sexuality, and gender.¹⁴

Examining automacy in L’Ève future allows us to go beyond diagnosing decadence to analyze the critical work that decadent tropes, strategies, and attitudes could do.¹⁵ Moreover, I will suggest that the novel offers views of automacy that are particularly relevant in the early twenty-first century as we come to terms with our own digitally based autonomous entities.

Against Nature

The real Thomas Edison was so devoted to technological advancement as idea and practice that he would choose Progress as the working title of a speculative novel on which he briefly tried to collaborate in 1890. He was even more committed to the goal of business success, making an “early and much publicized vow (or pretense) to employ market viability as the only touchstone” for his work as an inventor.¹⁶ As the first artificial doppelgänger constructed by the text of L’Ève future, Villiers’s fictional Edison already represents the supplanting of that hardheaded, forward-looking real-life inventor with a different kind of modern cultural producer: the decadent artist, filled with the sense of apocalyptic “endism” that Elaine Showalter sees characterizing the fin of the nineteenth century.¹⁷ Perhaps, as Christine Ferguson has suggested, the late nineteenth-century “man of the laboratory” (in a then-contemporary phrase) was never far from the decadent artist pursuing hidden knowledge or recondite sensations regardless of morality or consequence.¹⁸ But reinventing the inventor allows Villiers to reconcile Edisonian energy with ennui, as his speeches recast epoch-making inventions as latecomers to a world whose greatest events lie in the past. In fact, with his florid verbal performances, which take up most of the text, this Edison resembles no artist so much as Villiers himself, notorious as an extravagant raconteur whose late-night talk at Parisian cafés far outpaced his slow, punctilious literary production.

The novel’s high-tech-meets-Huysmans setting reinforces the connections of invention to decadence. Indeed, Edison’s suburban laboratory and residence, where he seems to enjoy a solitude broken only by phone calls from his assistants or his young children and by the rare, favored visitor, at times recalls the most famous domicile in the decadent canon. At the beginning of Huysmans’s À rebours, its protagonist Jean Des Esseintes moves into an isolated house outside Paris that has been carefully adapted to suit his taste for refinement, fantasy, and isolation, as well as his disgust with everyday life in the late nineteenth century.¹⁹ Instead of a window revealing the world outside, his room has a porthole through which he can view an aquarium filled with “marvelous mechanical fish” swimming through “artificial sea-weed” – part of an elaborate set of props to help him make mental voyages without the inconvenience of actually going anywhere (Villiers’s Edison too will stay in place).²⁰ Driven by “his love for artificiality,” Des Esseintes graduates from collecting fake flowers to seeking out real ones that look as synthetic as possible, although soon these too begin to pall.²¹

Des Esseintes would surely appreciate the underground bower Villiers’s Edison has built for the automaton Hadaly, in which a flock of artificial birds sing with “human voices and human laughter instead of the old-fashioned, meaningless song of the normal bird.”²² Even the plaintive voice of a real nightingale turns out to be technological; disguised as an artificial orchid, a loudspeaker repeats the last song of a dying bird as relayed from a phonograph playing miles away. In a burlesque of both the decadent cult of the artificial and the rising culture of invention, Edison’s multifunction flower outdoes any of Des Esseintes’s blossoms, not only playing birdsong and emitting artificial perfume but also functioning as a convenient electric lighter for cigars.²³

Huysmans makes Des Esseintes an admirer of Villiers’s “singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind,” and especially of the works in which Villiers attacks “the whole order of contemporary and utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the age.”²⁴ Villiers’s Edison would concur with Des Esseintes in finding “artifice … the final distinctive mark of man’s genius”:

Edison proclaims that he would “like to be introduced to that great lady ‘Nature’ some day, because everybody talks about her and nobody has ever seen her!”²⁶

As the language and images suggest, this is a gendered vision, posing the power of masculine creative “genius” (“du génie de l’homme”) against an aged female Nature who can no longer charm men. A final comparison in Huysmans jocularly reinforces the misogyny of this paradigm:

Villiers’s Edison doesn’t sing the praises of railway engines over women, but he will devise a different sort of “animated and artificial being” to surpass nature, an automaton explicitly intended to replace a living human woman.

Edison already has a prototype in preparation when his young friend, the English Lord Celian Ewald, arrives in a state of profound despair. Ewald says he has fallen in love with a beautiful would-be singer and actress named Alicia Clary – but only, it transpires, in love with her ravishing appearance, graceful movements, and marvelous voice, since in fact he cannot bear her words or sentiments. For Clary is a bourgeois Venus whose highest values are respectability, practicality, and what passes for conventional good sense, just the things to torment an aesthete, symbolist, or decadent. In Lord Ewald’s account, even her sins lack sublimity or conviction. Having ascertained that Alicia Clary’s middle-class uncouthness is no dissimulation but all too unalterably real, Ewald fantasizes about her death but – if only in order to avoid marring her physical beauty – has instead resorted to planning his own suicide. To save his friend, Edison proposes that they play God and Adam in this artificial garden, and complete the automaton by customizing it into a perfect double and improved version of Alicia Clary, a being of artificial flesh that will defy the not-so-great lady Nature altogether.²⁸

Atomized Anatomies

With L’Ève future, Villiers makes the nineteenth-century scientific romance into a decadent production. Edison’s crafting of a bespoke gynoid involves not only golden phonographic cylinders and electrical wires but also gems on soft robotic flesh, the jeweled necklace and rings of semiprecious stones that will function as Hadaly’s control interfaces.²⁹ Calling her opulent control ring a “wedding band,” Edison offers a concise image of marriage as male domination. But to add a little piquancy, Edison has also given Hadaly the ability to wield a deadly electric dagger without remorse; only a wand made of a special glass whose “formula was lost in the days of the emperor Nero” can disarm her.³⁰ The android’s exotic name (Edison claims that “Hadaly” is Iranian for ideal); her sumptuous adornments; her lethal beauty; the invocation of lost knowledge and a debauched emperor, the last of a dynasty: All of these enrich the atmosphere of exoticism and louche excess.

But probably the most distinctive expressions of decadent automacy here are the novel’s dilatory narrative pacing and linguistic extravagance, especially the long pages of description dedicated to the android’s physical parts and to the copying techniques that will make her a dead ringer for Alicia Clary. After an extended description of Hadaly’s synthetic body comes an elaborate delineation of the multiplex reproduction of the real woman, both “pitched to an extremity of lyricism that borders on the pastiche,” as one critic notes.³¹ A sculptress will faithfully copy Alicia Clary’s exact dimensions and lineaments to duplicate them on Hadaly’s protean frame via “photo sculpture.”³² Eyes, hair, skin, wardrobe: All will be perfectly replicated. The original woman will be asked to practice scenes and speeches as if for a theatrical performance, as her voice and gestures are recorded onto golden cylinders for endless replay and remixing. She will be unknowingly anesthetized so that a dentist can copy the configuration of her teeth and mouth. Even her bathwater will be analyzed to create a custom scent for infusing into Hadaly. The focus on the olfactory – a primal, even animalistic sense nevertheless open to voluptuary refinement – offers a special whiff of decadence; Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray carefully studies perfumes, and Des Esseintes, a master of them, is notably alert to the stimulation offered by the natural or artificial scents of his lovers.³³

The wry tone of Edison’s speeches about parts and processes does not obscure the seriousness of his and Villiers’s commitment to delineating them exhaustively. Such descriptions take up “three times the textual space of [Hadaly’s] actual participation in the novel’s plot,” including nearly the entirety of one of the novel’s six “books.”³⁴ Modern invention and decadence alike can become lost in detail as they combine a fervor for description with sangfroid. Amid its catalogues of multisensory steps and sensuous components, the novel lingers over the especially striking or macabre (say, a jewelry box full of artificial eyeballs, their appearance as individualized as human eyes, thanks to “color photography”).³⁵ Revealing how Hadaly’s frame and artificial skin allow not merely bodily gestures but also subtle movements according to the repertoire inscribed on her internal cylinders, Edison emphasizes not robotic regularity but a Paterian subtlety and receptivity:

Displaying Hadaly also permits an extended show of baroque technical language. In L’Ève future, as in several of the best among Villiers’s Contes cruels (1883), technological conceits furnish witty shortcuts to critical themes as they mock the claims made on behalf of technomodernity. Here Edison’s discourse mimics the language and syntax found not only in technical documents such as patents but even in the popular accounts of inventions and technologies that were becoming a staple of late nineteenth-century print culture, the rhetoric used in breathless journalism or electrical expositions to promote the latest marvel.³⁷ Such ostensibly concrete language can reach paradoxical heights of abstraction or opacity. As Edison points out to Ewald, describing the upper femurs of his future life partner, “the dimension of their diameters marked B – which corresponds to dimension A of the Android’s inner hip joint – is joined by a concave track of stainless steel, along which moves freely a crystal spheroid which is chiefly responsible for the action of walking.”³⁸

Villiers was no literary technophile, no Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. Rather, the novel’s parade of such passages bespeaks a formal satisfaction in scientific-sounding words, phrases, and syntax for their own sake, as recombinant linguistic elements that – far from straighforwardly “enhanc[ing] verisimilitude” in the text – can as readily undermine as shore up any sense of reality.³⁹ The literary pleasure of assembling fantasy descriptions out of technical-sounding language mirrors the perverse enjoyment Edison and the novel take in the work of “anatomy” and “dissect[ion]” – which here explicitly means piecing apart the psyches, attractions, and bodies of women, whether organic or synthetic.⁴⁰ Going far beyond the poetic blazon tradition, with its stylized catalogues of facial features and body parts, this description makes “the female body … the site of an analytic, mapping onto its landscape a poetics and an epistemology with all the somber ceremony and perverse detail of fetishism.”⁴¹

The novel’s fetish for such description openly risks tedium – or does more than just risk it. “Many critics” have viewed these passages as “an outright narrative flaw.”⁴² For instance, a twentieth-century assessment of the novel complains that “substantially less description would have sufficed”: Such descriptive “excess has dilatorious consequences … [the] details become wearisome, the work heavy”; “the question of proportion must be raised.”⁴³ With sequences such as the prolonged examinations of Hadaly’s innards, the novel tests its readers’ patience as Edison’s lectures and scalpel seem to test the durability of Ewald’s desire for a being whose inner workings have already been made so familiar. That desire at least endures; at the story’s climax, Ewald prepares to bid farewell to Alicia Clary but finds that her speech and manner have become so profound, poetic, and perfectly feminine that he comes to love her completely and to reject the idea of replacing her with a machine – only to discover that he has just fallen in love with Hadaly, exactly as planned.

The single-mindedness and monotony of the descriptive passages, along with their division according to Hadaly’s separate parts and systems, suggest how the text approaches them as ends in themselves, independent of the movement of the plot, the unity of the narrative, or the pleasure and patience of the reader. The entire scheme of the novel is salacious; to gratify his friend, Edison creates what is potentially a hyperrealistic automated sex doll.⁴⁴ Yet although many of the descriptions of Hadaly’s parts focus on conventional erotic features of the human body – mouth, eyes, hair, skin, flesh, body scent – they are devised to elicit boredom and benumbment rather than titillation. We could call this phenomenon la description pour la description, the expression of a decadent narratology that’s similarly in evidence in the languors of À rebours or in Wilde’s famous homage to it, the slow and self-consciously gorgeous inventory of Dorian’s decadent preoccupations (fashion, mysticism, music, jewels, perfumes, and so on) in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1).

Such instances of narrative distention or stoppage also bear out the celebrated “theorie de la décadence” offered by the poet, novelist, and critic Paul Bourget in 1881. As Havelock Ellis puts it, Bourget treats decadence as “the literary methods of a society which has reached its limits of expansion and maturity.”⁴⁵ Bourget’s explanation of decadence draws on a Romantic sense of socioaesthetic organicism but argues that the social organism is now out of harmony at every level. As translated by Ellis, Bourget asserts that

Bourget’s analysis has had an extensive afterlife in critical accounts of decadence and its legacies. For Philip Stephan, it clarifies the decadence/symbolism distinction as a question of foregrounding wholes or parts (“Symbolism … emphasises the aesthetic unity of a work of art, which decadence is willing to sacrifice for the sake of obtaining more striking effects in individual parts”).⁴⁷ L’Ève future too solicits these questions of disjunction and unity, even beyond its lengthy anatomization of Hadaly. Most of the novel consists of speeches by Edison, interspersed with dialogue from Ewald, and is supposed to take place over the course of a single evening – yet the novel is nevertheless divided into nearly eighty named sections and half a dozen “books” with individual titles of their own.

Going beyond aesthetics, Regenia Gagnier has recently shown how Bourget’s theory connects decadence to the great nineteenth-century problem of the nature and extent of individualism.⁴⁸ In Bourget’s account, decadence figures as both cause and effect of a nightmare of proliferating individuality that goes down to the smallest unit. Given Bourget’s vision of society, language, and books as organisms susceptible to decadence, it seems particularly striking that what sends L’Ève future into its most baroque hypertrophy of description is the chance to arrest the narrative and describe the components of an artificial organism using technobabble. Gagnier and Bourget prompt us to analyze decadence around the axes not merely of perversity, belatedness, or artificiality but also of individualism and interrelation. Hadaly’s implication in such questions supports this insight. For while the idea of an automaton might suggest a machine created to be independent, unitary, and self-sufficient, Hadaly’s decadent automacy turns out to challenge that model, offering a more complex and provocative way of imagining the agency and relationality of artificial entities.

The Soul of a New Machine

At times, that agency might seem in considerable doubt. “Never in the bazaars of Baghdad or Cordova was such a slave displayed before the caliphs!” exults Lord Ewald over his new mate. The comparison casts Hadaly as figure of exotic sexual availability and offers a gendered, orientalized variation on the fantasies of controlling labor and bodies that characterize the nineteenth century’s imagination of automata more broadly.⁴⁹ Like Edison’s earlier claim that “the complexion of our Caucasian race” will be easy to reproduce in Hadaly’s artificial epidermis because it requires only gradations of “pale white and rose,” the passage incisively suggests the racial dimension of Hadaly’s automacy.⁵⁰ Hadaly is created as not merely a synthetic female but a simulacrum of a fetishized whiteness whose manufactured purity, along with her electrical modernity and her programmed submission, presumably helps her outstrip even the caliph’s bazaar.

After cataloguing her parts and systems, after making her over as an electric doppelgänger, and after watching as his device goes live and successfully pairs with Lord Ewald, Edison finally “disconnect[s] Hadaly …, isolat[es] her” from his own laboratory network and prepares to send her off with his friend. Although he assures Ewald that Hadaly now “belongs” to him and “will respond only to the … rings and the necklace” that control her, he also suggests that permutations played on the speech and movements recorded from Alicia Clary, along with the encoding of several “major feminine types,” will permit her new owner to produce the bewitching impression of “limitless complexity.”⁵¹ Edison gives a special “Manuscript” to his friend: a user’s manual, the perfect wedding present.⁵² The automaton lies down in her “coffin” for a long journey to her lord’s English estate, and Lord Ewald is in control.⁵³

Except that he isn’t. At the end of the tale, Edison reveals what the story has long hinted, that there is a ghost in the machine. Early on, seemingly as another exercise in misogyny and a testament to the power of artificial attractions, Edison has recited the story of Edward Anderson, a married man who ended up killing himself after falling for the counterfeit charms of a danseuse (wig, dentures, makeup, padding). Now Edison reveals that the soul of Anderson’s living but nearly catatonic widow can escape into Hadaly. The result is a fused being, an electrical entity animated by a spirit who calls herself Sowana and who is not equivalent to the traumatized woman, just as Hadaly is not identical to her tediously enumerated parts. “Not everything about this creature is an illusion!” insists Edison:

The gender ideologies of decadence and of late nineteenth-century culture allow the female automaton to emerge as the collective expression and composite voice of a network or information system. Gagnier has identified a gendered dynamic at the fin de siècle and afterwards, in which decadent masculinity postulates an immured and solitary self, while women writers and aesthetes highlight individuals’ enmeshment in networks of relation.⁵⁵ Moreover, Gagnier’s insight about gendered modes of individualism dovetails with Jill Galvan’s analysis of “feminine channeling” in the era, when women were seen as ideal mediums for psychic transmissions and information transfers alike, incipient components of both occult and technological networks.⁵⁶

The story’s depictions of Hadaly’s words and behavior actually emphasize her relative automacy rather than any mechanical responses to the manipulation of her jewels. Perhaps with Sowana partially at the controls, it amounts to the same thing. Automacy becomes a mode of dynamic, collective agency between the spiritual and the material, the living and the nonliving – a model in keeping with decadence’s constitutive decay of boundaries and categories.⁵⁷ Even Bourget’s theory about the pathology of modern individualism might be understood as describing a dynamic relationality; what he takes as decomposing unities might look from another perspective like an efflorescence of interaction or intra-action between energetic parts. During an era when network structures and electricity seemed to provide crucial links between organisms and machines as well as between matter and spirit, Hadaly offers a model for these relations.⁵⁸

Moreover, Hadaly even claims that she (“they” might be more apt) has inspired Edison’s entire project in the first place, privately revealing to Lord Ewald that “while [Edison] thought he was acting of his own accord, he was also deeply, darkly obedient to me.”⁵⁹ Indeed, she hints that she might have helped to direct Lord Ewald as well. The heroic masculine agency of the individual inventor, the solipsistic obsession of the lovelorn male aristocrat – even these turn out to be the expressions of complex interrelationship. At least in retrospect, the tale now becomes a story of multiplex agency and affect that deliberately aligns human psychology and the automacy of machines. Both appear more as emergent features of an entire system than as properties of individual, autonomous entities. The disclosure of Sowana’s integration with Hadaly works less to reassert a stable Cartesian dualism between mind and body than to make the split irrelevant. As a sleepwalking Mrs. Anderson was acting as the photo-sculptress for Alicia Clary’s body, the spirit Sowana was inspiring the singer’s voice and helping the golden cylinders preserve the perfect sounds.

“Villiers’s L’Eve future is haunted by disembodied voices,” observes Felicia Miller Frank.⁶⁰ Arthur Symons wrote about decadence itself in parallel terms. Twice in his short essay on decadent literature, including as its conclusion, Symons hails the decadent “ideal” realized by Paul Verlaine: “to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul.”⁶¹ Precisely replayed, the phrase itself achieves a certain disembodiment. Named for the ideal, Hadaly reiterates the logic of the disembodied human voice, her phonographic lungs filled with artificial words once spoken as scripted speeches by Alicia Clary but now rendered responsive and real.⁶² If decadent authors aimed to counter “the petrifactions of written language” and to “return to the voice,” Villiers highlights the affiliation of this project with the history of sound reproduction.⁶³ He also anticipates a future in which technology might produce artificial sounds that are better, even somehow truer, than their original. The vibrational patterns inscribed on a set of golden cylinders become the speech of a living soul, a disembodied voice reproduced as the auratic voice of Sowana.

That voice is not heard for long. Like many a heroine of decadence, Hadaly dies too soon. Along with Alicia Clary, she is destroyed in a shipboard fire as a desperate Lord Ewald tries to break into the burning cargo compartment to rescue his mechanical bride, while Mrs. Anderson’s broken heart has stopped even before the honeymooners leave Menlo Park. The elaborate construction of the android and of the tale only culminates in another version of decadent untimeliness and loss. Yet as Christine Ferguson has noted, decadent narratives may end with death not because their quests to unveil hidden truths or to dissolve the boundaries of identity are doomed to failure, but because they have succeeded.⁶⁴

The real Edison also made notable experiments in intimate phonographic automacy, ventures that fell far short of Villiers’s fantasy and ended more ignominiously. Edison’s plans for his improved, wax-cylinder phonograph included the creation of talking dolls with recorded human voices. An entire building in his Phonograph Works became a doll factory filled with young women hired to warble children’s songs and nursery rhymes into cylinders all day, since the technology did not permit the use of master recordings. Edison hoped to produce five hundred dolls a day.⁶⁵ But the wax melted, the phonographs’ mechanisms were delicate and easily broken, and when they did work, the dolls’ machinic replays of the voices of adult women workers seemed creepy rather than charming or comforting.⁶⁶

In L’Ève future, Hadaly has no such problems, hoodwinking a captivated Lord Ewald. The novel’s Edison sets the stakes lower, proposing that with a little planning Ewald will be able to enjoy an infinite variety of engaging conversions with Hadaly simply by operating her jeweled control rings and necklace to elicit the responses he wants. But the novel finally “resists the reductionism that Edison posits,” and Hadaly’s automacy throws out the script.⁶⁷ She so far exceeds Edison’s sock-puppet model of interactivity that she can readily triumph in an embodied, nineteenth-century version of the Turing test and pass for human before she confirms her identity as an artificial being.

In fact, the circulation of agency and affect in the novel suggests a preemptive critique or clarification of Alan Turing’s operational definition of artificial intelligence (AI) as the art of fooling us, an “imitation game.”⁶⁸ As a work of decadent fiction that decomposes the putative boundaries of self and nonself, natural and artificial, autonomy and control, L’Ève future encourages us to contest the opposition between human and machine on which that test depends. For as Megan Ward has pointed out, the Turing test represents “a model for creating human-like subjectivity” as much as it does “a test of machine ability,” and in this model “seeming human” is a matter of “artifice.”⁶⁹ The test views the possibilities of AI not in terms of particular technical innovations (Hadaly’s specs are irrelevant) but as “more complex … emerging from the interactions between” human beings and machines.⁷⁰ The Turing test looks like a matter of the communication between discrete entities. But it is actually an exercise in relationality in which the tester and tested join a framework based on a shared sense of human behavior. Villiers suggests that the real issue is misrecognizing the nature of agency and automacy to begin with, as we marvel at the replay of shared patterns that satisfy our expectations.

This insight has become particularly necessary as AI technologies have grown in sophistication, pretension, and hype. Today, AI art generators literally draw from a vast array of digitized images by human artists; machine-learning and decision-making systems rewrite existing norms as algorithms; chatbots produce plausible babble by engaging in stochastic mimicry of previously written texts. This should make it less surprising when AI art yields stereotyped images, when ostensibly objective algorithms produce decisions that replicate persistent social biases, when a text generator spits back the commonplaces a user has asked for, or when a social media bot turns as combative or as racist as social media discourse can be. L’Ève future presents its own version of these paradigms. Lord Ewald falls in love with Hadaly when he notices with surprise that a being who seems to be Alicia Clary can now keep beautifully quiet, can be overcome with feminine sympathy for his masculine troubles, can shed a tear. The Turing game demands that its testing subject echo the examiner’s cultural expectations. However extraordinary her fashioning out of a mix of high technology, male desire, a woman’s words and image, and the astral projection of a cybersoul, there are only dark and scattered hints of what Hadaly might do beyond becoming an improved mate for a fastidious young aristocrat.

Automacy appears external and self-contained while nevertheless dispersing agency and incorporating social predilections and prejudices – indeed, while giving them the sheen of objectivity and allowing us to receive them as if we were hearing a disembodied voice that is also the voice of a human soul. Attracted to the artificial yet inclined to oscillate between enunciation and parody or critique, decadent writing turns out to offer an ideal medium for speculation about synthetic beings and intelligences. The decadent imagination, so conscious of the pleasures of elaborately arranging language at the expense of unity and meaning, can make us feel lost in technical details that prove as irrelevant to the story as they would be to the imitation game. A critical understanding of Hadaly as decadent AI allows us to recognize how we ask automata to reflect our own words and desires back to us, only to feel the perverse reassurance of surprise and discomfiture when they do – an amply decadent suite of affects. Perhaps some of that discomposure also stems from a deeper sense that our relationships with automata reflect the automacy within language, subjectivity, and the various other artifices we take to define the human.

Although he was no decadent artist, the real-life Thomas Edison also touched upon such possibilities, at least in frustrated jest. The failure of his own attempts at novel-writing inspired him to imagine a mechanized author, a kind of inversion of Villiers’s fictional inventor. As Edison abandoned collaborative work on the novel Progress, he groused to his would-be coauthor that “he would rather invent a dozen useful things, including a mechanical novelist who would turn out works of fiction when the machinery was set in motion, than go any further.”⁷¹