Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation

chapter four

139 chapter four Hospitality without End “Visitation”and Obligation in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man “Friend, come! I wait for thee! — Deh,vieni! Ti aspetto!” —The Last Man (355) J In the final stages of Mary Shelley’sThe Last Man (1826), Lionel Verney, sole surviving member of the human race, pauses a moment to record his exhaustion:“Now—soft awhile—have I arrived so near the end? Yes! it is all over now—a step or two over those new made graves, and the wearisome way is done.… Can I streak my paper with words capacious of the grand conclusion ?”(Last Man 340). Narrator of a novel written by a woman who believed herself to be the last of her kind,1 Lionel finds himself in the twilight of the twenty-first century a hopeless man confronted by an even more hopeless task: to tell the story of how an invincible plague easily levels an idealized English republic and, with it, the entire world, until there is but one man (Lionel himself) left to tell the tale. Although Lionel performs this task with as much equanimity and composure as can be expected from a man left alone in the world, his manner of prose has not always been the object of admiration. For instance,the first twentieth-century editor of The Last Man, Hugh J.Luke Jr., while acknowledging the novel’s relevance to our culture’s recent anxieties over the threat of atomic annihilation nevertheless complains, “We could wish, certainly, that the novel were somewhat shorter” (317). Similarly, Lee Sterrenburg, grumbling that the novel “is over-long,” ultimately excuses its length due partly to the fact that Mary Shelley was “trying to write a tripledecker so as to conform to the format of the circulating libraries” (343).2 While these critics anxiously apologize for what they perceive to be the novel’s meandering, episodic digressiveness, I wonder if we could really have expected J 04-hospitality 3/1/07 12:11 Page 139 anything less from a novel about humanity’s last stand. Could the dying breath of the human be anything but long-winded? I pose this question not to be facetious but rather to argue that Lionel’s inclination to overwrite the last story the human will ever tell—to get it all down on paper—is in fact seriously representative of The Last Man’s raison d’être: namely, to theorize the subject’s abiding obligation to engage the other, even and especially when the world is no longer inhabited by other subjects but by an otherwise indifferent expanse of everything but the human. What makes Lionel so interesting is the fact that he is compelled to speak when there are in fact no others left to talk to. Knowing full well that he will hear no reply, he insists on “lifting up the only voice that could ever again force the mute air to syllable the human thought”(Last Man 349). Lionel’s isolation at the end of the novel foregrounds the problems of a subject who is, ostensibly , no longer subject to the human but who continues to experience obligation nonetheless. “Here I am (me voici),” John Caputo might have him say, still “on the receiving end of an obligation” (Against Ethics 7), still bound to an other I can no longer see. Given his lingering desire to address himself to someone other than himself , it is not surprising that Lionel’s recollection of the end of days demonstrates a discernible interest in hospitality. Mournfully, nostalgically, Lionel recalls that instead of regressing into a free-for-all state England opens itself in the end to become an asylum“filled even to bursting”with strangers seeking refuge from the plague that eventually decimates the human race (Last Man 186). His good friend and mentor, Adrian, tells a group of Londoners: “We must all remain, and do our best to help our suffering fellow-creatures” (190). Unified by a fellowship of suffering, Adrian and his followers turn to greet the plague and its victims with what Lionel describes (perhaps melodramatically ) as“a devotion and sacrifice of self at once graceful and heroic” (241). What Lionel leaves us with is a narrative nostalgic for an obligation to be hospitable which promises nothing in return (neither an end to suffering nor an end to the plague), but which is in the end impossible to ignore. If The Last Man mounts a critique of Romantic ideology, politics, and...