The island of the penguins
The island of the penguins ( French L'Île des Pingouins ) is a historical novel published in 1908 by the French author Anatole France . Allegedly a chronicle of the fictional country of Alka in eight books, the novel is a satire on the history of France in particular and the history of the Christian West in general.
content
The first book (The Beginnings) tells how Saint Maël, who crossed the seas in a stone trough to convert the heathen, was struck by a storm on an island in the Arctic Ocean. The resident great auk be by him baptized because he in his myopia them with people (be in French with the word "pingouin" confused Auks the genus alca referred while the penguins are called the Southern Hemisphere "manchot"). In Paradise then a meeting will be convened to preserve it as the only way, the validity of the Taufakts, look, the penguins human form to give (France parodied here extensively theological thought and argumentation). After this is done, Maël takes the island in tow and moves it off the coast of Brittany .
In the second book (Antiquity) , Maël brings the newly formed human children closer to Christian civilization, with the devil interfering again and again , who takes the form of a monk and adds Mephistophelian comments to the events . Through lies, deceit and violence, a hierarchical society soon emerges, to which the monk Bulloch blesses. The most ingenious approach is the cunning Orberose, who with the help of her lover Kraken supposedly kills a dragon that the superstitious penguins suspected was behind the raids of Kraken. The descendants of Orberose form the ruling family of the Draconids; she herself is venerated as the patron saint of Alka.
The middle ages and renaissance of the penguin people are discussed in the third book. France makes fun of the Pre-Raphaelites' conception of art and, in a fictional literary fragment, gives Virgil the opportunity to express himself disparagingly about the reception he has received in Christian literature.
The next four books deal with modern times. In the fourth book, a revolution overthrows the Draconids from their throne - only to clear the way for a ruler named Trinko, who (like Napoléon Bonaparte ) first conquered half the world, later lost it and was posthumously revered by the people, although he was in penguins has fallen into a miserable state.
The fifth book revolves around the conspiracies that the clergy and the nobility hatch to overthrow the republic and reinstate the Draconids as rulers. A high military, the “Emiral” Chatillon, is built as an opponent of the “Dingeriche” (Republicans), but fails shamefully. Here France processes the events around General Georges Ernest Boulanger .
The sixth book (The Fall of the Eighty Thousand Bundles of Hay) satirizes the Dreyfus Affair . Once again the royalists are shipwrecked with their aspirations. But the supporters of the unjustly persecuted Jewish officer Pyrot have to recognize after his rehabilitation that nothing else has changed in the political situation, which is determined by greed for power, vanity and opportunism .
This point is underlined in the seventh book (Mrs. Ceres) . It describes the complications that arise when the prime minister begins a relationship with the post office minister's wife. The intrigues that the horned husband then stages contribute significantly to the breakout of a world war that no one wanted.
In the eighth book, France takes a bold leap into the future. A society that is technologically developing but culturally stunted is dominated by a class of plutocrats whose sole aim is to amass ever more wealth. This regime, "built on the strongest pillars of human nature, on conceit and greed", however, provokes a revolt of terrorist assassins who manage to wreak havoc on an unimaginable scale with highly developed explosives . The result is that not only civilization but also the memory of it disappears. The story begins in a new cycle that will follow the same path.
Position in literary history
With this novel, Anatole France stands in the tradition of such great satirists as François Rabelais and Jonathan Swift , but also anticipates dystopias of the later 20th century with his last chapter and thus proves to be a pioneer of science fiction . Legends of saints, chronicles and other historical sources are parodied and travestated with great stylistic sophistication and thus questioned in terms of their impact on the collective psyche. With this approach, France stands in opposition to a positivist historiography, whose representatives are mocked in the foreword in the form of the scholar Fulgentius Tapir, who dies when he literally drowns in the material he has collected.
The island of the penguins is still one of Anatole France's most popular works and has been translated into many languages.
Book editions
- L'Île des Pingouins . Calmann-Levy, Paris 1908
- L'Île des Pingouins . Tredition, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8491-4502-6
- The island of the penguins. Translated by Paul Wiegler . Piper, Munich 1909
- The island of the penguins. Translated by Edda Werfel and Paul Wiegler. Zsolnay, Vienna 1982, ISBN 3-552-03401-3 ; Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-596-10393-2
- The island of the penguins. Translated by Bernhard Wildenhahn. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1985