Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives

INTRODUCTION

Frankenstein

PRESENCE, PROCESS, PROGRESS

Francesca Saggini

Frankenstein is the kind of text that opens outward rather than closing in upon itself.

—J. P. Hunter¹

Always there.....................Always here.

—Libby Larsen²

SLICING LOOSE

The cultural value of a text, not least as a form of transferable and adaptable cultural capital that can exist independently of the text itself, has become of central concern to teachers and researchers in the broad field of adaptation studies, a diverse methodological and cultural domain informed by the same interdisciplinary and transmedia orientation that is so conspicuous in contemporary culture.³ In line with the concept of convergence theorized over the years by Henry Jenkins,⁴ which posits an expansive and collaborative pattern of textuality, it is generally accepted that a text is dispersed/regenerates diachronically and synchronically on multiple platforms and across different users. In the process, it does not lose, but rather gains and maximizes meaning and, especially, fullness. One might even argue that the true potential of the source text (or pretext) is most fully revealed by its long-term epistemological elasticity, in the difficult balance between redundancy and originality, between familiarity and difference. Indeed, the after in aftertext does not automatically imply, much less require, that one look backward; rather, it suggests the enriching, revitalizing possibility of looking beyond (forward as well as backward) in a dynamic and dialogic process.⁵ Hence, its textual afterlife—be it an adaptation, a sequel, a prequel, fanfic, merchandising, any tie-in product, and, more generally, the various forms of afterings involving the assimilation and overwriting of the multifaceted original context of a text (the breadth of potential material can be quite staggering)—can be said to realize and clarify the inherent potential of the original text.⁶

Before proceeding further, it is essential to provide a working definition of the concept of afterlife as it relates to issues of reproducibility, transmissibility, adaptation, and cultural legacy—while no longer relying on fidelity and authenticity as guiding principles. The concept of a transmedia afterlife falls under the broad and constantly evolving class of potential linguistic-discursive reformulations. Separately or in combination, these include at the very least linguistic reformulations (for example, abridgements, parodies, etc.), those relating to content, ideological reformulations, and those involving technological-media transpositions. These are the discursive practices addressed in various ways by the contributors to this volume. Less relevant to the present project, and therefore not included here, are academic reformulations (for example relating to revision or reception), translations, and cross-cultural reformulations (linked to translation as well as to transcultural transfers).

An important preliminary caveat should also be added here, in order to clarify the role of the afterlife’s reader. A reader does not necessarily perceive the afterlife as the aftering of a pretext (in this case Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) that alone can certify the afterlife’s status or, arguably, grant it a place in the cultural or media hierarchy. To be sure, this potential double reading (activated simultaneously by the memory of the Model Reader and by the medium he/she is using) may enrich the aftertext, but it cannot exhaust, much less dictate the aftertext’s textual possibilities. As this collection of essays clearly demonstrates, the afterlife’s Model User (I here switch to a term better suited to forms of textuality that might not involve writing) does not necessarily coincide with its Empirical User, nor, indeed, can he/she be simply equated with the ideal target of the afterlife’s textual producer.⁷ In this respect, it has become apparent that the discourses of afterlives significantly problematize the reading framework originally theorized by Umberto Eco, for whom the text is nothing else but the semantic-pragmatic production of its own Model Reader.⁸ The Empirical User of a textual afterlife may indeed be one and the same as its Model User, but this does not mean that he/she is also the Model User of the pretext (an early, prophetic example of this is James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, which performs a deft, self-reflexive sleight of hand by employing as its pretext not Shelley’s novel but rather Whale’s own 1931 Frankenstein). Indeed, this collection shows that it is not always possible, nor is it essential, to recognize the pretext as such (from a diachronic standpoint) in order to engage with its textual afterlives (from a synchronic standpoint). When Stan Lee’s young mutant X-Men encounter an evil version of Shelley’s Creature in The Mark of the Monster!—an early episode of the Marvel comic book series, dating to the late 1960s—they identify him simply as something you see on a late late show, rather than as a being endowed with a long-established literary pedigree; this annoys Professor Xavier: I see that you have not read the novel, Bobby [Iceman]—which I assigned last spring!⁹

This pop culture reference is in fact extremely useful to help us understand the synchronic workings of an afterlife, allowing us to see how the specific context of its use can radically reposition it in relation both to culture and media. In the 1960s, the Universal Studios back catalogue, including various Frankenstein films—ranging from Whale’s masterpiece to the bathetic Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)—first appeared on American television. Where the classic 1930s Frankenstein movies had relied on an audience including both older and younger viewers, the later American iterations of the Frankenstein tale—even more distant from the novel’s film adaptations, already at some remove from Shelley’s text—could instead rely on a significantly narrower TV fan base, made up mostly of children and teens close in age to Marvel’s X-Men. The latter were contemporary heroes who, despite their lack of background encyclopedic knowledge, to quote Eco again, nevertheless succeeded in defeating their adversary (read: as stand-ins for contemporary readers they still managed to fully engage with the afterlife).¹⁰

A final point, following from and rounding out these preliminary clarifications: an afterlife may or may not have metatextual import; that is, the afterlife does not inevitably entail a critique of the pretext, as occurs in most postmodern afterings (one need only think of the novel often cited as forebear, Jean Rhys’s 1969 Wide Sargasso Sea, discussed in Ruth Heholt’s chapter). And where such a reassessment is present, it is evidently only perceived by that Empirical User who is simultaneously also the Model User of the pretext.

In light of these theoretical and methodological premises, the anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), seems an apt moment to present a collection of essays by scholars from converging disciplines such as film and television studies, media studies, musicology, cultural studies, and the humanities, including English. Taken together, their contributions offer an innovative approach and cutting-edge research, investigating the afterlives of a novel that may be taught—and often is—in a disparate array of courses whose primary focus may not be Romanticism, or indeed literary studies (examples of this broad range are the essays by Lidia De Michelis, and Claudia Gualtieri).¹¹ Frankenstein is unquestionably a text that disturbs and transcends boundaries, be they political, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and not least of all medial, and this ensures its vibrant presence in contemporary popular culture. The essays gathered here attest to this extraordinary plasticity and are designed to unlock new, richer readings of the novel.

All too often, collections addressing the various aspects of adaptation tend to be organized into separate sections dictated by a rather parochial media imperative, reflecting outdated critical assumptions about the greater cultural prestige of textual over post-textual forms (computer games, transmedia webseries, ballets or cartoons, for example). To avoid grouping (or, better, relegating), Frankenstein’s textual afterlives into a separate section, we have sought to organize the volume’s four parts in such a way as to emphasize the anti-hierarchical transmedia dialogue between them, because we strongly believe that in the realm of afterlives, as in contemporary culture at large, such hierarchies are not in play and there is, rather, a multi-way traffic—a complementarity and mutual dependence of media environments (as theorized by Marshall McLuhan), and of the aesthetic and commercial conceptual systems.¹² Paraphrasing McLuhan, we can conclude that media actively contribute to translating a cultural product into new forms, and in the process, endow it with metaphorical value.

Finally, the collection Transmedia Creatures deliberately abstains from critical analysis of specific themes of the novel. These have been widely explored through the decades by criticism of various methodological persuasions, most recently in studies devoted to Frankenstein’s rebirths, including pop-cultural ones.¹³ For the authors presented here such readings are familiar territory, and rather than continue to tread the same ground, we have chosen to commission a series of original contributions that look at Frankenstein through the lens of transmediality. The emphasis is thus on how cultural content is redistributed through multiple media, forms and modes of production (including user-generated ones from below) that often operate simultaneously and have the power to dismantle and transform established readings of the text, while at the same time incorporating and revitalizing aspects that have always been central to it.

PRISMS AND MIRRORS

Working within the methodological framework of transmediality, Transmedia Creatures explores some of the semes of Shelley’s novel that seem particularly significant from a diachronic critical perspective, a perspective that—now that we have reached the bicentenary of the novel’s publication, a milestone that could well have marked the exhaustion of its mythopoetic force—connects it to a number of narratives of our contemporaneity, in a tropological revision of discourse. The collection offers a critical celebration of Frankenstein’s transmedia journey as the authors engage with concepts, value systems, and aesthetic-moral categories—among them the human, terror, love, responsibility, diversity, education, risk, fear, technology, creation—from a range of approaches and original perspectives that consider the varied and often contradictory incarnations that have kept the tale relevant through the decades.

The volume’s thirteen chapters are arranged into sections designed to yield new connections and to prompt fresh critical reflection, steering well away from the beaten track—for example, connections between Young Adult (YA) fiction and the re-readings of domesticity in Penny Dreadful (McInnes; Heholt), between the anxieties of science fiction (SF) and the celebratory technologism of steampunk (Roncaglia; Nally), between the emotional resonance of music, instrumentation, and sonic associations in the novel (Reggiani) and the famous dumbness of the Creature in Whale’s Frankenstein. Not to mention the Creature as a paradigmatic figure of difference, indexical bearer of renewed implications (and complications) in an age of global terror(ism) and (immaterial) technology (De Michelis; Gualtieri). The essays thus present a twofold view of Shelley’s text. On the one hand, they are firmly anchored in the Romantic context of its production and reception—this, as will become apparent in reading through the chapters, must remain the unavoidable starting point for any textual analysis, be it synchronic or diachronic (Larson). On the other hand, they follow the remoter pathways traced by the novel’s cannibalistic form, and its implicit narrative and epistemic actualizations (it is no coincidence that Judith Halberstam refers to the novel as a meaning machine).¹⁴ Following Aristotle’s theorizing in Metaphysics we shall call this movement, this regenerative possibility, the novel’s potentia or potentiality. Frankenstein is undoubtedly among those texts that have succeeded in staying alive and assertive due to an enduring cultural impact and an extraordinary adaptive capacity that could well be termed biologico-discursive; such texts provide textual projections of deep psychic drives and cultural values, anxieties and epistemological crises, and as such demonstrate their inherent versatility and reproductive force, if not outright seriality. We might think of this as a process of evolutionary phylogenesis, in which the text achieves pre-eminence (its potestas) thanks to optimal reproductive conditions (or, a favorable reproductive ecology), which allow it to regenerate and reproduce by gemmation, constantly adapting to new media and new discourses (its potentia).

Ontological, epistemological, cognitive, and ethical binaries such as Self/Other, techne/episteme (τέχνη/ἐπιστήμη), interiority/exteriority, right/wrong, organic/technological, beautiful/ugly, matter/spirit, art/mechanics were central to Romantic culture as they are to our own: in both cases, they are the terms through which the emotive stresses and contradictions of a society careening towards the unknown are narrativized at a critical moment in its existence. Such binaries are complicated, eroded, and problematized in the volume’s four sections, which offer comprehensive, though hardly monological, perspectives on Frankenstein and its afterlives: humanity’s relationship with the materiality and immateriality of the creative process—what we might call its literal enfleshments—is addressed in the first section, Labs, Bots, and Punks: Transmediating Technology and Science (Gino Roncaglia, Lidia De Michelis, and Eleanor Beal); the semantic fluidity of the human as a concept is the focus of the second section, Becoming Monsters: The Limits of the Human (Claire Nally, Claudia Gualtieri, and Federico Meschini); while the third, The Evolution Games of Sight and Sound, moves into more familiar adaptation studies territory—that of the intersemiosis, the collusion and collation of codes, whether already present in Shelley’s novel (as in the acoustic environments explored by Enrico Reggiani) or produced by its adaptations and transformations for the stage, the cinema, or television (Diego Saglia, Daniele Pio Buenza, and Ruth Heholt). Finally, Monster Reflections considers Frankenstein’s boundary play across wholly different contexts and media, such as ideologically engaged poetry (Janet Larson’s chapter on Margaret Atwood discusses the sexual politics of the Doctor Frankenstein persona in a narrative that was conceived from the start as transgeneric and multiplatform) and the repackaging of the tale for younger generations who, as suggested earlier, are probably unaware of either the original novel or its revered film adaptations (Andrew McInnes and Anna Enrichetta Soccio close this section devoted to retellings).¹⁵ The collection’s thematic approach is thus designed to highlight the importance of integrating diverse, even conflicting, interpretations into one’s own reading of a literary work. The various perspectives in the volume do, however, share the common strategy of quite deliberately stepping aside from the wealth of existing Frankenstein-related scholarship: the essays take their cue from it but then follow their own interpretive paths. This has two advantages: it makes it possible to break new ground while simultaneously privileging those subject areas and analytical methodologies that are especially relevant to the classroom, whether undergraduate or post-graduate.

Rather than presenting each essay in turn, as one might expect from an introduction, the following pages focus on some of the discourses in and around Frankenstein, and on some of the novel’s strikingly disparate derivations and deviations, in order to launch a dialogue among the volume’s four sections, and among the individual contributors. This approach is partly informed by my experience teaching interdisciplinary post-graduate courses combining literature, film, and theater studies, and I believe it is best suited to render the full scope of both the potestas and the potentia of Shelley’s text. I shall therefore open the discussion on Frankenstein’s transmedia afterlives by problematizing the concept of the human, one of the novel’s cardinal semes, and one of its most frequently recurring adjectives (listed in descending order of reification and materialization of the human, we find, for example, human being, human creature, human form, human frame). The concept is, in my view, crucial if we are to read Shelley’s novel in a contemporary context, because of its connection to a set of broad critical discursive categories that intersect different domains (such as the superhuman/abhuman/posthuman), which I will examine in some depth. Finally, I will discuss the transhuman, focusing on the relation between the human and technology, a subset of the more general relationship between the human and science informing Frankenstein; here, I look at the body of the Creature as both process and product of creation, and at the uncertain and shifting boundaries where the human and non-human (e.g., the artificial) blend into each other, whether to constitute altered hardware, so to speak, or—quite uncannily—software. These intersections prompt some concluding reflections on Shelley’s novel and on the essays in this volume which I hope can serve to stimulate and chart a course for further transmedia readings of Frankenstein.¹⁶

MORPHING FRANKENSTEIN

Unsurprisingly, a dominant theme in this collection is the Creature’s body, whose monstrosity is subjected to new transmedia scrutiny by several contributors who approach Shelley’s novel almost as though it were a body novel.¹⁷ This, too, is unsurprising, given the post-textual nature of so many of Frankenstein’s afterlives, linked to performance, music, or images—human-technological interfaces which have taken the shape of shadows walking the stage, four-color comics, and TV or silver-screen images. This is how Frankenstein morphed into Frankenstein, and the latter became indistinguishable from his Creature, the so-called monster whose iconic image—in the mythical and immortal guise invented for our times by that other creator/monster maker, Boris Karloff—can be said to precede and almost pre-empt Shelley’s novel in our collective consciousness.

The dual critical focus on the body and on creation reflects two important areas of contemporary inquiry that are not directly derived from the novel. We can, however, trace their relation to it by considering, for example, Igor’s body in Victor Frankenstein (dir. Paul McGuigan, 2015)—one of the latest cinematic incarnations of Doctor Victor’s assistant, a figure integrated into the story’s economy ever since its first adaptations for the stage—examined by Claire Nally in relation to the categories of normalcy and ableism that other contributors also discuss, from different perspectives.¹⁸ The notion of normality, it is worth recalling, derives its ideological and semantic power from the adjective normal, etymologically derived from the Latin norma (rule, standard). The latter noun naturalizes as ontological a normality that is, instead, ultimately phenomenological and as such intrinsically cultural—aesthetic, geometric, formal (for the eighteenth century, this would have meant neoclassical). The aporia (and allegory) of normality is captured perfectly in one of Frankenstein’s best-known visual afterlives, the famous frontispiece to the 1831 Standard Novels edition (the first to be illustrated), drawn by the German Theodor Von Holst (a pupil of Henry Fuseli) and engraved by William Chevalier, in which the Creature’s jarringly asymmetrical body—the skeletal hand, the blatantly misaligned head, the network of arteries and muscles plainly visible under the skin—contrasts strangely with its otherwise smooth, powerful, almost statuesque contours. I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! (F 57) cries a now disillusioned Victor.¹⁹ [A] rubble of tendons, / knuckles and raw sinews, adds Margaret Atwood’s Doctor Frankenstein, decades later (see Larson).

The 1831 frontispiece positions the Creature at the juncture of two overlapping aesthetic paradigms, picturing with plastic vividness his abject difference, but also the generative possibilities inscribed in his body. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject is apt here, because the Creature is, indeed, silenced beauty and horror; his birth is simultaneously an ejection and a rejection, in which the natural boundaries between Self and Other are imperilled, besieged, and desperately, uselessly defended, as in Victor’s famous anti-idealistic epiphany: the beauty of the dream had vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart (F 57).²⁰ Very perceptively, Angela Wright talks of the Creature’s invented body in terms of Romantic sublimity—the perversion of Renaissance blazon, a Dantesque horror evading rational definition and resisting to definitive designation.²¹ Troubling, morphing, defying—a chain of unstable signifiers try to pin down and immobilize an agonizing horror melting into visionary wonder, ambitiously aiming to name the un(n)amable.²²

In addition to spotlighting the fruitful contribution that an approach informed by disability studies can offer to the interpretation of Shelley’s Frankenstein, Nick Dear and Danny Boyle’s reading of the novel in their Frankenstein stage play (Royal National Theatre, 2011), which Nally points out is infused with steampunk aesthetic elements, draws attention to the Creator’s poiesis, to the concrete making engaged in by the desiring subject. And the latter turns out to be just as awkwardly positioned as the proto-cubist Creature of the 1831 frontispiece, a Guernica of distress exposed to our gaze in all his impure hideousness.²³ For the creator is uncertainly suspended between the roles of artist, craftsman, or mere mechanic—a post-Platonic severance that is very much of its time and which places Shelley’s text unequivocally at the threshold of the mechanical age, as Thomas Carlyle called it in his famous 1829 essay, Signs of the Times. (It is worth recalling that Frankenstein was written during the second phase of the Luddite machine-breaking rebellion of the 1810s, whereas the 1831 edition was published just after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, at the dawn of the so-called Iron Horse Age, an apt nature-machine metonym for this new, anxiety-inducing form of transport.)²⁴ This demiurgic disconnection is also stressed in Victor’s own description of his poiesis: I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade, than an artist occupied by his favourite employment (F 56).²⁵ It is hardly a coincidence therefore that another key word in the novel is hand, which appears so often to function as a textual isotopy, almost a semiotic score. Shelley’s body novel makes magnificently material, or rather corporeal, the metaphor of the hand, the poietic organ par excellence, capable of containing both the material and the spiritual dynamism of the (Romantic) creative process: we might think of the hand that the Divine Craftsman extends to instill the spark of life into man (as in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, a scene evoked antiphrastically in chapter V, F 58, where Victor recoils from the touch of the Creature’s hand, and again at the end of the novel, in Robert Walton’s letter of September 12, F 218), or the hand of the modern craftsman molding his imperfect creature (his handy-work, F 9), or that of the Creature himself, who leaves his dark, deadly marks on his victims’ necks as a stamp of his eternal vengeance—an existential imprint, or fingerprint signature that stands in for the identity and name which are repeatedly, obdurately denied him by his Creator and by humans.²⁶

Figure I.1. Theodor Von Holst. Engraved by William Chevalier. Frontispiece. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Bentley and Colburn edition. 1831. In public domain.

TECHNO-BECOMINGS

In our time, the challenge taken up by the Romantic Creator is echoed and amplified by those faced by the developer of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Paradoxically, building the body (the hardware, or frame for the reception of animation, F 53; i.e., the site of immanence) is perhaps the least difficult step, if utterly astonishing, of those required to construct a creature endowed with the complex capacity to learn and interpret (and thus to go beyond a basic reactive stimulus), capable, like humans, of emotion, memory, imagination, passions, ideas, doubts, compassion, judgment, all coalescing around that indefinable, transcendent something known in many philosophical or religious belief systems as the soul.²⁷ In light of the destabilizing medical-scientific developments occurring in Shelley’s time, it is no accident that soul, with all its Cartesian implications of conscious thought, and as central to Romantic poetics as hand, is a term that recurs frequently in the novel, and even more insistently in its subsequent transmedia versions. It already serves as the semic keystone in the title of the second silent film adaptation, Life Without Soul (dir. Joseph W. Smiley, 1915) with Percy Standing playing a counter-Rousseauistic Brute Man), but it is also invoked in the closing scene of a now largely forgotten play that preceded, and inspired, the Universal Studios Frankenstein:

FRANKENSTEIN. Soul—what is soul?

WALDMAN. It is the part of God He gives to every man who lives. It is the part of man God calls back to himself after man dies. (FRANKENSTEIN murmurs: not man.) That’s why I’m not afraid to die. You can kill the body, but not the soul … (Act 3)²⁸

Ironically, in our post–The Exorcist age, it is precisely the fact that he has a soul—with all its frailties and worldly temptations—that makes possible the demonic possession of the kindly and romantic Creature imagined by I, Frankenstein (dir. Stuart Beattie, 2014; based on the graphic novel by Kevin Grevioux, I, Frankenstein: Genesis #1, 2013), a film whose soundtrack, appropriately enough, features a song called Gimme Soul.²⁹

One of the most obvious links between Shelley’s Creature and AI relates to the concept of unsupervised machine learning, which shares some of the characteristics of the self-education the Creature pursues in the hovel (F 106) adjacent to the De Laceys’ cottage. This is a crucial episode in the Creature’s development (indeed, it is structurally at the center of the novel, in chapters XI-XV), during which he increases his ability to learn and to mimic humans, in accordance with John Locke’s empiricist theory of the tabula rasa (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690) whereby the human mind is formed by building experience through sensations (interestingly, the same theory that underlies cognitive robotics). This shift—or better, descent—from spirit to matter, together with the Creature’s strenuous efforts to communicate and so overcome his isolation (involving the distinctly modern use of a new medium, in this case language, that transforms his perception of the/his Self) are perhaps the more ambitiously humanistic aspects of Shelley’s novel. One might even identify as the structural turning point of the entire narrative the famous rhetorical tour de force of extraordinary perlocutionary power, that the Creature appears to address to himself, but which in reality is aimed provocatively at his creator (and by proxy at the reader): Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? (F 128). Placed at the start of chapter XV, immediately after his encounter with the De Laceys, these metacritical questions (a shattering self-questioning that could in fact equally well apply to the nature of Shelley’s peculiar novel itself),³⁰ position the Creature explicitly at the intersection of past and future, thus justifying a tropological reading of Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel, or even a proto–bot novel (see the essays by Gino Roncaglia, Lidia de Michelis, and Eleanor Beal).

At this stage in his development, the Creature is engaging with an ever more complex environment: not only does he attempt to emulate the De Laceys’ behavior, but he also absorbs an extraordinary reference library that vastly accelerates his learning process: Constantin-François Volney’s Ruins of Empires, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one volume of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, J.W. von Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther, and, of course, Victor’s journal of the four months that preceded the creation (F 130). This is the epistemological dataset that will serve to guide him, much as occurs with modern robotic creatures, from simulating behavior to emulating emotion, from deduction to association. And it is in this sense that, as the Creature’s capacity to feel evolves from perception to emotion,³¹ the symphonic succession of sensory perceptions placed at the start of chapter XI, heartrending in its ephemeral delicacy (I felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rung in my ears, and on all sides various scents saluted me, F 103), leads directly into the famous rhetorical questions, of almost cosmic resonance, that I quoted above. With their shift from an exquisitely intimate philosophical lyricism to a lyrical philosophy, the Romantic power of these pages is indisputable, and alone suffices to place Frankenstein among the major works of Romanticism, irrespective of language or national boundaries.³²

It is precisely where the novel expresses the Zeitgeist most fully that it opens itself in the most decisive and visionary way to a diachronic reading. Thus, if we were to read Frankenstein as the proto–bot novel mentioned earlier, we would be looking at a tangible example of how one era might be said to dream the next. In the chapters devoted to the Creature’s eavesdropping on the De Lacey family, he quickly learns to identify and make his own two of the fundamental requirements of what modern studies of cognitive robotics call unsupervised learning: the recognition of context and of emotions. From the start, the Creature’s language learning is clearly tied to linguistic experiences that associate language with feelings. "I perceived that the words [the De Laceys] spoke sometimes, produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it" (F 112, my emphasis), the Creature’s states, with a metacritical reference to the godlike science of the word, that governed by the Author, in which the allusion to Victor—and, en abyme, to Shelley’s own Platonic poiein—is evident.

With a conceptual leap that I hope is not too far-fetched, I would even venture that his encounter with Safie, the daugher of the Turk, sets in motion a learning process that transports the Creature to the transcendent level of a proto-technological myth. This transfiguration lifts him out of the dimension of pure mechanics (that of his secret physical labors to assist the De Laceys, in the course of which his superhuman strength and endurance of fatigue make him comparable to a mechanical servant, F 114–5, with a cheeky nod here to the Mechanical Turk, a famed pseudo-automaton created in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen) and into the far more versatile—and hence unsettling—dimension of robotic beings and AI.³³ The gentle, reassuring appearance of soft robotic creatures—for example the lovable balloon-like Baymax in Disney’s Big Hero 6 (dir. Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014) or the even more recent nursing-care Robear, who is indeed strong (and thus potentially lethal), yet looks like a cuddly polar-bear cub—is able to neutralize the so-called uncanny valley effect that, owing to the psychoanalytic mechanism of projection, makes us feel threatened and uncomfortable in the presence of the humanoid robot, or, even more so, of the android.³⁴ Indeed, research on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) shows that the more the artificial creature is aesthetically pleasing and/or obviously mechanical-looking, the more it is socially acceptable. By contrast, it is precisely the Creature’s atypical appearance, his unnerving reaching towards the anthropomorphic, which he never quite attains (a filthy mass that moved and talked, F 147), his capacity for autonomous movement as an active and self-making creature independent of his creator’s will (as the term automaton implies), that make him hideous, dyspathic and, ultimately, repulsive. If Victor at first enthusiastically imagines "many happy and excellent natures [owing] their being to me" (F 54, my emphasis), once he realizes that such offspring would move beyond his control, his glorious utopia quickly disintegrates into distopia: one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth (F 165).³⁵ As even the less savvy readers of Frankenstein might recognize, this desire for control and identity elision also informs the specific naming (and hence ideological-discursive) conventions preferred by the modern producers of creaturely beings—the bioengineer, the geneticist, the programmer—who have come to replace Victor: we thus have the symbolic-mythological hyperfemininity of Eva, the gynoid in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927); the metonymic acronym, or simple metonym of, respectively, HAL in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; an acronym for Heuristic Algorithmic) and Galatea, the ivory statue created by Pygmalion (whose name means white as milk); or the depersonalizing (at least in theory) palindrome Ava, the seductive and homicidal cyborg in Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina (2015), discussed by Eleanor Beal.³⁶ As Tzvetan Todorov explains, the act of naming entails the re-creation of, and dominion over, the world: nomination is equivalent to taking possession.³⁷

Three aspects link the Creature to specific challenges faced by the world of AI: his flawed spatiation, or recurring tendency to breach the security distance that underlies proxemics in robotics (this brings to mind the semiotics of hand, discussed earlier); his personality attributes, or attention-seeking behavior; his ability to learn through interaction (with humans), or almost vampire-like assimilative capacity, whether he is learning from texts or people—and crucially, from how people treat him. These programming defects, which are in fact among the Creature’s main characteristics, forge a strong link between the technological discourse embedded in the novel and the ethical and moral discourse of Shelley’s time, related to questions of creation, education, responsibility. Once again, the De Lacey family episode is, I believe, emblematic. The Creature’s decision to reveal himself to the (blind) patriarch of the family, taking advantage of the temporary absence of his children, sets in motion a sequence of events illustrated in the following syntagmatic scheme:

WORD → TOUCH → SIGHT → HORROR → REJECTION → REVENGE:

This, I thought, was the moment of decision, which was to rob me of, or bestow happiness on me for ever. […] I had not a moment to lose; but, seizing the hand of the old man I cried, "Now is the time!—save and protect me! […] At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie and Agatha entered. Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? […] Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung: in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground, and struck me violently with a stick. […] I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me; and finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then sat down and enjoyed the ruin. […] from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than that, against him who had formed me, and sent me forth to this insupportable misery. (F 135–6, my