Peter Ackroyd, "The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein" (2008)

:1:
Adaptation, as (for instance) from book to film, entails both simplification and complication. There's an obvious and a less obvious aspect to this. To start with the obvious: a 90-minute movie must inevitably simplify a novel, even a short novel, like Frankenstein. If, in a film version, all of Mary Shelley’s characters were included, and all spoke exactly the words she puts into their mouths, if every scene-setting were lingered on so as to bring-out all the specific details she mentions ... why, then, the movie would not only be fifteen hours long, it would be a very strangely shaped and pitched piece of work indeed, clogged with intolerable longeurs, exposition-heavy and wrongfooting. As well as simplification (the process, in effect, of modelling the original text in miniature), film-makers must adjust for the two key salient differences in media: novels are verbal and strong on interiority, films are visual and strong on exteriority. If one wishes to convey to a movie audience (or, mutatis mutanda, to a theatre audience, a TV audience, a video-game audience) what is going on inside a character’s head your options are limited. A monologue or voice-over, that clunky and crudifying convention, is one possibility. It is, though, a bad one. Better is to work with what you have, the exteriorities, in order to utilise the beauty of inflections, and indeed of innuendoes, to imply what is happening inwardly. It turns out in practice, though, that only the greatest directors can pull this off with any panache. Otherwise we find ourselves mired in the sink of visual cliché, where we know the main character is sad because it is raining and know that s/he is happy because the clouds have parted with meteorological implausibility and the sun is now shining. Don’t get me wrong: movies are capable of extraordinary and beautiful effects. But they aren’t as good at capturing interiority as novels, which is one reason why I write novels and don’t make films. There are other reasons, not least the lamentable lack of big-money producers hammering at my door waving fistfuls of moolah, but: you know.

I am not, to be clear, suggesting there's anything second-hand, or second-rate, about adaptation. So far as that goes I remain persuaded by Linda Hutcheon’s argument in her and Siobhan O’Flynn’s influential Theory of Adaptation book, a study that refuses to accept that an adaptation is in any sense a belated or subaltern matter (and which indeed argues, à la Derrida/Post-Card, that the line of influence sometimes runs the other way). It is not that James Whales’ Frankenstein (1931) or Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) are secondary to the, as it were, primary text of Mary Shelley’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Nor, Hutcheons argues, should we be distracted by the false criterion ‘fidelity’ when judging an adaptation. We should, rather, take every adaptation as valid on its own terms—for (she insists) the bald fact of intertextuality, quite as much as its uniquity, means that adaptation, in various ways, is what literature as a whole is.

Of course some adaptations are better than others, and setting adaptations alongside quote-unquote original texts can be a way of highlighting elements in both. Two aspects of Shelley’s original novel that are rarely or never carried-through into adaptations are: the Russian-doll narrative form (Walton’s outer narrative contains Frankenstein’s narrative which contains the Creature’s narrative) and her roman philosophe ambition—for her novel is actually a Rousseauian or Voltaire-ian experiment in prose, imagining how a Lockean ‘tablua rasa’ consciousness might fare in a world that judges on appearances rather than inner worth. We think of Frankenstein as a Gothic novel, but in many ways it’s an Englightenment conte like Candide (this is why Shelley sets her story in Switzerland, and afterwards in Edinburgh: those two great centres of Enlightenment thought). Her monster is not, whatever the adaptations say, stitched together from used body-parts—it's true that we’re told Frankenstein spends ‘days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses’, but that’s to examine corpses so as to deduce how the human body works, and more specifically ‘to examine the cause and progress of [postmortem] decay’ [ch. 4]. Shelley doesn’t tell us how, or from what raw materials, Frankenstein actually makes his golem, so that (she says) we are not tempted to imitate him. When Dr F. finally infuses the metaphorical ‘spark of life’ into his creation, it is during a scene which Shelley pitches as deliberately low-key, downbeat, anti-climactic:

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.

Contrast this with the scene in Whale’s uber-influential movie: ‘that great manic scene,’ in Michael Wood’s words; ‘—operating table hoisted on pulleys through the open roof of the tower to face the night sky, wild storm raging outside, whizzing electrical effects inside, all kinds of mad inventor’s equipment everywhere looking as if it would suit a power station in Toytown—as operatic as can be imagined.’ Compare it again with the even more hysterically hyperactive and overblown equivalent scene in Kenneth Branagh's version.

Whale is staging the external correlatives for his inventor’s interior excitement, and in doing so he sets-up a quite different emphasis so far as his overarching story is concerned. For Whale has jettisoned Shelley’s conte philosophe premise wholesale. His monster’s consciousness is not a tabula rasa; Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant, sent to recover a Normal Brain to fit into the creature’s cranium, has instead returned with an Abnormal one. Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein so beautifully parodies this moment: ‘whose brain did you take?’ Gene Wilder's Frankenstein demands of his idiot assistant. ‘Abby somebody,’ Marty Feldman's Igor replies. ‘I’m pretty sure that was the name on the jar. Abby Normal.’ Not Tabby Rasa, at any rate.

The point is that Whale’s monster is a rebus for the outsider, the socially rejected, the defective, not a vehicle for Lockean thought-experiment. The formal alterations Whale makes reinforce this: he does away both with Walton’s framing narrative—all that north pole gubbins—and with the monster’s own narration, nested in the middle of the novel. Shelley’s monster is superbly eloquent and articulate; Whale’s monster a lumbering, grunting hulk. Branagh, although he sometimes gets credit for directing what Wikipedia calls ‘the most faithful film adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel’, follows Whale in both these strategies, and indeed doubles down upon them: Karloff’s monster is ‘simple’, but de Niro’s monster is a bad  man before his death and therefore a bad monster after his resurrection. And by jettisoning the central narrative Branagh similarly flattens Shelley’s complex web of interacting subjectivities. This reduces the frame narrative to something approaching fatuity: Aidan Quinn’s Walton starts the movie a tyrannical captain driving his crew on towards the pole at all costs; then the movie reverts to its main narrative, Frankenstein’s story before returning, briefly, to Walton at the end: he has ‘learned his lesson’ and tells the crew to set a course for home. It's thin fare, narratively, and doesn't justify the frame narrative's inclusion.

In fact Branagh’s is a much-too-frantic adaptation, in which neither actors nor camera can ever be allowed to rest but must constantly be hurtling forward or spinning around or swooping up and down. It also contains a lot of goo and gunk, lashings of blood and slime and amniotic fluid, Kristevan abject matter that illustrates something not particularly well brought-into-focus overall, something about childbirth (poor old Cheri Lunghi as Victor’s mum, dying in a bloodily rendered childbirth at the movie's beginning) and sex—the creature is animated not by lightning, but by a gigantic phallic tube pumping a mass of wriggling electric eels, like gigantic spermatozoa, into his chamber.

Whale’s adaptation is better because it is cleaner, both formally (there is real subtlety in Whale’s precise movements of the camera; a slow pan up or down here, a restrained dolly zoom there) and in terms of what is represented: Victor’s spacious castle, the unhurried pace, Karloff's superb make-up, so often copied because its so eloquently copyable. It is hardly original to note that Whale, a gay man who confronted the conventions of his time by sharing his house with his partner, here made a movie about queerness, about the way society refuses to accommodate gayness, and how awkward and ungainly and, well, monstrous this state of affairs renders gay experience. The knee-jerk hostility of the villagers metaphorises the moral panic queerness so often provokes, just as the scene in which the monster plays with and then kills the little girl Maria by throwing her in the lake, reads like a bold appropriation of homophobic slurs (‘won’t somebody think of the children?’ and so on).

What is Frankenstein, after all, but a story about how a man makes another man without going through the scare-quotes ‘natural’ process of female mediated pregnancy and birth? Whale’s monster captures how physical, how erotically embodied one’s sense of self can become: the monster’s hefty, masculine frame poking out of its too-small clothes: so very unmissably male, so physical, so somatically overdetermined. It's also a film that apprehends the queerness of what, talking of his own project, Whale called ‘the ritual’. Here’s Michael Wood again:

Karloff and Whale had an argument during the shooting about the way the creature was to kill the little girl he was innocently playing with. Karloff wanted to ‘pick her up gently and put her into the water exactly as he had done to the flowers’, but Whale wanted the girl to be thrown into the water, in what Karloff called ‘a brutal and deliberate act’. Whale insisted, and trying to explain to Karloff and the rest of the cast, now committed to a view of the monster as an ugly, lovable innocent, said: ‘You see, it’s all part of the ritual.’ The ritual, I take it, involved the violence of the creature’s innocence, and horror in this sense would be closer to tragedy than we like to think, or would be tragedy as grand guignol, provoking pity and fear in unmeasured proportions.

According to Wood ‘the creature is dangerous and bewildered: we can’t really give him our sympathy or refuse it to him – well, we can sentimentalise him, but only if we refuse to pay attention to the ritual.’

The important thing, in the movie, is that we can’t regret his creation, and not only because there would be no movie without him. We can’t feel it was wrong to create him, and the whole question of the creator’s caring or not caring for his creature, so important in Mary Shelley, is entirely absent here. Frankenstein has made not an animated doll or puppet but an ungainly travesty of a man, a would-be person who suffers, beseeches, smiles, rages and murders. The creature can’t die, even when he is killed off, because we don’t know what to do with this life so curiously pitched between the human and the non-human, because he represents not only our fear of the unmanageable but also our addiction to it. The making of the creature is not a blasphemy or a desecration, as the story is supposed to say; it is what happens when you want the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem to be born.

We can’t, I suppose, call the movie a full-throated celebration of gayness, since the emphasis of the movie (in this respect, Whale is taking his cue from Shelley’s novel, I think) is on the hostility of the larger world to difference and the unusual; but it is a powerful and enduring movie because it has something to say, and says it. That’s not really true of Branagh’s film, I think.


:2:

Which brings me to Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), another adaptation of Shelley’s story made by a gay man. In this novel the action is moved from Switzerland to England. Frankenstein studies at Oxford and befriends Percy Shelley, the two of them discussing the possibilities of animating dead matter. After Percy is sent down for his atheism Frankenstein follows him to London, and Ackroyd gives us a clothier’s yard of atmospheric metropolitan gubbins, heavy on the dirt (‘these alleys were like some black shadow forever following its steps. We picked our way around the prone body of a woman in the last stages of intoxication, her legs were covered with her own filth’ [20]). Victor lurks in morgues:

One middle-aged man, thickset with a heavy jaw and a shaved head, appeared to have been burned … livid red bruising and swollen limbs … the face of an adjacent female was almost unrecognisable, looking like nothing so much as a bunch of bruised and overripe grapes: I could fathom no reason for the savage pulping of her visage, unless it were some frightful accident. The rest of her body was quite untouched, and it occurred to me that with a new head she might have been an object of lust. [71]

I tell you what, mate, with a new head even I might be an object of lust. Anyway: Frankenstein hears that his sister Elizabeth is ill with ‘consumption’ and returns to Switzerland just in time to be present at her deathbed. Provoked by his grief, he returns to England resolved to discover the secret of life, and establishes a lab at the outskirts of Oxford where he is supplied with dead bodies by ‘resurrectionists’. Whilst working, he is also hanging out with all the important Romantics: Coleridge, Byron and of course Shelley (‘Bysshe was eager to explain his schemes of future happiness … a little community in Wales dedicated to the principles of equality and justice [and] an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur’ [159]). Soon enough his experiments come to fruition.

In the course of these trials I noticed that, in the corpses of the younger specimens, the phallus became erect at the slightest excitation … my work on the phallus was at first confined to an examination of the three columns of erectile tissue, but then I advanced to an attempt at the measurement of the spermal fluid. By means of the firm pressure of my fingers I brought one body to a state of ejaculation, at which point there came a groan; but no spermatozoa appeared. There was no fluid, but there was instead a sprinkling of material with the appearance and consistency of dust .[163-4]

Ackroyd does not stint us the penile stuff:

I backed away, taking a few paces, and found myself against the wall of the workshop … he seemed to lose interest in me. He noticed his penis, still erect, and with a groan he began to stimulate himself in front of me. I looked on in absolute astonishment as he laboured to produce the seminal fluid. What monstrous issue might emerge from one who had died and had been reborn? His most devoted efforts were unavailing, however, and he turned to me with a curiously submissive or perhaps embarrassed look. [183]

Look away granny, it's Wankenstein! ‘Had he,’ Frankenstein-the-narrator wonders, ‘sinned like Adam in the Garden?’ recalling the famous verses in Genesis where the father of mankind mucks about with his enormous schwanzstucker. After this scene of *clears throat nervously* monsterbation Ackroyd's creature jumps in the river and zooms off: ‘he was able to swim at an extraordinary speed, and within a very few moments he was out of my sight.’ Michael-Phelpsenstein!

Frankenstein spends a week delirious with shock, going up to the Lake District to recuperate. But the monster follows him.

A small boat emerged from the other side … to my utter horror and amazement I realised who it was who stood in the boat … I could see the lurid yellow hair and the blank grey eyes. Now he held out his arms: his hands were covered in blood. [199]

Frankenstein scarpers, afterwards pondering what he had seen with the acuity and logical penetration of a Romantic-era Sherlock Holmes: ‘this visitation was evidence of some terrible event. I was sure of it. His bloody hands were the token of some crime perpetrated in vengeance.’ You think? At any rate, the monster kills Shelley’s wife Harriet, and later confronts Frankenstein in his lab (‘Are you my God? You were the first thing that I saw upon this earth. Is it any wonder that your form is more real to me than that of any other living creature?’ [227]). This is the occasion for a long, monsterly monologue: he learned to speak and read by eavesdropping on a labourer and his daughter sheltering in a barn; using Frankenstein’s notes he tracked down the sister he had loved before his death—she is Annie Keat, and he, we discover, was John Keat [sic]. But his reunion does not go well: ‘on seeing me she screamed out “my God! Out of the grave!” In a frenzy of fear she ran towards the bank of the river.’ [250]. She dies (‘of panic, or immersion, I did not know’).

The monster blames his creator. ‘I have read somewhere that suffering shares the nature of infinity’ he tells F., a reference to the lines from Wordsworth’s The Borderers: ‘suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,/And shares the nature of infinity’—which, since Wordsworth didn’t publish this play until 1842, is a quite remarkable prolepsis on the creature's part. ‘I am wrapped in anger,’ he assures Frankenstein, ‘and the contemplation of revenge!’ Rather than heed this warning, however, Frankenstein joins Shelley, Mary Shelley and others for a short holiday in a Thames-side villa near Marlow. Mary has nightmares and wakes screaming (‘I dreamed I saw a phantom by the window. It was a dream I am certain of it. There was a face’ [268]) but the party ignores all presentiments of ill. A local woman is murdered. The party return to London, hook up with Polidori and Byron, have a quick snack (‘William [the waiter] returned with the sandwiches. Bysshe fell upon them’ [328]) and resolve to visit the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, which Byron has rented for the season. Not, however, before another quick nibble: ‘William, without prompting, had brought over another plate of ham sandwiches. Bysshe attacked them.’ [330] The novel dallies on the shores of Lake Geneva for a couple of chapters:

“The servants tell me,” Byron said as we sat down to breakfast the following morning, “that a sea monster has been glimpsed in the lake.” [342]

Lake monster, surely? Or else, maybe, the Sea of Geneva? The Creature pops up to bug his creator (‘“Why are you here?” I asked of him. “Where else am I to come, if I seek for a companion?”’ [371]) and Frankenstein hurries back to London.

We're almost at the end of the novel now when, with hurried and ill-judged ta-dah!, Ackroyd pulls a twist ending out of his conjurer’s hat. It will come as a surprise, I suspect, to few readers: we discover that what the novel we've been reading is more Jekyll and Hyde than Frankenstein, and that, moreover, it’s all been in Frankie’s head. ‘Given to me by the patient, Victor Frankenstein, on Wednesday November 15th 1822,’ read the final words of the novel, ‘Signed by Frederick Newman, Superintendent of the Hoxton Mental Asylum for Incurables.’ There never was a monster; it was Victor killing all those people. The rapidity of this final turnaround is an extremely clumsy note on which to end, one notch up from “…and it was all a dream.’ The novels ends with that dull thud you experience when climbing stairs in the dark and reach the landing one step sooner than you think, so that your reaching foot slaps down hard. Is that it?

This twist ending is deflating because it forces us to reappraise everything we’ve just read. In part this is irksome because it boxes the reader into a series of more-or-less barren speculative forays (did he actually meet the Shelleys and Byron? Or was that also part of his hallucination? How did Shelley come to write her story about a character called Victor Frankenstein if she never met this Victor Frankenstein? Or is the idea supposed to be (as per that final date) that the narrator is actually called something quite other, but the balance of his mind has been disordered by reading Mary’s novel in 1818?) But it’s more irksome, I think, because it reverts the painstaking Whale-ian exteriorisation of the creature’s monstrosity so clunkingly back into interiority again. It sells the queer potential of the telling short.


:3:
Here’s the cover art to the last book Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published in her life, Touching Feeling Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003):

Sedgwick discusses it in her preface: the black and white photo was ‘the catalyst that impelled me to assemble the book in its present form’: the woman depicted, who is so awkwardly clutching that object, something like a gigantic pupa, or a wasps nest, made of sticks and twine, is the ‘outsider’ artist Judith Scott, with one of her pieces, a mysterious core ‘hidden under many wrapped or darned layers of multicoloured yarn, cord, ribbon, rope and other fibre ... whose scale bears comparison to Scott’s own body’. Elaine Showalter comments: ‘on the most immediate visual level, the photo is used to represent the act of touching feeling, the effort to hold and explore and seek comfort from something wordless and precious. For those familiar with Sedgwick’s own life and career, there are other correspondences. Sedgwick has often written about her own sense of alienation, outsideness, otherness, queerness.’ To be gay and out is to summon a monster as alter ego to walk the streets with you, to sit beside you on the bus, to join you at the restaurant table, and not only in the sense that homophobes, and a homophobic society, see you as a hideous Boris Karloff to be hunted down with flaming brands. Monster, as generations of critics of Frankenstein have noted, means something shown, something demonstrated (see the monster in the middle of that word), something not just meaningful, but meaningfully ‘out’. In classical times if (say) your cow gave birth to a two-headed calf, the birth was a monster in the specific sense that the gods were trying to tell you something (compare the French montrer; consider the original meaning of the English word muster). The best modern monsters are doing the same thing: Godzilla, say, is a monster in the demotic sense, but is also trying to tell us something (about, I suppose, the dangers of nuclear testing). The Mummy is a monster in the hide-behind-the-sofa sense, but it's also trying to tell us something (about the violation of history and memory entailed by imperialism, or something along those lines).

I take Sedgwick's choice of cover-art to be a way of talking about the monstrous beauty entailed by accepting, by hugging-close, one's queerness; a point (if I don't stray too far from the echt Sedgwickian line) as true of straight as gay individuals. We're all perverse, to one degree or another. Sex, as a human connection, is monstrous in the montrer-sense as much as in the Othello-ian beast with two backs, weird-creature sense. Ackroyd's problem, in his Casebook, is not that he tackles the queer aspect of Frankenstein's story, but that he's so plonking about it, so foresquare: his creature both male-model gorgeous (‘he was the most beautiful corpse I had ever seen ... the body itself was muscular and firmly knit ... chest abdomen and thighs perfectly formed’ [179]) and a literal embodiment of the sterility of same-sex desire, wanking dust and lurking in the shadows. Shelley's Frankenstein agrees to make his creature a mate, and only changes his mind at the last moment because he is afraid such a couple would populate the world with a race of monsters to overwhelm humankind. Ackroyd's monster begs his Frankenstein for a mate, but Ackroyd's Frankenstein refuses immediately; instead the final act of the novel concerns a machine of unmaking the scientist constructs, one that dissolves bodies down to their bones and then dissolves the bones themselves (he tests this on a ‘barbary ape’ he buys ‘at great expense’ at London Docks). F. hopes to use this is eradicate his creature altogether, although when he finally persuades the monster inside it proves useless. Apes, symbolic of heterosexual desire, can be unmade; but not the monstrous embodiment of queer sexuality it seems.

Casebook is a novel about London: more Newgate novel than Gothic, and a long way from the rational clarity and Adorno-Horkheimer inhumainty of Shelley's Enlightenment inspiration. Its problem is that it can't hug its monster; that it sees only sterility and, in its lumpen final twist, evanescence and hallucination in its creature. A much less eloquent articulation of queerness than Whale's.