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June 15, 2015 Taking a Bath with Mary and Jane

I arrived last weekend in Bath, England, where I am teaching “Writing Bath: Historical, Contemporary, Speculative Fiction,” a creative writing course focused on the multi-genre possibilities of place. Thank you, Advanced Studies in England, for flying me over and lodging me in a 19th century house two blocks from the wonderfully creepy Bath Abbey (the stone angels scaling its sides belong in a Doctor Who episode).

Bath’s most beloved author is Jane Austen, but Mary Shelley ought to be a strong second. She finished Frankenstein while lodging across the courtyard from that same Abbey. Austen’s house is a few blocks north, but she moved out well before the scandal-laden Shelleys moved in. Yet there’s no Mary Shelley tour, no building plaque–only in part because the building is gone, absorbed into the expanding Pump Room of the Roman Baths. The ASE director seemed a little chagrined, but added, “It’s not really a Frankenstein town though is it?”

My class is tracing both Jane’s and Mary’s literal and literary footsteps. The oddball pairing is especially fun for a superhero buff, since the superhero is its own sutured corpse of a genre. Austen was sketching a version of hypochondriac Clark Kent (more on that next week) while Shelley was penning literature’s first monstrous ubermensch. It would take later writers to weld the opposing impulses, love and horror, into a single cape-flapping creature, but Bath provided the embryonic fluid.

As any self-respecting goth can tell you, the nineteen-year-old Miss Godwin (she and the still inconveniently married Percy Shelley had been an item for a couple of years already) stayed the summer of 1816 at Lord Byron’s Swiss lair. This was The Summer That Never Was, the summer England and New England weathered historic snow and a veil of sulfuric fog from Mount Tombora in Indonesia the year before. In Switzerland, they were telling ghost stories, among other activities.

John Polidori, Byron’s much maligned traveling companion/physician, was the first of the class to publish his ghostly tale. He also gets credit for the first dual identity supervillain, the Byron-inspired aristocrat-vampire, Lord Ruthven. Vampyre: A Tale was a hit in English bookstores, and not just because everyone thought Byron wrote it. Byron, having suffered a bout of creative impotence that summer, put out Manfred instead. His Faustian super-wizard is neither exotically foreign nor ancient, so a prototype for later Doctors Fate and Strange—only with an autobiographical hankering for his sister, the reason Byron fled to the Alps in the first place. Both Tchaikovsky and Schumann wrote music for the three act poem, as did schoolboy Friedrich Nietzsche, who called the renegade sorcerer übermenschlich (supermanlike).

I don’t know if Nietzsche read Frankenstein too, but he should have, since Mary Shelley is first novelist to depict a race of eugenically superior supermen he calls for in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The name of her Faustian mad scientist usually conjuror images a flat-headed Boris Karloff with those c. 1931 electric bolts bulging from his neck. Movie buffs might tack on a corpse-sutured Christopher Lee or, more regrettably, Robert De Niro, but the Shelley original sports no stitches or jigsawed body parts. The guy is a god. Early stage productions draped him in Greek togas, his dark locks aswirl. Sure, his skin is transparent yellow and his face is a fit of twitching muscles, but his “limbs were in proportion” (a big turn-on for early 19^th century readers) and the doctor “had selected his features as beautiful.”

Shelley doesn’t call him a superman because the word wasn’t in circulation yet. Nietzsche borrowed “unbermenschen” from Goethe, who’d coined it for the mad alchemist hero of his own verse play Faust a few years earlier. English translators went with “superhuman” or “demigod,” until George Bernard Shaw gave us the name destined for a cape and tights—though he had Faust’s alter ego, Don Juan, in mind.

After returning to England, Percy’s destitute wife Harriet found herself conveniently drowned in London’s Hyde Park, allowing her adulterous husband to marry his teen mistress around the time he impregnated her again. (Presumably the six-month-old William was present for but not an active participant in the Swiss storytelling adventure.) Jane Austen started work on her last novel the same winter, before stopping in March due to an illness that confined her to bed the following month. Mrs. Shelley finished gestating her first novel in May. Austen died in July at the age of forty-one. Clara Shelley was born in September, six months before Frankenstein was delivered to bookstores. It was a hit, and not just because everyone thought Percy wrote it.

Percy, like Byron, didn’t conceive much during the Summer That Wasn’t. His “Ozymandias” (yes, an Alan Moore influence) appeared between Clara and Frankenstein, but he eventually one-ups Byron with his four act poem Prometheus Unbound. I’m waiting to see what my students will add to that speculative canon. Mary began her novel in June too, not quite two hundred years ago, but close enough.

Tags: Advanced Studies in England, Bath, England, Frankenstein, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley

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July 14, 2014 What is the Ape to Man?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s alter ego, Zarathustra, answers: “A laughing-stock, a thing of shame.”

Chernin Entertainment and 20^th Century Fox answer: “About $170 million.” That’s the budget for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, almost double the price tag of its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which grossed $176M in 2011.

Or I should say its most immediate predecessor. The original Planet of the Apes was released in 1968 (with a quaint budget under $6M and gross of $26M). It was based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 French novel La Planète des singes, but that’s not where the evolutionary ladder begins either.

Rise ends with mad scientist James Franco’s creation, a genetically altered super-ape, escaping to the wilds of the Redwood forest to father his own race. That’s how Victor Frankenstein’s creature wanted to end his origin story too. Either way, the creature is humanity’s first “arch-enemy,” the term he uses when Victor refuses to manufacture him a mate. The no-longer-mad doctor fears “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.”

Mary Shelley’s evolved imagination was pure fantasy in 1817, but Darwin made the terror real for Victorians. H. G. Wells named humanity’s predator the “Coming Beast,” describing “some now humble creature” that “Nature is, in unsuspected obscurity, equipping . . . with wider possibilities of appetite, endurance, or destruction, to rise in the fullness of time and sweep homo away.”

That fullness of time arrives regularly in Hollywood. If not apes, then zombies, aliens or androids are always propagating and making humanity’s condition precarious and terror filled. Some sane scientists take that last threat, the robopocalypse, seriously.

Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk worries about the evolutionary threat of artificial intelligence: “we risk yielding control over the planet to intelligences that are simply indifferent to us . . . just ask gorillas how it feels to compete for resources with the most intelligent species—the reason they are going extinct is not (on the whole) because humans are actively hostile towards them, but because we control the environment in ways that are detrimental to their continuing survival.”

That’s also the plot of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. The super-virus that decimated the human population between films is one of those unintended consequences popular in mad scientist plots. Mira Sorvino accidentally breeds an army of six-foot cockroaches after ending a cockroach-spread epidemic in Mimic. Emma Thompson cures cancer in I Am Legend, and next thing vampires rule Manhattan. James Franco’s genetic tampering would have turned everyone into super-geniuses. Or at least everyone who could afford his corporation’s new designer drug. If they’d had a chance to market it, the sequel would have been called Rise of the Planet of the Ubermensch.

“And just the same shall man be to the Superman,” continues Zarathustra, “a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.” No new breed ever cares about its predecessor. And yet Superman and his species of superheroes were born to battle such Coming Beasts. The Fantastic Four kept a subterranean world of monsters from rising up in their first issue. Atlanteans would have swept humanity away if the Human Torch hadn’t doused Namor’s Golden Age attacks. Blade is still staunching the destructive appetites of our vampire competitors. Every comic book is a survival of the fittest, ending with a superman at the top of the food chain.

But screenwriters Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver include no super-saviors in Dawn. The hero type is usually a literal or metaphorical cross-breed who absorbs the threat of the racial other and reverses it to save humanity. Thus cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger thwarts Skynet, and the Man of Steel thwarts General Zod’s Kryptonian invasion. Dawn would need an ape-man like Tarzan, but instead it’s the super-ape Caesar who was raised by humans and saves his people from us.

Which is a pretty compelling reversal of the formula. The supervillain is Koba, an ape so scared (literally and metaphorically) by humans that his hatred turns him into one. By the end, Caesar says he’s no longer an ape. He’s been completely absorbed by human hatred.

But there’s one flaw in the film’s evolutionary theory. It could have been titled Dawn of the Planet of the Patriarchy. I understand that actual ape culture is male-dominated, but these are scifi apes. They can talk and drive tanks. Surely there’s room for females somewhere in the hierarchy. The lone female ape character, Caesar’s jewelry-wearing wife, lies around giving birth and needing antibiotics. But would every female uber-ape accept the role of stay-at-home mom while the males go off to war?

The human cast is worse. The lone female Home sapiens character spends the movie saying things like, “I should come along in case someone gets hurt and needs a nurse!” She also prepares and serves food for her male campers. I was a part-time stay-at-home dad for years and still do a share of cooking and Band-Aid applying for my campers. But if faced with an ape-ocalypse, my wife and I would divvy up the guns too.

No intelligent species can ignore the skill sets of half its population. Not if the species wants to survive. And the humans in Dawn won’t. If you missed the first movie, there was a brief mention of a space mission to Mars. Those astronauts are scheduled to return (minus Charlton Heston) in July 2016, and I think we all know what Darwin is plotting for them.