In 2013, over at SEMIOVOX’s sister website, HILOBROW, we serialized this 1927 proto-sf novel by Muriel Jaeger. That same year, we published it in paperback with a new introduction by the philosopher Mark Kingwell.
Michael Bristowe is a mutant who turns out to be capable of perceiving (via a “sixth sense”) not only the molecular composition of objects but the ever-shifting patterns of electromagnetic fields. Hilda Torrington, a well-educated, beautiful member of England’s postwar generation takes this lower-class, irascible, difficult fellow under her wing. Michael can perceive “patterns coming and going,” she wants the world to know: “lines of energy,” “the vast ocean of movement.” Things beyond the limits of an ordinary mortal’s senses; the sorts of things that scientists were beginning to understand but that our ordinary senses couldn’t perceive.
We may or may not agree with Hilda that Michael represents the next rung on humankind’s evolutionary ladder, perhaps the first homo superior. But a fictional pattern-spotting prodigy is naturally of interest to semioticians. Like Michael, we understand ourselves to be surrounded by imperceptible, patterned forces that subtly guide our behavior… sociocultural forces, in our case. And like Michael, we struggle to find a way to turn a profit. Surfacing and analyzing unseen patterns, it seems, is not lucrative work.
Because he can “feel” the presence of metal beneath the surface of the terrain, for example, for a while Michael earns a decent living as a kind of consulting geologist. One may here think of the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who in his 1955 memoir Tristes Tropiques would describ geology (along with Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis) as one of his intellectual “masters” because it taught him to analyze and explain visible phenomena by surfacing hidden patterns or structures. However, this mercenary exercise of his pattern-discerning ability is draining; he grows increasingly frail.
What’s worse, Michael discovers that new technologies can do his job. This author, a consulting pattern-spotter whos livelihood is threatened by AI, can relate.
In his Introduction to the book, Mark Kingwell wrote:
[I]t is Michael’s irascible character […] that sustains our interest in this line of post-human speculation. In his suffering and anger, Michael makes the experience of extrasensory perception come painfully alive. We observe with sad recognition his vain attempts to monetize the ability, in the service of crime work or mining — the latter, significantly, quickly overtaken by technology. His everyday life is one of constant sensory bombardment, to the point where eventually he cannot stand the assault of modern London.
All else having failed, Hilda determines to marry the now-crippled Michael and bear his child — hoping thereby to perpetuate his mutation. Writing for the BSFA Review, Maureen Kincaid Speller suggests that rather than all the sixth-sense business, this is “what makes this novel so fascinating: the crisp, sympathetic and utterly uncompromising portrayal of a young woman determinedly making her own decisions about her life, not as an act of defiance but because she does know what she wants.”
A well-written tragicomedy, The Man with Six Senses was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. It’s a notable effort to export the occultist trope of extra-sensory perception into the emerging sf genre — by suggesting that a “sixth sense” is something that can be investigated and analyzed via scientific means. If today we assume that telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and other “perceptual” paranormal powers are inherent to sf, it’s thanks to Radium Age proto-sf stories like this one.
I’ll close this essay with an excerpt from late in the novel, when Michael uses his powers (augmented by an electrical device of his own invention) not merely to discern patterns but to create them — in an artistic performance invisible and unappreciated by all but a rural fellow (Naylor) who possesses mild extrasensory abilities of his own.
In the growing darkness, lit only by the flickering of the fire, Michael at his machine seemed half wizard, half monster, and the white-bearded old man on the chair seemed to advance and recede, to swell and to shrink, as if he had been a demon inadequately materialised from another plane of existence. I know that Michael went on for a long time, moving those flexible white hands of his over the switches, and I was conscious that abrupt questions and answers were still passing, and that Michael muttered frantically from time to time, “But that’s nothing! That’s nothing!” and then went on again. But I was engrossed with the fragmentary ideas flung out by the turmoil of my own mind. Only Hilda, sitting beside me, with shining watchful eyes, seemed to retain full reality. I fixed my eyes on her face as on the only stable refuge in a tottering world.
“It’s very clumsy. There’s an awful lot to do yet. I shall never finish it; but I’ll do better than this.” Michael’s voice, perfectly matter-of-fact, but alert and vigorous, as I had not heard it since his illness, cut through my dazzlement. And I heard old Naylor’s reply.
“It’s wonderful, Mr. Michael, it’s wonderful. I don’t rightly understand it all — you mustn’t think that I do. But it’s wonderful, I can see that.… I can’t say what I mean as I’d like to.…” They were standing together by the door.
“No one can say anything about this…”
I realised that they had finished and were going, but I could not summon the energy to move.
Hilda, too, sat on for a moment.
“They’ve forgotten us,” she said at last, and drew herself to her feet with a difficult effort. “I must go after them. Michael will be worn out.… He’ll be needing me.”
Left by myself, I came back slowly to normality. Presently, I was ashamed and distressed to find that tears were running down my face. I do not know whether it is truly a disgrace to a man to recognise an utterly new thing with a flood of tears. But this new thing was my enemy, and I did not know how to fight it. Michael’s faculty, a nuisance, a marvel, a puzzle, many things before that day, had suddenly become a live menacing entity in a sense that it had never been before. It was partly that another man had recognised it, however imperfectly. It had proved itself communicable; that seemed to give it a validity it had never yet possessed. But my state of shock was due also to the realisation that it had creative force. I knew intuitively, with the knowledge that belongs to one who has himself, however meagrely, the power of creation, that what I had been present at that evening had been an artistic achievement. I had been present at it — not witnessed it, not listened to it — for this was art beyond my range, art in a sphere to which I had no access. The humiliation had to be accepted. And Michael — the tiresome insufferable neurasthenic — had greatness because of it. He had greatness as a man of genius has it, who may be intolerable in himself, yet is the vehicle of something transcendent. As I forced myself to think more quietly, I began to apply what I had observed to be Hilda’s method in dealing with Michael’s peculiarity — to work out an analogy with the senses that we know, I considered, was the boy then an artist? He had, of course, the “artistic temperament,” as it is commonly recognised, but which, in fact, often exists apart from any creative skill. How were we to know whether he was an artist in this unique sphere of his, where, at best, there could be hardly any who could begin to follow him at an immense distance, and no one who could criticise? We had only old Naylor’s testimony that Michael’s inexplicable vagaries with his magnets had indeed produced something significant, something with the principle of symmetry in it. It might be comparable to “Jack and Jill,” or to Paradise Lost; it might be a jazz jingle or a Moonlight Sonata.
Then I realised that such absolute pioneer work could hardly be measurable on any such scale. It would be more analogous to the scratchings of a mammoth or a buffalo made by a man of the Stone Age on a tusk — those drawings where power and spirit strove so heroically through the poverty of the instruments, or to the first rhythmic beating of a tom-tom waking new delights in the breasts of a savage tribe. But these things were all relative, and we had no standard.