The Bridges Between the Worlds

‘The Bridges between the Worlds’ by J.J. Grandville

Un Autre Monde, or Another World, is perhaps one of the most famous works by the 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist J.J. Grandville. The ‘other’ world, created by the central characters of Dr. Krackq, Dr. Puff and Dr. Hahblle, is a satirical depiction of 19th century Parisian society, full of parody and political allusions.

Later acknowledged as an influence on the Surrealists, Grandville’s illustrations could also be regarded as early representations of science fiction:- visions of the future that drew from the contemporary interest in popular astronomy. ‘The Bridges between the Worlds’ (see above), also known as ‘The Bridge over the Stars’ and ‘The Footbridge between Worlds’, is one such example. A strange fusion of industrial innovation and intergalactic exploration, there’s something instantly appealing and memorable about this image, probably accounting for why it is one of the more commonly reproduced prints from Un Autre Monde. Fortunately, an entire copy of the book has been digitised and uploaded onto Flickr, which makes for easy viewing of Grandville’s beautiful illustrations.

A copy of Un Autre Monde is held in Special Collections, University of Leeds Library, and was featured in the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery’s exhibition ‘Visions of the Future’ (4 April - 11 June 2011).

Memory-Technology-Utopia

Or, Can We Salvage the Future?

[The following is an excerpt from a longer piece of writing, which forms part of my PhD research]

‘Why are there no utopias today?’ is Judith Shklar’s opening gambit in her essay, ‘The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia’,  a question that assumes the utopian project to be a thing of the past, a historical artefact. This view forms part of a broader narrative of utopia, dominant since the late 1960s, which attributes its disappearance to the decline of modernist narratives of collective progress and improvement. So, where did these utopian visions go? Were they banished to the convenient ‘no place’ of the word’s Greek origins? Was the unfashionable and deterministic idea of progress responsible for their fall from grace? And what, if anything, stood in their (no)place? One version of events is that by the 1970s, the unifying drive of utopia was no longer up to the task of reconciling the competing claims of minority groups in a world with increasingly global perspectives.  As the utopian project waned, the concept of collective memory began to emerge in academic discourse, with all its evocative, recuperative and inclusive potential. Offering a means of coming to terms with the events of the past in order to move forward, memory seemed like an antidote to the perceived authoritarian strain in historical narratives. The past, then, having achieved a healthy distance from the present, was once again close and familiar, no longer a foreign country, but the vehicle for societies’ shared inheritance.  This temporal manoeuvre is well documented, whereby the past, through a discourse of social remembering, is shaped and interpreted according to the present situation.  However, there is something in the latest incarnation which, under the banner of memory, speaks of a particular anxiety about the future. The renewed impetus to remember, memorialise and pass on a legacy, particularly in the sphere of culture, is underpinned by the fear that a failure to do so will perpetuate the already pervasive spectre of cultural amnesia.   Consequently, stories, sites and monuments of the past were never so popular, as much for what they represent as for what they are. But the question of what they represent now is critical; do they memorialise the glories of the past or hold the promise of the future? Is there something faintly utopian about the new and oft cited memory boom?

I want to explore this possibility further and to argue for a theory of utopia that goes beyond its status as an artefact of the modernist era. So rather than asking, as Skhlar does, ‘why are there no utopias today?’, I will not foreclose the question of utopia because it seems to me to be intimately linked to the contemporary concern with memory, borne out of a desire for the future. There is, of course, a well-established precedent for locating the utopian impulse within the realms of memory, for example, in the figure Walter Benjamin's angel of history,  or in the mixing of ‘memory and desire’  in T.S. Eliot’s opening to The Waste Land. Theodor Adorno gave a succinct expression of this relationship in Aesthetic Theory, writing ‘ever since Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, the not-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance’.  Here, memory appears as the anchor for utopia, opening up the space from which it emerges. The anchoring function of memory is significant in an age where temporal boundaries are being increasingly challenged, effecting a sense of displacement that has been noted by several cultural theorists. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman comments that, ‘due to the ‘pendulum-like’ trajectory of historical sequences a close proximity of forward and backward or ‘utopia’ and ‘nostalgia’ pregnant with confusion is virtually inevitable’.  In this regard, utopia is peculiarly relevant to my study, where the museum, that shrine to the past, is explored in its relation to digital technologies, the current symbol of the future par excellence. Furthermore, my focus is on memory, specifically the discourse of collective memory, and its uptake in discussions about preserving cultural heritage digitally. The question of digital technology is not insignificant, since it potentially re-defines the transmission of culture as the flow of information. Nor is memory a politically benign concept in the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal. The central proposition is that a loss of memory is what is at stake in a failure to digitise. Yet there is an irony in making claims, in the name of memory, for a technology which, arguably, changes the nature of how we experience time. As Andreas Huyssen, claims ‘the very organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete’.  The study of memorial forms also entails the study of the history of communication technologies; Paul Ricoeur’s observation that ‘what is peculiar to a history of memory is the history of the modes of its transmission’  highlights the extent to which they are inter-related. Developing this thought, Patrick Hutton adapts Walter J. Ong’s theory of media communications to broadly distinguish four modes of mnemonic representation. He links ‘orality with the reiteration of living memory; manuscript literacy with the recovery of lost wisdom; print literacy with the reconstruction of a distinct past; and media literacy with the deconstruction of the forms with which past images are composed’.  In its latest phase, the opportunities for a more reflexive engagement with memory are both obstructed and enabled by technology. While the capacity to access and interact with heritage collections are greatly increased by their presence online, the process of digitisation potentially disrupts the conventional sequence of past, present and future events, since cultural memory (that sense of the past defined through human actions or social phenomena), is not applicable to the digital archive, which has a time-based element internal to the workings of technical media.  The attendant concern is that in an environment of instant messaging and real-time updates, temporal categories will be swallowed up by an all-pervasive present. 

However, rather than allowing that this situation precludes the emergence of utopian visions, I want to examine how the utopian project is manifested in the wake of temporal crisis. Contra Huyssen who concludes that ‘there can be no utopia in cyberspace, because there is no there there from which a utopia could emerge’,  I will suggest that there is a viable account of memory, technology and utopia beyond the narrative of ‘techno-utopianism’ critiqued by many contemporary commentators. 

Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.5 Professor Cyril Oakley

Professor C.L. Oakley (1907-1975)

David I. Masson was previously featured on this blog for his role in founding the University of Leeds SF collection by donating books from his personal library. The rest originated in the gift of Professor Cyril Leslie Oakley, who began in 1971 to present his own extensive collection of science fiction literature to the Brotherton Library's Special Collections.

Appointed Brotherton Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Leeds in 1953, Professor Oakley was a founding fellow of the College of Pathologists and at various times edited the Journal of Pathology and the Journal of Medical Microbiology. He was awarded a D.Sc. by the University of London in 1953, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1957 and made a CBE in 1970. He died in 1975.

Sadly, there are few that now remember Professor Oakley but SF was just one of his many and varied interests. Former students and colleagues can recall a lecture on ‘Bug-eyed Monsters’ addressed to members of the Medical and other student societies. These were illustrated with slides of the magazine covers that later formed part of his gift, notably Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, which have recently been made available online. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to assume that Oakley's interest in SF was informed by his career as a scientist, and whether his lecture was delivered in a serious manner or just for fun (one would guess the latter), it is still indicative of the extent to which these realms were more closely aligned in the past than perhaps they are today. The time when SF stories were regarded as the speculative branch of science as opposed to complete fictions are therefore within living memory, and it's a period I'd like to explore further in this blog.

This post adapts text from the booklet Visions of the Future: The Art of Science Fiction by Paul Whittle and Liz Stainforth.

Guardian Books - Five Science Fiction Novels for People who Hate SF

Guardian Books recently featured the article, 'Five Science Fiction Novels for People who Hate SF'. This title is in-keeping with a slightly annoying tendency of some literature feature writers:- to offer a pre-emptive apology, assuming that readers will be automatically put off by the SF label.

But is this really reflective of what people think? So often has the well-worn, albeit legitimate, argument about SF's resonance with societal issues been stated that it seems contrived to make it the opening gambit of the article. Nevertheless, we are told, 'science fiction is all around us, from clandestine electronic surveillance to robots taking our jobs', echoing J.G. Ballard's 1971 observation that, 'everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century'.

In this case the writer, Damien Walter, is obviously an SF fan, so the early disclaimer is soon forgotten because of his evident enthusiasm for the genre. His picks are:

5. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
4. The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
3. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
2. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
1. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

Le Guin's exploration of gender and race issues, Gibson's prophetic vision of the disturbing progress of technology and Banks' end-of-history based adventure story offer plenty for readers to get their teeth into. All things considered, this list is less 'Five SF Novels for people that hate SF', and more five novels for those that enjoy reading (less catchy, I know!) That being said, I recently joined a book group where the first novel we read will be my suggestion of The Female Man by Joanna Russ. It'll be a good opportunity to find out if the old sterotypes about SF come out in a group of voracious, library-based readers. Watch this (outer)space...

UPDATE: November 2015

Apparently others have also found critics' separation of literary and genre fiction frustrating. See the following articles in The Guardian and The Norwich Radical:

https://thenorwichradical.com/2015/11/03/literature-vs-genre-seconds-out-part-1/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/nov/10/david-mitchell-and-literary-and-genre-fiction-world-fantasy-award

Life in Wax: Teaching Collections at Leeds

Still from Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

For many years now, arguably since the advent of the SF genre, insects have enjoyed an association with aliens in the popular imagination. From the archetypal bug-eyed monster depicted on the covers of early SF magazines, to the nightmarish insectoids of Starship Troopers, to the ant-like physiology of the creatures in Quatermass' pit, writers and filmmakers have drawn much inspiration from the insect world in their representation of martians, forms often regarded as frightening and strange.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the first thing I thought of when I saw the wax models of Hydrophilus piceus, or 'The Great Water Beatle' (see image below) were dormant, chrysalis-like aliens. These are part of the collection at the University of Leeds' Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and were formerly used in University teaching from the late 19th century onwards. What is unique about Hydrophilus is that it is the only insect to have been reproduced by the noted embryo modeler Adolf Ziegler (1820-1889). Louis Compton Miall (1842-1921), former Professor of Biology at Leeds, was widely acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost experts on The Great Water Beatle, second only to Karl Heider (1856-1935), who provided the drawings that the wax series was based on.

Hydrophilus piceus, or 'The Great Water Beatle'

While scaled up in size, the models replicate even the minutest features of the beetle throughout different stages of its life cycle, making them ideal for the study of biology and zoology, since they could be observed by a class of students. With real specimens being both expensive and difficult to present, wax models provided a clear visual aid to teachers trying to explain the development of human and animal embryos as three-dimensional structures.

During the latter part of the 19th century, wax models became instruments not just for teaching, but for research. Embryological development was called upon as key evidence in evolutionary debates and the models' great detail and accuracy meant they could be used in new investigations. Due to the public interest in embryology, wax models, along with text and print images, were displayed in a number of private and public museum collections. 

As well as Ziegler's water beetle, the collection holds series detailing the development of the pig, the vertebrate eye, the human heart, and the convolutions of the human brain. For further information, please visit: http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/museum-of-hstm/  

Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories now in Leeds University's Digital Library

Just a quick post to alert any interested parties to the fact that selected covers of the Hugo Gernsback-edited magazines Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories are now available to access via the University of Leeds' Digital Library (some images may require a University login). The covers viewable online are designed by Frank R. Paul, the artist most closely associated with Gernsback’s publications. Paul had studied to be an architect and, working in bright colours to offset the poor paper quality of low-cost printing, he became regarded as the most influential artist in the development of modern science fiction artwork. Here's a full list of issues with Paul's cover artwork in the Library's collection:

Amazing Stories

1927: April, May
1928: January-April, July-September, November
1929: January-March, June

Wonder Stories

1930: June, July, August

1931: April, June, August-December

1932: January-December

1933: January-June, August, October-December

1934: January, February, April-June, August, September, November, December

1935: January-October, December

1936: February, April

The completion of this project would not have been possible without the support of the Frank R. Paul estate, and is a step towards preserving these very fragile magazines.

Start the Week: Hari Kunzru and Dystopia - 17 June 2013

Lots to interest SF fans here. The episode focused on Hari Kunzru and his dystopian novella, Memory Palace, where books and the act of remembering have been banned. This work of fiction sits alongside 20 original commissions from leading graphic designers, illustrators and typographers to create a multidimensional story exhibition at the V&A. Jane Rogers discussed her apocalyptic tale, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, which is running as part of R4's Dangerous Visions season. This encompasses a selection of contemporary dramas with near-future dysopian themes, as well as new dramatisations of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and Concrete Island. James Robertson spoke about his latest novel, The Professor of Truth, which explores grief, justice and the truth, and the photographer Adam Broomberg raised questions about how far images of war capture the truth.