Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
participate in a similar story line, one that presents science as humanity's
natural destiny and the scientist as history's hero.
It is not the facts of evolutionary science that show this but rather the
narrative form that orders them. A quick comparison of the plot features
of these fictional romances with their documentary counterparts will bear
this out. Like the protagonists of tragedy, romantic heroes and heroines are
persons of extraordinary but also flawed character; what makes them differ-
ent from their tragic counterparts is the fact that they prove able, by various
acts of heroism, to overcome these flaws. Thus, just as tragic form works to
indict human nature, romantic form works to vindicate it. Northrop Frye
uses a classical vocabulary to outline the three stages of form that execute
this: “the
agon
or conflict, the
pathos
or death-struggle, and the
anagnorsis
or discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has clearly proved himself
to be a hero even if he does not survive the conflict.”
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The
agon
faced by
Gwyllm Griffiths in “The Sixth Finger” is the tension between the corrupt
human motives that are magnified once he is genetically altered and the
motive of knowledge that grows in concert with his physical evolution. We
might describe this as a conflict between science as power and science as
knowledge. As Gwyllm grows as a scientific being, so also does the temp-
tation to turn knowledge against his enemies. In his death-struggle, the
merely human resentments he harbors against the townspeople who once
held him back and who now regard him as a monster threaten to erupt into
a destructive rampage. Science stands in the balance: conjoined with the
lust for power, its growth threatens to undo the very humanity that is the
vehicle of its evolution. But science as knowledge (because it is revealed to
be the more essential property of human evolution) saves this protagonist
at the last moment. In the story's
anagnorsis
stage, we come to realize that
the decision to pursue science that Gwyllm made when he first volunteered
for Mathers' experiment has also put him on an evolutionary course that
has ultimately enabled him to transcend his merely human hatreds. A true
scientific hero emerges from this death-struggle. Like the beggar of medieval
romance who throws back his ragged cloak to reveal the crimson vestments
of a prince, we discover beneath the humble human appearance of our pro-
tagonist Welshman an evolutionary god.
2001
works out a similar story line upon a more sweeping mythological
canvas by first visualizing the dialectic of science as knowledge versus science
as power in the primordial setting of the film's first act. Here the scientific
purity of the extraterrestrials who are Kubrick's counterparts to the Creator
(or at least his angelic emissaries) finds its representation in the monolith
