Extreme Fabulations

by Steven Shaviro

  This vitalistic search for life in the depths has a long lineage in Western thought. For it is only a modern – scientific or pseudo-scientific – variant of the crucial distinction that Eugene Thacker traces throughout the history of Western metaphysics, all the way back to Aristotle:

  The distinction between that-which-is-living and that-by-which-the-living-is-living, or, more simply, the living and Life. The latter term denotes a general principle that grounds or conditions the specific instances of the former, while remaining itself inaccessible.

  (Thacker 2010)

  This distinction leaves us, Thacker says, with the unanswerable question as to

  whether this orderliness that is innate to life, this vital order, can be said to be fully internal to life itself, or whether it must have some sort of external source.

  (Thacker 2010)

  The science fictional form of this dilemma already appears fully developed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Shelley 1818). Victor Frankenstein succeeds “in discovering the cause of generation and life”; he is now “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” But this power implies a strange dualism. To make his monster, Victor first assembles a dead body, scavenging bits and pieces of flesh and bone “from charnel houses.” In order to make this body live and breathe, Victor must subsequently “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” This means that the “spark of being,” or inner principle of life, is something entirely separate from the organic matter that it informs. This contradiction at the heart of vitalism – the separation of life itself from the physical constituents of life – drives the novel’s many ironies.

  The scientists in “Shadow Show” suffer from a similar deadlock, albeit in inverted form. They can make far better physiological structures than Victor ever could, but they cannot find the “spark” to animate these inert bodies. Where Victor Frankenstein isolates the principle of life, they can neither disentangle this principle from the living bodies within which it operates, nor find it immanently within organic matter. They cannot even fully distinguish between its presence and its absence. Their search for a unique principle of vitality leads them into an interminable sojourn

  in that puzzling gray area where nonlife was separated from life by a shadow zone and a strange unpredictability that was enough to drive one mad, working with the viruses and crystals which at one moment might be dead and the next moment half alive and no man as yet who could tell why this was or how it came about.

  In what I am calling the old vitalism, the principle of life is neither immanent to living things, nor entirely separate from and transcendent to them. As a result of this “neither/nor,” it is endlessly elusive.

  Given the murkiness and difficulty of their task – not to mention the militarist paranoia that drives their research in the first place – it is no wonder that the scientists in Life Team No. 3 suffer from high levels of stress, anxiety, nervousness, dread, and guilt. The story is suffused with these negative feelings. The scientists’ “attitude” toward what they are doing is “an emotional thing, almost a religious thing. There’s little of the intellectual in it.” They all seem to be “suspicious and selfish and frightened, like cornered animals. Cornered between the converging walls of fear and guilt, trapped in the corner of their own insecurity.”

  The scientists’ explanations for why they feel this way are evidently inadequate; they are little more than rationalizations. In the first place, the scientists worry – in terms familiar from many other science fiction narratives – that their work is “unholy,” or “blasphemous and sacrilegious.” It is an act of overreaching hubris that will inevitably be punished. If there is “a definite key to life, hidden somewhere against Man’s [sic] searching,” then what would it mean for us to actually find it? Kent Forester, the team psychologist, compares the scientists of Life Team No. 3 to those who were involved in the Manhattan Project:

  You had the same situation a thousand years ago when men discovered and developed atomic fission. They did it and they shuddered. They couldn’t sleep at night. They woke up screaming. They knew what they were doing – that they were unloosing terrible powers.

  The scientists of Life Team No. 3 know that their research is dangerous, and that it will release powerful forces beyond their control. Of course, their mission is to create new forms of life, rather than to produce weapons of mass destruction and death. But in the research of Life Team No. 3, life itself is weaponized, just like nuclear fission. Vitality is explicitly developed and mobilized in order to serve as a tool for galactic domination. The implications of biopower are in their own way as immense, as ambiguous, as unpredictable, and as potentially destructive as those of nuclear power.

  At the same time, however, frustrated by their lack of progress, the researchers also worry that creating life might well be impossible in principle, forever beyond the reach of science. Their mission is nothing more than “a tangled trap into which Man [sic] had lured himself by his madcap hunt for knowledge.” Many of the scientists suspect that “life was not a matter of fact to be pinned down by formula or equation, but rather a matter of spirit, with some shading to the supernatural.” One or two of them are even unwilling to accept the scientific truism “that death is an utter ending”; if you cannot make life itself fully present, then you cannot ever fully get rid of it either. No matter how straightforwardly scientific the team’s work is supposed to be, it is still troubled by residual hauntings.

  Bayard Lodge, the team leader, tries to convince himself that “there is no reason for the guilt complex.” He maintains that these fears of blasphemy on the one hand, and impossibility on the other, ought to cancel each other out:

  Can Man [sic] do anything divine? If life is divine, then Man [sic] cannot create it in his laboratories no matter what he does, cannot put it on a mass production basis. If Man [sic] can create life out of his chemicals, out of his knowledge, then that will prove divine intervention was unnecessary to the genesis of life. And if we have that proof – if we know that a divine instrumentality is unnecessary for the creation of life, doesn’t that very proof and fact rob it of divinity?

  Yet even as he says all this, Lodge is forced to recognize that such rational analysis is useless. The argument convinces no one, not even Lodge himself. It cannot outweigh the obscure sense of wrongness that all the scientists feel. As Lodge puts it at one point, with considerable exasperation, the researchers “coddle” their sense of guilt, “as if it were a thing that kept them human, as if it might be the one last identity they retain with the outside world and the rest of mankind.”

  The scientists are not mistaken in their fear of being disconnected from humanity, or even cast out of it altogether. For they know that there is something inherently repulsive about their research. This is why it is kept secret in the first place:

  If the people of the Earth knew what they were doing, or, more correctly, what they were trying to do, they would raise a hubbub that might result in calling off the project.

  Here Simak undoes a foundational trope of science fiction narratives. Victor Frankenstein creates his monster in a state of feverish excitement; he only crashes and succumbs to despair after he is done. Similarly, the eponymous mad scientist of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau works on a desolate island where no one can interfere with his gruesome experiments. Both of these figures enjoy a splendid isolation that allows them to pursue their crazed assault upon the inner secrets of life, free from censorious disapproval by the masses.

  But in “Shadow Show,” to the contrary, scientific discovery is a group effort – as indeed it generally is in real-world technoscience. Nobody can create life all by him- or herself. Lodge recalls the “work of years” it took to get Life Team No. 3 together, “the team confidence which over many months had replaced individual confidence and doubt,” and “the smooth co-operation and co-ordination which worked like meshing gears” in the course of the team’s research. Without such group org
anization, no discoveries can be made at all. The Life Team’s enforced solitude is therefore of an entirely different sort than that of Frankenstein and Moreau. There are no mad scientists, or solitary geniuses, in the world of “Shadow Show.” The story has no room for the demented will to power of a lone inventor pursuing his experiments in defiance of the whole world, and exulting in his transgressions.

  Instead, the scientists feel a “terrible responsibility” for everything they do. They know that their research challenges all our definitions of what it means to be human in the first place. They are supposed to produce new types of human beings, adapted to the harsh environments of other sorts of planets. These new forms need to have entirely different senses, organs, and body plans than baseline human beings do. And yet, they must somehow still remain “human” inside. The scientists are asked to “imagine making a human being not in the image of humanity.” They are expected to “take a human mind and spirit and enclose it in a monster’s body, hating itself.” The resulting form might be “a spiderlike thing, or a wormlike thing, or a squatting monstrosity with horns and drooling mouth or perhaps something such as could be fabricated only in a dream.” But however ungainly and monstrous these new forms turn out to be, they must also remain “human, too, just the same as you.” What does being human even mean in such circumstances? Where are the limits of humanity?

  The real problem, as Forester puts it, is “not that we would be manufacturing life, but that it would be human life in the shape of monsters.” Truth to tell, he adds, “a monster itself would not be bad at all, if it were no more than a monster.” Our imaginations could easily encompass this. But it is far more disturbing to create something that is monstrous – irreducibly weird and inaccessibly other – while still remaining human at the same time. There is something in us that cannot help regarding such a being as “a perversion of the human form … a scrapping of human dignity.” For

  a human being must walk upon two legs and have two arms and a pair of eyes, a brace of ears, one nose, one mouth, be not unduly hairy. He must walk; he must not hop or crawl or slither.

  I am reminded here of a famous line from H. P. Lovecraft: “there are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other” (“The Call of Cthulhu,” in Lovecraft 2005). Lovecraft’s panic is not so much at the altogether inhuman, as it is at the human altered or made other, as in the case of men who supposedly sound like beasts. In other words, Lovecraft is less distressed by the indifference of the cosmos to humanity (though many critics have seen this as the ultimate source of horror in his fiction) than he is by the very existence of those he describes as “foreign mongrels”: that is to say, human beings whom he considers impure and animalistic, because they do not conform to his standards of white Anglo-Saxon propriety.

  Lovecraft is able to reconcile himself to – and even admire – the ancient alien entities whose traces are discovered in stories like “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out of Time.” For these beings are still, in Lovecraft’s reckoning, civilized and orderly. They may not be human at all, but they still conform to certain paradigms of whiteness. On the other hand, Lovecraft is filled with racist loathing, not only for his imagined hybrids like the fish people of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” but also for the actually existing “polyglot” masses of places like New York City – as is demonstrated both in his correspondence, and in stories like “The Horror at Red Hook.” What Lovecraft really hates and fears is any expression of multiplicity and heterogeneity within the human.

  There is a larger principle at work here. Whenever there is a normative model of “Man,” we may expect that actual human beings will be hierarchically graded and ranked according to their degrees of conformity to or difference from this fantasmatic model. We see this throughout the history of science fiction and weird fiction. Lovecraft’s racism is grounded in his dread at the supposed mutation, alteration, or denaturing of what he regards as the ideal human form. This is the source of his panic at the prospect of men who sound like beasts. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells explores the inverse formation: beasts who sound like men. The horror of that novel resides at least partly in the fact that Moreau cannot entirely achieve his goal. His transformed animals are only partly or imperfectly human, and retain the tendency to revert to their beastly origins.

  Simak does not share Lovecraft’s racism, but he understands the syndrome of uncertainty as to the boundaries of the human. At one point in “Shadow Show,” Lodge has a nightmare in which he meets a creature with a “hairy, taloned claw … Its odor had been overpowering and its shape obscene.” In the dream, this entity “had drooled upon him with great affection and had asked him if he had the time to catch a drink because it had a thing or two it wanted to talk with him about.” Lodge is horrified; yet he is sufficiently discerning to realize that what really bothers him about the dream figure is that, despite its repulsiveness, “it was a man like him, clothed in different flesh … I wake up screaming because a human thing I met put its arm around me and asked me to have a drink with it.” The drooling monster in Lodge’s dream arouses shame, guilt, and fear because it is not alien enough; its kinship with us still remains all too evident. Lodge’s visceral disgust coexists with his uneasy sense that, in spite of everything, “us humans … have got to stick together.”

  All this is background, revealed gradually in the course of the story. The narrative proper of “Shadow Show” begins with the death of one of the scientists in the team, Henry Griffith. There was “nothing organically wrong” with Griffith, Susan Lawrence, the team physician, reports; “he just toppled over. He was dead before he hit the bench.” It seems that Griffith died of sheer fright: “he didn’t want to live. He was afraid to live.” In other words, he died of “a psychosomatic illness brought about by fear.” The dynamic here seems close to that of suicide – even though this possibility is not explicitly entertained in the text. We might say that Griffith committed suicide unconsciously. His vital principle extinguished itself in dread and despair, even without the involvement of his will and conscious awareness.

  Henry Griffith’s death is the ironic culmination of Life Team No. 3’s vitalistic quest. For it seems that he died because he was on the verge of isolating the secret of life after all: “he thought he was close to finding something and he was afraid to find it.” What this secret might be is detailed in the research notes that Griffith leaves behind, in lieu of a suicide note. The story only presents these notes to us obliquely. The living members of the team read them, and we get their nervously dismissive reactions. This indirection is well suited to what seems to be the notes’ content. Apparently Griffith speculates that the essence of life is

  decay and breakdown … the senility of matter … disease … the final step to which matter is reduced, the final degradation of the nobility of soil and ore and water.

  For Griffith, life is a fever, a disturbance, a restless agitation of matter. And matter can only cure itself of this fever by sloughing it off, so as to return to its previous inanimate state. Griffith’s theory scandalizes some members of the team, who find it “humanly degrading.” They would still like to believe in the nobility and meaningfulness of life: “its power and greatness … the fine thing that it is,” filled with “wondrous qualities.” Others suggest, more resignedly, that even if Griffith is right in a universal sense, his theory need not disqualify our own limited, particular needs and values. From a cosmic point of view, life may well be “disease and senility,” nothing more than “a principle of decay and of disease.” But “what is poison for the universe is – well, is life for us.”

  Arguably, however, Griffith’s insight is the logical culmination, the ne plus ultra, of the old vitalist paradigm that drives the team’s research in the first place. The life principle that the scientists seek is a hidden essence that is neither absent nor present, that can neither be manifested nor eliminat
ed, and that both informs the inner nature of humanity and deforms it into monstrosity. And the team’s very attempt to grasp this self-contradictory principle leads to overwhelming feelings of anxiety and guilt. Under such conditions, it is tempting to conclude that the hidden truth of the vital impulse is what Freud calls the death drive. Life is a striving to abolish itself, in order to return to an older, inorganic state (Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Whatever lives is susceptible to death, and indeed fated to death. We are left with what Thacker describes as dark pantheism (Thacker 2010), or with what Ben Woodard calls dark vitalism (Woodard 2010).

  This dark vision can be restated as follows. If life is an internal principle of restlessness, then it can never reach any sort of fulfillment or realization; instead, it must continually work to scramble and disrupt whatever sort of order it has previously created. And if life is a negentropic force of self-organization, then it must also work, on the cosmic scale, to increase the entropy of its surroundings, degrading and reducing energy gradients on a massive scale (Schneider and Sagan 2006). Life for us is therefore necessarily “poison for the universe” as a whole. Any serious pursuit of an inner vital principle forces us to see life, in Thacker’s words, as “a fundamentally unhuman phenomenon.” Such an understanding invalidates our all-too-human “presumptions of life-as-generosity, as gift, as givenness” (Thacker 2010). The spark of life is harsh and parsimonious, not open and exalting.

  The old vitalist research program, as depicted in “Shadow Show,” thus inexorably leads to a dead end. For “decay” and “disease” are intrinsic to it from the very beginning. They are the logical underside, and the necessary complement, of its guiding premise that life is something exceptional. If life is indeed the product of a hidden principle not found in ordinary matter, then it can only be a monstrous aberration. We seem to have reached a point of total exhaustion. Lodge realizes that Griffith’s quasi-suicide marks “the end of Life Team No. 3,” and the final failure of their mission. Whatever else the scientists try to do,