The consequence of all this was that in the years immediately following Wells’s death, the future was effectively discovered all over again in Britain. The dissolution of British scientific romance into American science fiction was eventually to bring about a fruitful cross-fertilization. All speculative fiction is inherently both serious and playful, but between the wars American science fiction had almost surrendered all claim to seriousness while British scientific romance was crucially inhibited by doubts about the propriety of playfulness. After 1947 speculative fiction in Britain and America began to recover a balance between seriousness and playfulness which permitted them to enter into a synergistic relationship, and this has been greatly to the benefit not only to the literature of speculation but to the flexibility and enterprise of that kind of mindfulness which is orientated towards the future and its opportunities rather than towards the past and its prohibitions.
The achievement of this balance by the best of modern speculative fiction should allow us to appreciate the element of folly in Wells’s conversion to the project of discovering an actual and inevitable future instead of a future pregnant with many and varied possibilities. We must remember, though, that such a project is not as entirely ridiculous as fiercer critics than I have made it out to be.
The most scathing of all demolitions of the futurological project actually appeared before Wells delivered his lecture on the discovery of the future: it is to be found in the opening chapter of G. K. Chesterton’s futuristic fantasy The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), which suggests that history is engaged in a never-ending game of “Cheat the Prophet,” perversely determined to defy our anticipations with arbitrary shifts. This is untrue. The whole basis of rational thought—the power which makes us human—is our ability to anticipate the probable outcomes of different actions, and thus to choose between them.
What Wells says about the kind of mindfulness which is orientated toward the future is well worth attending to, and he is quite right to suggest that if we insist on being mindful of the future only in a narrow and personal sense then we are guilty of a great cowardice and a great irresponsibility. The fact that we cannot discover by inference a future history which is already mapped out for us does not mean that we should be in any way less mindful of the future, nor does it mean that we have a license to play carelessly with whatever fantastic future scenarios we can make plausible.
* * * *
It is good that many others followed where H. G. Wells led—and it is good that they followed up on both his discoveries of the future, eventually bringing them back together again, reuniting them in the modern genre of post-World War II science fiction. This genre—whose foundations Wells laid twice over—has blossomed into a vast industry, whose imagery has become an intrinsic element of modern popular culture. Dozens of invisible men have followed where the luckles Griffin led; hundreds of ambitious scientists have set out as Dr. Moreau did to remake and remould the flesh which is our natural heritage; thousands of alien invaders have fallen upon the earth like Wells’s Martians from the great wilderness of space; tens of thousands of astronauts have set forth like Bedford and Cavor into that same wilderness in search of alien landscapes and alien societies.
H. G. Wells was one of the first men fully to appreciate that if we are careful enough in our reasoning, and bold enough in our vision, we may be able to foresee at least some of the possibilities and threats which lie in wait for us as technology advances and the world changes. Although the actual shape of things to come is yet to be determined by the combined effects of our ambitions, our actions and our discoveries, and cannot possibly be determined as would-be prophets hope to determine it, the investigation of its myriad its possibilities remains an intellectually worthwhile activity. It also remains an exciting activity, which carries with it a very special thrill. That is why Wells’s scientific romances are entitled to be considered highly significant texts—perhaps more significant than anything else he wrote. By their example, they helped to promote a new way of looking at the world, and a new way of thinking about the world.
The invention of a time machine was a bold stroke of the literary imagination. Wells knew perfectly well, of course, that the machine was purely and simply a literary device, incapable of realization, just as he knew perfectly well that an invisible man would be blind (because light which passed straight through him would be unable to excite the retinas of his eyes). He also knew, however, that the real “time machine” was the human imagination itself, and that if one had to invoke the image of a machine in order to make the products of the imagination seem more solidly dependable than “mere dreams,” such an invocation was entirely justified.
The possible futures mapped out by the time machine of the imagination require constant revision and updating to take in our real discoveries, but it is vitally important in a world like ours that we never lose sight of them. It is far more useful to know what might happen than what must happen, because knowing all the things which might happen offers us a chance to choose which of those things we want to happen, and which ones we desperately want to avoid. It is, in fact, more important to know about the things which we definitely do not want to happen, but which might if we cannot take steps avoid them, than it is to know about the things which we would quite like to happen. We must first of all avoid destroying ourselves, or allowing ourselves to be destroyed; only when we have done that can we think sensibly about making the world better. This is why so many of the futures glimpsed through the time machine of the imagination are horrible and frightening; their purpose is to frighten us into taking care that we will not let such futures sneak up on us while we are not paying attention.
In the pages of modern science fiction stories, the time machine of the imagination is now operated simultaneously by thousands of writers working in dozens of different languages. It has to be, because as time goes by the pace of change speeds up, and many more possibilities come into view: many more dangers and many more threats, but also many more opportunities. We already know, a mere hundred years after Wells wrote his classic essay, that the future his time traveller saw is a mere phantom which cannot come true. We now know the secrets of the genetic code, and we have every reason to suppose that we will become masters of our own future evolution, and of the evolution of all life on earth.
The great adventure in which our children, and our children’s children, will take part, is greater than anything H. G. Wells could imagine; but because he showed us the way to do it, we can imagine it, and we should certainly try as hard as we can to foresee all of its possibilities, good and bad. The future is yet to be made as well as discovered, by ourselves, our children and our children’s children. Whatever power of choice we can exercise will depend on the extent and on the cleverness of our mindfulness. For this reason, we must do everything that actually is within our power to do what Wells asked of us, and discover what we can of the futures which are presently vying to be made by the collaborative decisions of contemporary men and women.
13Wells, H. G. The Discovery of the Future. London: Unwin, 1902, p. 1-3.
14Wells, H. G. The Shape of Things to Come. London: Hutchinson, 1933, p. 428.
15Bell, Neil. The Seventh Bowl. 2nd ed. London, Collins, 1934, p. 67-68. (The first edition was issued under the pseudonym “Miles”.)
16Wright, S. Fowler. Power. London: Jarrolds, 1933, p. 25.
17Houghton, Claude. This Was Ivor Trent. London: Heinemann, 1935, p.321-323.
18Stapledon, Olaf. Star Maker. London: Methuen, 1937, p. 333.
19Wells, H. G. Mind at the End of Its Tether. London: Heinemann, 1945, p. v.
20Ibid., p. 17-19.
THE MANY RETURNS OF DRACULA
The years leading up to the end of the last century, which brought the Victorian era to a close, produced two literary characters whose names have become more famous than any othe
rs and whose careers have extended over the intervening hundred years, quite unaffected by the fact that their creators killed them off and then died themselves.
One of these characters was a perfect hero for his times: a master of deductive reasoning who applied his genius to the unravelling of mysteries and the frustration of evil-doers. The other was an archetype of evil who, although he seemed at first glance to be an anachronism left over from an earlier time, might better be regarded as the perfect incarnation of a quintessentially Victorian paranoia. It is significant, however, that when these polar opposites were eventually brought together in one of the multitudinous exercises in pastiche which extended their adventures, they did not meet as enemies but as collaborators—and the scrupulous author of their joint enterprise took great care to point out that they were so similar in their physical descriptions as to be able to pass for close relatives. The two characters are, of course, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, and the pastiche in question is The Holmes-Dracula File (1978) by Fred Saberhagen.
Unlike Holmes, who featured in four novels and dozens of short stories by his original creator, Dracula was initially featured in a single novel, published in 1897 (although a chapter dropped from the novel, in which the Count does not actually appear, was later published separately as “Dracula’s Guest”). Holmes had the customary elasticity of a hero: he could always be provided with yet another challenge over which he would naturally triumph, and the record of his exploits was inherently endless. Dracula was not in such a fortunate position, because the usual expectation is that a plot should conclude with the villain’s destruction; the extension of his adventures was bound to be a much more problematic business—but where there’s a will there’s a way, and in this particular case the will was determined by Dracula’s success in Hollywood. Interested filmmakers had no difficulty at all in finding material for a multitude of Sherlock Holmes films, but they were forced to handle Dracula’s cinematic career very differently. Necessity proved, as usual, to be the mother of improvization, and they did what they had to do in their own inimitable fashion.
There are, of course, several different cinema versions of Dracula itself. The four most important are F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1923), starring Max Schreck; Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi; Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (1958), starring Christopher Lee; and Francis Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993), starring Gary Oldman. All of these films, like the book, end with Dracula’s destruction. Film-makers were not slow to notice, however, that the manner of his destruction already had an escape-clause built in. Because the count was never really alive it was not inconceivable—nor did it seem particularly unsporting—that he might be restored to “undeath” by some arbitrary imaginative flourish, so that he might be destroyed all over again (and again, and again, and again…). Then again, given his nature and modus operandi he could easily be credited with a large family of literal and figurative blood relations, among whom were ultimately to be numbered Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Son of Dracula (1943), Brides of Dracula (1960), Countess Dracula (1970), and Dracula’s Widow (1989), not to mention Blacula (1972) and Dracula’s Dog (1978; aka Zoltan—Hound of Dracula).
Not unnaturally, this promiscuous artistic license quickly came to seem silly, and the ritualistic repetition of Dracula’s rebirth and redestruction contributed in no small measure to the fact that many of his later manifestations reduced the count to a kind of camp joke (a joke which reached its feeblest levels of parody in The Munsters and Sesame Street). Sufficient charisma was attached to the role to secure Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee lifelong fame, but that same charisma made it terribly difficult for either of them to play any other character with authority—and although both actors played the part absolutely straight, with considerable conviction, they found themselves damned nevertheless by the camp jokiness associated with other manifestations of the character.
In spite of his cinematic debasement, however, the character of Dracula has retained an earnest aspect. Later users of the figure have frequently attempted to cut through the veils of ludicrousness which have come to enshroud it, in order to rescue the emotional charge which still resides there. The incessant revitalization of Dracula is not, therefore, merely a matter of narrative convenience; it appears that the character of Dracula is strong enough to withstand any amount of ham-fisted treatment and not be irreversibly diminished. For this reason, Dracula continues to weather and transcend the crudity and caricature of much modern treatment, just as easily as he survived the slightly ham-fisted treatment he received from his original creator.
* * * *
As with the work with which it is so frequently coupled in the popular imagination, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the seed of Dracula was sown by a dream. While he was alive Bram Stoker referred to this dream rather vaguely as a vision of a “King-Vampire” rising from his grave, and dismissively attributed it to the effect of having dined too well on dressed crab. His extensive working notes, however, make it clear that the scene in the book which is derived from the initial dream—and was the first to be written down—is that which concludes Chapter III. Here, the appearance of the lordly male vampire is a climactic moment, which saves Jonathan Harker, in the nick of time, from the clutches of three female vampires. It is the most intensely erotic passage in the whole book—and not for lack of competition.
This revelation has, of course, been a boon to critics fond of dream-interpretation, some of whom have gone so far as to declare that Stoker’s dream must have been a guilty transfiguration of an actual visit to a brothel, probably reflecting his awareness of the fact that some such visit had resulted in his infection with syphilis. This interpretation may be too fanciful (the conjecture that Stoker had syphilis is unsubstantiated by any hard evidence, although adherents of Freudian theory tend to think that the subject-matter and fevered manner of his last novel, The Lair of the White Worm, are proof enough) but there seems little doubt that the dream which Stoker had was powerfully erotic. It is understandable that he should have felt sufficiently uncomfortable about this to make light of it, but it is also understandable that he should attempt to preserve the experience, and expand upon it, in the relatively safe medium of fiction—in which a careful transmutation of the imagery could serve the censorial purpose that could only be served in conversation by omission.
The manner in which the dream-seed of Dracula is elaborated into a full-blown plot is, of course, rather evasive—the three female vampires who feature in this scene do not appear again until they are brusquely staked at the end—but its eroticism is nevertheless conserved. The role which the “King-Vampire” takes on in the novel is that of an evil force aimed directly at the sexual impulses of the other female characters in the book: Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray (who becomes Mina Harker in the course of the plot, but is not thereby immunized against the corruptive seductions of Dracula). The straightforwardly brutal threat which Dracula poses to the male members of the cast is a poor generator of horror by comparison with the threat he poses to the women they adore. The true horror is, of course, that he does not threaten them with death (which becomes, in the context of the plot, a merciful release devoutly to be wished) but with a metamorphic fate literally and metaphorically worse than death. The exact nature of this metamorphosis is very precisely described in Chapter XVI, in which the heroes confront the undead Lucy:
The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness…eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew…her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile.…21
In brief, what has happened is that Dracula’s “kiss” (in Stoker, vampires do not bite, they kiss) has transformed Lucy from the Victorian ideal of womanhood into a sexual predator redolent with whorish glamour. The fact that his subsequent attacks on Mina continue in spite of her marriage adds a further dimension of horror to thi
s awful thought.
At this almost-explicit level of symbolism, the text of the novel becomes an agonized rhapsody on the subject of Victorian ideas of sexuality—and Dracula’s emergence from the Gothic mists becomes a horror-stricken recognition of the fact that Victorian morality, no matter how strict or how strenuous its denials might be, could not in the end abolish or contain the reality of female sexuality. Given this, it is hardly surprising that Dracula could not long be forced to remain in the grave before getting up again (and again, and again, and again…).
* * * *
Bram Stoker researched the folkloristic background of Dracula for seven years, and clearly took the business of nurturing and developing his dream-seed very seriously indeed—but the dream was not the actual point of origin of the project. Like the dream which gave impetus to Mary Shelley’s novel, Stoker’s nightmare was as much a consequence of his interest in vampirism as a cause of it. The roots of the project went back a long way.
Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature Page 12