Fin-de-Siècle Fictions, 1890s-1990s

Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire

A. Mousoutzanis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137430144
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Fin-de-Siècle Fictions, 1890s- 1990s focuses on fin-de-siècle British and postmodern American fictions of apocalypse and investigates the ways in which these narratives demonstrate shifts in the relations among modern discourses of power and knowledge.

Part I
Technoscience

1

When Time Shall Be No More: Entropy, Degeneration, History

In January 1987, French President François Mitterand inaugurated the Génitron at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, a digital clock counting the seconds left until the year 2000. This clock was seen by Elaine Showalter as symbolic of the impact of saecula such as that of a ‘century’ and a ‘decade’ on the apocalyptic imagination:

The crises of the fin de siècle . . . are more intensely experienced, more emotionally fraught, more weighted with symbolic and historical meaning, because we invest them with the metaphors of death and rebirth that we project onto the final decades and years of a century. (1991: 1)

Showalter’s commentary relies on the most conventional perception of the apocalypse as a future-orientated, teleological, imminent concept, one that, as Frank Kermode has discussed, rests upon ‘rectilinear rather than cyclical views of the world’ based on ‘an ordered series of events’ which ‘derive their significance from a unitary system, not from their correspondence with events in other cycles’ (1967: 5). And yet, seven years after Showalter, Baudrillard saw the Génitron as an icon emblematic of ‘the reversal of time characteristic of our contemporary modernity’ (1998; emphasis added). The clock’s representation of time as subtracted from the end instead of progressing towards it was indicative of a ‘historical reversal’ that Baudrillard discerned in the ‘retro’ fashions of the last decades of the century or in the appropriation of elements from previous periods in postmodern art. These were examples of contemporary tendencies to ‘recycle’ the past and ‘launder’ any mistakes in order to ‘purify’ the twentieth century before its end. ‘Rather than pressing forward and taking flight into the future’, the West, Baudrillard suggested a few years earlier, would ‘prefer the retrospective apocalypse, and a blanket revisionism’ (1994: 22). The countdown of the seconds was an indication of the fact that ‘[t]he end of time is no longer the symbolic completion of history, but the mark of a possible fatigue, of a regressive countdown’ (Baudrillard 1998). These two interpretations of the symbolism of the Génitron present a temporal paradox between futurism and regression which, however, is not an aberration but a typical characteristic of apocalyptic temporality: in announcing the end, one has already passed beyond the end, which belongs to the past, and yet, to be able to speak about the end also implies that the end has been projected onto the future. The apocalypse, in this sense, is also always a post-apocalypse, its future-oriented narrative is at the same time moving backwards.

This temporal structure of the apocalypse reproduces a distinctive feature of traumatic temporality termed by Freud as Nachträglichkeit, variously translated as ‘belatedness’, ‘afterwardness’, or ‘deferred action’. Individuals who experience or witness a traumatic incident appear originally unaffected during an ‘incubation period’ and it is only later that they start developing symptoms such as anxiety, amnesia, nightmares or hallucinations. One implication of this symptom is the reversal of ordinary causality, according to a temporal logic that reverses cause and effect, past and future. Fin-de-siècle fictions have reproduced this logic in representing the post-apocalyptic future as a resurgence of the past: Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885) begins by depicting a Darwinian ‘relapse into barbarism’ when it becomes ‘green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended’ (1). W.H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887) envisions a post-apocalyptic agrarian utopian society whose people have discarded any sophisticated technology and live in harmony with nature. William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) describes a future rustic England purged of capitalism after a big strike in the middle of the twentieth century. The future of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) looks more like a pre-capitalist, primitivist landscape that makes the Time Traveller wonder if he has travelled ‘[i]nto the future or the past – I don’t, for certain, know which’ (8). ‘The gaze into the future’ in these narratives, David Seed confirms, ‘frequently reverses and so it is no paradox that a predictive work should be called Looking Backward’ (1995: xiii). Seed’s reference to Edward Bellamy’s novel is relevant to my discussion, since in Looking Backward (1888) the experience of time travel is followed by symptoms of traumatic belatedness: after remaining in suspended animation for roughly one century, Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to find himself in a Boston that has turned into a future utopian society. After a day or so, all of a sudden West gets gripped by ‘an emotional crisis’ when

with set teeth and labouring chest, griping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay there and fought for my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling, associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved and lost coherence and were seething together in apparently irretrievable chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was left stable. (37)

The motif of time travel in Bellamy’s text also conveys the uncanniness of post-traumatic experience: in the future, West is ‘unearthed’ from the underground vault after his ‘home’ has caught fire, whereas shortly after his awakening he contemplates on the ‘idea that I was two persons, that my identity was double’ (8). Later, he throws himself in a chair, ‘cover[ing] my burning eyeballs with my hands to shut out the horror of strangeness’ (39) and finally describes himself as ‘some strange uncanny being, a stranded creature of an unknown sea, whose forlornness touches your compassion despite its grotesqueness’ (144). The uncanny may also be identified in another feature of time-travel fictions, their restaging of the second distinctive aspect of traumatic temporality, the repetition compulsion, whereby traumatised subjects constantly re-enact the traumatic event in nightmares or hallucinations – hence Allan Young’s description of the psychopathology as a ‘disease of time’ (1995: 7), a compulsive ‘time travel’ back to the moment of the traumatic event. Apocalyptic fictions of time travel, such as the ones mentioned above, or even more recent ones, such as The Terminator films or Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995), represent in concrete, literal terms this aspect of traumatic temporality as they often revolve around a major event which structures their temporal pattern, endlessly circulating around but insistently evading the traumatic incident of total annihilation. It is in this sense that apocalyptic writing may be seen as ‘a remainder, a symptom, an aftermath of some disorienting catastrophe’ (Berger 1999: 7).

But since trauma is always ‘inevitably a problem of representation’ (Kansteiner 2004: 205), my discussion seeks to explore further the ways in which this resurgence of the past onto the future was represented in narratives with reference to terms, concepts and metaphors from contemporary technoscientific discourses, thus registering the technocultural shock of the technological revolutions brought about by these very discourses. The image of a clock running down resurfaces again as a symbol to represent one of the scientific discourses that had a profound impact on the apocalyptic imagination of the fin de siècle, the discipline of thermodynamics. In 1892, during his theorisations on the discipline, the Scottish physicist William Thomson considered the solar system to be ‘dynamically analogous to the clockwork’ driven by a weight which, when run down, would have all its energy spent in heat, with no heat left available for raising the weight and giving the clockwork any renewed ‘motivity’ (1892: 471). Thomson’s use of this metaphor came out of his researches on the second law of thermodynamics and his formulation of the principle of ‘entropy’, which served as a major source of apocalyptic speculation at the fin de siècle. The first law of thermodynamics, formulated during the 1840s by physicists such as Robert Mayer, Hermann von Helmholtz and James Prescott Joule, postulates the principle of the ‘conservation of energy’. According to this law, the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant; energy may be transformed from one state to another but it can be neither created nor destroyed. But if, according to the first law, the quantity of energy is constant, according to the second law, its quality, its ‘usefulness’ is constantly being degraded. The difference between the two laws was expressed concisely in 1865 by the physicist Rudolph Clausius in the paper in which he coined the term ‘entropy’ – as opposed to ‘energy’ – deriving from a Greek root meaning ‘transformation’: ‘The energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum’ (Clausius 1865: 400).

The first theorisations of the second law took place in the early 1820s, in Sadi Carnot’s researches on steam engine efficiency that led him to the what is now known as the ‘Carnot theorem’, according to which heat in steam engines tends to flow spontaneously and irreversibly from higher to lower temperatures (Carnot 1824). The official formulation of the second law, however, was made by Thomson, who extended Carnot’s research on engines to a cosmic theory underlying the fundamental principles of the universe itself. For Thomson, the sum of useful energy throughout the universe was constantly reduced by the diffusion of heat until all would reach a state of entropy. According to Thomson’s three conclusions:

1. There is at present in the material world a universal tendency to the dissipation of mechanical energy.
2. Any restoration of mechanical energy, without more than an equivalent of dissipation, is impossible in animate material processes, and is probably never affected by means of organised matter, either endowed with vegetable life or subjected to the will of an animated creature.
3. Within a finite period of time past the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have been, or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world are subject. (Thomson 1852: 514)

The law of entropy was suggesting a cosmic dissipation that would end in the exhaustion of any heat source, resulting in the ‘heat death of the universe’, a description made two years later by the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in a lecture where he elaborated upon Thomson’s research on energy dissipation. According to Helmholtz, ‘in the letters of a long-known little mathematical formula which speaks only of the heat, volume, and pressure of bodies’, Thomson ‘was able to discern consequences which threatened the universe, though certainly after an infinite period of time, with eternal death’ (1854: 154). The universe would reach a final state in which all energy would be transformed into heat of a uniform temperature that would cause all natural processes to come to a halt: ‘the universe from that time forward would be condemned to a state of eternal rest’ (153–4).

Thomson’s formulations had a major impact not only within scientific communities but also upon the general public that became familiar with the major tenets of thermodynamics through scientific popularisations that were becoming increasingly popular during the last quarter of the century. ‘The nineteenth century’, in this way, ‘found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics’ (Foucault 1986: 22). The law of entropy infiltrated not only end-of-the-century fictions of apocalypse but also, as I discuss in the following section, theories of historiography, such as the one to be found in the work of Henry Adams, who set forth a tendency that survived up until the end of the twentieth century and may be identified in the work of popular science writers like Jeremy Rifkin.

Energy watersheds and phase changes: Jeremy Rifkin/Henry Adams

In 1972, George Steiner suggested that ‘a good deal of the political barbarism of the politics of our century was anticipated, dreamt of, fantasised about in the art, literature, and apocalyptic theories of the previous hundred years’, a legacy that has led to a ‘view of history’ that is ‘not an anthropology, but an entropology’ (186). Such an ‘entropological’ historical model was presented by Jeremy Rifkin in his Entropy: A New World View (1981): ‘Each day we awake to a world that appears more confused and disordered than the one we left the night before. Nothing seems to work anymore . . .. The same inexorable force of disintegration is eating away at us all’ (3–4). Rifkin’s book was following an earlier trend to introduce concepts from thermodynamics in areas such as economics, education, religion, art and agriculture, represented by texts such as Rudolph Arnheim’s Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (1971) and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971). Rifkin’s book, however, became one of the most best-selling books on popular science of the 1980s, a genre that received a renewed popularity during that decade. In his work, Rifkin, in a typical fashion for the discourse of popular science, assumed the voice of the social prophet, as he assumed a spiritual, even religious voice and adopted a millennialist attitude when he viewed his contemporary moment as marking a paradigm shift towards an ‘entropic worldview’ that would replace the Newtonian mechanistic paradigm. The ‘Entropy Law’, for Rifkin, ‘has a special power. It is so utterly overwhelming that, once fully internalised, it transforms everyone it comes in contact with; it is its almost mystical attraction that makes the Entropy Law so frightening to take hold of’ (Rifkin 1981: 6). The religious rhetoric forms the wider framework for Rifkin’s apocalyptic historicist vision, which is largely determined by the concept of entropy. For Rifkin, ‘history is a reflection of the second law’:

In the course of history, critical watersheds are reached when all of the accumulated increases in entropy result in a qualitative change in the energy source of the environment itself. It is at these critical transition points that the old way of doing things becomes inoperative. (65)

History unfolds in terms of paradigm shifts which, in Rifkin’s text, were translated as ‘energy watersheds’, such as the one that Rifkin diagnosed in his contemporary moment, when ‘the new entropy paradigm just emerging’ would replace the Newtonian mechanistic worldview: ‘a new world view is about to emerge, one that will eventually replace the Newtonian world machine as the organising frame of history: the Entropy Law will preside as the ruling paradigm over the next period of history’ (Rifkin 1981: 7, 6). Rifkin’s appropriation of thermodynamics led him to build a historicist model indebted to Kermode’s sense of ‘living in the middest’.

Entropy had therefore become an entire ‘world view’ in Rifkin’s vision of the 1980s, even as one wonders why it should qualify as ‘new’ in the first place, especially when bearing in mind Greg Myers’s suggestion that Rifkin’s religious rhetoric ‘recalls the theological flights of Stewart and Tait’ (1989: 337). Myers refers to physicists Balfour Stewart’s and Peter Guthrie Tait’s best-selling The Unseen Universe, or Physical Speculations on a Future State (1875), a work that went through fourteen editions in thirteen years. Stewart and Tait relied on concepts of thermodynamics in order to provide scientific proof for the idea of immortality. The concepts of energy and entropy were discussed in order to suggest that ‘the visible universe must, certainly in transformable energy, and probably in matter, come to an end’ (1875: 64; original emphasis). However:

the visible universe cannot comprehend the whole works of God, because it had its beginning in time, and will also come to an end. Perhaps, indeed, it forms only an infinitesimal portion of that stupendous whole which is alone entitled to be called THE UNIVERSE. (Stewart and Tait 1875: 64)

The Unseen Universe was only one of a group of late Victorian popular science texts on the second law of thermodynamics. Written in the mid-1870s, Stewart’s and Tait’s work was a predecessor of turn-of-the-century discussions of entropy which assumed an even more pronounced apocalyptic attitude. ‘It is only around 1900’, Stephen Brush informs us, ‘that we find an increasing number of references to the second law of thermodynamics, and attempts to connect it with general historical tendencies’ (1978: 61). The most important representative of this tendency would be Henry Adams who, around the turn of the century, produced a number of texts on the implications of contemporary sciences like evolutionary biology and thermodynamics for historiography. One century before Rifkin, Adams had already suggested a historicist model informed by contemporary physics: ‘the future of Thought and therefore of History, lies in the hands of the physicists’ (Adams 1909: 283). Already by 1894, in ‘The Tendency of History’, Adams had noted the recent shift of opinion from the optimism of progress and Darwinian evolution to a general feeling of pessimism:

Of late years the tone of European thought has been distinctly despondent among the classes which were formerly most hopeful. If a science of history were established to-day on the lines of its recent development I greatly fear it would take its tone from the pessimism of Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg, unless it brought into sight some new and hitherto unsuspected path for civilisation to pursue. (1894: 129–30)

However, it was only after 1900 that Adams became even more preoccupied with the impact of entropy on the science of history, especially after he learned about William Thomson’s formulations from his friend Clarence King and read Thomson’s biography by the latter’s student Andrew Gray. In his ‘Letter to American Teachers of History’ (1910), Adams directly cited from scientific documents by Thomson and Clausius, among others, in order to suggest that ‘[t]he law of thermodynamics must embrace human history in its last as well as in its earliest phase’ (1910: 195). The first law made Adams see society as a closed system in which ‘social energy’ circulates without being created or destroyed, where there is ‘incessant transference and conversion, but neither final gain nor loss’ (144) and ‘nothing was created, nothing was destroyed’ (140). The second law led him to view history as ‘a record of successive phases of contraction, divided by periods of explosion, tending always towards an ultimate equilibrium in the form of a volume of human molecules of equal intensity, without coordination’ (213). The general properties of energy and entropy seemed useful to Adams for a science of history that would perceive social and intellectual change as an integral part of the cosmic process. Around 1900, Adams was staring towards a Western civilisation in a state of irreversible dissipation similar to the entropic universe that he was living in. He theorised a model of history that ‘pointed to inevitable, universal doom, a point of view’ that was ‘not unlike the fin-de-siècle pessimism of European thinkers’ (Herschfeld 1968: xiii). ‘The d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Technoscience
• Part II Empire
• Bibliography
• Index