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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