Charles Ferdinand Ramuz is the most important twentieth-century Franco-Swiss writer you’ve never heard of. Ramuz (pronounced “raw mew”) was born in 1878 in Lausanne, making him a contemporary of writers like Thomas Mann and James Joyce. His apocalyptic novel Présence de la mort, originally published in French in 1922, appeared in English translation in 1948 under the title The End of All Men and has been newly retranslated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan as Into the Sun. The stylistic simplicity of this short, 140-page book belies its subtlety and its strangeness. The publisher of this re-translation has billed it as a “frighteningly prescient climate-disaster novel,” but the themes are not specific to cli-fi; it’s about individual and societal breakdown in the face of any existential threat.
The set-up given in the first two-page chapter is this: “Because of an accident within the gravitational system, the Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun, pelting toward it, to melt there.” How did this accident occur? No idea. Is there anything we can do to stop it? No. Can we escape to, say, some other planet? The question doesn’t even come up. This is not about climate change mitigation, adaptation, or technological solutionism. It is about the mind faced with certain death. Of course, we are all already faced with certain death. “Because one does not come without the other,” the narrator reminds us. “Life had an intimate sister. You didn’t marry one or the other, you married both.” Death and life, inseparable twins.
At first, people in the book barely react to the news of their impending doom. A few words printed in the newspaper: What can they have to do with real life? One woman in the small village where the story opens, seeing the headlines, says, “What do I care?” We were all going to die anyway; the only difference is that now we will die together instead of separately. The lackadaisical attitude of the villagers is not sustained indefinitely. Soon the signs of unrest appear—there are guards stationed outside the bank in town; strange noises are heard at night; mobs begin to form. Money cannot continue to mean anything, and then no one owns anything, and then violence is the medium of exchange. But it’s gradual, and even this is not the point of the story. To be honest, there isn’t really a story. There is more of a slow unwinding which, as it unspools in the maddening sun, reveals what was inside of everything all along.
If Into the Sun does not really have a plot, neither does it really have characters. The narrative voice flexes between first-person, third-person, and even occasional second-person invocations. Ramuz is fond of the French third-person impersonal pronoun “on,” which the translators have rendered as the English first-person plural “we.” Similarly, the authorial “I” does not necessarily designate a specific individual, but rather an Everyman who serves as an observer at a range of shifting scenes. According to his biographical entry in the Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse, Ramuz had by this point in his career abandoned expository narrative (“roman explicatif”), which follows the exploits of an individual, in favor of a more “epic” style exploring the response of an entire community to a serious challenge or threat. He was writing about war, disease, and the existence of evil, but also about religious miracles and healing (see La guérison des maladies, 1917). At the same time, he was dedicated to delineating the rhythms and voices of people of the countryside. The translators’ note at the end of the present edition of Into the Sun quotes him imploring the reader to think of the “shuffling step of the person who returns from harvesting or pruning his vineyard: consider this gait and the fact that our sentences don’t have it.”
Ramuz’s efforts to remake the novel as a new form true to the inner life of ordinary people places him within a strand of Modernism. The 1920s was, in the West, a period of disillusionment following what was then still called in English the “Great War,” which was in turn accompanied by a devastating pandemic in 1918. The 1920s might be remembered now as a non-stop party filled with carefree flappers and hot jazz, but much literature of the era depicts a troubled milieu of dissipation, cynicism, and apathy. Quite a few classics of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction appeared around this time, including Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Karel Čapek’s stage play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and his novel The Absolute at Large (1922), and W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” (1920). The end-times had, perhaps, been narrowly averted, and could still be just around the corner. If any of this sounds like right now, well, yes, it does and it should.
In this translation, Ramuz’s sentences have the beauty of a beam of sunlight through swirling dust—simple, elegant, illuminating the structure of the invisible. Repeatedly he invokes a mirrored world, in which constructions partner natural objects, and the mind reconstitutes reality in its own image. A streetlight resembles the moon, it “looks like the real moon when bad weather is coming. And so we search for the real moon, and after a moment we’ve found it, over there, behind the rooftops, behind the chestnut trees, still so low in the sky and not any smaller than the other moon, but pale, so pale and immobile, as if painted as decoration in the sky with a brush.”
The sky is a backdrop; the landscape is a canvas; the moon is a bit of trompe-l’oeil; stars are paper lanterns. The world is a human world. “Our own world is so small,” explains Ramuz. “Our own world goes as far as our eyes can reach; it’s our eyes that create it for us.” To grasp the enormity of the coming disaster, “We would have to imagine the sky, the stars, the continents, the oceans, the equator, the two poles. Yet we can only imagine the self and what we have.”
As the destruction gets underway, the first-person narrator laments that he “loved the world too much. When I sought to imagine something beyond it, it was still the world that I imagined. When I sought to go past it, there I found it again. I tried closing my eyes to see the heavens; it was the Earth; and the heavens were the heavens only when they became Earth once again.”
Towards the end, when few people remain alive to experience themselves in isolation, a solitary pilot ascends with his plane in search of some respite from the heat. Failing, he begins his descent, and hearing the roar of the plane’s engine he finds that the “noise that he alone makes irritates and astonishes him. He seeks a response in this noise; he seeks an answer to himself from himself. He doubts that he exists, not perceiving any existence but his own anywhere. He considers himself angrily; he is a disruption. And he keeps descending, in pursuit of a resemblence and something like symmetry.”
One of the many symmetries in the text is provided by a lake, which appears in the first pages as a site of relaxation and pleasure, later as a refuge from increasing heat, and ultimately as a locus of death. A lake implies the symmetry of reflection, but by the time the unnamed pilot approaches it in his aircraft these qualities have eroded. “This expanse presented to him the absolute wasteland of its waters, motionless as metal, perfectly silent and fixed, bare, with no reflection, no image, no response.” The world has ceased to function as a mirror for humanity. Once the mirror is broken, could there be another, more real and primal perception that arises only in the face of death? To fall into the Sun is to come too close to the source, where our matchstick houses and stick-built hypotheses will burn away. The collapsing roofs of a town begin to look, from above, like a mud pie that a child has left to fissure in the heat. Our works were those of children and playtime is over. Now is time for a new world, an impossible world, a place we cannot live.