Conan Doyle, The Lost World (1912)

[My thoughts on this novel were focussed by attending this event. Below are notes jotted that summarise the line I argued there, which really has to do with a particular perspective on the development of utopia as a mode. Page numbers are to this penguin edition.]

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, first published in The Strand Magazine from April to November 1912, remains a key work of SF ‘a model,' in the words of Everett F. Bleiler, 'upon which many stories and motion pictures have been formed.’ For book publication Doyle appended a self-penned epigraph that identified the book as a story of 'Boys'—which is above all, of course, how the book has continued to be regarded: as a canonical, and even archetypal, Boy’s Own Story:

I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.

Irish journalist and rugy-footballer Ed Malone, eager to undertake heroic exploits of some sort in order to impress a woman, joins English aristocratic hunter-explorer-adventurer Lord John Roxton, Professor Summerlee and the eccentric, if forceful, Professor Challenger on an expedition to South America. Challenger has reason to believe that there exists, deep in the wilderness, a plateau that has been effectively cut-off from the outside world, and upon which dinosaurs and other wonders that have died out in the world at large, still exist. After various adventures these four white men, accompanied by a number of native guides and bearers, get to this place, which they call Maple White Land (after a prior US explorer who discovered a route up, got away again, but then expired). It takes some doing, but eventually they climb to the top of the plateau. Their adventures include the strange flora and fauna, battles with a savage tribe of ape-like creatures, and also with a more 'civilised' set of human natives. The book ends, startlingly, with the white men leading the natives in a gleefully described genocidal war against the ape-people. Returning home our adventurers discover themselves rich (the plateau, we discover, is littered with high quality diamonds) and two of them, including our narrator, make immediate plans to return.

It put me in mind of Thomas More's Dē optimō reī pūblicae statű dēque novā īnsulā Ūtopiā (1516).

Given the pronounced difference in tone between the two books, it might be thought an unlikely strategy to consider them as versions of one another. But nevertheless: More’s Utopia is a traveller’s tale, as is Doyle’s; of a journey to a distant land, one cut-off (to one extent or another) from the rest of the world. It is, I'm sure I need hardly point out, Utopian Studies 101 to identify the strategies utilised by utopian writing to separate their imagined worlds from the rest of the world (this is something put in critical play by Jameson's brilliant essay on utopias, 'Of Islands and Trenches'). So, More's Utopia used to be joined to the mainland by a peninsular; but King Utopus had this removed, turning his land into an island. Maple White Land is, in a sort of brilliant hypertrophy of this principle; not just surrounded by walls, but literally elevated out of the reach of common earth-crawling humanity.

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay notes that utopia is conventionally conceived in rational terms:

Utopias are distinguished from idylls by being not only good places but fully rational ones that exist by virtue of their rational laws, institutions and customs. The great trenches and walls that separate utopias from the social mainland embody the imaginary gap between humanity's capacities in first and second nature. [p.85]

So, for example, More deliberately distances his narrative from the stories of travelers encountering dangerous monsters at the edge of the world, because (he says) his theme is something even rarer: not monsters but good governance:

As for monsters, because they be no news, of them we were nothing inquisitive. For nothing is more easy to be found than barking Scyllas, ravening Celaenos, and Laestrygons, devourers of people, and suchlike great and incredible monsters. But to find citizens ruled by good and wholesome laws, that is an exceeding rare and hard thing.

Doyle is interested in the monsters, not the laws. Nevertheless it’s worth dwelling on a few salient similarities. Both these books present to the reader new worlds, and render them in such a way as to make them appealing to the reader both in their own right and as glosses on their own country.

Although Maple White Land is on the other side of the world from England, the narrator repeatedly describes it in homely, English terms. After traipsing through a distinctly tropical South American jungle and pampas to reach the plateau, ascent reveals a landscape ‘temperate’:

The beech, the oak, and even the birch were to be found among the tangle of trees which girt us in. [134]

The narrative mentions ‘forms of conifera and of cycadaceous plants which have long passed away in the world below’, but specificity is more likely to make an English reader feel at home than anything else: ‘mare’s-tails’, ‘tree-ferns’ and the like. There are plenty of dinosaurs, of course, and Malone describes them in terms of more exotic fauna (‘monstrous kangaroos, twenty feet in length, and with skins like black crocodiles’, 138); but before we have time to think of these creatures as in any sense Australasian or African he goes on: ‘you’ll find their footmarks all over the Hastings sand, in Kent, and in Sussex. The South of England was alive with them when there was plenty of good lush green-stuff to keep them going,’ [140] Thereafter the tendency is to describe the dinosaurs in European terms: the pterodactyls live in a ‘rookery’ [142]; in flight they are ‘all swooping like swallows … with a volume of sound that made me think of Hendon aerodrome upon a race day’ [143]. One beast is ‘like a giant toad’ [151]; another ‘like a huge swan’ [173].

Maple White Land as a whole is described as being ‘not larger than an average English county’ [155]. In amongst the monsters are ‘porcupines’, ‘a wild pig’ and a species of large deer [156-7]. When Malone takes a night-walk he follows a stream ‘a cheery companion, gurgling and chuckling as it ran, like the dear old trout stream in the West Country where I have fished at night in my boyhood’ [170]. A lake in a clearing ‘was not larger than the basin of the Trafalgar Square fountain’ [171]. The party are captured by savage ape-men, including one whose physical resemblance to Challenger is, to rather ponderous comical effect, repeatedly stressed. The effect of all this is to balance a narrative posited explicitly upon the appeal to exotic foreign otherness against a sense that the country in which our heroes are having their ripping adventures is similar to, or perhaps capable of assimilation to, home. Maple White Land, in other words, is to all intents and purposes a version England, or more specifically it is England with added excitement, adventure and exotic otherness (not to mention diamonds); its otherness inoculated by the repeated invocation of familiar flora and fauna. A world surely cannot be lost unless it was once possessed; Maple White Land is not defined by its alienness so much as its familiarity.

More’s Utopia occupies a similar imaginative space insofar as it parses its exotic distant land via England: The dimensions of More’s Utopia are, as Peter Ackroyd points out, exactly the same as those of England, with the same number of city-states as England has shires. The main city of Utopia, Amaurotum, has the same expanse as the city of London, with a main tidal river like the Thames, a grand stone bridge like London bridge, and many other smaller points of identification. In short ‘it is London redrawn by visionary imagination.’

My argument is this: the enormous success of Doyle’s tale points to a shift in the cultural logic—in the cultural function—of utopian narrative. In More’s 16th-century narrative, utopia is presented as a preferable to actual European society because it is better ordered; because it has better laws, and because they are better implemented. Utopia, in other words, is construed as a function of rational legality. In Doyle’s 20th-century novel, on the other hand—and despite the fact that the late C19th- and C20th- was massively oversupplied with self-consciously utopian narratives all predicated upon the same Morean premise—Doyle’s novel figures utopia in quite another way: as a place that offers precisely escape from law, from the restrictions of civilization. The cultural logic of utopia itself shifts from being the perfect embodiment of rationality to being the perfect escape from rationality. It is the place where you can escape both civilisation and its discontents; you will see exciting new things, experience dangers (ie thrills), indulge your violence (kill a whole population if you like) and return rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

It is, in fact, precisely because it is a necessary component of this new utopian logic that Doyle’s utopia is a place of danger, hardship and even physical pain. This speaks not to any masochism in Doyle’s utopian imagination, but rather to the extent to which The Lost World must necessarily position itself in opposition to the cultural construction of comfort. But the great utopias of the twentieth-century (and by 'great' I mean: broadly successful, culturally ubiquitous, imaginary spaces after which millions yearn, to which they hunger to travel, which they prefer to their own mundane lives) are Lost Worlds in this mode. The key example, I suppose, is Tolkien's Middle Earth; a similar balance of the exotic and the (English) familiar; a similar balance of danger and comfort; but above all a simmilar sense (here coded as 'magic') of a release from rationality.

That's what actually happened to 'utopia' in the twentieth-century: it went to New Zealand.

***

[Postscript: The ‘good’, human natives in White Maple Land are called ‘Accala’ (as if A C Doyle took his initials, and then reversed them, and then finished the word off with the ending of his own surname). The ape-creatures are ‘Doda’, which both suggests ‘dodo’ and therefore the creatures eventual extinction, and plays once again with ‘Doyle’ (both ‘Do’ and ‘D’) and Arthur (‘A’). Which, I think, speaks again to the sense that this South American environment is acutally a symbolic bodying-forth of the familiar and homely. What is more 'home' than your own self?]