Project MUSE - Conan Doyle’s Challenger Tales and the End of the World (original) (raw)

THE FIVE TALES by Arthur Conan Doyle that feature his scientist hero Professor George Edward Challenger are inordinately obsessed with beginnings and endings. You might say that beginnings and endings are thematised one way or another in almost any narrative. But they are ideas that are especially prominent in the Challenger stories, it will be argued, for three obvious reasons: first, because Challenger is a scientist; second, because these tales belong to that phase of Conan Doyle’s career in which his Spiritualist beliefs and activities were bulking increasingly large in his intellectual and creative life; third, because they belong to a time when a great deal of intellectual and aesthetic attention was being focused on beginnings and endings. Science and Spiritualism, practices and discourses and ideologies that might seem antagonistic but which Conan Doyle insisted were not incompatible, regularly and radically grappled with beginnings and endings in the shape of questions about origins, survival, and extinction.

And so, to give a quick initial summary of the tales—The Lost World (1912) takes its adventurers far back into prehistory and concerns the survival of species believed to be extinct, but also records the extinction of a protohuman species that has unexpectedly survived into modern times: The Poison Belt (1913) tells the story of the apparent extermination of all life on earth, and the birth out of this catastrophe of a new human order; The Land of Mist (1926) offers the materialist Challenger proof that individual death is only the portal to a new form of life, and ends with the prospect of a retributive apocalypse; “When the World Screamed” (1928) recounts an experiment to penetrate into the deepest secrets of the source of all life, the earth itself; and “The Disintegration Machine” (1929) is about a hubristic scientist whose own invention brings about not the promised new world order but his own complete dematerialization. In this article only the first three of these tales will [End Page 3] be discussed, as their interest in beginnings and endings bears particularly on a theme that exercised Conan Doyle’s contemporaries in many forms—the end of the world.

Challenger, I have argued elsewhere, is something of a combination of the emerging academic scientist of the late nineteenth century and the residual gentleman investigator of a slightly earlier time.1 He is a professor apparently without a university post, an “amateur” scientist at least in the sense of the range of his scientific interests and his scorn for narrow-minded specialists.2 He has practised medicine, is a zoologist and anthropologist and a fieldwork naturalist, author of a monumental book on zoology, and a vigorous controversialist on evolutionary questions. Later it emerges that he is a geologist too, writing a book upon the earth, and of course in The Land of Mist we see him entering vigorously into psychical research. He does not show an interest in the origins of languages, but his scientific researches connect him to all the other principal etiological questions of nineteenth-century science: the origin of the earth and of the cosmos, of species, of diseases, of human societies. It was a science with a markedly historical character, not only creating and managing knowledge of observable and measurable natural phenomena, but also devising protocols to seek out hidden sources, occult causes and long-vanished origins that might have to be reconstructed by imagination and inference or what C. S. Peirce called abduction, from inadequate evidence or tantalizing clues.3

But even the great teeming narrative of Darwinian evolution acquired its dark and slouching companion in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which has been described by Darryl Jones as “the most comprehensively apocalyptic of all Victorian totalizing theories.”4 For if Victorian science was enthralled by origins and an evolution that could be described as creative, often harnessed to a telos of progress and perfectibility, it concomitated, in this most melancholy of centuries, a parallel fascination with endings, producing an alarming new, secular vocabulary in which to imagine apocalypse: degeneration, re-barbarisation, species extinction, system failure, entropy, heat death.5 Each of these forms of ending is canvassed in H. G. Wells’s scientific romance The Time Machine of 1895—a very important text for Conan Doyle, whose first Challenger tale The Lost World is also a kind of scientific time-travel adventure—and indeed these end-of-the-world imaginings might be associated particularly with that decade aptly titled the fin [End Page 4]

First Edition Cover

“Yours truly, to use the conventional lie. George Edward Challenger.”

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912

First Edition Cover

Illustration by Harry Rountree

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913

First Edition Cover

London: Hutchinson & Co., 1926

[End Page 5]

de siècle, with its pervasive gloomy or feverish intimations of belatedness and finality. “The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least,” wrote Joseph Conrad coolly in 1898. “The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about.”6 But his contemporaries relished the contemplation of endings, and a genre of secular eschatological narratives, or end-of-the-world science fictions, flourished for several decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. In late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain alone, as W. Warren Wagar has shown, scores of end-of-the-world novels and short stories appeared, establishing a tradition that would be carried forward into a modernity of nuclear weapons and ecological disasters, and from the 1880s to the time of the First World War, “almost every sort of world’s end story that one finds in later years was written, published, and accepted by a wide reading public.”7 These stories can be described as science fictions even when, in some cases, they are resacralised under the influence of Theosophy, Spiritualism, Vitalism or similar movements.8

Popular science fiction, and an increasingly audible extra-ecclesiastical spiritual experience, provide the context in which I place the Challenger stories in this discussion in order to elicit a quite complex interplay between endings and beginnings in Conan Doyle’s historical understanding, his scientific conscience, his Spiritualist beliefs, and his aesthetic practice. It might be convenient, but (as will become clear) it is not accurate to suggest that the sense of entropy and ending was flowing into popular fiction from the narratives of science, whereas spiritual and Spiritualist experience was the source of images and stories of redemption and new beginnings. In fact, both science and spirit produce stories of beginnings and endings, while endings and beginnings themselves appear to be both mutually antagonistic and generative of each other, so that it is just as problematic to arrive at endings as it is to identify origins. Science fiction’s histories of the future have been described, most influentially by Fredric Jameson, as a utopian project, one of whose functions has been “to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization.”9

The adventure of The Lost World, the first Challenger story, is a tale of exploration and discovery, with Challenger insisting on reopening a story—the life of dinosaurs—which according to scientific orthodoxy had ended millions of years before. This is no fairy tale or fancy. At first the journalist narrator Malone judges Maple White’s sketch of a dinosaur, [End Page 6] shown to him by Challenger, to be a romantic or decadent fiction, “the wild dream of an opium smoker, a vision of delirium.”10 But like a Spiritualist insisting on the survival of the individual after death, Challenger denies the extinction of these Jurassic species, and he does so on the same basis of incontrovertible scientific proof as Conan Doyle was always to claim for the phenomena of Spiritualism. “I speak,” says Challenger, “as one whose scientific conscience compels him to adhere closely to facts.”11 In just the same way would Conan Doyle insist that his Spiritualist belief that death was not an end but a new beginning was founded “not upon ancient tradition or upon vague intuitions, but upon proven facts, so that a science of religion may be built up, and man given a sure pathway amid the quagmire of the creeds.”12

The Lost World is of course not lost to itself, just as the source of the River Nile did not need to be discovered by John Hanning Speke: it was where it always had been. But the epistemological adventure seems to involve Challenger and his companions in conundra of the kind that bedevil time-travel fictions. The creatures of the plateau are at once new to science, and immemorially ancient. Challenger, the brilliant scientist, is an avatar of progressive modernity, but in Maple White Land he seems to have suffered a ludicrous regression—“A single day seemed to have changed him from the highest product of modern civilization to the most desperate savage in South America”—an impression rendered dramatic when he is made to stand next to “his master the king of the ape-men,” whom he so uncannily resembles.13

Cedric Watts calls this resemblance “a post-Darwinian irony,”14 but there is something Conradian about it too. The Challenger theory of the survival of species denies extinction, but his actions bring extinction about. The visitors from Europe take this prehistoric or timeless place and launch it into the stream of human history. But in what direction, and to what end, is history flowing? The ape-men of the plateau do not have long to find out: “The males were exterminated, Ape Town was destroyed, the females and young were driven away to live in bondage, and the long rivalry of untold centuries had reached its bloody end. For us the victory brought much advantage.”15 The Challenger expedition to the Lost World had discovered a balanced ecosystem and a stable if brutal economy on the plateau, but their arrival will have the effect of bringing this state of affairs to an end. The investigative project is undertaken in the name of a modern professional science committed to a principle of objectivity and disinterest, just as, to adduce an example at the forefront of Conan Doyle’s mind when he was planning the book, [End Page 7] King Leopold of Belgium began operations in Central Africa in the name of philanthropy and antislavery humanitarianism. As far as the indigenous population and environment are concerned, of the Congo and of the Lost World, these principles are not worth the paper they are not written on, and those who profess them emerge as the agents of genocide and the expropriation of resources. The Lost World is found only to be doomed to be lost again to a future determined by the operation of “material interests,” the sinister leitmotif of Conrad’s Nostromo (for Conan Doyle’s novel points in one direction to the African “Heart of Darkness,” but in another to the South American Nostromo, and beyond that towards the future and mostly South American Tristes Tropiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss). It is Lord John Roxton, erstwhile champion of the Putamayo Indians, who has discovered diamonds on the plateau and thereby sealed its fate and that of its inhabitants.16

As they prepare to leave the plateau, the Challenger party take one last look back over a world on which darkness of more than one kind is falling:

Slowly the day passed, but when the darkness fell we were ready for our departure. With much labour we got our things up the steps, and then, looking back, took one last long survey of that strange land, soon I fear to be vulgarized, the prey of hunter and prospector, but to each of us a dream-land of glamour and romance, a land where we had dared much, suffered much, and learned much—our land, as we shall ever fondly call it.17

There is a familiar imperial geography in this panorama in which survey locks smoothly into possession.18 But it goes on record here as the first of several prospects on the end of the world in the Challenger tales. For when the travellers gaze on this strange land which has come into their possession, what they are looking at is its future, helpless before its predators from the modern world, including the surveyors themselves. If this survey were a language act it could be called a title deed. History is immanent in geography, and the future is inscribed in the landscape, just as Wells’s Time Traveller in The Time Machine (1895) can access the land of Eloi and Morlocks, and the shores of the end of the world, without moving away from the place that is currently in the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, actually Richmond in Surrey.19 The prospect of Maple White Land is prophetic of the catastrophic spoliation of the plateau, however Malone and the rest wish to dehistoricize and aestheticize it in mnemonic freeze-frame as a fantasy playground, just the “dreamland of glamour and romance” dismissed as nonexistent by both science and material interests. The critique of irresponsible [End Page 8] science and heedless materialism will be forgotten in the boisterous farce of the book’s last chapter. But the travellers have started the clock of a tragic narrative in the Lost World, which will push on to its end as inevitably as tock follows tick. At the very end of the story, Lord John Roxton is planning a second expedition to “the dear old plateau,”20 advertising the possibility of a sequel—another kind of peripeteia (reversal) that defers ending and turns it into a beginning—which Conan Doyle never wrote (though many authors and filmmakers have since made up for this omission).

It is modernity itself in the shape of a scientific expedition that has seeded the end of the Lost World. Conan Doyle’s contemporaries scared themselves with many stories in which scientific and material progress are themselves the instruments of catastrophe. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is one such: an experimental scientist ahead of his time, Dr. Jekyll awakens the atavistic force that will destroy him. Wells’s The Time Machine is another, with its imaginary future in which industrial society has evolved, the victim of its own success, to produce the beautiful but defenceless Eloi, prey to the bestialized subterranean Morlocks. The Time Traveller, no believer in the telos of progress, can see in the growing Benjaminian pile of human history “only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.”21 The scientific theory backing these visions had been elaborated in 1880 by E. Ray Lankester, later to be a friend of Conan Doyle and the author of Extinct Animals (1909), which is an important source for some of the ideas in The Lost World. Lankester’s earlier book, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880), a text in zoology that predates by a dozen years the social-science thesis of Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892), had argued that any new set of conditions that made life comfortable for an organism tended to lead to degeneration, “just as an active healthy man sometime degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world.”22 This is what has happened to Wells’s Eloi, who “like the Carlovignan [sic, for Carlovingian] kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility.”23

There were other ways in which human progress could itself be the cause of disaster. The Doom of the Great City, a novella by William Delisle Hay, is an early example of the genre of urban apocalypse, in which London—“foul and rotten to the very core, and steeped in sin of every imaginable variety”24—literally chokes itself and all its inhabitants to death on a miasmic fog. This is a man-made ecological disaster, [End Page 9] but to the survivor who narrates it, it is a punishment for the corruption, injustice and filth of city life in the modern Babylon, as retributive as Noah’s flood. (London is a favourite setting for both Victorian/Edwardian and later writers of apocalyptic texts.25) This story about an ending, like any apocalypse, also contains a beginning, and in a familiar pattern the indictment of London’s decadence is bundled with a call for regeneration and a fresh start. For the tale is told, sixty years after the event (in 1942) to his grandchildren by the now eighty-year-old survivor, who has escaped the fall of the great city and settled at the geographical end of the world, in the wholesome air of New Zealand, a latter-day Noah “still reverencing Just God; still dwelling in earnest faith on the love and mercy of Him Who is the Father of His creatures.”26 Hans Magnus Enzenberger has remarked on the tendency of ends and new beginnings to fold into each other: “The idea of the apocalypse has accompanied utopian thought since its first beginnings, pursuing it like a shadow, like a reverse side that cannot be left behind: without catastrophe, no millennium, without apocalypse, no paradise. The idea of the end of the world is simply a negative utopia.”27

The doom of the modern Babylon in Hay’s imagination was man-made, industrial. But in most fantasies of apocalypse, at least before the Great War, the end comes because of some natural or cosmic catastrophe. Either way, biblical accounts of the end of days were so strong a precursor that it seems to have been difficult for a modern author to envisage the end without evoking a metaphysical framework and a moral apparatus of retribution or reward. Kevin Mills has made a study of the cultural assumptions that are “the buried effects of an inherited biblicism which shape literary choices, endeavors, procedures” in Victorian writing, especially visible in apocalyptic tropes and images from the book of Revelation.28 Camille Flammarion, a Theosophist and friend of Conan Doyle, offers an anti-clerical version of the story, in which the Vatican ignores warnings to evacuate Italy, and Rome then reportedly suffers a direct hit from a large comet. The story is a pretext for a long chapter discussing the history of the idea of apocalypse: “La Comète avait surtout été le prétexte de toutes les discussions possibles sur ce grand et capital sujet de La Fin du Monde.”29 In a later chapter and epoch, when humanity is dying of cold in obedience to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the spirit of the Pharaoh Cheops emerges from his pyramid tomb to transport the last survivors, Omegar and Eva, to the planet Jupiter where the human story will resume. Life on earth disappears and is forgotten, but life will continue on Jupiter and [End Page 10] Saturn for another twenty million years, perhaps setting the record for the fictional deferral of ending.

In M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), the eponymous atmospheric effect seems to have been precipitated by a hubristic voyage of discovery to the North Pole that unwittingly stumbles on “the Sanctity of Sanctities, the bold eternal inner secret of the Life of this Earth, which it was a burning shame for a man to see.”30 Shiel’s apocalypse is both ecological and spiritual; as Ailise Bulfin points out, he “saw no fundamental conflict between his scientific and religious convictions, drawing heavily on both to inform his fiction,” and indeed he “seems to have been engaged in the serious endeavour to create a new scientific theology of the apocalypse.”31 In the novel the mysterious cloud causes all land-based life to perish from the earth, and most of the story—which has been phoned in from the future to a woman under hypnosis—recounts the macabre travels of the survivor, Adam Jeffson, around the dead world, in the literary footsteps of the eponym of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). But before he dies, he finds a single surviving woman and, after some initial reluctance, takes steps to repopulate the world and begin the story over again. Jeffson’s wanderings about the depopulated post-apocalyptic world may well have been influenced by the example of Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885), though it is never revealed what catastrophe has laid waste to Jefferies’s England.

Another Noah figure is to be found in Garrett P. Serviss’s The Second Deluge (1912). The great scientist Cosmo Versàl predicts a coming deluge, announced by the approach of a watery nebula, but his warnings are ignored: “I, Cosmo Versàl, inspired by science, can save a remnant to repeople the planet after the catastrophe.… I’ll be a second Noah.” He invites one thousand individuals into his Ark, carefully selected on eugenic principles. This timely intervention ensures not only continuity, but improvement, “and, as all readers of this narrative know, we have every reason to believe that our new world, although its population has not yet grown to ten millions, is far superior, in every respect, to the old world that was drowned.”32 Contemplators of the apocalypse often assume they themselves will be numbered among the survivors, as did the young and still civilian poet Wilfred Owen, who remarked on the outbreak of war in 1914 that “the guns will effect a little useful weeding.”33 Such assumptions can be rash.

Though he does not expect to survive personally, when Professor Challenger in The Poison Belt announces the impending end of the world, he too reaches for a metaphor from horticulture, or even green-grocery. [End Page 11] “Our Gardener,” he supposes, has discovered a bunch of grapes covered by some infinitesimal but noxious bacillus, and has decided to pass it through a disinfecting medium.34 This is why the solar system is about to pass into the belt of poisonous ether which will bring life to an end, or clear a space for a fresh start. The Poison Belt is an end-of-the-world story which announces its membership of the genre by redeploying many of the motifs sketched above—the deadly miasma of The Doom of the Great City and The Purple Cloud; the cosmic catastrophe interpreted as retribution in Flammarion and others; the scientific Noah, like Cosmo Versàl, with his unheeded warnings and his escape from death; the journey of the survivors across a post-apocalyptic landscape.

The calamity that overtakes the earth in The Poison Belt is carried in the ether, that “fifth element” or binding force whose chief theorist was Sir Oliver Lodge, a physicist and Conan Doyle’s Spiritualist ally. The ether, Lodge believed, not only transmitted electromagnetic waves, but bound together the particles of matter, endowing the universe with Cohesion.35 It acted, we might say, to make sense of everything, like the presence of grammar in a sentence. For Lodge, ether was a trope of both scientific and spiritual discourse. If it was an element, it was somehow a transcendental one, and Lodge’s scientific exposition flows at length into a theological rhapsody: “It is the primary instrument of Mind, the vehicle of Soul, the habitation of Spirit. Truly it may be called the living garment of God.”36 Therefore, when the ether becomes toxic in Conan Doyle’s tale, this signals both a physical and a metaphysical disaster, combining the two modes of the end-of-the-world story.

Things rapidly fall apart. Amusingly, as the poison cloud approaches, the impending end is first registered by the characters in the tale by a garrulousness that expresses itself in genres appropriate to each. Professor Summerlee the academic scientist drones on with a dogmatic vehemence. Lord John Roxton develops an aristocratic haughtiness he had not displayed before, and bores Malone with “some interminable story about a buffalo and an Indian rajah, which seemed to me to have neither beginning nor end.”37 Malone the Irishman becomes lachrymose (Summerlee assumes these tears are purely alcoholic) and embarks on an endless story about a game of football which is of no interest to his interlocutors. If the Cohesion of the universe is disturbed, this disturbance seems to be reflected in the world of narrative, where time is out of joint, the sense of an ending has been mislaid, and consequently storytelling has become intolerably boring to all but the storyteller. [End Page 12]

Challenger, now recognized as a scientific prophet and the world authority on the coming disaster by virtue of a warning letter he published in the Times, expounds to the guests he has summoned to his Sussex home, as bulletins of terrible news converge upon them. The poison is universal but “the less developed races have been the first to respond to its influence.”38 Africa, and the Australian aborigines, have suffered terribly. In Austria, the Slavonic population has succumbed while as yet the Teutonic has hardly been affected. These late-Malthusian imaginings merge with the popular discourse on eugenics, and the eugenic logic of the poison makes it appropriate that Challenger and his friends should survive the longest in his sanctuary on a hillside overlooking the South Downs.39 From a sealed room with a supply of oxygen cylinders, they settle down before a broad, low window to watch, like a cinema audience, the spectacle of extinction—echoing unawares their survey of the doomed plateau in The Lost World. Now in the field full of folk before their eyes, harvesters, golfers, a nursemaid with children, pleasure-seekers in a motor car go about their business, until death strikes, and this motion picture is stilled.40

The great man contemplates death with equanimity, displaying a tenderness very much at odds with his former scientific materialism: “We all have our own ways of praying. Mine is a complete acquiescence in whatever Fate may send me—a cheerful acquiescence. The highest religion and the highest science seem to unite on that.”41 This equanimity derives not only from his scientific willingness to deal with nature on its own terms, but also from a conviction about personal survival:

“Nature may build a beautiful door and hang it with many a gauzy and shimmering curtain to make an entrance to the new life for our wondering souls. In all my probing of the actual, I have always found wisdom and kindness at the core; and if ever the frightened mortal needs tenderness, it is surely as he makes the passage perilous from life to life. No, Summerlee, I will have none of your materialism, for I, at least, am too great a thing to end in mere physical constituents, a packet of salts and three bucketfuls of water. Here—here”—and he beat his great head with his huge, hairy fist—“there is something that uses matter, but is not of it—something which might destroy death, but which Death can never destroy.”42

Like Sherlock Holmes, Challenger has softer and harder phases, and he will have forgotten this repudiation of materialism when he appears again in The Land of Mist. Here Challenger’s description of his spirit— “something that uses matter, but is not of it”—sounds like Lodge’s description of ether, which disposed the particles of matter but was not itself material. His certainty about his spirit’s individual survival, and [End Page 13] the survival of those he loves, gives him the fortitude to watch death invade the world before his gaze. The machine runs down; everything becomes immobile: the moving picture becomes a still. Recalling later their expedition out into the dead world, Malone remembers a series of frozen tableaux: “These things I see as in a photograph.”43 The great leveller has been at his revolutionary work. “Death must have come on them in an instant and fixed them as they sat.… One instant of time had put aristocrat, waiter, tramp, and dog upon one common footing of inert and dissolving protoplasm.”44 The Challenger party drive along deserted roads, via Lewisham (Wells country), and into central London. They enter the apocalyptic cityscape traversed by the narrator of The Doom of the Great City, anticipating the post-traumatic necropolis of The Waste Land to come. The prospect had prompted Hay’s narrator to a jeremiad: “O London! Surely, great and manifold as were thy wickednesses, thy crimes, thy faults, who stayed to think of these in the hour of thy awful doom, who dared at that terrible moment to say thy sentence was deserved? And I, a lingering survivor of thy slain, oh city that it should have been my task to tell of thy CORRUPTION, to bear witness to thy PUNISHMENT!”45 In contrast, for all his earlier talk about the disinfectant activities of the great Gardener, Challenger and his party view the holocaust around them with sober pity. In central London they enter St. Mary’s Church, crammed from end to end with kneeling corpses, and toll the great church bell. Nobody comes.

Of course, this is not the end. After a great hiatus of twenty-eight hours, everyone awakes from their ether-induced catalepsy, life resumes, and the story ends. Life resumes, but not as before. The levelling of even a temporary death is not simply forgotten when people look around them, recalled to life: “How long its effect may last—how long mankind may preserve the humility and reverence which this great shock has taught us, can only be shown by the future.”46 What follows is an example of what Frank Kermode has called “utopian renovationism.”47 In a strongly didactic final chapter titled “The Great Awakening,” Malone details how life on earth has benefited from this near-death experience, a salutary ordeal that has left people more serious, more cooperative, and less materialistic than before. The science-fiction catastrophe has brought a spiritual cleansing and a moral reawakening; the temporary end of the world has brought about a new beginning:

Those empty lives which were wasted in aimless visiting and being visited, in the worry of great and unnecessary households, in the arranging and eating of elaborate and tedious meals, have now found rest and health in the reading, the music, the gentle family communion which comes from a [End Page 14] simpler and saner division of their time. With greater health and greater pleasure they are richer than before, even after they have paid those increased contributions to the common fund which have so raised the standard of life in these islands.48

To be sure, there is something bathetic about this happy ending, a thoroughly bourgeois utopia, with its disapproval of ostentatious wealth and consumption and its cosy vision of family life. It is certainly an instance of the stoutly prosaic nature of Conan Doyle’s spirituality. With its anticipation of a levelling of class differences, improvements in public health and cultural amenities, redistribution of wealth, and social inclusiveness, it savours less of the vision of John of Patmos than of the future England that would be imagined in the Beveridge Report of 1942, as the national reward for the testing ordeal of war. And if it seems mundane, it is the post-apocalyptic vision of a man who knows what he wants. Conan Doyle was ridiculed for expressing the hope that there would be golf in the afterlife. But, he asked reasonably enough, how did the more orthodox imagine what was in store for them? “Are we to be mere wisps of gaseous happiness floating about in the air?”49

The Poison Belt showed us the great scientist convinced of the kindness of Providence and the survival of the spirit. But when he returns a dozen years later in the avowedly Spiritualist novel The Land of Mist, Challenger seems to have reverted to the positivism, materialism, and scorn for superstition of an earlier phase. The Land of Mist is, among other things, his conversion narrative. As his daughter Enid, and her lover Malone, delve ever deeper into the world of Spiritualism and psychic phenomena, Challenger at first sets his face firmly against it. The great scientist is living in a material world; for him, the end of life is the end of the world: “Death ends all, Malone. This soul talk is the Animism of savages. It is a superstition, a myth.… As the tree falls, so does it lie. There is no next morning … night—eternal night … and long rest for the weary worker.”50 For the materialist, it seems all narratives move towards terminal immobility: there is no next morning. Challenger explicitly repudiates his anti-materialism in the earlier story: “Four buckets of water and a bagful of salts.… That’s your daddy, my lass, and you may as well reconcile your mind to it.”51

The great controversialist is bested in debate by an unprepossessing champion of the Spiritualist cause. It is not argument that brings Challenger into the Spiritualist community and faith, but evidence of survival after death, the discovery of the ghost in his mechanistic view of nature. For him this is both a spiritual revelation and a scientific [End Page 15] discovery, entailing a Kuhnian paradigm shift that rolls over his resistance: “It is incredible, inconceivable, grotesquely wonderful—but it would seem to be true.”52 It comes in the form of confirmation of the presence of his dead wife on the other side, and an exculpatory message from the spirits of two men he wrongly believed he had killed. This evidence is communicated to him through the mediumship of his daughter, who turns out to have psychic powers. Through the Shakespearean trope of the redemptive daughter, Challenger is given the gifts of love and atonement, and released into a new life, not however abandoning the scientific for the spiritual vision, but now believing they can be one and the same:

He was [a] gentler, humbler, and more spiritual man. Deep in his soul was the conviction that he, the champion of scientific method and of truth, had, in fact, for many years been unscientific in his methods, and a formidable obstruction to the advance of the human soul through the jungle of the unknown. It was this self-condemnation which had wrought the change in his character.53

It is indeed a Pauline conversion, for Challenger now becomes an apologist and missionary for Spiritualism, like his creator. This is a significant victory, and it is the last in a series where new life is vouchsafed in this tale. The series of redemptions includes the exorcism of the ghost of a suicide, the story of Challenger’s favourite student Ross Scotton, rescued from his deathbed by the aid of a spirit physician, and that of the children of the abusive Silas Linden, who are guided through the streets to sanctuary and a new family by the ghost of their dead mother.54 For these souls, there is a “next morning” after all. Evidences of the survival of the spirit, and of new beginnings, are all around in what might be called the private life of the represented world of this novel. Yet these individual regenerations stand out against an environment of the general decay of a society and nation unable to renew itself.

For the rest of the story, mostly following Malone and Enid in their exploration of psychic phenomena, shows postwar England itself as stubbornly incapable of regeneration as it had appeared in The Waste Land a few years earlier. In this most programmatic and socially inclusive of Conan Doyle’s tales, Spiritualism is the touchstone that tests the quality of persons, classes and institutions in what approximates (as I have argued elsewhere) to a diagnostic “condition of England” project.55 Spiritualists are denounced by the scientific profession, pilloried by the venal press, fitted up by the police, persecuted by the courts under antiquated laws, ignored or anathematized by the churches. No [End Page 16] doubt coloured by the disillusioning experience of Conan Doyle’s investigations of injustice, and by the apathy and ridicule with which most of the British public greeted his Spiritualist campaign, the portrait of society in The Land of Mist partakes of the strange impatient radicalism of his final decade. As is clear from his History of Spiritualism, he believed that the evidences of the existence of the spirit world had become increasingly available and verifiable since the middle of the previous century, and he simply could not understand why they were not generally accepted. His contemporaries, he felt, could not see what was before their eyes and were incapable of changing their ways. The competitive materialism of his own times had seen its own grim apotheosis in the slaughter of the Great War. At the end of his history of that war, Conan Doyle had recently written: “The system which left seven million dead upon the fields of Europe must be rotten to the core.”56

Intimation of another end of the world is framed in the last chapter of The Land of Mist by another prospect scene. This time Malone and Enid Challenger are on their honeymoon; sitting together at the window of the Imperial Hotel in Folkestone, they gaze westward down the channel at an angry evening sky, ominously streaked with great purple tentacles, “threatening forerunners from what lay unseen and unknown beyond the horizon.”57 This is the weather, the atmosphere, for the decline of the West. As it happens, the couple are recalling Miromar, the strange mystic whom they had heard warning of the Second Coming on the occasion of their first venture into the world of the Spiritualists, related in chapter two. Miromar spoke of a breaking of all the phials, of the coming of war, famine, pestilence, and other disasters—in fact, his prophecy takes its terms directly from the biblical apocalypse. If he is right, then surely some revelation is at hand. And yet to Enid, the human scene before them looks reassuring: “Look at the solid old earth of England. Look at our great hotel and the people on the Lees, and the stodgy morning papers and all the settled order of a civilized land. Do you really think that anything could come to destroy it all?”58 This dream of peace and continuity belongs with the pastoral of Georgian poetry, but intimations of disaster loom over it in that menacing sky. In this case it is useful to place this threatened landscape not in the context of contemporary end-of-the-world fictions, but alongside a later famous passage that begins: “Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood.” It goes on to enumerate “the posters telling of cricket matches, and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all [End Page 17] sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England.”59 A dozen years after The Land of Mist, George Orwell at the end of his Homage to Catalonia was to conjure his own prospect of a landscape unaware of its coming apocalypse, in this case in the form of the European war already begun in Spain. Malone too responds to his wife’s naïve pastoral with foreboding. As Orwell was to prophesy the sleep of England interrupted by the roar of bombs, Malone reminds Enid how modern progress in scientific knowledge has been responsible for the deadly arsenal deployed in the recent war: “At the present moment every nation upon earth is plotting secretly how it can best poison the others.”60 If the end is at hand, these are the weapons of mass destruction that will deliver it.

But this familiar vision of a science-led apocalypse is also a spiritual cleansing, and if an end, it is also the condition for a new beginning. Enid asks if Miromar prophesied the end of the world. Malone says no; it is the rebirth of the world that is coming, for the old world needs to be purged: “It is the materialism, the wooden formalities of the churches, the alienation of all spiritual impulses, the denial of the Unseen, the ridicule of this new revelation—these are the causes according to him.”61 This more or less summarises the diagnosis of the whole novel, whose climax here betrays a significant indecision about the end of the world. There is an intimation of a scientific (or science fiction) apocalypse of explosives and poison gases deployed in the recent war and already becoming more and more deadly—the product, Malone says of a “so-called civilization, which should have led [the world] to higher things,” but has now been “turned to evil.”62 This is the historical fate that awaits a rampant materialism. Firmly attached to this is the retributive apocalypse promised in the Bible, the punishment of that evil with pestilence and earthquake and other catastrophes, but also the guarantee of its ultimate defeat with a Second Coming of the Redeemer, a last judgement, and the establishment of new heaven, new earth.

And yet pulling against both the scientific and biblical sense of an ending are the instincts of a Spiritualism that was itself profoundly anti-eschatological. Spiritualists believed in heaven, but they had no belief in judgement or hell, and they scarcely believed in death. Death, as Conan Doyle had been reassured in a thousand Spiritualist séances, was not the end of the story but a peripeteia or new direction. When Spiritualists thought of death, they thought of a continuation. Sinners and saints, atheists and agnostics and believers—all could expect to go on to further adventures in a series of existences beyond the veil: “Providence is not so fiercely vindictive as theologians would try to [End Page 18] make us believe,” Conan Doyle told a lecture audience in 1919.63 So while Malone and Enid contemplate an end of the world conjured by Conan Doyle’s residual Christianity and his bleak 1920s historical pessimism, they are also suffused in a contradictory conviction of a benign, non-retributive Providence and a future of individual survival and spiritual growth, with no end in sight. Appropriately—since he is on his honeymoon after all, and just along the coast from Arnold’s Dover Beach—Malone turns to the language of romantic love to end the novel with a categorical denial of ending: “‘One thing we have learned,’ said he. ‘It is that two souls, where real love exists, go on and on without a break through all the spheres.’”64 The life of the spirit, Spiritualists believed, took a form that was not Aristotelian, with a beginning and middle and end, but serial. Even so, this reassuring belief was not enough to banish the dark clouds that loom over the last chapter and hint at a different kind of story, with an end from which there could be no individual survival. The Land of Mist concludes in a gridlock of endings, new beginnings, and seamless continuations.

Challenger himself does not participate in these final musings. The narrative has dropped him off a few pages earlier, exulting in his new role of scientific champion of the Spiritualist cause against its many detractors, denouncing its opponents as vehemently as he had once denounced the movement itself. Though it is said he is now a gentler and humbler man, he has lost none of his energy; his new life seems to have conferred on him a new intellectual youthfulness:

So we may leave Challenger, his black mane slowly turning to grey, but his great brain growing ever stronger and more virile as it faces such problems as the future had in store—a future which had ceased to be bounded by the narrow horizon of death, and which now stretches away into the infinite possibilities and developments of continued survival of personality, character and work.65

Since this is a study of a form of historiography, of endings and beginnings, it is appropriate to end with verbs, the words that signal the intersection of the actions and times that are the dimensions of history. Something odd has happened to the verb tenses in the valedictory sentence quoted above. There is a respectable narrative convention that may at the end of a story wash the characters up on the shores of the present—the prince and princess who had many adventures (past) and finally settled down in the palace (past), and live there happily to this [End Page 19] day (present). But does Challenger’s story close in the historic past, or are we to imagine it breaking the historic frame and forever continuing, with a new lease on life in an ongoing present? If the former, he should be contemplating “a future which had ceased to be bounded by the narrow horizon of death, and which now stretched away,” but if the latter, he would be facing ““a future which has ceased to be bounded by the narrow horizon of death, and which now stretches away.” The ungrammaticality of the sentence Conan Doyle wrote (had ceased; stretches away) is a moment from the psychopathology of everyday narration that can serve as a reminder of the more than dialectical habit of endings and beginnings to turn into each other.

Late in The Time Machine, when Wells’s Time Traveller in the deepest future sees something squirming on a rock at the seashore, is he witnessing the last spasm of life on earth, or the very moment of a new genesis? “It may indeed be the case,” Rowland Cotterill has suggested, “that the discourse of endings and beginnings are both mutually alien and mutually containable, already enfolded within one another.”66 Appropriately, it is possible to face both backwards and forwards with this imbrication of origins and endings. The organic Challenger with his graying mane is tending towards the grave, but the spiritual and intellectual Challenger, born again (to use an anachronistic phrase), is embarking on a new life. His unexpected juvescence, that new youthfulness, is a peripeteia, a deferral of ending. But peripeteia, Frank Kermode says, is “a disconfirmation followed by a consonance”: peripeteia “depends on our confidence of the end,” and so can be said both to suspend and to confirm the sense of an ending.67 Though he may now believe himself to be more than just four buckets of water and a bagful of salts, the great scientist is on the road to death like everybody else who started to die from the moment of birth.

To be sure, both beginnings and endings are (in the end) nothing more or less than discursive practices.68 The dominant trope of the end-of-the-world fantasies that have been discussed here is that the end of the world is also the beginning, and this is also the paradigm set down in the biblical apocalypse, the book of Last Things with its utopia of new heaven and new earth and its specific invocations of the book of Genesis. But in a story—for a story to be a story—a new beginning must concomitate an end: as Kermode argued, the end confers organization and form on temporal structure, and we could hardly tolerate a first chapter without the knowledge of a last chapter to come: “We like lives, and the world itself, to have a plot; a plot helps us to make sense [End Page 20] of our lives and of the world. Plots have endings, perhaps not the tying up of loose ends that we find in older fiction, for scepticism has entered also into plot-making; but even if the end is dubious, ambivalent, it must still be more than a mere cessation of narrative.”69 Beginning promises ending. Beginning is predicated, and dependent, on ending: in this sense, ending must be there first, preceding beginning. Death and new life, utopia and apocalypse: the balance of these great principles is essential to keep upright the narrative house of cards. It was a truth Conan Doyle had been obliged to acknowledge with respect to another of his serial characters, several years after he sent him tumbling over the lip of the Reichenbach Falls to death and resurrection.