Quick viewing(Text Mode)

Roger Luckhurst

Roger Luckhurst

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, AND THE

Roger Luckhurst

ecognisable modern popular fi ction 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 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 market in 1926, coined by editor , 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 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 , 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 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 — , 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 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 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 (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. The future ruin of London, the powerhouse of Britain’s global empire still not quite at its extensive peak in 1895, was a long established of satirical inversion, but the extrapolation of Victorian class confl ict into the branching out of species into the Eloi and Morlocks was

679 — Roger Luckhurst — embedded in theories of cultural decadence and biological degeneration circulating in the 1890s. It is an effective device to alter radically the axis of time, throwing the Time Traveller forward fi rst to the year 802 701, then forward again millions of years to witness the entropic heat death of the sun, but not move in space. Wells again anchored his tactic of defamiliarisation in the topography of London with (1898), a comical marriage of the parochial suburbs of the city with interstellar threat from the evolutionarily superior Martians. Sleepy Woking is smashed to pieces by death rays. The famous opening of that novel is the quintessential instance of the planetary perspective the scientifi c romance engenders: ‘No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water’ (Wells 1993, p. 5). After 1900, Wells lost much of his ambiguous and playful tone, convinced by the scientifi c accuracy of his extrapolated year 2000 in his set of lectures Anticipations of the Mechanical and Scientifi c Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902) and the essential rightness of his eugenic socialism in a sequence of didactic utopias that alienated liberal humanists like Henry James and E. M. Forster. Forster’s dystopia ‘The Machine Stops’ (1905) was an explicit riposte to Wellsian mechanised future, as was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and C. S Lewis’ That Hideous Strength (1945), the latter featuring a venomous portrait of Wells as a malevolent agent of modernity. But Wells’ later advocacy of world government led by an elite of engineers which was envisioned in the wake of the catastrophe of the Great War was consistent with the planetary perspectives of his early scientifi c romances. Of course, Wells was not the only source for the development of the scientifi c romance. In America, Edward Ellis’ The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) introduced the inventor Frank Reade and his unpredictable humanoid machine (the term ‘’ arrived in the English language in 1920 through Karel Cˇ apek’s Czech science fi ction). This became the basis for a series of dime novel inventor tales in the 1870s, which were copied in the pulp serials of the Frank Reade Library or the Tom Swift tales of the 1890s. All of these stories were about improvising technical solutions and dodging dastardly syndicates, often with a trusty if comical black sidekick (see Landon 2002). They were fi ctions that celebrated the mythical model of the self- made inventor, like Thomas Alva Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, who became national heroes for their string of inventions. These electrical wizards promised, in the wake of gramophones, telephones and light bulbs, fl ying machines, a whole new array of devices like wireless telegraphy, photophones, and schematics for machines to transmit thought instantaneously or to communicate with the dead. Accelerated invention and discovery blurred science fact and fi ction in a rapturous state of proleptic promise. Every electrical technology produced its own super- natural supplement, too, whether it was the spirits that tapped in Morse code down telegraph wires and the other end of telephones or the psychical phantasms zapped through the ether on newly detected Hertzian waves (see Sconce 2000). Rudyard Kipling’s characters were soon seeing ghosts on cinematograph celluloid in ‘Mrs Bathurst’ (1904) or picking up communications in the midst of Marconi’s

680 — Scientific romance, fantasy and the supernatural — early radio experiments in ‘Wireless’ (1902). The electrical revolution rewired the supernatural. Unlike the pessimistic fears of degeneration that weighed on the Darwinian imagination of Allen or Wells in England, the American engineer paradigm was often confi dent and optimistic. Technology was the vehicle of progress, the promise for a nation brought up on Horatio Alger self-help stories. American expansionist policy in South America and the Pacifi c in the 1890s heralded the dawn of the American Century. In popular fi ction, this is most strikingly demonstrated in Garrett Serviss’s instant sequel to War of the Worlds, published in the New York Evening Journal in January 1898 immediately after the American serialisation of Wells’ invasion narrative. Wells ends the novel with an ironic, accidental human victory: it is microbes that have stayed the Martians’ implacable advance, not man. In a riposte to this dying fall, Serviss depicts a global technological drive, headed by Edison, to command the world’s factory system to build spaceships and weapons to defeat the invader: the novel was called Edison’s Conquest of Mars. This was the American engineer resituating the challenge of the frontier in cosmic terms, just a few years after Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared that the Western frontier was intrinsic to American identity and yet had now been fully mastered: ‘the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the fi rst period of American history’ (Turner 1962, p. 38). No wonder Wells himself was aghast when he wrote of his arrival in New York in 1906: ‘The great thing is the mechanical thing, the unintentional thing which is speeding up all these people . . . making them stand clinging to straps, jerking them up elevator shafts, and pouring them on to ferry-boats.’ Here was the epicentre of ‘inhuman’ modernity (Wells 1906, p. 54). The technophilia of the scientifi c romance relied less on Wells and more on the fi ction of French author , a major infl uence on American popular fi ction (usually through very poor pirated translations). Verne’s series of novels loosely gathered under the collective title were marked by a ceaseless technological movement, plumbing the depths in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869), girdling the Earth in Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), or exploring the disjunctive temporal pocket of the hollow planet in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1872). Verne did write future fi ctions: his early Paris in the Twentieth Century, only recently rediscovered, was a striking projective portrait of Paris in 1960. In the main, however, Verne explored the hectic tilt of nineteenth century technological modernity, his enigmatic heroes Captain Nemo or Phileas Fogg roving the globe in innovative machines dedicated to ceaseless forward movement, a compulsion given scant motivation. These are fi ctions built from the experience of planetary space-time compression, the murky depths or the poles of the Earth brought into human grasp for the fi rst time. Verne’s largest global infl uence, oddly enough, may have been through the World’s Fairs movement that emerged after the Great Exhibition in 1851. The movement was championed by advocates of free global trade in Britain and by Saint-Simonian ideal- ists of industrial progress in France. Driven by internationalist rhetoric, the grandio- sity of world’s fairs was in fact marked by intense national competition, but the events also became a key cultural driver to communicate the global extensiveness and inter- connection of the capitalist economy. The exhibition sites became pockets of wond- rous futurity for tens of millions of visitors (see Greenhalgh 1988; Luckhurst 2012).

681 — Roger Luckhurst —

The 1889 World Exposition in Paris was presided over by the spirit of Verne, not just in Gustave Eiffel’s iron-lattice gateway or Edison’s pavilion of electric light or the Hall of Machines, but rather more literally in the fairground rides that transported visitors around the world in eighty days or twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea. Other Expos in the 1890s added voyages to the moon, and spaces like Luna Park on Coney Island constituted what the architect Rem Koolhaas has termed ‘urban science fi ction’ (Koolhaas 1994, p. 33), weird pocket universes in which futurity could be immersively experienced. This was then folded back into fi ction: in Enrique Gaspar’s Spanish novel The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey (1887), it makes perfect sense to launch a time machine in the grounds of the 1878 Paris World Exposition. I have elsewhere defi ned science fi ction as the literature of technologically saturated societies (Luckhurst 2005), with the implication that this limited the genre to advanced industrial societies of the West. In fact, the experience of modernity could be even sharper where uneven development meant less an immersive experience than a jagged confrontation of different speeds and temporalities that accompanied processes of globalisation. As genre historians have begun to show, the late nineteenth century was a crucial period for the development of science fi ction around the globe, in Japan (where Verne was translated fi rst in 1878), China (where Huang Jiang Diao Suo’s Tales of the Moon Colony appeared the year after Verne’s From Earth to the Moon was translated in 1903) and Latin America (see Tatsumi 2008; Wu 2013; Isaacson 2013 and Ferreira 2011). In Russia, Nature and People magazine announced in 1894 ‘Science and technology are defi ning modern reality by transforming not just everyday life, but the very ways in which we can think and imagine. A new kind of writing called nauchnaia fantastika, scientifi c fantasy, is playing a not inconsequential role in the process . . . Is it not in the imagination where bold theories and amazing fi ctions are fi rst born?’ (cited Banerjee 2012, p. 1). Given the strange mystical ‘cosmist’ theories that circled around both Russian scientifi c romances and the cadre of Russian Revolutionaries, the utopian projections of a Soviet Union can come to seem particularly science-fi ctional (see Young 2012). One of the most spectacular jarrings of space-time experience at world’s fairs was the deliberate disjunction between advanced industrial modernity and the display of native peoples, presented as anomalous survivals of prehistoric time. These ‘human zoos’ corralled peoples from Africa, Australia and the American wilderness into native villages as displays of savages being swept up and improved by the advance of Western modernity. In 1899 at the Greater Britain exhibition, it was possible to visit Savage South Africa, ‘A Vivid Representation of Life in the Wilds of the Dark Continent’, in which nearly 200 Africans daily staged their own defeat in Matabeleland in 1893. Paris put Dahomey tribes on display, widely depicted as the most savage African tribe recently rescued from their barbarous state, whilst the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 compressed a bewildering jumble of native villages from around the globe in a brutal disjuncture with ‘the lightning city’ around it. Chicago was widely regarded as an uneasy ‘laboratory of the future’ in the 1890s (Lewis 1997, p. 4; see also Blanchard et al 2008) and the native villages only exaggerated this bewilderingly uneven time of modernity. Travelling in colonial space was framed chronotopically: as . It is important to understand the emergence of scientifi c romance as thoroughly intertwined with the colonial romance. John Rieder’s critical study (Rieder 2008) reinforces the

682 — Scientific romance, fantasy and the supernatural — sense that the expansive imagination of science fi ction takes its historical underpinnings from colonialism. Cecil Rhodes, the agent of many dubious land-grabs in southern Africa, who annexed the territory of Rhodesia in his own name, gave the game away in his famous lament: ‘I would annexe the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far’ (Millin 1933, p. 138). In this way, the late Victorian romances of Rider Haggard can be seen as crucial switching points between genres, because his depictions of episodic travel through the unevenly distributed time of modernity around the globe generate moments of sublime wonder that tend to slide uneasily towards Gothic unease or outright horror. Henry Rider Haggard was born into a wealthy Norfolk farming family, but his father considered him too stupid to educate and so arranged for him to work on the staff of Sir Henry Bulwer, who was taking up the post of Lieutenant-Governor of Natal in southern Africa. Not yet out of his teens, Haggard travelled far beyond the borders of British territory, negotiating with tribal chieftains, acting as a circuit judge, and was one of the handful of Englishmen present at the Raising of the Union Jack when the British annexed the Transvaal in 1876. He briefl y attempted farming in Africa, but the Zulu War of 1879, in which the British punitively annihilated a complex and sophisticated culture, and rising tensions with Dutch Boer settlers, forced him back to England. He was failing at law and turgid Realism (his fi rst novel Dawn appeared in 1884) when he scribbled King Solomon’s Mines at delirious speed in 1885. It became a sensation, quickly followed by She in the following year. Haggard then regularly produced one or two romances per year until his death in 1925, always with the same smooth, unedited fl ow that – Freud and Jung, both avid readers, agreed – tapped something primal beneath this fastidious Tory squire. Haggard’s focus was both intensive – he once spent two years surveying the decline of farming in every county in England – and restlessly extensive, setting fi c- tions in southern Africa, modern and ancient Egypt, Mexico, Iceland and beyond. His home in Ditchingham was stuffed with curiosities gathered from his global travels – Zulu spears, Incan relics, Egyptian artefacts, Dickens’ desk – objects from which he used to conjure his fi ctions. King Solomon’s Mines establishes the plot pattern: a rag-bag of unregarded English adventurers, ill-suited to the effete moder- nity of London, venture into unknown African landscapes, breaching fearsome spatial boundaries to uncover isolated pockets where impossibly sophisticated civili- sations cling on, seemingly confounding the linear developmental time that drove both evolutionary anthropology and colonial ideology. The journeys are at once time travel back to a prehistoric past, but also disturb the self-regard of Victorian contemporaneity since the present is revealed less as a vanguard than an uncanny repetition. It is this disadjustment that feels science-fi ctional, yet Haggard’s romances are suffused with the melancholy of fantasy (these are always lost civilisations, after all) and ultimately tilt towards the uncanny or Gothic. Haggard’s fi ctions contained a signature scene that returned like an obsession in book after book: the discovery that a culture is literally undergirded by the brute materiality of corpses. Many of his romances culminate in the discovery of under- ground caverns stuffed with perfectly preserved legions of the un/dead. In King Solomon’s Mines, the adventurers discover the lineage of the kings of the Kukuanas in a mountain cavern, seated in eternal conference, preserved by being transformed over aeons into living stalactites. She has the same scene, the technique of mummifi cation

683 — Roger Luckhurst — even more uncanny, as Leo confronts his own double, the preserved ancestor he in effect reanimates. The Tombs of Kor are described as ‘a honeycomb of sepulchres’ and the horrifi ed realisation that ‘the whole mountain is full of dead’ (Haggard 1991, p. 214 and p. 170). It was even there in his fi rst novel, Dawn, written in ostensibly Realist mode, where Mildred Carr’s respectable middle-class home on Madeira bizarrely conceals a cavern carved out of the rock beneath it to display her collection of Egyptian antiquities, including a fi ne haul of mummies, ‘the corpses of the Egyptian dead, swathed in numberless wrappings’ (Haggard 1884, II, pp. 186–87). The un/ dead is the quintessential Gothic trope for ambivalent liminality. On the one hand the lively dead things that litter Haggard’s fi ctions represent a preservation of ancient forms that act as a bulwark against the depredations of modernity (Haggard died as the fi rst Labour government took power, a sign he took of the imminent demise of England). On the other, they are the dead weight of history that the romances half- acknowledge suck the lifeblood from any chance of a future. The masses of dead bodies that push up through the cracks are a sign that there is a mournful yet dis- avowed glimpse of the deathly logic of colonial possession in these romances. The Gothic romance, even in its fi rst Enlightenment iteration, mapped its fi ctions onto an international geography of terror. These were the fever dreams of northern, modern Protestants pitching their worst fears of reversion onto the superstitious, decadent and sunken populations of southern Catholic Europe. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) was set in a fantasy medieval Italy, The Monk (1796) in Catholic Spain, which still served as the backdrop for fears of biological degeneration as late as Robert Louis Stevenson’s lurid Gothic tale Olalla (1885). In the nineteenth century, there was a certain centripetal tendency in the Gothic, as the horrors moved progressively from the remote past to the present day and from the European periphery to the metropolitan centre. This is the path of Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, moving from the very edge of Europe, where Transylvania has repeatedly switched between Christian and Ottoman empires over the centuries, into England, relentlessly burrowing towards the heart from Yorkshire, then the eastern limits of London, to fi nally be tracked down in Piccadilly in a house a mere stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, the centre of empire. Order returns as the Count is chased back along this inward trajectory to his proper place on the margin to be exterminated there. The menacing irruption of the colonial periphery in the centre was a typical late Victorian Gothic trope. It is what Sherlock Holmes often defends the metropolis against, whether from savage pygmy assassins in The Sign of Four (1890) or the poisonous exotic snakes of India slithering through the home counties in The Speckled Band (1892). Sax Rohmer, who began writing in 1903, made a career from the mechanical reiteration of Eastern threats, Britain repeatedly saved from disaster at the hands of the dastardly Fu Manchu (a fi gure of aggressive Eastern modernisation) by the derring-do of Nyland Smith. Yet the Gothic does not just register the underside of the centripetal effects of cosmopolitan urbanisation. The Gothic experiences a centrifugal dispersal as well – and again supplies ample evidence that genre fi ction offers the means to grasp a kind of planetary, even cosmic, consciousness of late nineteenth century transformation. Rudyard Kipling became the laureate of the British empire but he was a restless Anglo-Indian migrant whose brief years in London after the sensational success of

684 — Scientific romance, fantasy and the supernatural —

Plain Tales from the Hills (1889) were very unhappy – and he moved on to live in America, South Africa and elsewhere. His earliest tales from India, often fi rst published in newspaper columns mixed in with local news, were received as communications from an utterly unknown territory, at and beyond the limits of the administered empire. ‘If you go straight away from Levées and Government House Lists, past Trades’ Balls – far beyond everything and everybody you ever knew in your respectable life – you cross, in time, the Borderline where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black sets in . . . One of these days, this people . . . will turn out a writer or a poet; and then we shall know how they live and what they feel. In the meantime, any stories about them cannot be absolutely correct in fact or inference’ (Kipling 1987, p. 91). Intelligence of native and colonial life was scanty and sometimes tended towards the fantastical. In Kipling’s tales, the supernatural becomes a way of articulating the oddness of encounters at the very limits of the colonial knowledge. They show how identity in Kipling is ‘created by faith and superstition, by psychic and paranormal experience, by trauma’ (Kemp 1988, p. 2). Kipling may have mocked the superstitious beliefs of Indian natives in stories like ‘The House of Suddhoo’ (1886), or demystifi ed spectral hauntings by revealing the plain facts of murder as in ‘The Return of Imray’ (1891), but just as often these tales trade in a currency of supernatural understanding. ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’ (1887) details how a new arrival in India has to abandon his rigid scientifi c positivism and rationalism to grasp the inexplicable of the colonial encounter in India. Strickland, Kipling’s British agent working undercover far beyond the palisades of white settlements and outposts, has to learn to fl ex with native beliefs, unmanning himself in the story of torture and supernatural regression ‘The Mark of the Beast’ (1890). These whispered tales are typical of the colonial Gothic form, stories traded around the campfi re in utterly alien territory. Rosa Campbell Praed’s Australian tale ‘The Bunyip’ (1891), for instance, absorbs and reconfi rms something of the Aboriginal belief in the chimeric creature that haunts lagoons with melancholy cries that perhaps echo the last gasps of the souls of captured settler children. A primal sense of dread at the vast wilderness and semi-mythic presences also typifi es ’s tales that derive from his failed experience as a farmer in Canada in the 1890s: ‘The Wendigo’ (1910) is his classic appropriation of a fi gure from Algonquian native culture. Blackwood was another global wanderer, somewhat uneasy in England, who generated metaphysical dread from the landscapes of the Black Forest, the deserts of Egypt or the Canadian wilderness. The outpourings of colonial Gothic continued from prolifi c authors like the Australian Guy Boothby or South African adventurer Bertram Mitford. Along with Conrad’s African horrors and the degenerative collapse in the South Pacifi c explored in Stevenson’s very late works like The Ebb Tide (1894), the Gothic shaded the map of the globe with cross- hatchings that darkly shadowed the bluff jingoistic talk of Greater Britain and the forward policy. In Kipling’s ‘At the End of the Passage’ (1890), the intolerable solitude of being alone in the last outposts of administered empire also turns resolutely metaphysical. At the very edge of the known world, stoical men crumble under the immense psychological pressure. They are haunted with thoughts of self-destruction: what they see at the end of the passage is a blankness that refl ects back only their own

685 — Roger Luckhurst — empty shells. These moments of revelation of a meaningless void that hides behind appearances is the quintessence of modern horror. Where Kipling manifested it on the edge of empire, the American author H. P. Lovecraft raised the stakes to a cosmic level. His doomed narrators travel to the edges of the known world: lost Pacifi c islands, inaccessible zones of the Antarctic or the measureless caverns beneath New England. What they fi nd opens up horrifying aeons of cosmic time. Lovecraft’s fi ction was written in accord with his philosophy of indifferentism. To Lovecraft, human meanings and values are worthless in terms of the ‘vast cosmos-at-large.’ As he said in a letter in 1927: ‘When we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our humanity – and terrestrialism at the threshold’ (Lovecraft 1968, p. 150). Lovecraft begins his most famous short story, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1926) in this vein: ‘We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infi nity . . . but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or fl ee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age’ (Lovecraft 2013, p. 24). Modern horror delivers what John Clute calls the horror of vastation – a moment of unveiling in which one comes ‘to experience the malice of the made or revealed cosmos’ (Clute 2006, p. 148). Lovecraft’s materialism and atheism were a response to the philosophical crisis wrought by the extensiveness of biological time and astronomical space. His response was also a conservative political one, convinced of a racial catastrophe in America, where strong Nordic settler blood was being diluted by indiscriminate immigration. In his embrace of the thesis of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), Lovecraft’s ideas were directly tied back to the popular degeneration theories and his models for fi ction were writers like , whose degenerationist horror fi ctions of the 1890s (such as The Great God Pan from 1894) scandalised good taste. For Lovecraft, the Gothic was an explicitly Nordic racial register of the crisis of modernity. Fantasy responded to the same conditions, but instead of the secular horrors of Lovecraft it often restated the tenuous possibility of Christian redemption. The chance of transcendence takes one out of the fallen temporal order of the modern. There is a line that leads directly from George MacDonald’s Victorian via C. S. Lewis to J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic of vanished shires, The Lord of the Rings. MacDonald was considered too unorthodox by his Scottish Presbyterian congrega- tion and resigned, becoming the author of peculiar fantasies that, between Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895), never quite comfortably mapped plots onto Christian nar- ratives, as if the machinery of was broken. Perhaps this brokenness was what allowed Oscar Wilde to use the conventions of the tale so subversively in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). Andrew Lang’s project to resituate fairy tales in his famous anthologies of the 1890s within the frame of comparative reli- gion and ethnography did not help. Yet Tolkien continued to regard fantasy on a Christian model of recovery, escape and consolation. Fantasy resisted the ‘dyscatas- trophe of sorrow and failure,’ he said, to provide instead a Christian eucatastrophe, ‘a fl eeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world’ (Tolkien 1964, p. 68). Yet genres, particularly in the process of emergence, are never stable or reducible to a single reading. Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (penned by another deeply unorthodox

686 — Scientific romance, fantasy and the supernatural —

Victorian priest) generate another tradition of fantasy interested less in the stability of waning cosmogonies than in the sly ‘subversions of social norms’ (Mendlesohn and James 2009, p. 20). A focus on the globality of this cluster of genres offers a perspective that lifts into view fi gures previously rendered elusive or marginal. A writer like Lafcadio Hearn was perhaps sliding towards obscurity, but his perpetual roving across the world and across fantastical genres now makes him look like an exemplary fi gure on which to end. Lafcadio Hearn was born to an Irish father and Greek mother on the Greek island of Lefkada in 1850 and educated in Ireland, England and France before travelling to Cincinnati and taking up journalism. He was at once a reporter of ‘lowlife’ poverty row and a translator of the French Decadents Théophile Gautier and Pierre Loti. He was fi red from his fi rst post for his marriage to a mixed race woman of Irish and African descent, a union not legally recognised in Ohio. It was part of a pattern of a horror of bourgeois convention and an embrace of the bohemian. In 1877, he moved to New Orleans and published carefully honed impressionistic sketches in the press – later collected under the title Fantastics and Other Fancies. To some, Hearn was the writer who invented the nostalgia for a passing French Creole exotic culture on which New Orleans has been sold to tourists ever since – Hearn even published a cookbook of Creole recipes (see Starr’s introduction to Hearn 2001). His reports included an account of the life and death of Bayou John under the melancholy title ‘The Last of the Voudous’, a man who had been born in Senegal, kidnapped by Spanish slavers, freed in Cuba, and become an overseer of workers on plantations outside New Orleans owing to his ‘peculiar occult infl uence’ (Hearn 2009, p. 78), a talent later translated into voodoo medicine. Such a fi gure represented a culture, Hearn thought, that was passing away and needed documenting before it completely disappeared. Hearn also became interested in collecting and legends and retelling them in Gothic mode in ornate Decadent prose. His fi rst commercial work, Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (1884) self-consciously sifted folkloric tales from Egyptian, Finnish, Arabic, Polynesian and Japanese traditions. In the preface to Some Chinese Ghosts (1885) he proclaimed he ‘sought especially for weird beauty’ in his loose adaptations (Hearn 2009, p. 9). His Eastern bug crested with the craze for ‘Japonais’ art and design, but it was properly kick-started, typically enough, by his ‘encounter’ with Japan at the New Orleans World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884. This was initially unashamed Eastern exoticism, an Orientalism little disturbed by actual knowledge, but with Hearn it would develop into a much deeper engagement. Hearn had announced his literary manifesto in a letter to a friend in 1884: ‘I have pledged me to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous’ (cited Rothman 2008, p. 265). This search consequently took Hearn into the tropics, another zone of projective Western fancy, on a journey through the Caribbean islands. Hearn composed the travel narrative Two Years in the French West Indies (1889), principally focused on the island of Martinique, where he positively embraced the complex mix of races (rejecting white and black ‘purity’ with equal disdain). The book is a mix of impressionistic writing marked by a strong erotic charge when describing native bodies, and the collation of local legends and

687 — Roger Luckhurst — superstitions less for ethnographic accuracy than weird and uncanny effect. He also wrote the novel Youma (1890), in which the nostalgia for plantation culture before the uprising of slaves in 1848 was plainly preferred to the sunken state of the modern Caribbean. This collapse Hearn blamed on the emancipation of the blacks rather than white abandonment once the economics of expropriation through slavery ended. On return to New York, Hearn contemplated the abyss of conventional newspaper reporting in a city whose brash modernity horrifi ed him, and he promptly took a commission from Harper’s Magazine to report on Japan, where he stayed for the remaining fourteen years of his life, marrying the daughter of a samurai and changing his name to Koizumi Yakumo. His Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) was a monumental 800 pages of travel, legends, speculations on the ‘inner life’ of the Japanese, and ghost stories. Weak health meant he was not able to maintain the pace of newspaper reportage at the Kobe Chronicle and he became a professor of English Literature at the Imperial University in 1896. He resigned his post when anti-foreigner restrictions began to bite in 1903. He published extensively on Japanese culture, including several collections of native ghost stories, delivered in a sparser, refl ective prose refl ecting Buddhist principles, including In Ghostly Japan (1899) and Shadowings (1899). He died in 1904. This peripatetic bohemian existence was dedicated to seeking the exotic, surfi ng the vanishing cultures of the French Louisiana and the Caribbean as the reconfi gura- tion of the global economy uprooted their social formations. He documented a similar effect in his record of Japan: as Yoshinobu Hakutani observes, one of his fi nal books, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904) was a shocked account of a newly militaristic and modernising country that shattered Hearn’s sense of a culture deferential to centuries of tradition. In many ways, his roving forms of writing matched this ungrounded trajectory around the southern and western rims of the American world. Although he was a defender of French Naturalism, that invented name for his ‘fantastics’ is a suggestive innovation for a dedicated Decadent who took the bejewelled prose of France beyond known frontiers to create a métis- sage of whimsy, wonder and weird: a kind of Gothic ethnography. Lauren Goodlad has called for a mapping of a ‘Victorian geopolitical aesthetic’ which would aim to capture ‘literature’s globality through the interplay of aesthetic expression and geohistorical process’ (Goodlad 2010, p. 404). It is easy to contend that an attention to the ‘fantastics’ of late Victorian genre fi ction already lays bare the extensive networks and routes of this globality for those willing to read it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Banerjee, A., (2012), We Modern People: and the Making of Russian Modernity, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT. Blanchard, P., N. Bancel, G. Boëtsch, E. Deroo, S. Lemaire, and C. Forsdick, (eds), (2008), Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool. Célestine, R., (1998), ‘Lafcadio Hearn’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 189: American Travel Writers, 1850–1915, ed. D. Ross and J. Schramer, Gale, Detroit, pp. 144–59. Clute, J., (2006), The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, Payseur & Schmidt, Cauheegan.

688 — Scientific romance, fantasy and the supernatural —

— (2011), ‘Fantastika in the World Storm’ in Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm, Harold Wood: Beccon, pp. 19–31. Edel, L. and G. Ray, (eds.), (1959), Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of their Friendship, University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Ferreira, R. H., (2011), The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT. Gissing, G., (1998), New Grub Street (1891), ed. J. Goode, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford. Goodlad, L., (2010), ‘Cosmopolitanism’s Actually Existing Beyond: Towards a Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic’, Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 38, pp. 399–411. Greenhalgh, P., (1988), Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs 1851–1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Haggard, H. R., (1884), Dawn, 3 vols, Hurst & Blackett, London. — (1991), She (1886), ed. D. Karlin, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford. — (2006), King Solomon’s Mines (1885), ed. D. Butts, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford. Hakutani, Y., (1989), ‘Lafcadio Hearn’, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 78: American Short Story Writers, 1880–1910, Gale, Detroit, pp. 220–26. Hearn, L., (1906), In Ghostly Japan, Kegan Paul, London. — (2001), Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. S. F. Starr, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson. — (2009), American Writings, Library of America, New York. Hinton, C. H., (1886), Scientifi c Romances, Swan Sonnenschein, London. Isaacson, N., (2013), ‘Science Fiction for the Nation: Tales of the Moon Colony and the Birth of Modern ’, , vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 33–54. Jameson, F., (2003), ‘Radical Fantasy’, Historical Materialism, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 273–80. Kemp, S., (1988), Kipling’s Hidden Narratives, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Kipling, R., (1987), Plain Tales from the Hills, ed. D. Trotter, Penguin, London. Koolhaas, R., (1994), Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Monacelli Press, New York. Landon, B., (2002), Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars, Routledge, London. Lang, A., (2000), ‘Realism and Romance’ (1886) in S. Ledger and R. Luckhurst, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880–1900, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 99–104. Lewis, A., (1997), An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago’s Loop, and the World’s Columbian Exposition, University of Illinois Press, Chicago. Lovecraft, H. P., (1968), Selected Letters 1925–29, ed. A. Derleth and D. Wandrei, Arkham House, Sauk City. — (2013), The Classic Horror Stories, ed. R. Luckhurst, Oxford, New York. Luckhurst, R., (2005), Science Fiction, Polity, Cambridge. — (2012), ‘Laboratories for Global Space-Time: Science-Fictionality and the World’s Fairs, 1851–1939’, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 385–400. Marx, K. and F. Engels, (1998), The Communist Manifesto (1848), Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford. Mendlesohn, F. and E. James, (2009), A Short , Middlesex University Press, London. Millin, S. G., (1933), Rhodes, Chatto and Windus, London. Rieder, J., (2008), Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, Wesleyan University Press, Middleton, CT. Rothman, A., (2008), ‘Lafcadio Hearn in New Orleans and the Caribbean’, Atlantic Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 265–83.

689 — Roger Luckhurst —

Said, E., (1994), Culture and Imperialism, new ed., Vintage, London. Sconce, J., (2000), Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Duke University Press, Durham. Stoker, B., (2009), Dracula (1897), ed. R. Luckhurst, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford. Suvin, D., (1979), Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, Yale University Press, New Haven. Tatsumi, T., (2008), ‘Japanese and Asian Science Fiction’ in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. D. Seed, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 323–36. Tolkien, J. R. R., (1964), Tree and Leaf, Houghton Miffl in, Boston. Turner, F. J. (1962), The Signifi cance of the Frontier in American History, Holt, New York. Verne, J., (1998), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), ed. W. Butcher, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford. Wells, H. G., (1906), The Future of America: A Search After Realities, George Bell, London. — (1993), The War of the Worlds (1898), Everyman, London. — (1998), The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, ed. D. Smith, 4 vols, Pickering and Chatto, London. Wu, Y., (2013), ‘“Great Wall Planet”: Introducing Chinese Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 1–14. Young, G. M., (2012), The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Federov and His Followers, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

690

Top View