Edison's Frankenstein

Charles Ogle was, I think, my first true glimpse of cinematic horror and absurdity. Even if that is not quite true, it still has the ring of truth buried somewhere deep, deep down in its brackish, still-beating heart. His agonized, idiot visage, his long, pointed nails, his hunched and hairy frame; these things all wore the aspect of a medieval peasant, a village idiot from some lost, forgotten fairy tale. His hair, which was a frizzy, wild coif atop his suffering skull-wherein dull, ignorant eyes rested above the misshapen mouth, a mouth from which no one could guess capable articulation could emerge--all added the mien of hideousness, of a legendary ogre to the grotesque embodiment of long-suffering abandonment; abandoned, because--born of death.

Lengths of rope had been wrapped around his frame. Perhaps this was the remains of the noose from which his criminal's body swung, perhaps at a crossroads. Certainly, it was left there to be picked apart by vultures, so that the eyes could be pecked out in the gloom. Overhead, in a dark, Bavarian sky, clouds gathered about the crown of this singular revenant, this accursed body would be in maggoty rags of brown filth. His legs were covered by thick peasant hosiery; his feet were enormous flapping "Krakow" (medieval pointed-toed shoes), lending an even more absurdly ugly spect to an already hideous form.

He seemed to exude filth and the grave in his wake. Did he climb down from the scaffold and present his flayed-open carcass for Frankenstein's delectation? Hardly. This is not the key point of the plot which we will now examine. The chief thematic element that resonates so strongly with this author, as well as many others, is the defiance of God, and God here is simply a substitute for DAD. It is the rejection of the Father by the Son (Frankenstein wishes to usurp the role of the Heavenly Father and assert himself as a replacement for divine order. He wishes to bestow animation upon the dead. Curiously, he chooses to create for himself a MAN (read into that whatever you wish) and later scuppers the Creature's desire to have a mate by creating a woman out of the "charnel odds and ends" of the freshly dead.

His desire to defeat death is his own Will to Power; it is a self-destructive tightrope stretched over Nietzsche's Abyss, wherein he looks down into the charnel pit of death, of extinction, and defiantly places himself in the chasm between the Will of God and the Ascent of Science. His misshapen progeny, the Monster, was rejected for him as if it had been cast forth from Eden. Out of the bits and pieces of death, out of sin and human frailty and the everlasting dust from which we return, called forth from the eternal grave, the Monster stumbles through one pathetic misadventure after another, at least in the novel. In the short (minuscule) first silent film adaptation, he is rather more a demon intent on pure revenge. His reflection in the mirror becomes confused with that of Frankenstein himself, who seems to have birthed the macabre dark ages denizen from his tortured consciousness, like Zeus giving birth from his head to Pallas Athena.

The mirror is a device used, in nearly the same way, in the same shot at the same angle, a few years later in The Student of Prague (1914), which is a sort of play on the Faust legend. This is thematically correct of course; Frankenstein is simply an adaptation or take-off of Faust. Moralistically, it gives the same message concerning the inadvisability of seeking knowledge at the expense of moral rightness; or, put another way. flying in the face of God is bound to result in an inevitable collision with the Powers That Be. It is damnation Frankenstein toys with; and the demon borne from the pit of his fears and desires comes back, a reflection of his dark and tormented beingness, his adaptation to the Dead; his sepulchral soul.

Here then, is his story. Or, an early adaptation of it. And THIS author's adaptation of THAT.

Edison's Frankenstein

Somewhere out of the deep brackish pits of my living soul, I breathed life into death eternal. This was my error; thus was the weight of my sin that I went down, down to a charnel pit of my destruction and despair.

My name is Frankenstein, and the ages know me well. I left my family, and my home, to pursue college in Ingolstadt. I had long been ridden, as if by a hag in a nightmare, by the spirit of death, which was the spirit of my dear mother, who succumbed to her illness after a life marked by tragic despair. My father rescued her from a sorry fate as an orphan, when her father, who was caught up in a sordid financial scandal that brought him disgrace and despair, ended his life by his own hand. And death, always a raven perched upon the edge of eternal night, looking out from eyes beetling and black, came flying by our fate, our familial curse.

I was hounded, all my life, by the fiery tale of Prometheus, who stole the thunderbolt of Zeus and brought man the secret of Life and Death. Imbuing him, like a leaden doll, with consciousness, Prometheus was cursed to have his heart and liver eaten for eternity, by vultures. He would reconstitute forever, never die, trapped in his living perdition. Such are the inscrutable ways of the gods.

Lightning flashed down out of a midnight sky. And I could SEE, in its crackling, a violent and intense manifestation of nature, the living consciousness of a universe I took as benevolent and whole. Indeed, I was wrong in this, but one can forgive youth for being naive, for dreaming dreams no mortal dared dream, as he cast his vision skyward, toward the circling abyss above.

But it was to the abyss below that I was inevitably drawn.

My "more than cousin" was the dear, sweet Elizabeth Lavenza, who was found in a hovel with her mother lying dead, another orphan rescued by the dint of the sweet grace of my parents, their charity, and tender souls. God rest them! They did not deserve a son such as I, one who would blacken the memory of my family name with a sin so monstrous and defiant of Providence that the terror of it would cast shadows of awesome gloom across the span of the centuries. My name is a legend now; I am eternally damned.

But, I should explain.

I left for university in Ingolstadt with all the best of intentions. It was with a head full of dreams and a heart full of what I took to be the noblest of intentions that I rode out, after bidding Father and Elizabeth adieu. Of course, I was a foolish, naive young man, a young man whose ideas of life and the possibilities of reanimating same were informed by the puerile, primitive books of alchemists and superstitious philosophers of a medieval past. It was this rubbish that was roundly rejected by my professors when I first arrived, as being unworthy of an enterprising, intelligent, and thoroughly-modern young man intent on entering with seriousness and sincerity upon a medical practice. All of them scorned me, scoffed at my ideas, of my reading of such "antiquated nonsense" as Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I soon feared becoming the laughingstock of my school. There was ONE professor, however, Professor Waldman, who was quite different from all the rest.

A dignified, reserved, but thoroughly strange man, he seemed to take my theories seriously.

"One should never be dismissive of knowledge, no matter the source. Some things can be applied to our quest to preserve and plume the mysterious depths to which life evolves. Come, my boy! I have much to teach you!."

And so he did. It was within two years of assiduous toiling in the brackish waters of chemistry, biology, and necrology, that I came, quite as if by accident, upon the secret to creating animation in a being that had been formed, not by an act of God, but by the Divine Will of a single man, a penetrating explorer into the nether regions of human mortality and the possibility of creating from scraps of decay something vital, something precious and pulsating and breathing and ALIVE. Was it a stroke of genius on my part? An accident? The manifestation of my own indomitable WILL? Or, was it simply the just and righteous punishment from God for seeking to usurp the ways by which he accorded destiny, life, and death throughout the universe? I do not know. To this day, I simply do not know.

I was exultant. Night after night, sitting alone in my laboratory, by the flickering, guttering flame of a single candle, I mixed the noxious preparations to bring about my mad, blasphemous dream. The dreary spattering of rain against the window, and the cold draft of air that did little to chill my bones (likewise, there seemed to be no fire that could warm the dark current of malignant, spiritual ice that flowed in my veins) were the only murmuring susurrations of peace to invade the stern, implacable concentration of my devoted, feverous brain. I worked until dawn.

In my laboratory, once I knew beyond any doubt that the capability for creating life lie within my hands, I wasted no time in setting up the boiling vat of chemicals and flesh, of placing the skeletal remains of the cadaver I intended to imbue with a hideous new life, behind the heavy leaden doors which I had installed at great expense. I had rifled the charnel houses and cemeteries looking for such body parts as I found extraordinary; all the better to create from such stuff a true, living, and breathing Adonis, a New God, an immortal among puny men.

I sank deeply into the rat-infested, stinking maw of death. Indeed, it was fortuitous for me that there was currently a plague raging through Ingolstadt, and that death trundled by, day by day, in the form of a corpse cart, bodies to be buried or burned at the edge of town, outside the city gates. Houses were marked with skull-and-bones and a warning to outsiders: "Here There Be Plague!" But, alas, perhaps the greatest plague of all was the eager student doctor beating the cobbles with his creaking, hell-bound shoes, his crooked fingers stinking of the rot of ages, the funk of cadaverous loves. I sank deeper, deeper into my world of death.

There is a legend of a certain vampire in Transylvania. [Note: That legend, or at the very least, our adaptation of it, is reprinted here] They say a young man doomed to be a vampire once rose from his grave. His casket became his cloak, his grave his horse, and his shroud a white road stretched before him. All night, his sister unknowingly followed him to the house of his grieving mother, who had been up all night cursing the day of his birth.

My mother, were she alive to see the tragedy that unfurled in the wake of my infamy, might very well grieve. Perhaps she is howling now, through the blackness of eternity, weeping forever my sorry name.

I was that Black Rider, alas. I was that revenant returned. I rode the spectral highway of death.

In the center of my leaden doors, which I was careful to bolt tightly, was a little glass. A peephole, so to speak. A hundred years later, when someone named Edison would conceive of telling my story (albeit, in his inimitable way), it would be through the use of a machine called the "Edison Kinetoscope." The device itself would have as its most salient feature a spyglass or peephole through which the viewer, who was tasked with turning the handle of a crank to make the succession of recorded images "move," would be privy to see a dancing girl, or men retiring after a long day's toil; even a kiss and a sneeze. And, also, a much-abbreviated version of my particular tale.

To resume.

The foul, stinking vat of chemicals began to bubble forth, and the noxious, yeasty and viscous stuff of life began to coalesce and take shape. It covered, like a living jelly, the desiccated skeleton floating within the tank. Flesh began to cover slimy bone, filling it within as the thing rose, lifting one bony arm in creeping animation. Bits of flesh began to fly, like ashes burning in reverse, into the smoke and swirling miasma of gases as the thing slowly, but with quicker vehemence, began to exhibit the first dreadful signs of a pestilential animation.

I could hardly contain the rapturous exultation within. Within, my heart beat like a dream so that I feared I might almost expire from its exertions. The blood coursed through my veins, and my temples throbbed, as my eyes rolled around in my skull, and I clapped my hands madly and howled at the silence that I, yes, I had truly taken the first giant step toward the final defeat of death--upon the creation of a New Life. A New Man. A SUPERMAN.

Yes, yes. I had crossed the abyss and looked deep into that churning pit of death. Before, I had dreams of seeing my beautiful Elizabeth Lavenza, walking the streets of Ingolstadt, in the very bloom of health. Racing toward her, I grasped her in my arms.

I felt her body stiffen and her skin grow coarse. I thought I held the corpse of Mother in my arms.

I threw her from me in disgust. She wore the leaden hue of death, and in the folds of her bridal garments, the grave worms ate her flesh.

In the dream, too, I was in a sitting room. The portraits hanging upon the walls slowly transformed themselves into the very images of the grave, as if they had been posed posthumously for the portraiture artist to preserve for posterity's sake.

A great table before the fire was transformed into the lacquered surface of a coffin. Beyond, in the glowing moonlight streaming through the window, the sash covered the face of a woman I thought to be Elizabeth. She breathed in as if about to speak when suddenly the filmy curtain was sucked deep into her throat, and I realized she had begun to choke. The entire house it seemed suddenly, was a tomb.

I ran across a stark, barren expanse of ground, finding the earth falling away beneath me. Below me, the ground opened up into a monstrous pit, a mass grave, wherein from out the sloping earth that proceeded down into blackness, the rotted forms of the unearthed and reanimated dead grasped for me, with rotted limbs covered by stinking rags. And I was pulled below, into the earth, into the Realm of the Dead.

And I awoke from this fever dream in my bed. The curtain closing me off from the rays of sunlight (I detested them at this point) proved something staring at me, from the moonlight streaming through the windows just beyond.

The thing crept forward, parting the curtain with its long, pointed, filthy fingers; fingers from which the flesh seemed to peel and flake from the taloned bone.

Mrs. Shelley, in her rather romantic and inimitable and perfect novel Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus, wrote:

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. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this, I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

She of course spoke with poetic license. But, still, the reaction was the same: I reeled in horror from the hulking, fairy tale ogre before me, the wretched thing with the idiot visage, the contorted mouth, and the stupid, shocked, benumbed eyes, betraying no intelligence; only pure, malicious stupidity, that I knew well could turn, like an enraged child, into evil intent. The head was quite grotesque, a study in misshapen deformity, and the hair was wild coif more appropriate to a storybook witch than a dignified man.

The arms were long and thin, the hands decaying pointed talons, as stated before. The upper torso was prodigious; the waist, alas, too thin. The legs were mere sticks, and the feet were too long for the body by half.

The foul revenant was able, accursed though its new-born condition is, to somehow manage to find for itself ragged garments, covering the thick, coarse red hair that sprouted from its monstrous form. It wore a tattered, filthy burlap shirt, as a jerkin, and cinched by a stout rope around the waist. Crossing the shoulder was another length of rope. The hands. But, great God, how can I describe the hands?

They were filthy claws, the flesh and hair seeming to have been melted together with grime and grease and flakes of dead skin. The nails were long and exceedingly filthy. I almost imagined his hands as monstrous gauntlets that had been left to rot and decay upon the long, skinny bones.

The arms seemed covered by filthy strips of cloth. The legs were covered by a hose. The monstrous, abnormally long feet were clad in "Krakow" shows, medieval, pointed-toed shoes that lent the image of the thing even more monstrously grotesque.

The pallor of the skin was exceedingly white; the brows met in two arches over the bridge of the nose. The eyes were dull, stupid pits, and the mouth a rictus of twisted pain.

I had stood exultant in my laboratory before the operation, my sacred laboratory with its display of skulls, spinal columns, odd and perverted masks of exceptional human faces; strange and distorted sculptures of the body. By the light of a guttering flame, I had taken quill in hand, writing to my Elizabeth:

"Sweetheart! Tonight I shall accomplish my ambition, the Great Work which will make my name famous, and cause the memory of me to live beyond the ages. I have discovered the secret of life and death, and in a few hours, I shall create into life the most perfect human being the world has yet known. When this marvelous work is accomplished I shall return to claim you for my bride. Your Devoted, F

And now I wished to rip to pieces that accursed letter of vanity and evil which I had penned! Oh, the thing that I had created was no "marvel", but a monstrous, hideous thing, a thing born from the evil, I thought, that must surely lurk within my very being.

Was I then a man cursed from birth, to enact evil upon the world? What, otherwise, could be the reason for my being? Cold a man who had fathered such a vile creation rest, upon death, in the bosom of the Almighty? Would he not, instead, be cast away, into the Outer Veil, into utter darkness, to suffer the torments and depredations of the Eternal Damned. Was, as Milton intoned, it better, "to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven"?

Overcome with such thoughts, I found myself growing faint, until I fell across the floor, in a deep swoon, and only later did my manservant, Henry Clerval, manage to rouse me. I awoke, peering in terror and fear into the darkest shadows of the room. My Creature, however, was gone.

I returned home shortly thereafter, greeting father and Elizabeth in the parlor by the glass doors leading into the garden. I told them exultantly of all that I had seen, and done, yet...I never told them of my Creature, although, based on the missive I sent Elizabeth, she must well have wondered.

It was a few days later, while busily planning our wedding night, that Elizabeth came into the study, very gaily, and taking a book of poetry into her hand, exclaimed what an old romantic bore I had become, in light of our impending nuptials, and "Oh, dear, you look pallid! And you're chilled to the bone! You must allow me to make some tea, and we'll have refreshment together!"

And rising from my lap, Elizabeth took the tea kettle and went into the next room, where the stove burned warmly. I reclined once again, looking deeply and unfathomably into the mirror. My eyes peeled away from their sockets when, in the depths of the mirror, coming through the door, I beheld the horrid wretch to which my blighted mind and evil fingers had given birth.

The hideous phantom, like some ogre from a fairy story, came slowly through the door, filling the doorway with his immense, hairy, filthy frame, and exclaiming, "So! I find you here, Frankenstein! Warm and comfortable and far, far removed from this cursed form into which you have breathed the hellish fire of animation!"

Speechless, struck dumb with terror, I rose from my chair, thrusting my horrified, quivering arms out in front of me, and exclaiming, "How on earth did you find me?"

The thing before me cracked a lopsided, horrific grin, and began.

"I wandered a confused and benumbed child And why should I not feel as if I had been brought into the world just to be orphaned? Had not my father rejected me? I came to a village; but, my ugliness and the stink of death that follows me caused the peasants to drive me into the forest, following me with their torches. They would have killed me, but I hid in a hog shed and escaped their fury and hate. The shed abutted a small cottage, wherein an old man and his son lived with his fiance. She was the daughter of a foreign diplomat, a man who had been accused of wrongdoing. The son's father had helped free him from prison, but he betrayed them all and took his daughter back home to Arabia. She finally escaped, and all of them went into hiding in a forest cottage, along with his sister. And so, as he taught her English, from the Bible, and Paradise Lost, I slowly began to learn as well.

"Now as luck would have it, I was wearing an old coat that I had stolen from the lab when you created me. It must have formerly belonged to somebody that you had rifled from the tomb, but, inside the pocket, lo and behold! What should I find but the crumpled page you had written on and cast aside, detailing your experiments, and how you created me, it even gave me a name to think about, the name of FRANKENSTEIN. Thou name most poisonous and hated, like a dagger thrust into the ribs! I swore vengeance against thee for making me, molding me from the charnel, rotting limbs of the dead. "Did I solicit thee, oh my maker, from darkness to promote me? as Milton might say!

"And so I searched for the high and low, after being driven from the only home I had ever known by the surprised return of the son and his fiance, when I was bent at the knees of the old, blind man, beseeching his kindness for a poor stranger. I burned down that cursed cottage later, and began an orgy of destruction, setting fires throughout the land, and being chased by stone-throwing villagers into the hills, and the mountains. Into the wild, lost places, where I had to learn to survive. Finally, one day, I came upon that brat, William. The one they accused Justine Moritz of, of killing! Yes! It was not Justine who did it, as you were surprised, but I! I was the murderer! I held the boy's throat in my hateful clutches and endeavored to strangle the life from his bones. In a short time, the thing was accomplished. I quickly stole the engraved locket and planted, as incriminating evidence, upon the sleeping form of the unfortunate Justine. As you will recall, the mob took her from her prison cell and gave her a good and proper lynching. The pain this caused you and Elizabeth only served to fill me with glee! But I was not finished yet.

"I came to you and demanded you make me a mate, a companion. A woman. A Bride for the Monster! Eh? And so you went to an isle in the Orkneys and began your work. In a little cabin laboratory on a lost island in the sea! But, wait! The consciousness of God must have gotten to you, for you abandoned this project, and rowed out to the middle of the sea, casting the remains of the cadaverous, unliving thing into the ocean depths. But, unknown to you, MY eyes were peering at you from the darkness, watching you, like a veritable Satan, watching you dishonor yourself and go back on your word. It was then, and only then, that I decided to kill your friend, Henry Clerval. A crime YOU nearly paid for with your life!

"So much tragedy. So much agony. So much grief and pain. And all because of you! Of what you brought into the world, all the grief and pain! Because you were not satisfied to be a man but had to become a god, a thing with mastery over life, and death! Well, m'lord, how are you enjoying your omnipotence? Have enough lives been sacrificed in the balance? Have you not felt the tortured anguish of one you brought to life, from the rotten, moldering entrails and cracked bones of the foul and putrescent dead, scream at you from the brackish pits of a Hell he can never escape, because, because, like Milton's Satan, a dead thing can never....find salvation. So I descend to the Hell below, a refugee from Heaven eternal. But, but, YOU! What if you, Frankenstein?"

And the monstrous thing turned, looking at itself in the polished laboratory mirror. It put out its arms, imploring some being on the other side of that mirror, and, I at its back, and its face contorted into some shock of genuine, child-like surprise; and, in a moment, the hideous visage was gone, and all that was left in its place was my image.

For, you see, it was a thing born from my sin, from the darkness that lurked within me; the shadow-self" of all our most dreadful imaginings and desires. But I had exorcised them, expiated my guilt, and now, in the arms of my sweet Elizabeth, I could find solace; I could find peace. And the darkness born from my brain would trouble me nevermore.

The End?

Afterword

The story of Frankenstein is as near and dear to me as my flesh, as my fractured relationship with my father, my Creator, and myself. I identify with the creature in his loathsome desire to enact vengeance against a man who brought him into this world of pain, only to abandon him; and I can relate to his howl of existential despair at being born a thing blasphemous, beyond the reach of salvation; accursed. No savior bled for a thing stitched-together from old, reeking cadavers, and brought to life by a scientist. Mary Shelley asked the question in 1818 we are still debating today: when does life begin? What is the animation of the body and the consciousness of the same, and how are they interrelated? Is it the will of a Divine Creator, or have we dispensed with him? As Nietzsche might quip, "God is dead." In the wake of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Sexual Revolution, the emergence of cloning, walking on the surface of the Moon, and the worldwide technological revolution brought about by the development of the Internet, some might very well ask: isn't God passe? Where is He hiding these days?

It's a flip, blasphemous question, but it rings true.

Man plays God every day. Does a lightning bolt come down upon his crown? Not immediately, but the wings are often plucked off of his greatest designs, his achievements become the dross of history, and he is forced to start again, picking himself up as he anxiously awaits the inevitable day when his technology of killing will render ALL life on this planet extinct.

in the light of that coming apocalypse, does the story of Frankenstein seem so monstrously far-fetched? Who then here is more hideous? The creature? Or the Doctor?

YOU decide.