Sleeping with the Lights On

by Jones, Darryl

  This kind of anti-scientific popular culture is a fundamentally modern affair, and in essence dates from the climate of scientific materialism which followed in the wake of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. The term ‘scientific materialism’ was coined in 1872 by the Irish physicist John Tyndall; T. H. Huxley, Charles Darwin’s colleague, preferred the term ‘scientific naturalism’, which he understood as antithetical to ‘supernaturalism’. Tyndall and Huxley were at the centre of a group of Victorian scientists who challenged the cultural and intellectual authority of the Church of England, one important battle in a broader Victorian ‘crisis of faith’. Famously, Huxley debated evolution with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the Oxford University Natural History Museum on 30 June 1860, a debate which history, at least, judged Huxley to have won by knockout when he answered Wilberforce’s snide question ‘was it through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?’ with the answer that ‘He was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.’ Huxley recognized that evolution’s dethroning of humanity from the pinnacle of creation was psychologically and existentially shocking, causing ‘the awakening of a sudden and profound mistrust of time-honoured theories and strongly-rooted prejudices regarding [humanity’s] own position in nature’.

  Huxley taught evolutionary biology to H. G. Wells in what is now Imperial College in London. Wells acknowledged that his intellectual debt to Huxley was immeasurable, and it can be seen very clearly in his own Darwinist horror, The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which a crazed vivisector attempts to demonstrate the relationship between man and beast by transforming a variety of animals into human beings. These concerns about the status and place of humanity raised by scientific materialism in general and Darwinism in particular are anxieties with which horror continues to wrestle, because culture at large does. ‘Mad science’—scientific progress completely severed from any ethical concerns—is a recurring trope in horror, and can be understood as giving form to genuine concerns about unchecked technological progress and its potential for dehumanization.

  Mad Science

  Carl Sagan’s enumeration of some of the reasons we have for being ‘nervous about science’ leads to a description of one of the products of that nervousness embodied in a familiar figure:

  And so the image of the mad scientist haunts our world—down to the white-coated loonies of Saturday morning TV and the plethora of Faustian bargains in popular culture, from the eponymous Dr. Faustus himself to Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove, and Jurassic Park.

  In this section, we will look at a number of these popular cultural manifestations of mad science. We will begin, as Sagan does, with ‘the eponymous Dr. Faustus himself’.

  In 1528, Johann (or possibly Georg) Faust was driven out of the German university town of Ingolstadt, accused of alchemy. Much is uncertain about his life (not least the fact that there seem to have been two different near-contemporary Fausts, Johann and Georg), but he seems to have been an alchemist, astrologer, magician, and author of numerous grimoires, or spell-books. According to contemporary accounts, Faust ‘dares to call himself the prince of necromancers, [but] is a vagrant, a charlatan, and a rascal’. Faust was a fairly well-known figure during his lifetime, certainly notorious enough to have attracted the notice of Reformation leaders and intellectuals such as Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. In 1540 or 1541, he blew himself up at an inn in Staufen while experimenting with chemicals; the whiff of sulphur left behind was a sure sign that he had been claimed by the Devil, there to make good on their deal and claim his soul. After his death, a number of legends began to attach themselves to Faust, whose exploits began to be recorded in a number of widely circulated works, including the anonymous Faustbuch, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, published by Johann Spies in Frankfurt in 1587.

  An English translation of this Faustbuch was a major source for Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (c.1604). Marlowe’s Faustus is the most brilliant scholar of his generation. Frustrated at having hit the limits of human knowledge, he sells his soul to the Devil in order to ‘Resolve me of all ambiguities’. He conducts the kind of black magic ritual we saw in Chapter 2, an inversion of traditional religious rites: ‘Within this circle is Jehova’s name | Forward and backward anagrammatised.’ Marlowe’s Faustus is a character distinctive of modernity, the scientist willing to transgress all human and moral limits in the search for knowledge.

  Goethe’s version of the Faust story (published in two parts, 1808 and 1832) turned it into a fable of Enlightenment scientific and philosophical advancement, even going so far as to save Faust’s soul, which is led into heaven at the close of Part II. It was Goethe’s version that Mary Shelley knew; she read a commentary on Part I before starting work on Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein, popular culture’s archetypal brilliant, overreaching mad scientist, is a student at Ingolstadt, which had banished Faust himself in 1528, and whose university had more recently been the birthplace of the Order of the Illuminati. This was a secret society of anti-clerical freethinkers founded in 1776 by the university’s Professor of Canon Law and Philosophy, Adam Weishaupt, and outlawed (along with all other Bavarian secret societies) in 1785.

  Frankenstein predates the absolute division between the scientific and occult worlds of the later nineteenth century, and so Victor himself is meant to be understood as an Illuminatus or a Rosicrucian, both a magus and a scientist. His initial intellectual inspiration comes from reading the alchemical writings of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, from whom he gets ideas about black magic: ‘The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors.’ Although his formal scientific training at Ingolstadt displaces the methods of the alchemists, it does not remove their aims: ‘I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science taught immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand.’ Victor Frankenstein is a scientific necromancer; he raises the dead. Frankenstein is particularly preoccupied with the deaths of women and children, and with a masculinist desire for a kind of supreme phallus, doing away with the necessity of women for procreation. In a remarkably sexually invasive metaphor, Victor’s chemistry professor, Waldman, describes the advances of Enlightenment scientists: ‘They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places.’

  Frankenstein is subtitled The Modern Prometheus. The myth of the Titan Prometheus exists in a number of related forms. In one early version, to be found in Hesiod’s Theogony (c.700 bc), Prometheus steals fire from the gods to give to man, thus in essence bringing about human culture. Prometheus, according to Robert Graves’s gloss of the myth, was learned in ‘architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, metallurgy and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind’. In later iterations, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Prometheus is the creator of mankind, whom he moulds from clay, since ‘the new earth, but lately drawn away from heavenly ether, still retains some elements of its kindred sky’. In all cases, Prometheus is punished by the gods for his transgression: chained to a rock in the Caucasus, an eagle eats his liver every day, only for it to grow back, the cycle of torment repeating endlessly.

  The Prometheus myth, then, simultaneously warns of the dangers of forbidden knowledge (the stolen fire) and insists that knowledge, creativity, and human civilization itself are all transgressive acts. In the quest for knowledge, the Promethean disregards social norms, which are constraints (the chains) punitively enforced (the eagle). For the Romantics of Mary Shelley’s generation, Prometheus was a heroic figure; in an age of revolutions, he was the first revolutionary. The Devil was read as a revolutionary Promethean, rebelling against God’s autocratic rule. In his classic rereading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost against the grain of its author’s ostensible intentions, William Blake famously w
rote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ When, in his poem ‘The Tyger’, Blake asked, ‘On what wings dare he aspire? | What the hand dare seize the fire?’, he was consciously invoking the stolen fire of the Prometheus myth. The Greek tragedian Aeschylus had dramatized the Prometheus myth in Prometheus Bound and its sequel Prometheus Unbound, which exists only in fragmentary forms. Percy Bysshe Shelley, classically educated at Eton and Oxford, recast Aeschylus for his own Prometheus Unbound (1820), a highly symbolic poetic articulation of his own revolutionary democratic beliefs. This is the intellectual climate out of which Frankenstein, very much a novel of ideas, emerges.

  Frankenstein itself is ambivalent about its Promethean transgressor, and about his creation. The novel variously renders Victor Frankenstein as an unethical experimenter, a grave robber, a neglectful husband, and a deadbeat dad. The Monster himself speaks in the voice of an Enlightenment philosopher, having educated himself through reading, among other things, Milton and Goethe. His is an eloquent plea for parental love and recognition, and to be afforded the Rights of Man. The Monster demands our sympathy, and most readers of the novel find themselves ready to give it, only to realize that the Monster is effectively using his highly advanced rhetorical skills to justify the unjustifiable, the trail of corpses (specifically, the dead women and children) he has left in his wake. So toxic, in fact, is the Monster’s speech that the novel needs to contextualize it within several layers of framing narrative, like the shielding around a radioactive core. At the centre of the novel, he tells his story to Victor Frankenstein, who in turn tells his story to the polar explorer Robert Walton, who in turn tells his story to his sister Margaret Saville.

  Frankenstein’s politics are similarly double-edged. The novel, we have seen, is a product of the fervour of revolutionary Europe. The novel’s central metaphor of the Monster, an eight-foot giant made up of the parts of many men, is an image with a distinct political pedigree. Abraham Bosse’s famous frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) (Figure 8)—the philosophical treatise which insists on the necessity of strong centralized authority in order to curb and regulate the riotous, anarchic, self-destructive capacities of humanity—shows an image of the monarch as a giant made up of many tiny people, the body of the state, illustrative of Hobbes’s assertion that ‘A multitude of men, are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular.’

  Figure 8. Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651).

  Edmund Burke, the great anti-revolutionary theorist, consistently throughout his writings used the image of the monster as a metaphor for the dangerous forces let loose by revolution. In October 1789 he wrote to his son of ‘the portentous state of France—where the Elements which compose human society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it’. France and its revolutionary government is described variously in his writings as ‘a monster’, a ‘monster of a state’, the ‘mother of monsters’, a ‘monstrous compound’, and a ‘cannibal republic’; Jacobinism is nothing but a ‘monstrous fiction’. In his Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (1796–7), Burke wrote: ‘out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous unformed spectre, in a far more terrifick guise than any which yet overpowered the imagination, and subdued the fortitude of man’. This in turn seems to have informed the celebrated, and highly Gothic, opening sentence of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848): ‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.’ Victor Frankenstein has let loose a monster on the world, but the novel will not commit to an interpretation of this action.

  Subsequent iterations of the Frankenstein story tended to smooth out these ambiguities and ambivalences. The central problem of the Monster’s persuasive speech was elided by rendering him effectively mute. Boris Karloff’s almost wordless performances in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) are iconic and as powerful as anything in cinema, but his Monster is no Enlightenment philosopher.

  Film versions have also tended to be very clear as to what they understand as the nature of mad scientific transgression. In a spoken preface to Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), Edward Van Sloan explains, ‘We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image, without reckoning on God.’ As the creature comes to life, Colin Clive’s Henry (sic) Frankenstein exclaims, ‘It’s alive! It’s alive! Oh, in the name of God! Now I know how it feels to be God!’ (This last line was considered so inflammatory that it was replaced by a thunderclap, and only restored in later reissues.) In The Bride of Frankenstein, Dr Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) offers Frankenstein a toast ‘To a new world of gods and monsters!’ Cinematic mad scientists are forever playing God. Charles Laughton’s Dr Moreau in The Island of Lost Souls (1932) claims he knows ‘what it feels like to be God’—an entirely plausible spin on H. G. Wells’s original novel, which the author himself described as a ‘theological grotesque’. In The Raven (1935), Béla Lugosi’s neurosurgeon Dr Vollin describes himself as ‘a god tainted with human emotions’. In the 1958 original of The Fly, Al Hedison’s scientist is warned that his research is ‘frightening. It’s like playing God.’ And so on. From Frankenstein onwards, mad scientists are hubristic monsters. Like Prometheus, they are demiurges, stealing the power of the gods to create life.

  Technophobia

  As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, horror’s scientific narratives began to incorporate specific anxieties about the rise of scientific specialization. This was a development which took the concerns and the language of scientists very far from those of non-scientists, and led to fears of the unchecked, antisocial powers of what Sagan called ‘morally feeble technologists’, pursuing disinterested scientific research for its own sake, heedless of the consequences. In an age of superweapons, nuclear power, genetic engineering, man-made climate change, and mass surveillance, scientific advances have given us much to be afraid of, not least because we live with their consequences without understanding them.

  When the Royal Society was founded in 1660 as the major British learned society for the advancement of scientific knowledge, part of its initial remit was the formalization of a specialized scientific language in which to report its discoveries, and although these linguistic strictures took a long time to be accepted absolutely, by the close of the nineteenth century they certainly were. In 1791, the natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin published The Botanic Garden, perhaps the last major scientific treatise to be written in verse. When, in 1859, his grandson Charles published The Origin of Species, which was, as we have seen, probably the single most revolutionary book of the nineteenth century, he made sure that it was written in a style that was accessible to the educated lay reader. The Origin of Species was in its turn heavily influenced by the formulation of geological deep time in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1833), a work which was something of a bestseller. But works such as these stand out against the tenor of their times, which saw scientific theory become increasingly distant from the concerns, and even the comprehension, of most Victorians. Few, if any, non-scientists could hope to understand the intricacies of the great late-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell, for example, let alone the work of Albert Einstein, who has settled in the public imagination as the archetypal remote, abstract scientific genius.

  This opened up a fissure, what was to become known as the ‘two cultures’ model, after the controversial series of Rede Lectures given by C. P. Snow in 1959. As both a chemist and a novelist, Snow had a foot in both camps, and thus felt himself able to comment with sympathy and auth
ority on the division he saw opening up:

  I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups….Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground.

  The notion of a scientific and a humanistic culture viewing one another with mutual incomprehension and suspicion was ripe for exploitation in horror. This sense of cultural distance and dislocation has contributed to a characteristically modern horror discourse, the technophobic narrative, in which ‘the machines’ rise up and enslave or destroy humanity. Technophobic narratives of this kind generally exist on the cusp of two major and increasingly closely interrelated genres, horror and science fiction.

  Killer robots of various kinds have long been a staple of science fiction. Gort, the intergalactic humanoid superweapon controlled by Michael Rennie’s Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), is one of many popular cultural responses to the political and existential crisis caused by the atomic bomb in the post-war decades, from the city-destroying Godzilla to the giant ants of Them! (1954) or the protagonist of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), increasingly tiny and powerless as a result of his exposure to a mysterious mist. Gort itself is an unstoppable destroyer that can only be deterred by the abort code, ‘Klaatu barada nikto’. In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the sentient computer HAL 9000 attempts to take over the ship and destroy the crew. (Perhaps not ironically, HAL is by far the most human thing about Kubrick’s brilliant but notably cold and stylized film.) In Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977), Julie Christie is impregnated by sentient supercomputer Proteus IV, in what is effectively a technophobic adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby. In The Terminator (1984) and its various sequels, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s indestructible cyborg is sent back in time, originally to destroy and then later to protect key figures in the human resistance to Skynet, a self-aware supercomputer system which has superseded human civilization. In The Matrix (1999), contemporary reality is the fictional creation of a computer programme, while machines battery-farm humanity for a source of energy.