“The Last Man” centers on a cosmic disease transferred to humans:
The Sun’s eye had a sickly glare,
The Earth with age was wan,
The skeletons of nations were
Around that lonely man!
Some had expired in fight,—the brands
Still rusted in their bony hands;
In plague and famine some!
Earth’s cities had no sound nor tread;
And ships were drifting with the dead
To shores where all was dumb!
(11–20)
Indeed, Tambora’s eruption in 1815 was a worthy inspiration for these apocalyptic visions. It was the largest eruption in recorded history, as measured by the volume of magma expelled—140 billion tons (Oppenheimer 230). The sudden ejection of such a mass of pollution into the higher levels of the atmosphere had gradual global climate effects: it took slightly more than a year for the high-flown ash and gases to form an aerosol veil that darkened European and North American skies the following summer. As with Laki, this global event was more than a chilly inconvenience. Tambora caused crop failures, widespread animal deaths, and subsequent famine. Life on earth in 1816 also had the misfortune of particularly low solar activity, which intensified the volcanic winter.
In the poetry of Byron and Campbell, the effect was figured as ecocidal, driving earth to death in either the deep past or the entropic future. To Byron, earth seemed to have reverted to a primordial form, a “lump” and “chaos of hard clay” unsupportive of life and subject to wicked extremes in the elements—a young, undifferentiated planet. Campbell’s vision is centered more on the fate of humans and the postapocalyptic vacuum of life and culture extinguished. The sun’s “sickly glare” and the aged earth’s “wan” face are images of senescence that speak of entropy as the ruling cosmic force dismantling order, and Campbell’s sun and earth resemble the bloody sunsets and milky daylight of a volcanic atmosphere. In both poems, despite the wicked weather of 1816, the effects of ecological chaos are too weird to be contemporary; they must be primordial or futuristic.
Details of these climate extremes and their literary offspring in Byron and Mary Shelley are part of the lore of Romantic scholarship. A unique summer like 1816’s must make an indelible impression on the mind, especially if it serves as the inspiration for an author’s magnum opus, as it did for Shelley in Frankenstein. In the spirit of a theme with variations, Shelley’s flint stone for catastrophe in The Last Man is again chaotic weather, but in this novel the climate is not the clammy summerless depths of Ingolstadt laboratories or the remote reaches of the Hebrides or the Arctic (or Frankenstein’s brain); rather, she develops catastrophe out of humid tropical warmth that is an excellent vector for disease. The novel was written in the confines of Shelley’s London apartment after the death of three of her children and Percy Shelley’s drowning, and the roman à clef explores the widow’s new realities in its characters, events, and climates. Her letters in those years reveal how she felt like The Last Woman, marooned apart from her lost generation. She gathers her circle by reanimating the dead in the forms of Percy Shelley and Byron (in the characters of Adrian and Raymond, respectively), and by transforming the chilly London dampness of February 1824, when she began writing, into a lush, tropical England in the last decades of the twenty-first century. Like the later nineteenth-century Thames Valley catastrophes, which include After London and The Time Machine, Shelley’s vision of her perishing civilization invokes the powers of a wild, witchlike Mother Nature. Shelley implicitly challenges the assumption that global trade and colonialism were healthy endeavors, not only for the British body but also for English ecosystems. Influenced by her knowledge of Thomas Malthus’s Principles of Population, The Last Man depicts the environmental checks on population that undercut philosophies of Enlightenment utopia such as those advocated by her own father William Godwin.
The novel progresses from the classic autobiographical beginning of the hero, Lionel Verney, with the first line, “I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook,” to the promised singular resolution: “behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney—the LAST MAN” (9, 470). Any apparent coherence or order in this seeming A-to-Z narrative is misleading. The frame of The Last Man, contained in the preface, introduces a second author of the narrative, an unnamed vacationer who in 1818 discovers the scattered “Sibylline leaves” that he assembles into Verney’s linear story. The Last Man is a narrative of fused fragments confused by time: the human extinction of the late twenty-first century is assembled from fragments in 1818. This discoverer, a cave spelunker, describes his formative editorial role: “I present the public with my latest discoveries in the slight Sibylline pages. Scattered and unconnected as they were, I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent form. [. . .] Sometimes I have thought that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer. [. . .] My only excuse for thus transforming them, is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition” (6–7). These “obscure and chaotic” fragments of a narrative are assembled in a certain order, one that doggedly pursues coherence and causality, when they essentially have none. In their discovered form they are admittedly “unintelligible,” and this outer-frame narrator claims responsibility for causal sense in the unfolding of events, including his temerity in composing “links” between fractured episodes. The novel seems unable to fulfill its own prophecy of human extinction. Frankenstein’s doubly framed narrative makes an apparent study of each teller’s manipulations and reliability. Shelley’s framing in The Last Man is less coherent, and therefore more mysterious. One could claim that the preface’s sole purpose is to seal off logical objections that the narrative of a last man would have no readers, but her placement of the preface anterior to the agonies of the twenty-first century gestures to a more essential, if enigmatic, role for these initial five pages out of nearly five hundred total. The time inversion might suggest that Verney’s story is a prophecy of future England, not a lived event, or that Shelley wishes to fragment linear time in order to question assumptions of the inevitable advance of society. Perhaps when nature itself behaves chaotically, narrative follows.
Narrative chaos has been embraced by literary deconstruction, which looks at narrative dynamics through a lens of nonlinearity and contingency (see Hayles; Parker; Conte; Palumbo; and Livingston). Most of this material comes from twentieth-century literature, and James Joyce in particular is a strange attractor for chaos. Carolyn Merchant has suggested in Reinventing Eden that chaos, from a narrative theory perspective, “might posit characteristics other than those identified with modernism, such as a multiplicity of real actors; acausal, nonsequential events; nonessentialized symbols and meanings; many authorial voices, rather than one; dialectical action and process, rather than the imposed logos of form; situated and contextualized, rather than universal, knowledge. It would be a story (or multiplicity of stories) that perhaps can only be acted and lived, not written at all” (157–58). Harmony, causation, and coherence are constructed from the disordered elements that make up the original story. Any appearance of order in The Last Man is based on an illusory cognitive drive to organize chaos.
This cryptic beginning leaves authorship indeterminate and creates a narrative experiment. It is a literary echo of Charles Darwin’s notion that the fossil record was an imperfect chronicle of a perfect story of evolutionary gradualism. Darwin filled in the gaps with narrative speculations on the intermediary forms not recorded in fossils. The “history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect,” required some spiffing up for Darwin’s gradualism to be true (Origin of Species 229). If the existing fossil record reflects the pattern of natural history, the evolutionary narrative is chaotically fragmented, like Shelley’s sibylline leaves. These texts are original artifacts, and the patched quilt of a coherent narrative pieced together
