In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [78]
The answer to the second question, Dear Reader, rests with you. Look in the mirror: do you see Lenina Crowne looking back at you or do you see John the Savage? If you’re a human being, you’ll be seeing something of both, because we’ve always wanted things both ways. We wish to be as the careless gods, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having sex and being entertained by the anguish of others. And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe, with John, that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses and that immediate gratification will never be enough.
It was Huxley’s genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity. Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to their uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions. It’s these double-sided abilities that produce masterpieces of speculation such as Brave New World.
To quote The Tempest, source of Huxley’s title: “We are such stuff/As dreams are made on.” He might well have added: and nightmares.
Of the Madness of Mad
Scientists: Jonathan Swift’s
Grand Academy
In the late 1950s, when I was a university student, there were still B movies. They were inexpensively made and lurid in nature, and you could see them at cheap matinee double bills as a means of escaping from your studies. Alien invasions, mind-altering potions, and scientific experiments gone awry featured largely.
Mad scientists were a staple of the B-film double bill. Presented with a clutch of white-coated men wielding test tubes, we viewers knew at once—being children of our times—that at least one of them would prove to be a cunning megalomaniac bent on taking over the world, all the while subjecting blondes to horrific experiments from which only the male lead could rescue them, though not before the mad scientist had revealed his true nature by gibbering and raving. Occasionally the scientists were lone heroes, fighting epidemics and defying superstitious mobs bent on opposing the truth by pulverizing the scientist, but the more usual model was the lunatic. When the scientists weren’t crazy, they were deluded: their well-meaning inventions were doomed to run out of control, creating havoc, tumult, and piles of messy guck, until gunned down or exploded just before the end of the film. Where did the mad scientist stock figure come from? How did the scientist—the imagined kind—become so very deluded and/or demented?
It wasn’t always like that. Once upon a time there weren’t any scientists as such, in plays or fictions, because there wasn’t any science as such, or not science as we know it today. There were alchemists and dabblers in black magic—sometimes one and the same—and they were depicted not as lunatics but as charlatans bent on fleecing the unwary by promising to turn lead into gold, or else as wicked pact-makers with the Devil, hoping—like Dr. Faustus—to gain worldly wealth, knowledge, and power in exchange for their souls. The too-clever-by-half part of their characters may have descended from Plato’s Atlanteans or the builders of Babel—ambitious exceeders of the boundaries set for human beings, usually by some god, and destroyed for their presumption. These alchemists and Faustian magicians certainly form part of the mad scientist’s ancestral lineage, but they aren’t crazy or deluded, just daring and immoral.
It’s a considerable leap from them to the excesses of the wild-eyed B-movie scientists. There must be a missing link somewhere, like the walking seal discovered just recently—though postulated by Charles Darwin as a link between a walking canid and a swimming seal. For the mad scientist missing link, I propose Jonathan Swift, acting in synergy with the Royal Society.