Courting Catastroph(e)ism: Conflicting Narrative and Competing Earth Theories in Mary

Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’.

I Introduction

When I saw the word catastrophe in the title of this conference, Conflict & Catastrophe, my coming

was a given. The (working) title of my thesis is Courting Catastroph(e)ism: New Theories of the

Earth in Literary Fiction 1813-1860. I then had to double-check the dates on the long eighteenth

century - just to make sure how long it actually was. Fortunately, in my case, some scholars make it

long enough for me to include my work - taking it all the way up to 1832. So thanks, firstly, to

them. [SLIDE 2]

Frank Kermode writes in ‘The Sense of an Ending’ that “[...] it makes little difference--

though it makes some--whether you believe the age of the world to be six thousand years or five

thousand million years, whether you think time will have a stop or that the world is eternal; there is

still a need to speak humanly of a life’s importance in relation to it--a need in the moment of

existence to belong, to be related to a beginning or an end.” (Frank Kermode, ‘The Sense of an

Ending’, pp.3-4)

It is just endings and beginnings, and our relation to them ‘in the middest’--in media res--

that I’d like to discuss today. I’d like to investigate that relationship through catastrophe in literary

fictions, and draw on my particular area--Literature and Science--to examine the influence on

fictions of Cuvier’s theory of Catastrophism - which can be termed a ‘Theory of the Earth’ or earth

theory. This takes place at the end of the long eighteenth century, and I would like to highlight its

use in Mary Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’ from 1826. [SLIDE 3]

Now, no introduction would be complete without an outline; its very own beginnings and

ends, if you will. So in this brief paper I will outline The Last Man as a literary fiction and its

development from 1805 to Shelley’s in 1826. Much could be said of before and after - but there you

are - time, as in this paper, is always an issue. I will then turn to the work of Cuvier and his Theory

of the Earth: Catastrophism. Finally, I will offer a discussion of Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’ using

some of the elements of Cuvierian Catastrophism. In doing this, I’d like to suggest that it is

Courting Catastroph(e)ism that may secure it the epithet of ‘major novel’.

II Will the real ‘Last Man’ please step forward...

‘The Last Man’ uses a popular theme of the period (1805-1826 in particular, but also before,

on throughout the nineteenth century, and up until the present day). The Last Man as a figure is a

chance for us to, again quoting Kermode, “project ourselves [...] past the End, so as to see the

structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle” (Kermode, 8). In short,

we are related to (or must find a relation to) the end (and beginning) whether we like it or not. This

is done through various devices throughout this period of initial popularity. [SLIDE 4] In 1805, de

Grainville in ‘Le Dernier Homme’ (translated to English in 1806 as ‘Omegarus and Syderia, a

Romance in Futurity’) uses Malthusian sterility to initiate an extinction narrative. Ormus, the spirit

of the earth, can no longer support the human race, which slowly dies out - Omegarus becoming the

last man in search of Syderia, the last woman. [SLIDE 5] After the dark rumblings of the 1815

Mount Tambora eruption - a truly worldwide catastrophic event - the Year Without a Summer

spawned Shelley’s Frankenstein (a last man of sorts, as well as a new Adam through human agency)

and Byron’s universe-engulfing vision in the poem, ‘Darkness’, in addition to annotated Cuvierian

themes in ‘Cain’ (gifted this vision of beginnings and ends by Lucifer - including a view of earth’s

extended history and Cuvier’s mammoths, of which, more later). Thomas Campbell’s, ‘The Last

Man’, from 1823 imagines “Creation’s death” through solely divine agency. Both Thomas Hood in

1824 and Shelley in 1826 then use a plague narrative - Hood for satirical ends - to initiate an

extinction drama and perpetuate the figure of the Last Man. [SLIDE 7]

In Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’ the plague narrative arrives late on - after what is generally

accepted to be an autobiographical roman à clef. Plague deserves separate treatment and cannot be

covered here. In spite of the role of deluge in not only the accepted religious narrative, but Cuvier’s

work and concordant theories reconciling the two, it should be noted that the flood has no role to

play in any of our last-man texts. Various reasons can be noted here - in fictions we can term

concord fictions, that attempt to reconcile convention and new evidence, then deluge is not the

divine agent of restoring the earth to a pristine state, but rather conflagration (see Burnett, Sacred

Theory of the Earth). [SLIDE 8 - Describe slide] (I think there are very good reasons why Shelley

does not employ the deluge which I shall discuss later)

[SLIDE 9] Shelley’s novel charts the slow “degradation” of the human species without the

expected drama and catastrophe:

“Hear you not the rushing sound of the coming tempest? Do you not behold the clouds

open, and destruction lurid and dire pour down on the blasted earth? See you not the

thunderbolt fall, and are deafened by the shout of heaven that follows its descent? Feel you

not the earth quake and open with agonising groans, while the air is pregnant with shrieks

and wailings,--all announcing the last days of man?

No! none of these things accompanied our fall!”

The actual last-man narrative when protagonist Lionel Verney is shipwrecked on the Italian coast

and directly compared to a washed-up Robinson Crusoe occupies a brief, closing section of the

book, fifteen pages perhaps. [SLIDE 10] The confrontation of Last Man and maker so central to

previous texts is marginalised. Instead, it is an extinction narrative that leaves us with the meeting

of last man and nature. Shelley rewrites the last-man narrative in ways that assure its future success.

The last man becomes a survivor. And, as very often is the case with books that challenge

convention, it was attacked, ridiculed and savagely parodied at the time. Kermode, notes “it is the

popular story that sticks most closely to the established conventions; novels the clerisy calls

‘major’ tend to vary them, and to vary them more and more as time goes by.” (Kermode, 17)

Shelley rewrites the “established conventions” of the last-man genre in several ways. First, while

giving us catastrophes and signs of apocalypse, she refuses to deliver deluge or conflagration. She

courts catastrophe but does not deliver. Second, the Last Man as a character is naturalised, no longer

a religious figure confronting its maker in a scheme of divine agency, but instead a Crusoevian

survivor. In ‘Le Dernier Homme’, Adam, as first man, is forced to witness the demise of man. First

and last are united. But, just as in Campbell, Hood et al the fiction finds concord with convention

placing it in a Christian eschatological context. Where de Grainville’s last man fails to become a

new Adam, Shelley’s succeeds, if through a temporal paradox. She plays an extinction scheme, but

leaves us unsure to the actual end. Again, in terms of extinction, she courts catastrophism refusing

to provide a concordant text that satisfies a linear narrative. More of this in our third point: time.

In ‘Le Dernier Homme’, a young man travelling in Syria enters “the Cavern Death” and

meets “the celestial Spirit” who shows him a vision of the future, reasoning: “The last man will not

have any posterity to know and admire him. I wish before his birth that he may live in memory

[...]” (Ch.1). This revelatory frame device produces a piece of pure prophecy, a concordant literary

fiction that plays out in conventional theology. The problem of posterity did not go unnoticed by

critics of the day. Morton D. Paley, in ‘Apocalypse without Millennium’ reminds us that, “Behind

the ridicule, however, there is a suggestion that the imagination resists the idea of Lastness, an idea

that presupposes a recipient or reader whose very existence negates the Lastness of the narrating

subject”. Time schemes linked to the age of the earth were problematic in fictions trying to bolster

convention. Ussher’s six thousand years contra Hutton’s vision of deep time with “no vestige of a

beginning, no prospect of an end” were clearly difficult to reconcile. Shelley uses her own frame

device, effectively looping narrative back into frame, producing an unending cyclical and

paradoxical time scheme:

[...] a feeling experienced by all, understood by none, - a feeling, as if in some state, less

visionary than a dream, in some past real existence, I had seen all I saw, with precisely the

same feelings as I now beheld them - as if all my sensations were a duplex mirror of a

former revelation. (283)

This is the third element of her courting catastrophism that ensures readership many cycles ahead. It

provides both linear and cyclical time opportunities. It provides scenarios of multiple worlds and

multiple versions of ours.

So we move on to Catastrophism having three elements to consider: catastrophe, extinction

and time.

III Cuvierian Catastrophism

[SLIDE 11] Catastrophism is attributable to Baron Georges Cuvier. Cuvier (famed zoologist and

palaeontologist 1769-1832) in his “doctrines de révolutions” describes the stratigraphy of the Seine

basin. [SLIDE 12] He observes revolutions, flooding, leading to extinction of fauna and foliage, on

a repeated basis. In addition, Cuvier shows that fossil bones of mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses

were so different from contemporary species as to be classifiable as different ones. [later collated in

his ‘Theorie de la terre’ (1821)] This established a basis for extinction. Together, these empirical

observations, of catastrophe and extinction provide the foundation for his theory of the earth.

Moreover, they provide both linear and cyclical models of time.

In Europe, these developments were part of a progression in the scientific community in

extending the age of the earth. [SLIDE 13] However, on translation to English, Robert Jameson (in

the preface) and then most notably William Buckland, insisting on the veracity of the biblical

account, attempted to reconcile the implications of Cuvier’s work with religious beliefs and

attached earth theories. I suggest that the more discordant Cuvierian catastrophism is a naturalistic

worldview that anticipates Sir Charles Lyell’s Uniformitarianism (a world of uniform processes

where “the present is the key to the past”) and later, of course, Darwin. The catastrophists represent

a concordant catastrophism that links back to natural theology and a world of divine design.

The thematic implications of catastrophism for literature are many. The overriding question

is the theme of firstness and lastness - of beginnings and ends (q.v.). This will be treated in the three

identified elements of catastrophism. Firstly, there are the catastrophes themselves and attendant

view of nature. The Newtonian model made the world into a machine - perfect in every way. How

then could catastrophism be reconciled with this when there was only a destructive force and not a

restorative one like Hutton’s uplift? The opposite of a Newtonian perfect-world theory is a broken-

world one. The earth theory of Natural Theology was a “broken and confused heap of bodies”.1

Cuvier envisaged only a destructive force in line with other catastrophists and the biblical account.

He, of course, did not attribute divine agency to unexplained and catastrophic events in nature.

Catastrophists would still argue ultimate divine cause. But Cuvier’s theory was one of nature and

the world continuously unmade and remade. What then is Shelley’s take on the disaster and

upheaval as depicted in ‘The Last Man’? I noted earlier how the “fall” was not accompanied by the

expected signs of upheaval and attendant catastrophe. Shelley does use devices of catastrophe -

comets, floods, tsunamis etc. But what does she do with them? I marked earlier that she does not

deliver a deluge or conflagration. Instead she plays on our expectation-set (of last-man narrative and

catastrophe) to deliver perepetia - a true reversal in circumstances or sudden change.

The second idea, similarly of firstness and lastness - of beginnings and ends, is at species

level: extinction. In discordant Cuvierian catastrophism, species die out in direct contravention of

any ideas of natural theology where there is a fixity of species. God created all the creatures on

earth in one creation; evidence to the contrary is difficult to reconcile with the bible. If that species,

moreover, is man, then our position at the centre of creation is questioned. This challenges

anthropocentrism - that the world is made for humans. Creation and end-time must be conceived of

in terms of God’s agency and judgement for a conventional view to prevail (in 1826). We have seen

how de Grainville and Campbell did this. Byron may have, to a degree, dodged a bullet. But how

does Shelley measure up in terms of extinction? Can man die and the world machine spin on?2 It

1 Burnet

2 World Machine - a reference to Isaac Newton’s vision of a mechanical universe set in motion according to inviolable laws then left to run ad infinitum (or rather until God returns). This also can be classified as a perfect-world theory, rather like the vision of James Hutton and then Charles Lyell. The world is ancient - deep time - and a perfect system that self-regulates through tiny changes over time.

has been noted that Cuvier’s work on mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses provided enough of a

distinction to classify them as different species. What then of Shelley’s Last Man becoming a New

Adam? Can the resulting repopulation of earth be sufficiently different to constitute a different

species? Cuvier implies multiple worlds, anterior worlds. Does Shelley work this into the novel?

The third idea is not in space, but in time. What is first and what is last? Cuvier was a part of

a tradition that extended the age of the earth. He did not hold to James Hutton’s theory of uplift that

provided the earth with a restorative mechanism in contrast to the broken earth awaiting

conflagration in Burnett’s scheme. But his theory of revolutions provides a potentially cyclical view

of time due to its destruction/extinction-events and attendant creation events. Cuvier was convinced

of previous incarnations of the world having been subject to different forces, an unquestioningly

linear aspect to time with a distinct historical narrative. British Catastrophists seeking to reconcile

earth theory with biblical account needed to put firstness and lastness in terms of a Christian

scheme. Contrasting ideas like Hutton’s of course were antihistorical - the human narrative

seemingly losing all significance in a world with “no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of end”.

How does Shelley treat time in ‘The Last Man’?

So there we have my division into three elements of Catastrophism. I’m going to pick up on

some examples of how these figure in Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’ now, time permitting. I’ll look in

further detail at elements of catastrophe, extinction and time.

IV Shelley’s Last Man - Catastrophe, Extinction & Time

We share Lionel Verney’s urge of “an indefinable anxiety to behold the catastrophe” (139), and

‘The Last Man’ does deliver in increasing degrees. Nature is “become dark, cold and

ungenial” (181). “Why dost thou howl thus, O wind?” apostrophises Lionel “By day and by night

for four long months thy roarings have not ceased” (182) adding “very cities are wasted by

thee” (182). Lionel labels as “mischief” the destruction of the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, at the

hands of an earthquake. He notes that Mexico is “laid waste” by “storm, pestilence and

famine” (184) “Can it be true [...] that whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by

these disorders in nature?” Are we to have the end of the world after all?

Indeed, at Dover, as the rear guard prepares to leave England for Paris, there is grave

turbulence in the natural world. The “tempestuous world of waters” (287) attacks the literal and

symbolic defences of England as “vast fragments of the near earth fall with crash and roar into the

deep” (287-288). The “greater part” deem this a “judgment of God” (288) as conventional thinking

should interpret both unusual and more frequent convulsions in nature. The tension between

supernatural revelation and scientific observation continues in images conjuring up Whiston’s ‘A

New Theory of the Earth’ (1696):

Many cried aloud that these were no meteors, but globes of burning matter, which had set

fire to the earth, and caused the vast cauldron at our feet to bubble up with its measureless

waves; (289)

Preparing to be “deluged”, the crowd is divided into the superstitious - “the day of judgment was

come they averred” - and “those less given to visionary terrors” (289). Scientific knowledge and

method is pitted against superstition and triumphs in this case. However, the pyrrhic victory only

left all free of the fear of “immediate catastrophe” (289).

The signs of apocalypse gather. Parhelia or sun dogs: “suddenly the three mock suns united

in one, and plunged into the sea” (288), causing “a deafening watery sound [...] from the

spot” (289). Afterwards Lionel tells us that “the sun, disencumbered from his strange satellites,

paced with its accustomed majesty towards its western home” where “the sea rose to meet it” in a

“wall of water” (289). The “black sun” incident (177), at first seemingly describing a total solar

eclipse, takes on supernatural tones. Indeed, Lionel declares that “little credit would have been

given” the “strange story” had there not been “a multitude of witnesses, in various parts of the

world” (177), adding “Night fell upon every country”.

Soon “Every evening brought its fresh creation of spectres” (317). Lionel himself admits to

having “the utmost difficulty” in discrediting the supernatural. Mass delusions such as that the sun

“grew paler” gain credence, and, as Lionel problematises the credibility of sensory experience as of

“little worth [...] when unsupported by concurring testimony”, several incidents highlight this lurch

back toward a primitive and superstitious existence. Firstly, “a figure all in white, apparently of

more than human stature” (317-8) turns out to be an opera dancer in costume (probably on stilts

though this is not made clear). Secondly, the “Black Spectre”, Death personified, turns out to be a

French nobleman stricken with plague. Again, the superstitious is first compelling but then easily

and rationally explained away.

And there the impending apocalypse melts away. The Flood narrative is revisited after the

ramshackle fellowship enters the gates of Dijon, just eighty in number. The “sorrowful procession”

is contrasted to humanity becoming deluge, which “like a flood, had once spread over and

possessed the whole earth”, “generation after generation flowing on ceaselessly” (319). But as is

said: “He felt that the end of time was come; he knew that one by one we would dwindle into

nothingness.” (256) As does the promised apocalypse. Instead our final shipwreck that casts ashore

our Crusoesque survivor on Italian shores is all that awaits.

Shelley proffers an expectation-set of apocalypse. A Christian mythical scheme requires

deluge or conflagration (according to Burnett) to satisfy a last-man plot. Having established this

expectation-set Shelley deliberately disappoints readers and critics alike in courting catastrophe and

Catastrophism. Comets, celestial signs, flood waves, earthquakes, all manner of signs of apocalypse

are noted in the story. Yet for our protagonist, Lionel, the last man, the “fall” is a gradual one.

Shelley therefore does not deliver according to our expectation-set. Instead, perepetia - sudden

change or a reversal of fortunes - occurs. But this is not through deluge or conflagration; it is rather

through its absence. The change effected is in the biblical story and our expectations of apocalypse.

But does not Shelley write a last-man apocalypse of sorts? The answer is an unequivocal no.

Yes, there may be all the signs of apocalypse - pestilence being a popular one. But does not simply

Shelley produce a literary fiction that simply dramatises Cuvierian Catastrophism. Instead, she uses

our expectations of the former, then delivers elements of the latter. Signs are interpreted as

apocalypse, as proof of divine agency and cause, as a “judgment of God” (288). But naturalistic

interpretations prevail. Moreover, the plot simply does not deliver End-time as imagined. The

catastrophe of ‘The Last Man’ becomes cyclical as Cuvier’s work implies. If there is divine agency

- and this is still a possibility - then it is of an absent deity in a mechanistic universe. Catastrophe

becomes then a punctuating, regulating force in a Newtonian “world machine”.

Extinction

In Chapter II of Volume III, Adrian prepares to lead “the numbered remnant of the English nation”

into exile “there to die, one by one, till the LAST MAN should remain in a voiceless, empty

world.” (258) This narrative line leads to Cuvierian extinction, set against the traditional myth of

annihilation as visited on mankind by divine retribution for its wickedness and the world’s

corruption. However, the “voiceless, empty world” of Shelley echoes an Ecclesiastesian view of

infinite time and space, rather than that of divine retribution the reader recognises from the Book of

Genesis. Of course, the idea of voicelessness alludes both to humanity’s narrative (both actual and

textual) and the creation-destruction implicit in God’s Word. Tellingly in ‘The Last Man’, a world

bereft of man’s voice seems similarly stripped of divinity.

In one episode, Idris (sister to Adrian, heir to the throne, that leads the company to Europe)

determines to turn back in order to save Lucy Martin (Vol. III, Chap. III) - a decision which leads to

her own death - “extinction” is explored at an individual level. The intricacy of causality, “the many

minute threads”, “the inextricable net of our destinies”, “inmeshed completely” (275) underline an

inevitability in death; and, moreover, a single human’s inability to check fate. This “extinction”, this

inevitable destruction, is traced out from the part to the whole, the individual to the race. ‘The Last

Man’ is an extinction narrative. However, it is one tempered by the interrelation of the textual and

actual. The reader is provided with an incomplete textual extinction where both frame and

protagonist refer beyond extinction to both textual and actual (us) readers. Is the universe held

together by reason or divine will? Most importantly, the reason to be found or read into the

extinction narrative is the human voice, and the human voice alone.

Again, Shelley puts in place a set of expectations of what extinction (perhaps judgement in

an apocalyptic scheme) should be. We expect a last man and then an end, we expect conflagration.

Of course, we learn from Cuvier that extinction is never complete - not for life itself. His work on

mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses may prove extinction as a “scientific fact” but we know that

rhinoceroses and elephants are still around today - even if they are different species. Cuvierian

extinction as a part of a scheme of Catastrophism includes recurring versions of our world,

undergoing, perhaps, multiple creations and re-creations. Shelley promises conflagration and this

confrontation of man and maker. She then courts Catastrophism, using its proof of extinction

through natural causes and, moreover, its theme of renewal. Verney, our last man, does not survive

the deluge - God’s remaking of the world and destruction of a sinful mankind. Nor does he face the

conflagration as Campbell’s. Our Last Man is rather, I would argue, a new species in the making, as

the world itself is remade.

Is there data that contradicts this reading? Can the book in fact prop up Natural Theology - a

natural world brimming with divine design? Perhaps a mechanistic world machine, like Paley’s

famous watch and watchmaker analogy? Were Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’ purely a concord fiction

trying to shoehorn Cuvier’s proofs back into conventional biblical account then, I argue, it would

not have succeeded in its longevity and influence. If we are to interpret the destruction of humanity

as a replay of the deluge by other means, then it is in an essentially unknowable universe where

apocalypse and divine agency are meaningless to humanity’s last poor player - Verney, the Last

Man. Instead we are left with a Cuvierian form of extinction: a restart, reuse and recycling.

Humans’ relation is no longer to a deity, but rather to the planet. A case of ecology over theology.

Time

And so to our third element, time. In the introduction to Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’ the narrator

recounts a visit to the supposed Cavern of the Sibyl in the Bay of Naples in 1818. In reality, this trip

had been made by Mary, Percy and Claire Clairmont on the exact same date. In the novel, the now

two companions leave their guide and happen upon a wondrous discovery. “This is the Sibyl’s cave;

these are Sibylline leaves.”3 (7) They discover “leaves, bark, and other substances [...] traced with

written characters. They gather together a “hasty selection” written in dialects both modern and

ancient, the narrator referring to the “earthquake and volcano”4 that have somehow miraculously

preserved the record. The pair then stay in Naples and conduct field work5 in going out to the caves

and reassembling this record. The narrator, presented with fragments, must make them whole:

“Scattered and unconnected as they were, I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into

a consistent form.” (8) The narrator freely admits that “obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe

their present form to me, their decipherer.” (8)

The frame to the narrative is a key element in reading the book. The story, in short, starts

with the discovery of the text itself in 1818. The text then covers the period 2092 to 2100. It then,

read at face value, loops back to antiquity and presumably the restart of a complete Cuvierian

revolution. We are given references to the destruction of Pompeii and back to the Aeneid. This

constitutes a naturalistic looping of time in a cyclical nature.

[...] a feeling experienced by all, understood by none, - a feeling, as if in some state, less

visionary than a dream, in some past real existence, I had seen all I saw, with precisely the

3 Coleridge note. Perhaps include further information regarding classical sites.

4 Vesuvius note. See note 8 re Laki eruption.

5 Footnote re field work versus classical knowledge through books. Here in a constant play. Explain.

same feelings as I now beheld them - as if all my sensations were a duplex mirror of a

former revelation. (283)

The improbability of such a scheme no doubt jarred the sensitivities of contemporary critics. Up to

this date, visions of the future, such as in ‘Le Dernier Homme’, ‘Cain’ and predecessors, were

fantastical in nature. Shelley offers a naturalistic vision of the future and past, looped into one

continuous cyclical time scheme.

Framing introductions were primarily used to add authenticity to travel literature in both

fantastical, but plausible, voyages predicated on the Western exploration.6 Shelley appears to use

the device in several respects. In effect, Verney is the last man, but, just as Omegarus flew in an

airship to Brazil to discover Syderia in *Le Dernier Homme’, we must assume Verney did likewise

in order to propagate the human race. He must have found the last woman.7 Criticism of the book at

the time ridiculed the paradoxical impossibility of the last man leaving any record to be read by

non-existent progeny. But it was their inability to understand a non-linear time scheme - and

moreover a single instead of multiple time scheme - their expectation-set of end-time and how it

plays out. Once you accept the implications of the theory of catastrophism, then the last man

automatically becomes, potentially, the first man: the two are united. The previous last-man texts

had the last man brought face to face with his maker in a denouement to the Christian narrative.

Shelley sidesteps this issue and makes of her last man a new Adam. A new Adam in a new world

that is a) a variation of this one, and b) part of an endless cycle of worlds. The phrase “history

repeats itself”8 is pushed to the limit in a multiple-worlds scenario. Shelley uses catastrophism to

unlock unending possibilities in the new genre of science fiction.

Shelley’s use of a catastrophist time scheme does not allow us to “project ourselves [...] past

6 Give examples (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver etc) and ref criticism.

7 Footnote - decentering of male-oriented assumption of importance of the last man. It is, of course, the last woman that makes the continuation of humans possible.

8 Where does this originate?

the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle”.

The End we see is in fact a beginning. The image of the “duplex mirror” means which ever way we

look we simply see a reflection of ourselves. It means that we cannot see the End, but only the

Beginning. It calls to mind the tribe who see the past as being front of them - because they can see it

- and the future as behind them because they cannot. Shelley again rewrites apocalypse as part of a

naturalistic scheme.

To conclude, it is these expectations of apocalypse in terms of catastrophe, extinction and

time that Shelley plays on. She is courting catastroph(e)ism in order to subvert the conventions of

her time, and in doing so produced a novel and propagated a genre destined to last to ours.

Yet another time-based element the book explores in our relation to the past, our reading of

any record. This in turn raises questions about narrative and how we reconstruct the past, both real

and imagined. Cuvier’s work on fossils was part of a broader movement to make sense of the

confounding fossil record. The sibylline leaves constitute a similar record, one from antiquity and

yet an antiquity of both future and past. The literal record is fragmented and confusing, the eventual

sense-making act of the “decipherer” decisive in creating a credible narrative. The device of making

the book itself a reconstruction of extant text fragments by an unreliable and unknown narrator

plays on our own relationship to the evidence of earth’s history, our history and the past. There is an

awareness of methods of inquiry and scientific technique that inform the book, setting it apart from

its last-man predecessors. Given, Byron in ‘Cain’ premeditatedly works Cuvier’s catastrophism into

his drama. But Shelley’s novel understands and plays on the methodological questions of earth

history. Reading the record of the past - from the evidence - is, indeed, an interpretive project for

Shelley. Perhaps, in this sense, Shelley yearns for a return to Romantic ideals and a return to

classical knowledge from extant texts. It may be true that that the text constitutes a revelatory

transmission of knowledge - in short, nothing less than prophecy.