ADAM, Paul Auguste Marie.
Lettres de Malaisie.
Paris, Editions dela Revue Blanche, 1898.
Octavo, some browning, uncut; a good copy in publisher's blue quarter cloth.
Probable first edition of Adam's most important work (Lewis cites a first edition of 1897, but that may be a ghost as this 1898 edition is generally regarded as the first).
Adam (1862-1920) declared that he wrote this novel set in the East Indies as an extension of the earlier work of French utopian writers, but it also shows an awareness of realized societies in Texas and Illinois. It is an account of the fictional 'Adam's Country', a colony established by a dedicated community of French settlers, marked by ostentatious comfort and extreme xenophobia. Despite its humble beginnings, the settlement has quickly come to dominate the local tribes, pressing them into unquestioning obedience to the State.
Like so many ideal societies, its continuing harmony is due to oppressive social controls: the sterilisation of asocials; the State control of artists; the enlistment of criminals into the Army. Even the advances in science (which include a pre-Edison description of the phonograph) are usually dedicated to the active or passive control of the population. This fascination with observation and control extends to descriptions of some of the scientific experiments being conducted on the native population, including the most infamous, where the inhabitants are 'rehabilitated through satiety in weekly public orgies in which the 'communism of erotic sensations' results in the successful neutralization of sexuality' (Frédéric Rouvillois, 'Utopia and Totalitarianism,' in Schaer et al., Utopia).
Lewis, p. 1; Manguel & Guadalupi; Negley, p. 3.
