The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Read online

  But the true roots of that SF development which Gernsback consolidated under the name “science fiction” can be traced even earlier than the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

  It would be fair to say that as soon as there was a special and distinctive modern Western mode of thought, there was a need and a potential for SF as a special and distinctive form of myth. And all of that which has happened up to Gernsback’s time and since has been the gradual unfolding and fulfillment of that potential and that need.

  The new myth of SF became necessary when a new worldview was adopted by the West during the Seventeenth Century. This worldview rejected the very basis of traditional conceptions of transcendence.

  The transcendent symbols of ancient myth—the magical powers, supernatural beings, and otherworldly realms—were all grounded in a fundamental belief in the existence of spirit, as distinct from matter. It was the given opinion of all traditional thought that there was a realm of spirit as well as a realm of matter with connections between the two. But it was spirit that was the more powerful and enduring, and closer to the true origin of things.

  During the Seventeenth Century in the West, there was a great revolution of thought, a rebellion against spirit and the worldly order of kings and prelates that justified itself by appeal to the invisible. Men of a new scientific cast of mind appeared, concerned with objective examination of the world around them, men like Francis Bacon and Johannes Kepler, Galileo and Descartes. As the result of their writings and investigations, a new philosophy of rational materialism came to be adopted. In the view of this new Western philosophy, all that could not be proved, measured, or logically argued from material principles was subject to doubt.

  The new scientific philosophy did not make its way easily or lightly. In 1600, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned by the Inquisition for asserting, among other things, the existence of a multiplicity of worlds beyond our Earth. Other adherents of the new mode of thought were silenced, like Galileo, or imprisoned for years, like Tommaso Campanella. Nonetheless, through the Seventeenth Century, the attention of the West moved gradually but inexorably away from the invisible world of spirit and toward the study and manipulation of matter.

  The concept of spirit was not immediately and totally discarded, but a sharp separation was made between spirit and matter. Two elements of spirit were still conceded, even by the most radical thinkers—God and the human soul. God was a cosmic clockmaker who, some long whiles past, had set the great machinery of the universe in motion, withdrawing discreetly to let it tick and whir its way to eternity. As for the human soul—one brave and tattered shred of spirit in a universe otherwise made of dead matter—why, that was the hope and promise of human specialness and purpose, and could not easily be surrendered. But the new prevailing materialistic philosophy of the West would not allow that God or the soul had any direct influence on the everyday cause-and-effect world.

  An appropriate date to mark the emergence of scientific rationalism as the leading mode of Western thought and culture is the year 1685. It is possible to argue that the old worldview still prevailed prior to that time. But after that year, we can say that the balance of opinion in Western society was in favor of rational materialism.

  We can see our point illustrated in two facts. The year 1685 was when the last execution for witchcraft in England took place. Also in England in 1685, Isaac Newton arrived at the Universal Law of Gravitation. In both cases, the passing of the old belief in the realm of spirit is indicated. After this, spirit-based witchcraft, for centuries the bugaboo of Western man, would no longer be given serious credence by leaders of opinion—the men who make and enforce the law. At the same time, a new rule of rational physics had proclaimed the high heavens—formerly considered to be a part of the spirit realm—to be subject to the same mechanisms that govern the motion of bodies on Earth.

  The shift from one worldview to the other is visible in the imaginative literature of the Seventeenth Century. In the early years of the Seventeenth Century, in Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest, Shakespeare might write of witches, ghosts and magic. Even as late as the 1660s and 1670s, in Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Milton and John Bunyan could still write with the old seriousness of Hell and Heaven. By the 1690s, this was no longer possible. The transcendent symbols of traditional mythic literature could no longer be considered plausible. As things of the spirit, they had no part in a material world.

  By the turn of the century, the old wonders and marvels could only appear as the stuff of simple entertainments, such as the literary fairytales like “Cinderella” and “Beauty and the Beast” that were the delight of the French court during the Age of Reason. One of these, “Princess Rosette” by Madame d’Aulnoy, who died in 1705, may serve as an example of the degree to which even fairytales were affected by the change in worldview. The one fantastic element in this story is the troop of fairies who come to the princess’s christening. But these once clearly transcendent beings apparently live in the vicinity of the court rather than in their own spirit realm of Faerie. And instead of giving the child traditional magical gifts—we are told “they had left their book of magic at home”4—their role is reduced to giving well-intentioned but incomplete and misleading advice.

  The new scientific doubt of the Seventeenth Century was a powerful weapon, a glittering inevitable razor. One slash—and all that was not subject to measurement, to proof or to rational argument was cut away!

  A great simplification was undergone in the West. Long-standing political arrangements, the power of religion, the social order itself—all these were eventually to be altered by the change in belief. Much was gained and much was lost in the shift of worldview.

  On the one hand, in the West, the great static accumulated weight of the invisible spirit realm was shrugged off. Popular revolutions of a kind previously unthinkable took place in England in 1642 and 1688 and in France in 1789. Kings with a right to rule that had been given to them by God were turned into mere mortal men who might be executed or sent into exile. The Roman Catholic church, which had held the power and dignity of a state for more than a thousand years, was reduced to wielding a merely theoretical authority.

  The superstitions of the ages were discarded overnight. There was a great release of pent-up energy. Everything was open to examination; nothing was free from doubt. Armed with his newly invented weapons and machines, his science and skepticism, Western man set off to conquer the whole world.

  On the other hand, what was sacrificed was also great: all traditional wisdom, morality, and knowledge based in spirit. Western man, as he launched himself into the world-at-large, was a brainy toolmaker with no morals, out for the main chance, practical, powerful and unscrupulous.

  There have always been those in the West who have regretted the choice that was made. For as long as the new ways have been adopted, there have been nostalgists who have longed for the secure order of the old ways, who have wished again for the comfort of mother church and the natural order of feudal society.

  But, of course, there is no going back. We are now three hundred years down this particular road. The existential decision to abandon the old given spiritual authority has been made, and it is compelling. Whether we like it or not, we in the West are condemned to examine everything for ourselves and to accept responsibility for the decisions that we make. We were set on this road long ago and we cannot resist it now. We can only follow it out to the end and see where it leads, remembering as we do that what far too often has been taken by Western man as a right to license in the absence of moral rule, first began as the existential moral decision to subject all aspects of life to scientific scrutiny.

  Among that which was discarded when Western man set out on his special path was traditional myth with its spirit-based transcendent symbology. The appearance and development of SF can be understood as the gradual re-establishment of myth in the Western world, starting from first principles, and phrasing itself in a new, deliberat
ely “non-spiritual” symbolic vocabulary. From 1685 until the time of Gernsback and his consolidation of the genre, SF developed almost subliminally, slowly working out those basic arguments that would permit transcendent powers, beings and realms to be considered plausible within the special terms and standards of Western rationality and materialism.

  But the very first step that was taken by SF—the new myth—was a fall. Hamlet and Paradise Lost, which might be named as final works written within the old imaginative order, are high literature. The Age of Reason can boast no imaginative work of comparable stature.

  The early Eighteenth Century is a mythic desert. There is very little imaginative literature of any kind from this period, as though without recourse to the traditional symbols, the mythic faculty was stunned into silence. What little imaginative work there was, like Gulliver’s Travels, can boast only such limited wonders as dwarfs and giants and talking horses employed for purposes of satire. Next to examples of the old myth like The Odyssey or Beowulf, The Divine Comedy or Doctor Faustus, a story like Gulliver’s Travels must seem an imaginative, moral and mythic reduction.

  The nearest thing to a new contemporary myth that the period could offer was the utopian story. Though a form of fiction, utopian stories primarily consisted of static and didactic descriptions of the workings of the Perfected Society. This superior mode of living, conceived as the outward expression of man’s God-given rational soul, was the only transcendence this form of imaginative literature had to offer.

  In the absence of high mythic literature—epic, romance and tragedy—the new major literary form of the Eighteenth Century was the mimetic novel of social and sexual intrigue, the reflection of the mundane, materialistic middle-class world that was beginning to emerge. One reason that SF developed in comparative obscurity from the beginning of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment to Gernsback’s time was that imaginative literature in general was completely overshadowed by the successes of the mimetic novel as exemplified by Fielding and Austen, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Twain. Beside fictions about the real factual world of materiality, the new SF seemed frivolous stuff, merely fanciful.

  And SF was also overshadowed by the imaginative literature of former times, which was still held in high regard, even though it was no longer believed in. Next to ancient myth—or even next to comparatively graceless contemporary imitations or retellings of ancient myth—the new SF seemed trivial.

  Trivial and frivolous—those were the beginnings from which science fiction grew. SF before Gernsback, and even since, has very often been trivial and frivolous—that is, apparently playful and unserious. Deliberately courting these qualities has been a survival strategy for SF in its times of unpopularity, a way of attracting an audience craving to be entertained, and even a deliberate artistic method. But underneath this protective disguise of playful unseriousness, throughout its history SF has been continuously engaged in the very serious business of reestablishing transcendence in all its guises, and the reinvention of high myth.

  The state of the invisible and nonexistent SF of the Eighteenth Century—its uncertainty, its limitation, its special problems and the first tentative steps toward their solution—is best illustrated by one novel published nearly eighty years into the rational era: The Castle of Otranto (1764), by Sir Horace Walpole. What is significant about The Castle of Otranto insofar as SF is concerned is that it was the first attempt to reshape traditional mythic material into a form acceptable to the modern Western sensibility.

  The author of The Castle of Otranto, Sir Horace Walpole, was the youngest child of a British prime minister. Walpole was himself a member of Parliament, an extreme political liberal, but is better remembered as a writer of letters and as an eccentric. Walpole was a nostalgist, an antiquarian, one of those who long for the bygone days and ways. In 1753, he began the physical conversion of his country villa, Strawberry Hill, into a little Gothic castle, with details copied out of one book and another. The haunted medieval castle described in The Castle of Otranto is Strawberry Hill combined with Trinity College, Cambridge, and written large.

  The Castle of Otranto is Walpole’s only novel, although he wrote one play and a number of other books, including a defense of Richard III. Like various SF stories in other eras, The Castle of Otranto came to its author in a dream, and then gripped him utterly. In 1765, the year after it was written, Walpole described its genesis in a letter to a friend:

  I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it—add that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics. In short I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o’clock, till half an hour after one in the morning, when my hands and fingers were so weary, that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a paragraph.5

  To another of his correspondents, Walpole wrote:

  I gave reign to my imagination; visions and passions choked me. I wrote it in spite of rules, critics, and philosophers; it seems to me the better for that. I am even persuaded that in the future, when taste will be restored to the place now occupied by philosophy, my poor Castle will find admirers.6

  The Castle of Otranto tells the story of the overthrow of a tyrant prince in an Italian state during the time of the Crusades, and the restoration of the rightful line in the person of a seeming peasant boy of noble bearing. The instrument of this turnabout is the vengeful ghost of the boy’s ancestor, Alfonso, poisoned in the Holy Land.

  At the outset of the story, the ghost appears as “an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionate quantity of black feathers,”7 and dashes the son of the tyrant prince to bits. At the end, he appears again, after various hauntings, after melodrama and murder, and identifies the rightful heir:

  A clap of thunder at that instant shook the castle to its foundations; the earth rocked, and the clank of more than mortal armour was heard behind. . . . The walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the centre of the ruins. Behold in Theodore, the true heir of Alfonso! said the vision: and having pronounced these words, accompanied by a clap of thunder, it ascended solemnly towards heaven, where the clouds parting asunder, the form of saint Nicholas was seen; and receiving Alfonso’s shade, they were soon wrapt from mortal eyes in a blaze of glory.8

  In today’s terms, we might call The Castle of Otranto a fantasy in a historical setting. The most obvious model for this novel is the plays of Shakespeare, particularly Macbeth and Hamlet. But Walpole, writing his Gothic fantasy in an era of rules, critics, and philosophers, “which wants only cold reason,”9 was not at all certain beforehand what reception his strange dream-begotten story would arouse in a skeptical modern public. He was so uncertain that he took great pains to hide his identity and the true time and place of the book’s origin.

  He hid himself, and then hid himself again. The title page of the first edition of The Castle of Otranto declared that it was translated by William Marshal, Gentleman, from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto.

  Walpole did his best to further muddy the waters in a preface written in his persona of Marshal-the-translator. He began by claiming, “The following work was found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529.”10

  Walpole went on to suggest that the story might have been written
at the time it was supposed to happen—that is, at some time roughly between 1095 and 1243. But then again, from the names of the servants, perhaps it was written rather nearer in time and place to its original appearance in print. And as for the good Canon Onuphrio Muralto—not mentioned by name in the preface—“Marshal” describes him conjecturally as someone who might have been “an artful priest”11 who used his abilities as an author to enslave vulgar minds and confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions.

  But it was not enough that Walpole attempted to slide his story off on an irresponsible person in some former time and place. As Marshal, he went on in his preface to apologize at length for the marvels in his story:

  The solution of the author’s motives is however offered as a mere conjecture. Whatever his motives were, or whatever effects the execution of them might have, his work can only be laid before the public at present as a matter of entertainment. Even as such, some apology for it is necessary. Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances. That was not the case when our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself, but must represent his actors as believing them.

  If this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal. Allow the possibilities of the facts, and all the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situation.12