Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (46 page)

This, as I give it, is a verbatim translation done by Pundit himself, so there can be no mistake about it. From the few words thus preserved, we glean several important items of knowledge, not the least interesting of which is the fact that a thousand years ago actual monuments had fallen into disuse—as was all very proper—the people contenting themselves, as we do now, with a mere indication of the design to erect a monument at some future time; a corner-stone being cautiously laid by itself “solitary and alone” (excuse me for quoting the great American poet Benton!), as a guarantee of the magnanimous intention. We ascertain, too, very distinctly, from this admirable inscription, the how as well as the where and the what, of the great surrender in question. As to the where, it was Yorktown (wherever that was), and as to the what, it was General Cornwallis (no doubt some wealthy dealer in corn). He was surrendered. The inscription commemorates the surrender of—what? why, “of Lord Cornwallis.” The only question is what could the savages wish him surrendered for. But when we remember that these savages were undoubtedly cannibals, we are led to the conclusion that they intended him for sausage. As to the how of the surrender, no language can be more explicit. Lord Cornwallis was surrendered (for sausage) “under the auspices of the Washington Monument Association”—no doubt a charitable institution for the depositing of corner-stones.—But, Heaven bless me! what is the matter? Ah, I see—the balloon has collapsed, and we shall have a tumble into the sea. I have, therefore, only time enough to add that, from a hasty inspection of the fac-similes of newspapers, &c., &c., I find that the great men in those days among the Amriccans, were one John, a smith, and one Zacchary, a tailor.

Good-bye, until I see you again. Whether you ever get this letter or not is point of little importance, as I write altogether for my own amusement. I shall cork the MS. up in a bottle, however, and throw it into the sea.

Yours everlastingly,

PUNDITA.

In the 1954 Preface to his
Universal History of Iniquity,
Jorge Luis Borges defined the baroque as “the style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature.”
¹
The baroque is therefore a self-conscious style
par excellence.
According to Borges’ definition: “The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous”; and “this humor is unintentional in the works of Baltasar Graciàn but intentional, even indulged, in the works of John Donne.”
²
In the manner, then, of seventeenth-century church architecture—it might be in Spain or Bavaria—the spirit of the baroque piles ornament relentlessly on ornament, while cultivating
trompe-l’œil
for its illusion of depth
, and while obsessively re-cuing every curlicue in anticipation of the fractal geometry of a Mandelbrot algorithm. The baroque in music refers to the fugal style, in which again the artist, preeminently J. S. Bach, raises self-imitation to a structural principle. Yet fugue also refers to a state of social disintegration and to an accompanying panicked mentality that drives forth the individual refugee from the incendiarism and bloodletting of civic breakdown. Europe’s baroque centuries saw the religious wars, Puritanism, agitation of the protesting masses, and the inevitable massacres, for which music offers a counterpart in the
stretto
of the fugue. Here the competing voices figuratively tear the subject to shreds in an aesthetic refinement of the Dionysiac sparagmos.

The novel arises with the baroque, in the
Simplicius
and
Eulenspiegel
narratives, in
picaresque,
and in the moralizing abyss of
Don Quixote,
where Part One is a topic of discussion, mostly inane, among the characters in Part Two. The baroque therefore peculiarly trumps the modern in its exploitation of formal complexity; the modernist writers might match, but they never excel, their two- or three-century precursors in self-allusion and abyssal autoscopy. Indeed, the Parisian Symbolists, those first modernists, remained keenly aware of their debt to the seventeenth century “Parnassians,” Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé assiduously practicing the sonnet, as though writing in the time of Louis XIII. Later Max Reger (1873–1916) and Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) mimicked baroque-era models in music, as did M. C. Escher in graphic media. Borges, in his Preface, “would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage of art,” a stage which some would call decadent.
³
Borges notes that the eighteenth century, which coined the term
baroque,
considered the seventeenth century, which invented the style, to have been in bad taste. Borges fails to deny this charge, whereby one might consider that he adds it to the repertory of the baroque, as perhaps a studious awkwardness or an occasional deliberate pedantry in the articulation.

In
The Decline of the West,
Oswald Spengler says that the Western baroque strove towards the dissolution of genre in a movement of synesthesia: “Painting becomes polyphonic, ‘picturesque,’ infinity-seeking,” while “the colours become tones” and “the art of the brush claims kinship with the style of cantata and madrigal.”4 Again, “the background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as fill-up and, as space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance.”5

I.

A baroque spirit pervades the creativity of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), arguably the innovator of the science fiction genre. Indeed, Poe’s
oeuvre,
in which his science fiction stories play a central role, constitutes a gigantic baroque structure comparable in its unity-in-variety to an instance of Palladian architecture or an extended variation-composition by Bach. Poe himself, increasingly aware of that unity-in-variety, planned his extravagant, speculative prose poem
Eureka
(1848) to be the belated theoretical foundation of what had come before it, subsuming all earlier productivity in its paradoxical reconciliation of Epicurean atomism with a distinctly Neoplatonic version of Plato’s
Timaeus-
cosmology. In
Eureka,
applying Spengler to Poe, one might say that “the background…gains a preponderant importance,” but in Poe’s
oeuvre
many other baroque traits lend character to the individual stories. In the early “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833), for example, the first-person narration begins with an announcement of emissary status corresponding to the fugal, or centrifugal, or fugitive theme that belongs at once to the Simplicius story and to contrapuntal music. “Of my country and my family I have little to say,” Poe’s narrator reports; “ill usage and length of years have driven me from one, and estranged me from the other.”6

Mental exhaustion overwhelms Poe’s narrator, a self-reported condition that reappears as an exegetical trope in the prose of H. P. Lovecraft (1897–1937), often cited as Poe’s successor, and in that of Clark Ashton Smith. A student since youth “of the German moralists”—presumably Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and F. W. J. Schelling—who admires their “eloquent madness,” Poe’s narrator remarks of his own intellect its “Pyrrhonism” or ultra-skepticism and its “aridity”.
⁷
He has relentlessly, systematically worked through the litany of received wisdom, critiquing each tenet of standing doctrine only to reject it, on “the principles of science.”
⁸
By an uncanny reciprocity, which makes him both pursuer and pursued, the narrator senses himself the prey of “a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me like a fiend,”
⁹
and which precipitates him geographically where he already is philosophically—irretrievably at sea. The final image of “MS,” an all-devouring whirlpool into which the enigmatic ghost ship must plunge, becomes a
Leitmotif
of the Poe-esque, recurring in “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841) and, as a cosmological Ur-Phenomenon, in
Eureka.
Baudelaire wrote of Poe that, “The opening passages of [his] writings always have a drawing power without violence, like a whirlpool,” the image corresponding to what the Symbolist calls the American’s “nervous tension”; to which Baudelaire adds, “the reader, as though in the grip of vertigo, is impelled to follow the author in his inviting deduction.”10

Poe’s interest in science is really his connoisseurship of the seventeenth-century natural-philosophical systems, such as those of Johannes Kepler (1671–1630) and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), which carried over into the “Age of Enlightenment” select traits of Scholasticism and Neo-Platonism. In
Eureka,
Poe praises Kepler for having
“guessed,
that is to say…
imagined”
that the planetary orbits corresponded to the dual
foci
of a parabola and not to the long-assumed single focus of a true circle; and he lavishly distinguishes thinking
in modo Kepleriano
from what he calls thinking “Ram-ishly” and “Hog-ishly,” terms which belong to an elaborate lampoon of Aristotle and Francis Bacon.
¹¹
As Borges writes, “the baroque is intellectual.” Poe is an intellectual, sometimes shading into a wit; but he is a wit who elaborates his jokes exhaustively, the way that Bach exhausts the self-referential B.A.C.H.
motif
in
The Art of the Fugue.
Baudelaire remarked Poe’s “knowledge of the harmonic terms of beauty,” but also his “hideous logic” and his ability “to express grief by laughter.”
¹²
Eureka begins in laughter, in the topsy-turvy rhetoric of a letter from the year 2848, and finds its climax in the annihilating
“Oneness”
into which the universe, as Poe argues, must inevitably collapse once its property of attraction overcomes its property of radiation so that the former resolves the multiplicity of divided atoms back into its primal de-ontological unity.13 Poe describes the mental tone attendant on imagining these events as the equivalent of what would be felt by a man who balances on the lip of a volcano “whirling on his heel.”14

Cosmic vertigo attends the pyrotic end-of-the-world in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), one of Poe’s short stories in the form of a Platonic dialogue. Prototype of the
fin-du-monde
genre, and generically affiliated with Reformation-era apocalyptic, “Eiros and Charmion” records the death of humanity when, the chemistry of a comet’s tail withdrawing nitrogen from the earth’s atmosphere, the concentration of oxygen incites the
stretto-
like global spontaneous combustion of living matter. Eiros, the narrator, describes “a combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate… the entire fulfillment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book.”
¹⁵
Yet there
is
a narrator. The “furious delirium” and “wild lurid light” of what seemed the last moment were not extinction, but rather translation to a non-supernatural higher realm, “Aidenn,” where the “conversation” occurs.
¹⁶

In the cosmology of Poe’s
Eureka
, as in that of Swedenborg’s
Arcana Coelestia
(1747),
the soul ascends through a hierarchy of dimensions, the lower being grossly material with the higher tending towards pure spirit. Poe, however, like Epicurus, distinguishes spirit from matter only by the fineness of its atomic basis, a notion foreign to Swedenborg. In “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841), another Platonic dialogue, Monos details the post-mortem decay of his interred corpse and the liberation from fleshly trammels of the finer spiritual part of his existence. But the real interest in “Monos and Una” lies in the glimpse of industrial futurity and the defense of imagination against the scorn of a merely utilitarian logic.

The world of the twenty-fifth century is, as Monos remembers it to Una, one of triumphant “Democracy” and “huge smoking cities…innumerable,” in which a few prophet-critics had “ventured to doubt the propriety of the term ‘improvement,’ as applied to the progress of our civilization.”
¹⁷
Monos says: “Occasionally the poetic intellect—that intellect which we now feel to have been the most exalted of all—since these truths which to us were of the most enduring importance could only be reached by that
analogy
which speaks in proof-tones to the imagination alone, and to the unaided reason bears no weight—occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic.”
¹⁸
The “utilitarian” minded majority insisted, however, on the sole epistemological legitimacy of its own “infantine imbecility,” as Monos calls it; that insistence issuing fatally in “a diseased commotion, moral and physical.”
¹⁹
The malady of manic agitation increased as humanity “grew infected with system, and with abstraction” until the afflicted social order fulfilled the law that, “widest ruin [is] the price of the highest civilization.”20

Poe’s ornate sentences and anti-positivist leaps of logic validate Borges’ observation on the epistemology of the baroque. The classical age condemned the baroque age for its dubious syllogisms, especially for those rooted in Scholasticism, which argued that things in the City of Man are analogous to things in the City of God. Aristotelian though it tended to be, Scholasticism nevertheless incorporated what Poe calls “the majestic intuition of Plato,” and it understood that the cosmos resonated with “the
μ
o
υσίχή
” [
music
] that only a finely attuned “moral sense” can apperceive.
²¹

II.

The rubric of
the baroque in science fiction
entails at least one imbroglio. Poe, the true
atavus
of the science fiction genre, while baroque in style and temperament, is nevertheless not central to any contemporary understanding of that genre, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells having usurped that station. Yet Poe inspired a multitude of followers not only directly but also indirectly
via
the curious roundabout of French Symbolist poetry. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), and M. P. Shiel (1865–1947) were more or less direct successors of the master. So also were the members of a coterie of American writers who, notwithstanding their connoisseurship of Poe, followed the quirky ambition of translating the poetic sensibility of Baudelaire—along with that of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1897) and Paul Verlaine (1844–1896)—into fantastic narrative. The Symbolist school, beginning with Baudelaire, revered Poe, just as it revered the writers of the French Baroque. The American Symbolist-imitators for their part drew additionally on two quirky themes that originally became topical in the seventeenth century. Atlantology was one; the theory of cycles of civilization, of an unknown history before history, was another.