Charles Cros - An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the literary currents of his time, and the other in the field of science.This amalgamation is fully demonstrated in this collection, which includes proto-science-fiction stories; his contributions to what was then the new form of the prose poem

 

Charles Cros, The Science of Love and Other

Writings. Translated, with an introduction, by

Doug Skinner 2024 

The Science of Love and Other Writings brings together for the first time in English all the literary prose of Charles Cros. An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the literary currents of his time, and the other in the field of science. This amalgamation is fully demonstrated in this collection, which includes proto-science-fiction stories; his contributions to what was then the new form of the prose poem; a sober, if fantastical, scientific study on methods of communication with other planets; and the patent application written with his brother for a (never-built) notating keyboard.

The literary imagination he was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, “The Science of Love”: a depiction of a young scientist’s painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis, utilizing litmus paper and measuring releases of carbonic acid during maximized passion. Its humor led Joris-Karl Huysmans to include it in the rarefied library of À rebours, where the College de ’Pataphysique declared “An Interplanetary Drama” to be a “canonical text.” Also included are stories such as “The Newspaper of the Future” (which presents a nineteenth-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and “The Stone Who Died of Love.”

Charles Cros (1842–1888) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and at one point provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre and invented both the gramophone (which he named the “paléophone”) and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a non-metallic battery and a musical stenographer. “The freshness of his intelligence was such that no object of desire seemed utopian to him a priori,” André Breton wrote of him, adding: “The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.”

“For readers both interested in science and unperturbed by the aspect of casual fugues between consenting rocks and fissures and related phenomena, The Science of Love is your book. Hats off to Doug Skinner and his relentless quest to find and translate into English unknown and little-known gems from the French humanities.”—Tom Bowden, The Book Beat

Charles Cros, Principles of Cerebral Mechanics. Translated, with an introduction, by Doug Skinner. Wakefield Press, 2021

A visionary treatise on perception from the extraordinary polymath Charles Cros―poet, friend to Rimbaud and Verlaine, and inventor of color photography and the phonograph

Establishing the author’s standing as the inventeur maudit of his time, Principles of Cerebral Mechanics was first presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1872, but was not published until 1879, and then only in fragmentary form. Setting out to understand the mechanics of perception―the organs of which at the time were too small and inaccessible to be studied directly―Cros instead attempted to reverse-engineer the sensory organs. Whereas his previous inventions in the realms of audio recording and color photography had focused on technology for the senses, with this ambitious essay Cros turned to conceptualizing the technology of the senses themselves: rather than the transmission of color to the retina, here he instead attempted to conceive of how color was transmitted from the retina to the brain. By approaching the human brain as a “mechanism of registration,” Cros’ essay can be set alongside the groundbreaking work of such revolutionary figures who transformed modern vision as Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.

Charles Cros (1842–88) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre, and invented both the phonograph (which he named the “paléophone”) and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a nonmetallic battery and a musical stenographer.