Prospero's Books

In recent times, Shakespeare's Tempest has influenced works as varied as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Roger MacBride Allen's Isaac Asimov's Caliban (1993), John Fowles's The Magus (1965) and The Collector (1963), Marina Warner's Indigo (1992), L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero series, and Elizabeth Nunez's Prospero's Daughter (2003). The latest member of this vigorous and interesting family is Dexter Palmer's debut novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion.

Naturally, the story has a magician (Prospero Taligent), a teenage daughter (Miranda Taligent), a Prince Ferdinand (Harry Winslow), and an Ariel (Astrid Winslow). As with the original, a father's love for his daughter is this story's fuel. But Palmer's novel, unlike its inspiration, is concerned not with the limits of art as its point in an age without aura.

So it's not surprising the novel reveals other significant influences besides The Tempest. One of its arms is cautiously draped around the lumpen shoulders of literature's Caliban: science fiction. Palmer's doctoral thesis was on encyclopedic narratives, and Edward Mendelson's ideas on the structure of such narratives appear to have shaped the novel's composition. Astrid's aesthetic notions owe a debt to Walter Benjamin, as is perhaps inevitable, but they also reminded me of Paul Celan. The final metamorphosis of Miranda provides an illustration of Deborah Lyon's thesis that in myth—at least in Greek myth—it is generally easier for heroines to achieve apotheosis than it is for heroes. In short, this work is that relatively rare unicorn: an American literary novel of ideas.

The sophistication of the ideas combined with the fine writing helps offset the elements of Victorian melodrama: rotten childhoods, a genius sister who may have committed suicide for the sake of her art, a boy who's given a poisoned gift, a domineering father, a revolt of the lumpenvolk, sex as corruption, immortality as stasis, and, of course, a palpable longing for the pastoral.

H. G. Wells, with remarkable foresight, anticipated the loss of the pastoral, that is, the loss of existential innocence, as among the central conflicts of science fiction. In The Land Ironclads (1903), Wells concretized this conflict as a war between a technology-loving race and a people clinging to the old, nature-bound, feudal ways. In Palmer's novel, this paradigmatic conflict is embodied in the figure of Prospero Taligent. If the achievement of science is, as Alfred North Whitehead claimed, the invention of invention, the achievement of Prospero Taligent is to have automated automation. But then there is no going back. Not for men, not for wombs, not for nature, and certainly not for art. And not for language. Palmer argues—or rather, his characters argue—that what is lost with automation—the ability to produce any kind of order—is the function of language itself: the possibility of human-generated order. We, like Shakespeare's Prospero, are about to throw our magic into the indifferent sea. Contrary to Celan's claim that language protects us against all losses, it cannot protect us against a world where the vital silence between words—Celan's Atemwende, shared breath—no longer exists. If Astrid ends her life in a demonstration of the problem, Prospero Taligent's solution is to enclose all that he loves in a suspended breath—an airship.

In The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), Oscar Wilde declares that "all men kill the thing they love." He claims it thrice, so it must be true. So one might rightly suspect The Dream of Perpetual Motion is not about the yearning for perpetual motion but a yearning for perpetual stasis. As Prospero says, "We want all possible things made actual, the perpetual possibility of perfection, the best of futures all at once. We always fail. We always fall short. Because when we see the perfect thing before us we have to touch it. And then it vanishes or bruises...."

But why would we yearn for stasis...