H. G. Wells, Visionary Telescopes, and the "Matter of Mars"
2004; University of Iowa; Volume: 83; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0031-7977
Autores Tópico(s)Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
ResumoFamously, H. G. Wells traced the begetting of The War of the Worlds to a casual remark made by his brother Frank on a walk through rural Surrey. Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly ... and begin laying about them here! (1) As the author recalled the conversation, the brothers had been discussing the extermination of the Tasmanians by European settlers. This anecdote has always been useful in opening up the anticolonialist allegory of Wells's invasion-from-Mars novel, but the kind of Martian narrative he devised did not itself simply drop into literary history out of the ether. The War of the Worlds, the first romance of extraterrestrial invasion, is both a culminating event in a speculative tradition and a strikingly original departure point for what the American poet Frederick Turner has called, by analogy with the Arthurian of Britain, the Matter of Mars. (2) This essay examines how three centuries' worth of scientific and literary speculation led up to the creation of the book that set a new standard for fiction about other worlds. As Karl Guthke argues in the definitive history of extraterrestrial literature, the telescope liberated the fictional imagination, and fictional voyages through space in the post-Copernican universe could be justified as philosophical searches for truth. (3) The development of a literary Matter of Mars, of which The War of the Worlds is the first masterpiece, is inseparable from the history of the earth-based telescope, which enjoyed its greatest prestige in the nineteenth century. But a telescopic image, as we now realize, is no more objective than a camera image. Telescopes, trained on a distant planet like Mars and straining to penetrate the turbulent and distorting atmosphere of our own world, were undependable scientific instruments, capable of creating illusory images--or, sometimes, visionary ones. Therein lay their usefulness to literature. (4) At the close of the nineteenth century, in his great history of Martian studies, Camille Flammarion cited Galileo's hesitant declaration of victory in 1610 in his struggle to get a good view of the planet. Galileo had been fabricating telescopes, enhancing their magnification, and experimenting with what they could do, ever since he heard the year before about the new Dutch invention and immediately grasped its principles and its potential. His letter to Benedetto Castelli, says Flammarion, contains our earliest record of Mars in the age of the telescope: Je n'ose pas assurer que je puisse observer les phases de Mars; cependant, si je ne me trompe, je crois deja voir qu'il n'est pas parfaitement rond. [I dare not say for sure that I could observe the phases of Mars; however, if I am not mistaken, I believe I have already perceived that it is not perfectly round.] (5) With primitive tube and lenses Galileo was better equipped to study the moon than Mars. Telescopes improved so slowly that the orange world that bewitched the naked eye yielded few details for hundreds of years, leaving the literary imagination little to work with until the famous observations of 1877, but writers in the seventeenth century immediately began assimilating telescopic astronomy into lunar fantasies and satires like Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638) and Cyrano de Bergerac's States and Empires of the Moon (1657). (6) The foremost seventeenth-century literary evocations of telescopic vision are in Paradise Lost. The meeting in 1638 between young John Milton and old Galileo, under house arrest for heresy for his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, is one of the perfect symmetries of history. Here were two of the century's boldest minds, one a scientist with literary gifts at the end of a shattered career, the other a revolutionary poet drawn to scientific study on the brink of a tumultuous celebrity that almost ruined him when he was marked for execution by the restored Royalists in 1660. …
Referência(s)