Pale Shadow of Science

But SF is not only hard science, and related to the first core is a second, also science-fictional, the tale of an experiment in political theory which relates to William Godwin’s ideas. Frankenstein is horrified by his creation and abjures responsibility. Yet the monster, despite its ugliness, is gentle and intelligent, and tries to win its way into society. Society repulses it. Hence the monster’s cry, ‘I am malicious because I am miserable,’ a dramatic reversal of received Christian thinking of the time.

The richness of the story’s metaphorical content, coupled with the excellence of the prose, has tempted commentators to interpret the novel in various ways. Frankenstein’s sub-title, The Modern Prometheus, leads us to one level of meaning. Prometheus, according to Aeschylus in his play Prometheus Bound, brings fire from Heaven and bestows the gift on mankind; for this, Zeus has him chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle eats his viscera.[2] Another version of the legend, the one Mary had chiefly in mind, tells of Prometheus fashioning men out of mud and water. Mary seized on this aspect of the legend, whilst Byron and Shelley were writing Prometheus and Prometheus Unbound respectively. Mary, with an inspired transposition, uses electricity as the divine fire.

By this understanding, with Frankenstein acting god, Frankenstein’s monster becomes mankind itself, blundering about the world seeking knowledge and reassurance. The monster’s intellectual quest has led David Ketterer to state that ‘basically Frankenstein is about the problematical nature of knowledge.’[3] Though this interpretation is too radical, it reminds us usefully of the intellectual aspects of the work, and of Mary’s understanding of the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

Leonard Wolf argues that Frankenstein should be regarded as ‘psychological allegory’.[4] This view is supported by David Ketterer, who thinks that therefore the novel cannot be science fiction.[5] Godwin’s Caleb Williams is also psychological or at least political allegory; it is nevertheless regarded as the first crime novel.* Surely there are many good SF novels which are psychological allegory as well as being science fiction. Algis Budrys’s Who? is an example. By understanding the origins of ‘real’ science fiction, we understand something of its function; hence the importance of the question. Not to regard Frankenstein but, say, The Time Machine or even Gernsback’s magazines as the first SF – as many did only a few years ago – is to underestimate the capabilities of the medium; alternatively, to claim that Gilgamesh or Homer started it all is to claim so almost anything becomes SF.

Mary Shelley wanted her story to ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our (i.e. humankind’s) nature’ … Is that not what SF still excellently does?

That the destructive monster stands for one side of Shelley’s nature, and the constructive Victor for the other has been convincingly argued by another critic, Christopher Small.[6] Mary’s passion for Shelley, rather than blinding her, gave her terrifying insight. In case this idea sounds over-sophisticated, we must recall that Mary herself, in her Introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, means us to read it as a kind of metaphor when she says ‘Invention … does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but it cannot bring into being substance itself.’

In referring to Frankenstein as a diseased creation myth,[7] I had in mind phrases with sexual connotations in the novel such as ‘my workshop of filthy creation,’ used by Frankenstein of his secret work. Mary’s life experience taught her to regard life and death as closely intertwined. The genesis of her terrifying story came to Mary in a dream, in which she says she saw ‘the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy half vital motion.’ The powerful line suggests both a distorted image of her mother dying, in those final restless moments which often tantalisingly suggest recovery rather than its opposite, and also the stirrings of sexual intercourse, particularly when we recall that ‘powerful engine’ is a term which serves in pornography as a synonym for penis.

The critic, Ellen Moers, writing on female gothic,[8] disposes of the question of how a young girl like Mary could hit on such a horrifying idea (though the authoress was herself the first to raise it). Most female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were spinsters and virgins, and in any case Victorian taboos operated against writing on childbirth. Mary experienced the fear, guilt, depression and anxiety which often attend childbirth, particularly in situations such as hers, unmarried, her consort a married man with children by another woman, and beset by debt in a foreign place. Only a woman, only Mary Shelley, could have written Frankenstein. As Beard’s girlfriend says, ‘She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life.’

Moreover, the casual remark made by Beard’s girlfriend takes us into a deeper level of meaning which, although sufficiently obvious, has not been remarked upon to my knowledge. Frankenstein is autobiographical.

It is commonly accepted that the average first novel relies for its material on personal experience. We do not deny other interpretations – for a metaphor has many interpretations – by stating that Mary sees herself as the monster. This is why we pity it. She too tried to win her way into society. By running away with Shelley, she sought acceptance through love; but the move carried her further from society; she became a wanderer, an exile, like Byron, like Shelley. Her mother’s death in childbirth must have caused her to feel that she, like the monster, had been born from the dead; behind the monster’s eloquence lies Mary’s grief. Part of the continued appeal of the novel is the appeal of the drama of the neglected child.

Upon this structure of one kind of reality, Mary built a further structure, one of the intellect. A madness for knowledge abounds; not only Frankenstein but the monster and Walton also, and the judicial processes throughout the book, are in quest for knowledge of one kind and another. Interestingly, the novel contains few female characters (a departure from the Gothic mode, with its soft, frightened heroines); Victor’s espoused remains always a cold and distant figure. The monster, product of guilty knowledge, threatens the world with evil progeny.

The monster is, of course, more interesting than Victor. He has the vitality of evil, like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost before him and Quilp in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop after him, eloquent villains both. It is the monster that comes first to our minds, as it was the monster that came first to Mary’s mind. The monster holds its appeal because it was created by science, or at least pseudo-science, rather than by any pacts with the devil, or by magic, like the golem.

Frankenstein emerges from the Gothic tradition. Gothic still tints science fiction with its hues of suspense and doom. In Billion Year Spree I argued that Frankenstein was the first real science fiction novel. Here the adjective ‘real’ serves as an escape clause. The point about discussing where science fiction begins is that it helps our understanding of the nature and function of SF. In France in pre-Revolution days, for instance, several books appeared with Enlightenment scenarios depicting a future where present trends were greatly developed, and where the whole world became a civilized extension of the Tuilleries. The best-known example is Sebastien Mercier’s L’An 2400, set seven centuries ahead in time; it was translated into several foreign languages. Mercier writes in the utopian tradition; Mary Shelley does not. Here we see a division of function. Jules Verne was influenced by Mercier, and worked with ‘actual possibilities of invention and discovery.’ H.G. Wells was influenced by Frankenstein, and wrote what he called fantasies – the phrase set in quotes is Wells’s, who added that he ‘did not pretend to deal with possible things.’* One can imagine Mary Shelley saying as much.

As Muriel Spark says, Mary in her thinking seems at least fifty years ahead of her time.[9] She discovered the Irrational, one of the delights and torments of our age. By dressing it in rational garb, and letting it stalk the land, she unwittingly dealt a blow against the tradition to which Mercier was heir. Utopia is no place for the irrational.

Other arguments for the seminal qualities of Frankenstein are set out more fully in Billion Year Spree, for those interested. In sum, Victor Frankenstein is a modern, consciously rejecting ancient fustian booklore in favour of modern science, kicking out father figures. His creation of life shows him further usurping paternal power, invading what was previously God’s province – the role medicine has played since Jenner’s smallpox vaccine. Victor and his monster together function as the light and dark side of mankind, in a symbolism that was to become increasingly comprehensible after Mary’s death.

As befitted an author writing after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Industrial Revolution was well under way, Mary deals, not merely with extrapolated development like Mercier before her, but with unexpected change, like Wells after her. Above all, Frankenstein stands as the figure of the scientist (though the word was not coined when Mary wrote), set apart from the rest of society, unable to control the new forces he has brought into the world. The successor to Prometheus is Pandora. No other writer, except H. G. Wells, presents us with as many innovations as Mary Shelley.

The Last Man was published in 1826, anonymously, as Frankenstein had been. Few critics of standing have praised the novel. It meanders. Muriel Spark, however, said of it that it is Mary’s ‘most interesting, if not her most consummate, work.’

The theme of The Last Man was not new, and could hardly be at a time when epidemics were still commonplace. The title was used for an anonymous novel in 1806. Thomas Campbell wrote a poem with the same title; whilst at the Villa Diodati, Byron composed a poem entitled ‘Darkness’ in which the world is destroyed and two men, the last, die of fright at the sight of each other. In the same year that Mary’s novel was published, John Martin painted a water-colour on the subject (later, in 1849, he exhibited a powerful oil with the same title).

The novel is set in the twenty-first century, a period, it seems, of much sentimental rhetoric. Adrian, Earl of Windsor, befriends the wild Lionel Verney. Adrian is the son of the King of England, who abdicated; one of the King’s favourites was Verney’s father. Adrian is full of fine sentiments, and wins over Verney. Verney has a sister called Perdita who falls in love with Lord Raymond, and eventually commits suicide. Raymond is a peer of genius and beauty who besieges Constantinople. The relationships of these personages, together with a profusion of mothers and sisters, fill the first of the three volumes. Adrian is Mary’s portrait of Shelley, the bright rather than the dark side, Perdita is Claire, Raymond Byron. Verney plays the part of Mary, and eventually becomes the Last Man. Verney, like Frankenstein, is a paradigm of the Outsider.

There is undoubted strength in the second and third books, once the plague has the world in its grip. Society disintegrates on a scale merely hinted at in the unjust world of Frankenstein. ‘I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety. In the south, the disease, virulent and immedicable, had nearly annihilated the race of man; storm and inundation, poisonous winds and blights, filled up the measure of suffering. In the north it was worse ….’

Finally, Verney-Mary alone is left, drifting south towards the equator, like a character in a J.G. Ballard novel. So Mary tells us how life was without Shelley; her universe had gone. Through science fiction, she expressed her powerfully inexpressible feelings.

In his brief book on Mary,[10] William Walling makes a point which incidentally relates The Last Man still more closely to the science-fictional temper. Remarking that solitude is a common topic of the period and by no means Mary’s monopoly, Walling claims that by interweaving the themes of isolation and the end of civilization, she creates a prophetic account of modern industrial society, in which the creative personality becomes more and more alienated.

Tales and Stories by Mary Shelley were collected together by Richard Garnett and published in 1891. They are in the main conventional. Familial and amorous misunderstandings fill the foreground, armies gallop about in the background. The characters are high-born, their speeches high-flown. Tears are scalding, years long, sentiments either villainous or irreproachable, deaths copious and conclusions not unusually full of well-mannered melancholy. The tales are of their time. Here again, the game of detecting autobiographical traces can be played. One story, ‘Transformation,’ sheds light on Frankenstein – but not much. We have to value Mary Shelley, as we do other authors, for her strongest work, not her weakest; and her best has a strength still not widely enough appreciated.

This collection of stories from scattered journals and keepsake albums indicates Mary’s emotional and physical exhaustion. In the course of eight years, between 1814 and 1822, she had borne four children, three of whom died during the period, and had suffered miscarriages. She had travelled hither and thither with her irresponsible husband, who had most probably had an affair with her closest friend, Claire. And she had witnessed suicides and death all round her, culminating in Shelley’s death. It was much for a sensitive and intellectual woman to endure. No wonder that Claire Clairmont wrote to her, some years after the fury and shouting died, and said, ‘I think in certain things you are the most daring woman I ever knew.’[11]

1. An enjoyable recent biography is Jane Dunn’s Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley, 1979.

2. One thinks here of the scene after Shelley’s death, when Trelawny caused his corpse to be burnt on the shore, Byron and Leigh Hunt also being present. At the last possible moment, Trelawny ran forward and snatched Shelley’s heart from the body.

3. David Ketterer, Frankenstein’s Creation: The Book, The Monster, and Human Reality, University of Victoria, 1979.

4. Leonard Wolf, The Annotated Frankenstein, 1977.

5. David Ketterer, ‘Frankenstein in Wolf’s Clothing,’ Science Fiction Studies, No. 18, July 1979.

6. Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, 1972.

7. Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, 1973.

8. Ellen Moers, ‘Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother,’ The New York Review, 21 March 1974, reprinted in Literary Women, 1976.

9. Muriel Spark, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1951. *A biographer of Mary Shelley, writing in the nineteen-thirties, advances the argument that Frankenstein is ‘the first of the Scientific Romances that have culminated in our day in the work of Mr. H. G. Wells,’ because it erects ‘a superstructure of fantasy on a foundation of circumstantial “scientific fact.”’ Shrewd judgement, although the excellence of the novel is otherwise underestimated. (R. Glynn Grylls: Mary Shelley, A Biography, 1938.)

10. 9 William Walling: Mary Shelley, 1972.

11. Claire Clairmont, letter, quoted in Julian Marshall’s Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1889.

The Immanent Will Returns

‘WHAT OF THE IMMANENT WILL AND ITS DESIGNS?’ ASKS Thomas Hardy at the beginning of The Dynasts, and proceeds to demonstrate at length how little the Will cares for its creations. He leaves us with a faint hope that the Will can in some way evolve, and that ‘the rages of the Ages shall be cancelled,/Consciousness the Will informing,/Till it fashion all things fair.’ Thinking the matter over after the First World War, Hardy conceded that this was a little too optimistic: thereby leaving the door open for Olaf Stapledon.

Stapledon sweeps away the human characters in whom Hardy delighted, to give us a threadbare stage upon which humanity is lost in the incomprehensible toils of creation or the soliloquies of the Star Maker. The Star Maker is the Immanent Will wearing another hat.

W. Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) is a very English kind of writer. He won no great reputation in his lifetime and has accumulated little since; yet he cannot be said to be entirely forgotten, despite his mysterious absence from most of the histories of English Literature.

His work in philosophy – a subject which at one time he taught in the University of Liverpool – has proved impermanent, although A Modern Theory of Ethics went through several reprints.

His kind of visionary writing, which attempts to establish an individual mythology, is not unfamiliar. His novel Odd John has a subtitle which recalls Blake (‘A Story Between Jest and Earnest’ – though there’s precious little enjoying of the lady in it); his grandiosities recall Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, Dawn in Britain, with its quixotic resolve to restore Chaucer to modern English. Two other conflicting voices echo strongly through Stapledon’s fiction: the Milton of Paradise Lost and that great Victorian storm-trooper, Winwood Reade, whose Martyrdom of Man attempted to justify the ways of man to a dead god.

We may call H.G. Wells’s early scientific romances science fiction with a clear conscience. It is more debatable whether Stapledon’s first novel, Last and First Men (1930), and Star Maker (1937) so qualify. They are Stapledon’s attempt to blend fiction and philosophy. Wells’s imagination was untainted by metaphysics, though politics finally eclipsed it; but Stapledon read Modern History while up at Balliol from 1905–09, and most of his fictions strive to iron themselves out into the progressions of historicity, complete with time-charts.

These two vast works, best regarded as a unity, are sui generis. The preface to Last and First Men warns that this ‘is not a prophecy; it is a myth, or an essay in myth.’ Even sterner is the disclaimer at the portals of Star Maker: ‘Judged by the standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all.’

The Novel has proved itself unexpectedly capacious, but the Immanent Will does seem to demand a less convivial stage on which to enact the rages of the ages. The rages which energise the gaunt structures of Last and First Men and Star Maker are, basically, religious faith versus atheism and the quest for individual fulfillment versus the needs of the community, whether terrestrial or stellar. Modern rages, one might call them.

With their emphasis on spiritual suffering, catastrophe to come, and the surrealist mutations of shape which mankind must undergo in submission to the Creator, those great glacial novels, together spanning the thirties, now appear oddly characteristic of their day.

In many respects, Stapledon himself is markedly of his time. As were many men of his generation, he was torn by religious doubt; he was a non-combatant in the 1914–1918 war, and had some trouble in fitting himself, essentially a Victorian, into post-war society. Along with other intellectuals of his day, he flirted with pacifism and promiscuity. He had strong leanings towards Communism without ever becoming a member of the Party. Like many writers outside the swim of London literary society, he knew few other authors, and was critically disregarded.

It could also be said that the central premise of his work, that mankind is irrelevant to the purposes of the universe, is unpalatable to believer and unbeliever alike. It is precisely for that unpalatability, so variously, so swoopingly, expressed, as if in contradiction to itself, that his admirers honour him.

Last and First Men belongs to that class of book which needs to arrive in a reader’s life at the right moment if it is to arrive at all. Then one never forgets it.

I remember my first encounter with it. I was awaiting a typhus inoculation in Assam in 1943, before the British Second Division advanced on Japanese-held Mandalay. The medical officer was housed in a commandeered bungalow outside Kohima which possessed a considerable library. On the shelves stood a book I had never heard of, in two volumes, the first two volumes Allen Lane published in his blue series of Pelican Books (for he had taken Stapledon at his word and issued the work as non-fiction). I was captivated before I was inoculated.

For the last and first time in my life, I deliberately stole a book. I could not bear to be parted from it.

While great things went forward in the world – destruction and victory – Stapledon’s voice proved to be what was needed, in marked contrast to the pedestrian chat of soldiers. His daring time-scales in particular corresponded to something felt in the bloodstream.

What filled me then was Stapledon’s all-embracing vision of humanity locked within the imperatives of creation, untainted by a Christianity which seemed to have failed. Star Maker, written only seven years later, amplifies this vision, elevates it, and marks a great advance in the writer’s art. The two billion year long history of the future which is Last and First Men is encompassed in one paragraph of the second book. Again, human kind – this time one individual soul – is confronted with the necessity of comprehending the cosmic process of which it is part: a noble and ever-contemporary quest.

Noble or not, Stapledon has been neglected. He had a dislike of Bloomsbury and satirised the coterie in Last Men in London – which presumably did for him. If his name is to be preserved, it will be by science fiction readers. Science fiction studies are now so alarmingly advanced in the United States that the first two studies of Stapledon’s oeuvre are American. First was Patrick McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon (Twayne, 1982). Now here comes the energetic, unorthodox Professor Leslie A. Fiedler, with Olaf Stapledon, A Man Divided (O.U.P., 1983). His volume appears in a series flatly entitled ‘Science Fiction Writers,’ edited by Robert Scholes, in which studies of Wells, Heinlein and Asimov have already appeared.

Fiedler has problems. One initial difficulty is that Last and First Men evidently did not arrive in his life at the right moment. He was ‘infuriated’ that it had no story or characters. He finds it improbable that he should be writing on ‘so anomalous an author.’ Not an encouraging start, not an encouraging attitude.

One’s initial misgivings are never allayed. Fiedler briefly covers Stapledon’s life (though not the Oxford years, when Stapledon rowed for his college), deems it an uneventful one, like the lives of most writers, and hurries on to investigate the glories and shortcomings of the fiction. The book reaches roughly the same conclusions as would any reasonable man: that Odd John is a worthwhile contribution in the Poor Little Superman line, that Sirius is late gold, and that Star Maker is the great triumph, with its ‘all but intolerable appeal.’ While finding the other writings disappointing, it relates them illuminatingly to one another.