Creating Frankenstein Jeremy Kessler - The New Atlantis

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Creating FRANKENSTEINbig and then small. Environmentalinfluence exerts a strong grip onthe story and on the natures of itscharacters. If the steamy lake-housewhere the novel was conceived produceda fraught, ambiguous work,the bustle of a metropolis calledforth different qualities. In the summerof 1823, the play Presumption,or the Fate of Frankenstein opened inLondon, the first dramatic adaptationof Shelley’s tale. As its title indicates,the play traded on a didacticism aliento the early versions of the novel.Tellingly, Presumption began a traditionthat extends to the present dayin rendering Frankenstein’s creationmute. The emphasis thus shifts tothe sin committed—the presumptuousfall—rather than on the ongoingstruggle of creation, as witnessed bya dialogue between creator and created.The Gnosticism of the Romanticsis repossessed by a more familiarapologetic.Similarly, in James Whale’s famous1931 film adaptation starring BorisKarloff, a mute creature’s evil istraced to the substrate of his consciousness:he has mistakenly beengiven the brain of a criminal. Thisliteralization of contemporary psychologicalexplanations for the sourceof sin was and remains a comfort toaudiences. Surely, our brains are not“mismatched.” How could they be?And yet time and again, when webetray ourselves, or when we feel notright for our bodies, this experienceof impure creation returns.Frankenstein’s monster himselfargued that his violence was a productof external forces, though of asocial and not a biological kind:I am malicious because I am miserable.Am I not shunned andhated by all mankind? You, mycreator, would tear me to piecesand triumph. Remember that—and tell me why I should pityman more than he pities me. Youwould not call it murder if youprecipitated me into one of thoseice rifts and destroyed my frame,the work of your own hand. ShallI respect man when he contemnsme? Let him live with me inthe interchange of kindness, and,instead of injury, I would bestowevery benefit upon him with tearsof gratitude at his acceptance. Butthat cannot be; the human sensesare insurmountable barriers toour union.Made of parts of many men, themonster is the unhappy productof inexorable nature and nurture,his very heart a collection of theemotions that have been directedat him throughout his strange life.Our modern debate between natureand nurture—as if they are the onlyalternatives—reveals an essentialpessimism: both are forms of determinism,both denying the freedom oftrue self-composition.In the end, the problem of the creatorand the created are united.The human creator himself creates inSummer 2009 ~ 87Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.
Jeremy Kesslerpart to dispel the terror of his beingcreated. Herman Melville, one ofthe many nineteenth century writersinfluenced by Shelley’s tale, powerfullyfelt the union of these problems.Hitchcock astutely flags Melville’shomage in Chapter 44 of Moby-Dick,when Ahab storms out of his cabin ina strange fit:For, at such times, crazy Ahab, thescheming, unappeasedly steadfasthunter of the White Whale; thisAhab that had gone to his hammock,was not the agent that socaused him to burst from it inhorror again. The latter was theeternal, living principle or soulin him; and in sleep, being for thetime dissociated from the characterizingmind, which at othertimes employed it for its outervehicle or agent, it spontaneouslysought escape from the scorchingcontiguity of the frantic thing, ofwhich, for the time, it was no longeran integral. But as the minddoes not exist unless leagued withthe soul, therefore it must havebeen that, in Ahab’s case, yieldingup all his thoughts and fanciesto his one supreme purpose; thatpurpose, by its own sheer inveteracyof will, forced itself againstgods and devils into a kind of selfassumed,independent being of itsown. Nay, could grimly live andburn, while the common vitalityto which it was conjoined, fledhorror-stricken from the unbiddenand unfathered birth. Therefore,the tormented spirit thatglared out of bodily eyes, whenwhat seemed Ahab rushed fromhis room, was for the time but avacated thing, a formless somnambulisticbeing, a ray of livinglight, to be sure, but without anobject to color, and therefore ablankness in itself. God help thee,old man, thy thoughts have createda creature in thee; and he whoseintense thinking thus makes him aPrometheus; a vulture feeds uponthat heart for ever; that vulturethe very creature he creates.Ahab displays the classic divided consciousnessof the created being—there are parts of him that he doesnot experience as being his own.There are states he enters which arebeyond his will. There is a vultureinside of him that is beyond him. Andyet, as Melville devastatingly catalogues,Ahab has created this vulture,a symbol of his createdness, throughhis own war against creation. Ahab,like the greatest of the poets, has constructeda world—a ship, a journey,an inimical fiend—as an alternativeto the contingency of his own mortallife. But it is this wild act of creation,this magnificent, obsessive tale, thatconfirms his createdness, and propagateshis dependence. The desire tobe uncreated is the ultimate mark ofthe creature. It is through subsidiarycreations that the creature tries to fulfillthis desire: If I am the creator, perhapsI eclipse the limits of creation.The proliferation of new worldsundermines our certainty in the one88 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.
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