Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  One of the Grimm brothers, Jacob, had retold the sixteenth-century story of the golem in 1808. Grimm was prescient. By 1808, he could already see that the golem perfectly captured the philosophical spirit of the age. In the original Jewish legend, a famed rabbi named Judah Low of Prague breathes life into a lump of clay, just as God had done with Adam, but, instead of creating human life, produces a creature called the golem. While the rabbi intends the golem to protect the Jews against attacks from the gentiles, in Jacob Grimm’s retelling, the golem assumes its own life, then grows monstrously large and out of control, so that its creator must eventually destroy it. Grimm had Goethe in mind, specifically his “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a 1797 ballad based loosely on the legend of the golem. In the “Apprentice,” a scientist’s supernatural powers, which he uses to animate inert life, once again lurch wildly out of control. Both Goethe and Grimm offered warnings to whoever would listen.

  But neither Goethe nor Grimm seized the popular imagination. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley did; and I want to spend some time with her story here, for she frames the period so well. In some ways, the search for the secret of life, as it must inevitably be, was naïve and immature. And that’s one reason, at least, that a young person, Shelley, could see with such astonishing clarity into the heart of the period. Shelley published her popular novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in 1818, at barely nineteen years of age, and settled on Prometheus for her subtitle with good reason, for she had written an allegory about an act of cosmic disobedience—stealing fire from the gods, or, in the context of the novel, discovering how to create life from inert matter. We can thus read Frankenstein as the ultimate pursuit for that one grand prize, life itself. But, like Grimm and Goethe before her, she also wanted her novel to serve as a warning, alerting scientists that they were chasing after the wrong thing, and that, in the end, the pursuit would ultimately destroy them. Shelley, who spent two years writing her book, invested Frankenstein with a great deal of humor and ironic detachment. She begs us to read her narrative in anything but a straightforward way. She makes us see the silliness in the search.

  The search for the secret of life, because of its forbidden nature, found little favor with the general public and sank to the level of underground activity, pure and simple. Shelley understood that. Doctor Victor Frankenstein leaves home and follows his obsession and, in so doing, resembles many of the period’s own scientists: “From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. . . . My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded, and soon became so ardent and eager, that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning whilst I was yet engaged in my laboratory.”

  As Victor plunges deeper into his studies in natural philosophy, he moves more and more to the edges—becoming a fringe character—and, at the same time, deeper and deeper underground. The light goes out in the novel: Most of the action takes place at night, for Victor sees most clearly, he believes, by the dull reflected illumination of the moon. Like Dostoevsky’s underground man, Victor remains out of sight, working behind closed doors, in muted light, in hiding. He might as well work away at the center of the earth. Isolated and alone, he gives himself over to one scientific pursuit only, to the exclusion of everything else—family, friends, nature, even love—a pursuit that usurps God’s role: the creation of life. And so he asks himself the question that consumed the scientific community in the nineteenth century: “Whence . . . did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.” Nothing can turn aside the obsessive genius, for the person blinded by such overweening pride, by definition, has to resist as flat-out silliness any warning to steer clear of forbidden knowledge. The ego can become the world’s insult.

  And so, like Doctor Faustus, some three hundred years earlier, Doctor Victor Frankenstein defies every accepted boundary of knowledge. His misguided ego demands that he possess all knowledge, starting with the creation of life and ending with the elimination of death: “ Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. . . . if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.”

  He succeeds in achieving the first half of his dream, the secret of life: “After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” He has not realized the second and more crucial half of his dream: the creation of life. And, for a brief moment, he’s not certain he wants to open that door. He hesitates. The story teeters; it can go either way. But that momentary pause, freighted with centuries of metaphysical meaning, passes like a heartbeat.

  What follows may not be the very first passage in the new genre of science fiction, but it surely counts as one of the earliest, and Shelley gives it to us with a recognizable amount of tongue in cheek. In fact, this singular event has all the trappings of a parody of the gothic romance—a dark and rainy night, a candle nearly burned out, the dreary fall of the year, a woods both deep and creepy. At precisely one in the morning—with every solid citizen fast asleep—as the rain begins pattering against the windowpanes, Frankenstein “collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” And then Doctor Victor Frankenstein does what only up to this point God has done. He creates life: “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.”

  But Victor’s elation is shockingly short-lived. One brief paragraph later, Victor yearns to undo his miracle work: “Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room . . . I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created.”

  Frankenstein’s creature has a life—of sorts. But he lacks a soul. He faces the world as a lonely and baffled outsider—the ultimate deviant—desperately in need of a female partner. The monster (who remains unnamed throughout the novel) begs his creator for a soul mate, so that he, too, can create life—normal life. But the doctor recoils at the prospect of creating yet another aberration, another freak of nature. Suddenly, for the first time, Frankenstein looks his creation in the eyes, and offers us his only full-blown account of that alien, animated being. The description, once again, rivals any parody of the gothic:Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again imbued with animation could not be hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.

  Throughout the rest of the novel, Victor flees from what he has done, only to have the monster confront him in the last several pages. Each thinks the other heartless, soulless, cruel, and wicked. Creator and creation merge, the reader recognizing them—doctor and monster—perhaps for the first time, as twin aspects of each other. Such merging must always take place, for whatever the endeavor, one cannot help but replicate oneself. What else is there? That’s why, when readers confuse the doctor with the monster, and refer to the latter as Frankenstein, they reveal a basic truth: The doctor and the monster live in effect, really, as one—opposing characteristics of a single, whole person.

  Mary Shelley hints at this idea in her subtitle, The Modern Prometheus. For one cannot invoke Prometheus without raisin
g the specter of his twin brother, Epimetheus. Where Prometheus stands for foresight, for a certain degree of prophesying, Epimetheus represents hindsight. That’s the only way he can see clearly, for he is befuddled by reality, and continually misinterprets the present. He promises to marry Pandora, but in keeping his word manages to let loose on the earth every evil known to humankind. He bumbles.

  Victor, as I have said, exists both as himself and monster, creator and creation, light side and dark side, victor and victim—a seeming prophet, but in reality a man unwittingly bent on ruining everything he holds dear. According to Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology at the end of the nineteenth century, we are all twins, all of us in need of integrating the two halves of our divided soul. When Rimbaud writes, “Je est un autre,” he reminds us that, like Victor, we all live as part solid citizen and part monster, sometimes buoyed by brightness, and sometimes dragged down deep into our shadow selves.

  The nineteenth century gives birth to a great number of twins because, as with Jung, many writers and philosophers find our basic human nature in that twinning: We pass our days as schizophrenic creatures. I offer only a few examples: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Double, Poe’s “William Wilson” and “Black Cat,” Kipling’s “Dream of Duncan Parrenness,” Guy de Maupassant’s “Horla,” and a good deal of the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann. The age courted so many doubles it needed a new word to describe the phenomenon, so the British Folklore Society fashioned one out of German and introduced it in 1895: doppelgänger, the “double-walker.”

  We know the nineteenth century itself, as I said at the outset of this chapter, as a formidable and mighty twin—a century characterized by an energetic, lighter, and upbeat side, and a darker, more tragic one. That dichotomy helped fuel the search for meaning throughout the entirety of the nineteenth century, for in a large sense, meaning usually results in a degree of resolution. In the end, in a world more perfect, the nineteenth century, perhaps, might have reached some sublime integration.

  But the age wanted little if any of that. We bump up against exceptions, of course—Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman—but for the most part professionals, from businessperson to biologist, craved Frankenstein’s power. That legacy has helped to shape the twentieth century, and it has gathered momentum in the first few years of the twenty-first century, in our avaricious political appetite for power and control and all-out victory at any cost. Mary Shelley’s warning about creating monsters and then having to live with them has gone unheeded. That’s the problem with nineteen-yearolds. No one listens to them. While generations of readers have embraced her novel as pure horror, Hollywood, of all industries, seems to have gotten it right. It read her story not just as horror, but horror leavened with a good deal of dark, sometimes very dark, humor. Frankenstein has provided solid material for both the prince of gore, Boris Karloff, as well as for those sillies Abbott and Costello and Mel Brooks. The formula has proved highly successful: Since 1931, Hollywood has released forty-six separate movies based on Mary Shelley’s teenage novel.

  And even if Hollywood never releases another film about Frankenstein, the monster will never really die—on the screen or off—for, as we shall see, he keeps reappearing, in many different forms, all through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He certainly stalks our own times. He is, many would argue, us. Which is to say that we have all had a hand not just in creating him. We have also done our part in keeping him alive.

  Very early in the nineteenth century, physicians got infected with Victor Frankenstein’s vision, and radically changed the underlying philosophy of medicine. From the ancient world on, doctors had aimed at restoring patients to health. Then, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the profession assumed a radically different goal: the prolongation of life—no, the extension of life—sometimes beyond a time when it made good medical sense. (This desire, too, has been passed down to us in the twenty-first century.) Well-known and respected surgeons in London even believed that they could reanimate the recently dead, as if the longer one remained dead the harder it would be wake up. This is no less than what Victor Frankenstein and hundreds of real scientists and writers also pursued in the period, expending their time and their souls in the pursuit of some special elixir, a magic potion, that would unlock that key secret of the universe: mastery over death or, turned another way, a hold on eternal life. But first there was that deep-seated, elemental spark to discover—as Victor Frankenstein put it—the “cause of generation and life.”

  How different, Frankenstein from Pinocchio, but also how similar. “In 1849, before he became Carlo Collodi, Carlo Lorenzini described the Florentine street kid as the incarnation of the revolutionary spirit. Whenever there is a demonstration, said Lorenzini, the street kid ‘will squeeze himself through the crowd, shove, push and kick until he makes it to the front.’ Only then will he ask what slogan he must shout, and ‘whether it is “long live” or “down with”’ is a matter of indifference.”3 This passage is from a review of a book about the creation at the center of Collodi’s immensely popular and perdurable book, Pinocchio. Collodi imparted that revolutionary spirit to the heart of the children’s book when Geppetto, the lowly artisan, starts carving his puppet out of a block of wood only to pull off the ultimate miracle of the period—bringing Pinocchio to life as a young boy.

  Collodi published his Pinocchio in 1881. It has been ever since one of Italy’s most treasured books: Italo Calvino, the great fantastical writer, confessed that Pinocchio had influenced his writing career his entire life. Toward the end of the story, Pinocchio begins to read and write. Through those two activities, he transforms into a “ragazzo per bene,” literally “a respectable boy,” or idiomatically, “a real live boy.” He looks at “his new self” in a mirror—a traditional way of representing self-reflection—and feels a “grandissima compiacenza,” which has been translated as simply “pleased.” Pinocchio is of course far from Frankenstein’s monster, but he arises out of the inertness of matter—in this case, out of wood. He begins as a puppet—controlled and manipulated and directed—but his master, Geppetto, imbues him with that revolutionary fervor of the street kid, a perfect blending of the political, the scientific, and the spiritual, in keeping with the interests of the late nineteenth century. Pinocchio “comes alive” in the broadest sense. The prize for his good deeds in the book is consciousness, the seat and secret of all life.

  In the opening days of the new century—January 6, 1800, to be exact—Britain’s old and very staid Royal Academy got the search for the secret of life started. The Academy signaled both its approval and support for the quest in a peculiar way by announcing a prize of fifty guineas and a gold medal for the first person who could produce twenty pounds of raw opium from five acres of land. Settling on opium for its own experiments, the Academy had chosen a most ancient drug. In fact, the nineteenth century could have easily installed Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century physician, as patron saint of opium. According to legend, Paracelsus carried a sword with a hollow pommel in which he kept the elixir of life. Historians conjecture that the potion may indeed have been opium, which he affectionately called “the stone of immortality.” A contemporary description of his healing method links him closely with opium and connects him with the nineteenth-century belief in the essentialist qualities of that drug:In curing [intestinal] ulcers he did miracles where others had given up. He never forbade his patients food or drink. On the contrary, he frequently stayed all night in their company, drinking and eating with them. He said he cured them when their stomachs were full. He had pills which he called laudanum which looked like pieces of mouse shit but used them only in cases of extreme illness. He boasted he could, with these pills, wake up the dead and certainly he proved this to be true, for patients who appeared dead suddenly arose.4

  This is the sort of resurrective magic that drove scient
ific interest in the magical properties of opium.

  An enterprising laboratory assistant named Thomas Jones claimed the prize money just after the century opened, by producing twenty-one pounds of opium from five acres that he had planted near Enfield, north of London. And the race was on. Opium tapped into some center of sensation, but no one knew for certain how, or where; and no one seemed able to control its effect. Nonetheless, from this moment on, chemists and physicians took the cessation of pain as the principal piece of evidence that they had homed in on that hidden center of power. The nineteenth century was shaping up as the century of the anodyne to such a degree that many scientists considered their experiments a success if they could eliminate pain in their subjects and maximize their pleasure. Even before Freud popularized the pleasure principle, the nineteenth century was hard at work putting that idea into practice.

  Like every drug in this period, opium quickly moved out of the laboratory and into the streets. Doctors recommended it for virtually every illness, from a simple headache to tuberculosis to menstrual cramps. Up to the time of the first opium wars in the late 1830s, a British subject could freely buy opium plasters, candy, drops, lozenges, pills, and so on, at the local greengrocer’s. The English took to smoking opium, or ingesting a tincture called laudanum (from the Latin laudere, “to praise”), available, quite readily, at corner apothecary shops. Since laudanum sold for less than a bottle of gin or wine, many working-class people ingested it for sheer pleasure.