The novel progresses from the classic autobiographical beginning of the hero, Lionel Verney, with the first line, “I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook,” to the promised singular resolution: “behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney—the LAST MAN” (9, 470). Any apparent coherence or order in this seeming A-to-Z narrative is misleading. The frame of The Last Man, contained in the preface, introduces a second author of the narrative, an unnamed vacationer who in 1818 discovers the scattered “Sibylline leaves” that he assembles into Verney’s linear story. The Last Man is a narrative of fused fragments confused by time: the human extinction of the late twenty-first century is assembled from fragments in 1818. This discoverer, a cave spelunker, describes his formative editorial role: “I present the public with my latest discoveries in the slight Sibylline pages. Scattered and unconnected as they were, I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent form. [. . .] Sometimes I have thought that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer. [. . .] My only excuse for thus transforming them, is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition” (6–7). These “obscure and chaotic” fragments of a narrative are assembled in a certain order, one that doggedly pursues coherence and causality, when they essentially have none. In their discovered form they are admittedly “unintelligible,” and this outer-frame narrator claims responsibility for causal sense in the unfolding of events, including his temerity in composing “links” between fractured episodes. The novel seems unable to fulfill its own prophecy of human extinction. Frankenstein’s doubly framed narrative makes an apparent study of each teller’s manipulations and reliability. Shelley’s framing in The Last Man is less coherent, and therefore more mysterious. One could claim that the preface’s sole purpose is to seal off logical objections that the narrative of a last man would have no readers, but her placement of the preface anterior to the agonies of the twenty-first century gestures to a more essential, if enigmatic, role for these initial five pages out of nearly five hundred total. The time inversion might suggest that Verney’s story is a prophecy of future England, not a lived event, or that Shelley wishes to fragment linear time in order to question assumptions of the inevitable advance of society. Perhaps when nature itself behaves chaotically, narrative follows.
Narrative chaos has been embraced by literary deconstruction, which looks at narrative dynamics through a lens of nonlinearity and contingency (see Hayles; Parker; Conte; Palumbo; and Livingston). Most of this material comes from twentieth-century literature, and James Joyce in particular is a strange attractor for chaos. Carolyn Merchant has suggested in Reinventing Eden that chaos, from a narrative theory perspective, “might posit characteristics other than those identified with modernism, such as a multiplicity of real actors; acausal, nonsequential events; nonessentialized symbols and meanings; many authorial voices, rather than one; dialectical action and process, rather than the imposed logos of form; situated and contextualized, rather than universal, knowledge. It would be a story (or multiplicity of stories) that perhaps can only be acted and lived, not written at all” (157–58). Harmony, causation, and coherence are constructed from the disordered elements that make up the original story. Any appearance of order in The Last Man is based on an illusory cognitive drive to organize chaos.
This cryptic beginning leaves authorship indeterminate and creates a narrative experiment. It is a literary echo of Charles Darwin’s notion that the fossil record was an imperfect chronicle of a perfect story of evolutionary gradualism. Darwin filled in the gaps with narrative speculations on the intermediary forms not recorded in fossils. The “history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect,” required some spiffing up for Darwin’s gradualism to be true (Origin of Species 229). If the existing fossil record reflects the pattern of natural history, the evolutionary narrative is chaotically fragmented, like Shelley’s sibylline leaves. These texts are original artifacts, and the patched quilt of a coherent narrative pieced together from their fragments may show the author’s attempt to conform to the expectations of the nineteenth-century reading public. Shelley’s novel has received much more positive attention from postmodernist scholars than it did from her contemporaries. The Last Man received widespread critical appraisal only after a new edition was printed in America in 1965 (Parrinder 66). Reflecting the generally poor critical reception in 1826, one reviewer called the novel “the offspring of a diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste” (“Review of The Last Man”). With today’s popular tastes, the ecological valences of disease and pollution may be read to great advantage in this prophetic novel, and its narrative chaos is familiar to modern readers.
It is a complicated tale, with a wandering plot and surprisingly conventional characters, not improved by the sentimental and logorrheic dialogue. The novel’s value lies in Shelley’s perceptive treatment of a chaotic female-gendered nature, her appreciation of radical contingency in natural history, and the remarkable visions of global warming through globalization, which together exacerbate the spread of disease. Her characters are tortuously, farcically Romantic, but the imagined twenty-first-century climate she describes is eerily apt. Frederick Buell’s analysis of apocalypse reminds us that “plague” has dated, almost medieval connotations for individuals in modern developed nations, who often believe that medical technology and inoculation have eradicated epidemiological threats to our bodies (132). However, Shelley realizes that disease transmission will only increase as the climate warms. Shelley’s novel shows a perverse reversal of the colonial project by depicting the decline of the British body as it is colonized by exotic microbes, and an assault on English nature by advancing tropical species.
Where Frankenstein drew scenes of sublime terror evoked by the vast arctic plains, ending with the blind image of the creature “lost in darkness and distance,” The Last Man capitalizes on the paradoxical horror of a too-pleasant nature mocking psychological despair. The early arrival of the warm season indicates the arrival of the survivors’ annual trial by plague. Mother Nature reveals her vindictive, witchlike properties in the face of humanity’s reasoned opposition:
Nature, our mother, and our friend, had turned on us a brow of menace. She shewed us plainly, that, though she permitted us to assign her laws and subdue her apparent powers, yet, if she put forth but a finger, we must quake. She could take our globe, fringed with mountains, girded by the atmosphere, containing the condition of our being, and all that man’s mind could invent or his force achieve; she could take the ball in her hand, and cast it into space, where life would be drunk up, and man and all his efforts for ever annihilated. (232)
This willful, vindictive, powerfully destructive characterization of Nature, the portrait drawn in chaos ecology, was originally embodied as the fallen Eve in the Western tradition (Merchant, Reinventing Eden 157). This gendering of Nature reawakens mythological traditions of natural power lying in the laps of personified