Brian Aldiss - Collected Essays

This appointment appeals to female and feminist critics, making SF—for a long while regarded as a male preserve—more open to them. Their scholarship is becoming an increased contribution to the field—and perhaps beyond. One indication of this effect occurs in the latest Frankenstein film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh. Hitherto, the poor creature has been born in a dry Spartan manner upon a slab, the method immortalized in the song, The Monster Mash, where

suddenly, to my surprise,

My monster from his slab began to rise …

In Branagh’s film, amino acids are injected into the creature’s feet and it is born in—or tipped out of—a copper bath full of amniotic fluid, in a striking approximation of a real birth. Child and father (Robert de Niro and Kenneth Branagh) splash together nakedly in the gushing waters. This may not have happened in the book, but it certainly does in the subtext.

The seminal point about Frankenstein is that its central character makes a deliberate decision. He succeeds in creating life only when he throws away dusty old authorities and turns to modern experiments in the laboratory. One of Victor Frankenstein’s two professors scoffs at his reading such ancients as Paracelsus, Agrippa and Albertus Magnus—’These fancies, which you have imbibed, are a thousand years old!’—while the other professor is even more scathing: the ancients ‘promised impossibilities and performed nothing’.

Frankenstein rejects alchemy and magic and turns to scientific research. Only then does he get results. Wells was absolutely mistaken in his remarks about ‘jiggery-pokery magic’; it is jiggery-pokery magic which Frankenstein rejects.

This is qualitatively different from being carried to the moon accidentally by migratory geese, or being shipwrecked on Lilliput, or summoning up the devil, or creating life out of spit and mud. Victor Frankenstein makes a rational decision: he operates on the world, rather than vice versa; and the reader is taken by plausible steps from the normal world we know to an unfamiliar one where monsters roam and the retributions of hubris are played out on a terrifying scale.

I say that the reader is taken by plausible steps. In fact, the interwoven processes of the Frankenstein narrative are better described by Suvin—’the ever-narrowing imaginative vortex …’ etc. ( ibid.)

To bring about the desired initial suspension of disbelief, Mary Shelley employs a writerly subterfuge which has since become the stock-in-trade of many SF writers. Wells imitated her method some decades later, to good effect. She appeals to scientific evidence for the veracity of her tale.

It is no accident that Mary Shelley’s introduction to the anonymous 1818 edition of the novel begins with a reference to one of the most respected scientific minds of her day, Dr Erasmus Darwin. Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, and early propagandist of evolutionary theory, was referred to by S. T. Coleridge as ‘the most original-minded man in Europe’. The opening words of the Introduction are ‘The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the psychological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence’. Thus Mary Shelley makes it clear that the first aspect of her novel which she wishes to stress is the scientific-speculative one.

This is the most revolutionary departure of Frankenstein. This is the one which separates it most markedly from any preceding Gothic novel (another factor being the absence of simpering heroines). We must not ignore a further novelty. The monster in his isolation operates as a criticism of society, as later does Wells’s The Invisible Man and the central figure in Vonnegut’s Galapagos. When the monster cries ‘I am malicious because I am miserable’, this atheistic note echoes the central blasphemy of Frankenstein’s diseased creation. SF was to become a refuge for anti-religious and anti-establishment thinking, and some criticism of society is present in most successive SF, save in the trivial examples of Instant Whip.

In his edition of Frankenstein, Leonard Woolf argues that the novel should not be considered as SF, but rather as ‘psychological allegory’. [16]This is like arguing that Red Dust is not SF because it is about terraforming. There is no reason why both books should not support both functions. The strength of SF is that it is not a pure stream.

David Ketterer, who has written perceptively about Mary Shelley’s novel, [17]agrees with Woolf, while saying that the concerns of Frankenstein might more broadly be described as ‘philosophical, alchemical, and transcendental, than psychological or scientific’. Ketterer also argues that Frankenstein cannot be described as SF. [18]

Arguments against Frankenstein being SF at all rest on very uncertain ground. Not only is there Mary Shelley’s own intention, as expressed in her Introduction, but her sub-title points to where she believes its centre to lie; she is bringing up-to-date the myth of Prometheus. Her fire comes down from heaven. It was an inspiration—and one that Universal Studios would later make much of—to utilize the newly captive electricity as that promethean fire. Later generations of writers, with neither more nor less regard for scientific accuracy, would use ‘the power of the atom’ with which to energize their perceptions of change. Nowadays, telepathic superpowers get by under the name of SF and cyberpunk passes for prophesy.

The argument against Frankenstein ’s being the first novel of SF could be more convincingly launched on other grounds, historiological ones. The more any subject is studied, the further back its roots are seen to go. This is true, for instance, of the Renaissance, or the Romantic movement. So perhaps the quest for the First SF Novel, like the first flower of spring, is chimerical. But the period where we should expect to look for such a blossoming is during the Industrial Revolution, and perhaps just after the Napoleonic Wars, when changes accelerated by industry and war have begun to bite, with the resultant sense of isolation of the individual from and in society. This sense of isolation is a hallmark of Romanticism, displayed in the opening paragraph of that milestone of Romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions: ‘I feel my heart and I know men. I am not like others whom I have seen; I dare believe that I am not made like anyone else alive’.

This is the region of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley found an objective correlative for the cold intellectual currents of her day. It has maintained, and even implemented, its power to our day.

We need to resist a temptation to classify rigidly, thinking to achieve intellectual clarity by so doing. There is no contradiction involved in regarding this remarkable transitional novel as a Gothic story, as one of the great horror stories of the English language, and as the progenitor of modern SF. [19]

Nobody seeks to argue that Frankenstein is not a horror story. The influence of the movies has greatly persuaded us to concentrate on the horror aspect. Yet the movies have always cheapened Mary Shelley’s theme. The creature is usually turned into a dotty bogeyman, allowed only to grunt, grunt and destroy. It is presented as alien to humanity, not an extension of it.

Mary Shelley depicts the creature as alienated from society. Just when we have learned to fear the creature and loathe its appearance, she shows us the reality of the case. This is no monster. It is a lost soul. Above all things, it wishes to reverence its absent creator.

Every good Frankenstein-watcher has his own opinions about the monster. It is the French Revolution, says Suvin. It is Percy Bysshe Shelley, says Christopher Small. It is an hermaphrodite, says William Veeder. It and Victor are two different modes of one consciousness says Mary K. Patterson Thornburg. [20]I have come to believe that the stricken creature is Mary herself, that she found in the monster a striking objective correlative for her misfortunes at birth. Later in her career, in her other SF novel, she projects herself as Verney, the Last Man in a world of death wandering alone without a soulmate.