The Lost World in Jurassic Park: A Study in Plagiarism?
The Lost World in Jurassic Park: A Study in Plagiarism? is an article written by Michael A. Meer published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 5, 1994).
This comparative literary study analyses the strong structural, thematic, and character parallels between Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, questioning whether the later novel constitutes inspiration, adaptation, or implicit borrowing. Through detailed comparison of plot construction, scientific concepts, and character roles, it argues that Crichton's work functions as a modern reworking of Conan Doyle's original vision.
The Lost World in Jurassic Park: A Study in Plagiarism?
- When [the pterodactyls] were high, these looked like small airplanes ... One of the dactyls spiralled down, a flashing dark shadow that whooshed past them with a rush of warm air and a lingering sour odour ... A second dactyl swooped down, moving faster than the first. It came from behind, streaked over their heads. Grant had a glimpse of its toothy beak and the furry body ... But Grant was impressed with the frail appearance of the animals. Their huge wingspans — the delicate pink membranes stretched across them — so thin they were translucent everything reinforced the delicacy of the dactyls ... Lex shouted, grabbing her hair. 'He bit me!... When she took her hand away, he saw blood on her fingers. Up in the sky, two more dactyls folded their wings they made a kind of scream as they hurtled downward. [Grant] flung himself on the ground at the last moment, pulling the kids down with him, as the two dactyls whistled and squeaked past them, flapping their wings. Grant felt claws tear the shirt along his back ... he ran forward and jumped up, throwing himself against the body of the dactyl. The animal screamed and snapped; Grant ducked his head away from the jaws and pushed back, as the giant wings beat around his body ... The clawed legs scratched frantically at his chest ... Grant pushed away from the dactyl and it squeaked and gibbered as it flapped its wings and struggled to turn over, to right itself. (1)
I imagine that most readers are thinking exactly what I thought when I first read this passage by Michael Crichton: I have read this before! And indeed, one can easily find a corresponding scene in The Lost World:
- Well, suddenly out of the darkness, out of the night, there swooped something with a swish like an aeroplane. The whole group of us were covered for an instant by a canopy of leathery wings, and I had a momentary vision of a long, snake-like neck, a fierce, red, greedy eye, and a great snapping beak, filled to my amazement with little, gleaming teeth ... Then suddenly out of the whizzing, slate-coloured circle a long neck shot out, and a fierce beak made a thrust at us. Another and another followed. Summerlee gave a cry and put his hand to his face, from which the blood was streaming. I felt a prod at the back of my neck, and turned dizzy with the shock. Challenger fell, and as I stopped to pick him up I was again struck from behind and dropped on the top of him. At the same instant I heard the crash of Lord John's elephant-gun, and, looking up, saw one of the creatures with a broken wing struggling upon the ground, spitting and gurgling at us with a wide — opened beak and blood-shot, goggled eyes, like some devil in a mediaeval picture. (2)
A coincidence? Inspiration? Or, to put it less mildly, plagiarism? If we read on, more and more parallels occur, and one really has to ask whether Crichton's worldwide success depends on his art of writing, and his imagination, or Conan Doyle's. A closer look into the two novels might give an answer.
Let's begin with The Lost World (3). The hot-tempered, but nevertheless amiable, zoologist Professor Challenger returns from an expedition into the Amazon and affirms that there are still places in the world where prehistoric life has been able to survive up to now, as these places have not taken part in normal evolution because of their complete isolation. The scientific world, of course, has nothing to offer but sneers and derision, a reaction which encourages Challenger to arrange an independent group of explorers to prove definitely that what he says is true. He chooses his arch-enemy Professor Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and a young journalist, Edward Malone, to accompany him, and during their travels they actually find the plateau with dinosaurs, prehistoric plants, insects, and even Darwin's missing link-some sort of ape men who cruelly oppress a colony of Indians which arrived at the plateau after it had been isolated from the outer world. Challenger and his companions free the Indians and go home with living proofs of prehistoric life.
In Jurassic Park the InGen company, under the eccentric proprietor John Hammond, has been able to create prehistoric life by isolating and completing dinosaur-DNA from fossils. The company has built a dinosaur game-park on a jungle island near Costa Rica and the paleontologist Alan Grant paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, Hammond's grand-children Tim and Lex, a technician and a representative of an insurance company arrive to test out the park's facilities. Everything goes wrong: the system breaks down, dinosaurs escape from their cages and finally the island has to be destroyed.
In comparing the two works, the obvious points one has to consider are the plot and the general subject-matter of the stories.
We find our first parallel in the subject itself-most obviously in the dinosaurs. Conan Doyle's plausible explanation of the possible existence of dinosaurs is founded on the theory of evolution developed by Charles Darwin (1809-1882): the plateau with fauna and flora 'has been lifted up and cut off by perpendicular precipices of a hardness which defies erosion from all the rest of the continent. What is the result? Why, the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks which influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralised or altered.' (4)
Scientists have recently found such isolated places with strange forms of life-one more proof of the accuracy of Conan Doyle's writing. According to scientists, the strange anatomic attributes of the prehistoric birds found have been caused by the long geographic isolation of South America. Finds of uncommon dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds support the theory of the 'lost world' of South America. (5)
To introduce dinosaurs in a twentieth-century novel, Crichton has to rely on modern bio-technology, i.e., the most recent results of science — just as Conan Doyle had to in his time. There will remain disputes as to whether Crichton's theory might one day become reality.
In Jurassic Park dinosaurs are made ready for the public on the volcanic island Isla Nublar, an island whose very name seems to echo the title of another Challenger story, The Land of Mist; in Conan Doyle's novel one can find dinosaurs on a volcanic plateau in the Amazon. Turning again to the plot, The Lost World could be called the story of an adventurous trip to a prehistoric plateau; Jurassic Park is not far removed from that description: a test group makes an adventurous trip to an island teeming with prehistoric life.
It is interesting to note that even the climax of the stories is identical: in both novels the highest point can be located with the humans encountering Tyrannosaurus rex.
This leads us to the authors' conception of man. In the liberation of the Indians, Conan Doyle symbolises the beginning of human life, but he also clearly states that man is superior to Nature. With Crichton it is different: men think they are superior to Nature, and only realise they have been wrong when the catastrophe has occurred. Despite this difference concerning the nature of man, the constellation of characters is almost the same: protagonist and antagonist remain the same. In The Lost World the main character is Professor Challenger, the bearded man of genius, who knocks down journalists and can be infinitely good at the same time. Professor Summerlee on the other hand is a thin, bitter and peevish sceptic, sometimes quite detestable. Hammond of Jurassic Park corresponds absolutely to the picture we get of Challenger's egoism, arrogance and inner childlikeness. Even the inner goodness is visible when Hammond talks of his dream that everyone should be able to afford a day in his park to enjoy the fascinating beauty of prehistoric life. Hammond, too, has to defend himself against a doubting Thomas - the mathematician Ian Malcolm who prophesies catastrophe from the very beginning.
Lord John Roxton and Edward Malone have been looked upon as symbolising children: they are evidently contrasted to the 'grown-up' professors and therefore act as identification figures for the reader. (6) This principle can also be found in Jurassic Park: whereas Hammond, his team and Malcolm form the higher level, the two paleontologists and the children form the reader level, or, more correctly, two reader levels in order to motivate a wider readership.
Only one pair of secondary characters remains and it is an important one: Gomez, the half-caste of The Lost World, and Nedry, the computer expert of Jurassic Park. Both of them cause a peripeteia in the plot: Gomez destroys the only connection to the rest of the world in order to take vengeance on Roxton, who had killed Gomez's brother on a former expedition; Nedry switches off the whole control system because he wants to rob dinosaur embryos and sell them to a rival firm. The way back has become impossible; fear and horror take the place of enjoyment and amazement; looking for an exit instead of carrying out scientific studies of the unknown becomes necessary in order to survive.
The way out is the end of both novels and leads to the meaning of the stories, the message the authors want to give in their writing, and it is here that the deepest discrepancy between Conan Doyle and Crichton can be found. The members of Conan Doyle's exploring party are heroes; science is looked upon as being something purely positive, something that has to be advanced-even a further expedition into The Lost World is planned. Crichton displays another attitude towards science, but it is the general attitude of today, just as Conan Doyle's approach corresponded to the general attitude of his time. Crichton shows how deeply economic power is connected with science, and how dangerous such situations can be.
Both novels have at their beginning sturdy proofs for the existence of living dinosaurs: Challenger has a huge bone (evidently from a dinosaur) and a part of a pterodactyl wing, but nobody believes their authenticity. In Jurassic Park small escaped raptors offend people, and a raptor carcass is sent to a specialist laboratory in New York, but is identified as a 'normal lizard'
But how does one of the authors view things? In an interview, Michael Crichton said that his literary mentor was Arthur Conan Doyle. (7) The persona of Sherlock Holmes impressed him because of his extraordinary analytical power. He did not mention either Professor Challenger or The Lost World. Indeed, one can find two more allusions to the Holmes canon: firstly, Hammond's opponent Dodgson of Biosyn reminds us of Professor Moriarty — the personified representative of evil (it was Dodgson who made Nedry steal the embryos); secondly, the dialogues with Ian Malcolm sound very familiar to any reader of the Sherlock Holmes stories: Malcolm the mathematician argues over the inevitable catastrophe of the Jurassic
Park in just the same way as Holmes presents a theory or a solution. To the reader it seems absurd at first sight, but with further logical explanations (in Malcolm's case they are based on modern mathematical theories, such as the chaos theory) the reader has no choice but to agree. Even the Watsonian quotations are brought into use:
- Gennaro said, 'Your paper concludes that Hammond's island is bound to fail?'
- 'Correct.'
- 'Because of the chaos theory?'
- 'Correct. To be more precise, because of the behaviour of the system in phase space.'
- Gennaro tossed the paper aside and said, 'Can you explain this in English?'
- 'Surely,' Malcolm said. 'Let's see where we have to start.' (8)
In conclusion, I think it would be wrong to accuse Crichton of cheap plagiarism. There are too many parallells to call it a coincidence; too much has been changed to call it a copy. One has to read Jurassic Park as an adaptation or a modern version of The Lost World. Unfortunately one cannot call the novel a homage to Conan Doyle's original as Crichton himself missed the opportunity of declaring it as such. Alas, Crichton goes on enjoying his incredible success without naming its spiritus mentor. Conan Doyle, his venerated model, really deserves much of the credit.
Notes:
1. Crichton, M.: Jurassic Park, Random House, London, 1991.
2. Conan Doyle, A.: The Lost World, John Murray, London, 1912.
3. A short synopsis of the novel follows to refresh the memory of those who have read the story, and to make it understandable for those who have not (yet, I hope) had the pleasure of reading it.
4. Conan Doyle, op. cit.
5. cf Windolf, Raymond: Das Vergessene Land, bild der wissenschaft 2/93 (February), p.109. Windolf also uses the term 'vergessenes Land' in his text.
6. cf. Nordon, P.: Conan Doyle - A Biography, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1967; p.332.
7. Stern magazin, Hamburg, ? Juli, 1993.
8. Crichton, op. cit., p.75.
Acknowledgement:
Many thanks to Mr Edgar Erismann, Langenthal, who has corrected the original translation.
Bibliographical Note:
This article appeared in German in shortened form in the news-magazine Focus Nr.43/1993 (Munich) and in The Reichenbach Journal, No.6 (1994). The text has been revised for the present translation.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
