Roger Luckhurst
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CHAPTER FORTY-THREE SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, FANTASY AND THE SUPERNATURAL Roger Luckhurst ecognisable modern popular fi ction genres began to emerge in the latter half Rof the nineteenth century, with the extension of mass culture driven by a transformation in the economic and technological basis for print journals. This was the literature for what George Gissing dismissively called the ‘quarter educated’ in New Grub Street (Gissing 1998, p. 460). Conservative commentators dismissed the fi ction fi lling the new journals as quick and formulaic, a crude stimulus for blunted nerves already over-stretched by urban modernity. This was not culture, but anarchy. Fin-de-siècle Decadence has often been critically regarded as a defensive formation against this mass culture. High art hoped to raise itself above the lowly market, and however hopeless and contradictory this aim, literary criticism has tended to follow. Henry James was understood to have won the aesthetic argument with H. G. Wells over the nature of fi ction; it was Wells who quitted the fi eld calling his own art ‘abortion’ (Wells in Edel and Ray 1959, p. 176). Yet genre fi ction has its own distinct cultural work to do; one aesthetic standard will not fi t all. Genre may appear formulaic, but formulae, after all, are immensely generative symbolic expressions: concentrations of thought, not signs of its absence. There is something worth exploring about the fl owering of non- or anti-Realist popular genres in the late Victorian period. The ‘scientifi c romance,’ coined in the 1880s, named an innovative fusion of ancient form with modern content (the awkward term ‘scientifi ction’ appeared in the American pulp magazine market in 1926, coined by editor Hugo Gernsback, before ‘science fi ction’ settled the generic name three years later). The scientifi c romance was intertwined with a signifi cant Gothic revival that resituated the delirium of the eighteenth-century Gothic in the structures of the new print culture, producing a golden age of supernatural fi ction. The eccentricities of Victorian fantasy were also channelled through new formal possibilities: Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegâna (1905), for instance, constructed a fantastical cosmogony through brief sketches and fables rather than epic poetry or immersive fi ction. Although often artifi cially separated by critics who want, typically, to try to maintain an opposition between the alleged scientifi c rationalism of science fi ction and the irrationalism or mysticism of fantasy and the supernatural (see Suvin 1979), 677 — Roger Luckhurst — these genres clearly exist on the same spectrum. They refract the same light, the same generative conditions, only at different wavelengths. All are fi ctions that might be defi ned by their response to the accelerations of technological modernity experienced in the nineteenth century. The genres communicate disorientations in spatial and temporal belonging. The scientifi c romance tilted these transformations into the future, for good or ill: utopia was an old form, but it took the extremes of the new century to coin the antonym ‘dystopia.’ The Gothic haunts the modern with stubborn past survivals, human agents weighed down with the nightmare of history in anxiety and fear, whilst fantasy is frequently suffused with a melancholia, the genre anchoring itself on a deep, mythical past that is nevertheless acknowledged as irretrievably lost in the relentless forward thrust of the modern. These genres refuse the novelistic dominant of Realism, but this is never – even in the case of fantasy – an act of aesthetic evasion or escape. Rather, it is the formal registration of the fact that the logic of modernity continually uproots and redefi nes the very structure of the social world. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels evocatively described the revolutionary effects of capitalism: ‘All fi xed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air’ (Marx and Engels 1998, p. 6). As the industrial revolution set about remaking the world, so we might regard the various modes of fantastic fi ction as a distinctive array of cultural forms that are highly responsive to the continual revolution typical of capitalist modernity. It is the ‘painful mutation in historicity’ at the end of the nineteenth century that suggests to Fredric Jameson the emergence of ‘a fantasy narrative apparatus capable of registering systemic change’ (Jameson 2003, p. 280). Another stage in the argument is to contend that it is because of their uncoupling from mimesis that the genres of the fantastic register the globality of the nineteenth- century modernity far more explicitly than Realism. The Realist novel form was already buckling under pressure in the late Victorian period, producing the mannered over-determinism of Naturalism. The Realist or Naturalist novel may exhaustively particularise the local but can often only imply the larger forces of the global. It takes the brilliance of a critic like Edward Said to discern the trace of the colonial periphery in the great tradition of the nineteenth century English novel. In contrast, the critic John Clute has suggested that the genres he collects under the more inclusive Russian term fantastika (fantasy, science fi ction and horror) are defi ned by their intrinsic status as ‘planetary’ fi ctions. For Clute, these are modern genres because they emerge only after 1750 with the consciousness that we exist not in a world but on a planet. The planet is hugely extensive and yet ever more interconnected by trade, diplomacy and colonisation. Communication technologies continually shrink the space and time of the globe until its curvature, as it were, becomes humanly perceptible. The last link in the all-Red imperial telegraph route that linked New Zealand to Canada fi nally completed the ‘British World’ in 1903. Science charts the surface and ages the depths of the Earth and situates it within a solar system, whilst travel opens up a comparative anthropological knowledge that profoundly disturbs traditional structures of belief. These disjunctions positively require fantastical representations to capture the traumatic novelty of this new global consciousness. ‘Fantastika is the planetary form of story’ (Clute 2011, p. 24): it is a record of the world storm that constitutes modernity. 678 — Scientific romance, fantasy and the supernatural — This essay explores the thesis that it is genre fi ction in the fi n de siècle that consistently works to register the full impact of late nineteenth century globalisation. I will begin in England, but the logic of the argument will rapidly push out centrifugally beyond national bounds to regard the genres in their emergent globality. The revival of the literary romance form in England in the 1880s was hailed by its defenders as a return to older, virile, native forms of narrative against the etiolated, Decadent interiors of the analytic novel (usually a code for Henry James or the foreign fi lth of Émile Zola). The infl uential critic Andrew Lang praised Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) in avowedly ethnographic terms – these forms reached back into the childhood of the northern races to reinvigorate contemporary fi ction. ‘Not for nothing did Nature leave us all savages under our white skins; she has wrought thus that we might have many delights, among others “the joy of adventurous living” and of reading about adventurous living’ (Lang 1886, p. 102). The Stevenson and Haggard adventures were driven by their expansiveness, their breaching of limits: both stories centre on maps that point beyond the edge of the known world, the sort of white spaces that inspire Marlow to travel up the Congo River in Conrad’s fractured romance Heart of Darkness (1899). The ‘scientifi c romance’ was a hybrid development that created adventure from the possibilities opened up by the revolutions in science and technology that trans- formed everyday life with a host of electrical inventions and scientifi c breakthroughs in the 1870s and 1880s. The eccentric science populariser Charles Howard Hinton called his miscellaneous set of mathematical speculations and fi ctional sketches Scientifi c Romances in 1886. It was at this vanishing point between science and fi ction that his occult speculations on the fourth dimension prospered, Hinton arguing that his awkward sketches had ‘considerable value; for they enable us to express in intelligible terms things of which we can form no image’ (Hinton 1886, p. 31). A more successful contemporary pioneer in the form was Grant Allen, a fervent social Darwinist who was unable to secure a post as a biologist after the failure of his debut Physiological Aesthetics (dedicated to his hero Herbert Spencer) and so shifted to science journalism, lurid Gothic fi ction and proto-science fi ction in the 1880s. His heavy-handed satire The British Barbarians (1895), in which a twenty-fi fth-century anthropologist examines the primitive social and sexual taboos of fi n-de-siècle England, was only the most explicit of his fi ctions premised on the temporal dislocation of perspective granted by evolutionary theory. The young H. G. Wells followed Allen’s trajectory away from science education, text-book hackwork and journalism towards fi ction. Wells respectfully wrote to Allen after the publication of The Time Machine (1895): ‘I believe that this fi eld of scientifi c romance with a philosophical element which I am trying to cultivate, belongs properly to you’ (Wells 1998, pp. 245–46). The Time Machine, nevertheless, is regularly declared as one of the inaugural texts of science fi ction. What is most relevant here about Wells’ novella is that the melodrama is driven by the disadjustment opened by evolutionary time, a sublime terror that is generated by a strict adherence to social Darwinian logic.