Wednesday 11 September 2019

'Once upon a time there weren’t any scientists, as such, in plays or fictions, because there wasn’t any science as such!'

Bill Bryson and the Atwood Connect!

As noted critic Scupin Richard once said, ‘There are types and types of writers! Some are, by their own choice, always a step ahead, wanting us to follow them through the course of their mighty pages; some prefer to be at our back all the time, giving us leads and cues, prompts and high signs, to infer and to decipher the meaning all by ourselves down the pages; there are yet others who take pleasure in ambling up a leisurely stroll along with us, holding our hands, and guiding us through their pages in such gentle ways, with an involvement beyond measure!’

One such writer of the last order is Bill Bryson!

Indeed, just one cursory look at his range and his sweep makes you stand in awe of him!

Be it on travel writing, be it on the English language, be it on science, be it on memoirs, be it on philosophy, he’s got them all on him in abundant measure!

An engaging style is sure bound to be an endearing style wherein the writer resolves to take you on an awesomyyy ‘haiyahh’ kinda journey ;-) along with him/her, through his/her ideations, ruminations and reflections that’s been transferred with such enormous care and an abundance of love, onto reams and reams of paper white!

How could we ever thank Bill for making science accessible to us the lay in every way, through his wonderfully enticing book on science, titled, A Short History of Nearly Everything, published in 2003! One of the hot-sellers even today, this book takes credit for being one among the ‘mainline few’ that have made science sound so simple and so cool for all and sundry!

However the signpost thread for this post hinges on Bill’s commemorative volume to the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society of Science, titled, Seeing Further, a book which has quite unfortunately, not seen quite those stunning, raving reviews as have his other titles!


The Guardian and The Telegraph in especial, have been so bold and brazen in their bashing! ;-( Well, they’ve just unabashedly ripped apart the book as a huge ‘disappointment’, and a ‘missed opportunity’!

Ladies and gentlemen, they may be right! At the same time they may be equally wrong too!

Cos!

Bryson ain’t the reason! Nayyy!

Rather, the liaison is!

Of course, liaisoning with an astounding array of scholars drawn from different disciplines - to each their quiddities and their quirks – is, should I say, a sheer labour of love in the interests of science, ‘so to say’! (‘so to say’ is Bill’s favourite refrain, again, by the way!)

One cannot but quite appreciate the eclectic range of the contributors to this commemorative number – from Margaret Atwood to Maggie Gee on the literary arena, to Holmes and Gleick on the historians’ realm, to Dawkins and Jones on the scientific sphere, yes! you’ve got them all here by the number!

One particular essay on this commemorative volume so endeared itself to me!

And nooo! Not because Atwood happens to be one of my die-hard favourites, but because Atwood is here in a dynamic, new avatar, exploring the claims behind the ‘mad scientist’ archetype!


Or should I personally quip, on an aside, Atwood here is, on a light-lighter-lightest vein, making (or poking) fun of this sinister archetype! ‘Figures of fun’ as she calls ‘em!!!

Moreover, the beauty of this feature lies in its appeal to all and sundry across times and climes!

A lively, engaging feel there is, to this narrative!

How beautifully she engaged us all right from the opening line, ‘In the late 1950s, when I was a university student!’ And yes, from thence on, chances are, you won’t bat an eyelid even as the pages flap and flutter all by themselves, and even as you are winged and hooked to a different environ altogether, and even as you are completely unperturbed by the wing’d chariot gently flitting you by and by!!!

Oh so! Let’s thank Bill yet again, for giving us all such an engaging essay from such an endearing writer of our times! So to say! ;-)

Again, it ain’t meet for this blogger to dole out the entire essay on a platter at the pavapetta publisher’s peril!

But it would be his earnest request of sorts that you buy for yourself a copy of Bill’s all for yourself, - a personal copy – so to say - ;-) which in turn would do Bill and his  publisher a huge favour, in an era where a spate of digital textualities have slowly and steadily started usurping the fiefdom of the ‘sages of the pages down the ages’!

Snippets from Atwood’s “OF THE MADNESS OF MAD SCIENTISTS: JONATHAN SWIFT’S GRAND ACADEMY” in Bill Bryson’s Commemorative volume!

And here we go and let’s hear Atwood speak  from here on!

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.

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 pulverising 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 goo, 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 being, 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.

I read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a child, before I knew anything about the B-movie scientists. Nobody told me to read it; on the other hand, nobody told me not to.

The edition I had was not a child’s version, of the kind that dwells on the cute little people and the funny giant people and the talking horses, but dodges any mention of nipples and urination, and downplays the excrement.

These truncated versions also leave out most of Part Three – the floating island of Laputa, the Grand Academy of Lagado with its five hundred scientific experiments, the immortal Struldbrugs of Luggnagg – as being incomprehensible to young minds. My edition was unabridged, and I didn’t skip any of it, Part Three included. I read the whole thing.

The miniature people and the giants did hint to me of fairy tales, but Part Three – the floating island and the scientific establishment – didn’t seem to me all that far-fetched. I was then living in what was still the golden or bug-eyed monster age of science fiction – the late forties – so I took spaceships for granted.

This was before the disappointing news had come in – No intelligent life on Mars – and also before I’d read H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, in the light of which any life intelligent enough to build spaceships and come to Earth would be so much smarter than us that we’d be viewed by them as ambulatory kebabs.

So I considered it entirely possible that, once I’d grown up, I might fly through space and meet some extraterrestrials, who then as now were considered to be bald, with very large eyes and heads. Why then couldn’t there be a flying island such as Laputa? I thought the method of keeping the thing afloat with magnets was a little cumbersome – hadn’t Mr Swift heard of jet propulsion? – but the idea of hovering over a country that was annoying you so they’d be in full shadow and their crops wouldn’t grow seemed quite smart.

As for dropping stones on to them, it made perfect sense: kids of the immediately post-war generation were well versed in the advisability of air superiority, and knew a lot about bombers.

As I told y’all earlier, these are snippets! Do buy for yourself a book and read it for yourself! If need be, you could always borrow mine too! So to say! ;-)

Happy reading folks!

image courtesy: varietydotcom

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