by David Lodge
She glanced down at her own hands, clasped together in a misleading attitude of tranquil repose, and sheathed in serviceable pigskin which she was permitted to remove only at night, in total darkness, with the assistance of the blind maidservant, Lucy, thus preventing any inadvertent glimpse of the pearly pinkness that – so she understood – tinted the translucent plates covering the dorsal surfaces of her finger-ends.
Well, she would soon see her fingernails along with many other things, but mingled with that agreeable reflection was the apprehension, at once vaguer and more exciting, that it was not only her sense of sight that would be enhanced by ‘coming out’ into the world of colour, but also her sense of touch. She might take Professor Hubert Dearing’s naked hand in her own when he greeted her in future – though ‘naked’ was not of course the right word, neither was ‘bare’ nor ‘unclothed’. She finally settled on ‘divested of its customary leathern integument’, but not before the more expressive epithets that presented themselves to her mind as candidates had caused her to blush. That is to say she experienced a burning, tingling sensation in her cheeks which she knew was caused by a sudden flooding of the blood vessels in her facial dermis, though the visual effect of this phenomenon, like every other alteration in her complexion, was something she knew only theoretically. There was not a single looking glass or other reflective surface in the entire suite of rooms she inhabited, and even the surface of Professor Dearing’s mask had been carefully roughened so that it would not give back to our heroine even a distorted image of her own face.
Was she pretty? Was she beautiful? She hoped, at any rate, that she wasn’t altogether plain, if only for Hubert Dearing’s sake, since he was professionally required to spend so much of his time in her company. She couldn’t ask poor Lucy’s opinion on this matter, and she dared not enquire from Miss Calcutt, the forbiddingly helmeted matron who supervised her activities in the hours of artificial light. It is hardly necessary to add that she would have died rather than put the question to Hubert Dearing himself – the very thought was enough to send another blush surging through her cheeks. He praised her intelligence, her diligence, her eager and rapid assimilation of scientific knowledge. He had said to her once, when she was fourteen – she had commemorated the remark in her diary – ‘You are a remarkable girl.’ But he studiously avoided any observation about her person, perhaps fearing to excite her curiosity, or even vanity – weaknesses the female sex was apparently predisposed to in the great world outside – about the colour of her eyes, hair and lips; thus tempting her to obtain some forbidden piece of mirrored glass which might compromise the whole experiment. He need not have disturbed himself on that score, Mary thought, stiffening and straightening her back at this hypothetical suspicion. The long minute-hand moved a centimetre nearer to the apex of the clockface.
For her part, she already considered Hubert Dearing the handsomest of men, having seen several photographic portraits of him in black and white, but she looked forward with eager expectation to seeing him, as it were, in the flesh. Indeed it seemed to our young friend that nothing could more appropriately present itself first to her starved apprehension of colour than the visage of the great man who had presided over her upbringing and education for so many years. Heroically bearded and whiskered as he was, however, it was likely that at first glance the chief points of colour in his face would be his eyes. Would they be brown, or blue, or grey? Grey would certainly be disappointing – she had already had a surfeit of grey. She had a fancy they would be brown, because the sound of the word matched the timbre of his voice. But what would brown look like? Soon she would know.
Or would she? She recalled, with a slight qualm of fear, the warning note he had sounded at their last interview, only the day before. ‘It’s possible, you know, that you won’t see anything.’
‘Anything?’ She gave it back to him as a question.
‘I mean anything in the way of colour. It’s possible that after so long a confinement in a monochrome environment . . .’ He let the consequence make its own way to her lively intelligence.
‘I might be literally colour-blind,’ she concluded.
He fidgeted with his gloves, flexing his fingers and pushing the tight leather down between them. ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘If it should turn out so, could you ever forgive me?’
‘I should still be an object of some interest to medical science, would I not?’ she said bravely. ‘That would be a compensation.’
‘You’re wonderful,’ he said simply, and a thrill coursed through her entire body as she took the full measure of his esteem. ‘I only stated the worst possible case because it is my duty to do so,’ he went on. ‘I have no doubt that tomorrow will be the happiest day of your life.’
‘I think so too,’ she said.
That day had dawned – whatever dawn looked like – and now it was the eleventh hour. The minute-hand twitched forward to point to twelve. The clock began to strike. Even louder it seemed to Mary was the beating of her own heart, always prone to palpitations at moments of strong emotion. She heard the sound of bolts being drawn on the other side of the door. She rose from her seat and clasped her bosom with an involuntary movement of one gloved hand.
The door swung open, and there on the threshold stood Professor Hubert Dearing, smiling through his beard.
‘Well, my dear,’ he said, ‘are you ready for your great experience?’
She stared, and her face was deathly pale. She was not staring at his beard-fringed lips, however, or into his dark brown eyes. Her own eyes had been drawn to a brighter spot of colour on the lapel of his jacket, where a red rosebud, plucked from his garden that morning, and framed by a green leaf or two, was pinned to his buttonhole. Dearing observed the direction of her gaze and glanced down complacently at the flower, fingering the lapel of his jacket. ‘This is –’ he began. But before he could say more she had collapsed at his feet.
‘Mary!’ he exclaimed in horror. He knelt swiftly beside her, felt her pulse, ripped apart the bodice of her dress, loosened the tight lacing of her corset, and pressed his ear to her breast. But to no avail. The redness of the rosebud had penetrated her brain like an arrow, and her fragile heart, overcharged by the intensity of the sensation, had stopped.
Mary’s Rose
So this is the story of how Mary saw color for the first time when she was a young woman, because she did not see color when she was a baby like you and I, though nobody knows exactly when babies first see colors, because they see them when they cannot tell you that they see them, but babies certainly do see them, and when they begin to learn to talk they learn the names of the different colors, and the color they nearly always learn the name of first is red.
Mary learned the names of the colors when she was an infant but she did not see the colors themselves, she was not allowed to see any colors in the place where she was living, only black and white and all the shades of grey in between, so the names of colors when she was learning them did not mean the same as what they meant to you and to me when we were learning them, they were like words in a foreign language to Mary when she was a little girl learning them, she could only guess at the thing that happened in your head when you saw something that was red or yellow or blue or one of the other colors. She was not allowed to play with colored bricks or colored balls or colored toys of any kind. She was not allowed to use colored paints or colored pencils or read books with colored pictures. She lived underground in a house with no colors in it at all except black and white and all the shades of grey in between, and there were no mirrors anywhere so she could not see the color of her own lips, eyes and hair. All day and every day she had to wear clothes that covered every inch of her body so she could not see the color of her own skin, and the clothes were black or white or one of the shades of grey in between. And she was never allowed out of doors so she never saw a green field or the blue sky or a rainbow. As she grew up she learned more about color, but she was never allowed to see any things that were
colored. All this was to find out what would happen to a person who knew everything about color except what colors looked like, to find out what they would feel inside themselves when they finally saw a color, as Mary did on the day which I am going to tell you about.
Before the day when Mary saw color for the first time she would try and discover what the different colors were like by just thinking about them. When she was young she used to say the color-words aloud to herself and try to imagine what the colors would be like from the sounds of the words when you said them, but when she was older she discovered that there were many languages in the world and that the same color could have different names with entirely different sounds in the different languages, so that for instance ‘yellow’ was ‘jaune’ in French and ‘gelb’ in German and ‘zolty’ in Polish, though a yellow object, say a lemon, or a pat of butter, would look the same to an English person or a French or a German or a Polish, so there was no way you could tell what a color would be like from its name. Then she tried to guess what the different colors were like from phrases and expressions she met in her story books, phrases and expressions like ‘he was red with anger’ or ‘I’m feeling blue’ or ‘she was green with envy’ and she would try to will herself into these moods and wait for a color to suffuse her mind and tint her vision of the black and white and grey world she inhabited but it did not happen that way and then she read in other books that people were sometimes red with embarrassment or blue with cold or green with nausea so she concluded that there was no correspondence between a particular color and a particular state of mind or body.
What is color? Well it is a very strange thing, it is a kind of light, in fact what we call light is made up of all the colors of the rainbow mixed together, color is light that has been broken up into its separate parts, it is waves of light hitting different objects and bouncing off them to hit the inside of your eye and sending different signals to your brain. Mary learned all about that in science lessons as she grew up, she learned all about the different lengths of the waves of light and the different frequencies of the waves that belonged to the different colors, and she learned about the different cells in the eye that received the different waves, and how some people could not see some colors because they didn’t have a full set of receptor cells, she learned about the various kinds of color-blindness, about deuteranopia and protanopia and tritanopia, but she herself had never seen any colors at all until the day I am going to tell you about. She learned everything there was to know about color from blackboards with diagrams drawn in white chalk and from scientific textbooks with black and white illustrations.
So the great day came when Mary was let out of her underground home and allowed to see color for the first time. You can imagine how excited she was, but the scientists and philosophers who had brought her up and educated her and taught her everything there was to know about color were nearly as excited because they were going to get answers to questions that had puzzled them for a long time and about which they had argued among themselves for a long time, questions such as what is it like to see color for the first time, because as I was saying you cannot ask a baby what it is like to see color for the first time because they cannot talk so they cannot tell you but Mary would be able to tell them, and is color something that just happens in your brain or is it something that exists on its own in the world, and is color something you can imagine in your head without seeing it or do you have to see it, and is a particular color the same for everybody or is it different for each individual, and could a color-scientist like Mary, for that is what she had become by now, who knew all about wavelengths and frequencies, identify the first color she saw just by taking measurements with a spectrophotometer or would she have to be told what it was? These were some of the questions the scientists and philosophers hoped Mary would be able to answer for them when she saw a colored thing for the first time on the day that I am telling you about.
The scientists and philosophers argued among themselves about what thing this first colored thing that Mary was to see should be, because of course they were not going to let Mary walk out into the outside world with all its multiplicity of colors, she. would be overwhelmed, she wouldn’t know where to start, it would be impossible to monitor her responses with scientific precision, so it had been decided that on the first day she would see just one colored thing and that thing would be a red rose. They chose red because it is the most common color concept in the world, not counting black and white, that is to say every known language has a word for red though not all the languages in the world have words for all the colours there are in the world. And they decided on a rose, rather than a red brick or a red flag, because a rose is a natural object and its red a natural red.
So when Mary came out of her underground home for the first time, on the day I am telling you about, carrying her spectrophotometer, she did not find herself in the open air, but in another windowless room painted a uniform pale grey and lit by white light. The walls had observation holes drilled in them through which the scientists and philosophers could observe Mary and grilles through which they could speak to her, and in the middle of the floor was a white plinth and on the plinth was a single red rose in full bloom and that was the only thing that was in the room.
Mary dropped her spectrophotometer on the floor and went straight to the rose. ‘What do you see, Mary?’ the chief scientist asked her, and all the other scientists and philosophers held their breaths. ‘A rose,’ she said. She knew it was a rose because she had seen black and white drawings and photographs of roses in her botanical textbooks. But she had never seen a real rose in three dimensions before and she had never held a real rose in her hand before and she had never smelled the perfume of a real rose before. She picked up the rose by its stalk very carefully between finger and thumb and stroked its velvety petals and buried her nose in its centre and inhaled its perfume and she seemed like someone in ecstasy. ‘What color is the rose, Mary?’ asked the chief scientist, and again all the other scientists and philosophers held their breaths.
‘I don’t know,’ Mary said, ‘and I don’t care.’ ‘You don’t care?’ the scientists and philosophers all cried together. ‘I don’t care what colour it is,’ said Mary. ‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.’
Mary Sees Red
‘Well, today’s the day, Dickinson!’ Professor Horatio Stigwood rubs his eternally cold hands together expectantly. He is wearing a bright red tie under his white lab coat as a sign of his confidence.
‘Quite so,’ Professor Giles Dickinson dourly replies. The two men are waiting for the elevator on the ninth floor of the Centre for Consciousness Studies, Stanstead Airport Science Park, on this bright and breezy April day in the year 2031.
‘You don’t want to raise your stake?’ says Stigwood.
‘No.’
‘Do I detect a note of apprehension?’ Stigwood enquires, with a thin, dry-lipped smile.
‘I don’t approve of betting,’ says Dickinson. ‘Certainly not betting on the result of a scientific experiment. I was persuaded into that wager against my better judgement.’
An electronic ping announces the arrival of the elevator. The doors slide open and the two men enter the padded cube.
‘I’ll release you, if you like,’ says Stigwood.
‘No, let it stand,’ says Dickinson. ‘I’m quite confident of the outcome.’
The elevator slows to stop at the fourth floor. Dickinson moves closer to the doors.
‘See you in the observation room at eleven, then,’ says Stigwood.
‘At eleven,’ says Dickinson, leaving the elevator without looking at him.
Oh, the wonderful world of scientific research! Such patience, such dedication, such attention to detail! For thirty-one years Mary X has been incarcerated in her underground cell (‘suite’, the experimenters prefer to call it). Taken as a new-born infant straight from the darkened delivery room, her eyes bandaged on the journey from the hospital so that no possible inkling
of the coloured nature of the world would have an opportunity to reach her brain through her still undeveloped optical nervous system. Nourished and played with and educated by a team of masked assistants dressed from head to foot in black and white clothing. Introduced to the wider world via virtual reality machines programmed to operate exclusively in monochrome. Instructed in physical sciences by distance learning, tutored in optics and neuroscience by Nobel prizewinners, furnished with the very latest research into the phenomenology of colour perception – she knows everything it is possible to know about colour without having had the actual experience of colour. All coloured illustrations in her books and periodicals have been removed and replaced with monochrome replicas. There are no mirrors or reflective surfaces in her living quarters in which she might see the pigmentation of her lips and eyes and hair. As it happens, she has raven-black hair, and full red lips, and her eyes are cornflower blue; she is actually a very beautiful young woman, though of course she doesn’t know it. Poor Mary! Mary, Mary, solitary, how does your garden grow? With grey, grey grass and black, black shrubs, and dead white flowers all in a row.
But now her life is about to change. The experiment, begun in the year 2000, with a grant from the National Lottery’s Millennium Fund, is all but complete. The momentous day has come: Mary is to be released from her long colourless hibernation to settle the great debate about qualia. Are they, as neuroscientists like Stigwood maintain, merely electro-chemical reactions in the brain; or are they, as philosophers like Dickinson assert, irreducible subjective experiences of the individual human gestalt interacting with its environment? For months now, Stigwood has been artificially stimulating Mary’s brain with electrodes, replicating the pattern of brain cells firing in his own brain when perceiving the colour red, as revealed by positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. She reported a sensation which he told her was red. Whether it corresponded to the ordinary perception of red there was no way of knowing. That is exactly what they are about to find out. When Mary steps out of her colourless habitat at precisely eleven a.m., she will find herself in a bare, white-painted anteroom with just one spot of colour: on a glass-topped table in the centre of the floor is a single red rose in a transparent glass vase. The question is, will Mary know when she sees it that it is a red rose?
