The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (3 page)

I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it—add that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics. In short I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o’clock, till half an hour after one in the morning, when my hands and fingers were so weary, that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a paragraph.
⁵

To another of his correspondents, Walpole wrote:

I gave reign to my imagination; visions and passions choked me. I wrote it in spite of rules, critics, and philosophers; it seems to me the better for that. I am even persuaded that in the future, when taste will be restored to the place now occupied by philosophy, my poor
Castle
will find admirers.
⁶

The Castle of Otranto
tells the story of the overthrow of a tyrant prince in an Italian state during the time of the Crusades, and the restoration of the rightful line in the person of a seeming peasant boy of noble bearing. The instrument of this turnabout is the vengeful ghost of the boy’s ancestor, Alfonso, poisoned in the Holy Land.

At the outset of the story, the ghost appears as “an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionate quantity of black feathers,”
⁷
and dashes the son of the tyrant prince to bits. At the end, he appears again, after various hauntings, after melodrama and murder, and identifies the rightful heir:

A clap of thunder at that instant shook the castle to its foundations; the earth rocked, and the clank of more than mortal armour was heard behind. . . . The walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the centre of the ruins. Behold in Theodore, the true heir of Alfonso! said the vision: and having pronounced these words, accompanied by a clap of thunder, it ascended solemnly towards heaven, where the clouds parting asunder, the form of saint Nicholas was seen; and receiving Alfonso’s shade, they were soon wrapt from mortal eyes in a blaze of glory.
⁸

In today’s terms, we might call
The Castle of Otranto
a fantasy in a historical setting. The most obvious model for this novel is the plays of Shakespeare, particularly
Macbeth
and
Hamlet
. But Walpole, writing his Gothic fantasy in an era of rules, critics, and philosophers, “which wants only
cold reason
,”
⁹
was not at all certain beforehand what reception his strange dream-begotten story would arouse in a skeptical modern public. He was so uncertain that he took great pains to hide his identity and the true time and place of the book’s origin.

He hid himself, and then hid himself again. The title page of the first edition of
The Castle of Otranto
declared that it was translated by William Marshal, Gentleman, from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto.

Walpole did his best to further muddy the waters in a preface written in his persona of Marshal-the-translator. He began by claiming, “The following work was found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529.”
¹⁰

Walpole went on to suggest that the story might have been written at the time it was supposed to happen—that is, at some time roughly between 1095 and 1243. But then again, from the names of the servants, perhaps it was written rather nearer in time and place to its original appearance in print. And as for the good Canon Onuphrio Muralto—not mentioned by name in the preface—“Marshal” describes him conjecturally as someone who might have been “an artful priest”
¹¹
who used his abilities as an author to enslave vulgar minds and confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions.

But it was not enough that Walpole attempted to slide his story off on an irresponsible person in some former time and place. As Marshal, he went on in his preface to apologize at length for the marvels in his story:

The solution of the author’s motives is however offered as a mere conjecture. Whatever his motives were, or whatever effects the execution of them might have, his work can only be laid before the public at present as a matter of entertainment. Even as such, some apology for it is necessary. Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances. That was not the case when our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the
manners
of the times who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself, but must represent his actors as believing them.

If this
air
of the
miraculous
is excused, the reader will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal. Allow the possibilities of the facts, and all the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situation.
¹²

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 Britannica
¹⁴
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.