George R. Stewart: Earth Abides

George R. Stewart
Earth Abides


This is the second of my plague posts, the first being on Feb. 16, 2017. (http://tinyurl.com/kman92p) which included a brief discussion of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" and Jack London's novella, "The Scarlet Plague.

One intriguing overlap is that Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" and Stewart's Earth Abides were set in the San Francisco area and that the POV characters in both stories had been professors at a local university.   It may simply be coincidence since Stewart taught at the University of California at Berkeley and London was born in San Francisco and died in northern California, as did Stewart. 

Earth Abides is one of the best post-holocaust novels I've ever read. It's a quiet novel which focuses on the effects on those who survived a war in which over 99% of the human race died. The title comes from Ecclesiastes:

"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities: all is vanity.
 What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;
 but the earth abideth for ever. "

Ish comes across in the first chapter as the quiet, reflective type who seems to prefer being an observer than a participant (an observation he makes himself at one point).. I wonder how much of this detachment is him and how much is shock at seeing his world ended.

The story has two narrative structures.  The first is the one in regular print, and that's mostly the story of Ish and his doings--his attempt to deal with the drastic change in the status of the human race.  During the past century or so, humans had become the dominant species on the planet, and its favored animals and plants were slowly pushing the unfavored ones to the sidelines.  Now, Ish has to change his behavior to reflect that of humanity's new status, a vastly reduced position, both in dominance and in numbers.   Technology, his greatest asset, is slowly disintegrating and would soon be useless.  The safety net that technology and the civilization based on it was gone.  He finally realized it to some extent when his fears returned shortly after starting out.  Before the catastrophe, if his car had broken down for any reason, he could just wait for a passing motorist, even on remote roads, or perhaps a state highway patrol officer.  Now, he was on his own.  Nobody would come to rescue him.

The second narrative is the one in italics.  It is there for a very good reason.  Ish is only human and has only a limited perspective, centered mostly on himself and his concerns.  He has little if any idea of what goes on around him, especially if it's out of sight.  The title of the novel is not Ish Abides, or Humanity Abides., but Earth Abides.  The focus of the novel is, therefore, on the effects on Earth and the plants and animals that share the planet with humans.  Humans are once again back on the same level as other creatures:  it must take the Earth as it is and learn how to survive with what is provided by Earth.   He can no longer reshape the Earth to fit in with his desires and presumed needs. 

For example, we take fences for granted.  They are one of humanity's means of  control of the environment.  Fences are humanity's way of saying these animals must stay here and not go somewhere else, while other animals occupy other places specified by humans.  Now, the fences are breaking down, and those animals are now free to go as their natures dictate, regardless of  human plans. 

The novel is an account of the way the group survived several crises, grew, and changed over the years.  There are no bloodthirsty mutants or no spectacular scientific advances, nor do they set up an Edenic society, in which all are wise, reasonable, and loving.  Stewart has given us humans who lose almost everything they had taken for granted and that includes friends and relatives.  Of the survivors, all have lost everybody they knew, the one exception in Ish's group being a young mother and her infant child. They are the only two with a connection that survived the Plague. 

What we see in the novel is the gradual acceptance of their situation and an attempt to survive. It is a low key novel with expected challenges: the search for food, water, shelter, and companionship.  The most significant change over the years is the passing of the first generation and the gradual assumption of control by the next generation, those that had no experience or knowledge of what life had been before the Plague.

Ish attempted to teach the new generation, but they were not interested in sitting around a classroom and being lectured on things which seemed to have little relevance to life now.  Perhaps Ish's greatest contribution to their physical survival was the introduction of the bow and arrow.  Ammunition supplies were dwindling and they lacked the knowledge and technology to make more or to repair or manufacture gun or ammunition.
.

Stewart has provided the reader with what I can only call a very human  and a very ironic and a very satisfying ending, though it is not the ending of Ish's group.  Those who have read the book will recognize the irony of the following statement:  a foreshadowing of the slow development of a Myth. Early in the book, the question of his relationship to the group arises.  He provides them with stability, and he alone, in the early days at first, is able to function.  They look up to him, for his detachment to some extent sets him apart from the others.  But, at one point he thinks to himself:  "'No,' he thought.  "Whatever happens, at least I shall never believe that I a god.  No, I shall never be a god!'"

I wonder how future generations will view Ish. 


At the beginning of this post, I wrote that this was one of the best post-holocaust novels I had ever read.  I would like to modify that by saying it is one of the best SF novels I had ever read.

Jack London: The Scarlet Plague

Jack London:   The Scarlet Plague


Edgar Allan Poe published a short work titled "The Masque of the Red Death" (aka "The Mask of the Red Death) in 1842 about a virulent plague that caused instant bleeding from the pores and immediate death.  In 1912, some 70 years later, Jack London published a novella, The Scarlet Death in which he depicted a plague that caused a bright reddening of the skin and almost instantaneous death.  Did London borrow the idea from Poe?  I don't know as I've never read anything that suggests such a possibility.  Aside from the symptoms and the high mortality rate, the two tales are very different in time and place.  Poe's tale takes place in Renaissance Italy (or so I guess) while London's is set in the San Francisco Bay area in 2013. 

Poe's story focused on a small group of people who fled the city for an isolated "castellated abbey," hoping to escape the plague.  It had a high wall and an iron door.  They sealed the door in an attempt to keep the plague or plague bearers out.  However, as those who have read the tale know, they were unsuccessful  What happened after the plague appeared and apparently killed all in the abbey is not told.

London's tale, however, is a flashback, a reminiscence of one of the few survivors, called Granser by the boys,  told to the next generation, a small group of young males who are the descendants of those few who were immune to the plague.  While the story was written in 1912, London set it in 2013, in the San Francisco Bay area. 

The frame tells us what life is like several decades after the plague.  Granser's  audience consists of teen-aged boys, whose language consists mostly of a very basic vocabulary and they see no reason why there should be more than one word for something.  They deride the old man for referring to something as "scarlet" when "red" is a perfectly good word.  While we never really get a close look at the way the people live then, London does provide sufficient information to suggest that humanity has reverted back to the hunting and gathering stage, a period of savagery, as Granser complains.  But, this is all part of the cycle, for the old man tells the boys:

 "You are true savages.  Already has begun the custom of wearing human teeth.  In another generation you will be perforating your nose and ears and wearing ornaments of bone and shell.  I know.  The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.  When we increase and feel the lack of room,  we will proceed to kill one another." 

Most of the tale, though, consists of the horrors experienced during the outbreak of the plague and the breakdown of society, the rioting, looting, and killing that occurred as the terrified population thought only of their own survival at any cost.  What's intriguing is that Granser, a literature professor at the University of California,  and numerous colleagues in the university community attempted to barricade themselves in the Chemistry Building, bringing in supplies and weapons and prepared to do whatever they had to do to keep the plague and plague bearers out, just as the Prince and his friends had done in Poe's tale. And, they were just an unsuccessful.  At the end, the few survivors fled the building.

London doesn't go into any great detail about what had happened during the sixty years that had passed since the outbreak.  He is most concerned with the breakdown of society at the time of the plague and some depiction of life today.

Interwoven though is London's socialist philosophy as the old man tells of society in 2013 as consisting of Masters and Slaves (capitalist owners and workers).  He, in speaking of the events of 2013, tells us  "(t)hat was the year that Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates."

London also makes the point, over a century ago, that he was aware of what we today are only too aware of--the relationship of a large population and the appearance of new diseases and the role of rapid global  transportation in the spread of these diseases.  Improved methods of food production led to an increase in population.  "The easier it was to get food, the more men there were; the more men there were, the more thickly were they packed together on the earth; and the more thickly were they packed, the more new kinds of germs became diseases."

We are certainly well aware of the problem today, especially when we consider the onset of AIDS, Ebola, and most recently the Zika virus.  So far we've been lucky as rapid transmission of information has allowed us to stay ahead of the threat, even though several countries were placed under quarantine during the last Ebola outbreak.

London's tale is a disquieting one, even though it is considered science fiction.  It is not an highly improbable invasion by aliens that poses the threat but invaders from Earth itself.  We see examples of it perhaps every decade or so.

At one time I had considered calling this post "The Three Plagues."  I had planned to write about three plague stories--the two mentioned above and George R. Stewart's great novel, The Earth Abides.   However, the length of this commentary on the first two is long enough, so I will post on Stewart's work separately.

 I would recommend, if you have the time, to read all three stories:  first Poe, then London, and then Stewart's novel, for together they provide an thorough exploration of the theme--the plague and its aftermath.  .  
 

Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes from Underground

I found that I had posted several entries about The Notes from Underground in association with other works, but I had never given this work its own posting.  So, I decided (being lazy) to gather together the various comments I had made to see if I could make something coherent about this very complex work.

The first part consists of an extended passage in which the underground man (UM) reveals himself. He is a civil servant who has come into a small inheritance and has retired. He is an outsider with no friends or relatives. He lives in isolation. He sneers at society, but at the same time longs to join them, to be one of them.  It is also a philosophical rant against those who think that human behavior will eventually be completely explainable and predictable by the immutable laws of science.  In addition the narrator contends that there are two types of people:  the doers and the thinkers or the intellectuals.   Everything that is accomplished is done by the doers, because the thinkers are paralyzed when they attempt to handle all the ramifications of acting.


The second part shows our reclusive narrator in action and supports both of the arguments put forth in the first part.  In the second part, the UM forces himself upon some former student acquaintances who are giving a going-away party for one of the students. The UM insists on attending the party, while mocking himself and eventually the others. He desires to be one with them, but actively works to make this impossible.

 The UM also meets a prostitute in the second part; the UM persuades Liza to escape from the life of a prostitute. However, when Liza appears at his apartment several days later, telling him that she wants to escape, he rejects her and sends her away.

This is one of Dostoyevsky's most unusual works.  It was while I was reading it, for the third or fourth time actually, that I began to see some similarities between Dostoyevsky's short novel and Poe's short story, "The Imp of the Perverse." "The Imp of the Perverse" is another of Poe's first person confessions--the individual attempts to explain why he committed his act from a jail cell, with a gallows outside awaiting him.

One of the similarities is the format: both begin with lectures on one or more topics which are of considerable length in comparison to the work which is then followed by an incident that exemplifies the topic(s) discussed in the first part. Poe's lecture is solely on the nature of perverseness in human behavior while Dostoyevsky's contains several themes, only one of which is perverseness.

One of Dostoyevsky's first examples of perverseness is that at times he is sick but doesn't go to the doctor out of spite. Who is he injuring--himself. He knows he should go because he is "only injuring [himself]...My liver is bad, well--- let it get worse." He is knowingly acting against his own best interests. Later he speaks of a "friend" of his:

"When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony he will upbraid the shortsighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and within a quarter of of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct opposition to what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to everything..."


Poe advances a similar argument about perversity: "Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say through its promptings we act, for the reason we should not."  In other words, we act  because we know we shouldn't.

Dostoyevsky here, like Poe, argues that humans will act at times in direct conflict with what they know to be their best interests.

Dostoyevsky postulates an advance in science which might provide accurate prediction of human behavior while Poe points out a combination of phrenology and metaphysics that attempts do the same. Both then attack the possibility of a completely accurate science of predicting human behavior.

Dostoyevsky says, "science itself will teach man that he never really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are , besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will not longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms..."

And then, when complete rational harmony and prosperity is established, someone will stand up and say that we should "'kick over the whole show here and scatter rationalism to the winds' ... [and] he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning; that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated."

Again, we do things simply for the sake of  being perverse or because we know we shouldn't.



A Side Note:


There are some subtle comic comments buried within the text. The UM seems such a humorless person in much of the work, I wonder if he understands what he says here.   

". . . I began to feel an irresistible urge to plunge into society.  To me plunging into society meant paying a visit to my office chief, Anton Antonych Setochkin.  He's the only lasting acquaintance I've made during my lifetime;  I too now marvel at this circumstance.  But even then I would visit him only when my dreams had reached such a degree of happiness that it was absolutely essential for me to embrace people and all humanity at once; for that reason I needed to have at least one person on hand who actually existed.  However, one could only call upon Anton Antonych on Tuesday (his receiving day); consequently, I always had to adjust the urge to embrace all humanity so that it occurred on Tuesday. . . .The host usually sat in his study on a leather couch in front of a table together with some gray-haired guest, a civil servant either from our office or another one.  I never saw more than two or three guests there, and they were always the same ones.  They talked about excise taxes, debates in the Senate, salaries, promotions, His Excellency and how to please him,  and so on and so forth. I had the patience to sit here like a fool next to these people for four hours or so; I listened without daring to say a word to them or even knowing what to talk about.   I sat there in a stupor; several times I broke into a sweat; I felt numbed by paralysis; but it was good and useful.  Upon returning home I would postpone for some time my desire to embrace all humanity."


 Is he being ironic?

Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable, pt. 2

This quotation follows directly after the quotation included in the earlier post titled "Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable."  I had planned on a series of sequential posts from this section of Eiseley's The Night Country, but it didn't work out that way.  Reality sometimes barges in and upsets "the best laid plans of mice and me."


"It is through the individual brain alone that there passes the momentary illumination in which a whole human countryside may be transmuted in an instant.  'A steep and unaccountable transition,' Thoreau has described it, 'from what it called a common sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded and liberating one, from seeing things as men describe them, to seeing them as men can not describe them.'   Man's mind, like the expanding universe itself, is engaged in pouring over limitless horizons.  At its heights of genius it betrays all the miraculous unexpectedness which we try vainly to eliminate from the universe.  The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.  One does not see, one does not hear, until he speaks to us out of that limitless creativity which is his gift."


I find this startling and illuminating.  I have heard many scientists defend what they do to be as beautiful and stirring as as any work of art--that science is not the enemy of the arts.  But now I read Eiseley's comment here:

"At its heights of genius it betrays all the miraculous unexpectedness which we try vainly to eliminate from the universe."

Isn't that the task of science--to remove the unexpectedness and unpredictability of the universe?  I am reminded of Poe's "Sonnet--to Science."


Science!  true daughter of Old Time thou art!
    Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
     Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee?  or how deem thee wise,
     Who wouldst  not leave him in his wandering
To seek for resurrect in the jewelled skies,
     Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
     And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
     Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?


I think Poe and Eiseley would agree here.  After all, what is science about--it is an attempt to explain all things and reduce it to predictability, to do away with surprises and the unexpected.  What happens when scientists stumble across something unexpected?  They greet it with joy and then go about trying to eliminate it.  Scientists, some day, may be able to tell us from what parts of the brain a poem or a symphony emerges, but they will never be able to predict the next poem or symphony that emerges.

The next paragraph in Eiseley's essay:

"The flash of lightning in a single brain also flickers along the horizon of our more ordinary brains.  Without that single lightning stroke in a solitary mind, however, the rest of us would never have known the fairyland of The Tempest, the midnight world of Dostoevsky, or the blackbirds on the yellow harvest fields of Van Gogh.  We would have seen blackbirds and endured the depravity of our own hearts, but it would not be the same landscape that the act of genius transformed.  The world without Shakespeare's insights is a lesser world, our griefs shut more inarticulately in upon themselves.  We grow mute at the thought--just as an element seems to disappear from sunlight without Van Gogh.  Yet these creations we might call particle episodes in the human universe--acts without precedent, a kind of disobedience of normality, unprophesiable by science, unduplicable by other individuals on demand.  They are part of that unpredictable newness which keeps the universe from being fully explored by man."

all quotations:
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country


This is probably one of the clearest and most succinct comments on the value and importance of the arts that I have ever read.  And, as I read it, what Eiseley says about the flash of genius that illuminates others, is equally true of what he writes here, for he has changed my thinking about the value of the arts and also about the value of science and their roles in human culture.  The arts can not  do nor should they be expected to do that which science can, but on the other hand, science can not do what the arts do for humanity--transport us out of mundane reality into a new unexpected and unpredictable world.  Science attempts to reduce all to a  mathematical formula--The Grand Theory of Everything--while the arts seek to maintain the sense of wonder, of surprise, of unpredictability that makes us human.