Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

People always go around saying that people always go around saying that “Frankenstein was the name of the creator, not of the monster” but a) I don’t think people do go around saying that, and b) I also don’t think anyone ever points out that Frankenstein wasn’t just the name of the creator, but it’s also the name of the book. Or, I suppose, it’s PART of the name of the book, because – as everyone who is anybody knows – the full title of the book is Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (check out all that punctuation).

Victor Frankenstein, not his unnamed and unloved creature creation but the man himself, isn’t really a Promethean figure, though imo.

Rather than stealing fire and transforming the world in the image of the gods with a brand new power he has given to the rest of humanity, Victor “Frankie” Frankenstein instead finds the secret of reanimating and/or creating living flesh (he’s light on the details on purpose so that no one who hears his story secondhand can replicate his experiments, which I must say is fucking convenient for the author of this story, hmmm), does it once, doesn’t publish his findings, doesn’t do anything responsible with the produce of his experiment (i.e. the living, feeling, thinking, being that he has created), wanders off, feels the repercussions of his actions (The Creature starts killing his friends and family), then goes mad and travels into the Northern wilderness in pursuit of the beast and dies, with The Creature telling someone else that he’s going to go and die, too, yet he doesn’t on the page, and may well be living (fictionally) among us now, another one of those beings cursed to never die. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

Is The Creature himself Promethean (he’s always referred to as male, and when the creature asks Frankie to build him a mate, Frankie worries that if he were to do so, the two Creatures would produce a whole populace of freaks and fearsome monsters, which means that he’s 100% certain that he’s given The Creature fully functioning reproductive organs, something which – to know for sure – he would have had to have tested)?

If so, what’s the metaphorical fire? What has he stolen from the gods? Life itself? He has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and is a brand new Adam with no Lilith or Eve to play with?

A hideous (they keep going on about how ugly The Creature is in a way that feels mean-spirited – we all know ugly people yet we don’t have to comment on this in every interaction) yet naive blank slate who is treated with horror and fear and violence and responds with that in kind, quickly becoming cruel and malicious, even as he becomes articulate and literate and speaks (misleadingly?) about only wanting love and community and companionship…

If – right – The Creature has got fully functioning reproductive faculties – right – then that means he’s also probably got a libido and sex drive, which is never mentioned, though (we trust, we presume, especially if we are to find The Creature sympathetic in any way at all, which I presume we must be expected to?) the murders he does are not meant to be seen as sex murders.

The Creature is not killing for an erotic thrill. He’s not killing to get himself off, though he is choking people to death, which a few years ago seemed to be what The Guardian wanted me (a millennial) to believe was the central erotic act of the lives of all Gen Zs. Maybe this wasn’t the case in Mary Shelley’s days, but since the heady years around Y2K when (I believe) multiple (minimum one) Tory MPs died during acts of autoerotic asphyxiation, the neck (and airway in particular) has been increasingly seen as an erogenous zone (erotic area). But that’s now, and this is from then.

We must – we have to – see The Creature’s killing as pre-meditated and intentionally cruel acts of violence perpetrated to emotionally wound an absent creator, with their purpose not visceral or libidinal. Yes.

–///–

It’s Gothic Gothic Gothic throughout, right?

Big landscapes of ice and rock described at length. Passions alluded to but never indulged (or never openly indulged).

On one of the days I was reading Frankenstein I got a lift with a load of lads in their early 20s from an event we all worked at to a station and I’m pretty certain in their conversation they were alluding to one of the three of them regularly paying for sex, and so I suppose someone like Victor Frankenstein would similarly have normalised this in his homosocial world.

These three lads definitely lived in a homosocial societal niche and were definitely sexist and they were also mean to the one who was using sex workers about his DJ career not going very well and I think maybe the reason why he brought up what I’m 99% certain was a suggested trip to a brothel that evening was because I (old) was sympathetic when the other boys were being mean to him about his DJing (it’s not going well) and presumably he wanted them (the other young boys) to know (not me, I was irrelevant which was fair enough – it neither mattered if I understood what he was talking about nor if I didn’t) that he wasn’t some dumb little boy playing with decks but a real grown up boy who pays people for sex…

Sorry, I don’t know why I’m going into this in detail, but it did feel like something Victor Frankenstein would also do. Though it isn’t mentioned.

Because Victor Frankenstein isn’t just a dweeb, but he’s a child. He plays with things he shouldn’t and takes no responsibility for what he’s done. He’s not an absent father to the creature, more like an absent God, an absent creator.

Well, yeah. 🙃🙃🙃

One of the problems with trying to think about something that’s been thought about as much as Frankenstein is that it’s fucking (near) impossible to think about it without running into the thought that what you’re thinking has been thought before.

So, what’s the point?

What’s the point in me sneeringly questioning, “Errr, just who is Prometheus here?”

With me getting distracted and digressing while talking about some young provincial student lads I met (who were absolutely friendly enough to me – some old bald manager-type they were generously giving a lift to (I gave the driver a tenner which I think looked like a lot to him for a 25 minute ride, but the taxi would have been about 40 quid and taken 30 mins to arrive, so actually I was aggressively underpaying, and because he drove far more recklessly than any paid driver would have done I was at the station in time for an earlier train than I was expecting to catch when we left the event site, so it was definitely a good deal all round, though all my clothes did smell of vapes afterwards), who are probably Victor Frankensteinesque?

What’s the point of me commenting on Frankenstein having lots of landscape description? It’s facile stuff, really…

–///–

The novel is epistolary, which is fun, with an initial framing narrative of an unstable polar explorer who finds Frankie up on an ice floe and then hears his life story, as Frankie lies dying on his boat. And so all of the adventure is reported, which means that until the final page (when The Creature appears to the polar explorer), it’s entirely possible that absolutely everything said about The Creature and the string of deaths around Frankie could have been a lie. In my opinion, the book would have been a tiny bit more fun if it did leave itself just a little bit more ambiguous at its end. But it is fun (and Mary Shelley does not need notes from scott manley hadley), and it’s meant to be fun.

It’s OTT and it’s silly, too, and it’s vague and playful and strange and interesting and fun and inventive.

Linguistically and narratively and thematically it’s doing fresh things. The impact of a novel like this is something that can’t really be underplayed.

A treat, I suppose. Though reading it during a busy and distracting period means I slowly clambered through it over the course of about two weeks, rather than sitting down and ploughing through in a handful of sittings, which is what the book deserves, so maybe a better reading experience would have led to a gushing response

–///–

Constantly, though, Frankenstein made me think of Frank-N-Furter and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, something I watched repeatedly when young and have listened to the soundtrack (which doesn’t have all the songs on) over and over again in the decades since.

It’s something I think about often that makes me melancholy, as although I know the film ends miserably for all concerned except for the character played by the film’s writer-director, the flashes of meaningful and unequivocal joy most of the characters are able to find when giving themselves over to absolute pleasure and swimming in the warm waters of sins of the flesh (copyright Richard O’Brien) always seemed like somewhere all people who were aware it was an option would one day be able to get to.

I often describe myself as repressed and this is what I mean by that: I’m not constructing a castle (literal or metaphorical) dedicated to nothing but sensuality and I wouldn’t know how to live there even if I did.

I felt like I had a sexual awakening coming in 2015, which was why I shaved my head, both as punishment and as prevention, and it worked to both punish (I’ve found myself repulsive almost constantly since, which isn’t nice) and to prevent (I have not built a pleasure-centred life 🙏🙏🙏, if anything joy continues to recede even as horrors are further away… a fade to plateau, which is narratively uninteresting).

Frankenstein made me think about this, which is probably why those lads chatting while I had this book in my bag felt like something to mention here.

It’s all bodies and sex, isn’t it? Life, I mean, and though I don’t want to be doing anything that Victor Frankenstein or The Creature or the Slough-based [very] amateur DJ is doing, they’re all people moving with the movements of their bodies, with the hungers and the passions and the power of doing what they want when they want, regardless of ethical or consequential concerns.

Is carelessness and cruelty and self-interested selfishness and a disinterest in and disregard for the internal lives of others what I mean by “unrepressed”? Maybe, though I would mean it to refer exclusively to cruelty-free contexts where my internal life would be simultaneously being disregarded by the people whose internal life I was disregarding.

Anyway.

Here’s a video from 2016 of me as SOLID BALD singing ‘Over At The Frankenstein Place’. Disregard my internal life and enjoy: