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

by Alexei Panshin

  Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. . . . I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.16

  It was Lord Byron who proposed to the party that each of them should write a ghost story. Byron and Shelley both set to the job confidently, though neither of them did more than turn out fragments. Byron’s physician, Dr. John Polidori, also set out to write a story, and in fact did complete one. It was entitled The Vampyre and was published in 1819 with a preface and afterword by Byron.

  Mary included herself in the competition. Shelley had been pressuring Mary to follow the example of her parents and write, and she had spent her childhood in composing fanciful stories for her own amusement. She volunteered that she, too, would write a story. At first, however, she could not think of one. As she remembered in 1831:

  I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. . . . Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.17

  What was the problem? If the problem was merely to think of a story and no more, then Mary Shelley might have whipped together some trifle about ghosts and kisses of death, and then either finished it like Dr. Polidori or set it aside like the others. The problem was to write a story that could be believed in. That was what baffled Byron and Shelley and what stymied Mary. How could these people, with their histories and their beliefs, write of inconstant lovers wrapped in the arms of the ghosts of the women they had deserted? That might be well enough for Polidori—“poor Polidori”18 as Mary calls him, shaking her head over his story—but it would not do for a young modern.

  Mary only found the key to her story at last as a result of listening to a conversation between Byron and Shelley:

  Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him,) who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.19

  What a typically blasphemous conversation! Here these young mods of the early Nineteenth Century were, titillating each other by separating the power of life from God and speculating about spaghetti coming to life like a pair of giggling eight-year-olds. The Darwin they mentioned was Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, who in the years around 1790 wrote poems about science and evolution. The scientific experiments they discussed were the experiments of Luigi Galvani, who had made the muscles in the legs of dead frogs move through the application of electricity, the newest discovery of science.

  After this conversation, Mary went to bed, but lay awake in a twilight state, her mind racing with visions:

  When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine; show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.20

  Once again, at a crucial point in the development of SF, we have vital conception taking place within a nonordinary mental state. Mary’s creative imagination had accomplished what all her vain “thought and pondering” could not:

  Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.21

  Like lightning, the solution to the problem of plausible transcendence had broken in upon Mary. It was the power of science that would bring horror to life. She hardly says more than this in her story, but it is enough.

  We all know some version of Mary’s story from the many Frankenstein movies, which are the offspring of Nineteenth Century stage plays. But all these Frankensteins were revised and refined, altered for dramatic effect, updated for the sake of plausibility. They are not Mary’s story as she wrote it. Her Frankenstein was an early Nineteenth Century story, written in the context of the times.

  Inasmuch as it is removed into the past and evokes horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the Gothic tradition. But it is far less Gothic than its popular adaptations. In the original story there is no castle, no baron, no hunchbacked assistant, no dungeons, no chains, and no peasants with torches and pitchforks.

  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is set in modern times, during the Eighteenth Century, in Walpole’s lifetime when science was making its first great impact on the world. Her central character is no nobleman with a private electrical generator and basement laboratory. Her Victor Frankenstein is merely a student of chemistry in nearby Geneva with great aptitude and strange ambitions.

  Through diligent study, Victor has learned the secrets of life. As in Byron’s and Shelley’s conversation, his impulse is to gather the component parts of a creature and endue them with vital warmth. He collects bones from the charnel house and animates them.

  We hardly see how the trick is performed. There is none of the “powerful engine” that Mary, in 1831, reported herself as having seen in her dream. The crucial scene that Mary wrote on the morning after her inspiration, the scene of the animation of the monster that begins Chapter 5, is very spare:

  It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breat
hed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.22

  This is all we get of the mechanics. As in her dream, Mary’s protagonist is immediately horrified at what he has done and runs away. He will tell us no more:

  I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be; listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject.23

  Here in Frankenstein is evidence that exact detail, however useful to plausibility, is not itself necessary for plausibility to be achieved. The plausibility—the potential possibility—of the transcendent science that animates Victor Frankenstein’s creature is established through a dramatic argument. We are prepared for the monster’s animation by this argument, which is presented in the form of the story of Victor Frankenstein’s education.

  Mary Shelley’s argument for new plausible transcendence is designed to encapsulate the experience of the early Nineteenth Century, still tied to the past, but a witness to change: At the age of thirteen, Victor Frankenstein stumbles across the alchemical works of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, the representatives of the old spiritual science, and is struck by their mystery and power. Stimulated by these marvels, he seeks to find the elixir of life and attempts to raise ghosts and devils. But he fails. Victor is a modern, and this ancient spirit-based science will not work for him.

  Then Victor becomes acquainted with more contemporary science. Its overwhelming power of doubt ends his attempts to operate the old transcendent science. But it also makes him bitter:

  I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.24

  However, when Victor goes off to the university, his outlook on science is changed. A lecturer in chemistry speaks to his class about ancient science and modern science—and lays the groundwork of plausibility for the marvel of transcendent science that will ensue:

  “The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”25

  If science can do so much, how much more is there that it may yet do?

  What a powerful and subtle argument this is, as Mary presents it. It notes the demonstrable historical continuity between alchemy and modern chemistry, and calls them both “science.” It steals the fire from the old transcendence at the same time that it dismisses it and alleges the superior power of modern science. This powerful new science is not science as it may be now, but science-as-an-ideal, science as a potential higher state. This is mythic science, transcendent science, science-beyond-science. It is plausible inasmuch as it is an extension of existing science, and it is mysterious in that it is science that does not yet exist. All that we must do is acknowledge that there are miraculous powers, like the power of life, which modern science may yet discover—and the creature is ready to stir. Transcendence is ready to be born again.

  It is not Victor Frankenstein, with his vague “instruments of life,” who is the true “modern Prometheus,” bringer of fire down from heaven, darer of divine wrath. Behind Victor stands his creator. It was she who truly dared the wrath of heaven, who in fear and trembling reanimated the corpse of transcendence. She gave it a shot of super-science, these bones she had reassembled, and watched in horrified fascination as they began to move. Such is the power of super-science.

  Mary and Percy Shelley had some sense of the potential inherent in their argument. Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818. In a preface—written, as Mary later recalled, by Percy26—a claim is made. The claim is made in as roundabout and self-denying a fashion as the claim of Walpole in the “William Marshal” preface of The Castle of Otranto, but nonetheless, a claim is made:

  The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantments. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops; and however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.27

  What is said here so languidly and elliptically is that Frankenstein is based on a scientific speculation which the author considers an impossibility. Nonetheless, this scientific transcendence is superior to spectres, enchantments and supernatural terrors. It is exempt from their disadvantages, the author of the preface says, without spelling out the disadvantages. He suggests merely that science-beyond-science permits novel situations and points of view.

  In fact, there are great limitations to what Mary Shelley was able to accomplish. She had established an argument for the transcendent power of science-beyond-science, but no more. Not transcendent aliens or realms.

  As long as it remains in the background, Frankenstein’s creature does appear as a being of more than human powers. It is endowed with strength and endurance greater than that of an ordinary human, climbing nearly perpendicular ascents during savage lightning storms. It follows poor Victor all over Europe, ruthlessly murdering his bride and his brother while remaining unseen by anyone but Victor.

  But the arguments Mary had made for bringing the creature to life in a miraculous manner provided no justification for representing it as the master of higher powers of its own. As a result, when he is finally observed at close range, the creature does not retain his mystery. The instant he opens his mouth to speak and give an account of himself, he reveals himself to be just one more Romantic, pained and wounded by the world. He wonders why men are not more rational, and strikes out wildly in fits of passion and revenge. Another young modern.

  No, of the three forms of transcendence, it was transcendent power alone that Mary Shelley was able to reawaken. The simplest transcendence—the power of creation and destruction. As presented in Frankenstein, this was superior power without a proper home, or source, or realm of being. It was superior power without superior beings to operate it. It was live, raw, untamed power, standing alone.

  A further limitation of Frankenstein was that its transcendence was made after the model of the spirit-based transcendence of former times. Mary Shelley was attempting to write a story—in more contemporary terms—that would be the functional equivalent of The Castle of Otranto. The embodiment of her new transcendent science-beyond-science was set to do the work of an old-fashioned ghost—to haunt poor Victor, clank, clank, rattle, rattle—as though science-beyond-science didn’t have any better work to do than that.

  Mary Shelley should suffer no blame for this. She had, after all, set forth with the intention of writing a ghost story in the first place. She was making up her argument for the first time, and because it wa
s the model of transcendence available to her—and the appropriate model to offer to the state of understanding of her audience—her new transcendent science-beyond-science necessarily looked very much like old-fashioned spirit-based necromancy in its effect. Even so, this cutting of science-beyond-science to the shape and size of spiritual conjuring was a limitation.

  A third limitation in Frankenstein was the attitude of horror taken toward the new transcendence. Within the story, it is precisely because of this attitude that everything goes wrong for Victor Frankenstein. If he had only been able to master his ambivalent passions and sit down and have a chat with his creature, he would have found that they had much in common and a great deal of useful information to exchange. Instead, the instant the creature is born, Victor gets a rising gorge and runs and hides under the bedcovers, and it is this act of rejection that turns his creature against him.

  Again, this is not so much a fault as it is a sign of the state of mind of the early Nineteenth Century: They were launched into the new worldview. Science and the general mood of inquiry were having effects on life. People didn’t know how they felt about it.

  Mary was looking to speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and to curdle the blood. She needed something she genuinely felt ambivalent about. She found that in the speculative conversation between Byron and Shelley. It was well enough to be a freethinker, a challenger of convention, but here was the promise of material science to usurp the power of the Creator and awaken life, even in a corpse. She didn’t know how she felt about that. It seemed like a step too far. To write her story was to deal with her anxiety.