Seeing Further (6 page)

Despite the indulgent tone, the Lagadan comic aspects are in evidence: the chemical experiments that blow up, the stinky substances, the mess, the animal excrement, the obsession.

The tragic or sinister mad scientist evolutionary line runs through R.L. Stevenson’s 1886 novel,
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
in which Dr Jekyll – another of those cross-the-forbidden-liners, with another of those mysterious laboratories – stumbles upon, or possibly inherits from Hawthorne, another of those potions that dissolve the bonds holding spirit and flesh together. But this time the potion doesn’t kill the drinker, or not at first. It does dissolve his flesh, but then it alters and re-forms both body and soul. There are now two selves, which share memory, but nothing else except the house keys. Jekyll’s potion-induced second self, Hyde, is morally worse but physically stronger, with more pronounced ‘instincts’. As this is a post-Darwinian fable, he is also hairier.

Dr Jekyll is then betrayed by the very scientific method he has relied upon. Time after time, the mixing up of the potion and the drinking of it produce the same results; so far, so good-and-bad. But then the original supply of chemicals runs out, and the new batch doesn’t work. The boundary-dissolving element is missing, and Dr Jekyll is fatally trapped inside his furry, low-browed, murderous double. There were earlier ‘sinister double’ stories, but this one – to my knowledge – is the first in which the doubling is produced by a ‘scientific’ chemical catalyst. As with much else, this kind of transmutation has become a much-used comic book and filmic device. (The Hulk, for instance – the raging, berserk alter ego of reserved physicist Bruce Banner – came by his greenness and bulkiness through exposure to the rays from a ‘gamma bomb’ trial supervised by Dr Banner himself.)

Next in the line comes H.G. Wells’ 1896 Dr Moreau – he of the Island, upon which he attempts, through cruel vivisection experiments, to sculpt animals into people, with appalling and eventually lethal results. Moreau has lost the well-meaning but misguided quality of the projectors: he’s possessed by a ‘passion for research’ that exists for its own sake, simply to satisfy Moreau’s own desire to explore the secrets of physiology. Like Frankenstein, he plays God – creating new beings – but like Frankenstein, the results are monstrous. And like so many of the sinister scientists who come after him, he is ‘irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on …’

From Moreau, it’s a short step to the Golden Age of mad scientists, who became so numerous in both fiction and film by the mid-twentieth century that everyone recognised the stereotype as soon as it made its appearance.

Its lowest point is reached, quite possibly, in the B-movie called variously
The Head That Wouldn’t Die
or
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.
The scientist in it is even more seriously depraved than usual. The head in question is that of his girlfriend; it comes off in a car accident, after which incident most men might have cried. But the mad scientist is building a Frankenstein monster out of body parts filched from a hospital, underestimating as usual the monster’s clothing size – why do those monsters’ sleeves always end halfway down their arms? – so he wraps the girl’s head in his coat and scampers off with it across the fields. Once under a glass bell with wires attached to its neck and its hair in a Bride of Frankenstein frizzle, the head gives itself to thoughts of revenge while the scientist himself haunts strip clubs in search of the perfect body to attach to it.

There’s another element in Book Three of
Gulliver’s Travels
that bears mention here because it so often gets mixed into the alchemist/mad scientist sorts of tales: the theme of immortality. On the island of Luggnagg, the third in Swift’s trio of capital-L islands, Gulliver encounters the immortals – children born with a spot on their foreheads that means they will never die. At first, Gulliver longs to meet these ‘Struldbrugs’, whom he pictures as blessed: surely they will be repositories of knowledge and wisdom. But he soon finds that they are on the contrary cursed, because, like their mythological forebears Tithonus and the Sibyl of Cumae, they do not receive eternal youth along with their eternal life. They simply live on and on, becoming older and older, and also ‘opinionated, peevish, covetous, morose, vain … and dead to all natural affection’. Far from being envied, they are despised and hated; they long for death, but cannot achieve it.

Immortality has been one of the constant desires of humanity. The means to it differ – one may receive it through natural means, as in Luggnagg, or from a god, or by drinking an elixir of life, or by passing through a mysterious fire, as in Rider Haggard’s novel
She,
or by drinking the blood of a vampire; but there’s always a dark side to it.

Luggnagg is Gulliver’s last noteworthy Book Three stop. Through his encounter with the Struldbrugs, he’s drawing close to the heart of Swift’s matter: what it is to be human. In Book Four he plunges all the way in: his final voyage takes him to the land of the rational and moral talking-horse Houyhnhnms, and brings him face to face with an astonishingly Darwinian view of humanity’s essence. The filthy apelike beasts called Yahoos he encounters there are viewed by the Houyhnhnms as beasts, and treated as such; and, much to Gulliver’s dismay, he is at last forced to recognise that, apart from a few superficial differences such as clothing and language, he too is a Yahoo.

As Swift’s friend Alexander Pope wrote shortly after the publication of
Gulliver’s Travels,
‘The proper study of Mankind is Man.’ In our own age, that study is not only proper, it’s more necessary than ever. The botched
experiments of Swift’s projectors and our own exponentially successful scientific discoveries and inventions are both driven by the same forces: human curiosity and human fears and desires. Since, increasingly, whatever we can imagine we can also enact, it’s crucial that we understand what impels us. The mad scientist figure is – to paraphrase Oscar Wilde – our own Caliban’s face in the mirror. Are we merely very smart Yahoos, and, if so, will we ultimately destroy ourselves and much else through our own inventions?

Science was just coming into being in the age of Swift. Now it’s fully formed, but we’re still afraid of it. Partly we fear its Moreau-like coldness, a coldness that is in fact real, for science as such does not have emotions or a system of morality built into it, any more than a toaster does. It’s a tool – a tool for actualising what we desire and defending against what we fear – and like any other tool, it can be used for good or ill. You can build a house with a hammer, and you can use the same hammer to murder your neighbour.

Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn’t changed for thousands of years, because as far as we can tell the human template hasn’t changed either. We still want the purse that will always be filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible servants. We want the Seven-League Boots so we can travel very quickly, and the Hat of Darkness so we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and the castle that will keep us safe. We want excitement and adventure; we want routine and security. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners, and we also want those we love to love us in return, and to be utterly faithful to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve. We want to be surrounded by music, and by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We don’t want to be too hot or too cold. We want to dance. We want to
speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be immortal. We want to be as gods.

But in addition, we want wisdom and justice. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the shadow side of our other wants. Swift’s Grand Academy and its projectors, and their descendants the mad scientists, are among those shadows.

Last week I came across a ‘project’ that’s a blend of art object and scientific experiment. Suspended in a glass bubble with wires attached to it – something straight out of a fifties B-movie, you’d think – is a strangely eighteenth-century Lilliputian coat. It’s made of ‘Victimless Leather’ – leather made of animal cells growing on a matrix. This leather is ‘victimless’ because it has never been part of a living animal’s skin. Yet the tiny coat is alive – or is it? What do we mean by ‘alive’? Can the experiment be terminated without causing ‘death’? Heated debates on this subject proliferate on the Internet.

The debate would have been right at home in Swift’s Grand Academy: a clever but absurd object that’s presented straight but is also a joke; yet not quite a joke, for it forces us to examine our preconceptions about the nature of biological life. Above all, like Swift’s exploding dog and the proposal to extract sunshine out of cucumbers, the Victimless Leather garment is a complex creative exercise. If ‘What is it to be human?’ is the central question of
Gulliver’s Travels,
the ability to write such a book is itself part of the answer. We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine. Perhaps, by imagining mad scientists and then letting them do their worst within the boundaries of our fictions, we hope to keep the real ones sane.

T
HE MAD SCIENTIST PLOTTING WORLD DOMINATION IS A FICTION. BUT IT IS NO FICTION THAT THE MODERN SCIENCE WHICH WE IDENTIFY WITH THE
R
OYAL
S
OCIETY WAS A PROFOUND CHALLENGE TO EXISTING WORLDVIEWS AND SYSTEMS OF MEANING. JUST HOW PROFOUND IS EXPLORED BY
M
ARGARET
W
ERTHEIM, WHO WONDERS WHETHER WE HAVE YET COME TO TERMS WITH THE CHANGE.

The Starship
Enterprise
heads into the void, its warp drive set to maximum, its crew primed ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’. The drive engages, a burst of light flares out from the rear engines and with an indefinable Woosh ingrained in the minds of
Star Trek
fans everywhere, the world’s most famous spaceship disappears from our screens and zaps across the universe to a far distant galaxy. As one of those besotted millions, I am not here to quibble about the scientific ‘errors’ in Gene Roddenberry’s masterpiece; as far as I’m concerned ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ remains the most thrilling line on television. What I wish to discuss here is an underlying
premise of the series that has tugged at the back of my consciousness since childhood. The crew of the
Enterprise
take it for granted – as do real-life physicists, astronomers and SETI enthusiasts – that our cosmos is a homogeneous space ruled everywhere by the same physical laws. Such continuity is logically necessary if humans are ever to travel to the stars or communicate extraterrestrially. So essential is the idea of spatial homogeneity to modern science it has been named ‘the cosmological principle’ and it serves as the foundation of our faith that if indeed we are
not
alone then we will share something meaningful with our alien confrères – the Laws of Nature.

In the realms of both science fiction and science practice the importance of this principle is hard to overstate, for it underpins physicists’ confidence that the patterns of behaviour discovered here on Earth will govern distant worlds. Apples, planets, stars, galaxies, black holes and the explosive aftermath of the big bang are all compelled by gravity’s unifying force. The
Enterprise
can set its navigation system to any spatial coordinates precisely because the cosmological principle assures its crew that when they arrive the physics they know and trust will still be working. In contrast to biology, whose plasticity
Star Trek
writers gleefully celebrate in a myriad polymorphous modes, the laws of physics remain the same everywhere – they are the Platonic ideal at the core of an otherwise capricious cosmos. It is physics that makes ours a
uni-
rather than a
multi-verse.

To citizens of the twenty-first century the cosmological principle may seem close to tautological. For us
space
is now an arena to be measured and mapped, ‘the final frontier’ on which we have imposed a metric of parsecs and light years. Yet the idea of spatial continuity was one of the more contentious propositions of the scientific revolution and its consequences have been far reaching. I want to argue here that adopting this view set the stage for an unbearable tension between science and Christianity and has problematised the very concept of a human ‘self’. In essence, concepts of space and concepts of self are inextricably entwined so that when a culture
adopts a new conception of space, as Western culture did in the seventeenth century, it impacts our sense of not merely
where
we are but
of what
we are. While Newton’s synthesis famously united the heavens and Earth, it tore a hole in our social fabric that we are still struggling to comprehend and whose consequences continue to reverberate in the US ‘war’ between science and religion.