by Philipp Blom
By having subjected this experience of lived duration to measurements in space, Western culture had effectively made living experience a slave to the hard, spatial culture of facts and figures, inches and tons. For the sake of success in business and science, Bergson implied, civilization was depriving itself of its most fundamental freedom.
To Bergson, consciousness had to rely on memory to create a coherent picture of the world, and in so doing the mind functioned remarkably like a movie camera, spooling off static images to give an illusion of continuous movement, of identity:
If you abolish my consciousness ... matter resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers…Reestablish now my consciousness, and ... the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.
Bergson would have been pleased with the following lines in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), in which the narrator apparently sees pure, unmediated moments in the sweltering African night: ‘a dark figure obscured the lighted doorway of the manager’s hut, vanished, then, a second or so after, the doorway itself vanished too.’ In the heat of the African night there was nothing but shapes, forms and other impressions, moulded together into a coherent world (and, according to Ernst Mach, a personality) by the workings of the mind.
As scientists smashed the object world into relative values and invisible forces, knocking over matter and time like Ming vases in an old aunt’s drawing room, philosophy and the arts collected the shattered remnants and went about organizing a sumptuous funeral for them. The American philosopher William James (1842-1910), brother of the novelist Henry, pulled the rug from under his colleagues’ feet when he said that truth itself was relevant if - and only if - it could be demonstrated to have a beneficial effect: everything is true that is good for you. Beyond this pragmatic definition lay mayhem and scholasticism, he believed.
If truth was nothing but a useful fiction, then so was all thought, declared the German Hans Vaihinger in his Philosophie des Als Ob (Philosophy of As If, 1911), who insisted that we make intellectual models of the world treating them as if they corresponded to a reality that is in essence unknowable. These models were essentially intellectual tools for managing the challenges of daily life, science and the arts. They had nothing to do with any reality, but they were accurate enough to be able to predict the future, to establish causalities. Ultimately however, these models - God, the soul, the atom - were nothing but mental maps, useful fictions which were valid only until better ones replaced them.
Cursing the grey weather in the German university city of Marburg where he did research, the Spaniard José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) broke down all knowledge and experience into individual circumstance and mutable perspective: ‘this supposed immutable and unique reality ... does not exist: there are as many realities as points of view.’ Points of view became increasingly important, particularly to artists working with what they saw: nowhere were the splintering of identities and the fragmentation of time and space dramatised more astonishingly than in the arts, on the canvases of Picasso and Braque, Malevich, Kandinsky, Carrà and Boccioni.
Amid the weariness of reality and truth and the doubts about language itself and the multiple perspectives of experience, modernism was born. Ever ironic, Robert Musil set the tone for his Man Without Qualities by contrasting in the very first sentences the scientific striving for objectivity and the contents of experience:
A barometric minimum was above the Atlantic; it moved eastwards, towards a maximum above Russia, and showed no inclination to swerve to the north. The isotherms and isotheres did their duty. The air temperature was in a regular relationship to the mean annual temperature, to the temperature of the coldest and the warmest month and to aperiodical monthly temperature variations. Rise and set of the sun, the moon, the light variations of the moon and of Venus, of the rings of Saturn and many other important phenomena were in accordance with the predictions in astronomical annuals. The evaporated water in the air was at its highest elasticity and air humidity was low. In a word, which is really quite good but may sound a little old-fashioned: it was a beautiful August day of the year 1913.
Nervous Currents
While the world was attacked, ridiculed, reshaped and questioned on a conceptual, fundamental level which was understood only by a few brilliant minds, the scientific recasting of reality also had very palpable effects, reaching into the daily lives and imaginations of ordinary people. The burst of scientific discovery during the nineteenth century now pushed technology into every area of human experience. Gas lighting had conquered cities and was now itself replaced by electric light, which was cheaper, less dangerous, and free of soot. Telephones connected hundreds of thousands of households to one another, Marconi’s telegraph conquered ever-greater distances through wireless transmission (the Colonial Office in Berlin directed ships off West Africa by telegraph signal); advances in technology and in the understanding of natural processes conquered the streets through automobiles, brought cheap cameras into the reach of the masses, lent colour to everyday life through the invention of synthetic pigments, paints and dyes, and put food on the table with the help of artificial, nitrogen-based fertilizers.
The protagonists of these developments became popular heroes, a race of intellectual demigods replacing the saint and the artistic genius. Just like Marie Curie in Europe, Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) achieved iconic status in the USA. ‘If Dante, Michelangelo and Beethoven were the creative geniuses of past ages, Edison was “the wizard of Menlo Park” and of the modern age. Material as opposed to spiritual or artistic illumination was his special gift - the light bulb, the kinetoscope - though he was also the democratic-heroic inventor of waxed paper, the alkaline battery, the mimeograph, and so forth ...’ Other scientists such as Poincaré, Röntgen, Max Planck and Rutherford and scientist entrepreneurs like Werner von Siemens were treated as lesser gods. Some of them became household names, celebrated in newspaper articles and on commemorative postcards, their names emblazoned on automatons and machines pushing their way into doctors’ surgeries, fashionable department stores and, in the form of the newly efficient light bulb, ordinary homes.
Electricity was exciting. Exhibits like the gigantic Palais d’Electricité were the stars of the 1900 World Fair in Paris, where millions of people flocked to see the miracle of tens of thousands of light bulbs turning night into day, and lending mysterious colours to the grand fountain in front of the building, while in the Hall of Dynamos, Henry Adams saluted the purring machines as the creative power of a new age. It was a healing power, too, or was believed to be. Ever since Mesmer’s experiments on Paris society ladies in the eighteenth century, electricity had had its place in medicine, but now new possibilities and new anxieties combined: ‘Come on!’ shouted a typical advertisement in the French Le Matin:
Get up! What cured me will cure you, too. I’ve taken all sorts of drugs and they all failed. But electricity has worked. Doctor MacLaughlin’s Electro-Vigueur [electrical invigorator] cured me and will cure you. Every weakened man will congratulate himself on making a free trial of this great remedy, which has given health and strength to millions of people. Electro-Vigueur will make you resistant. It will heat up the blood in your veins. You will feel a wonderful energy penetrate to your very bones ... it is easy to prove that electricity restores vital forces, and that vital force is nothing else but electricity ... In the morning, when you wake up, you will feel active and vigorous, you will notice with joyous astonishment that your pains have gone…Brochure and free consultations from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., 14, boulevard Montmartre, Paris.
Vigour, energy, vital forces, joyous astonishment: in an age of nervous tension these words sounded like magic charms. Masculine identities were shaken and subtly undermined by women challen
ging their role, by constant talk about falling birth rates, about degeneration, mechanization and anxiety. Electrical baths were widely prescribed for a wide range of ailments, including digestive problems, headaches, menstrual cramps, impotence and neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion).
After the Curies and their work on radium, the range of quasi-occult medical treatments was enlarged by X-ray and radium therapies, which were equally widely prescribed, especially after radioactivity had been shown to be usable in the fight against advanced cancers. Indeed, there seemed to be no end to the beneficial properties of this new, mysterious substance. Soon the cosmetics industry seized on the public interest and produced balms and creams containing traces of thorium and radium, such as Tho-Radia, a supposedly miraculous cream produced in France. ‘Stay ugly if you want to!’ trumpeted the slogan of the manufacturer, whose products were wont to lend an altogether new meaning to the idea of radiant beauty.
While radioactive treatments remained a curiosity, electricity soon conquered the world as light-bringer and supposedly all-healing source of energy, all the more powerful for being invisible: ‘Few New Yorkers realize that all through the roar of the big city there are constantly speeding messages between people separated by vast distances, and that over housetops and even through the walls of buildings and in the very air one breathes are words written by electricity,’ commented the New York Times on 21 April 1912.
Miraculous but disquieting, electricity could also bring death. In 1890, newspapers in the United States had ardently followed the controversy between Edison and Westinghouse as to whether alternating or direct current was the most appropriate means of powering the first electric chair, scheduled to be used for the execution of William Kemmler, who had killed his lover with twenty-six axe blows to the skull. Edison threw himself into a series of experiments to determine the proper procedure and the current required to cause the death of a man, a process which itself resulted in the electrocution of scores of dogs and several calves and horses, strapped into electrical harnesses by the wizard’s assistants. When the execution of Kemmler finally took place on 6 August 1890, the condemned man seemed calm and collected. ‘Now take your time and do it all right, Warden,’ he said as he was strapped into the chair, ‘there is no rush. I don’t want to take any chances on this thing, you know.’
The moments that followed the throwing of the switch were something that no one was prepared for. Instead of gracefully slumping over as Edison’s dogs had done, Kemmler showed every sign of being in extreme agony, as his face turned dark red, blood vessels burst, and his nails cut through the skin of his palms. It took a second shock to kill him. By then the room was filled with the smell of scorched flesh. The Chicago Evening Post reported: ‘The wretch was actually tortured to death with a refinement of cruelty that was unequalled in the dark ages.’ The New York Times described the state of the witnesses: ‘as miserable, as weak-kneed a lot of men as can be imagined ... They all seemed to act as though they felt that they had taken part in a scene that would be told to the world as a public shame, as a legal crime.’
The dark, dangerous side of the medium illuminating the world made it an ideal subject for science fiction novels, which quickly seized the new discoveries for their own purposes: the unseen power of electricity and radioactivity, of X-rays and atomic structure, was ideal to conjure up the wildest and most fascinating scenarios. Already during the 1870s and 1880s, Jules Verne had created a large readership for scientific visions of the future. Now a new generation of authors took this futuristic writing to a new level of imagination and sophistication: ray guns and microfilm, atom bombs and nuclear power, humanoid robots and gigantic airships, tape recorders and television, technological warfare, travel to distant galaxies and alien invasions, surviving dinosaurs, faster-than-light travel and human cloning can all be found in popular literature prior to 1914. Its tone, though, differed from that of earlier science fiction. It no longer had the thrusting optimism of Verne, the belief that science meant progress. The new generation of writers were often dystopians, believing or suggesting that the dangers inherent in harnessing and then unleashing the hidden force of nature might yield devastating outcomes. Change was inevitable, they wrote, but it was by no means sure that it would not lead into the abyss.
The most arresting and prophetic visions of technological futures and their many pitfalls appear in the work of H. G. Wells (1866-1946), an English novelist whose imagination seemed as boundless as it was dark. The Time Machine, The Stolen Bacillus (both 1895); The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896); The War of the Worlds (1898); The First Men in the Moon (1901); The Land Ironclads (1904); A Modern Utopia (1905); The War in the Air (1908); The Sleeper Awakes (1910); and The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind (1914) all describe possible transformations of the world due to physics, technology and modern capitalism, dramatizing travels into a devastated future and into space; warfare with tanks and aircraft. To Wells, the new world of science simply overwhelmed the world after centuries of ignorance:
To electricity ... mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity for attention? It thundered at man’s ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur. It rotted his metals when he put them together ... There is no single record that any one questioned why the cat’s fur crackles or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new spirit of the Seeker turned itself to these things.
The effects of this new realm, however, were often menacing and at times catastrophic, as Wells depicted in The War in the Air, in which the protagonist finds himself in an air force encampment and is overwhelmed: ‘The whole camp reflected the colossal power of modern science that had created it. A peculiar strangeness was produced by the lowness of the electric light, which lay upon the ground, casting all shadows upwards and making a grotesque shadow figure of himself and his bearers on the airship sides, fusing all three of them into a monstrous animal with attenuated legs and an immense fan-like humped body.’ Man found himself dwarfed by science.
While Wells’s utopias oscillated between benign and catastrophic, the American Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) described life in a thoroughly technological world in the year 2660, in which the inventor hero and title character of his novel Ralph 124C 41+ (1911) uses futuristic devices such as ray guns and space ships for very conventional ends: he saves his sweetheart. On the Continent, popular novelists unleashed new technologies on the heroes of their stories. Paul d’Ivoi (1856-1915) dramatized the findings of his compatriot Marie Curie in his adventure La Course au radium (The Race for Radium, 1909), while Arnould Galopin (1865-1934) used pre-Einstein physical theory to have his Doctor Omega travel race through space. Even the famous master thief Arsène Lupin was sent by his creator, Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941), to help solve the secret of a mysterious and terrifying island in L’Ile aux trente cercueils (The Island of the Thirty Coffins, 1919). The ‘divine stone’ giving life as well as death which is the object of the heroine’s epic search turns out to be a radium rock hidden by gigantic flowers.
In German-speaking countries, there seemed to be less appetite for futuristic adventure stories. The journalist Hans Dominik published some popular stories about space and time travel, but no novelist could make this subject his own, and no fictional hero or series of stories emerged to fill this void. Or was it a void? Is it possible that the Germans, with their fast-growing cities, their burgeoning industrialization and their almost daily news about inventions and technological records felt that they needed not more of the future but rather refuge in a simpler, more primitive life? While French, British and American readers were devouring new instalments of science fiction stories m
aking writers such as Maurice Leblanc and H. G. Wells both rich and famous, the most famous German writer of popular adventures, Karl May (1842-1912), specialized in exotic tales set either in the Middle East or in the Wild West. His best-loved hero was a noble Apache warrior, Winnetou, who braved innumerable adventures together with his white trapper friend, Old Shatterhand. May, who had never actually set foot in the western United States which he described so vividly in his fiction (though in 1908, after having written most of his novels, he did visit New York), became one of Germany’s most popular bestselling authors. His novels are still in print.
The popularity of Karl May was certainly linked to a scepticism about scientific advances, a lurking suspicion that underneath the relentless advance an atavistic world continued to exist and was waiting to burst out and sweep away the achievements of urbanized civilization. Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World described the discovery of live and ferocious dinosaurs on a remote South American plateau (a story echoed eighty years later in the film Jurassic Park), and in the same year Edgar Rice Burroughs became famous with his creation Tarzan of the Apes (1912, first film version 1917).
Unperturbed by cultural tremors in which she showed little interest, Marie Curie pursued her research. After her husband’s death in 1906 she herself became professor at the Sorbonne, the first woman to hold such a post at France’s most prestigious university. Radiation poisoning (as yet unrecognized) and her grief about Pierre had left a deep mark on her, as a journalist for Le Figaro recorded during her inaugural lecture: ‘I look at that strange, ageless face, which seems to have read too much, or wept too much; ... a face of cold serenity, of suppressed pain ... And I hear behind me something which seems very true:
