One Literary Pandemic Prophecy Told from Suffering to Mourning
By Kardelen Damla Başaran
The Last Man is an overlooked epidemic story compared with the others that have captured the public eye’s attention since pandemic started. Or since two hundred years ago, actually, when it was first published and never came near to the reputation of its elderly sibling, Frankenstein. They are siblings who are also the two sides of the same coin. Quoting their mother Shelley:
“False was all this-false all but the affections of our nature, and the links of sympathy with pleasure or pain. There was but one good and one evil in the world-life and death.”
Frankenstein was the story of life; a creation, and a celebration of life despite how distorted it can be. The Last Man is the story of death, where civilization is slowly being destroyed with every lovely thing inside it: friends and feelings. ‘Apocalyptic, dystopian, and semi-biographical' as the book was introduced to the audience. But having the favor of being a classic, its six hundred pages deal with much more than that.
I will start by saying that the original storyline does not completely belong to Shelley herself, or at least she told us so in the prologue. She mentions Sybil Cave and says that she wrote the book according to the manuscripts which she found there. Sybil is the symbol of prophecy and using her in literature is common, as The Last Man benefits from these prophecies and is shaped by misfortunes. In addition, the book has different sections that can be thought of as different layers that open into one another, like the massive doors of the Sybil Cave.
Sybil Cave. Source: italyunlocked
If the first section was published alone, it would be an average Godwinian fiction and we would get an exaggerated, emotional read with dignified dramatizations of politics, betrayals, families falling apart, unwanted marriages and of course war, always war in the background. This would still be effective, but not something extraordinary. The second section, where the plague epidemic explodes, changed the tone and took it from dark to darker. This is also where the book masters and exceeds its time. She writes the future from the past but she describes our present exactly. The fictional storyline is not only Sybil’s misfortunate prophecies anymore, but our reality. Thanks to Covid, I did not even have to imagine or guess what an epidemic does to rents, prices, or immigrant policies because I already knew.
But their epidemic outdid ours in terms of uncertainty and inevitability, ornamented by irony sprinkles. Human beings were supposed to forget about death in their daily lives; and death was supposed to happen at an unknowable time. When you are living with an unstoppable and incurable plague, suddenly it becomes so much more certain. Death’s loss of its inherent mystery stops the ordinary course of life, and there is no Noah’s ark to be a safe haven.
So, the population falls one by one as the plague rages all over the world. Result? It was because of regression, probably: Calamity triggers collective anxiety, leaves the culture behind and goes back to the earliest stage of state. And they end up going back to a portrait that very much looks like primitive communism.
Using nature to mirror her inner world, Shelley enlaces her Last Man with perishing winds and gloomy days. And thinking broadly, plague is an act of nature and she turns her mourning -the remaining from the death of beloved ones, husband and friends- to a plague that will afflict the characters she creates. She creates intelligent, well-thought-out characters, and then punishes them with inevitable bad fates. But still, she leaves the door open to the light in the end. Mr. Shelley and Lord Byron, who were solitary protagonists rejecting society in their real lives, become transfers of hope. Their reflections and corresponding characters in the book become the last representatives of human beings in the figure of, The Last Man.
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Kardelen Damla Başaran is a senior psychology student. Formerly worked with immigrants and children. Always interested in academical, critical and creative writing.