The Last Man & Catastrophe Two clear narrative strands meet in Mary Shelleys (MS) The Last

Man (LM). First, the drama of lastness which Lionel compares to Defoes Robinson Crusoe. Second, the plague narrative which, again, Lionel compares to its antecedents in Defoes Journal of the Plague Year (1772), Boccaccios Decameron (1349-51), and Charles Brockden Browns Arthur Mervyn (1799). Of course, MSs narrative differs from these textual predecessors in becoming an extinction narrative. These not necessarily interdependent narrative strands allow the author to explore catastrophe in to an individual, and out to a societal - and even global/universal - level. By marrying the last-man-cum-survivor genre of Robinson Crusoe with that of natural disaster, Shelley may have bequeathed to world literature a very singular sub-genre that has proved to have lasting appeal, and seemingly increasing relevance. For example, clearly inspired by the current swine-u pandemic, the BBC television series Survivors explores and combines just these two subjects: a last-man and a virus narrative, encompassing a very real threat of extinction. Hollywood pre-empted swine u with its release of I Am Legend (2007), another lm adaption of Richard Mathesons novel,1 downplaying the analogies with vampirism evident in the original sci-/ horror plot. Moreover, The Last Man (2008) is a low-budget (presumably) comedy-horror that retains character names and plot elements if little else. Indeed, Planet of the Apes (1968), a dramatization of Pierre Boules La plante des singes (1963), while replacing the plague narrative with nuclear holocaust, retains the other basic narrative elements. For more recent literary developments, Margaret Atwoods books Oryx and Crake (2003) and Year of the Flood (2009) depict themes of lastness and extinction - the Waterless Flood of virus/plague-based extinction replacing the biblical deluge. In short, Shelley managed to effectively combine genres to create a lasting sub-genre; one which has had increasing relevance in popular culture throughout the twentieth and into a twenty-rst century setting. " There is immense dramatic potential inherent in the two narrative strands, the lastman narrative and the plague narrative. Together they combine to produce a study of catastrophe that compels attention. There are inarguable similarities between The Last Man and Shelleys science-ction classic Frankenstein (1816). Lionels lastness and singular, life-saving immunity to the plague can be contrasted with Frankensteins monster, who embodies both lastness and rstness. Indeed, Lionel is, in writing his text for supposed future generations both last and rst; both Adam and his inversion - the last
1

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson, 1954. The book was adapted as The Last Man on Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971). 1

man. An interesting distinction to be made here is that the monsters plight in Frankenstein is inicted by a Romantic mad scientist, experiencing a eureka moment, and then, in turn, unleashing the destructive power of science.2 Frankenstein is, in that sense, a classic model for Romantic science. This contrasts sharply with the lack of all such three elements in The Last Man. In fact, it is the destructive power of nature that is emphasized in LM, pitted against the innocuous resistance of mankind and its knowledge. Whereas Frankenstein dramatizes the wonder and terror of human discovery and, seemingly inevitable, hubris, LM does not. Instead, science or natural philosophy is impotent beyond its ability to observe, categorize and speculate. For example, in itemizing solar and natural phenomena, there is only a sense of the observational role of natural philosophy. By comparison, Victors science - an act of revelation left undescribed - is a dynamic force that drives the narrative. Similarly, Merrivals highly speculative ideas concerning the ecliptic and gradual change over thousands of years, are ridiculed and remain just that, speculative. " From the moment the capitalized word PLAGUE appears (139) - screaming out on the page, if unspoken in the narrative - LM nally becomes the book for which the reader has waited. The roman clef of Volume I3 dissipates and the readers mind is xed, just like Lionels in an indenable anxiety to behold the catastrophe (139). From this moment on, the book launches its plague narrative, and with it the modern reader is swept along. Its premise, that of a pandemic accompanied by large-scale natural disasters, speaks the vocabulary of the modern world. The success of the virus narrative and last-man narrative hinge upon the equal promise of destruction and salvation. In so much as the narratives are presented as inevitabilities, in both title and frame, catastrophe is guaranteed. However, in the existence of an extant text and a world in which to discover it, there is the promise of avoidability. It is the successful mixture of inevitability and avoidability that underpins plot tension. " From Chapter V of Volume II onwards evidence of natural disasters multiply. Plague, and extinction through plague or pandemic, will be dealt with separately, while here natural phenomena and the growing hostility of nature will be addressed. Chapter V begins with disorder in the elements (181), and the reader, just as Lionel does, must ask why there is this strange darkening of nature, which has become dark, cold and ungenial (181). Why dost thou howl thus, O wind? apostrophizes Lionel By day and by
2 3

For discussions of Romantic science see Richard Holmes The Age of Wonder (2007).

It should be noted that little, if no, attention has been paid to Volume I. The focus here being from the plague/extinction narrative onwards. 2

night for four long months thy roarings have not ceased (182). Now, this seems a fair question. Why is the world in LM subjected to such increasing extremes of weather? Even allowing for poetic licence in this description, LM features natural disasters and climactic aberrations which have nothing to do with the plague narrative. They are not immediately nor directly attributed to supernatural means, neither by Shelley nor narrator Lionel. Instead, it is the effects of human civilization that are destroyed. First, the shores of the sea are strewn with wrecks, the medium of human exploration and expansion, the sea, confounds mankinds mastery of it. Second, the frail balloon dares no longer sail on the agitated air. Again, human mastery of the elements through technology and science is thwarted in LM. Soon humans very cities are wasted by thee (182), Lionel continues to apostrophize. These extremes in nature then seem to have no causal relation to human advancement, technology and science. They are not the result of hubris or the destructive power of Romantic science. " The destruction abroad is delivered at times in laconic fashion. 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). The Black Death of 1348 is recollected, where it is estimated that a third of the worlds population was wiped out. He asks Can it be true [...] that whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature? Neither Shelley nor Lionel imply any supernatural connection between the growing turbulence in nature and the outbreak of plague. If anything, this may seem unusual in the 1820s. To attribute patterns and laws in the natural world and creation to a creator, namely God, would have been quite normal and expected. Excepting the religious sect that ourishes in Paris, the decline in nature and the world has an unusually secular and naturalistic feel in LM. The compelling vision of darkness and a disrupted, hostile nature may owe a lot to the so-called Year without a Summer (1816) that gave rise to Shelleys rst novel, Frankenstein (1818) and Byrons Darkness (1816). Mount Tamboras eruption in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) in 1815, after a great deal of volcanic activity in previous years, led to climactic aberrations in the summer of 1816 that are analogous to Shelleys descriptions in LM.4 In spite of the fact that both LM and Darkness envisage a naturalistic worldwide catastrophe, there is one clear division in that Byron foresees in his dream, which was not all a dream an apocalyptic end-time to both mankind and world, even universe: Darkness had no need of aid from them - She was the Universe. Shelleys vision incorporates climactic aberrations
4

The eruption of Laki - the Laki haze - in 1783 led to similar climactic aberrations and increased death tolls throughout Europe. 3

but no end for the natural world, only for the human one. In Byrons nightmarish fantasy there is the cold comfort of an end-time encompassing both mankind and the universe. Byrons poem echoes Erasmus Darwins long, scientic poem The Botanic Garden (1791) in which, referring to Herschels papers on the Construction of the Heavens (1785 and 1789), the poet picks up on a vision of a universe in differing stages of growth and decay. A universe that, therefore, has an end: "
" " "

Star after star from Heavens high arch shall rush, Sun sink on suns, and systems systems crush, Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall, And death and night and chaos mingle all!

Here the word extinct encompasses a plurality of worlds; an annihilation of not only creatures and habitats, but of planets and star systems. " When Adrians entourage arrive at Dover, nature is in uproar in a tremendous war of air and water (287). At the start of Volume III, Lionel had mocked - in self-deprecation the very absence of conventional apocalyptic signs in nature in a passage worth quoting in full: "
" " " " "

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 agonizing 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!" (247)

Lionel goes on to describe a pastoral idyll of the garden of England in spring. Although there is a degree of unreliability in Lionels narrative (i.e. that there are indeed natural phenomena traditionally treated as portents of supernatural activity, or their results on earth), this passage may be important as an indication of how to interpret the quite incredible events to follow. Strictly speaking, a lot of the unusual celestial and natural phenomena are yet to come. However, not only is Lionels narrative retrospective, but also the message seems clear: this is no traditional biblical end of time. Indeed, at Dover, in Chapter IV, as the rear guard prepares to leave for Paris, there is grave turbulence in the natural world. The tempestuous world of waters (287) attacks the literal and symbolic
4

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. " Then, in watching the sunset, where a forecast of the next days weather might be elicited in folkloric sayings (red sky at night, shepherd's delight), an event akin to parhelia (sundogs or mock suns) is observed in wonder by the group:
" " " When the mighty luminary approached within a few degrees of the tempest-tossed horizon, suddenly, a wonder! three other suns, alike burning and brilliant, rushed from various quarters of the heavens towards the great orb; they whirled round it. (288)

Parhelia, referred to as early as Aristotle and Cicero, were well documented scientic phenomena, appearing in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society during the eighteenth century. However, Shelleys account does not seem like a naturalistic appropriation of sundog stories. The movement and circling - the sun itself seemed to join in the dance - and uncertainty as to whether there are three mock suns, or just two as in the scientic phenomenon, is unclear. MS seems to return to standard eye-witness accounts in stating that suddenly the three mock suns united in one, and plunged into the sea (288), but then adds 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). In conclusion, this must be a deliberate misrepresentation of a sundog phenomenon; indeed, the apparition of these meteors implies meteoric behaviour, or that which can be attributed to other celestial phenomena. Shelley appears to be toying with, on the one hand, the reliability of scientic accounts, while, on the other hand, gently mocking the human predisposition to ascribe supernatural causes to natural, and more specically, celestial phenomena. " Shelley then draws in the ideas of Copernicus and Herschel - a sharp redressing of traditional cosmology: "
"

[...] it appeared as if suddenly the motion of the earth was revealed to us - as if no longer we were ruled by ancient laws, but were turned adrift in an unknown region of space. (289)

The revelatory emphasis of Romantic science touched on above surfaces here. The group is given a sudden vision of scientic truth. The ancient laws referred to are the legacy
5

from Greek natural philosophy of Ptolemaic cosmology, wherein the world, the heaviest and basest element earth, lies at the centre of the universe. In such a scheme, all else revolves around, or spirals out from, the earth. Although the spherical nature of the earth was an idea not inimical to Greek natural philosophy, it was Copernicus that is credited with decentring the earth in the universe, and revealing that the earth circled the sun. The astronomer Herschel, in his paper On the Proper Motion of the Solar System, showed not only that the planets of our solar system revolve around the sun, but that the entire system rotates around an unidentied point in the Milky Way, which, in turn, was rotating around other galaxies. This is clearly echoed in Shelleys idea of the earth being adrift in an unknown region of space. Far from being the centre of a xed universe, the earth is moving through stellar space. The revelation, then, of this moment, is of earths lack of specialness. Instead it is one of a plurality of worlds, and rather than being part of a static, permanent and xed scheme, it is adrift in space. " The tension between supernatural revelation and scientic observation continues in images conjuring up Whistons A New Theory of the Earth (1696): "
" "

Many cried aloud that these were no meteors, but globes of burning matter, which had set re to the earth, and caused the vast cauldron at our feet to bubble up with its measureless waves;" (289)

The distinction between meteors and globes of burning matter is an interesting one. There seems to be a shift in vernacular from the inherently scientic meteor to the more religiously apocalyptic globes. However, even these, as burning matter, are predominantly scientic in character. The image of the destructive power of celestial bodies crashing into the earth (or vice versa) causing global catastrophe evokes, as noted, Whistons seventeenth-century work attributing Noahs ood to the earth passing through the tail of a comet. Indeed, Whiston linked comets and earthly catastrophes generally. In this case, preparing to be deluged, the crowd plays out the division of the group into the superstitious - the day of judgment was come they averred - and those less given to visionary terrors (289). Scientic 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 biblical rhetoric picks up on an interesting image from Ecclesiastes 12; an image that returns in the text as a motif of catastrophic change. In Chapter I of Volume III, resonant with echoes of the discussion of Ecclesiastes on Mans position and fate, MS/
6

Lionel rst draws parallels to the biblical fall in that man is like our rst parents expelled from Paradise (252). Then the grasshopper image of both gradual and catastrophic change is brought in where every small and pelting inconvenience came with added force; [...] we sank beneath the added feather chance threw on us; the grasshopper was a burthen (253). MS develops this idea, of the compounding effect of tiny changes in circumstance, in Chapter II as the band of emigrants led by Raymond prepare to leave England. Lionel lingers on the heightened signicance of an every day act in the swinging open of the white gate to Windsor forest, confessing that, At times like these, minute circumstances assume giant and majestic proportions (258). This movement MS observes, from the minute to the majestic, from microcosm to macrocosm, plays on the signicance, or lack of, of humans in the universe. Later, when Lionel goes to nd Lucy Clayton before the departure for the continent, he nds her working on her mothers shroud (284), a detail of woe that tellingly links life to the human lot of mortality. Lucys long-suffering mother gives in to extinction in one, swift and sudden demise: Her life, which had long been hovering on its extinction, now yielded at once to the united effects of misery and sickness, and that same morning she had died. (285) Again we nd a degree of worldly, scientic causality in united effects conspiring gradually, reaching a threshold or tipping point, and then producing a dramatic or catastrophic end. Similarly, the events leading up to Idris death that directly precede the death of Lucys mother, show how tiny changes, seemingly mundane and insignicant events, conspire to produce catastrophic and life-changing outcomes. They go back for Lucy at Idris behest; the carriage breaks down; they go on in a cabriolet; they get caught in the storm... Lionel later laments his inability to perceive the many minute threads of the inextricable net of our destinies in which we are inmeshed completely (275). His choice of words hint at fatalism and belief in a pre-ordained destiny. Indeed, he is trying to nd meaning in an incomprehensible situation. However, the series of events rather points to the potential catastrophic effect of causality. Later, after the Countess death in Dijon, the dwindling band of humanity scales Jura to cross from Switzerland into Italy, seeking an easier life. Their slow, Sisyphean task is again linked to the Ecclesiastian grasshopper: There are times when minor difculties grow gigantic - times, when as the Hebrew poet expressively terms it, the grasshopper is a burthen. (323) " The grasshopper motif is problematic in many ways. Firstly, the translation used from the King James Bible appears inaccurate. The actual biblical image is - translating from the hebrew - of the grasshopper dragging itself along instead of hopping as it naturally should. This does not equate to MSs burthen - meaning that the tiniest of things
7

can weigh you down. There is a clear shift in meaning here. But that does not affect Shelley's use of the image meaning that the minor can encompass the major. In part, it is a synecdochal vision of the universe where the tiniest component can undo the whole. Moreover, a vision of change where seemingly insignicant, humdrum variations or changes can cause wholesale change through an entire system. The biblical rhetoric is both perpetuated and naturalized or secularized. Lionel refers to the Hebrew poet rather than scripture. In fact, Koheleth (Heb. speaker) or Ecclesiastes, presents a bleak, stoical cosmology that resonates with LM. The opening mantra of all is vanity (Eccles. 12:2) sets the tone of the chapter, where human efforts go unrewarded, where toil leads nowhere, where the universe seems to care little, and where man is at the mercy of chance. LMs relation to Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) then is twofold. Firstly, MS uses the only book of the bible that, written post-Exile, presents a truly challenging and bleak worldview. A vision that provides a very different view of humanitys end in a slow inexorable decline. Indeed, there is perhaps no need to naturalize the palpable decay and decline evident in Ecclesiastes 12:5. Instead, Shelley purely picks up on the arresting image of a world where One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; and the earth abideth for ever. (Eccles. 12:4) Another connection is the idea that comes from this gradualist view of decline, that, out of tiny changes, great change is born; in other words, catastrophic change. This combining of Huttonian Gradualism and Cuvierian Catastrophism is part of the books treatment of time. The Treatment of Time LMs treatment of time is primarily a drama of the last days of man (247), and in that sense juxtaposes traditional, religious last-days narratives with more modern, scientic and secularized workings of the idea. In addition, and as a result, LM poses various questions regarding the nature of time, and human ability to interpret it. Before Raymonds vainglorious demise in single-handedly storming the gates of plague-stricken Istanbul in Volume II, Lionel walks in the armys encampment: "
" "

The arrival of several with fresh stories of marvels, from the eet; the exaggerations bestowed on what was already known; tales of old prophecies, of fearful histories of whole regions which had been laid waste. (155)

MS underlines humans predisposition for superstition when faced with extreme events and natural disasters. The text turns to marvels, exaggerations and tales of old
8

prophecies. In one sense, this is the established vocabulary to deal with such phenomena. The other growing tradition evident in LM is, of course, the secularized, scientic tradition of observing and describing unusual events. In Chapter IV of Volume II, for example, the two strands are juxtaposed. The black sun incident (177), at rst 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) However, as Night fell upon every country we know that this is not a total solar eclipse as that would only be visible from highly limited areas of the earth when it does, very rarely, occur. Instead, MS deliberately embellishes the reports to gently mock the superstition of the human race. The wave of dread created by the sun of darkness (178), unknown shapes gured on the ground (177), is played against the opening of the chapter and the superstitious science of Merrival. " MS notes that Merrivals earthly paradise is based on an ingenious essay by Mackey where pericyclical motion of the earths pole (and thus of the ecliptic), not the wickedness of mankind, was the source of all myths of decline (174). The shift in primary cause, however, does not seem to alter the end result, as Merrival confesses that an earthly hell or purgatory, would occur, when the ecliptic and equator would be at right angles (174). Merrivals well-meaning natural philosophy, bound up in myth, preserves a religious end-time with both an earthly paradise and hell envisaged. It is mocked by Ryland who pithily states: Be assured that earth is not, nor ever can be heaven, while the seeds of hell are natives of her soil. (173) Moreover, the reader, knowing the predestined outcome of the plague narrative and last-man fable, must join in in mocking such scientic prophecy. " As the group make their way through France toward Switzerland there are further incidents that juxtapose the scientic and the superstitious. They are subject to extravagant delusion as Every evening brought its fresh creation of spectres (317). Lionel himself admits to having the utmost difculty in discrediting the supernatural. Mass delusions such as that the sun grew paler gain credence, and, as Lionel problematizes 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 gure 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 personied, turns out to be a French
9

nobleman stricken with plague. Again, the superstitious is rst compelling but then easily and rationally explained away. " The restatement of the term the last days of man inevitably lends apocalyptic, end-time strains to the narrative. However, in our case, the prophecy has already been instigated as a fait accompli. The reader knows Lionel to be the last man. The reader knows that the supernatural, Gothic elements are part of the human narrative and understanding of what is supercially a secular drama. Lionel imparts the reactions of the group, while himself remaining objective and seemingly unmoved by ostensibly supernatural phenomena. Religious catastrophes and apocalypses tend to offer salvation and redemption for an elect or chosen group, particularly within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Noahs ood is retribution for mankinds wickedness, but in destroying mankind, God saves Noah. This, in itself, constitutes a last-man narrative; a remaking of the world, purging it of its wickedness. Indeed, a drama of lastness and rstness. The Flood narrative is revisited in LM after the ramshackle fellowship enters the gates of Dijon, just eighty in number. The sorrowful procession is contrasted to humanity which in turn is likened to a ood, which like a ood, had once spread over and possessed the whole earth, generation after generation owing on ceaselessly (319). Now, the Flood is the archetypal catastrophe in Western terms. Here humanity, destroyed by the Flood for its wickedness, becomes the Flood sweeping over the face of the earth. In one sense, this resonates with the naturalistic vision of the world in Ecclesiastes. Moreover, it might t in with a progressionist view of humanity developing from puny streamlet to vast perennial river to ocean; from plaything of nature to gardener of earth and shepherd of her ocks (319) in a universe in constant movement toward perfection. But the ood is, at the same time, an agent of divine retribution and a natural disaster (not unlike the plague). Implicit in Lionel and MSs analogy is that mankind is akin to a natural phenomenon, a form of plague or catastrophic event that grows incrementally then sweepingly effects catastrophe. The two strands read together ambivalently. Is mankind some kind of plague? A natural disaster that builds up gradually over a long time-period then ebbs away, at last incredibly suddenly in a catastrophic end? Or is humanity a divine agent, like the Flood, effecting Gods will? That mans dominion seemed eternal is the upshot of the rhetoric; however, the image - of mankind as some kind of ood or tide that, just as it emerges, must also become dried up - provides a far more naturalistic tenor that resonates with ideas of deep time that were growing in inuence. " It is time - and specically the theories concerning the age of the earth initiated by
10

James Hutton and later developed by Charles Lyell, after the writing of LM, in 1830-33 -

that undoes natural theological schemes where there is a divine, primary cause in the universe. Arguably, its spatial counterpart is Herschels vision of a universe where our world, solar system, galaxy is adrift in a cosmos riddled with worlds and, most probably, other life. Indeed, MS asks Will the earth still keep her place among the planets? will she still journey with marked regularity around the sun (320). Herschel inspired Percy Byssche Shelley (PBS) to attack established religion and declare himself an atheist. Lionels speech (320) zooms in from universe to planet, through ora and fauna, rushing centripetally inwards; and yet man, paragon of animals fades. Others tried to make sense of apparent inconsistencies between a universe founded on reason and a universe seemingly innite in space and time. Cuviers Catastrophism, a vision of a world repeatedly drowned and remade, pointed perhaps to fragmentation, disintegration and reconstruction. LM does just this in its narrative devices. The last-man premise, and the extant text in the frame, allows us to look both into the future and the past. These pasts and futures are seemingly both inevitable and avoidable at the same time. Allen (94) considers the idea of reversibility in LM. In doing so he discusses various points. Firstly, the relation of reality to texts and vice versa in LM. The frame of LM, where fragments of text are reconstructed into the narrative that the reader then receives, comes from a movement of reality to text Allen contends. But, at the same time, the reconstructed text then may or may not become a reality. This is another way of framing the aforementioned point of inevitability versus avoidability that creates plot tension. This leads into the second point he considers in relation to reversibility: the collapse of linear time. This invertible sense of ow from reality to text and text to reality collapses a sense of linear time. Linear time is a cornerstone of both a progressionist worldview that envisages a universe developing and owing in the direction of (inevitable) perfection, and a natural theological scheme where there is a distinct beginning and end frame - in creation and salvation. Allen (95) questions whether we are all Cassandras in that we are doomed to see the future and inevitable catastrophe. This is a key theme in LM. Even though we know our fate, can we change it? Lionels speeches consistently leap from specicities to universalities as he describes the human condition:
" " I strove to escape from thought - vainly - futurity, like a dark image in a phantasmagoria, came nearer and more near, till it clasped the whole earth in its shadow. (201)

Two contradicting experiences and understandings of time provide plot tension: on the one hand, the foreboding of Cuvierian catastrophe, annihilation, destruction; on the other, the
11

sense of time and space that is innite - Huttons no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. When Lionel soliloquizes regarding the partygoers at Windsor - Ye are all going to die, I thought; already your tomb is built up around you. (189) - both a Cuvierian catastrophe and Huttonian eternity resonate. The coming Cuvierian extinction, of which both protagonist and audience know, will destroy the youths, but they will be buried in the earth for an eternity, in a world that, seemingly, has no end. " At the start of Volume III, as emigration from dank and cold (253) England takes hold, Lionel alludes to Paradise Lost, where Like to our rst parents, the whole earth is before him, a wide desart. (252) This allusion to the fall cycles time and places us both in the present and the beginning of time (253). The drama of mans fall from grace and expulsion into the wilderness and death is replayed in LM. But this time, it is the civilized world of human dominion - outside of the original paradise - that is made the new paradise. Man and his giant powers (252) has, seemingly, made a paradise of exile, only to be forcibly exiled once again. At the same time, there are hints that the Romantic image of earthly paradise - as uncovered by Joseph Banks in Tahiti - still exists on earth, and it is to there the migrs must travel, to a naturalistic beginning that still exists. Lionel's declares: The south is the native place of the human race; though, again, we know that all but one of the fellowship will never make it. Rather than replaying the religious narrative of the bible, MS rewrites this fundamental human drama as a recurring, naturalistic scheme. Adrians conviction that the survivors should leave their homeland and seek out milder climes in Chapter II underpins an Ecclesiastesian worldview of stoical acceptance: He felt that the end of time was come; he knew that one by one we would dwindle into nothingness. (256) And yet, in this end-time of inevitable annihilation, Adrian nds the strength and courage to lead the few out of their now-inhospitable Eden and away toward a new paradise. In Englands demise there is a strange sense of cyclical time:
" " " " [...] 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)

MS expresses and describes paramnesia or dj vu - concepts attributed to much later thought.5 She makes quite clear that these events are a re-enactment of biblical and
5

Paramnesia is attributed to neurologist Arnold Pick (1903), while dj vu to French philosopher and psychic mile Boirac (1876). 12

mythical events. In doing this she presents a time continuum that is the antithesis both of a traditional, natural-theological view of time and a secular, progressionist timeframe. Instead, Cuvierian revolutions of catastrophe wipe the earth clean, an earth that stretches on regardless in an innite, Herschellean space and eternal, Huttonian time. In this cycle of expansion and destruction, all is, as in Ecclesiastes, chasing the wind; indeed, Lionel declares that: "
" "

[...] an uninhabited rock in the wide Pacic, which had remained since creation uninhabited, unnamed, unmarked, would be of as much account in the worlds future history, as desert England. (295)

Plague & Extinction in The Last Man The plague narrative constitutes the dominant plot-driving device in LM. It acts both as an intertextual element that sets LM in a tradition of plague texts, and therefore in an historical context of human continuity, and also as the agent to effect human degeneration and extinction. These two latter ideas - which follow on from the epidemic or virus narrative - are signicant contextualizations in the scientic atmosphere of Shelley and her contemporaries. On the one hand, Buffonian ideas of degeneration permeate the text; on the other, Cuvierian themes of extinction. The historical idea that plague could wipe out populations en masse was preserved in texts that Lionel mentions in LM. As noted above, these themes, far from becoming unfashionable, are all the more relevant in the twentyrst century. " In Chapter VI of Volume II Ryland rejects his role of Lord Protector crying: Death and disease level all men. (192) This statement underpins the signicance of the pandemic in LM. It is highly ambivalent in, at once, being both a utopian - it creates equality among humans - and dystopian - it destroys human society - force. This destructive, dystopian force is echoed in Rylands cry of Every man for himself! (192). Though once again, this statement brims with ambiguity as an Edenic state was a form of every man for himself. The plague is termed an epidemic (183) and Lionel tells us that:
" " " Yet a feeling of awe, a breathless sentiment of wonder, a painful sense of the degradation of humanity, was introduced into every heart. Nature, our mother, and our friend, had turned on us a brow of menace. (183)

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Natures ambivalence as regards humanity is embodied in the plague; a destructive force that threatens extinction: whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature? (184). The Black Death of 1348 is mentioned (184). It seems, as Ryland noted (q.v.), [...] that earth is not, nor ever can be heaven, while the seeds of hell are natives of her soil. (173) Indeed, Lord Protector Ryland epitomizes humanitys helplessness against the ruin caused by the convulsions of physical nature (190). He declares: All the world has plague! Adrian replies, ever in search of utopia (nowhere), Then to avoid it we must quit the world (191). When Lionel speaks of the enemy - the impalpable, invisible foe, who has so long besieged us (251) one wonders if he speaks only of the plague or of nature, purifying itself of mankind. " There are traditional stop-off points in plague literature that Lionel (and MS) discuss in the book. On learning of an infected person at Bolters lock (Ch. VII. Vol. II) Lionel hastens to his aid, championing Christian compassion - I am going to do, as I would be done by (203). Lionel (203) recalls De Foes A Journal of the Plague Year (1772) and Charles Brockden Browns Arthur Mervyn (1799) in seeing the corpse. They may have provided the vernacular to describe the effects of plague, but Lionels experience far outstrips the written word. This in itself is paradoxical as it is through the insufcient written word that Lionel conveys his message to us. Lionel contradicts himself, shifting between modes of rstness and lastness. In one passage he tells us directly that there is to be a new beginning for mankind: "
"

Yet we were not all to die. No truly, though thinned, the race of man would continue, and the great plague would, in after years, become matter of history and wonder. (204)

In the following chapter (VII) he refers once again to Brown and De Foe, adding Boccaccios Decameron (1349-51) which documents the Black Death in Florence. But he recalls texts with a reverie that somehow blunts their edge. He dwells in a vast annihilation and voiceless solitude (209) where any voice helps remember and re-enact the past. " In Chapter III of Volume III, Lionel himself exhibits signs of infection. In his own words, The rst symptom of the disease was the death-warrant, which in no single instance had been followed by pardon or reprieve. (268) At rst there seems No gleam of hope, and yet Lionel recovers. Regarded as deception (268), Lionel ensures his lastness by recovering from the plague, just as humanity is to be undone in order to be reborn. However, there is little of the miraculous in Lionels recovery. His strength is
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redoubled after his recovery. His recovery is, of course, a necessary plot device in order to deliver the last-man fable. The reader knows the protagonist must survive so that the titular or textual prophecy is fullled. " After Lionels recovery, Idris too pledges to throw off this degrading weakness of body (268). Of course, her fate is not to be last and rst. Instead she degrades and dies. LM abounds with such imagery of human degeneration, from Lionels nding of Raymonds body in Constantinople, a shattered mechanism, incapable and clodlike (164), to his anthill image where humans are degraded to insects: Such were we on earth (248). Echoing the ecclesiastian worldview discussed earlier Lionel cries: life is all that we covet, there being no fruits to Human labour wasted (248). He describes his fellow men as automatons of esh and degraded (248). In this reduction of humanity, it is the human spirit (presumably the divine spark) that is lacking or lost. As external factors drive their existence into misery, characters display a form of Buffonian degeneration. Faced with a harsh and hostile climate humans begin to degenerate from the best work of God (205) to automatons of esh. Shelley underlines this by drawing on The Iliad where Diseases haunt our frail humanity (247); she points to, rstly, the degradation and degeneration of humans at the hands of nature, and, secondly, the idea that the seeds of destruction lie inert but hidden in nature; that nature might not only be our carer and all-inall but also our destroyer, careless of our self-appointed position as lord of creation (248). Raymond presages this degradation and natures ills before his death in in Volume II:
" " " Earth is to me a tomb, the rmament a vault, shrouding mere corruption. Time is no more, for I have stepped within the threshold of eternity; each man I meet appears a corse, which will soon be deserted of its animating spark, on the eve of decay and corruption. (149)

Raymond foresees how the pandemic leads to a breakdown in synecdochal human structures: disintegration and disunion, a dying and decomposing of both the individual human body and body politic. It is a destruction of the part and whole where all are equal in u- and dystopian degeneration and death. " 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 worlds corruption. However, the voiceless, empty world of Shelley
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echoes an Ecclesiastesian view of innite time and space, rather than that of divine retribution the reader recognizes from the Book of Genesis. Moreover, Noah saves his family - therefore being no strictly dened tale of rstness and lastness as in LM - making the Mosaic account not a narrative of extinction. Of course, the idea of voicelessness alludes both to humanitys narrative (both actual and textual) and the creation-destruction implicit in Gods Word. Tellingly in LM, a world bereft of mans voice seems similarly stripped of divinity. Shelley plays on the Cuvierian idea of extinction. For example, in the episode where Idris determines to turn back in order to save Lucy Datchet (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. Moreover, a single humans ability to check fate is marginalized. This extinction, this inevitable destruction, is traced out from the part to the whole, the individual to the race. LM is an extinction narrative. However, it is one tempered by the interrelation of the textual and actual. Allens idea of reversibility (q.v.) applies again. The reader is provided with an incomplete textual extinction where both frame and protagonist refer beyond extinction to both textual and actual (us) readers. This enmeshed ambiguity dodges the bullet of Ultimate Cause that philosophically underpins the book. Is the universe held together by reason or divine will? It seems that the Romantic drive to the unexplainable holds sway. Most importantly, the reason to be found or read into the extinction narrative is the human voice, and the human voice alone. Cosmology & Synecdoche in The Last Man So where does the plague/extinction narrative leave mankind apropos nature, the world and the universe? This lord of creation that vacillates between dys- and utopia, progresses toward perfection and degenerates toward animal machine (236), is both lauded and lampooned at a subtly satirical level. When MS, through Lionel, ventures that nobles, natures true nobility, who bear their patent in their mien, who are from their cradle elevated above the rest of their species, because they are better then the rest (176) then the reversibility of the text reminds us that these nobles will later be dying helpless without their servants. The statement is satirically ludicrous - it is an in-joke, a nod to a savvy audience that shares the inverted time perspective of author and protagonist. The reader knows that, although individuals and individuality are praised, ultimately, all are rendered equal before plague and extinction. This is the realization of a utopian ideal in dystopia, catastrophe and extinction.
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"

Society is inverted at the beginning of Volume III. The poor enter the houses of the

rich (248). The rich die on the threshold of poverty (251). A striking image of a poor woman dead in garb of splendour before the mirror and on the toilet in a rich familys house illustrates this. (250) We were all equal now - is repeated twice like a mantra - but near at hand was an equality still more levelling [...] a state where beauty and strength, and wisdom, would be as vain as riches and birth. (249) This is death and the prospect of extinction. Ironically, the utopian emerges from the dystopian: the products of human labour [...] were [...] far more, than the thinned generation could possibly consume. Shelleyian radicalism seeps through: the rich out-consume their needs, but gone, they leave a surplus behind beyond imagination. " Differing structural models are brought up and discarded throughout the book. The narrator quotes from Burkes Reections perpetual decay, fall, renovation and progression and declares, Strange system! [...] that thus man remains, while we the individuals pass away (180). This Burkean political organicism - a permanent body composed of transitory parts - falls, just as all other models or systems in LM. All human societal structures fall, echoing the bleak and moribund worldview of Ecclesiastes. The question of whether this is a self-regulating principle of nature that is part of a natural cycle - as discussed by Cuvier - remains unanswered. Faced with potential catastrophic extinction man is dispossessed:
" " " What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people innite space? [...] man shrinks into insignicance, he feels his tenure of life insecure, his inheritance on earth cut off. (182)

The proposition of there being other worlds and peoples in space was well spread at this time - and inimical to a Christian worldview. In this sense, humanity risks more than just disinheritance on earth, but also insignicance among a multitude of worlds and galaxies. The shift from a natural-theological worldview that sees nature as proof of divine design is complete as Lionel declares, we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb (211). The rhetoric and vernacular of Natural Theology and religious belief remains; however, it is increasingly undermined: once man was a favourite of the Creator, is man lord of the creation? Lionel concludes apostrophizing:
" " Lie down, O man, on the ower-strown earth; give up all claim to your inheritance, all you can ever possess of it is the small cell which the dead require. (248)
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The shift in nature goes through every level of the universe. On earth - She could take our globe... (183) - nature is hostile and mocks mans dominion by demonstrating power over man. This vast indifference mocks fallen and degenerate mankind: Nature was the same, as when she was the kind mother of the human race; now, childless and forlorn, she was a mockery; her loveliness a mask for deformity. (257) While there a many images of society and nature disintegrating - the corn [...] lay in autumn rotting on the ground (216) - death fell on man alone (216). Man seems to be rotting away leaving nature puried: the ploughman had died beside the plough (250). The relation between man and nature is inverted, though in sum, mans mooted power over nature seems just human rhetoric. " The synecdochal structure of human society breaks down into a form of animal naturalism, into the animal machine. After tall tales are told as Raymonds soldiers prepare to storm Constantinople, the cohesive, societal force that gels the men together simply falls away and they seem reduced to a more primiitive and naturalistic state:
" " Each individual, before a part of a great whole moving only in unison with others, now became resolved into the unit nature had made him, and thought of himself only. (155)

At once a Romantic primitivization into a state akin to the noble savage - an Edenic utopia where man is an individual alone - and yet also a dystopian disintegration of the bonds that hold human civilization together. Indeed, at the end of Volume II, Lionel entreats them to leave England in search of some natural Paradise (243). However, it is only after the evident disorder throughout society. Man as individual performs animal functions , but as lord of created nature [...] existed no longer (251). MS explores mans relation to creation/nature which is inverted by events/narrative/plot. In spite of this, mans exalted position is constantly reafrmed, only to be consistently collapsed. Shelley continuously reafrms a natural theological worldview, and that of religious orthodoxy, but only in overturning said cosmological order. Her naturalistic view of nature is strikingly askew from broader accepted views. " In sum, human insignicance in time and space are presented factually. the precariousness of human existence, the natural drama of rstness and lastness, the continuous threat of extinction through plague and various other media, is dramatized in LM. Human relation to time and space, to nature and universe, are depicted in terms that only nd biblical resonance in the bleak, moribund and highly unrepresentative Ecclesiastes. Scientic evidence is used throughout in both playing up to, and
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undermining myth. Cuvierian themes of Catastrophism and extinction exploited to compel audience attention. The result reads like prophecy. It is also an ecological diatribe championing human individuality and humility. Idris, in the throes of a purely natural death, perhaps summarizes mankinds rule in terms of individual and species in the great scheme of things: One moment, only one moment (266). Bibliography Allen, Graham. Critical Issues: Mary Shelley. Palgrave MacMillan. Basingstoke: 2008. Beer, Gillian. Darwin and the Uses of Extinction, in Victorian Studies, 51:2 (2009), pp. 321-330. Canuel, Mark, Acts, Rules, and The Last Man, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 53.2 (1998), pp.147-170. Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder. How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Harper Press. London: 2009. Kilgour, Maggie. One immortality: The Shaping of the Shelleys in The Last Man, in European Romantic Review 16:5 (2005), pp. 563-588. Melville, Peter. The Problem of Immunity in The Last Man, in SEL 47:4 (2007), pp. 825-846. Shelley, Mary. The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley Volume 4: The Last Man. Pickering. London: 1996. Sterrenburg, Lee. The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions, in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33:3 (1978), pp. 324-347. Sussman, Charlotte. Islanded in the World: Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man in PMLA 118:2 (2003), pp. 286-301. Vine, Steven. Mary Shelleys Sublime Bodies: Frankenstein, Matilda, The Last Man in English 55:212 (2006), pp. 141-156. Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. Performing History, Performing Humanity in Mary Shelleys The Last Man in Studies in English Literature 42:4 (2002), pp. 753-780.

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