Framing Frankenstein

This is the fourth installment in Emma Garman’s series about found documents, fiction, and history. Read the first installment here, the second here, and the third here.

Alasdair Gray’s introduction to Poor Things (1992), his wildly entertaining neo-Victorian satire, presents a 1909 memoir, EPISODES FROM THE EARLY LIFE of a SCOTTISH PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICER by Archibald McCandless MD. For an epilogue, Gray explains, he has appended a 1914 letter from the memoirist’s wife, Victoria McCandless MD, who hotly disputes this account of a dead woman re-animated by the brain of her own baby. As in any “found documents” novel worth its salt, Gray’s possession of these items is plausibly explained. A “local historian,” Michael Donnelly, retrieved them from some box files abandoned on a Glasgow curbside, outside a disused law office. Thinking EPISODES a lost masterpiece, Donnelly entrusted Gray with its editing and publication. But whereas the historian, who ought to know, sees the book as “blackly humorous fiction,” Gray says he believes every word. He’s written enough fiction, he points out, to know history when he reads it. Poor Things, then, neatly announces its theme: recorded history is unreliable, the border of fiction and history is confoundingly porous, and the past can never truly be understood: subjective and often warring versions are all we have.

Gothic fiction, which Poor Things spoofs with such panache, has always been reliant on paratextual devices: frame tales, long-lost manuscripts, diaries, letters. The ur-Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, was published in 1764 as a medieval manuscript “found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England.” Walpole’s preface asks the reader to excuse the tale’s “air of the miraculous,” its “visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events” as “faithful to the manners of the times.” In other words, if Walpole himself had written anything so fanciful, you’d dismiss it as unbelievable, but he’s simply blown the dust off a book that’s half a millennium old. Castle was a major critical and commercial hit, and so the Gothic novel’s rubric was set. No storylines were too fantastical, no era too distant as a setting nor culture too remote, given sufficient meta-contextualizing. The Italian (1796) by Ann Radcliffe, the best-selling novelist known as “the Great Enchantress,” begins in a Naples church “of a very ancient convent,” where an Englishman arranges to receive “a volume” detailing an assassin’s confession. Featuring Inquisition dungeons, religious apparitions, and murderous Neapolitan aristocrats, the volume’s tale departs, to say the least, from the lived experience of Radcliffe, a young British woman who’d never visited southern Europe.

As well as providing an authorial alibi, the “found documents” trope allegorizes the genre’s rebellion against Enlightenment objectivity and historical linearity. When the dead can speak, whether via hauntings or the resurrection of their written words, the neat chronology of historians is disturbed and the dark cracks in civilization exposed. “Remember the country and the age in which we live,” Henry Tilney admonishes Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Gothic satire Northanger Abbey (1818). He means to dissuade her that dark secrets lurk in his family history, but Catherine, an avid reader of “horrid” fiction, isn’t easily convinced. She is bitterly disappointed when “a manuscript of many generations back,” which she snatches from a locked cabinet, turns out to be household bills of the most mundane kind. Susceptible to outlandishly spooky notions in novels, she is dismissive of recorded history: “I often think it is odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.”

The narrative layers of the most enduringly famous Gothic work, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) — the frame of a North Pole explorer’s letters to his sister, Victor Frankenstein’s first-person telling, and the monster’s account as told to Victor — work to erode the reader’s incredulity by stealth. As Victor tells the explorer: “You will hear of powers and occurrences such as you have been accustomed to believe impossible.” Poor Things, a reimagining of Frankenstein that puts a knowing gloss on all its elements, doesn’t groom the reader into dropping their skepticism. Instead, we’re invited upfront to decide if we believe, on the one hand, the novelist “Alasdair Gray” and the medical memoirist Archibald McCandless or, on the other, the historian Michael Donnelly and the avowed truth-teller Victoria McCandless. According to Archibald’s narrative, in 1881 “a surgical genius used human remains to create a twenty-five-year-old woman,” named Bella. The genius is Archibald’s friend and medical colleague, Godwin Bysshe Baxter — “God” as Bella calls him — who happens to share names with Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Baxter tells Archibald how he achieved his feat, the culmination of his “childhood hopes and boyhood dreams,” and we see, through Archibald’s eyes and from his transcription of her letters, Bella’s progress from a barely verbal infant “inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman” to a worldly-wise, hyper-articulate adult on track to be one of the first women doctors in Britain.

The briskly disdainful rebuttal to Archibald’s version of events, written by Bella (who has reverted to her original birth name, Victoria), characterizes it as a morbid Victorian fantasy “filched” from well-known novels. She insists that the scar on her scalp, supposedly from Baxter’s brain-swapping, is the result of her father hitting her as a child — an apt emblem of the just-so tendencies of historical interpretation. Historians, looking at the past from their Archimedean vantage point, arrange facts in a logical sequence, inadvertently mis-attributing cause to effect if it fits the “plot.” History’s “events are made into a story,” writes the influential historical theorist Hayden White, “by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like.” In setting out to disprove Victoria’s claims, Gray “had to become a historian,” which he accomplished after six months of archival research, collecting “enough material evidence to prove the McCandless story a complete tissue of facts.” The actual author Gray — as in, he who exists outside of the novel — offers competing “emplotments,” to use the term White coined for the imposed structure of a narrative. In concert, the clashing metatextual elements of Poor Things playfully dramatize White’s thesis: no two perspectives ever result in the same story.

A “Frankenfiction” novel, comprised of stitched together texts, has obvious thematic resonance with a stitched-together being — who, in running amuck through the world, is an uneasy allegory of writing that escapes its creator’s interpretive control, as all narratives do. The man-made monster in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad — published in Arabic in 2013 and in Jonathan Wright’s English translation in 2018 — wasn’t even meant to come alive. In this darkly comical take on Shelley’s tale, a junk dealer, Hadi, decides to stitch together body parts gathered from the car bombed streets of 2005 Baghdad — a city “stalked” by death “like the plague” — in the hope of giving the people blown to pieces “a proper burial.” But the creature, Whatsitsname, is unexpectedly inhabited by the soul of a hotel security guard, the victim of a suicide bombing. He goes on a murderous rampage, baffling the authorities by his apparent immunity to gun shots. An enthralled media chronicles his exploits with escalating sensationalism, while competing theories of his identity abound. “In Sadr City they spoke of him as a Wahhabi,” the narrator — or, as he is termed, “the author” — explains, “in Adamiya as a Shiite extremist.” In his own view, Whatsitsname is uniquely non-sectarian: “Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds — ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes — I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen.” 

Like the body politic he represents, Whatsitsname is constantly on the verge of disintegration. As his organs and appendages putrefy, he must keep killing for parts to maintain a grim semblance of wholeness — just as an “assassination squad” is directed by the American ambassador “to create an equilibrium of violence on the street between the Sunni and the Shiite militias, so there’ll be balance later at the negotiating table …” Or so a character claims. Saadawi’s literary construction casts all perspectives as partial — even, or especially, if they are subject to official documenting. The opening frame of the novel is a report from the “Tracking and Pursuit Department” of Iraqi and U.S. intelligence, which has been “operating outside its area of expertise” by employing astrologers to predict “serious security incidents.” In the pages that follow we meet a journalist, Mahmoud, whose well-sourced magazine piece about Whatsitsname paints him as an urban legend. Aware the creature is real, Mahmoud sells the so-called “author” a recording device containing ten hours of Whatsitsname’s eloquent self-interviewing. The author then writes a story about it — the novel we’re reading — which is confiscated by the Department “for precautionary reasons.” Complicating the original Gothic technique of seducing his reader with “personal” written accounts, Saadawi induces both terror and suspension of disbelief with the paperwork of officialdom. In the 21st century, documentary evidence from professionals — governments, intelligence agents, journalists — is likely to be partisan, unreliable, and designed to manipulate, undermining our sense of a shared reality as sinisterly as supernatural happenings.

When Hadi, Whatsitsname’s maker, tries to explain his creature’s existence, a woman says: “That guy’s recounting the plot of a movie … He’s stolen his story from a Robert De Niro film.” She’s talking about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the 1994 adaptation directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring De Niro as the monster. The point is that reality is hopelessly elusive: the truth is either withheld, disbelieved, or mixed up with fiction — or, as in the conclusion to Frankenstein in Baghdad, when the mystery of Whatshisname is “solved” for the public, all three. (Affirming the truism that satire gets overtaken by reality, a May 6 Politico headline was: “Cardinals are watching ‘Conclave’ the movie for guidance on the actual conclave.”) Saadawi doesn’t go so far as to explain, within his novel’s framework, how the documents that comprise it fell into his hands. But the prospect of their historical reliability being debated in the future, like the McCandlesses’ texts, is implicit. A story, once written down, has its own epistemological existence and acquires an unpredictable status in posterity. 

Frankenstein, as Saadawi skillfully lampoons, is the ultimate example of a story taking on an independent existence, untethered from its origins. Like the monster played by Boris Karloff in the 1931 film, Whatsitsname is made of corpse parts; contrary to popular belief, Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein only admits to studying the dead, rather than repurposing their components. Branagh, in putting Shelley’s name in his film’s title, aimed to restore her ownership after countless reinventions, while signaling that his adaptation was unusually faithful to the book. He even retained the epistolary frame story of the arctic explorer, Captain Robert Walton. Branagh’s good intentions, alas, counted for little. No one remembers poor Walton and, in the public imagination, Frankenstein remains the name of the monster, not the doctor. In Poor Things, Victoria’s reclaiming of her name and shedding that of her alleged creator is a wry allusion to this — making it ironic that, thanks to Emma Stone’s incredible performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 adaptation, Gray’s heroine is now famously known as Bella Baxter.

Victor Frankenstein, at least, might reprise some name-recognition when he’s played by Oscar Isaac in Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation for Netflix. (Tagline: “Only monsters play God.”) 

Shelley’s masterpiece, evidently, is destined to achieve innovative new forms into perpetuity. The assemblage quality of Gothic literature, with its faux tapestries of source material, seems to lend itself to ever more palimpsestic adaptations, much as our emplotments of history are continually reconfigured according to contemporary mores and hindsight. In Poor Things, Bella learns ruefully that “most history is written by friends of the conquerors,” while Donnelly concedes that “some real experiences and historical facts” are woven into Archibald’s narrative. Inescapably, fantasy and reality bleed into each other, an animating premise of Gothic fiction and the measured opinion of Northanger Abbey’s Eleanor Tilney:

I am fond of history — and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one’s own observation; and as for the little embellishments … they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made — probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great.