The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (25 page)

But even A. Merritt’s creative insight had its limits. Like the great SF writers who came before him, Merritt, too, came to a sticking point and could go no further. Or, perhaps it might be more accurate to say, eventually the times put too great a strain on Merritt’s fragile attempt to reconcile science and spirit, and it shattered in his hands.

It is in the midst of
The Metal Monster
that the bubble bursts. Merritt was able to present a vision of universal consciousness, but he was not able to sustain it. Fear and negativity overwhelm his story and change its focus from the conscious force that finds its expression in everything to the lesser question of which mode of consciousness may be fittest to survive.

When perceived with the eyes of fear, Merritt’s Metal People begin to seem as implacably alien and relentlessly hostile as Wells’s Martians. They are revolted by our organic nature, which appears messy and unnatural to them. No real communication with these Shapes is possible, only a desperate struggle for survival.

In this contest between metal life and human life, the Metal People have the advantage. They have the mathematical certitude and inexorability of cosmic law. They have direct awareness and command of energies both known to us and unknown.

As in
The War of the Worlds,
humanity is saved from annihilation, but not through the power of its own efforts. Instead, the metal creatures self-destruct in a kind of civil war. There is the implication that the fragmentation of the Metal People’s formerly unified consciousness comes as a result of contamination by human anger, pride and sexual antagonism.

The novel concludes with a re-evocation of the sense of cosmic mystery that opens the book—but now tainted with menace:

For in that vast crucible of life of which we are so small a part, what other Shapes may even now be rising to submerge us?

In that vast reservoir of force that is the mystery-filled infinite through which we roll, what other shadows may be speeding upon us?

Who knows?
¹⁸⁷

These were dark times. The doubt and fear that mark the ending of
The Metal Monster
were a reflection of the unhappiness, despair and loss of confidence that gripped the Western world in the aftermath of the Great War.

In the half-dozen years that followed World War I, the world was stricken with epidemics, revolutions, massacres, starvation, economic turmoil, anarchy and subversion. It was a time of unsettlement and horror for many, a great psychic crashout.

Even in the United States, so much less severely affected by the war than Europe or Britain, and so much less shaken by the war’s aftermath, there was a conviction that things were profoundly wrong, and a desperate search for scapegoats. There were political witchhunts and racial lynchings, labor violence, literary censorship, and laws passed against the teaching of evolution in schools.

It was as though genteel society hoped that if only the right people could be stuffed back into their proper places—Communists, Negroes, anarchists, unionists, freethinkers, free-speakers, and scientists—then perhaps the world might be set right again. At the same time, there was profound disillusionment, bitterness and cynicism, and the numb suspicion that no matter what was done, things could never be set right.

It seemed that the lost race mythos—like the future war story before it—had proven to be true. The Edwardian years before the war were looked back upon as some Golden Age of peace and ease whose like would never be seen again. Now civilization had fallen. Nothing was left but barbarity.

This was a wild time and a very sad time. It was not by chance that the wounded youngsters who survived the war called themselves the Lost Generation. Their youth and innocence were gone, and civilization was dead. They were poor lost souls adrift and wandering through the cold material universe.

Poor lost souls . . . If the Great War spelled the end to mighty Nineteenth Century civilization—the old order—it also made it impossible to go on any longer believing in the rational soul. The personal spiritual connection to God which had given life its meaning and purpose for so long now seemed implausible, a mere figment of religious wishful thinking.

If men did have a higher nature, would they have fought this awful war? If God did exist, could he have allowed men with souls to create a hell on earth like this one?

World War I and its bitter aftermath made Western people unbelievers. Certainly a great number of people did continue to consider themselves Christians, but after the Great War, Western society was clearly post-Christian, run with less and less regard for established religious notions of propriety.

But if the soul was no longer credible and Christianity no longer a guide, how were people to know how to proceed? Many did not.

This was a moment both of excess and of disgust with excess. Sex and drugs, which in the Teens had seemed to be modes of liberation, now took on overtones of decadent self-indulgence. Hollywood, the new sin and glamour capital of the West, was rocked by a string of scandals involving rape, murder and drug addiction, and the careers of a number of well-known movie stars were ruined.

In its sense of revulsion at human grossness and animality, Merritt’s
The Metal Monster
was very much of this moment. In this climate, it was possible for organic existence to be perceived as inherently flawed, rotten and foul. A mistake. An aberrancy.

The reciprocal of this disgust with the flesh can also be seen in
The Metal Monster
—an implicit admiration of the purity and simplicity of the metal Shapes. These postwar years were the period of the emergence of Art Deco; during the Twenties, the clean lines and unadorned efficiency of the machine would become a model for architecture and design.

In the Twenties, more than at any moment before or since, the universe of space and time appeared to people in the guise of a perfect inexorable machine. Mankind—that soulless barbarian, that revolting cosmic error—seemed no better than some noxious fungus gumming up the works.

The postwar years were not an easy period for SF. All the conflict at large in the world and all the uncertainty in people’s minds were reflected in SF literature. It was necessary for writers to decide what they really believed. They had to make the choice between science and superstition, between the God-given soul and a sterile universe without meaning.

Making this decision was most difficult and agonizing for those writers from the old aristocracy—Britons, Europeans, and one gentleman from Virginia—who returned to imaginative literature after the hiatus of the war to produce some of the most heartfelt and striking work of the period. The soul, that phantasm, was the source of their personal and class superiority, while the new universe of the machine barbarians seemed both trivial and repulsive.

It was only a very few among the established—scientific utopians like H.G. Wells, and lifelong scientific materialists like his elder French contemporary, J.H. Rosny aîné—who could muster the will, the nerve and the energy to make positive statements about science and the material universe. More typically, British and European writers of privilege looked upon the face of science and responded with cries of denial, disgust, abhorrence and fear.

Some writers attempted evasion. The nonce worlds of fantasy seemed to offer the hope of a possible place of retreat from the disastrous Twentieth Century. In these nobler and more romantic regions, perhaps, mystery might still be magical, the fact of the soul might still be beyond doubt, and men of chivalric sensibility might still pursue higher purpose.

But where were these fantasy worlds to be found?

In one aristocratic fantasy,
Jurgen
(1919), by the Virginia novelist James Branch Cabell, such a place is imagined by the expedient of wrenching apart space and time. In a blank spot on the map, an area of Europe overlooked by mapmakers and geographers, in a time that never was, the gap between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, Cabell located his sometimes magical realm of Poictesme.

In another aristocratic fantasy of the period,
The Worm Ouroboros
(1922), by the British civil servant and student of Old Norse, E.R. Eddison, the nominal setting is a place distant in space, the surface of the planet Mercury. But this imagined Mercury is a fanciful and unscientific realm that is reached by means of a deliberate dream.

What fantasies such as these were attempting to flee was expressed by Cabell in one typically wry and ambivalent episode in
Jurgen
that combines a twitting of the titular character’s overweening egotism and a very genuine dismay at the meaningless nature of the universe as it was then understood.

In an attempt to purge Jurgen of his illusions, the magician Merlin has sent Jurgen to visit a transcendent being—not named, but apparently the god Pan. This superior creature entertains Jurgen by revealing a vision of All to him. But the shadow show displayed to Jurgen is a depiction of the Twentieth Century Western worldview, and Jurgen will not and cannot accept that:

“Fact! sanity! and reason!” Jurgen raged: “why, but what nonsense you are talking! Were there a bit of truth in your silly puppetry this world of time and space and consciousness would be a bubble, a bubble which contained the sun and moon and the high stars, and still was but a bubble in fermenting swill! I must go cleanse my mind of all this foulness. You would have me believe that men, that all men who have ever lived or shall ever live hereafter, that even I am of no importance! Why, there would be no justice in any such arrangement,
no justice anywhere!”
¹⁸⁸

But this denial cannot be convincing to us. As much as it is a protest, it is also an admission. Whether he likes it or not, Jurgen must grant that the fantasy realm of Poictesme is a part of “this world of time and space and consciousness.” And it is time, space and consciousness that are the parameters of the modem scientific universe.

It would seem, then, that the fantasy worlds of Poictesme and Mercury are vulnerable to scientific criticism. Would the land of Poictesme wink out of existence if we were to insist on looking closely at our maps and reading our history books with care? And what would befall the fantastic Mercury of
The Worm Ouroboros,
land of humanlike Demons and Witches, if an astronomer should happen to point out the true feeble gravity, blazing temperatures, and absence of atmosphere on the planet Mercury?

Lord Dunsany’s
Time and the Gods
and A. Merritt’s “Through the Dragon Glass” had previously implied that the nonce worlds of fantasy were open to invasion by universal scientific law and to subjugation by the power of technology. But what are we to make of fantasy worlds where the likes of Merlin and Pan—creatures of magic—disavow magic to become advocates of Twentieth Century Realism?

What we can say of these particular fantasy realms is that they were compromised as soon as they were conceived. If they are magical places, it is only that they appear magical to us for as long as we are willing to make believe. The very instant science begins to inquire into them seriously, they must become anomalous and implausible.

Like Lord Dunsany, their primary model, Cabell and Eddison were aware that the old values expressed in fantasy had become unfounded, and that new values reigned. And persisted in writing fantasy anyway. But a fantasy tinged by irony and self-doubt.

It is not surprising that both
Jurgen
and
The Worm Ouroboros
should undercut their own ideals of magic, chivalry and romance even as they presented them. As much as these books were protests against the Twentieth Century, they were also typical expressions of the Twentieth Century, touched by the postwar blight at the very instant they cried out against it. Both of these books had moments when old-fashioned idealistic morality was replaced by the new cynical hard-boiled pragmatism. And there were other moments in each book when the contemporary mood broke in and cool rational calculation suddenly gave way to shudders of physical and sexual revulsion.

Ultimately, these postwar aristocratic fantasies were not at all successful in evading the modern scientific universe that they so despised. It is by no accident that both
Jurgen
and
The Worm Ouroboros
(a title that refers to the world-girdling serpent that bites its own tail) were circular in construction, ending just where they began, with nothing changed or accomplished by the passage of four hundred pages. These fantasies aimed to run away from the scientific universe, only to be thrown back into it by a kind of self-applied, self-defeating judo move.

With entirely appropriate irony, Cabell’s
Jurgen
became a success through a great public scandal. This witty and elliptical expression of uneasiness at the nature of the modern world was condemned by the American Society for the Suppression of Vice as a work of obscenity and was banned from sale for twenty months during 1920 and 1921—which had the contrary result of making this elitist work a popular bestseller. And the biggest joke, of course, was on all of those readers who bought this fantasy expecting to find it pornographic.

There were other aristocratic SF books during this postwar period that did not attempt to take flight from the foul and unjust Twentieth Century scientific universe, that unavoidable fact, but instead—queasily, unhappily, even masochistically—submitted to its power. Two books by British writers may serve as examples of this disgusted acknowledgment of gross matter.

David Lindsay’s
A Voyage to Arcturus
(1920) was a simultaneously brilliant and murky occult SF novel. It told the tale of a trip to the planet Tormance, a place where fears and desires are given form and body. The gnostic conclusion of this story was that all material existence is the creation of a demonic demiurge whose snares of pleasure entice Spirit and then entrap it into shameful, unbearable degradation by Matter.

The Amphibians
(1924), by S. Fowler Wright, was a time travel story that made reference to H.G. Wells. In this novel, the superior beings of half-a-million years from now are a commentary on the limitations of our physical nature. They are asexual creatures, and are also exempt from our need for food and sleep. They are even able to shed their vestigial bodies and then reincarnate at will. These mental beings view their human visitor from our imperfect era with a horror that he compares to that aroused in him by the sight of a maggot-ridden sheep.