Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Frankenstein: The Monster’s Constructedness and the Narrativity of Consciousness
by
American University of Sharjah, UAE
Bouriana Zakharieva argues that Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) “coincide in their principle of animation” (417), and that montage is “the cinematic principle proper of creating a screen character” (418). She asserts that Victor Frankenstein’s monster and Branagh’s film are both products of montage, the monster being a “composite body” created from dead body parts—just as the film’s composite “life” is created from inert images. But while Zakharieva claims that the monster’s creation through cutting and montage connects the novel’s ideology with “the aesthetics of cinema” (418), the novel and its film adaptation invite radically opposing responses to the monster’s identity. This difference, moreover, hinges on the effects of animation. Both Shelley and Branagh deconstruct the nature/culture opposition and question the fusion of nature and science in the construction of the monster’s identity.
While Shelley’s reader can imagine the monster as an “organic,” integrated whole, one that perhaps extends even beyond its socially constructed identity, Branagh’s audience is compelled to see the monster as a “mechanical,” fragmentary being with a problematic soul. In fact, the monster, played by Robert De Niro, laments, “What of my soul? Do I have one? Was that the part you left out?” The contrasting aesthetics of reading the book and watching the film account for the rival views of the monster’s identity. Although Victor’s creature seems to be the archetypal posthuman (Hayles 1999; Pepperell 2003), a merging of the given and the produced, biology and technology, the reader tends to focus on the given and the moviegoer on the produced. This distinction epitomizes one of the key ontological problems of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To what extent can Victor’s monster, however sympathetic as an alienated character aspiring for personhood and social acceptance, be considered a human being. And if not a human but a posthuman or cyborg, then can a “composite body” have a soul or consciousness, or if not, can you still qualify as a posthuman without consciousness? While critics have raised the question about the monster’s soul, the answer seems to depend on two issues yet to be considered in relation to Frankenstein: how we define consciousness, and whether we accept the possibility of the mechanical construction of the human spirit. Recent developments in the new interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, combined with the insights of Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta of Indian philosophy, may help to shed light on the nature of Victor’s monster and the true cause of its merciless behavior.
Brian Aldiss says that the creature “was created by science, or at least pseudo-science, rather than by any pacts with the devil, or by magic, like the Golem” (1995, 62). Warren Montag, however, notes that science is present only through its effects in Frankenstein, which “veils” the scientific in theological terms (2000, 393). Branagh’s film adaptation elaborates on the scientific process of production because of the visual nature of film, but Shelley’s narrative, remaining true to the infant state of science in its day, casts a “veil over reality,” . . . covering “that which it reveals” (393). Elaine Graham (2002), moreover, points out that critics such as John Sutherland (1996) believe that “Frankenstein must be read more as a work of occult or gothic literature than as an early example of science fiction shaped with any degree of credibility by the scientific practices of its day” (74). Although Sutherland claims that “Shelley’s Frankenstein is no ‘scientist,’ whether mad or sane, but an Enlightenment philosophe” (1996, 25), Graham and others argue that ample evidence in the novel attests to Shelley knowledge and cogent application of natural philosophy (2002, 74). Nevertheless, due to the influence of the Romantic and Gothic movements, Shelley placed greater emphasis on the passions as a means of representing human motivation and creativity than on scientific theory (ibid.).
As David Punter notes in Gothic Pathologies, Derrida says that “outside the text there is indeed . . . Nothing. Gothic fiction is haunted by this: it is haunted by Nothing” (1998, 4). As well shall see, Nothing relates to a certain definition of consciousness, a nothingness that haunts Victor’s monster by its absence. As Punter observes, “the law, Derrida says, is mad,” and the Gothic, as its provisional hypothesis, “deals with those moments when we find it impossible, with any degree of hope, for ‘our case to be put’” (5). Thus Victor’s monster, who is outside the law, continually tries “to find a site on which his case might be heard” (6). Like an adolescent, for whom everything inside finds itself on the outside, the monster’s subjectivity is entirely projected on the outside as it aspires for its case to be heard. It has no self-sufficient inner being, no sense of self-identity beyond its social/(al)chemical constructedness.
Victor’s monster completely identifies with the content of its awareness, showing little tendency to transcend the material body and the thought of its condition. During its first real encounter with Victor, the monster says, “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us” (95). After having admired the De Lacey family from its cottage hideout, the creature describes to Victor its reaction to its own reflected image: “I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions; but how I was terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror . . . that I was indeed the monster that I am . . . I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification” (109). Instead of expressing its own innate compassion or evolving toward resignation or detachment, the monster allows its identification with its physical condition to spur it into violent behavior toward Victor and his friends. It warns Victor that “If you comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends” (95). As Punter says, “Gothic enacts an introjection of the destruction of the body, and thus introjects death; in so doing it attains sublimity because it is necessary for there to be a circling, hovering, transcendent self which can enact the survival and supersession of physical difficulties, the ‘last man,’ the wanderer, the ancient mariner” (17). But for Victor’s monster, there is no gothic supersession, no will to transcend; arguably, although it thinks and expresses itself to others, it lacks the experience of soul/consciousness, the indispensable basis of any transcendence. Something is indeed left out in Victor’s construction of the monster. As a student of science with Professor Waldman in Ingolstadt, Victor finds himself caught in the paradigm shift between alchemy and chemistry, supernaturalism and modern science. As the novel suggests, however, neither paradigm has the capacity to provide Victor’s creature with the Nothingness at the core of human nature.
When Victor refers to the monster as “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy all that was dear to me” (76), he not only implies that as a bad father he has no right to expect gratitude, that the monster’s cruelty reflects the neglect of his “offspring”; he also suggests that in a fundamental sense the monster has no spirit of its own. Johanna Smith argues that although Victor hoped and indeed expected to endow his creature with its own spirit, the scientific tools at his disposal, however eclectic, prevented him from achieving his goal (2000). Victor’s own reaction to bringing the monster to life reveals his failure, for had he succeeded in animating his creature with a soul/consciousness, one could infer there might have been a flash of recognition, an intuitive, intersubjective identification between the two. On the contrary, Victor recalls, “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. . . . but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes . . . his shriveled complexion and straight black lips” (55). Profoundly disturbed by his revulsion, Victor has a nightmare in which Elizabeth, whom he embraces in the dream, suddenly transforms into the corpse of his dead mother. He starts up in horror only to behold “the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created,” gazing down at him in bed and muttering inarticulate sounds. Foreshadowing Elizabeth’s murder, Victor’s nightmare undermines any hope of the monster’s connectedness to the human spirit, an intersubjective space in which the “transcendent self . . . can enact the survival and supersession of physical difficulties” (Punter 17).
According to Montag, Victor’s failure suggests that “Frankenstein thus rejects one of the most fundamental myths of the Enlightenment, the notion that scientific and economic progress will continually improve the condition of humankind, the idea that once the barriers of knowledge are pushed aside, the conditions for perpetual peace and a universal harmony will have been established” (391). As Smith argues, by investigating not only the laws of nature but also the hidden “causes of things,” Victor fails to make the paradigm shift from alchemy to chemistry, from supernatural modes of knowledge developed by alchemists like Cornelius Agrippa to the respectability of modern science (324-25). Alchemy and the research of the electricians are superceded paradigms, or what Foucault calls “subjugated knowledges” (Smith, 325). While Victor makes an incomplete paradigm shift between alchemy and chemistry, ultimately, as I will argue, whatever paradigm he might have used (past or present) would have made little difference to the nature of his monster.
Why would Shelley have Victor resort to alchemy unless she suspected that chemistry would never lead to the creation of a human spirit through a composite body? The transformation of body parts into soul, however, would not be entirely foreign to the Gothic and Romantic imagination. Despite his training in chemistry, Victor is reluctant to give up alchemy: “I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, though futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed. . . . I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth” (45). As Arthur Versluis notes of the alchemical worldview,
Alchemy, both as laboratory alchemy and as spiritual alchemy, holds that the cosmos is alive and that we are not separate from it. Whereas scientific rationalism and the technology derived from it are founded in the separation of subject from object, so that the subject can manipulate the object, alchemy in its various forms is based in a profoundly different approach, representing a discipline in which subject and object are revealed to be in fact inseparable. Given this profoundly different view of subject and object, one can see how the various aims of alchemy flow from it, including the possibility of turning lead into gold, or of creating elixir that can prolong physical life indefinitely or bring about immortality. These aims are brought about, from an alchemical viewpoint, by the union or transcendence of subject and object by way of various laboratory or spiritual “operations.” (2001, 11)
The main purpose of alchemy, defined as esoteric universalism or pansophic mysticism, is not to turn lead into gold but to turn mind/matter into spirit. In trying to bestow animation upon lifeless matter, Victor no doubt believes that animation and soul/consciousness are synonymous. One reason Victor’s monster fails to assimilate as a social entity, other than his monstrous physical appearance, is that his animation derives solely from a self-identity based on an attachment to its physical and mental attributes. Lacking the power to achieve a sense of nonattachment from these attributes and thereby to react differently to its rejection, alienation, and abuse, the monster has no recourse but to succumb to the pressures of the world. Even as a joint product of alchemy partially integrated with chemistry, then, Victor’s monster lacks the human capacity for uniting subject and object through transcendence. As portrayed through Shelley’s gothic narrative, the monster remains within the boundaries of mental computation, a duality of subject and object.
What I’m suggesting here is that the monster, as a merger of animate (given) and inanimate (produced), does not have the innate capacity to unify or transcend subject and object, self and other, to transform the lead of mental content into the gold of soul/consciousness. It languishes in a world of duality, hurt and confused by the people it tries to befriend, seeking revenge for the fear and dread it evokes in everyone it meets. Is this all we can expect from the merger of the given and the produced, as Shelley and Branagh seem to suggest? To better explain the monster’s failure to acculturate as a cyborg, I want to distinguish between the mind as defined by scientific rationalism and consciousness as defined by Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta.
In describing the posthuman condition as a biology/machine merger, Robert Pepperell defines a conscious system in terms of the objects of consciousness as opposed to consciousness itself. He applies a functionalist definition both to human beings and intelligent machines.
The system cannot be conscious of nothing. As many philosophers have said, “To be conscious is to be conscious of something.” If the concept of consciousness has any shared meaning (and it must have some to be of value) then this proposition must hold. . . . The significance of this interpretation [of consciousness], then, is this: any system that claims to be conscious (or any system about which such claims are made) cannot be entirely closed, and this acts as a constraint on the conditions necessary for such a system to exist. Even if it has no apparent physical connection with anything outside itself it must have been provided with some object other than its own sentience for it to be conscious of. (2003, 175, Pepperell’s italics)
Further, Pepperell, following Daniel Dennett’s computational definition of consciousness (1991), questions the idea that “the system might be ‘conscious only of its own consciousness’; that it might have no need of any ‘external’ data or experience to serve as the object of its thoughts other than its own sentience” (176). Pepperell considers the experience of pure consciousness, which is at the basis of Advaita Vedanta, awkward because the union of subject and object falls outside the grasp of scientific rationalism, which depends on the material extension of space, time and causality. In Pepperell’s definition of the posthuman, therefore, any conscious system must have a purpose or function; a light bulb cannot light itself, its purpose is to convert electrical current into light (176). If we provisionally accept this definition, then the monster’s purpose is not to enjoy a sense of autonomous being like its human counterpart, but to satisfy Victor’s desire for immortality, for circumventing natality, for replacing his lost mother, or for whatever other function his unconscious drive demands. To deny the monster the capacity to experience pure consciousness means to deny it the basis of personhood. Ultimately, this denial is worse than its combined rejection by Victor, the De Lacey family, and William, his first victim, for it deprives it of a minimal self-sufficiency for coping with rejection. In recounting how it was cast out by the De Laceys, the monster asks, “should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No; from that moment I declared ever-lasting war against the species, and more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery” (131). Its awareness clearly fixates on the boundaries of phenomenal experience, on the world of duality, the separation of self and other.
In “I = Awareness,” Arthur Deikman defines awareness in the advaitan sense as the “ground of all experience” (1996, 351). To describe awareness in material, third-person terms as Dennett, Pepperell and other functionalists do means to describe merely its content, the objects of awareness: sensations, thoughts, perceptions, memories, moods, images, and emotions, which in the monster’s case are all negative. “I” is equivalent to “awareness” in the sense of being the observer, the experiencer, which can be experienced but not seen like conscious content. When the monster tells its story to Victor on the Alps, it reflects on its own life as an observer. This self-reflexiveness may lead one to question whether the nature of self-knowledge merely involves an infinite regress of the observer as a layering of conscious content. While such layering of the objects of awareness in fact describes the monster’s narrative, this does not qualify it as possessing the capacity for pure awareness. As Deikman notes, “I/awareness has no elements, no features. It is not a matter of a searchlight illuminating one element while the rest is dark—it has to do with the nature of light itself” (353). In Samkhya-Yoga philosophy, moreover, mental content is distinguished from purusha, the witnessing self as pure consciousness (Pflueger 1998, 48). Deikman notes that “identifying ‘I’ with awareness solves the problem of the infinite regress: we know the internal observer not by observing it but by being it” (355, Deikman’s emphasis). Both Victor and his monster, however, dwell obsessively on conscious content: Victor fixates on the hidden causes of things as a escape from mortality; the monster agonizes over its rejection, and, in Robert De Niro’s portrayal, fears that the self as witness (or soul) was the part left out of its composite body.
Given the above definitions of consciousness—I = awareness as opposed to conscious content—we can reasonably argue that Victor in his metaphysical quest to produce a being like himself succeeds (metaphorically speaking) in replicating the conscious content but fails in replicating consciousness as the “internal observer.” Shelley’s Frankenstein displays the contradictions, discrepancies, and inconsistencies unavoidable in the representation of the two aspects of consciousness—observer and observed. Indeed, pure consciousness as a unity of subject and object lies beyond representation, beyond the external tokens of language and interpretation, and can only be evoked through the aesthetic power of suggestion (rasa or aesthetic rapture) (Chakrabarti 1971, 40-43). Victor’s monster is pitiable and even sympathetic to the extent that Shelley gives it a narrative voice on the par with that of the two other narrators, Victor and Robert Walton. Yet even though she provides complex psychological motivation for its cruelty, the monster’s crimes remain excessive. The fact that it overreacts to William’s fear by killing him and then murders Elizabeth on her wedding night because Victor, having second thoughts, destroys its partially constructed mate suggests that its character is congenitally flawed by an inability to witness its mental content and thereby distance itself from its emotions. Graham says the monster’s suffering reveals its dehumanization (69); this is true to the extent that it lacks the human capacity to forget or overcome its suffering through “a void in thought” (Artaud 1958, 71)—possibly the only way it might have redeemed itself from damnation and estrangement.
Frankenstein also calls into question the postmodern distinction between the essentialist and constructionist view of self-identity. Victor’s monster, a soulless composite body, does not truly problematize the opposition nature/culture, given/produced because it does not share humanity’s essential characteristic. Shelley portrays the monster as an autodidact who in a Roussean state happens to read Milton’s Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s Lives, and who feels an affinity for the qualities of benevolence and generosity it perceives in the De Lacey family. But while these experiences furnish its mind with conscious content and thereby form the basis of its self-construction, they do not, as suggested earlier, contribute to the development of consciousness itself. In describing for Victor what it calls “the progress of my intellect” through reading, the monster says, “I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversations I was a listener. I sympathized with and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none and related to none” (124). Again, the monster lacks an intuitive connectedness to others on a level of consciousness transcending human attributes, whether positive or negative. It identifies with Satan in Paradise Lost because they are both outcasts, although for different reasons. As an archetypal cyborg, the monster is an outsider for lacking the one feature indispensable for an essentialist identity: namely, pure consciousness. As Shelley’s novel and Branagh’s film suggest, constructing pure consciousness exceeds the power of technology, of whatever paradigm. The constructionist position on self-identity typically confuses consciousness with a so-called essentialist “concept of self” (Kondo 26), which it then attempts to deconstruct. As Samkhya-Yoga tells us, however, consciousness is not a concept, an object of observation, but rather the internal observer or self as witness. As Derrida might say, the observer is Nothing, but in this case a nothingness that is also everything (see Borges 248-49).
The hard problem of consciousness—why everything in the mind doesn’t go on in the dark—along with the mind/body problem—whether consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain or an autonomous entity—have yet to be resolved in cognitive science (Chalmers 2002). The physicist Jean Burns, however, argues that volition, as an aspect of I/awareness, “is not a part of presently known physical laws and it is not even known whether it exists—no physics experiments have ever established it presence” (27). There is no scientific evidence to support the idea that consciousness, which is beyond space and time, can ever be constructed, as Victor Frankenstein thought he was doing. The monster, moreover, doesn’t display volition, or give evidence of being “conscious only of its own consciousness” (Pepperell 176), so much as react to social forces in its environment.
To construct a cyborg like Victor’s monster, therefore, necessarily entails constructing an entity whose conscious awareness does not extend to pure consciousness but consists solely of conscious content, like the content of a computer. On the one hand, mental content—the objects of observation—can be constructed by physical laws, as Pepperell argues in relation to intelligent machines, with Victor’s monster being an unfortunate prototype. On the other hand, however, all evidence based on current scientific knowledge and the ancient Vedic tradition indicates that the witnessing self transcends physical laws and therefore the possibility of ever being constructed. The inconsistency and contradiction of Shelley’s narrative depiction of human identity hinges on the fact that Victor treats the human brain as a piece of dead tissue, from which no witnessing self could ever arise. Yet paradoxically, Shelley’s narrative portrays the monster as a sentient creature that for all practical purposes seems to behave like an ordinary mortal. This inconsistency stems in part from the epistemological “problem of other minds.” As Chalmers puts it, this “problem arises because it seems logically compatible with all the external evidence that beings around us are conscious, and it is logically compatible that they are not. We have no way to peek inside a dog’s brain, for instance, and observe the presence or absence of conscious experience” (1996, 74). Any analysis of the monster’s conscious experience thus depends on how we interpret its behavior.
David Lodge has demonstrated that literature, in its depiction of subjective experience, provides insight into the workings of human consciousness (2002). In his own analysis he mainly focuses on the way modern fiction tends “to center narrative in the consciousness of its characters, and to create those characters through the representation of their subjective thoughts and feeling rather than by describing them objectively” (57, Lodge’s emphasis). He does not separate consciousness from its content, the fundamental distinction in determining whether an intelligent machine will ever be endowed with conscious awareness. Nevertheless, he quotes Antonio Demasio as saying, “Whether we like it or not, something like the sense of self does exist in the human mind as we go about knowing things . . . the human mind is constantly being split . . . between the part that stands for the known and the part that stands for the knower” (15). Any confusion over the boundary between the natural and the artificial in a persona stems in part from a confusion over the boundary between the knower and the known. This ambiguity is heightened by the fact that in narrative the knower/known distinction is veiled by the ineffability of the knower as witnessing consciousness.
While attributing monstrosity, then, has its pitfalls, one approach is to examine the extent to which the knower is collapsed onto the known. Of Shelley’s multiple narrators—Victor, Robert, and the monster—the first two reveal evidence of a gap between knower and known by complying with the better judgment of the what Yohanan Grinshpon (2003) describes as “the healing potency of ‘knowledge of the better self’” (viii). Victor makes a conscious decision not to create a female companion for the monster on moral grounds, and Walton reluctantly aborts his expedition to the North Pole for the sake of his suffering crew. As opposed to the “lesser self,” the better self is defined as witnessing consciousness or Atman, which Grinshpon refers to as “Vedic otherness” (5). The monster, on the other hand, knows that its vengeance against Victor is wrong, but as it confesses to Robert while repenting over Victor’s death, “I recollected my threat [to kill Elizabeth] and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture, but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse which I detested yet could not disobey. . . . The completion of my daemoniacal design became an insatiable passion” (212). Although fully aware it was committing a crime, this knowledge consists merely of the conscious content of the lesser self constructed through the monsters reading and observations of the world; it is not grounded in the knower as witnessing consciousness. Given the problem of other minds, this analysis may seems to beg the question about attributing monstrosity, but we have to remember that the self as witness—the Nothingness that is also everything (as the basis of all knowledge)—cannot be known by way of ordinary experience based on the duality of subject and object, knower and known. Recalling Deikman, “we know the internal observer not by observing it but by being it” (355). To be, ultimately, is inseparable from doing, and the quality of action by Victor’s monster, as depicted by Shelley’s narrativity of consciousness, does nothing if not give one pause about the quality of its humanity.
David Noble quotes the geneticist French Anderson as saying, “If what is uniquely important about humanness is not defined by the physical hardware of our body, then since we can only alter the physical hardware, we cannot alter that which is uniquely human by genetic engineering . . . We cannot alter our soul by genetic engineering” (1999, 199). Although built from scratch and not genetically engineered, Victor’s monster contradicts this claim. If ethnicity, gender and race can influence the constructed self, then modifying our DNA will certainly have an unnatural effect on “what is uniquely important about our humanness.” Arguably, if the given self or soul/consciousness, considered omnipresent and immortal by the world’s contemplative traditions, can be described as that which is reflected or tuned into by the natural condition of the mind/body (which includes the lesser self), then genetic engineering would undoubtedly deform the reflector and thereby distort the reflection. Whatever geneticists or posthumanists believe, whether we like it or not corrupting the natural condition of the body, as in the case of Victor’s monster, will inevitably distort the reflection of consciousness to the point that even the constructed self would suffer. As the Bhagavad-Gita states, to contact the better self the physiology has to be “freed from blemish” (Ch. 6, verse 28): “The most normal state of the human nervous system is that which can support ‘contact with Brahman,’ the omnipresent Reality. It must necessarily be a state of extreme refinement and flexibility, and this is possible only when the nervous system is entirely pure” (Yogi 1969, 439). The dead tissue from which Victor creates his hapless monster, while producing a sympathetic lesser self, not only distorts the reflection but also warps the composite body.
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