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Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it, spent a few minutes contemplating his favourite page of The Illustrated Picture Book of Sex, which showed the girl on top, then placed the plastic bag of reds beside his bed, lay down with an Ayn Rand book and unfinished protest letter to Exxon, tried to think of something meaningful but could not, although he kept remembering the girl being on the top, and then, with a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, gulped down all the reds at once. After that, the deed being done, he lay back, the Ayn Rand book and letter on his chest, and waited.
However, he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates, as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics, of a type he had never dropped before, probably a mixture, and new on the market. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. Well he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off. He had to face the fact—considering how many of the capsules he had swallowed—that he was in for some trip.
The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly.
The creature had many eyes, all over it, ultra-modern expensive-looking clothing, and rose up eight feet high. Also, it carried an enormous scroll. ‘You’re going to read me my sins,’ Charles Freck said. The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.
Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, ‘and it’s going to take a hundred thousand hours.’
Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, ‘We are no longer in the mundane universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as “space” and “time” no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end.’
Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last half-hour of his life.
A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed with the Ayn Rand book and the letter to Exxon on his chest, listening to them read his sins to him. They had gotten up to the first grade, when he was six years old.
Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade.
The year he had discovered masturbation.
He shut his eyes, but he could still see the multi-eyed, eight-foot-high being with its endless scroll reading on and on.
‘And next—’ it was saying.
Charles Freck thought, at least I got a good wine.
This unusual ability to mix tragedy with farce is matched by a paranoid’s ability to scramble—if not always unscramble—plots. The result is an oeuvre which presents a large scale portrait of the incursions of technological advance upon the psyche of the West, and its shattering under a series of hammer blows. Occasional protagonists may survive, but Dick never leaves us under any illusions about the magnitude of the incursion.
Thus his work represents an unrivalled unity in the SF field, a unity only reinforced by the way in which most of the texts of that oeuvre are staged—not far away in the galaxy, which might have afforded some relief—but in one of the epicentres of the disintegrating psyche, Southern California.
With the disintegrating psyche, as some might expect, the disintegrating family. The one portrait of a family in all of Dick’s oeuvre is four miserable junkies, spying on each other, dying or trying to die, together with their cat child-substitute, in A Scanner Darkly. With this absence of familial pattern goes a disconcerting absence of mother-figures, and indeed a certain lack of females all round. It’s hard to imagine a Mrs Palmer Eldritch, and the policeman who wants his tears to flow has for a wife merely a devilish sister.
For three decades, Dick unfolded this schizoid portrait of the coming age. Again, one must repeat, we can observe in his writing a steady deepening of his understanding and capacities, as we observe it in Dickens.
During the first decade, the 1950s, we admire the surface glitter of his puzzles—Time Out of Joint—and all that. His prankish short stories become increasingly sophisticated. In the 1960s, profound change continues: what was devised becomes felt; complexity of plot becomes matched to a complexity of thought. The Weltanschauung is not universally dark, though illusion is harder to disentangle. In this period stand three of Dick’s surest memorials, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip. Slightly later, also in the 1960s, is another group of three, though I think a lesser group, Now Wait For Last Year, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik. Here, unrealities have multiplied to such an extent that the result is a confusion we are tempted merely to reject as abnormal; the threatened illusions of the earlier group strike much nearer home.
The 1970s yield two remarkable novels in which the protagonists strive for reality, in one case finding and in one case failing to find it: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly. The ‘explanation’ of Flow My Tears, whereby a group of people move into transposed reality because of another person’s, Jason Taverner’s, failings, makes no scientific and even worse theological sense, though for all that it is a sombrely glittering novel, the real hero being a corrupt police chief who does not enter until half-way through the book. But A Scanner Darkly is all too terrifyingly plausible, on both scientific and theological grounds, with the terrible drug, Death, which splits the corpus callosum, rendering the victim dissociated from himself. This, it seems to me, is the grandest, darkest, of all Dick’s hells.
Dick at one time came to some kind of perilous treaty with various drugs, just as Anna Kavan did with heroin. Kavan never came off heroin; it was her doppelganger, her bright destroyer, killingly necessary to her. Dick’s renunciation of drugs brought forth the 1980s group of novels, again a trio, Valis, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. It’s too early to judge this group. The last novel is set in what for Dick is a curiously sunny Southern California, and opens on the day John Lennon is shot. It thrills with intimations of death—but when I said that to someone he replied, ‘What Dick novel doesn’t?’
I have to say, ungratefully, that I so vastly enjoyed Dick giving me bad news, opening up whole new cans of worms at every turn, that I become peevish when a can opens and angels come winging out. That the narrator of Timothy Archer is a lady called Angel hardly helps matters. Despite these reservations, it is a complex and interesting novel, fairly light and sunny in tone. It bears the hallmark of Dick, a hallmark discernible even in the minor novels, genuine grief that things are as bad as they are. That’s a rare quality in SF.
So Dick began as a smart imitator of van Vogt and ended up as a wizard. Most careers in the SF field flow the other way about. Maybe it’s the Hobart effect.
Dick said that it was not the possibilities of SF that appealed to him but the wild possibilities. Not just, ‘What would happen if …’ but ‘My God, what would happen if …’.
This is partly why we like him. But ultimately the affection he inspires is beyond analysis. He had a way of dramatizing his inner fears which made you laugh. His novels are full of gadgets, sentient hardware and awesome entities, but nevertheless they are inward novels. He constantly invents new means of doom and destruction, but nevertheless a sense of gusto bounces up from the page. In some peculiar sense he was a world-league novelist, yet he meekly burnt two mainstream novels when Don Wollheim told him they were no good. There’s the paradox. If it wasn’t for Don Wollheim at Ace, we’d possibly never have seen any Dick novels ever, and the universe would have been different. And our inner lives, ditto.
Dick’s first American readers appear only to have found Dick depressing. Was he too wild? Did they not dig his humour? Were there too many worms in his can? It was in Britain that he first found a more realistic and welcoming appraisal. Accustomed by national temperament to sailing through seas of bad news without turning a vibrissa, we appreciated Dick’s ingenuity, inventiveness, and metaphysical wit. We taught the Americans to see what a giant they had in their midst, just as they taught us to admire Tolkien. If we do admire Tolkien.
The tide has turned. Hollywood made an over-heated, over produced, and over immoral film from a lovely book, and called it by an old Alan Nourse title, Blade Runner. (Then there was Total Recall. The rebarbative Stanislaw Lem said that Dick fought trash with trash. It looks like trash could win!)
Meanwhile, the SF world rallies round, aware that some awful grey shagged-out thing on Mars has now got Dick by the short hairs. I’ve never liked the SF community more. A real spirit of affection is in evidence. Hence this meeting.
The SF newspaper, Locus, put out an excellent Dick memorial number just after he disappeared, with tributes and memories from many hands. Perhaps I may quote here a paragraph from what I said then, writing in New York:
Dick was never out of sight since his first appearances in those great glad early days of the fifties, when the cognoscenti among us scoured the magazines on the bookstalls for names that had suddenly acquired a talismanic quality: J. G. Ballard, William Tenn, Philip K. Dick. Now he’s gone, the old bear, the old sage and jester, the old destroyer, the sole writer among us who, in Pushkin’s mighty phrase, ‘laid waste the hearts of men’.
The above was written in 1982. Some of us knew Dick was a towering writer long before that date. We did not foresee that he would be canonized after death, that even his rejected non-SF would be published to acclaim. Looked at detachedly, the blossoming Dick industry has its sad side. A writer needs appreciation in his lifetime; praise goes unheard when you’re six feet under.
For the purposes of this volume, I hoped to update the above, but cannot see how. Dick is in a process of being deified. Total Recall (1990) was a brutal and unscientific mess of a movie, which certainly made it look as if trash had won. On the other hand, we have had some excellent productions of Dick material. These certainly include an elegant Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1974 (1991), edited by the energetic Paul Williams, who has done so much to tend Dick’s reputation, and Lawrence Sutin’s brilliant and truthful biography, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, and, towards the rave end of the spectrum, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the ‘Exegesis’ (1991), edited by Lawrence Sutin.
Dick remains irreplaceable. One can name at least six of his novels which are startlingly good, witty and dark, in which even what is monstrous is treated with human sympathy: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Martian Time-Slip, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, and Valis. While they are interesting, the non-SF novels are thinner; Dick needed the bitter lemon of futurity in his potion.
With Martian Time-Slip in particular I have a rather long relationship. After protracted dealings, I secured for this beautiful complex novel its first hardcover edition. That was in 1976. In the same year, I was in contact with Stanley Kubrick, and suggested to him that Dick’s novel would make an excellent film. Nothing came of the suggestion.
In the 1980s, having founded the small company of Avernus Ltd with Frank Hatherley, I started negotiations with those at the top of Paramount UK for a movie. The heads were keen: then the heads started to roll. But I had opened protracted negotiations for an option on film and TV rights in the book. These I eventually bought. We’re talking now about the 1990s.
As a bit of agitprop, or agit-pop some might say, I wrote the imaginary conversation, Kindred Blood in Kensington Gore, which Avernus published as a pamplet in 1992. This represents Dick in the Afterlife. I have performed this surreal piece several times on stage, with two gallant actresses playing the multiple roles of Dick’s father, his sister, and VALIS itself. The ladies are Petronilla Whitfield in England and Colleen Ferro in the USA.
By this time, we had the TV Drama department of the BBC interested. More than interested, enthusiastic and involved, once they clearly understood this was not just a tacky length of sci-fi. Martian Time-Slip was to be a five-part mini-series produced with serious resources behind it. Given 250 minutes or so of air time, one can serve up more than one plot; characters and backgrounds get a chance to emerge. Not only were the BBC thoroughly behind it, but we managed to secure a considerable investment from Europe.
Hours, days, weeks, months, were taken up with various negotiations. Those who have written screenplays will know it is an elaborate, protracted business, not without its own dreadful attractions, every word being weighed in the balance, every page being written over and over.
Changes were overtaking the BBC as we wrote. Knowing how brilliant it was, knowing we already had the script editor’s approval and support, we delivered the first of five episodes. This was late in 1993. We were informed after some delay that the drama department wished to take the development no further. Martian Time-Slip was out in the cold.
Of course Frank and I have not given up. But two years of my working time have gone down the drain. For this reason, I must return to my own work and leave this article unmodified. Sorry, Phil!
SCIENCE FICTION’S MOTHER FIGURE (#ulink_cb6da8a1-9edd-555b-9e1a-24576824c2b6)
I (#ulink_01b7dcb9-e535-5c67-8770-38707caa6796)
My scrutiny of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modem Prometheus in Billion Year Spree in 1973 overturned a few old formulations and jerry-built temples. My argument was and remains that the beginnings of real science fiction can plausibly be identified in that novel. Here is no idle wonder; here is a man taking control of what was previously in the provenance of nature alone. Two decades on, and my once heterodox view has won wide favour.
Since Billion Year Spree was published, we have learnt more about the author of Frankenstein. Once regarded merely as the second wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley now shines forth as a vital part of the Romantic movement, and her most famous novel as a vital document of feminism.
Mary Shelley has become almost an industry. I list at the end of this article some of the most crucial books on and about the subject of the author and her circle.
The industry has also allowed us to know some of the other players better. The shelves are already well-filled with books on Byron and Shelley; now we can see more clearly the absent mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and that far from absent Claire Clairmont, bane and bosom friend of Mary Shelley. Both remarkable women, living in times that often seemed against them.
A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by Sir John Opie shows a moody and passionate woman. Her Scandinavian letters are back in print again, to demonstrate her wild nature and descriptive powers. This true Romantic document, published in 1776, also contains a thought for the future which must have interested her daughter when she came upon it.
Wollstonecraft writes from the coasts of Norway. The passage, from Letter xi, runs as follows:
I anticipated the future improvement of the world, and observed how much man had still to do, to obtain of the earth all it could yield. I even carried my speculations so far as to advance a million or two of years to the moment when the earth would perhaps be so perfectly cultivated, and so completely peopled, as to render it necessary to inhabit every spot; yes; these bleak shores. Imagination went still farther, and pictured the state of man when the earth could no longer support him. Where was he to fly from universal famine? … The images fastened on me, and the world appeared a vast prison.
Wollstonecraft bore two daughters. One, Fanny, was fathered by an itinerant American, Gilbert Imlay. The second was fathered by William Godwin, born in 1797, and named after her mother.
In Anthony Burgess’s novel, Beard’s Roman Women (1977), there is a passage where Beard, the central character, meets an old girlfriend in an airport bar. Both work in ‘the media’; they discuss Byron and Shelley, and she says ‘I did an overseas radio thing on Mary Shelley. She and her mother are very popular these days. With the forces of woman’s liberation, that is. It took a woman to make a Frankenstein monster. Evil, cancer, corruption, pollution, the lot. She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life …’
Even today, when our diet is the unlikely, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein seems extremely far-fetched; how much more so must it have appeared on publication in 1818. Yet Beard’s girlfriend puts her finger on one of the contradictions which explain the continued fascination of Frankenstein. It seems to know a lot about life, whilst being preoccupied with death.
A preoccupation with death was undoubtedly an important strand in the character of the author of Frankenstein. Marked by the death of her mother in childbirth, she was haunted, at the time of writing Frankenstein, by precognitive dreads concerning the future deaths of her husband and children. By embodying this psychic material into her complex narrative, she created what many regard as that creature with a life of its own, the first SF novel.
Of course, it is a mongrel novel. But modern SF/fantasy is at its best when, like a mongrel, it runs barking down the road of present-day imagination. It’s a mongrel art.
Frankenstein is generically ambivalent, hovering between novel, Gothic, and science fiction. To my mind, precisely similar factors obtain even today in the most celebrated SF novels. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land contains magic; Anne McCaffrey’s dragon novels hover between legend, fairytale, and science fiction. Is Greg Bear’s Blood Music nanotechnological or allegorical? ‘Pure’ science fiction is chimerical. Its strength lies in its hybrid nature.
Where the central strength of Frankenstein lies is hard to say. We may admire the paintings of Picasso and feel intensely for them without knowing precisely why; some things lie beyond analysis. But just as many Picasso canvasses betray his ferocious anger, so a similar emotion burns in the darkness of Mary Shelley’s pages. She rails against the injustice of the world.
The elements of fairy story are here; ‘Red Riding Hood and the Wolf’ comes to mind. Here are the same dark irrational codes: sex, death, domination, secrecy. Our fear of the monster fights with our pity, as our sympathy for Victor must struggle against our dislike of him. Will the wolf eat Red Riding Hood—or she him? What exactly is the disastrous nature of the relationship between Victor and his creature, that it must be fought out in the wild places of the earth?
The events of Mary Shelley’s life (1797–1851) crowd into the early years. Many transactions that would mould her character occur before she was born.
Her parents both played important roles in the intellectual life of the time. William Godwin was a philosopher and political theorist, whose most important work is An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793). Godwin wrote novels as a popular means of elucidating his thought, the most durable being Caleb Williams (1794), which can still be read with interest and excitement. The influence of both these works on Godwin’s daughter’s writing is marked.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). She came to the marriage with Godwin bringing little Fanny Imlay. Distracted by the failure of her love for Gilbert Imlay, Mary had tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames off Putney Bridge. Surviving to marry Godwin, she bore him a daughter, Mary, only to die ten days later.
Godwin remarried. His second wife, Mrs Mary Jane Clairmont, brought with her two children by her previous liaison, Charles and Jane. Jane later preferred to be known as Claire. She bore Byron an illegitimate child, Allegra. Fanny and Mary, four years old when Godwin remarried, were further upset by the arrival of this new stepmother into their household. Alienation was no doubt increased when Godwin’s new wife bore him a son. The five children crowding into one house increased Mary’s feeling of isolation. Isolation is the refrain which sounds throughout her novels and short stories. Another constant refrain, that of complex familial relationships, derives from that confused childhood. Of the five children, no two could muster two parents in common, Charles and Jane excepted.
Mary grew to be an attractive woman. Her reserved manner hid a deep vein of feeling, baffled by her mother’s death and her father’s distance. The two kinds of coldness, one might say, are both embodied in her monster’s being in a sense dead and also unloved. When Shelley arrived on the scene he received all her love, and Mary remained faithful to him long after his death, despite his frequent neglect of her.
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone
And left me in this dreary world alone?
So said Shelley. In fact, the reverse was true.
The product of two intellectuals, Mary Shelley was a blue-stocking, and through many years maintained an energetic reading programme, teaching herself several foreign languages. She had the good fortune to meet in childhood many of the celebrated intellectuals and men of letters of the time, Samuel Taylor Coleridge among them. Trelawny said of her that ‘her head might be put upon the shoulders of a Philosopher’.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet and son of a baronet, was an emotional and narcissistic youth. Before his twenty-second birthday, the pair had eloped to France, taking Jane Clairmont—soon to be Claire—with them.
Europe! What freedom it must have represented to Mary, after her sixteen circumscribed years, and what brilliant companionship Shelley must have offered. The youthful travellers were among the first to enter France after the Napoleonic Wars, and a desolate place they found it, fields uncultivated, buildings and villages destroyed. On the way to Switzerland, Shelley wrote to invite his wife Harriet, now pregnant with Shelley’s second child, to join the party. Before they reached Lake Lucerne, Mary knew that she also was pregnant.
Catastrophe followed the lovers. Mary’s child, a daughter, was born after they returned to London and their debts. She was premature and died. A second child, William, scarcely fared better. In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary went to Switzerland again, taking along William and, inevitably, Claire Clairmont. They found accommodation at the Maison Chapuis, on the shores of Lake Geneva, next to the Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron was staying. Claire threw herself at Byron’s head, and managed to encompass the rest of him. It was a creative time for them, with philosophy and learning pursued, as well as the more touted facets of the good life. It was here that Mary began to write Frankenstein. She was eighteen. Summer had too short a stay, and the party returned to England to face more trouble.
Mary’s self-effacing half-sister, Fanny, committed suicide with an overdose of laudanum at the age of twenty two. The Shelley ménage had moved to the West Country. Claire still followed them, as the monster followed Frankenstein. She was now pregnant by Byron. Then news reached them that Shelley’s wife Harriet had drowned herself in the Serpentine, when far advanced in pregnancy. Shelley and Mary married almost immediately.
The date of the marriage was 29 December 1816. Five and a half years later, in July 1822, Shelley drowned whilst sailing on the Ligurian Sea. By that time, the little boy, William, was dead, as was another child, Clara. Mary had also had a miscarriage. A further son, Percy Florence, was born. He alone of Mary’s progeny survived to manhood. Even Claire’s daughter by Byron, the little Allegra, died in Italy.
The rest of Mary Shelley’s life is lived in the shadow of her first twenty-five years. After Byron died in Greece in 1824, both the great poets were gone. Mary remained ever faithful to the memory of her husband. She edited his poems and papers, and earned a living by her pen. Frankenstein, published in 1818, became immediately popular. She also wrote historical novels, such as Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835) which enjoyed some success, travel journals, short stories, and a futuristic novel, The Last Man (1826) which, by its powerfully oppressive theme of world catastrophe, is classifiable as science fiction. Percy married. Her cold father, Godwin, died; Shelley’s difficult father died. Finally, in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, Mary herself died, aged fifty-three.
This painful biography, as confused as any modern one, helps to explain why Mary Shelley’s temperament was not a sanguine one. From it derives much of what we read in her two science fiction novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man. As do all novels, both owe a great deal to the literature that preceded them. Much is owed to experience. Critics are liable comfortably to ignore the latter to concentrate on the former.
The essence of the story of Frankenstein is familiar, if in distorted form, from many film, stage and TV versions; Victor Frankenstein constructs a creature from corpses and then endows it with life, after which it runs amok. The novel is more complex than this synopsis suggests.
Some of its complexities have recently been explored by Marilyn Butler in her exemplary edition of the novel (see Bibliography). Butler examines the work of scientists who were influential, in particular the avant-garde William Lawrence. Something of the disputes of the time regarding the role of mind, physical sciences, and the irrational, are preserved in Frankenstein’s three narrators, Walton, Victor, and the creature. In the same way, modern SF novels contain debates about the future of Artificial Intelligence, and whether AI will prove beneficial or otherwise.
Butler presents the 1818 text, with convincing arguments as to why it is to be preferred to the hitherto more popular 1831 text. The latter was toned down in many aspects, to make it more acceptable in a conformist age. Mary Shelley had to live by her pen, in a harsh society well depicted in William St Clair’s biography (see Bibliography). Besides, that one surviving son of hers was to become a baronet …
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus begins with letters from Captain Walton to his sister. Walton is sailing in Arctic waters when he sees on the ice floes a sledge being driven by an enormous figure. The next day, the crew rescue a man from a similar sledge. It is Victor Frankenstein of Geneva. When he recovers, he tells Walton his tale. This account takes up the bulk of the book, to be rounded off by Walton again. Six chapters give the creature’s own account of its life, especially of its education. If the style of the novel is discursive, Mary Shelley was following methods familiar to readers of Richardson and Sterne. It became unfashionable but—to readers of eccentric modern novels—is now increasingly sympathetic and accounts in part for the new-found popularity of the novel.
Most of the drama is set not in the seamy London Mary Shelley knew from her childhood, but amid the spectacular Alpine scenery she had visited with Shelley. The puissance of Frankenstein’s creature gains greatly by its association with the elements—storm, cold, glaciers, desolation.
Interest has always centred on the monster and its creation. In the novel it has no name, being referred to as ‘creature’, ‘daemon’, or ‘monster’. This accounts in part for the popular misusage by which the name Frankenstein has come to be transferred from the creator to the created—a mistake occurring first in Mary’s lifetime. The roles of the two chief protagonists also become interchangeable. The essential SF core of the narrative is the experiment which goes wrong. This prescription is to be repeated later, many times, in Amazing Stories and elsewhere.
Victor Frankenstein’s is a Faustian dream of unlimited power, but this Faust makes no supernatural pacts; he succeeds only when he throws away the fusty old reference books, outdated by the new natural philosophy, and gets to work on research in laboratories. Paracelsus out, Science in.
This is the new perception. This is the revolt of Shelley’s generation. Kick out the old laws. Kick the Ottomans out of fair Greece. Get rid of those old spells. The new formulae of science, of a new age, have more power—even the power of life over death.
Mary Shelley in her Journals speaks of a tyrannical buried life she was forced to lead, ‘an internal life quite different from the external one’. It is a revealing remark—and not an uncommon discomfort. For our hopes themselves come trailing a shadow side. And with the bold new experiments designed to change the world, a bill is always presented. Victor Frankenstein himself begins work with what are, on the surface, the best of motives. ‘What glory would attend the discovery’, he says in Chapter II, ‘if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!’
But SF is not only hard science. Related to the first core is a second, also science-fictional, the tale of an experiment in political theory which relates to William Godwin’s ideas. Frankenstein is horrified by his creation and abjures responsibility. Yet the monster, despite its ugliness, is gentle and intelligent, and tries to win its way into society. Society repulses it. Hence the monster’s cry, ‘I am malicious because I am miserable’, a dramatic reversal of Christian thinking of the time.
The richness of the story’s metaphorical content, coupled with the excellence of the prose, has tempted commentators to interpret the novel in various ways. Frankenstein’s subtitle, The Modem Prometheus, points to one level of meaning. Prometheus, according to Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound, brings fire from Heaven and bestows the gift on mankind; for this, Zeus has him chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle eats his viscera.
Another version of the legend, the one Mary Shelley had chiefly in mind, tells of Prometheus fashioning men out of mud and water. She seized on this aspect of the legend, whilst Byron and Shelley were writing Prometheus and Prometheus Unbound respectively. With an inspired transposition, she uses electricity as the divine fire.
By this understanding, with Frankenstein acting God, Frankenstein’s monster becomes mankind itself, blundering about the world seeking knowledge and reassurance. The monster’s intellectual quest has led David Ketterer, in Frankenstein’s Creation: The Book, The Monster and Human Reality (University of Victoria, 1979), to state that ‘basically Frankenstein is about the problematical nature of knowledge’. Though this interpretation is too radical, it reminds us usefully of the intellectual aspects of the work, and of Mary’s understanding of the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.
Leonard Woolf, in The Annotated Frankenstein,
argues that Frankenstein should be regarded as ‘psychological allegory’. This view is supported by David Ketterer, who thinks that therefore the novel cannot be science fiction. Godwin’s Caleb Williams is also psychological, or at least political allegory; it is nevertheless regarded, for example by Julian Symons in his history of the detective novel, Bloody Murder,
as the first crime novel. Many good SF novels are psychological allegory as well as being science fiction. Algis Budry’s Who? is an example.
By understanding the origins of ‘real’ science fiction, in which humanity seizes on new powers, we understand something of SF’s function; hence the importance of the question. Not to regard Frankenstein but, say The Time Machine or even Gernsback’s 1920’s magazines as the first SF—as many did only a few years ago—is to underestimate the capabilities of the medium. Alternatively, to claim that Gilgamesh or Homer or the satirical Lucian of Samosata started it all is to claim that almost anything is SF.
Mary Shelley wanted her story to ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our (i.e. humankind’s) nature’ … Is that not what SF still excellently does—or can do, for instance in Rob Holdstock’s Mythago Wood?
No doubt the novel gave voice to Mary Shelley’s own mysterious fears. What makes our flesh creep is not Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee in funny make-up, but the terror that there may be an enemy trapped within ourselves, waiting to leap out and betray us. This was the tyranny of Mary’s inner life. It was also the tyranny inherent in another scientific experiment, written later in the century, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
[Jekyll] thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing: … that what was dead, and had no shape, should unsurp the offices of life.
In his book, In Frankenstein’s Shadow (OUP, 1987), Chris Baldick speaks of Stevenson’s short novel as ‘the clearest presentation of Victorian writers’ concern with ‘‘the divided self”. Mary Shelley’s fear of further sexual reproduction is embodied on the one hand in Victor, while her rage and loneliness is embodied on the other hand in the creature. But the game is not as simple as that.
That the destructive monster stands for one side of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s nature and the constructive Victor for the other is convincingly argued by another critic, Christopher Small, in Ariel Like a Harpy.
Mary’s passion for Shelley, rather than blinding her, gave her terrifying insight. Mary Shelley herself, in her Introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, means us to read it as a kind of metaphor when she says ‘Invention … does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but it cannot bring into being substance itself’.
In referring to Frankenstein as a diseased creation myth (Billion Year Spree, 1973), I had in mind phrases with sexual connotations in the novel such as ‘my workshop of filthy creation’, used by Frankenstein of his secret work. Mary’s experiences showed her life and death closely intertwined. The genesis of her terrifying story came to her in a dream, in which she saw ‘the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy half vital motion’. The words suggest both a distorted image of her mother dying—in those final restless moments which often tantalizingly suggest recovery rather than its opposite—and the stirrings of sexual intercourse. ‘Powerful engine’ is a term which serves in pornography as a synonym for penis.
The critic Ellen Moers, in ‘Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother’,
disposes of the question of how a girl still in her teens could hit on such a horrifying idea (though the authoress was herself the first to raise it). Most female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were spinsters and virgins; Victorian taboos operated against writing about childbirth. Mary experienced the fear, guilt, depression and anxiety which attend childbirth, particularly in situations such as hers, unmarried, her consort a married man with children by another woman, beset by debt in a foreign place. Only a woman, only Mary Shelley, could have written Frankenstein. As Beard’s girlfriend says, ‘She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life’.
It is commonly accepted that the average first novel relies for its material on personal experience. We do not deny other interpretations—for a metaphor has many interpretations—by stating that Mary sees herself as the monster. This is why we pity it. She too tried to win her way into society. By running away with Shelley, she sought acceptance through love. The move carried her further from society; she became a wanderer, an exile, like Byron, like Shelley, like Trelawny, and Claire Clairmont, who spent many years abroad. Her mother’s death in childbirth must have caused her to feel that she, like the monster, had been born from the dead. Behind the monster’s eloquence lies Mary Shelley’s grief. Part of the continued appeal of the novel is the drama of a neglected child.
Upon this structure of one kind of reality, Mary built a further structure, one of the intellect. A fever for knowledge abounds; not only Frankenstein but the monster and Walton also, and the judicial processes throughout the book, are in a quest for knowledge of one kind and another. Interestingly, the novel contains few female characters (a departure from the Gothic mode with its soft, frightened heroines). Victor’s espoused, Elizabeth, remains always a distant figure. The monster, a product of guilty knowledge, threatens the world with evil progeny.
