EL CONVENTO DEL CARMEN DE LARREA, AMOREBIETA

Shiel portrays the Earth as monstrous, thus associating horror with the little known Arctic, an oft occurring fin-de-siècle motif of a landscape at the limits of scientific knowledge in 1901. The Purple Cloud echoes both Shelley’s The Last Man and Frankenstein:76 Adam Jeffson recounts his

experiences as one of two survivors left on Earth after a catastrophic cloud of gas expelled by volcanism kills sentient life on its surface. Consequently much of this apocalyptic narrative develops the theme of isolation and offers a redemptive Adam and Eve myth set against the living planet motif, creating a space to focus consideration onto human responses to non-human nature. Jeffson

encounters a lake at the pole, ‘the old eternal inner secret of the Life of this Earth, which it was a most

74

Jon Turney, Lovelock and Gaia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 77. 75

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed’ (1929)

<http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff3/wscream.htm> [accessed 22 November 2009]. 76

Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 1996) and Frankenstein, Or, The Modern

burning shame for a man to see […] this fluid was the substance of a living creature’. He vaguely recalls ‘a creature with many dull and anguished eyes’ and ‘the appalling nightmare and black abysm of sensations’ that this confrontation affects. Resonant with but unlike Stapledon’s Star Maker, in which the narrator comes to terms with the presence of an inscrutable alien other, Jeffson relates his experience to ‘fancy’, an ‘impression, or dream, or notion’, and finally to ‘[his] madness’, in an attempt to deny its existence.77 This vision occurs after Jeffson crosses a boundary into a world aligned with darkness, nightmare and horror, establishing the structural theme of trespass. The creature itself is composed of fluid, which complements this trespass and potential breakdown of spatial boundaries with that of indeterminate monstrous form. The theme of the infinite (‘eternal’) and silence (‘secret’) are central to Jeffson’s response to the living Earth.

Description of the creature draws significantly on the sublime. Burke locates the origin of the sublime in objects that excite a sense of self-preservation and which therefore turn on feelings of pain or danger; he claims that ‘terror is in all cases whatsoever, either openly or latently the ruling

principle of the sublime’.78 Shiel firmly associates the creature with supernatural terror, intensifying such associations by situating Jeffson’s confrontation in the Arctic. The unfamiliarity of the landscape and the uncertainty of Jeffson’s description tap into Burke’s observation that obscurity enhances the terror of the sublime: Burke remarks that ‘[w]hen we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes’.79 This insight connects the search for comprehensive geographical knowledge, essentially a scientific and colonial quest of discovery and exploration, with the desire to encompass the obscure and to familiarise and therefore reduce the terror and the sublimity of these unknown landscapes. In this sense it bears affinities with Stapledon’s Star Maker and illustrates how the Gaian motif functions to landscape nature’s otherness.

Jeffson’s encounter occurs in the supernatural context of a Manichean struggle between cosmic “Powers” of light and darkness, a duality that is literalised by the Powers’ internal struggle for Jeffson’s soul. The catastrophe underscores humankind’s fragility compared to nature, which Jeffson

77 Shiel. 78

Edmund Burke, ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful: And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. by David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 49-199 (p. 102).

79

sees as cruel and heedless. He describes a feminised Earth as ‘dark and moody, sudden and ill-fated’, who ‘rends her young like a cannibal lioness’. In another episode he uses this metaphor again when addressing nature, calling it a ‘dark-minded Mother, with thy passionate cravings after the Infinite, thy regrets, and mighty griefs, and comatose sleeps, and sinister coming doom’.80 George R. Stewart would later echo this theme in a biblical context in Earth Abides (1949), which contain passages emphasising Earth’s autonomous existence after civilisation’s destruction by an unknown plague.81 These intellectual landscapes associate Earth with the infinite, which Burke identifies as a major source of the sublime; Jeffson’s ascription of infinity to the non-human world highlights his sense of an asymmetric relation to the unfathomable otherness of Earth.82 When Jeffson thinks that ‘nothing could be more appallingly insecure than living on a planet’, he gives voice to Promethean fears that nature is not neutral but antagonistic to humanity. Conversely he also positively contrasts this

intellectual landscape to the ice, arguing that ‘the firm land is health and sanity, and dear to the life of man’. Shiel’s use of the image highlights a negative, spiritual response to the immensities of Earth and the cosmos, but this relationship is ambivalent: he ultimately realises that the feminised Earth ‘is old and wise […] for great is the earth, and her Ages, but man “passeth away’.83

On his journey back from the Arctic Jeffson witnesses the effect of the still unknown natural catastrophe and experiences ‘that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up’.84 In his less lucid moments Jeffson entertains the fear of

indistinguishability; that the boundaries between his individuality and the Earth as a feminised other will dissolve. Without a social context to provide points of recognition or self-definition, Jeffson finds growing difficulty in maintaining his self-awareness:

more and more the earth over-grows me, wooes me, assimilates me; so that I ask myself this question: ‘Must I not, in time, cease to be a man, and become a small earth, precisely her copy, extravagantly weird and fierce, half-demoniac, half-ferine, wholly mystic – morose and turbulent – fitful, and deranged, and sad – like her?’.85

80

Shiel. 81

George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (London: Transworld Publishers, 1956; repr. 1961). 82 Burke, p. 115. 83 Shiel. 84 Shiel. 85 Shiel.

What is feared here would later be sought after by others. This passage anticipates deep ecology’s transpersonal identification with a transcendent nature in which the subject’s ego is subsumed. Voller notes that this is anticipated by ‘the Romantic visionary mind’, which explored ‘an identifying engagement with the numinous perceived to be informing nature’.86 The theme of being “One” with nature is already implicit in this passage, yet Jeffson’s awareness of a connection to the Earth excludes knowledge of this other. He explains that

[h]er [Earth’s] method of forming coal, geysers and hot sulphur-springs, and the jewels, and the atols and coral reefs; the metamorphic rocks of sedimentary origin, like gneiss, the plutonic and volcanic rocks, rocks of fusion, and the unstratified masses which constitute the basis of the crust; and harvests, the burning flame of flowers, and the passage from the vegetable to the animal: I do not know them, but they are of her, and they are like me, molten in the same furnace of her fiery heart.87

This view of Earth’s natural processes highlights the fundamental recognition that humankind shares its origins with diverse non-human others, thus breaking down the radical separation between the human/nature duality. Yet this passage erects boundaries as much as it offers identification with non- human nature, thus establishing a distinction between humankind and the non-human. Nature retains an otherness that Jeffson landscapes in terms of the feminine and of supernatural terror, itself evocative of the sublime.

While Shiel focuses on the individual’s sense of cosmic horror toward the immensities of Earth and the cosmos, he nevertheless assigns to the social sphere responsibility for the projection of intellectual landscapes derived from human experience:

Man’s notion of a Heaven, a Paradise, reserved for the spirits of the good, clearly arose from impressions which the earth made upon his mind: for no Paradise can be fairer than this; just as his notion of a Hell arose from the squalid mess into which his own foolish habits of thought and action turned this Paradise.88

An interest in social worlds accompanies portrayals of an individual’s experience of cosmic horror. Jeffson’s claim that paradisal landscapes are based on experience of non-human nature while its converse is a consequence of culture assigns accountability for nature’s asymmetry not only to the

86

Jack G. Voller, ‘Universal Mindscapes: The Gaia Hypothesis in Science Fiction’, in Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined Worlds, ed. by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University State Press, 1989), pp. 136-154 (p. 138).

87 Shiel. 88

human management of Earth’s resources, but more generally to their politico-cultural attitudes. Jeffson landscapes the planet as a terrestrial ship, a significant motif that also literally provides transport for the Arctic expedition and Jeffson’s later international travel. His experiences during these solitary years lead him to orient himself toward civilisation’s ruin and nature as the only other sources of interaction. He metaphorically extends his phenomenal experience of the world to Earth’s processes; by relating the eruption of the purple cloud in language that ties it to the beating of waves against his ship he establishes a relationship of microcosm-macrocosm between his journey and ‘this planetary ship of earth’, using this model to understand the catastrophe as ‘a wave rather which she [the Earth] had reserved, and has spouted, from her own un-motherly entrails...’.89 In this context the catastrophe itself can be read as a punishment for civilisation’s transgressions.

The image of the Earth as a ship sailing through space foregrounds the planet’s fragility and contributes another dimension to Jeffson’s anxiety toward nature. This metaphor of the ‘planetary ship of earth’, like Wells’ reference to an abundant Earth opened up by geoengineering, echoes Henry George’s metaphor, in Progress and Poverty (1879), of Earth as a well-provisioned ship, and with popularised images of Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth.90 Everett F. Bleiler notes Shiel’s adaptation of George’s concepts in his novel The Lord of the Sea, highlighting Shiel’s interest in the socio-economic ramifications of human responses to Earth.91 George’s metaphor highlights the human exploitation made possible by an elite’s possession of a planet’s abundant resources and reveals his arguably justified faith in Earth’s material ability to sustain the human population in 1879, a state of affairs that is maintained in Shiel’s text at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In Doyle’s “When the World Screamed”, George Edward Challenger, the distinguished if intolerant professor of The Lost World, sets out to prove his hypothesis that Earth is an organism whose skin is the eight mile crust of the planet’s surface. Challenger contracts the narrator Mr. Peerless Jones to complete the final stage of a drilling project designed to pierce the flesh of the

89

Shiel. 90

George, para. IV.II.21. 91

Everett F. Bleiler, ‘Shiel, M(atthew) P(hipps)’, in The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, ed. by John Clute and John Grant, 2nd edn (London: Orbit, 1999), pp. 1101-1102 (p. 1102).

uncovered organism. Challenger considers this project ‘one of the greatest experiments – I may even say the greatest experiment – in the history of the world’, and explains that:

‘the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed, as I believe, with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own.’

Clearly the man was a lunatic.92

Challenger’s thesis anticipates the concept of planetary homeostasis, while Peerless’ reaction

prefigures the resistance Lovelock faced from the scientific community upon first proposing the Gaia hypothesis. Lovelock retrospectively claimed James Hutton as one of the precursors of Gaia theory, a Scottish scientist who argued in 1785 that ‘the Earth was like an animal and that its proper study should be by physiology’. The French physiologist Claude Bernard first recognised organisms’ self- regulating properties as the ‘wisdom of the body’, which Walter Cannon referred to in the 1930s when he coined “homeostasis”.93 Lovelock calls the study of Earth as Gaia geophysiology, which draws together this combination of the physiological and geophysical sciences and echoes what is literalised in this story: traditional literary images of a personified or zoomorphic Earth that act as intellectual landscapes prefiguring a colonial approach to physical space.

Challenger’s ostensible motivation is the search for scientific knowledge: he points out that ‘[t]o know once for all what we are, why we are, where we are, is that not in itself the greatest of all human aspirations?’. Behind this lies a narrative of conquest which informs his language: ‘I propose to let the earth know that there is at least one person, George Edward Challenger, who calls for attention – who, indeed, insists upon attention’.94 Having dominated the academic sphere and amassed a fortune his ambition escalates, but his declaration suggests that underlying this disinterested

scientific inquiry is an infantile desire for recognition and attention. His desire, as two of the characters point out, is coupled to a general lack of care and respect and is overlaid with personal aggrandisement, qualities that contribute both to his notoriety and the appeal of his entrepreneurial individualism.

92

Doyle. 93

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1995), pp. 9, 18-19. 94

Edward Malone calls Challenger ‘a primitive cave-man in a lounge suit’, but clearly admires his achievements, also calling him ‘the greatest brain in Europe, with a driving force behind it that can turn all his dreams into facts’. The scientific pursuit of knowledge, joined to a disregard of its effects, is characterised as a fundamental yet primitive trait of human nature. Despite many lawsuits

Challenger continues to show little respect for the environment. In an episode that exhibits an early interest in issues of environmental respect, Malone reports how Challenger ‘[s]aid [the machinery] was one-tenth of an inch out of estimate, so he simply chucked it by the wayside’. Expressive of fears that the British countryside would be despoiled by the whim of entrepreneurs and industrialists, mistreatment of social and natural worlds by the wealthy and independent pioneering scientist is explicitly aligned when the narrator explains that ‘[a]n audience after one of Challenger’s harangues usually felt as if, like the earth, its protective epidermis had been pierced and its nerves laid bare’, which emphasises Challenger’s capacity for confrontation and mastery by his ability to get under an eight mile thick skin.95

Peerless, an expert in Artesian borings, actualises the relationship of dominance Challenger poses to Earth. Challenger internalises the gap between himself and others, describing Peerless in unflattering terms as a mechanical instrument to be directed by his intelligence and will. He naturalises this relationship when he claims that ‘[a] certain analogy runs through all nature’:96

You, sir, represent the mosquito. Your Artesian borer takes the place of the stinging proboscis. The brain has done its work. Exit the thinker. Enter the mechanical one, the peerless one, with his rod of metal. Do I make myself clear?.97

This insect analogy anticipates Hamilton and Williamson’s use and is reiterated in many later living world narratives, standing as a model of human asymmetry in relation to the planet. It is here connected to another prevalent symbol, the drill, often gendered and opposed to the feminised Earth. Upon seeing the Earth’s flesh Peerless exclaims, ‘Good Lord! […] And am I to plunge a harpoon into that beast!’, thus paralleling Challenger’s hubristic domination of the landscape and Ahab’s attempt to dominate the sea and its eponymous denizen in Moby-Dick.98 The narrator’s closing words, that ‘[i]t 95 Doyle. 96 Doyle. 97 Doyle. 98

has been the common ambition of mankind to set the whole world talking. To set the whole world screaming was the privilege of Challenger alone’, situate Challenger at the forefront of civilisation’s progress. This is made possible by an ethically vacuous science and technology and does not in itself represent any progress in human nature but an extension of basic human responses to the non-human. Peerless refers to the living planet as ‘Mother Earth’ when he credits Challenger with an ironised panegyric at the successful conclusion of the project: ‘Challenger the super scientist, Challenger the arch-pioneer, Challenger the first man of all men whom Mother Earth had been compelled to

recognize’, and reports that ‘nowhere did the injured planet emit such a howl as at the actual point of penetration, but she showed that she was indeed one entity by her conduct elsewhere’.99 The image constructed is of a scientist raping the world, an action supported by a self-centred application of technology.

Peerless witnesses a scene that indexes an alternative mode of relating to nature’s otherness. A system of elevators from the Earth’s surface to its unshielded flesh operate as a metaphorical time machine through geologic time. The strata revealed by the borings are a sign of the Earth’s age, and Peerless’ reaction to this signifier of the infinite is one of wonder: ‘[t]he archaic rocks varied wonderfully in colour, and I can never forget one broad belt of rose-coloured felspar, which shone with an unearthly beauty before our powerful lamps’.100 ‘Unearthly’ is a strange adjective to attach to the earth, which paradoxically constructs our native planet as alien and reveals the extent of the limits to intellectual landscapes when confronted with the Earth’s strata, a spatial geography in which temporal estrangement increases the further down you go (down is back in time). Peerless’ sense of awe and wonder toward the alien beauty of Earth’s geology and age offers an alternative to

Challenger’s antagonistic attitude toward nature’s otherness. It also suggests that the familiarity of Earth is itself due to intellectual and physical interactions between the human and non-human which elide Earth’s alien otherness. Despite Fogg’s complaint that the term terraforming describes the task of adapting planets to resemble Earth and so cannot be applied to it, the phrase ‘an unearthly beauty’

99

Doyle. 100