In Other Worlds

by Margaret Atwood

  It was Huxley’s genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity. Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to their uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions. It’s these double-sided abilities that produce masterpieces of speculation such as Brave New World.

  To quote The Tempest, source of Huxley’s title: “We are such stuff/As dreams are made on.” He might well have added: and nightmares.

  Of the Madness of Mad

  Scientists: Jonathan Swift’s

  Grand Academy

  In the late 1950s, when I was a university student, there were still B movies. They were inexpensively made and lurid in nature, and you could see them at cheap matinee double bills as a means of escaping from your studies. Alien invasions, mind-altering potions, and scientific experiments gone awry featured largely.

  Mad scientists were a staple of the B-film double bill. Presented with a clutch of white-coated men wielding test tubes, we viewers knew at once—being children of our times—that at least one of them would prove to be a cunning megalomaniac bent on taking over the world, all the while subjecting blondes to horrific experiments from which only the male lead could rescue them, though not before the mad scientist had revealed his true nature by gibbering and raving. Occasionally the scientists were lone heroes, fighting epidemics and defying superstitious mobs bent on opposing the truth by pulverizing the scientist, but the more usual model was the lunatic. When the scientists weren’t crazy, they were deluded: their well-meaning inventions were doomed to run out of control, creating havoc, tumult, and piles of messy guck, until gunned down or exploded just before the end of the film. Where did the mad scientist stock figure come from? How did the scientist—the imagined kind—become so very deluded and/or demented?

  It wasn’t always like that. Once upon a time there weren’t any scientists as such, in plays or fictions, because there wasn’t any science as such, or not science as we know it today. There were alchemists and dabblers in black magic—sometimes one and the same—and they were depicted not as lunatics but as charlatans bent on fleecing the unwary by promising to turn lead into gold, or else as wicked pact-makers with the Devil, hoping—like Dr. Faustus—to gain worldly wealth, knowledge, and power in exchange for their souls. The too-clever-by-half part of their characters may have descended from Plato’s Atlanteans or the builders of Babel—ambitious exceeders of the boundaries set for human beings, usually by some god, and destroyed for their presumption. These alchemists and Faustian magicians certainly form part of the mad scientist’s ancestral lineage, but they aren’t crazy or deluded, just daring and immoral.

  It’s a considerable leap from them to the excesses of the wild-eyed B-movie scientists. There must be a missing link somewhere, like the walking seal discovered just recently—though postulated by Charles Darwin as a link between a walking canid and a swimming seal. For the mad scientist missing link, I propose Jonathan Swift, acting in synergy with the Royal Society. Without the Royal Society, no Gulliver’s Travels, or not one with scientists in it; without Gulliver’s Travels, no mad scientists in books and films. So goes my theory.

  I read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a child, before I knew anything about the B-movie scientists. Nobody told me to read it; on the other hand, nobody told me not to. The edition I had was not a child’s version, of the kind that dwells on the cute little people and the funny giant people and the talking horses, but dodges any mention of nipples and urination, and downplays the excrement. These truncated versions also leave out most of Part Three—the floating island of Laputa, the Grand Academy of Lagado with its five hundred scientific experiments, and the immortal Struldbrugs of Luggnagg—as being incomprehensible to young minds. My edition was unabridged, and I didn’t skip any of it, Part Three included. I read the whole thing.

  I thought it was pretty good. I didn’t yet know that Gulliver’s Travels was satirical, that Mr. Swift’s tongue had been rammed very firmly into his cheek while writing it, and that even the name “Gulliver,” so close to “gullible,” was a tip-off. I believed the letters printed at the beginning—the one from Mr. Gulliver himself, complaining about the shoddy way in which his book had been published, and the one from his cousin Mr. Sympson—so close to “simpleton,” I later realized—testifying to the truthfulness of Mr. Gulliver. I did understand that someone called Mr. Swift had had something to do with this book, but I didn’t think he’d just made all of it up. In early eighteenth-century terms, the book was a “bite”—a tall tale presented as the straight-faced truth in order to sucker the listener into believing it—and I got bitten.

  Thus I first read this book in a practical and straightforward way, much in the way it is written. For instance, when Mr. Gulliver pissed on the fire in the royal Lilliputian palace in order to put it out, I didn’t find this either a potentially seditious poke at the pretensions of royalty and the unfairness of courts or a hilarious vulgarism. Rather, having been trained myself in the time-honoured woodsman’s ways of putting out campfires, I thought Mr. Gulliver had displayed an admirable presence of mind.

  The miniature people and the giants did hint to me of fairy tales, but Part Three—the floating island and the scientific establishment—didn’t seem to me all that far-fetched. I was then living in what was still the golden or bug-eyed monster age of science fiction—the late 1940s—so I took spaceships for granted. This was before the disappointing news had come in—no intelligent life on Mars—and also before I’d read H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, in the light of which any life intelligent enough to build spaceships and come to Earth would be so much smarter than us that we’d be viewed by them as ambulatory kebabs. So I considered it entirely possible that, once I’d grown up, I might fly through space and meet some extraterrestrials, who then as now were considered to be bald, with very large eyes and heads.

  Why then couldn’t there be a flying island such as Laputa? I thought the method of keeping the thing afloat with magnets was a little cumbersome—hadn’t Mr. Swift heard of jet propulsion?—but the idea of hovering over a country that was annoying you so they’d be in full shadow and their crops wouldn’t grow seemed quite smart. As for dropping stones onto them, it made perfect sense: kids of the immediately postwar generation were well versed in the advisability of air superiority, and knew a lot about bombers.

  I didn’t understand why these floating-island people had to eat food cut into the shapes of musical instruments, but the flappers who hit them with inflated bladders to snap them out of their thought trances didn’t seem out of the question. My father was by that time teaching in the Department of Zoology at the University of Toronto, and growing up among the scientists, and thus being able to observe them at work, I knew they could be like that: the head of the Zoology Department at the University of Toronto was notorious for setting himself on fire by putting his still-smouldering pipe into his pocket and could have made excellent use of a flapper.

  When I got as far as the Grand Academy of Lagado I felt right at home. In addition to being the golden age of bug-eyed monsters, the late 1940s was also the golden age of dangerous chemistry sets for children—now prohibited, no doubt wisely—and my brother had one. “Turn water to blood and astonish your friends!” proclaimed the advertisements, and this was no sooner said than done, with the aid of a desirable crystal named—as I recall—potassium permanganate. There were many other ways in which we could astonish our friends, and short of poisoning them, we did all of them. I doubt that we were the only children to produce hydrogen sulphide (“Make the smell of rotten eggs and astonish your friends!”) on the day when our mother’s bridge club was scheduled to meet. Through these experiments, we learned the rudiments of the scientific method: any pro
cedure done in the same way with the same materials ought to produce the same results. And ours did, until the potassium permanganate ran out.

  These were not the only experiments we performed. I will not catalogue our other adventures in science, which had their casualties—the jars of tadpoles dead from being left by mistake in the sun, the caterpillars that came to sticky ends—but will pause briefly to note the mould experiment, consisting of various foodstuffs placed in jars—our home-preserving household had a useful supply of jars—to see what might grow on them in the way of mould. Many-coloured and whiskery were the results, which I mention now only to explain why the Grand Academy “projector” who thought it might be a brilliant idea to inflate a dog through its nether orifice in order to cure it of colic raised neither of my eyebrows. It was a shame that the dog exploded, but this was surely a mistake in the method rather than a flaw in the concept; or that was my opinion.

  Indeed, this scene stayed with me as a memory trace that was reactivated the first time I had a colonoscopy and was myself inflated in this way. You had the right idea, Mr. Swift, I mused, but the wrong application. Also, you thought you were being ridiculous. Had you known that the dog-enlarging anal bellows you must have found so amusing would actually appear on Earth two hundred and fifty years later in order to help doctors run a tiny camera through your intestines so they could see what was going on in there, what would you have said?

  And so it is with the majority of the experiments described in the Grand Academy chapters of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift thought them up as jokes, but many of them have since been done in earnest, though with a twist. For instance, the first “projector” Gulliver meets is a man who has run himself into poverty through the pursuit of what Swift devised as a nutty-professor chase-a-moonbeam concept: this man wants to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers so he can bottle them for use in the winter, when the supply of sunbeams is limited. Swift must have laughed into his sleeve, but I, the child reader, found nothing extraordinary in this idea because every morning I was given a spoonful of cod liver oil, bursting with vitamin D, the “Sunshine Vitamin.” The projector had simply used the wrong object—cucumbers instead of cod.

  Some of the experiments being done by the projectors interested me less, though they have since contributed to Swift’s reputation for prescience. The blind man at the Academy who’s teaching other blind people to distinguish colours by touch was doubtless intended by Swift to represent yet more foolishness on the part of would-be geniuses, but now there are ongoing experiments involving something called the BrainPort—a device designed to allow blind people to “see” with their tongues. The machine with many handles that, when turned, cause an array of oddly Chinese-looking words to arrange themselves into an endless number of sequences—thus writing masterpieces eventually, like the well-known infinitely large mob of monkeys with typewriters—is now thought by some to be a forerunner of the computer.

  Predicting the future and suggesting the invention of handy new devices was, however, very far from Swift’s intention. His “projectors”—so called because they are absorbed in their projects—are a combination of experimental scientist and entrepreneur; they exist within Gulliver’s Travels as pearls on his long string of human folly and depravity, midway between the Lilliputians and their tiny fracas and petty intrigues and the brutal, nasty, smelly, ugly, and vicious Yahoos of the fourth book, who represent humanity in its bared-to-the-elements Hobbesian basic state.

  But Swift’s projectors aren’t wicked, and they aren’t really demented. They’re even well meaning: their inventions are intended for the improvement of humankind. All we have to do is give them more money and more time and let them have their way, and everything will get a lot better very soon. It’s a likely story, and one we’ve heard many times since the advent of applied science. Sometimes this story ends well, at least for a while—science did lower the human mortality rate, the automobile did speed up travel, air conditioning did make us cooler in summer, the “green revolution” did increase the supply of food. But the doctrine of unintended consequences applies quite regularly to the results of scientific “improvements”: agriculture can’t keep up with the population explosion with the result that millions are leading lives of poverty and misery, air conditioning contributes to global warming, the automobile promised freedom until—via long commute distances, clogged roads, and increased pollution—it delivered servitude. Swift anticipated us: the projectors promise an idyllic future in which one man shall do the work of ten and all fruits shall be available at all times—pace automation and the supermarket—but “The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection, and in the meantime, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes.” Under the influence of the projectors the utopian pie is visible in the sky, but it remains there.

  As I’ve said, the projectors are not intentionally wicked. But they have tunnel vision—much like a present-day scientist quoted recently, who, when asked why he’d created a polio virus from scratch, answered that he’d done it because the polio virus was a simple one, and that next time he’d create a more complex virus. A question most of us would have understood to have meant, “Why did you do such a potentially dangerous thing?”—a question about ends—was taken by him to be a question about means. Swift’s projectors show the same confusion in their understanding of ordinary human desires and fears. Their greatest offence is not against morals: instead they are offenders against common sense—what Swift might have called merely “sense.” They don’t intend to cause harm, but by refusing to admit the adverse consequences of their actions, they cause it anyway.

  The Grand Academy of Lagado was recognized by Swift’s readers as a satire upon the Royal Society, which even by Swift’s time was an august and respected institution. Though English seekers after empirical facts had been meeting since 1640, the group became formalized as the Royal Society under Charles II, and as of 1663 was referred to as “The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.” The word natural signifies the distinction between such knowledge—based on what you could see and measure, and on the “scientific method”: some combination of observation, hypothesis, deduction, and experiment—from “divine” knowledge, which was thought to be invisible and immeasurable, and of a higher order.

  Though these two orders of knowledge were not supposed to be in conflict, they often were, and both kinds might be brought to bear on the same problem, with opposite results. This was especially true during outbreaks of disease: victims and their families would resort both to prayer and to purging, and who could tell which might be the more efficacious? But in the first fifty years of the Royal Society’s existence, “natural knowledge” gained much ground, and the Royal Society acted increasingly as a peer-review body for experiments, fact-gathering, and demonstrations of many kinds.

  Swift is thought to have begun Gulliver’s Travels in 1721, which was interestingly enough the year in which a deadly smallpox epidemic broke out, both in London and in Boston, Massachusetts. There had been many such epidemics, but this one saw the eruption of a heated controversy over the practise of inoculation. Divine knowledge had varying views: was inoculation a gift from God, or was smallpox itself a divine visitation and punishment for misbehaviour, with any attempt made to interfere with it being impiety? But practical results rather than theological arguments were being increasingly credited.

  In London, inoculation was championed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had learned of the practise in Turkey when her husband had been ambassador there; in Boston, its great supporter was, oddly enough, Cotton Mather—he of the Salem witchcraft craze and The Wonders of the Invisible World—who had been told of it by an inoculated slave from Africa. Both, though initially vilified, were ultimately successful in their efforts to vindicate the practise. Both acted in concert with medical doctors—Mather with Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, who, in 1726, read a paper on the results of his
practise-cum-research to the Royal Society, Lady Mary with Dr. John Arbuthnot.

  You might think Swift would have been opposed to inoculation. After all, the actual practise of inoculation was repulsive and counterintuitive, involving as it did the introduction of pus from festering victims into the tissues of healthy people. This sounds quite a lot like the exploding dog from the Grand Academy of Lagado and such other Lagadan follies. In fact, Swift took the part of the inoculators. He was an old friend of Dr. Arbuthnot, a fellow member of the Martinus Scriblerus Club of 1714, a group that had busied itself with satires on the abuses of learning. And, unlike the ridiculous experiments of the “projectors”—experiments that may have been invented by Swift with the aid of some insider hints from Dr. Arbuthnot—inoculation seemed actually to work, most of the time.

  It isn’t experimentation as such that’s the target of Book Three, but experiments that backfire. Moreover, it’s the obsessive nature of the projectors: no matter how many dogs they explode, they keep at it, certain that the next time they inflate a dog they’ll achieve the proposed result. Although they appear to be acting according to the scientific method, they’ve got it backward. They think that because their reasoning tells them the experiment ought to work, they’re on the right path; thus they ignore observed experience. Although they don’t display the full-blown madness of the truly mad fictional scientists of the mid-twentieth century, they’re a definitive step along the way: the Lagadan Grand Academy was the literary mutation that led to the crazed white-coats of those B movies.