Books: Mad science, 18th Century style.

ABC Radio's show The Philosopher's Zone has a transcript up regarding the scientific and philosophical contexts of the Romantic Era and how these influences made their way into the classic horror novel Frankenstein.

Sadly the audio has been taken down, but interested Screamers and Screamette's can read through host Alan Saunder's Q&A with Joan Kirkby and Jane Goodall (not THAT Jane Goodall), two contributors to the new essay collection Frankenstein's Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780-1850, and film historian Rudi Belmer.

Here's some highlights:

Jane Goodall: . . . The novel was kind of known in this rather one-dimensional way as 'a Monster novel' and an 'early horror novel'. Then it went through a phase where it was really the property of feminist criticism, and the dominant theme out of that was that it was a novel written as a cautionary tale against the scientific over-reacher, and the masculine ego in science.

And I think what happened was critical views of the novel got stuck on this, and people became unable to read it as other than a cautionary tale against science. And that's an interesting thing to happen, because people weren't reading the novel at all. They were reading an idea of the novel. And if you actually any attention to these vast, rich passages in the novel, it's not that at all. It's a novel written absolutely out of the Romantic movement, which was in love with inquiry of all kinds, free inquiry, and particularly scientific inquiry because people really thought it could save the world, and that was not a naïve notion at that time.

On the creation of the creature:

Alan Saunders: But what role did electricity play in the creation of the Creature?

Rudi Belmer – "Frankenstein" reading: '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.'

Then she goes on. She left it deliberately vague, but you're not quite sure whether there was some Black Magic involved, or whether there was some vague elixir or something; certainly not by thunder, lightning, electrical impulses and so forth and so on. There was none of that. There's certainly many dimensions to this story, and we can talk about Faust, we can talk about the over-achiever, we can talk about man trying to emulate God, there are so many aspects, which I think is the keynote as to why this particular idea has transcended time.

Interestingly, you talk about the electrical science of the time, and one of the great students of electrical science at the time was Joseph Priestly, the great 18th century chemist, one of the discoverers of oxygen, and he himself had been brought up a Calvinist, had had a terrible time in childhood because of uncertainty as to whether he was saved. And he, like Godwin, broke free from the Calvinist shackles and among other things, wrote about and experimented on electricity."

Jane Goodall: Well electricity I suppose helped to liberate people from that psychology, because it was a form of visible and palpable power that you could operate. If you made sparks fly, that was the most exhilarating experience, and you get from Priestly's generation, sort of 1730 through to the end of that century, this new mood of incredible sense of possibility and hype surrounding science and experiment. And electricity I suppose was the visualisation of that, because you saw the spark.

Link Proliferation: Gesù Cristo! Un piccolo uomo fatto dei quadrati!

That's right, pussycat!

The generous papercraft figure designers at Cubeecraft are offering free downloads of their models for Italian Spiderman and his lead baddie Captain Maximum.

To truly make this your Friday productivity sink, here's the first episode of Alrugo's Italian Spiderman:



Follow the flick all the way through the series and you'll be another hour or so closer to the weekend.

Leaping from papercraft to t-shirt design, Devil's Due Publishing – the group that handles the indie hit series Hack/Slash - and online t-shirt retailer Threadless are joint-hosting a horror-themed design contest. The rules can be found here. If you've got any artistic talent, give it a shot! I'm looking at you, Screamin' Spacejack.

Now that the political debates are over, let's get back to discussing the real issues of the day!

Simon "Shaun of the Dead" Pegg sounds off in the pages of the Guardian: Zombies don't run!

From Pegg's rant:

I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run. It's a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

Speaking of debates, the Chronicle of Higher Education sounds off on the Mary/Percy Frankenstein authorship debate recently rekindled by the publication of an new edition of Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein manuscript. From the article:

In 1974, the late James Rieger published a new edition of the 1818 text. (Up until then, the 1831 edition, which incorporated substantial revisions by Mary, was the one familiar to most readers.) "Shelley oversaw his wife's manuscript at every stage," Rieger argued. "Not only did he correct her frequent grammatical solecisms, her spelling, and her awkward phrasing," Percy made more-substantial suggestions "for the improvement of the narrative."

Rieger summed up Percy's influence this way: "His assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator."

…

One of the first scholars to put the focus back on Mary's accomplishment was Anne K. Mellor, a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. In the 1980s, Mellor went to the Bodleian Library in Oxford to take a look at the manuscript evidence — including the two Frankenstein notebooks — which had been more or less ignored by researchers.

…

Mellor's 1988 book Mary Shelley: Her Fiction, Her Life, Her Monsters goes after Rieger's claim that Percy's interventions improved the novel. Rieger's account is "so biased in Percy Shelley's favor that it must be read as a tissue of facts, half-truths, and pure speculation," Mellor wrote.

Her own study of the notebooks led her to conclude that Percy "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text." In Mellor's reading, however, Percy at times "misunderstood her intentions and distorted her ideas" as he attempted to impose his style on his wife and make the novel more formal and Latinate.

"Percy never met a monosyllable that he didn't want to make a polysyllable," Mellor says. "Percy thought he was heightening her prose style, making it sound more erudite." So the monster walks around "sounding as if he's Horace."

…

We are not likely to know why Mary accepted those words, or any of Percy's other edits and additions. Robinson [editor of the new edition – CRwM] hopes that readers will take the evidence laid out in the Bodleian edition, weigh it for themselves, and — putting the ideological extremes of past disputes aside — go easy on both Shelleys.

"Some people are going to argue that Percy is usurping his authority and changing Mary. Other people would argue, at the other extreme, that Mary needs this advice," Robinson says. "I like to give them the benefit of the doubt. Here are two people who love each other. One is giving a manuscript to the other for editorial advice, one suggests changes, the other accepts them, the end. But that makes no drama."

To stay on the subject of horror novels, remember the untitled online serial novel I hipped you to back in August? It's got a title now and it available as hardcopy novel. You can score your own copy of Cryptic Bindings On/Off - A Jekyll & Hyde Story at their Web site.

Finally, for you screamers and screamettes who dig a little high culture with your morning coffee, here's a poem by Roberto Bolaño.

GODZILLA IN MEXICO

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn't tell you we were on death's program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn't be afraid.
When it left, death didn't even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We're human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

Stay classy, Screamers and Screamette's. And remember, rispetti la donna!

Books: The other author of "Frankenstein"?

The online edition of the Time Literary Supplement features an interesting article about Percey Shelley, iconic Romantic poet and husband of Mary Shelley, and his contributions to the horror classic Frankenstein.

In a review of a new edition of the novel, the first to include the actually manuscript Mary Shelley submitted to publishers, Times reviewer Linda Pratt gives readers a overview of the books round-about pre- and post-publication history. Famously, Frankenstein began life as what Mary Shelley herself referred to as "a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream." From the article:

Mary’s "transcript" of her "grim terrors" has not survived and it was, indeed, quickly superseded. Urged on by Percy Shelley, she continued to work on her tale through July and August 1816, perhaps, as Charles E. Robinson [editor of the new edition – CRwM] notes in the introduction to his new edition, finishing a "short or novella-length version", now also lost or destroyed, by the time she returned to England at the end of August. The decision to expand her "story" into a novel was taken about this time and a first draft was completed by late March or early April 1817. Mary revised and expanded this between April 9 and 17, and between April 18 and May 13 she made a fair copy that included a number of textual and structural alterations. This eventually became the printer's copy for the first edition. Further changes at both proof and revise stages took place before Frankenstein was finally published by the London firm of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones in 1818. The text's evolution did not stop with its publication, however. A second, "New Edition" appeared in 1823, incorporating 123 verbal alterations made not by Mary, but by either her father William Godwin or an unknown printer, though Mary was responsible for the third "revised [and] corrected" edition of 1831. This incorporated most of the changes introduced into the 1823 text as well as numerous other revisions, including an entirely new chapter and an "Introduction" (reproduced as Appendix C in Robinson’s edition). Mary lived for twenty more years, but the Frankenstein of 1831 represented her final public word on the text.

One of the things that makes the new manuscript edition interesting is the attention it gives to the work of Shelley's then famous poet husband. Again, from the article:

Robinson pays special attention to the manuscript first draft as a collaborative enterprise – as the work of "Mary (with Percy) Shelley", the brackets are revealing – and provides two separate, but linked, reading texts. The first reproduces the manuscript draft with Percy Shelley’s additions, corrections and revisions, using italics to make "evident . . . . [his] considerable hand" (the pun is presumably intended) at this stage of the novel’s development.

So what in the novel can be traced to Percy Shelley? First and foremost, the highlighted revisions confirm that the novel's chief creative force was Mary Shelley herself. Of the 72,000 words in the original manuscript, only 4,000 to 5,000 seem to be from Percy Shelley. That's less than 10% of the book. Still, his alterations were not negligible:

These revisions and additions take a number of forms. Some replace colloquialisms with more formal, Latinate language: “ghost story” with “tale of superstition”; “go to the university” with “become a student at the university”; “it was safe” with “the danger of infection was past”. Others clarify motivation and set up the events that Frankenstein’s insatiable curiosity will unleash. For example, the following comparison between Frankenstein and his future wife, Elizabeth Lavenza. In the draft, Mary Shelley’s “my [ie, Frankenstein’s] amusements were studying old books of chemistry and natural magic; those of Elizabeth were drawing & music” is expanded and changed by Percy Shelley to: “I delighted in investigating the facts relating to the actual world – she busied herself in following the aerial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret which I desired to discover – to her it was a vacancy which she sought to people with imaginations of her own”. The revisions amplify the difference between the two characters, and establish the curiosity which Frankenstein will later pursue to fatal effect, a curiosity which leads to Elizabeth’s death at the hands of the creature.

Yet further revisions are evidence of what his widow described years later as Shelley’s ability and willingness “to embody ideas and sentiments” rather than to “invent the machinery of a story”. To give one example, the social position of Justine, the girl from a poor family brought into the Frankenstein household as a twelve-year-old, is described by Mary in the first draft as follows: “she was taught all the duties of servant & was very kindly treated”. Percy Shelley’s alterations to this passage offer instead a political disquisition on the difference between servants in the Swiss Republic and those in unreformed monarchies, such as England.

Currently, the new edition, with the unwieldy title FRANKENSTEIN OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS: The original two-volume novel of 1816–1817 from the Bodleian Library Manuscripts by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (with Percy Bysshe Shelley), is only available in the UK. American Frankophiles will have to wait for an American publisher to pick up the book.