Frankenstein's Frankenstein
An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (2016) by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
Books about how to read books are my vice. Of these, old reliables are works by Harold Bloom and Terry Eagleton.
Bennett and Royle, whom I just started reading two years ago, are very rewarding as a team and in their individual works. They are patient, excited, and clear.
Their keen sense of the fun involved with literature is on full display in this excerpt from chapter thirty-two of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory.
32. Mutant
[....] In this chapter we would like to explore the workings of such compulsions and terrors in the context of literature and other so-called ‘humanities’ subjects, and the fascination that the limits of the human seem to hold for humans. Literature is, above all, about the human, about what it means to be human, and therefore about the non-human, about what it might mean not to be human. Literature allows us to think the limits of the human, even to unthink our often unthinking attachment to notions of the human and humanity. Finally, literature itself may be conceived as a monstrous or mutant discourse, a humanism that is also inhuman, alien. In each of the texts mentioned above, there seems to be an engagement with the human that is expressed in terms of a fascination with the inhuman, or with a human becoming non-human, ahuman, abhuman or parahuman. As our reference to biotechnology, nanotechnology, genetics and so on suggests, there is a notably topical dimension to these questions. This is perhaps most clearly evident in cinema, with its devotion to mutant, computerized, cyborg or alien beings such as the Terminator, ET, Blade Runner or Robocop, those appearing in Metropolis, Star Trek, Star Wars, Close Encounters, Alien, Men in Black, The Matrix, Under the Skin, and Ex Machina, as well as those that have morphed into familiar figures from countless Frankenstein remakes, vampire and horror flicks, and gothic comic books or ‘graphic novels’. In all of these movies, Hollywood plays out a cultural desire for and fear of the parahuman and non-human, of the ‘invasion of the body snatchers’, the invasion of the boundaries of the human: each of the films mentioned presents a battle between the human and the non- or para- or quasi- or post-human. And in each case, human will and imagination, feeling and compassion, is what survives. All of these films attempt, in the end, to confirm the idea that we are each of us unique, sentient and compassionate – that we are ‘human’. Despite the state-of-the-art special effects, the hyper-modern and futuristic scenarios, the avant-garde narratives and the balletic digitized violence, films like the Matrix series or Ex Machina are deeply traditional, deeply concerned with traditional ‘human values’, with humanity….
[....] Perhaps the most compelling and most influential of literary monsters is Mary Shelley’s creature in her first novel, Frankenstein (1818). But Frankenstein is also the subject of one of the commonest misapprehensions in English literature, namely that Frankenstein is the name of a monster. This is almost as common as the error of thinking that Wordsworth’s poetry is mainly about daffodils, that James Joyce’s Ulysses is unreadable, or that John Fowles’s The Magus is a great novel. In fact, however, there are very few daffodils in Wordsworth, Ulysses is a wonderful if challenging novel (and a piece of cake compared to Finnegans Wake), The Magus is verbose, dull, self-regarding and (too often) overrated – and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is as human as the rest of us. Victor Frankenstein is a young Genovese man of ‘distinguished’ birth who leaves his family to study at the University of Ingolstadt in Upper Bavaria and there becomes fascinated by the possibility of creating a living being. The monster that Victor Frankenstein creates in fact has no name: this itself is doubtless one reason for the confusion and for the popular idea that Frankenstein is the name of a monster. Naming the monster of Mary Shelley’s novel ‘Frankenstein’, then, is an egregious if understandable mistake.
 But it is worth contemplating the error, it is worth thinking about how and why it has been such an important dimension of the novel’s reception over the years since its first publication in 1818, why the inventor’s name has mutated, morphed, into that of his creature. The error might be seen as valuable and instructive for at least two reasons. In the first place, the idea that ‘Frankenstein’ is the name of a monster marks an important division between the popular idea of Mary Shelley’s novel and the novel itself – the popular idea as disseminated by theatre and film versions, by the appearance of the monster in comic books and cartoons, in advertising and TV comedy sketches, in rock music and on the internet, rather than any actual reading of Shelley’s book. In this popular conception of Shelley’s novel, in this common misreading or non-reading of her text, the name ‘Frankenstein’ often works as shorthand for ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ or ‘Frankenstein’s Creature’. In a sense there are two Frankensteins – two ‘texts’ called Frankenstein – one being the novel written by Mary Shelley, the other being something like an infection, a virus or outgrowth, a mutant transformation of the novel and its dispersal into popular culture, into popular mythology. The fact that there is a veritable glut of entries (2,666 items are listed) in D.F. Glut’s The Frankenstein Catalogue (Being a Comprehensive History of Novels, Translations, Adaptations, Stories, Critical Works, Popular Articles, Series, Fumetti, Verse, Stage Plays, Films, Cartoons, Puppetry, Radio and Television Programs, Comics, Satire and Humor, Spoken and Musical Recordings, Tapes and Sheet Music featuring Frankenstein’s Monster and/or Descended from Mary Shelley’s Novel) (1984) gives an indication of the monstrosity of the novel, its uncontrolled, uncontrollable outgrowth. This leads us to our second point, which is that the misnaming of Shelley’s monster nevertheless expresses a truth. It would be true to say that ‘Frankenstein is a monster’. Frankenstein – the novel – is a kind of mutant or monster, is, in a sense, monstrous. Victor refers to his own tale as ‘my hideous narration’, and it is a tale that Walton, who hears it, describes as one to ‘congeal’ or ‘curdle’ the blood (Shelley 1994, 222, 233). One contemporary reviewer even referred to the novel itself as a ‘monstrous literary abortion’ (quoted in Botting 1995, 5).
 The way that the novel is constructed seems in fact to bear an uncanny resemblance to the way that a monster is formed. Both Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein are wisely rather unforthcoming about the mechanics of creating a monster (you can find out how to construct a nuclear bomb by surfing the internet, but you can’t find out how to build Frankenstein’s monster). All we can gather is that the technique involves the collection of assorted body parts from dead people and their reconstruction and revivification through a (vaguely defined) process of surgery, galvanism and electrification. Victor Frankenstein, we are told, ‘pursue[s] nature to her hiding places … among the unhallowed damps of the grave’; he ‘collect[s] bones from charnel houses’ and ‘disturb[s], with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame’. His laboratory, his ‘workshop of filthy creation’ is ‘a solitary chamber, or rather cell’ where he collects materials furnished from the ‘dissecting room and the slaughter house’ (Shelley 1994, 83). In principle, though less gruesomely, Frankenstein is constructed in the same way. In her 1831 Introduction to the novel, Mary Shelley declares that ‘everything has a beginning’ but that that beginning must necessarily be ‘linked to something that went before’. Referring to the Hindu belief that the world is supported by an elephant but that the elephant in turn is supported by a tortoise, Shelley argues that literary ‘invention’ ‘does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos’. Literary creation, in other words, like the creation of a monster or indeed like the theological act of creation, ‘can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself’. Shelley’s comments alert us to the fact that making a literary text is akin to other forms of making, including most pertinently, the making of monsters. In this respect, too, her novel is a kind of monster, mutated or created out of her reading. Shelley draws on contemporary scientific and medical works by Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy and others. She alludes to and quotes contemporary poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe, and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as Milton and other canonical writers. She engages with works of social, political and moral philosophy by her father William Godwin and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, and with classical works of historiography by Plutarch and Volney. And before all of these there is the grounding intertext of that great mutant book of creation, the Bible. In other words, just as Frankenstein’s creature is constructed out of pieces hewn from dead bodies, the novel is largely constructed – thematically, verbally, conceptually, intellectually – from the huge corpus of Shelley’s reading, from the writings of the living and the dead. And the novel comes across, sometimes rather awkwardly, monstrously, like something created out of different genres (the Gothic novel or novels of sensibility, moral or theological disquisitions, novels of ideas), just as it brings together the rational investigation of Enlightenment science with the other of that rationality, the discourse of the superstitious, the monstrous, the Gothic, the uncanny. The Russian critic M.M. Bakhtin’s word for this is ‘heteroglossia’, the distribution within a text of different discourses or genres or ‘voices’, while Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and others call it ‘intertextuality’; our words for it are ‘monstrism’ and ‘mutant’.
 This genesis and reception of Shelley’s novel, then, offers a dramatic instance of a more general law of literature. Literature, we might say, is a monstrous or mutant form, a mutant discourse. Literary texts don’t appear out of nowhere. As we suggest elsewhere in this book, recent literary criticism and theory has been much concerned with intertextuality, with ways in which a poem or novel is constructed out of other cultural and literary discourses, the ways in which texts, ideas and words mutate, ceaselessly evolving and transforming the possibilities of literary forms. This is why literary studies, this unruly, improper discipline, is in fact truly, properly ‘interdisciplinary’. The study of literature involves, from the start, a mixing and contamination of disciplines and genres. Literary criticism and theory are themselves mutant, and any significantly ‘new’ or ‘original’ critical or theoretical work produces a mutation in the discipline. Frankenstein can perhaps also help us to grasp how literary texts are mutated in their reception. Perhaps more virulently than any other nineteenth-century text, the germ of Frankenstein has been passed on in endless mutations. Mutation, in this respect, is central to the process that we call canonization: for canonization to occur, a text must be inherited, transformed, responded to, deformed, developed, and imitated – in future texts, in the literary and other traditions to which it gives birth, in being read. Neither Mary Shelley nor Victor Frankenstein is in control of the monsters s/he creates. And this is what is monstrous about the monster in general. It is precisely this fear that we will not be able to control what we create – a fear that Christians project onto God’s relationship with his unruly angel, Satan – that defines the contemporary concern with GM products (so-called ‘Frankenstein Foods’). And it is a fear expressed in debates surrounding our current crisis of humanity, the development of ‘gene therapy’ and the suspicion that these technologies will result in the production of genetically modified people (as if we weren’t all genetically modified anyway).
 Criticism and theory have recently been much taken with mutants and monsters: ‘English Studies’ sometimes seem to read like an emerging tetralogy, a study or discourse of monsters. But what is a monster? The OED – that monster of a book – is, of course, essential reading for students of the monster. The English word ‘monster’ mutated from the Latin ‘monere’, to warn, a word related to ‘monare’, ‘to show’: the monster is something shown, in other words, as a warning. But the complex of senses in which ‘monster’ has been used in English, the way in which the word has mutated out of this original sense of warning, is also instructive: the monster is something ‘extraordinary, or unnatural; a prodigy, a marvel’; it is ‘an animal or plant deviating in one or more of its parts from the normal type … a misshapen birth, an abortion’; it is ‘an imaginary animal … having a form either partly brute and partly human, or compounded of elements from two or more animals’; it is ‘a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness’; and it is ‘an animal of huge size’ and by association ‘anything of vast and unwieldy proportions’. For Charles Darwin, a ‘monstrosity’ is ‘some considerable deviation of structure, generally injurious to or not useful to the species’ (Darwin 1866, 46). All of these senses are useful for a theory of the monster, but what they make clear, finally, is the fact that the monster is not so much unnatural as something that comes out of nature, something that goes through and beyond nature. The monster is both natural and unnatural, a grotesque development of, an outgrowth from or in nature. And it is for this reason that the monster must be abhorred, rejected, abjected, excluded. But let’s be clear about this: the monster is excluded, abjected, not because it is entirely other but because it is at least in part identical with that by which it is excluded – with, in this case, the human. As Diana Fuss comments in this context, ‘sameness, not difference, provokes our greatest anxiety’ (Fuss 1996: 3). The monster is both of nature and beyond it: as the OED informs us in one citation, ‘the vegetable kingdom abounds with monsters’. The monster is, indeed, the most natural thing in the world, and fundamentally allied with birth. Babies are monsters: David Lynch’s wonderfully dark Eraserhead (1976) knows this, knows what we fear inside (literally) ourselves and in others; the pregnant Desdemona in Middlesex knows it too as she ‘prepares to meet the creature hidden in her womb’ (Eugenides 2002, 123); and ‘monstrous birth’ is also of course the subject of the play from which the name Desdemona has itself sprouted (see Othello 1.3.396)....
Jay
