Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel, The Last Man, tells the story of Lionel Verney, the survivor of a plague that has killed all humankind. Verney lives on in the libraries of Rome, dedicating himself to writing the history of the last man, a book addressed to the dead. Bruce Gardiner supervised my PhD, which read Shelley’s book, among others, in consideration of modes of first person narrative and practices of writing. This essay is a meditation on the dynamics of literature, reading and survival, dedicated to a literary and personal survivor.

Two scenes of writing, and of reading. The first scene (and sequence will be challenging in this context), is in a cave, that of the Cumaean Sibyl in a description that is presented as an introduction to the work that follows. The second scene (and ultimate beyond the usual sense of an ending or finality), is in a library, in Rome, and comes at the climax of the novel.

In the Cave

So, to the first scene.

The “Author’s Introduction” to The Last Man, while clearly an introduction, is not so clearly the account of an “author”. Notions of authorship are complicated by a discourse that opens with an account of a visit to the Bay of Naples and the Baiae in December 1818:

This account is to be contrasted with the impressions of this visit recorded in Mary’s Journal:

The fact that this is all that is recorded there about this journey effectively functions to distance the more elaborate account of the “Introduction” from any relation to the events of December 1818, from History and from a Mary Shelley as Historical and Authorial Subject. However, at first the “Introduction’s” account concurs with the Journal:

The account breaks off with a dash, and this is the point at which the “Introduction” is most in accord with the Journal account, in the noting of the disappointment the unnamed “Mary” and “Percy” felt in this place. The divergence between the two accounts then opens at exactly this point of identity and, following the dash, the account opens up the question of the processes of writing-reading in a certain allegorical mode – one that is itself involved in the oracular and apocalyptic genres – for what is figured here is a revelation of the oracular, apocalyptic texts that will then be the texts revealed in The Last Man, a text that will reveal the End of Man to come two centuries later, an Apocalypse Not Now, Not Yet.6 There will be a revelation of the mode in which these revelations, apocalypses may be inscribed or intoned, a revelation of an answer to the question of the place of the writer, here a writer of the female gender operating within the bounds of late romanticism: within the closure of that romanticism, but at its limen, its threshold. The revelation, then, of how one may write at the End, of what can be written of the End.

After the dash – the account proceeds –

The travellers then proceed through a number of narrow and difficult passages, finally reaching another cave, containing a raised stone seat and the “perfect snow-white skeleton of a goat”, which has apparently fallen through the veiled aperture in the roof of the cavern. Mary Shelley continues this account by mentioning the other adornments of this space:

So far, then, there is a succumbing to enthusiasm which leads to a further investigation of the passage leading to a second cavern – which is supposed to be the Sibyl’s Cave and isn’t – and then the investigation and penetration of another series of passages to the third cavern, one veiled by nature, containing leaves, bark, and corn hoods. Now the identity of this last cavern is revealed:

Thus, the “real” cave, the last cave, of the Cumaean Sibyl is revealed, its veil undercut: a veiling previously made complete by nature after a moment of the “catastrophe” of the fall of the goat, but which is now rent again and revealed by enthusiasm, rather appropriately given that it is a Sibylline cave. Therein, the texts of various voices delivered through the Sibyl lie, texts ranging across History as the oracular utterances are fabled to have done, texts of voices requiring reinscription: requiring a Sibyl to render them intelligible again. Or for the first time. These are texts or voices whose origins it would be better for us not to inquire after; whose multiplicity and multivalency will intone the death knell of certain rules of discourse, and of concepts of an author, intoning a death knell for certain orders of Literature and Philosophy.

This “Author’s Introduction” to The Last Man breaks the oracular mode free from the constraints of unintelligibility, and of the hermeneutic constraint which requires a translator for oracles and apocalyptic texts: a constraint no less incumbent upon masculine writers of apocalyptic texts than upon feminine writers, as indicated by the critical history of commentaries upon John of Patmos’ Apocalypse.11 Where previously the oracular-oneiric or apocalyptic text required a masculine translator-priest for its intelligible inscription, this task now becomes a feminine one and, in terms of the structure of this sexual-hermeneutic economy, thus one belonging to the Sibyl herself.

Two points here: one, on the process of writing as transcription and decipherment; the other, on the consolations of the imagination of disaster. When Mary Shelley writes that “Yet such is human nature, that the excitement of mind was dear to me, and that the imagination, painter of tempest and earthquake, or, worse, the stormy and ruin-fraught passions of man, softened my real sorrows and endless regrets, by clothing these fictitious ones in that ideality, which takes the mortal sting from pain”, she can be understood as stating that the thought of the death of all humanity offered solace for her loss of Percy Shelley, found in the process of writing (or transcribing) the Sibylline texts.

A play occurs here between the terms used to describe the appearance of this oracular text, its phenomenal appearance in the world as text, a movement between terming it a product of the revelation of the “divine intuition” of the Sibyl – implicitly linking it to a theory of genius and imagination – and terming the text a work of decipherment and translation, a work reading these texts and making them intelligible, legible. At first, the text is an inscription of certain “discoveries” in the Sibylline pages, resting upon them and upon “intuition”. Then, it appears that there has been a “transformation” of those pages and not simply a decipherment, and this text finally appears as an “adaptation and translation” giving “form and substance” to those leaves and pages. There is also the matter – involving a theory of poetry and genre – of the transformation of verse into prose, one bound to retain the poetic quality of verse expression in the guise of unmetered language.

The fact that this priestly function of interpretation and decipherment is discharged by a female and feminine writer – one who thus shares some sexual identity with the Sibyl – raises a number of questions concerning the implications of this shift upon sexual-hermeneutic economies: does Mary Shelley become a “drag-priest”, and what are the implications of such a discursive transvestism for writing-reading and Philosophy?13 Does this conflation of roles put into question the categories of writer/decipherer, even announcing the Death of the Hermeneut?

This “Author’s Introduction” is, then, an account of certain apocalypses leading to the genesis of an apocalyptic-eschatological text in which there is a concurrence, between and in the various shifts in the description of the inscriptive/hermeneutic operations occurring here – of the revelation of text(s) and the text(s) of revelation – a concurrence complicit with an activity of translation. An account in which an extreme position with regard to generic orders and laws of inscription is delineated: neither a text of direct experience, nor of personal vision, rather a hybrid of these, with all the hermaphroditism of hybrids.

In a Library in Rome

After the introduction, the novel begins. It is a first person narrative featuring Lionel Verney, a native of the British Isles, and is set in the late twenty-first century. It conjures a future barely different to the early nineteenth century, and hardly marked by the industrialisation which was occurring as it was written. Presciently, the throne is held by the House of Windsor, and balloon travel is the greatest advance on coaches and boats. Spread over three volumes, the narrative is far less remarkable than its framing: both the opening in the Sibyl’s cave, and its ending in a deserted Rome. The major action involves a “PLAGUE” which sweeps through Europe from the Orient, and eludes the measures of medical science. Eventually, it kills all of humanity: Verney contracts the plague, but survives it, as an apparently sole survivor. In one of the many unexplained aspects of the plague’s action, Verney wanders a depopulated Europe without encountering corpses: the dead apparently burying themselves, or vanishing.

He eventually arrives in Rome, where he spends time in its libraries, seeking solace from his sense of devastation after the loss of all his friends and family.

As a complement to the extreme position taken up in the “Author’s Introduction”, The Last Man takes up an extreme position as concerns Man and History in being the narrative of the LAST MAN, Lionel Verney: an exile from humanity and its History (and even from death). Its position of extremity is in being at the limits in a liminal position with regard to certain categories but yet included within them and bounded by them. Recalling Nietzsche’s narrative of the letzten Philosophen, Verney’s narrative is begun in Rome amidst the death of humanity from a strange PLAGUE, and the beginning gesture of this tale that is to become The Last Man – before any of these “events” occur – one recorded late in the tale’s narrative order, is as follows:

The logical problems and paradoxes of this inscription encapsulate the problems of the apocalyptic genre in general, particularly the temporal paradoxes involved: a text written at the End of History that is yet a self-proclaimed “HISTORY OF THE LAST MAN”, dedicated to the dead, and without a reader other than its “author” – underlining the conflation of reading and writing in this text.

It also returns us to the “Author’s Introduction”, as writing occurs as both solace in loss, and as an activity of taking up discarded texts.

It is an extraordinarily striking and melancholic scenario, and prefigures Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections on the same trope in the figure of the last Philosopher, as a “Geschichte der Nachwelt” (“History of Posterity”).

A discourse of the last man with himself, couched in the form of a fragment from a future history of posterity: this is an impossible discourse which fragments History, and has an eccentric relation to philosophic discourse. It raises the question of the discursive possibility of both History and Philosophy, of their laws of genre and generation. Nietzsche’s schema perfectly fits The Last Man and the genre of the apocalyptic – a genre of texts with the project of a revelation of the last, the end. In its paradox, it shows the tenacious logic that if someone is talking to me (even if it is myself), I am not yet alone. For Shelley and Verney, if they are writing, then there is always the possibility of a reader, of another survivor to witness their survival.

Both Verney’s Rome, and Nietzsche’s “fragment from the history of posterity” share a scene of devastation in which loneliness is escaped through a self-delusion that opens up an impossible dialogue. For Nietzsche, this dialogue is at the end point of Philosophy, understood as a discourse involving a certain conception of humanity, which is said to have died while the world continues to live. It is a death on the other side of the pursuit of knowledge, which Nietzsche had analysed as being a dangerous encounter with dispelling all that kept humanity alive: a protective form of ignorance.18

For Mary Shelley or Lionel Verney, literature – its reading, its writing – offers a form of survival, in the face of bereavement and devastation. Literature becomes a mode of living on, for both the survivors and the dead, even a literature that imagines the death of all as solace for the death of a few.

Modes of Reading: Modesty and Care

As noted in the epigraph from Maurice Blanchot, the writing of the disaster is structured by temporal rupture, and the effacement of the subject. As he puts it: “something which never yet takes place happens nonetheless, as having long since already happened”, which he claims inheres in the relation between writing and passivity.

Familiarly, passivity is more associated with reading than with writing. Mary Shelley – in her “Author’s Introduction” to The Last Man as well as in her more famous 1831 Preface to Frankenstein; Or The Modern Prometheus – positions writing as a form of reading, and as a product of the unknown known. Writing after The Last Man, Mary Shelley enlarges on the ghost story competition in the Byron–Shelley circle which led to Frankenstein, and Mary commences the account of her contribution as follows:

Thought is figured as being unproductive, a vain resource, particularly in terms of the writing of a story defined as speaking “to the mysterious fears of our nature”. Thought having failed, there is an invocation – the voice’s calling – of invention, with all its appropriate religious and oracular associations.

Mary Shelley then goes on to relate conversations between Byron and Percy Shelley concerning the principle of life and the possibility of reanimation, “to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener”, and then narrates the night of her dream:

Almost as if in a riposte to Keats’ question “Do I wake or sleep?” Mary Shelley writes that she does neither: “I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think.” Imagination possesses the writer as if in a dream, but this reverie is already beyond itself: it is “far beyond the usual bounds of reverie”. What is also beyond those “usual bounds” is the subject of those images itself: the “hideous phantasm”. Haunting Mary’s vision is a process of abjection: her vision comes to her in an abject manner with an image of an abject creation.

Like a Sibyl, the writer “sees” with her eyes closed, “seeing” beyond the bounds of what may normally be seen: she “sees” that which would mock God, and in this, that which would be “supremely frightful”. The “stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world”, then, will not only be Man but also the system of concealment in which the Creator is figured, since the creation of Life and Man is the point at which the Creator is created as Creator. And this will be borne out in the various interchanges in the narrative between the roles of Creator/created, organised around readings of the Promethean myth and the Miltonic-Satanic myth: both Victor and the creature take on the roles of Creator and Man in relation to their contestation of the poles of a Master/Slave dialectic.

Yet, to return to the question of thought versus dream, there is a certain slippage in the difference between thought and non-thought argued here: not only are the usual bounds of reverie exceeded here, but also the difference – sketched by Mary Shelley – between what can be said to be “thought” (attached to some notion of will and voluntarism, such that it is solely an active process), and what is presented as other than thought. A slippage constituting the laws governing what may be thought, and how thought appears in writing. Further, a slippage legislating for the area whose bounds are exceeded: in this case, reverie. At first, “imagination” is used to distinguish this non-thought, but Mary will later announce that she “had thought of a story”. She will also describe the product of her vision as an “idea”:

Again, there is a recurrence of the structure that might be referred to as the unknown-known, as writing-reading more than one knows. Before Mary knows it, before it has entered the realm or bounds of thought, she has solved the problem of the ghost story, but she does not realise this at first. The story – what she knows but does not know – haunts her. And, when she announces that she has thought of a story, a passage from a realm outside “thought” – from non-thought to thought – may be identified. In this passage the story traverses the distance between thought and its other, the story/idea has come forth into thought and into the world, but only after it had come to mind.

Thoughts unbidden, texts found, deciphered, transcribed and transposed: these are modes of reading and writing that are modest about claims of originality, and careful to preserve and cherish a wider body of literature. From the Sibyl’s cave to the libraries of Rome, the reader and writer still proceeds with care.

Now, let us imagine the last Academic. A survivor, of plagues both literal and figurative, of the changing histories and practices of university teaching, research and administration. A person of modesty, and meticulousness, committed to reading and teaching as critical acts, a commitment borne with generosity and dedication.

Bibliography