Four Encounters

by Olaf Stapledon

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Four Encounters is an unfinished work by the writer and philosopher Olaf Stapledon, written in the late 1940s but only published 26 years after the author's death. It takes place in contemporary (post World War II) Britain, and describes four meetings with various characters who are named for the spiritual quality that best defines them: a Christian, a scientist, a mystic and a revolutionary. There were originally to have been ten encounters, but Stapledon died before the project was completed.

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 132

Sample

“Doubt is the offspring of knowledge; the savage never doubts at all.” The words are not Olaf Stapledon’s, but Winwood Reade’s.

Winwood Reade wrote the little-remembered The Martyrdom of Man, which was first published in 1872. Among other intellectual pleasures, The Martyrdom of Man offers a concise history of the world since the planets first formed round the sun, to “rotate like joints before the fire,” and a predictive history of the future. The emphasis it placed on Process was novel and alarming.

Among Reade’s audience was H. G. Wells, who declared how strongly Reade’s book influenced him. Like attracts like, and the far-sighted Stapledon must also have been powerfully moved by Reade’s book; originality builds on firm foundations, and Stapledon’s greatest works, Last and First Men and Star Maker, must owe an honorable debt to Reade’s intoxicating mixture of fact and speculation.

If doubt is the offspring of knowledge, then this book is the offspring of doubt. Although Four Encounters may be regarded as operating on a small scale, it covers a wide canvas, the whole canvas of modern questioning.

William Olaf Stapledon would require no introduction were it not that he has suffered from neglect by publishers and critics. He has an ardent following of readers, who will not need my words. Neglect attends any writer who is ahead of his time or stands apart from main literary currents. Jesus’ bitter truth about a prophet being not without honor save in his own country is aptly quoted in such circumstances. Comfortable myopia is the enemy of foresight.

In the circumstances, my duty is first of all to say that I find this volume profound and moving, not least in Stapledon’s perception that there are many truths, to which different temperaments must remain loyal.

For this is a book of conversations, not conversions. In four dialogues, the Stapledon persona encounters a Christian, a Scientist, a Mystic, and a Revolutionary. Views are aired, often pungently, opinions are not changed. Beside the passion of debate runs the dispassion of enquiry—we recognize both as Stapledonian qualities, although the method is Socratic.

One derives two kinds of pleasure from the book. To begin with, there is a beautiful contrapuntal argument that runs through all four pieces. In the first piece, an embittered engineer finds that belief returns to him when he surveys the interior of a cathedral, wondering at the fact that “stone should live and praise while in our hearts faith lies dead.” At the same time, the Stapledon persona makes an unstressed analogy with the universe itself, “the vastness of the physical,” and finds peace in the reflection that, if our small grain of a world can harbor spirit, much greater things must be at large in the wholeness, the hugeness, of space and time.

So the persona achieves a plane of thought where thought itself is impotent. Some intimations lie beyond words. For mankind may form one instrument in the orchestra of the universal spirit’s music. “Whether this music is only to be appreciated gropingly by the players themselves, or whether it is for the discerning joy of some cosmical artist, or perhaps in some incomprehensible way for the very music itself, we cannot know.” Language cannot assist us in resolving the problem, for language is no more than “primitive grunts of a terrestrial animal.”

Does Stapledon contradict himself here? Can we be both part of a universal music and little better than grunting animals? We can. The answer is to cease grunting. “Even if I say ‘Thou! Oh, Thou!’ I say too much.”

In the second conversation, the argument with the geneticist runs in different channels, although always with reference to a larger sphere of existence. The geneticist will have no nonsense with the music of the spheres. Other intelligent species may well exist in the universe, but what of them? “They are beyond our reach and I hope we are beyond theirs.” The scientist emerges as even more prideful than the Christian; like the latter, and the Mystic, he lives in a partly sought estrangement from his fellow beings, and from love.

Love forms a vivid subtheme in the book. The Stapledon persona sees love as an agent that has at least the potential to free us from various kinds of self-involvement; whereas each of the four characters against whom he is ranged see it as a web, a net, a seductive distraction.

This attitude is best displayed in the last two conversations. The Mystic puts love away from himself in an attempt to gain self-transcendence. But this may be a trap he falls into while attempting to avoid the snare of sensation; he can no longer care for people. To the Stapledon persona, this is false; people matter as they are manifestations of the spirit.

To my mind, this third conversation is the most seductive and compelling.

But the argument is developed further in the last piece, where the revolutionary-minded mechanic believes—and his girl friend believes even more strongly—that it is society that matters, not individuals. Here the spirit previously talked about so freely is narrowed to exclude all but the corporate entity of the middle or the working class. The Stapledon persona has been willing to accept the validity of spirit as a larger and all-pervasive force; he rejects it in a narrow Marxist connotation. What is under examination here is the whole concept of mankind, now seen as a social unit needing economic salvation, whereas previously it has been presented as individuals striving for individual salvation.

So the argument broadens, narrows, opens out again. In many ways, this last piece is most powerful, not least because the mechanic is divided against himself, and so comes over more clearly as a person, less as a dialectic.

One error of reasoning that Stapledon causes the mechanic to commit is of significance. The mechanic argues that an understanding of historical processes leads to a desire for the happiness of mankind as a whole. This is by no means so. It is more likely to lead to the distancing skepticism of a Gibbon, the disgust of a Swift, the learned schadenfreude of a Spengler. No man can be cheered by a study of Byzantium.

But Stapledon does not present us with dismay in his works. With disarray, yes, with a questioning of the Immanent Will that rivals Thomas Hardy’s; but never with undiluted pessimism. Indeed the fine conclusion to Last and First Men, “it is very good to have been man,” is often quoted against Stapledon as an example of smugness. The truth seems to be that Olaf Stapledon was one of the first writers to achieve a true and level agnostic perspective on the processes of history (and beyond history, on the processes of the universe of which we have only just realized we form part). If doubt is honorable, his viewpoint is ultimately the only sane one.

Having said this, I will say by contrast that Stapledon is intensely English in outlook. There is no contradiction here. Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time; he was also a Warwickshire man. I began by saying that one derived two pleasures from this book. The first pleasure lies in the language; “Thou! Oh, Thou!” may be too much, but many phrases are sufficient unto themselves. Whenever the argument threatens to become diffuse, there is an apothegm to make it all clear. What is more English in its moderation and tone than “Marxism is all very well, but if you push it too far it turns just silly”? And much of Stapledon and his philosophical stance is summed up in “I said I could understand the view that nothing mattered, but that society as such should matter, rather than individuals, seemed to me a crazy notion.” The combination of lofty idea and common English goes down well.

I have been careful throughout to refer to the “I” character in the four dialogues as “the Stapledon persona.” It is always a mistake to charge the “I” character in any fiction with representing exactly the feelings and opinions of its author—a mistake that readers and critics perpetually tumble into. But is Four Encounters fiction? Stapledon always took care to remind us that his writings were not prophecy but myth, that what he said would raise thunder “both on the Left and the Right,” and that his novels are fictionalized philosophy. In this book the fictionalization is, at first blush, of a small order. Yet there are always touches of a true novelist at hand, glimpses of nature at work of a starling gulping a butterfly, which, though introduced for a didactic end, nevertheless serve to heighten the argument and adorn the tale.

Perhaps it is misleading to suggest, as I have, that the book represents a whole and comes to a well-wrought conclusion. I do perceive such unity, while knowing from the book’s history that it is an accidental unity. Perhaps the coherence of the universe is no less unplanned.

A pattern if not a plan emerges from the prehistory of the book. While I was in New York in April of 1975, I was phoned by Harvey Satty, who told me that he had in his possession an unpublished Stapledon manuscript. I was in quest of things American, not things British, but my surprise was the surprise of an explorer of the Mayan civilization who trips across, in the rain-drenched forests of Yucatan, the secret of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.

The manuscript proved to be Four Encounters. Mr. Satty told me that Agnes Stapledon, the writer’s widow, was willing to have it published if I would write the Introduction to it. This I am now doing, confident that I am unequal to the task. My qualifications, like the coherence of the universe, are accidental. I introduced Last and First Men to the Penguin-reading public in 1963, and I devoted a eulogistic section to Stapledon’s novels in Billion Year Spree, my history of science fiction. I am proud and horrified to appear in a spot that, I feel, should be occupied by someone w. . .