The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (5 page)

Like lightning, the solution to the problem of plausible transcendence had broken in upon Mary. It was the power of science that would bring horror to life. She hardly says more than this in her story, but it is enough.

We all know some version of Mary’s story from the many
Frankenstein
movies, which are the offspring of Nineteenth Century stage plays. But all these
Frankensteins
were revised and refined, altered for dramatic effect, updated for the sake of plausibility. They are not Mary’s story as she wrote it. Her
Frankenstein
was an early Nineteenth Century story, written in the context of the times.

Inasmuch as it is removed into the past and evokes horror, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
is in the Gothic tradition. But it is far less Gothic than its popular adaptations. In the original story there is no castle, no baron, no hunchbacked assistant, no dungeons, no chains, and no peasants with torches and pitchforks.

Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
is set in modern times, during the Eighteenth Century, in Walpole’s lifetime when science was making its first great impact on the world. Her central character is no nobleman with a private electrical generator and basement laboratory. Her Victor Frankenstein is merely a student of chemistry in nearby Geneva with great aptitude and strange ambitions.

Through diligent study, Victor has learned the secrets of life. As in Byron’s and Shelley’s conversation, his impulse is to gather the component parts of a creature and endue them with vital warmth. He collects bones from the charnel house and animates them.

We hardly see how the trick is performed. There is none of the “powerful engine” that Mary, in 1831, reported herself as having seen in her dream. The crucial scene that Mary wrote on the morning after her inspiration, the scene of the animation of the monster that begins Chapter 5, is very spare:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
²²

This is all we get of the mechanics. As in her dream, Mary’s protagonist is immediately horrified at what he has done and runs away. He will tell us no more:

I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be; listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject.
²³

Here in
Frankenstein
is evidence that exact detail, however useful to plausibility, is not itself necessary for plausibility to be achieved. The plausibility—the potential possibility—of the transcendent science that animates Victor Frankenstein’s creature is established through a dramatic argument. We are prepared for the monster’s animation by this argument, which is presented in the form of the story of Victor Frankenstein’s education.

Mary Shelley’s argument for new plausible transcendence is designed to encapsulate the experience of the early Nineteenth Century, still tied to the past, but a witness to change: At the age of thirteen, Victor Frankenstein stumbles across the alchemical works of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, the representatives of the old spiritual science, and is struck by their mystery and power. Stimulated by these marvels, he seeks to find the elixir of life and attempts to raise ghosts and devils. But he fails. Victor is a modern, and this ancient spirit-based science will not work for him.

Then Victor becomes acquainted with more contemporary science. Its overwhelming power of doubt ends his attempts to operate the old transcendent science. But it also makes him bitter:

I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
²⁴

However, when Victor goes off to the university, his outlook on science is changed. A lecturer in chemistry speaks to his class about ancient science and modern science—and lays the groundwork of plausibility for the marvel of transcendent science that will ensue:

“The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”
²⁵

If science can do so much, how much more is there that it may yet do?

What a powerful and subtle argument this is, as Mary presents it. It notes the demonstrable historical continuity between alchemy and modern chemistry, and calls them both “science.” It steals the fire from the old transcendence at the same time that it dismisses it and alleges the superior power of modern science. This powerful new science is not science as it may be now, but science-as-an-ideal, science as a potential higher state. This is mythic science, transcendent science, science-beyond-science. It is plausible inasmuch as it is an extension of existing science, and it is mysterious in that it is science that does not yet exist. All that we must do is acknowledge that there are miraculous powers, like the power of life, which modern science may yet discover—and the creature is ready to stir. Transcendence is ready to be born again.

It is not Victor Frankenstein, with his vague “instruments of life,” who is the true “modern Prometheus,” bringer of fire down from heaven, darer of divine wrath. Behind Victor stands his creator. It was she who truly dared the wrath of heaven, who in fear and trembling reanimated the corpse of transcendence. She gave it a shot of super-science, these bones she had reassembled, and watched in horrified fascination as they began to move. Such is the power of super-science.

Mary and Percy Shelley had some sense of the potential inherent in their argument. Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818. In a preface—written, as Mary later recalled, by Percy
²⁶
—a claim is made. The claim is made in as roundabout and self-denying a fashion as the claim of Walpole in the “William Marshal” preface of
The Castle of Otranto,
but nonetheless, a claim is made:

The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantments. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops; and however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.
²⁷

What is said here so languidly and elliptically is that
Frankenstein
is based on a scientific speculation which the author considers an impossibility. Nonetheless, this scientific transcendence is superior to spectres, enchantments and supernatural terrors. It is exempt from their disadvantages, the author of the preface says, without spelling out the disadvantages. He suggests merely that science-beyond-science permits novel situations and points of view.

In fact, there are great limitations to what Mary Shelley was able to accomplish. She had established an argument for the transcendent power of science-beyond-science, but no more. Not transcendent aliens or realms.

As long as it remains in the background, Frankenstein’s creature does appear as a being of more than human powers. It is endowed with strength and endurance greater than that of an ordinary human, climbing nearly perpendicular ascents during savage lightning storms. It follows poor Victor all over Europe, ruthlessly murdering his bride and his brother while remaining unseen by anyone but Victor.

But the arguments Mary had made for bringing the creature to life in a miraculous manner provided no justification for representing it as the master of higher powers of its own. As a result, when he is finally observed at close range, the creature does not retain his mystery. The instant he opens his mouth to speak and give an account of himself, he reveals himself to be just one more Romantic, pained and wounded by the world. He wonders why men are not more rational, and strikes out wildly in fits of passion and revenge. Another young modern.

No, of the three forms of transcendence, it was transcendent power alone that Mary Shelley was able to reawaken. The simplest transcendence—the power of creation and destruction. As presented in
Frankenstein,
this was superior power without a proper home, or source, or realm of being. It was superior power without superior beings to operate it. It was live, raw, untamed power, standing alone.

A further limitation of
Frankenstein
was that its transcendence was made after the model of the spirit-based transcendence of former times. Mary Shelley was attempting to write a story—in more contemporary terms—that would be the functional equivalent of
The Castle of Otranto.
The embodiment of her new transcendent science-beyond-science was set to do the work of an old-fashioned ghost—to haunt poor Victor,
clank, clank, rattle, rattle
—as though science-beyond-science didn’t have any better work to do than that.

Mary Shelley should suffer no blame for this. She had, after all, set forth with the intention of writing a ghost story in the first place. She was making up her argument for the first time, and because it was the model of transcendence available to her—and the appropriate model to offer to the state of understanding of her audience—her new transcendent science-beyond-science necessarily looked very much like old-fashioned spirit-based necromancy in its effect. Even so, this cutting of science-beyond-science to the shape and size of spiritual conjuring was a limitation.

A third limitation in
Frankenstein
was the attitude of horror taken toward the new transcendence. Within the story, it is precisely because of this attitude that everything goes wrong for Victor Frankenstein. If he had only been able to master his ambivalent passions and sit down and have a chat with his creature, he would have found that they had much in common and a great deal of useful information to exchange. Instead, the instant the creature is born, Victor gets a rising gorge and runs and hides under the bedcovers, and it is this act of rejection that turns his creature against him.

Again, this is not so much a fault as it is a sign of the state of mind of the early Nineteenth Century: They were launched into the new worldview. Science and the general mood of inquiry were having effects on life. People didn’t know how they felt about it.

Mary was looking to speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and to curdle the blood. She needed something she genuinely felt ambivalent about. She found that in the speculative conversation between Byron and Shelley. It was well enough to be a freethinker, a challenger of convention, but here was the promise of material science to usurp the power of the Creator and awaken life, even in a corpse. She didn’t know how she felt about that. It seemed like a step too far. To write her story was to deal with her anxiety.

But this kind of anxious horror, however necessary a stage, was an impediment. As long as this stage persisted, it effectively prevented any development of the possibilities of science-beyond-science.

Frankenstein
was the model of SF for the following forty years, until the 1860s and the stories of Jules Verne. It was not quite as singular and inimitable a model work as
The Castle of Otranto
—but neither was there any clear advance or development of the insights of
Frankenstein
. With its awakening of life in a creature that almost might be a devil,
Frankenstein
was the very limit of dareable speculation. The work that followed it was written well within its shadow.

We should understand that SF at this point had no name and was not a genre. It was not even so much as a story type. It consisted of no more than an argument—the argument for transcendent science-beyond-science. And that argument itself was not taken seriously, so that even Percy Shelley in the original preface to
Frankenstein
could state on Mary’s behalf, “I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination. . . .”

Before Mary Shelley, during the Age of Reason of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, there had been no possibility at all of SF literature. This was a time of reaction against the old spirit realm and all its creatures. In a period of “rules, critics, and philosophers” all athirst for rationality, mysterious unknown things were generally not given leave to exist.

Science itself was not then considered to be mysterious. Rather, it was taken to be the rational process of consideration of phenomena that were known but not yet understood. Science was undertaken by gentlemen amateurs. It had a distinctly practical and material nature. It was only at the end of the Age of Reason, with the isolation of the unknown gas oxygen in 1774, the discovery of the unknown planet Uranus in 1781, the launching of the first balloon in 1783, and similar scientific news, that it became just barely possible to perceive science as mysterious.