The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Read Online Free PDF Page A

transcendence into the Village only by limiting its visibility and influence—by keeping it in dark corners, restricting its powers, and having it depart before the world at large notices it is there.
    Behind Walpole’s ghost of Alfonso stands a vast, heavenly realm that empowers it and receives it when its mission is completed. But Clara Reeve could not accept anything as blatantly spiritual as a heavenly realm in her tale. As a result, her ghost is earthbound and unrooted. He comes from nowhere, he vanishes into nothingness, and he accomplishes very little in between.
    In Walpole’s next imitator, Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, who wrote a handful of novels in the early 1790s, the seeming mystery would be even more rationalized. Mrs. Radcliffe’s gambit was to suggest the supernatural—and then to explain it away as the result of human agency and natural coincidences.
    In Mrs. Radcliffe’s best-remembered novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which we may take as our example, there is once more the historical setting, this time closer yet to the present—the end of the Sixteenth Century. There is the castle and the haunt. But this time the haunter is no ghost at all, but Montoni, lord of the castle of Udolpho and chief of a local robber band, and the hints of the supernatural are all a plot to intimidate an heiress.
    Here is a balance of mystery and plausibility more in keeping with the temperament of the time, and hereafter the model of the Gothic story would be Radcliffe rather than Walpole. Beyond Radcliffe, we can see the Gothic romance, with its old manses, frightened heroines and Byronic heroes; we can see the rational detective story; and we can see the unsupernatural historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, who in 1824 wrote an appreciation of Mrs. Radcliffe’s work for a new edition.
    If these lines of literary descent from Walpole through Ann Radcliffe came to abandon transcendence entirely, except for that faintest air of the miraculous still present only to be dispelled by rationality, there were other stories written after the manner of Walpole in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries in which undispelled mystery continued to figure, but at the opposite price, the abandonment of plausibility. The most extreme example may be The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis, which compounds a fantastic stew of dead babies, matricide, incestuous rape, torture by the Spanish Inquisition, ghosts, devils, and the Wandering Jew. Stories of this sort aimed to entertain and titillate, to shock and unnerve, but not to persuade.
    Horace Walpole’s concern in The Castle of Otranto had been truly mythic to the extent that he aimed to combine mystery and plausibility. The crucial imperfection of The Castle of Otranto was the fundamental implausibility—in modern Western terms of thought—of the central transcendence.
    Certain lines of literary descent from Walpole—the Gothic romance, the rational detective story, the historical novel—could not tolerate the implausible and so abandoned transcendence in favor of a strict adherence to “the facts”—the facts of history, the facts of society, the facts of love and marriage, the facts of life and death. And, to the extent to which they favored what is over what might be, these lines became mythically sterile.
    Other forms that owe something to Walpole, like heroic fantasy and the supernatural horror story, could not give up the old spirit-based transcendence. But they were not effective myth, either. They were conservative. They looked backward. They ignored “the facts.” And so they have been reckoned implausible escapist fantasy without relevance to the ordinary conduct of daily life.
    SF is that line of descent through Walpole which has sought to find new grounds of plausibility for transcendence that a modern Western audience could relate to and accept. In this book, we are going to follow the line of development that has aimed to extend both the plausibility and