Читать книгу Pale Shadow of Science - Brian Aldiss - Страница 9

IN ANTHONY BURGESS’S NOVEL, BEARD’S ROMAN WOMEN (1977), there is a passage where Beard, the central character, meets an old girl friend in an airport bar. Both work in what it is fashionable to call ‘the media’; they discuss Byron and Shelley, and she says ‘I did an overseas radio thing on Mary Shelley. She and her mother are very popular these days. With the forces of women’s liberation, that is. It took a woman to make a Frankenstein monster. Evil, cancer, corruption, pollution, the lot. She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life ….’

Even today, when our diet is the unlikely, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein seems extremely far-fetched; how much more so must it have appeared on publication in 1818. Yet Beard’s girl friend puts her finger on one of the contradictions which possibly explains the continued fascination of Frankenstein, that it seems to know a lot about life, whilst being preoccupied with death.

This preoccupation was undoubtedly an important strand in the character of the author of Frankenstein. Marked by the death of her mother in childbirth, she was haunted, at the time of writing Frankenstein, by precognitive dreads concerning the future deaths of her husband and children. By embodying some of this psychic material into her complex narrative, she created what many regard as that creature with a life of its own, the first SF novel.

This perception will bear examination later. Meanwhile, it should be pointed out that Frankenstein is generically ambivalent, hovering between novel, Gothic, and science fiction, just as its science hovers between alchemy and orthodox science. To my mind, precisely similar factors obtain even today in the most celebrated SF novels. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land contains magic; Anne McCaffrey’s dragon novels hover between legend, fairy tale, and science fiction. ‘Pure’ science fiction is chimerical. Its strength lies in its appetite.

Mary Shelley’s life (1797–1851) forms an unusual pattern, with all the events crowding into the early part and, indeed, many transactions that would mould her character occurring before she was born. Both her parents played important roles in the intellectual life of the time. Her father, William Godwin, was a philosopher and political theorist, whose most important work is An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793). Godwin also wrote novels as a popular means of elucidating his thought, the most durable being Caleb Williams (1794), which can still be read with interest, even excitement, today. The influence of both these works on Godwin’s daughter’s writing is marked. Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was a brilliant woman who wrote the world’s first feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Mary Wollstonecraft came to the marriage with Godwin bringing with her a small daughter, Fanny, the fruit of her affair with a charming but elusive American, Gilbert Imlay, who deserted his pregnant mistress in the Paris of the Terror.

A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by Sir John Opie shows a moody and passionate woman. Distracted by the failure of her love for Imlay, she tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames off Putney Bridge. She survived to marry Godwin and bear him a daughter, Mary. After the birth, puerperal fever set in, and she died ten days later.

Godwin remarried. His second wife was a Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont, and she brought with her two children by her previous marriage, Charles, and Jane, who later preferred to be known as Claire and bore Byron an illegitimate child, Allegra. Fanny and Mary, then four years old, were further upset by the arrival of this new step-mother into their household, and the alienation was no doubt increased when Godwin’s new wife bore him a son in 1803. The five children crowded into one house increased Mary’s feeling of inner isolation, the refrain of which sounds throughout her novels and short stories. Another constant refrain, that of complex familial relationships, is seen embodied in the five children, no two of whom could muster two parents in common, Charles and Jane excepted.

Mary grew to be an attractive woman.^[1] Her reserved manner hid deep feelings baffled by her mother’s death and her father’s distance – two kinds of coldness, one might say, both of which are embodied in her monster’s being in a sense dead and also unloved. When Shelley arrived, he received all her love, and Mary remained faithful to him long after his death, despite his callow unfaithfulness to her. She was also a blue stocking, the product of two intellectuals, and through many years maintained an energetic reading programme, teaching herself several foreign languages. Moreover, she had the good fortune to know in childhood many of the celebrated intellectuals and men of letters of the time, Samuel Taylor Coleridge among them. Trelawny said of Mary that ‘her head might be put upon the shoulders of a Philosopher.’

Enter Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet, son of a baronet. An emotional and narcissistic youth, full of admiration for Godwin’s revolutionary but now somewhat faded political theories. When nineteen, he had married Harriet Westerbrook. He soon fell in love with Mary, and she with him. Before his twenty-second birthday, the pair had eloped to France, taking Jane with them.

Europe! What freedom it must have represented to Mary, after her sixteen circumscribed years, and what close companionship Shelley, handsome and intellectual, must have offered. But these youthful travellers were among the first to enter France after the Napoleonic Wars, and a desolate place they found it, the fields uncultivated, the villages and buildings destroyed. On the way to Switzerland, Shelley wrote to invite Harriet, now pregnant with Shelley’s second child, to join the party. Before they reached Lake Lucerne, Mary knew that she also was pregnant.

Catastrophe followed the harum-scarum young lovers. Mary’s child, a daughter, was born after they returned to London and their debts; it was premature and died. A second child, William, scarcely fared better. In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary went to Switzerland again, taking along William and, inevitably, Claire, as Jane now called herself. On the shores of Lake Geneva, they found accommodation at the Maison Chapuis, next to the Villa Diodati, where the poet Lord Byron was staying. Although Claire threw herself at Byron’s head, and managed to encompass the rest of him too, it was a happily creative time for them, with philosophy and learning pursued as well as the more touted facets of the good life. Here, Mary began to write Frankenstein. Summer had too short a stay, and the party returned to England to face more trouble.

Mary’s self-effacing half-sister, Fanny, committed suicide with an overdose of laudanum at the age of twenty-two, by which time the Shelley menage had moved to the West Country; Claire still followed them, as the monster followed Frankenstein, and was now also pregnant. Then news reached them that Shelley’s wife Harriet had drowned herself, not in the Thames, but in the Serpentine. She had been far advanced in pregnancy. Shelley and Mary were married almost immediately.

The date of the marriage was 29 December 1816. Six and a half years later, in July 1822, Shelley was drowned whilst sailing on the Ligurian Sea. By that time, the little boy, William, was dead, as was another child, Clara; Mary had also had a miscarriage, but a further son, Percy Florence, was born. He alone of Mary’s progeny survived to manhood. Even Claire’s daughter by Byron, the little Allegra, had died.

The rest of Mary’s life is curiously empty, lived in the shadow of her first twenty-five years. After Byron died in Greece in 1824, both the great poets were gone – a loss to English letters. Mary remained ever faithful to the memory of her husband. She edited his poems and papers, and earned a living by her pen. She wrote historical novels, such as Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), which enjoyed some success, short stories, and one novel, The Last Man (1826) which, by its powerfully oppressive theme of world catastrophe, is classifiable as science fiction. Percy married. Her cold father, Godwin, died; Shelley’s difficult father died. Finally, in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, Mary herself died, aged fifty-three.

This painful biography, as confused as any modern one, is worth retelling, for it helps to explain not only why Mary’s temperament was not a sanguine one, but where much derives from what we read in her two science fiction novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man. Both owe a great deal to the literature that preceded them; more is owed to experience. Critics are liable comfortably to ignore the latter to concentrate on the former.

The essence of the story of Frankenstein is familiar, if in distorted form, from many film, stage and TV versions, in which Victor Frankenstein compiles a creature from corpses and then endows it with life, after which it runs amok. The novel is long, and more complex than this synopsis suggests. It is a flawed masterpiece of growing reputation, and an increasing body of criticism attests to the attraction of both its excellences and its flaws.

Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus begins with letters from Captain Walton to his sister. Walton is sailing in Arctic waters when he sees on the ice floes a sledge being driven by an enormous figure. The next day, the crew rescue a man from a similar sledge. It is Victor Frankenstein of Geneva; when he recovers, he tells his tale to Walton, which account makes up the bulk of the book, to be rounded off by Walton again, and to include six chapters which are the creature’s own account of its life, especially of its education. If the style of the novel is discursive, Mary Shelley was following methods familiar to readers of Richardson and Sterne; the method became unfashionable but, to readers of eccentric modern novels, may now be increasingly sympathetic and help to account in part for the new-found popularity of the novel.

One of the enduring attractions of the book is that Mary sets most of the drama, not in the seamy London she knew from childhood, but amid spectacular alpine scenery, such as she had visited with Shelley. The monster’s puissance gains greatly by this association with the elements, storm, cold, snow, desolation.

Interest has always centred on the monster and its creation (it has no name in the novel, merely being referred to as ‘creature,’ ‘daemon,’ or ‘monster,’ which accounts for the popular misusage by which the name Frankenstein has come to be transferred from the creator to the created – a mistake which occurred first in Mary’s lifetime. This is the essential SF core of the narrative: a fascinating experiment that goes wrong: a prescription to be repeated later, many times, in Amazing Stories and elsewhere. Frankenstein’s is a Faustian dream of unlimited power, but this Faust makes no supernatural pacts; he succeeds only when he throws away the fusty old reference books, outdated by the new science, and gets to work on research in laboratories.

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.