KENJI KAZAMA

Charles P. Snow aroused much controversy with his famous lecture "The Two Cultures" in 1959. Snow stated in this lecture, "How many people from the humanities can explain the second law of thermodynamics? This law is as important for people from the sciences as a famous passage from Shakespeare for those from the humanities." Snow warned that the humanities and the sciences had separated into two opposite poles and that either would not understand what the other said.

Of course, we realize now that such warnings of Snow were judged merely as an old man's anxiety when we read the books of postmodern writers from the 1960s to the 1970s such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo. These circumstances are well explained in treatises on communication between science and the imagination of contemporary literature from the viewpoint of cybernetics, chaos, quantum physics, and forefront technology such as "The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction" (1985) by David Porush, "Chaos Bound" (1990) by N. Katherine Hayles, "Fiction in the Quantum Universe" (1992) by Susan Strehle and "Postmodern Sublime" (1995) by Joseph Tabbi.

However, there are few writers in fact who can straddle freely the two domains of knowledge of the arts and the sciences, as well as few readers who can understand the two different cultures as their education. However, in Western Europe, especially in Britain and America, in the 19th century, when there were full of new discovery and invention after the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century and the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, science and literature developed together as twins. Both writers and readers perceived science and literature as two cultures in a close complementary relationship.

Today's general public considers science and literature to be as separate as oil and water. (Readers who enjoy postmodern novels of Pynchon or Barth are in the minority.) In this serialization, I would like to discuss science and literature in the 19th century, when these two cultures were in a honeymoon.

Well, it is machines that had a great effect on the politics, economy, cultural structure and people's psychology in the 19th century. Machines changed the country to cities, farmers and slaves to factory wage-workers, space to time, hours to minutes and a primitive utopia to an industrialized technotopia. In the extreme change of the environment with machines, artists regarded an automaton as a metaphor of the dream and nightmare of society. Though machines dispensed with labor, they led people into the world of efficiency with repetitive tasks and depersonalization. A possibility occurred that machines might take over people's identities and human lives full of emotion without people's recognition. Rightly, resistance to machines was born among artists, a part of intelligentsia and people with great sensitivity. Luddites are especially famous among such anti-machine movements.

In 1779, a man whose name was Ned Ludd broke into a house in the village of Leicestershire and destroyed two sock knitting machines in a fit of anger. The story of Ludd's insane convulsion was embellished and his deed itself became heroic. In this way, people who were urged to destroy machines whenever they saw them came to be called Luddites. As a parenthetical note, there is a novel that can be called a modern-version of a Luddism novel. It is "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (1975) by Edward Abbey, who is the master of nature writing. This comical picaresque novel is a bible to workers on nature conservation who promote an environmental revolution.

Apart from such illegal and radical anti-machine movements, the intellectuals also decried mechanization of the human being. For example, in his essay "The Sign of the Times" in 1829, Thomas Carlyle called that time "the age of mechanization" and insisted that people's minds, spirits, and even hands are mechanized; that people do nothing directly by using their own hands and everything is done by devices that work with formulae and calculations.

Robert Seymour, a caricaturist, depicted such mechanized people with much humor in his work "Locomotion" (1829). There was a man who was inspired by the steam man in "Locomotion": Zadoc P. Dederick, an American inventor. In 1868, he applied for a patent for a steam man of seven feet and nine inches with a three-horsepower steamer that draws a four-wheeled vehicle 30 miles per hour.

In fact, there is another man who got an idea from the steam man of Seymour. It is Edward Ellis, a dean of American dime novelists and progenitor of a science adventure sub-genre called 'invention stories.' Ellis' "The Steam Man of the Prairies" (1865), a story where an automaton flourishes in the settlement of the American West, obtained much popularity. Consequently, there was a follower of this story: a series of Frank Reade, an inventor and an adventurer, as the hero. This series became a riot again. When the popularity of this series started to sputter, Luis P. Senarens took after Harry Enton, the first writer of the Frank Reade series, to bolster popularity. Senarens became a popular novelist with this Frank Reade series at the end of the 19th century - so much so that he was called Jules Verne of America.

When we look back at the history of the steam man that gave dreams to young people through dime novels, we remember the famous "Frankenstein" (1818) of Mary W. Shelley. "Frankenstein," a classical masterpiece of a Gothic romance, is called the mother of science fiction. This novel has been a good subject of literary criticism and literators have interpreted it in various ways. Anyway, I recommend you to read through this novel as a work that left a metaphor of the relationship between machines and people, that is, the dream (completely automatic machines) and the nightmare (runaway automatic machines) of mechanization.

By the way, there have been thought to be three motives for Dr. Frankenstein's attempt to create an artificial person: longing for the Creator, utility of automatic machines, and regeneration without the opposite sex. The third objective seems to have been underlying the unconscious from the time of Paracelsus, an alchemist who came up with an homunculus, golem, a Jewish legend, and "Frankenstein", extending to today's various works on human clones.

Next time, I will look back the history of automata in detail and include discussion of "The Bell Tower" (1855) by Herman Melville.