Crumbling visions: Mary Shelley's The Last Man

'Where was the plague? 'Here-every where!' Mary Shelley imagines the decay of human civilisation by plague in her 1826 novel The Last Man. Protrite observations on the thematic applicability of Shelley's novel during COVID-19 aside, Shelley should indeed be revisited in 2021. The novel depicts a world crumbling at the hands of a communicable disease but it more importantly captures the solitary thoughts of one who's belief in imagination, art and popular political individuals fails.

On one level, the novel itself was born through the grief of Shelley for her husband: the recent death of the literary Percy Shelley. The novel's obituary status telescopes from an ellergy to her dead lover, to the death of the entire human race. The death of a loved one feels like the end of the world. Similarly, the death of such a literary influence on Shelley might betoken the death of a belief in the literary world itself - noticeably Shelley tried to revive Percy's memory through publishing a number of his works in the months to follow The Last Man's publication. 

The grip of the plague in the novel is reminiscent of a destructive world of grief, but it is also destructive of any future hope in the pastoral and Rousseauian world many of the Romantics envisioned. Shelley's work smacks of Voltaire's Optimism in its defience of hopeful expectation, either of a political positivity or of a successful dénouement to the world of the novel and the earth. The characters thus reel from country to country witnessing the effects of the plague. The travellers, like Voltaire who finds no philosphical or political refuge, ceaselessly find only death in the world they visit. The grip of the plague is total and just as it gradually extinguishes the members of the social group of protagonists in the novel, so it dampens any hope of revival by the hands of caring and revolutionary individuals. 

As destructive a plague evidently exists in today's global epoch. Shelley's novel speaks not only of the spreading physical malady, but also of the dying hope in the Romantic sensibility. Ardent and total belief in political ideology at the expense of religious, cultural and historical traditions cannot be the answer to the crisis of decay that we ourselves experience. More lasting, historical and traditional truths must be unurthed in our day in order for our civilisation to outlast devastation. 

Pericles, Søren Kierkegaard and the PM

Peter Jones of the Spectator pithily compares Boris Johnson to the Greek hero Pericles. The Athenian and the British Prime Minister are, according to Jones, proponents of a ‘hard line, needs must approach’, the former shutting off Athens from the Spartan invaders, the latter shutting down Great Britain in response to the Coronavirus outbreak. The comparison is a tad grandiose but nonetheless instructive. Søren Kierkegaard, the 19^th Century Danish theologian and philosopher helps explain Jones’ comparison. Kierkegaard proposed that a person might achieve goodness through action in faith and that, however absurd action might be, a leader might ‘through his action receive the highest good’. Jones was right to compare Johnson and Pericles, but the duo should be accompanied with the countless leaders in the NHS at this time who are putting their front foot forward and saving lives day by day. Although Kierkegaard was famously cynical of the methods of the scientific researcher, he would approve of the action of scientific men and women in the NHS today, and of the bravery of Johnson and other decision makers.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/pericles-would-have-approved-of-the-pm-s-response-to-the-pandemic

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kierkegaard-Concluding-Unscientific-Postscript-Philosophy/dp/0521709105

Virtual tours of modernist architecture

Virtual tours of modernist buildings have an air of the dystopian. Tempted by the promise of an experience of great American architecture from the comfort of self-isolation, I opened the Instagram self-made video.  The grainy hand-recorded image is of Greycliff House, New York for the Martin Family the subject of this particular #wrightsvitualvisit, designed to acquaint isolated fans with Wright’s extensive range of modernist architectural projects. Built in 1931, the structure is poised gallantly on the precipitous black mass of rock from which it overlooks a murky, even more grainy, grey lake in the background. Of course, the footage is not in any way crystalline and professional but it’s a great effort, an act of altruism. However, it’s an interesting interruption to the usual experience of visiting a modernist building. For one thing, the viewer cannot modulate or self-direct the journey through the house.

The archdaily.com website offers slightly more professionally dubbed viewing experiences of Wright’s European counterpart Le Corbusier by cleverly embedding google street view into the frame. However, like the Wright virtual tours, the image is empty of life, strangely frozen in time and space. Revolutionary emphasis was put on pictorial resting spaces by Le Corbusier within the house, framed so beautifully by a handrail here, a concrete window frame there, all of which are cleverly staged by movement and travel through an open plan interior.

I think therefore Le Corbusier would find the archdaily.com experience convulsively bizarre because, from the comfort of your own bedroom you can’t revolve around Savoye’s staircases, but you must pivot and peer from a stationary position, fixed by the hand held camera. What the great modernist architects would appreciate about self-isolation is the way that our homes are being tested to their limit: their role as ‘machines of living’ is foregrounded in our stationary experience of them. Let us find a way of reigniting the utopian spirit of Le Corbusier and Wright from within our homes and experience their houses from behind a google street view lens. 

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/wrightvirtualvisits/?hl=en

https://www.archdaily.com/936442/gaudi-wright-niemeyer-and-le-corbusier-take-a-virtual-tour-through-iconic-architecture