What? Excuse the miraculous, the very inspiration and fabric of his story, as “unworthy”? Plead verisimilitude and plausibility? Here the mask of the weird priest Muralto slips aside and we see the author of the preface for a moment revealing himself as the author of the story, a modern attempting to conjure up the miraculous again in a bygone setting for a modern audience that could not accept the miraculous as a fact in its own daily life.
So—hiding behind a false title page, hiding behind a misleading and apologetic preface, hiding behind two different false beards—Walpole gave his story of the miraculous to the Eighteenth Century British public . . . and a miracle occurred! Walpole’s dream-begotten fancy was enthusiastically received.
The 500-copy first edition of The Castle of Otranto, published in December 1764, quickly sold out. When a second edition was published in April 1765, Walpole’s initials were on the title page, a clear indication of his identity to the reading public of the time. In a new preface, Walpole explained his intentions more honestly and directly, this time writing not as an uncertain miracle-monger attempting to slip one over on the public, but as a successful artist, hailed as a breath of fresh air, who is explaining how his special trick is performed:
It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion.
The author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds. Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations, he wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions.13
This is what Walpole, under his masks, had been saying and not-saying in his original preface: his aim, as a modern, was to combine the transcendent mystery of ancient romance with the plausible characters of the contemporary novel. The rest of the preface is devoted to a defense of Shakespeare as a model of this kind of mixture.
And, clearly, The Castle of Otranto is, on one level, warmed-over ersatz Shakespeare. On another level, however, taken in the context of its own time as an experiment in the novel—and as a unique synthesis of mystery and plausibility—it is revolutionary. The Castle of Otranto is given credit by the Encyclopaedia Britannica14 for sparking the Romantic Revival, the great wave of artistic longing for the bygone spiritual ways that seized the West during the following three-quarters of a century.
But the influence that The Castle of Otranto has had can be traced even further. Walpole’s novel is in some degree the ancestor of at least six separate literary forms of the present day: the mimetic historical novel, the Gothic romance, the supernatural horror story, the mystery story, heroic fantasy in the Tolkien style, and modern science fiction.
Of these, the connection to science fiction may be the least obvious—but still it is present and present again. The Castle of Otranto, inasmuch as it initiated the Romantic Revival, which influenced, nurtured and shaped Nineteenth Century SF, is an indirect ancestor of science fiction. However, more directly, The Castle of Otranto was the forefather of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was both in the Gothic tradition and a crucial reaction against it. And finally, still more directly, The Castle of Otranto is the ancestor of the new SF because of its concern for both mystery and plausibility, or, in Walpole’s words, “the great resources of fancy” and “the rules of probability.”
Walpole managed to blend the two, more or less, but his synthesis was both unique and incomplete. It was unique because no later storyteller of the Eighteenth Century, neither Walpole nor anyone else, was able to successfully blend mystery and plausibility again in this same manner. It was incomplete because it was only the human characters, “the mortal agents,” that Walpole aimed to make plausible. The ghost of Alfonso, the central transcendent symbol of The Castle of Otranto, remained as implausible, as not-to-be-believed, as unacceptably spiritual, as ever—the one note in his story that Walpole must hang his head over and call “unworthy.”
It is as though by some accident of timing, of special interest, and of passion, Walpole had delivered himself of a prodigy—a blend of the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. As a prodigy, a unique event, The Castle of Otranto could be accepted, but it could not be exactly copied.
Walpole’s earliest would-be imitator was Clara Reeve, author of a historical study of the romance as well as one novel, The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic Story (1777), which is better known as The Old English Baron. As in her model, Reeve’s Gothic story was set in an earlier time, the Fifteenth Century, and involved a ghost-haunted castle. But the marvelous element was clearly a problem for her, and she aimed to keep it “within the utmost verge of probability.”15
Reeve’s ghost is confined to a cupboard, where he is given liberty to do no more than groan occasionally. Eventually someone looks within the cupboard and discovers, not the ghost, but his skeleton, evidence of his murder. Here we have, not the actual marvels and unreined imagination of The Castle of Otranto, but only that “air of the miraculous” of which Walpole spoke in his first preface.
Reeve’s narrowness was the natural result of the confinement of her story to familiar historical settings. Transcendence that appears within the context of the everyday world has to be tightly limited in expression and effect, or appear implausible.
Transcendence by definition consists of things which not only do not exist in our familiar world but are different in kind from anything we see around us—things which are not bound by the limitations that bind us. To claim in a story that transcendence is visibly present in our local world—which we may call the Village—would violate our sense of plausibility. We know things just aren’t that way here.
It’s possible to bring transcendence into the Village only by limiting its visibility and influence—by keeping it in dark corners, restricting its powers, and having it depart before the world at large notices it is there.
Behind Walpole’s ghost of Alfonso stands a vast, heavenly realm that empowers it and receives it when its mission is completed. But Clara Reeve could not accept anything as blatantly spiritual as a heavenly realm in her tale. As a result, her ghost is earthbound and unrooted. He comes from nowhere, he vanishes into nothingness, and he accomplishes very little in between.
In Walpole’s next imitator, Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, who wrote a handful of novels in the early 1790s, the seeming mystery would be even more rationalized. Mrs. Radcliffe’s gambit was to suggest the supernatural—and then to explain it away as the result of human agency and natural coincidences.
In Mrs. Radcliffe’s best-remembered novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which we may take as our example, there is once more the historical setting, this time closer yet to the present—the end of the Sixteenth Century. There is the castle and the haunt. But this time the haunter is no ghost at all, but Montoni, lord of the castle of Udolpho and chief of a local robber band, and the hints of the supernatural are all a plot to intimidate an heiress.
Here is a balance of mystery and plausibility more in keeping with the temperament of the time, and hereafter the model of the Gothic story would be Radcliffe rather than Walpole. Beyond Radcliffe, we can see the Gothic romance, with its old manses, frightened heroines and Byronic heroes; we can see the rational detective story; and we can see the unsupernatural historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, who in 1824 wrote an appreciation of Mrs. Radcliffe�
��s work for a new edition.
If these lines of literary descent from Walpole through Ann Radcliffe came to abandon transcendence entirely, except for that faintest air of the miraculous still present only to be dispelled by rationality, there were other stories written after the manner of Walpole in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries in which undispelled mystery continued to figure, but at the opposite price, the abandonment of plausibility. The most extreme example may be The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis, which compounds a fantastic stew of dead babies, matricide, incestuous rape, torture by the Spanish Inquisition, ghosts, devils, and the Wandering Jew. Stories of this sort aimed to entertain and titillate, to shock and unnerve, but not to persuade.
Horace Walpole’s concern in The Castle of Otranto had been truly mythic to the extent that he aimed to combine mystery and plausibility. The crucial imperfection of The Castle of Otranto was the fundamental implausibility—in modern Western terms of thought—of the central transcendence.
Certain lines of literary descent from Walpole—the Gothic romance, the rational detective story, the historical novel—could not tolerate the implausible and so abandoned transcendence in favor of a strict adherence to “the facts”—the facts of history, the facts of society, the facts of love and marriage, the facts of life and death. And, to the extent to which they favored what is over what might be, these lines became mythically sterile.
Other forms that owe something to Walpole, like heroic fantasy and the supernatural horror story, could not give up the old spirit-based transcendence. But they were not effective myth, either. They were conservative. They looked backward. They ignored “the facts.” And so they have been reckoned implausible escapist fantasy without relevance to the ordinary conduct of daily life.
SF is that line of descent through Walpole which has sought to find new grounds of plausibility for transcendence that a modern Western audience could relate to and accept. In this book, we are going to follow the line of development that has aimed to extend both the plausibility and the mysteriousness of transcendence. While other Western literary forms have favored either mystery or plausibility, SF is the line that has striven to be complete myth.
3: The New Prometheus
THE FIRST WRITER AFTER WALPOLE concerned to find a point of balance between mystery and plausibility was Mary Shelley. She was able to solve the problem that Walpole had not solved, nor any other writer of the Eighteenth Century. In her story Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), begun when she was not yet nineteen years old, Mary Shelley presented an argument that rendered transcendent power plausible in contemporary Western terms.
The argument that Mary Shelley discovered was an argument for the potential transcendence of creative science. Walpole could not have thought of it—but more than fifty years had passed since The Castle of Otranto. The times had changed. The quality of life had changed. In this altered atmosphere, new arguments were possible.
It takes time for new beliefs to be accepted, and even more time for changes in belief to be translated into changes in life. The roots of modern Western scientific thought can be traced at least as far back as the Thirteenth Century, when the English Franciscan friar-philosopher Roger Bacon taught the tools of mathematics and deductive scientific reasoning, and for this and other reasons, such as denying the truth of unexamined authority, was perceived as dangerous by the superiors of his order and placed in confinement. It took no less than four hundred years after this, as we have seen, until the late Seventeenth Century, for the philosophy of scientific rationalism to wrest the leadership of society from the traditional spiritual philosophy.
Even then, the argument between materialism and spiritualism was not settled. Through the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the representatives of spirit were a great conservative force in society. Spirit had vast inherited material wealth and position. It had prominent spokesmen. It had great capacity for resistance to the pace and direction of scientific progress. Even as late as 1860, it was possible for a bishop and a biologist to debate in public the propriety of the scientific theory of evolution. It was only in the 1920s—the era of Gernsback and the founding of Amazing Stories—that scientific materialism finally broke the last grip of traditional thought on the reins of Western society.
For the first hundred years of the modern period, well into the Eighteenth Century, it was possible for most people in the West to live as though nothing had changed, as though the old traditional beliefs were still the rule of society. The scientific doubt of Descartes and the scientific theory of Newton might convince a reasonable man, but for all that, life was still much the same. There was a great deal of radical thought, but very little radical action. Kings and nobles were still kings and nobles, priests were still priests, merchants still merchants, peasants still peasants. Whatever ideas for new parts and for independent action might be in their heads, the actors in the social drama still fit their traditional roles.
The perfect example is Horace Walpole. Just as The Castle of Otranto combined the ancient and the modern with no apparent sense of the fundamental contradiction in terms that defeated all imitators, so was Walpole’s personal life also a contradiction in terms. In politics, as a member of Parliament, Walpole was a liberal—a modern man. In private lifestyle, Walpole was a conservative. He was a member of the British ruling class, in the last years of his life inheriting the noble title Earl of Orford. He had traditional tastes. He lived a traditional life of high privilege. Life and thought were two different matters to him.
At the end of the Eighteenth Century, when Walpole was an old man, the social stasis was shattered. The American Revolution of 1776 and, even more, the French Revolution of 1789 were profound social events. The American Revolution was an assertion of political independence of thought. The French Revolution was a radical overturning of traditional society in the very heartland of the Western world. People at last had begun to act in accordance with their private thoughts. During the 1790s, the structure of traditional society began to break down.
At this very same time, the new Western material science finally overcame its inertia and moved beyond the stages of criticism and theory, beginning to demonstrate its practical power to transform the world. In the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution began. The steam engine was perfected. The power loom was invented, and the modern factory system emerged. Canals were dug to facilitate commerce. Balloons were flown, demonstrating scientific mastery of the skies. With the Nineteenth Century, the pace of change began to accelerate. In the fifteen years that followed Horace Walpole’s death in 1797, the gaslight, the steamboat and the locomotive were all invented.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in the year that Horace Walpole died. The world that she grew up in was very different from his. It was a world with reason to believe in change, a world that was beginning to associate change with the creative powers of science.
At the turn of the Nineteenth Century, the balance between the old views and the new was still precarious. There was profound ambivalence about the new modern world that was being ushered into being. Great enthusiasm alternated with great fear and reluctance, sometimes within the same person. Often within the same person. The new moderns of the Nineteenth Century dared to do what had not been done before, and were frightened at their own audacity.
Mary Shelley was an archetypical young modern of the early Nineteenth Century—a second-generation modern. Her parents had been among the first during the 1790s to advocate new ways contrary to tradition and attempt to live them. Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, had lived with a married man and borne a child out of wedlock. Mary’s father, William Godwin, to whom Frankenstein is dedicated, was a minister turned freethinker, the author of Political Justice, a radical critique of society, and the pioneer social novel, Caleb Williams.
When the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was dismissed from Oxford in 1811 for authoring a pamp
hlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism,” it was only natural that he would seek out the acquaintance of the foremost freethinker of the day, William Godwin. In 1814, he met young Mary Godwin in her father’s home, and with the aid and company of Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, eloped with her. Mary was sixteen, Shelley five years older. Shelley was already married and a father, with another child on the way, but no matter. In terms of traditional society, Percy Shelley’s and Mary Godwin’s conduct might be scandalous, but they were only acting out of principle. The willful new ideas of the times were in their heads and they could not bear not to live as they believed.
In the summer of 1816, when she began Frankenstein, Mary and Shelley were living with Claire near Geneva, Switzerland. Much had happened to Mary in two years. She had borne Shelley two children, one of whom had died when only two months old. She and Shelley would not be married until the end of December, three weeks after the discovery of the suicide of Shelley’s wife, Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine.
Their party in Geneva was joined by George Gordon Byron, with whom Claire had begun an affair, and by whom she would have a daughter in 1817. In an age when poets were pop stars, Byron was a poet and rebellious spirit even more notorious than Shelley, singing sympathy to the devil. He was rumored to have an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. Crippled and handsome, the bearer of a noble title, a rakehell and a revolutionary, Byron was the living embodiment of the contradictions of the time. He and Shelley hit it off well together, each influencing the other.
It was a rainy May and they were forced to spend time indoors. For amusement, they turned to reading supernatural horror stories, stories that from Mary Shelley’s description sound closely related to The Castle of Otranto:
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 3
