The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's greatest impact on literature may be the opening line of his novel Paul Clifford. It was picked up by no less a character than Snoopy the dog in Charles Shultz's great cartoon series Peanuts.



It was used as the opening line in the Newberry Award winning novel A Wrinkle in Time.

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

Wikipedia informs me that Joni Mitchell used the line to start her song "The Crazy Cries of Love."

You'd think that the author of that line would be well-regarded, especially since he also originated other well-known phrases, from "the great unwashed" to "The pen is mightier than the sword." However, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which has given me much pleasure over the years, celebrates his reputation as a writer of terrible prose.

Still, he's famous. In particular, I have often read the title of his novel The Coming Race in histories of the science fiction genre. In it, I've heard, he tells about a superior race of people whose power is based on the control of a fundamental life force called vril, a term that lives on in the form of the beef drink Bovril.



So, eventually, I had to read The Coming Race to see what it is like. I found a free copy on Feedbooks that is based on the free version from Project Gutenberg.

Overall, I can say that its setting is a staider version of the underground worlds described by Jules Verne (in Journey to the Centre of the Earth) and Edgar Rice Burroughs' (in At the Earth's Core and the other Pellucidar novels). Like them, The Coming Race describes a system of hollows underground that contain reptilian species that either perished from the upper world or never lived there at all and a civilization that lacks knowledge of the upper world. Granted, the underground hollow in Burroughs' novel is expanded to the point that the world we know is only a shell around the interior world, and its dominant civilization belongs to intelligent reptiles, but the basic similarities remain. I wonder if Verne's novel, published seven years before The Coming Race, was one of its inspirations. The Burroughs novel came later, in 1914.

In theme and even plot, The Coming Race reminds me a bit of H.G. Wells' Men Like Gods (1923). Both books show a physically and morally superior commonwealth through the eyes of contemporary human beings who do not (on the whole) like it very much. On the other hand, we are given very little reason to respect the people who represent our points of view. The situation is ripe for satire. Like Wells, Bulwer-Lytton did not neglect the the opportunity.

For example, Chapter 9 tells that the Vril-ya people have legends about entering their caverns as they fled a flood in the upper world. (Is Bulwer-Lytton hinting that they are Atlanteans, or refugees of Noah's flood?) Although Bulwer-Lytton makes it clear that this origin story is the truth, most of the Vril-ya themselves no longer believe it. Coincidentally, in 1872, one year after the publication of The Coming Race, the Assyriologist George Smith published the Mesopotamian Flood Myth contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh. That confirmed the reality of the Biblical Flood in the minds of many people although many others, similar in spirit to the Vril-ya, disbelieved its literal truth.

Another example of his satire is directed at Darwin's Theory of Evolution as it applies to mankind. The Theory of Evolution was new and controversial at the time: Although Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859, his Descent of Man came out in 1871, the same year as The Coming Race; T.H. Huxley's Man's Place in Nature was published eight years earlier. The Vril-ya, says Bulwer-Lytton (Chapter 16), once had much argument over the origin of man, but had settled that topic by agreeing that they were descended from "the Great Tadpole." Among the evidence they adduce for this are the similarities in appearance of humans and frogs, the presence of an atrophied swimming bladder, and ancient paintings of sages who resemble frogs more than modern Vril-ya do.

Based on this book, I assume that Bulwer-Lytton was no fan of Darwin's evolutionary theory. Instead, he seems to favour Lamarckism, saying

We are all formed by custom--even the difference of our race from the savage is but the transmitted continuance of custom, which becomes, through hereditary descent, part and parcel of our nature.

Indeed, the Vril-ya are described as having a physical difference from other people, one that allows them to generate and control the vril better than any other race of humans. This is explained as the result of generations of practice, rather than selective breeding.

Some of the humour is close to farce. For example, not one but two women are romantically interested in the tiny, timid barbarian who narrates the book. One woman is the highest-ranked scholar in the community and the other, the daughter of its political leader. If he had been bolder then he would be part of one of the oddest couples imaginable. Then, shortly after, he would be executed before he could pollute the Vril-ya's gene pool.

In addition to satire and farce, some of the book's humour is purely word play. For example, narrator insists on using the Vril-ya's word for a woman, "gy," to refer to any of the the tall, physically powerful, beautiful women. Since the narrator is too intimidated by these women to respond to their romantic advances, the fact that he calls them "guys" is halfway between ironic and revealing. Another example of the author's word play is the word for democracy, Koom-Posh, which means "That nonsense (bosh) about the masses."

Outcrops of dry humour also occur in lumbering sentences such as

In this resolve I obeyed the ordinary instinct of civilized and moral  man, who, erring though he be, still prefers the right course in those cases where it is obviously against his inclinations, his interests, and his safety to elect the wrong one.

Unfortunately, the book is slow to get going. Not until Chapter 4 do we meet a Vril-ya. (At which sight, our fearless leader faints). Not until Chapter 6 is he able to speak with one. Chapter 10 has a long description of the Vril-ya's working life (what little of it exists) and marriage customs. Chapter 11, the lighting arrangements of the underground world. Chapter 12, the language of the Vril-ya, which is apparently Indo-European. Chapters 13 and 14 are on the religious beliefs.

The Coming Race is far from the best book of its type that I've read. It is even far from the best book of that type from that era, as H. Rider Haggard's "Lost Civilization" stories such as King Solomon's Mines and She were published only a few years after Bulwer-Lytton's book. On the other hand, his book has never fallen into oblivion. In fact, just yesterday I discovered that the sequel for the satirical movie Iron Sky is to be called Iron Sky: The Coming Race. Like Bulwer-Lytton's book, it features an unknown civilization underground, co-existing with giant reptiles (well, dinosaurs), and posing an existential threat to us dwellers on the world's surface. The movie's title and content are a pretty compliment to a Victorian writer who is often listed as one of the world's worst writers.

Steinbeck's "Sweet Thursday"

In high school, I barely escaped an aversion to anything written by John Steinbeck. To this day, high school students tell me that the only works of Steinbeck that are assigned them are The Red Pony, The Pearl, and, especially, Of Mice and Men. Fine books, every one, but so depressing. What saved Steinbeck's reputation for me was a fortuitous and non-curricular encounter with his hilarious novel The Short Reign of Pippin IV. This book is closer in tone to farce than philosophy, to The Mouse that Roared than The Old Man and the Sea.

This summer, I seized the opportunity to study Steinbeck's Cannery Row with a group of students. They loved it! The characters were alive to them as we read the pages together. The themes--that we can find beauty and nobility where we normally overlook them and that people are as interdependent as the plants and animals in an ecology--were recognized and appreciated. The controversial elements--for example, that a house of prostitution was a pillar of the community--made for interesting discussions. When I told the class that there was a sequel to the book, Sweet Thursday, they were intrigued.

I had never read Sweet Thursday myself, though. I finally bought a copy and finished it last week. It's not as good as Cannery Row, but it's still better than most novels. It's interesting to hold it up to Cannery Row for comparison.

Cannery Row, as the opening paragraph makes clear, is about a place. It's a love song to the community that defines that place. However, Sweet Thursday tells us that the place was ruined after World War II. The fishery it depended on disappeared. Some important members of the community died. Some people changed and, we are told, being changed is similar to being dead.

If that specific place is ruined and that specific community is gravely wounded, then what remains for Sweet Thursday to celebrate? Something not confined to a specific place or community. Something universal. As the book title and four chapter titles tell us, Sweet Thursday is about a time. Unlike a place, a time is available to anyone, in any place. The book, therefore, overcomes the tragic changes to a place and to people whom Steinbeck loves.

Autobiography of a Lungworm by Roy Fuller

The long-standing sense that we could read the intentions and beneficent wisdom of God in the work of his hands, the book of nature, was shaken in Victorian times by a growing understanding of parasitism. For example, the life cycle of the Ichneumon Wasp seemed both cruel and unusual to Darwin. If it tells us of God's nature. he seemed to think, the news is too depressing to bear.

The poem "Autobiography of a Lungworm," on the other hand, brilliantly extracts a life-affirming message from the life cycle of a parasite. In it, Roy Fuller shows that Darwin might have seen things differently if he had looked at them from the point of view of the parasite.

----------------------------------

My normal dwelling is the lungs of swine,
My normal shape a worm,
But other dwellings, other shapes are mine
Within my natural term.
Dimly I see my life, of all, the sign,
Of better lives the germ.

The pig, though I am innofensive, coughs,
Finding me irritant:
My eggs go with the contents of the troughs
From mouth to excrement--
The pig thus thinks, perhaps, he forever doffs
His niggling resident.

The eggs lie unconsidered in the dung
Upon the farmyard floor,
For from the scarlet and sustaining lung:
But happily a poor
And humble denizen provides a rung
To make ascension sure.

The earthworm eats the eggs; inside the warm
Cylinder larvae hatch:
For years, if necessary, in this form
I wait the lucky match
That will return me to my cherished norm,
My ugly pelt dispatch.

Strangely, it is the pig himself becomes
The god inside the car:
His greed devours the earthworms; so the slums
Of his intestines are
The setting for the act when clay succumbs
And force steers for its star.

The larvae burrow through the bowel wall
And, having to the dregs
Drained ignominy, gain the lung's great hall.
They change. Once more like pegs,
Lungworms are anchored to the rise and fall
--And start to lay their eggs.

What does it mean? The individual,
Nature, mutation, strife?
I feel, though I am simple, still the whole
Is complex; and that life--
A huge doomed throbbing--has a wiry soul
That must escape the knife.


(1957)

(pp. 1146-1147 of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Third Edition, 1983)

Rock and Roll

Because I teach, I sometimes dream about teaching. Last night was no exception. In my dream, I was in the middle of explaining to a young Asian woman the vexatious difference between "good" and "well" when she interrupted to ask what Rock'n'Roll was. I wasn't sure what she had said, but she pointed to a page of a book, and there the word was. I tried defining it by metaphor: "It's K-Pop mixed with good scotch," but she reacted to that with an "Ugh." Evidently, she was no fan of scotch. I decided to define it by playing one example, but what one song would serve as the exemplar and paradigm of Rock'n'Roll? What one would you choose? I know that I briefly considered and rejected songs by Slash and The Who before my subconscious mind made its choice. In the end, I feel quite proud of its good taste and perspicacity: it played "I Saw Her Standing There."

Continuing Evolution of the Human Race

For my first year of university, I decided to fulfil my science requirement by taking a first year biology course taught by David Suzuki. My reasoning was simple: I was interested in biology (of the evolutionary persuasion, not so much the details of cell structure or function), and I had listened to Dr. Suzuki almost weekly for almost all of my conscious life, both on the radio (Quirks and Quarks) and on television (The Nature of Things). To listen to him in person would be interesting and fun, I was sure.

And it was. I learned interesting facts about chromosomal abnormalities, gene penetrance, homology and convergence, and so on. And when the time came to choose the topic of my term paper, I decided to throw myself into finding answers to a topic that had always intrigued me: now that we live in cities, what are the evolutionary pressures and trends that are shaping us. In other words, what are we evolving into?

The resulting 36-page magnum opus was a peculiar item. Its sections had epigraphs by Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, and Robert Heinlein, among others. Its scope was broad, including evidence of the genetic component of behaviour, the miscarriage rate among prisoners, and so on. Its major component was that the stresses of city life cause fatalities, miscarriages, poor parenting, and poor survival ability often enough to have an evolutionary effect. My most important conclusions were, first, that the genetic load (roughly speaking, the proportion of genes that are potentially deleterious) will increase in the foreseeable future, due to medical care, and that those who are genetically predisposed to feel less stress in an urban environment will have an evolutionary advantage. Those people's genes will spread through the population, I said. In my conclusion, I used a quotation from Robert Heinlein's book Beyond This Horizon about a person with a mutation that made him "more civilized" than could reasonably be expected. I saw such genes as the present trend and the future reality of human evolution.

The reason that I am recalling that early work is that a recent study published in Current Anthropology is making me feel justified in my conclusions. It purports to show that many of the physical changes that occurred over time in humans correlate to reductions in testosterone levels and, further, that reductions in testosterone levels correlate to advances in human social organization. Many of those changes, which have been collectively termed "juvenalization" or "neoteny," could therefore be called "feminization" instead. There is much to think about here, and I'll have to do a little reading. The main point, though, is I feel my early paper, the work of a very young dilettante in biology, has received some professional support. It may well be that mankind has displayed a long-term trend to becoming more civilized.

A Few Good Pairs for "Compare and Contrast" Essays

Let's begin with noting that the ever-popular "compare and contrast" essays that teachers love to give have a redundant name. "To compare" means to find both similarities and differences, so the "and contrast" is unnecessary.

That being said, some writings are better subjects for comparison than others. A really good pair of writings, to my mind, would have multiple similarities and at least one solid, significant difference. Here are a few that I enjoy assigning.

1. Roch Carrier's short story "A Secret Lost in Water" and Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging." Both are about the relationships of fathers and sons; both are about the handing-down of some skill from father to son; both feature a skill useful in the countryside that cannot be passed intact to a son who makes his living from a predominantly urban profession, and so they both relate to the loss of tradition and identity during the influx of people to the cities, a fact of life since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The big difference between them is that Carrier's story has the tradition "lost," leading to regret, while Heaney's poem has the tradition adapted, so his emotion towards it (and his forebears) is pride. Both writings are short, so this is a wonderful pair of writings to give students a bit of quick practice.
2. John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row and Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne." Both works try to show that (in the words of Cannery Row) "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches" can be seen as "saints and angels and martyrs and holy men" if you look at them a little differently; "Suzanne" shows that ordinary tea and oranges are anything but ordinary: they come "all the way from China." Cannery Row shows that a tide pool is a marvellous tool for looking at life in general; "Suzanne," when she goes to "her place by the river" also sees "angels in the seaweed" and "children in the morning." To be more specific, Doc sees a dead girl in the seaweed, with a look of peace and relaxation on her face. Both works are full of religious references. The big difference is that Cannery Row is about a community that collectively makes Steinbeck's points for him; Suzanne is just one "half-crazy" woman who happens to be wise. 
3. The play Antigone by Sophocles and the life of Ben Salmon. It was interesting to read Matthew Arnold imply that Antigone is not relevant to modern times: "An action like the action of the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine’s duty to her brother’s corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest." Instead, less than one hundred years after Arnold wrote, Antigone's theme that public and private morality, duty and conscience, can conflict, is alive and well and in the daily news. Look at Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor who broke an oath to his country and a duty to his employers to bring to the public matters he felt were wrong. However, the Snowden affair is too recent, and Snowden's fate (through his foresight) has not been Antigone's, so a slightly older example of civil disobedience is a better one to compare with Sophocles' play. Ben Salmon was a Christian conscientious objector in the United States in World War I. He refused to be inducted into the army. Despite the fact that he was not inducted, he was court martialled and sentenced to death, a sentence that was reduced to twenty-five years' hard labour, beginning shortly before the war that he objected to reached its end. He began a hunger strike, which was interpreted as a sign of mental illness, so he was sent to a mental hospital (like Antigone locked up in a cave) where he wrote a 208 page rebuttal of the Catholic Church's doctrine that war can be justified. The Catholic Church, shamefully, refused to administer sacraments to him because it supported the war. His health broke. He died not long after he was released. I think the parallels between Antigone's story and Salmon's are clear. The big difference, to my mind, is that Antigone's religious duty was in the private sphere--she had to bury her brother properly--whereas Salmon objected to the broader actions of his government. (Alternatively, one could compare Antigone to a short poem by E.E. Cummings, "I sing of Olaf glad and big," also about a conscientious objector).

Slavs vs. NATO?

There is an article on the CBC website today about anti-Western feelings in Russia. Someone identifying himself as @FedupRU left this comment under the article:

I see no Slavic people in NATO...Germany, Italy,France, Britain etc....do they really care about Ukraine?.....Russia is a Slavic country and wants the best for the Ukraine...its obvious from the vote in Crimea that Ukraine cannot be trusted anymore to protect slavs...people in Ukraine want security first and then prosperity comes second.....Russia offers that.

It fires me up when someone says something that is, as far as I know, contrary to fact. So, when I saw the words "I see no Slavic people in NATO," I checked and found that the following Slavic countries were members of NATO: Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Croatia, and Slovenia. Together, their populations total 67,000,000. Montengro and Ukraine, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina want to join NATO. If they did, then NATO's Slavic population would rise to 115,800,000. For reference, the population of Russia stands at 144,700,000.

The second point is more fundamental. @FedupRU implies that only Slavs could possibly care about Slavs. I think that says more about him than about the world. Human beings, especially those with shared values, care about each other. Any country that wants to join NATO obviously shares values with NATO.

What are those values? NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen said, "In our NATO Alliance, nearly a billion people share not only the same values of freedom, democracy and humanity – they also share the capabilities to safeguard those values."

"Freedom," for many people whose countries were in the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, means making sure that Russian domination does not recur. Obviously, this is an lesson from history that some Russians still reject in favour of either a romantic Pan-Slavism or bitter revanchism.