#135 = Volume 45, Part 2 = July 2018
SPECIAL ISSUE ON FRANKENSTEIN (Edited by Michael Griffin and Nicole Lobdell)
Jed Mayer
The Weird Ecologies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
While a number of terms have been used to describe our current ecological crisis, perhaps none better captures the experience of living this crisis as global weirding, a time of unpredictable weather extremes bringing toxic heat, drought, and wildfires one year, and the next, perhaps, an unexpectedly “wet, ungenial summer” (Shelley 195). This is how Mary Shelley described the summer of 1816 during which she began composing Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). Often called “the Year without a Summer,” the weather event has been traced to climatic changes resulting from the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia the previous spring, releasing massive clouds of sulfurous ash into the atmosphere that resulted in plummeting temperatures, torrential rains, widespread crop failures, and forced migrations. While many have noted the parallels between the climate of Shelley’s novel and the atmospheric conditions of 1816,1 this essay will focus on how that “wet, ungenial” climate is weirdly reflected in “the watery, clouded eyes of the monster,” eyes that frighten even as they urge us to acknowledge our kinship (Shelley 154). The novel thus offers us a cognitive framework that is especially relevant for our present moment, where we regard the nonhuman world with equal parts fascination and dread, alienation and intimacy.
While it is often described as the first science-fiction novel, Frankenstein might be better described as the first weird tale. H.P. Lovecraft wrote of Shelley’s Frankenstein, “It has the true touch of cosmic fear,” a quality central to the weird, described as “a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and unplumbed space” (Supernatural Horror 107). As the climate crisis continues to upend what we thought we knew about our planet’s ecologies, what we once considered “fixed laws of Nature” are increasingly unstable. Distinct from the genres it most resembles—such as gothic, horror, and science fiction—the weird is a genre uniquely suited to narrating climate change, offering neither hope of transcendence nor surrender to abjection. Mingling fear and fascination, it instead presents an imaginative framework for “staying with the trouble,” of “making kin” with our monsters, to paraphrase Donna Haraway (2).
Frankenstein concerns the inextricability of the human and the nonhuman, its fantastic premise founded on the understanding that the natural can be manipulated, manufactured by humans, and that humans can be simulated, supplemented by nonhumans. The horrors evoked in the narrative reflect anxieties concerning lack of boundaries, of the weird hybridities that are the unintended consequences of our actions. The novel’s fears are our fears, in an era when we have come to recognize humans as a geological force, our actions fundamentally altering the biosphere, from ozone layer to lithosphere. Climate scientist Paul J. Crutzen has argued that the “Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane” (23). Like these concentrations of CO2, Victor Frankenstein’slate eighteenth-century creation haunts polar landscapes and glaciers, emerging at key moments in the narrative to remind his creator of the consequences of his actions. The creature sees himself as “a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned” (96), and yet this blot has a face, a look that yearns for human recognition. “If the Anthropocene has a face,” Shalon Noble argues, “that face needs to be entirely hybrid. It is a patchwork, palimpsest, which can embody our overwritten and overdetermined ideas of nature and culture as well as reflect them back toward us as in a mirror, revealing every tenuous stitch that holds them together” (125). This face evokes more than simply horror, more than mere loathing, because uncannily mingled in its inhuman features are traces of the human, grotesque reflections of his creator.
This feeling of the uncanny, in which what seemed to be nonhuman appears to gaze back at us, when what seemed lifeless or inert assumes disturbingly lively form, is one that has become increasingly familiar in the Anthropocene. In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), Amitav Ghosh asks, “Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive?” (3). Such moments once seemed exceptional and appeared to deny rational accounts of the way things behave, yet now the weird has become the new normal. Ghosh stresses the uncanny experience of living through climate change: “No other word comes close to expressing the strangeness of what is unfolding around us. For these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors” (30). Yet while “we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm,” mainstream realist literature has yet to register this seismic shift: “if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed—and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis” (8). To look back at Frankenstein—which responds so viscerally to the uncanny weather of its time and which seems so attuned to the disturbing consequences of our attempts to control nature—in our present era of climate catastrophe and extinction, is to see the emergence of a counter-tradition to the mainstream realism of its author’s time, one that might provide us with a more fitting cognitive framework to address the changes to come.
The weird tale is commonly designated as having flourished in the period of 1880-1930 (Joshi 1, Miéville 510), but our growing awareness of the climate changes emerging out of the human activities of the late eighteenth century may entail a radical revision of literary, as they have of geological, history. S.T. Joshi begins his influential history of the weird with what he calls a “rather odd assertion,” that “the weird tale … did not (and perhaps does not now) exist as a genre but as the consequence of a world view” (1; emphasis in original). This world-view of the weird has been described as specifically built around the experience of trauma, in particular that of an accelerating modernity. Although individual weird writers register this in their own peculiar way, their work more generally may be read as “expressions of a foundational underlying crisis” (Miéville 513). For China Miéville it is that of “capitalist modernity entering, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of crisis in which its cruder nostrums of progressive bourgeois rationality are shattered” (513). Although he claims that the “heart of the crisis is the First World War,” he elsewhere broadens the sense of crisis to include “the burgeoning sense that there is no stable status quo but a horror underlying the everyday, the global and absolute catastrophe implying poisonous totality” (513). Though Miéville does not specifically address this “totality” as climate change, the portrait he paints of the tentacular reach of global crisis may certainly be said to include it.
Shelley’s novel may be read as the first to have responded to this crisis, its concern with disturbing developments in science and technology strangely tied to its preoccupation with weird climate. If the Anthropocene may be said to have begun in the late eighteenth century, one of several “golden spikes” marking accelerated climate change, a key factor for this sea change was the carbon footprint left by James Watts’s steam engine and its successors,2 and the novel’s titular scientist is himself a projector exploring the potential in this new technology: “The natural phænomena that take place every day before our eyes did not escape my examinations. Distillation, and the wonderful effects of steam, processes of which my favourite authors were utterly ignorant, excited my astonishment” (Frankenstein 24). Victor dabbles in many branches of science—from electricity to chemistry to physiology—yet preeminent in his various preoccupations are those natural forces that can be harnessed to generate motive power. Famously, a decisive catalyst propelling Victor into the pursuits that will produce his creature is his witnessing the destructive power of lightning during a thunderstorm over the Jura mountains. As John Clubbe has shown, the passage describing this event closely parallels one in a letter of Shelley’s from the cold and rainy summer when she began composing the novel (qtd. in Clubbe 32). Yet while Shelley resembles her character in having “enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld,” Victor’s description of the weather departs from Shelley’s in its preoccupation with the destructive effects of a lightning strike. Victor conveys his fascination with the sight of a blasted oak tree to his father, who explains to his son “the various effects of that power,” and constructs “a small electrical machine” to enlighten and entertain him (Frankenstein 24). This harnessing of electrical power will, of course, create a circuit in Victor’s various pursuits that will ultimately result in his “infus[ing] a spark of life” into his creature. The “watery clouded eyes of the monster” (154), as well as his recurring appearances during periods of rain and storm, reinforce an association between the creature and the weather that reflects his weird climatological origins, both in Shelley’s imagination and in Victor’s experiments.
Thus a weird loop is created, in which the disturbingly unseasonable and destructive weather of the summer of 1816, experienced by Mary Shelley and her companions while living in Geneva, takes fictional form in the story of an ambitious natural philosopher who harnesses the power of natural phenomena to create a creature that will destroy all he holds dear. Just as climate change may be regarded as an unintended consequence of the invention of the steam engine, the creature’s destructive power may be read as the unintended consequence of Victor’s experiments, which themselves are the consequence of destructive climatological events. Placing the novel in the broader ecological context of the early Anthropocene enables us to see the relationship between the novel’s portrayal of weather, technology, and creature as a peculiarly causal one, tacitly linked to the industrial developments emerging in the period of the novel’s composition. It is no longer possible to claim, as one critic of the novel does, that, “Rather than representing the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, Victor Frankenstein’s monster symbolizes the capacity of nature to instigate environmental crises of biblical proportions” (Phillips 59), we are now painfully aware of the causal relationship between the two.
Such causal relationships are notoriously difficult to mark with precision, hence the challenge of convincing climate-change skeptics of the urgency of our plight. The causes of the “wet, ungenial summer” of 1816 were similarly hard to identify, and it was not until 1913 that a climate scientist drew the connection between the atmospheric dust released by the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora in 1815 and the widespread flooding and crop devastations beginning the following year (Clubbe 30). Gillen D’Arcy Wood has suggested that we consider the volcanic eruption, “not as the natural disaster of a single year, 1816, but as a three-year episode of drastic climate change whose downstream effects can be traced long into the nineteenth century” (10). Indeed, its effects may be seen as continuing through the twenty-first, as evidenced by Tambora’s use as a comparative reference point for modeling and measuring weather events influenced by anthropogenic climate change (Wood 55). As the premier work of literature responding to these early nineteenth-century weather events, Frankenstein similarly offers a reference point for imaginative responses to the extreme climate shifts associated with the Anthropocene. As Jesse Oak Taylor argues: “The Anthropocene reorients the scale of human history in ways that render many nineteenth-century concerns, from smoke pollution to what it means to think about the human as a species, strikingly contemporary” (9). Readers in the twenty-first century and writers in the nineteenth “are all in this together,” not just in the perceptual sense that “current climate change debates become part of the atmosphere in which we read” literature of the nineteenth century, but also in the more tangible sense that “those works themselves are woven into the historical and cultural climate now vaporized in the atmosphere and imprinted in the polar ice caps that provide some of our strongest evidence of the composition of climates past” (9-10). Reading Shelley’s novel in 2018, we find ourselves caught in its weird loop, seeing its ecological concerns from within the very changes that began to emerge during the period in which it was composed.
If our climate crisis has forced us to reconfigure geological and historical narratives in recognition of the cataclysmic effects of industrialization, globalization, and agriculture, so global weirding should inform the way we read writers and narrative practices once regarded as marginal. Placing Shelley at the head of a long line of writers whose work has long been considered ephemeral would seem to reduce its significance unless we also reevaluate these so-called minor writers within an Anthropocenic context. Even more so than those genres to which it is most clearly related—science fiction and the gothic—weird fiction has traditionally been associated with the lowliest of pulp fiction. Yet even while writers such as Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and M.R. James have begun to achieve a quasi-canonical status, published by Penguin Classics, the Library of America, and Oxford University Press, the weird remains a fringe formation, a sub-genre whose significance remains ambiguous. Lovecraft explicitly distinguished the brand of horror literature he sought to craft from the traditional form of the gothic: “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present” (Supernatural Horror 107). This dread responds to a very different world-view from that represented by traditional gothic. As Luckhurst observes: “the weird is distinguished from both the trappings of the gothic romance … and also from its metaphysics. The gothic romance was a Protestant nightmare of feverish Catholicism, stuffing a fantasy Europe with mad monks, ravished or ravishing nuns, arbitrary feudal tyranny and debilitating superstition” (“Weird Stories” 450). The weird breaks away from gothic’s resurgent past, its horrors less a response to the return of the repressed than of an emerging unknown. As Miéville notes, “The awe that Weird Fiction attempts to invoke is a function of the lack of recognition” in witness to an emergence of a “bleak, unthinkable novum,” a horror of now, tomorrow, and to come (512-13).
Shelley’s novel marks a similar break with the gothic past. In Percy Shelley’s introduction to the 1818 edition of the novel, he stresses that the “event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantage of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment,” and both his preface and Mary Shelley’s later introduction to the novel stress the influence of contemporary insights of the natural sciences, chiefly “the physiological writers of Germany,” “galvanism,” and “the experiments of Dr. Darwin,” inspiring the imagined possibility of “some powerful engine” inducing dead matter to stir “with an uneasy, vital motion” (Frankenstein 3, 195, 196). It is largely these elements that have led critics to regard Frankenstein as the first sf novel. Despite the effort of writers such as Isaac Asimov to distance themselves from the cautionary elements of the novel, the so-called “Frankenstein syndrome,” in favor of a “technophilic optimism” (Stableford 48), Brian W. Aldiss’s claim that the novel’s “combining [of] social criticism with new scientific ideas … anticipates the methods of H.G. Wells when writing his scientific romances” has proved the more influential in regards to its watershed status in the genre (23). Despite the affinities with sf’s speculative practices, however, the novel is clearly designed to inspire fear as much as wonder at its scientific speculations. This is, indeed, the chief ethical challenge the novel presents us with: how to reconcile our fears regarding a strange new manifestation of the nonhuman with respect for other forms of life. The creature asks for his creator’s and his reader’s sympathy, but as Paul Outka argues:
The difficulty of making this shift fully … is underscored by the continuing legibility of the horror the monster inspires. Whether or not we feel the same way a nineteenth-century reader might, their reaction—“unnatural! talking meat!”—remains readily comprehensible, at least in part because we retain a concept of Nature as something found rather than made and of the human as essentially immaterial. (45)
The “strange incidents” the novel presents, as Victor says to Walton, “will afford a view of nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding” (17). It achieves this, however, through fear, and is thus uniquely suited to our era of ecological anxiety.
Unlike the gothic, the weird is preoccupied with modernity, and its horrors are more generally those emerging out of a world we have yet to fully understand. In this respect it resembles sf and, indeed, during the pulp era the weird often oozed past early generic divisions, with readers of Weird Tales calling for the editors to publish more “so-called ‘pseudo-scientific’ tales” in its pages, and writers such as Lovecraft publishing their work in foundational sf publications Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories (Luckhurst “American Weird” 195-96). Joshi classifies Lovecraft’s later work as “pseudo- science fiction” because “the implication in his stories is that we may some day be able to account for ‘supernormal’ phenomena, but cannot do so now; and these tales are not actual science fiction because of their manifest intent to incite horror” (8). The same might be said for other classic weird writers such as Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, and Algernon Blackwood, whose work evokes horrors far from the ancient superstitions that haunt the gothic.
This sense of horror is the weird’s chief ethical value. Any fantasies of conquering or subduing the monstrous forces unleashed in weird fiction inevitably give way to resignation and troubled acceptance of a world fundamentally altered. When confronted by the weird, fantasies of technological progress deflate. In this respect it might be seen as offering a more compelling posture for living in the Anthropocene than sf, which, despite its rich history of cautionary accounts of environmental collapse, has also participated in framing a rhetoric of technofixes to ecological problems, the potentially dire consequences of which are often muted by narrative closure. Ursula K. Heise has noted how the tropes and narrative practices of sf circulate in the Anthropocene, where popular science writing often employs the genre’s “capacity to cast the present as a future that has already arrived,” but also in the speculative strategies of “new environmentalists” who have “in recent years moved to a relentless boosterism of modernization and technological progress that leaves no room for considering how the missteps and disasters of the past might be kept from repeating themselves” (203, 12). Frankenstein, in contrast, is about living with the consequences of human tampering with nature, and in this respect it anticipates how later weird writers represent encounters with nonhuman monsters, with a sense of fear seemingly indistinguishable from wonder.3
Given the weird’s, and particularly Lovecraft’s, association with discourses of racism and xenophobia, attributing to it any ethical value may seem problematic, even offensive. Yet, as Patricia MacCormack argues, “While the content of his writing is often offensive against and oppressive of minorities, Lovecraft’s larger vision … opens up the very possibilities of ethical alterity and encounters premised on the destruction of the privileged subject of the white male that are necessary in order to lead to liberation of all lives as unique emergences” (204). As I have argued elsewhere, while Lovecraft’s preoccupation with narratives of biological kinship has been read in light of the author’s racism and fears of miscegenation, in its fascination with hybrid forms—fantastic creatures that disturb the boundaries between human and nonhuman—Lovecraft’s weird fiction may also be seen as intimately, even obsessively, preoccupied with questioning human uniqueness and exploring interspecies connectivity. Such preoccupations are common to weird writing more generally, and figures such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, or more recently, Miéville, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and Jeff VanderMeer, whose work is particularly concerned with the place of the human in uncanny or altered landscapes, model affective responses to weird ecologies that are especially suited to the Anthropocene.4
One of the chief difficulties of living in our ecological moment is reconciling a well-founded fear of harmful phenomena conventionally classified as “natural” with an ethic of care toward the nonhuman, an ethic that is our best hope for reducing our impact on this planet’s ecologies. Modernity’s utilitarian devaluation of the nonhuman, which reduces nonhuman beings and environments to the status of resources for our use, is uniquely responsible for the acceleration of production and consumption that has produced anthropogenic climate change and the Sixth Extinction. A reductively materialist world-view has also reduced the richness of human experience, producing what Jane Bennett calls a “narrative of disenchantment” that has impaired our affective relationship with the world around us. She argues that at the present moment it is particularly important that we seek alternative narratives: “In the cultural narrative of disenchantment, the prospects for loving life—or saying ‘yes’ to the world—are not good. What’s to love about an alienated existence on a dead or dying planet?” (4). Instead, she proposes a counter-narrative of modern enchantment, one that creates a life that “promotes moments of joy,” a joy that “can propel ethics” (4).
Bennett’s notion of modern enchantment emphasizes the experience of surprise and wonder that may result from our experience of strange hybridities, “where things cross back and forth over the nature/culture divide” (50). She notes that “One might say that such a world … is a monstrous world,” but stresses that a fear response to strange, surprising hybridities inhibits our ethical response to the unfamiliar. Fear, she argues, “cannot dominate if enchantment is to be, for the latter requires active engagement with objects of sensuous experience; it is a state of interactive fascination, not fall-to-your-knees awe. Unlike enchantment, overwhelming fear will not becalm and intensify perception but only shut it down” (5). While I would concede that any “overwhelming” response to strange phenomena (of joy or of fear) is likely to impede our perceptions as well as our actions, I would also argue that certain kinds of fear can promote “interactive fascination” with the world around us, and can “propel ethics.”
At the very least, fear can instill humility before phenomena we do not fully comprehend. Given the role that human dominance has played in our current ecological dilemma, humility before the nonhuman is certainly a valid ethical alternative. Brad Tabas notes that, while horror “may tend to produce a kind of paralysis and existential nihilism within its readers, in the way that a blood-curdling scream can freeze us in our tracks … given our society’s tendency to lapse into close-minded ignorance, particularly towards ecological problems, I am hardly sure that this is a bad thing” (“Dark Places”). Indeed, it could be argued that we are not frightened enough, given the abidingly tepid response to climate change. The mingled fascination and horror towards the nonhuman that is central to the weird may not only reflect our current crisis but can also promote a kind of dark enchantment that may enhance our ecological sensibilities. As Tabas suggests:
Re-encountering familiar scenes after having read horror is to see these scenes with heightened senses, with an awareness of straining for sight beyond sight. Thus the weird hardly leads us away from the places in which we dwell. On the contrary, it brings us back to them with x-ray attentiveness and extra-ordinary humility. (“Dark Places”)
Weird fiction abounds in scenes of heightened senses, arousing a sense of horrified awe mingled with fascination with a world beyond the human. An element of fear may be said to be a necessary component in evoking the weird ecologies we now associate with the Anthropocene, yet this fear should also induce what Lovecraft describes as “a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities” (Supernatural Literature 108). Indeed, as Lovecraft argues: “Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or ‘outsideness’ without laying stress on the emotion of fear” (Miscellaneous Writings 113). The attitude of “awed listening” to the nonhuman emerges in the weird as a kind of counter-narrative to the reductive materialism of modernity. The chief figures associated with classic weird literature of the period 1880-1940—including Machen, Hodgson, Blackwood, and Lovecraft—each expressed their dissatisfaction with modernity in distinct ways, yet common to all is a preoccupation with evoking a sense of awe towards the nonhuman world, particularly in its aspects that elude human understanding and control.
Though space forbids an extensive survey of weird fiction’s engagement with the nonhuman, a brief example might help to clarify the kind of disposition towards strange ecologies I am seeking to describe. In Algernon Blackwood’s story “The Willows” (1907; like much of his work, loosely based on his own wilderness excursions), the narrator describes his encounter with uncannily active willow trees on an island in the Danube. After reflecting on his previous response to the sublime sense of awe inspired by mountains or oceans, the narrator notes: “With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different I felt” (Blackwood 23). The trees, “moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world” (24). Their strange undulations and whisperings make him “think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves” (29). Though these alien beings are resolutely other, the travelers understand that their “intrusion had stirred the power of the place into activity,” recognizing a complicity between their own actions and the strange behavior of the willows (32). Despite his sense of the willows’ malignancy, however, the narrator experiences a sense of uneasy wonder: “When common objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance” (44). This response to uncanny nature is paradigmatic of the weird; it also resonates keenly with the experience of living in the Anthropocene, when what we once called an environment, the background to human activity, is now the foreground, charged with meaning, and quite likely harmful: “Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us” (44). And yet fear ultimately gives way to wonder, as the narrator is “possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such as I have never known” (32).
This sense of awe in the face of that which exceeds the human may sound suspiciously like that classic eighteenth-century aesthetic configuration, the sublime, particularly in Kant’s description of the effect as one “arous[ing] enjoyment but with horror” (47). This horror initially produces a sense of powerlessness in the observer of sublime objects that exceed his or her comprehension and threaten to overwhelm—objects such as mountains, the ocean, and extreme weather. For Kant, this initial powerlessness in the face of the nonhuman ultimately leads to the individual’s reassertion of self, as the subject imaginatively incorporates into his or her mental and spiritual understanding, and thus transcends, an awe-inspiring and potentially overwhelming nature. As Paul Outka explains: “The meaning of the sublime comes not in the momentary confusion of the borders between self and nature, but in their absolute restoration,” and the once-threatening external landscape becomes merely “a symbol of the subject’s metaphysical difference and fundamentally greater immaterial essence” (35-36). Yet while the Kantian sublime ultimately promotes in the human observer a sense of superiority to, and transcendence over, the awe-inspiring object, the weird works to instill a sense of humility towards the alien other. If the Kantian sublime produces “enjoyment with horror,” the weird might be said to offer horror with benefits, among them a heightened awareness of, and respect for, the more-than-human world. As Miéville argues, “The Weird is radicalized sublime backwash,” undermining any Kantian effort to transcend one’s material surroundings (511).
Frankenstein systematically counters each narrative evocation of the sublime with a radical subversion, repeatedly undoing the anthropocentric disposition towards the other promoted by Kant. Outka notes that “after building the creature, every time Victor tries for the sublime the creature shows up immediately, whether mushing on a dog sled, bounding up an alpine cliff, or demanding a long conversation in a hut with his maker” (36; emphasis in original). Thus, seeking to forget his responsibilities for the creature he created, and to repress his guilt for the deaths of William and Justine, Victor begins his ascent of Montanvert:
I remembered the effect that the view of the tremendous and ever-moving glacier had produced upon my mind when I first saw it. It had then filled me with a sublime ecstacy [sic] that gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy. The sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind, and causing me to forget the passing cares of life. (74-75)
As he seeks to cast off his earthly cares in contemplation of the sublime glacier, however, his contemplative trance is broken by the sight of a figure “advancing towards [him] with superhuman strength” (76). The balance of enjoyment with horror is suddenly overturned, as the “sight tremendous and abhorred” of the creature obscures the sublime backdrop. As always, Victor’s description emphasizes his creation’s grotesque appearance: “its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes” (76). The creature is a weird manifestation of the nonhuman that exceeds its creator’s ability to master his response, and as in all of these encounters, he responds with “anger and hatred … furious detestation and contempt” (76). Victor regards him as a “vile insect” whom he would “trample to dust,” an enemy with whom “[t]here can be no community” (78).
Were this encounter to end here, with Victor’s loathing and fear, the experience would simply be one of horror, without any ethical benefits. But what follows, of course, is an impassioned plea for compassion by the creature, to remind his creator that they are “bound by ties only dissoluble by the dissolution of one of us” (77). He seeks to persuade his creator by intruding into Victor’s sublime detachment, telling his own tale, one “long and strange,” which will serve as a counter-narrative to his creator’s. Even before he begins, Victor begins to feel “what the duties of a creator towards his creature were” (78) and to consider the needs of the other. The creature’s story is, of course, one of tremendous pathos, deeply imbued with the affective mode of sensibility so prevalent in novels of the early nineteenth century. Without denying the power of the creature’s narrative, however, it should nevertheless be stressed that it ultimately fails to elicit his creator’s compassion. Just as every moment of the Kantian sublime is subverted by the grotesque appearance of the creature, each of his attempts to elicit his creator’s sympathy is undermined by his grotesque physicality.
Like the creature itself, the novel Frankenstein is in many ways a hybrid, each generic element complicating conventional readerly response. If the creature’s sentimental autobiography fails ultimately to convince Victor, it may be due to the limitations of the narrative of sensibility as much as to Victor’s anthropocentric prejudices. In fact, the conventions of such narrative practices might themselves be said to suffer from the very anthropocentrism that the creature’s story seeks to subvert. The creature’s sentimental Bildungsroman momentarily convinces his creator that he is a “creature of fine sensations,” and thus worthy of his compassion, but this approval is earned at the expense of denying his own nonhuman status (120). Describing his imagined life with a future mate, the creature claims: “The picture I present to you is natural and human” (120). Thus, his sentimental narrative ultimately serves to reinforce his creator’s anthropocentric premises rather than to challenge them, making a very shaky ethical foundation for mutual recognition and obligation. And indeed, shortly after this exchange, Victor reflects: “His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred” (121). The failure of sensibility is thus followed by a resurgence of horror.
Yet if Victor ultimately fails to compassionate his creature in all his alterity, this does not entail the reader’s rejection of him. Instead, Frankenstein continually challenges narrative expectations, eliciting compassion for the creature’s anthropomorphic qualities, only to remind us, forcibly, of his strangeness. In this respect Shelley’s novel inaugurates the birth of the weird, by presenting to us a creature who fascinates as much as he repels us. As Mark Fisher argues, “it is not horror but fascination … that is integral … to the weird,” so that “if the element of fascination were entirely absent from a story, and the story were merely horrible, it would no longer be weird” (17; emphasis in original). Through such a mingling of horror and fascination, Shelley’s novel departs from gothic conventions as well as those of the novel of sensibility: it is neither a “mere tale of spectres,” nor does it reproduce “the enervating effects of the novel of the present day,” but offers, instead, horror with benefits (Frankenstein 3).
Calling Frankenstein the first work of weird fiction offers us a longer and more substantial history for this seemingly marginal subgenre and further emphasizes the genre’s ongoing relationship with the emerging ecologies of the Anthropocene. It also enables us better to theorize the role of fear and loathing in confronting the effects of climate change and of reconciling these responses with an ethic of care for the more-than-human world. As Jesse Oak Taylor notes, “Conditions of possibility are genre-specific.... Sustained attention to the properties of literary genre affords a useful glimpse into the cognitive engineering necessary to build mental, social, and rhetorical techniques capable of responding to the challenge of the Anthropocene” (100). The weird offers us conditions of possibility for envisioning the effects of climate change beyond the speculative fictions of technological optimism or dystopian pessimism. In Imagining Extinction Ursula K. Heise reads a wide range of cultural responses to the Sixth Extinction to see “whether and how it might be possible to move environmentalism beyond the stereotypical narrative of the decline of nature without turning it into progress boosterism” (12) and asks: “Is it possible to acknowledge the realities of large-scale species extinction and yet to move beyond mourning, melancholia, and nostalgia to a more affirmative vision of our biological future?” (13). Donna Haraway offers a radical presentism that eschews nostalgia and futurism, a “staying with the trouble” in which we recognize kinship with other “mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” and envision “possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance” (1, 37). This is precisely what weird ecology offers, in fictive configurations of fear of and fascination with an emerging unknown.
Frankenstein presents an early instance of fictive engagement with the problem of pollution, with matter altered by human tampering. The ethical challenge faced by Victor is to accept “community” with a “filthy mass,” and this is very much the challenge posed by our altered world. Stacy Alaimo has explored the possibilities for “[i]magining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (2); crucially, this also involves recognizing our imbrication with beings and substances that are inimical, even deadly. And yet we must own our trans-corporeal relations with such toxic bodies, whose ubiquitous circulation “may render it nearly impossible for humans to imagine that our own well-being is disconnected from that of the rest of the planet or to imagine that it is possible to protect ‘nature’ by merely creating separate, distinct areas in which it is ‘preserved’” (18). Mary Douglas famously described pollution as “matter out of place,” a concise definition that can include such diverse phenomena as carbon in the atmosphere, plastics in the ocean, and nuclear radiation. Traditionally, Douglas notes, our response to such matter, “our pollution behaviour,” has been to condemn “any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications,” but such reactions will no longer do (37). Rob Nixon has called attention to the ways in which the pollution behavior of the first world has enacted a kind of “slow violence” on the third, as we use other countries as toxic waste dumps or sites for the most environmentally destructive industries. Shelley’s Frankenstein offers an early example of fictive engagement with a fearsome hybrid being who is the unintended result of human tampering, and as in the weird fiction of writers emerging later in the nineteenth century, it calls for an alternative form of pollution behavior in which we learn to live with our monsters.
NOTES
1. The fullest account of Tambora and its global repercussions may be found in Wood. For other accounts of the weather in 1816-1817 and its influence on Shelley’s novel, see Clubbe and Phillips.2. Crutzen designates 1784 as the date of the “golden spike” of carbon emissions marking the beginning of the Anthropocene. Malm offers a detailed account of the relationship between steam power and the origins of climate change.
3. By situating Shelley’s novel within colonial discourses surrounding uninhabitable spaces such as oceans and the arctic, Siobhan Carroll has shown how Shelley intervenes in speculations concerning private and government-funded searches for a Northwest Passage, by drawing parallels between Walton’s ambitions and Victor’s, and their disastrous results (see especially 51-55).
4. In an essay that has helped to shape my consideration on the relationship between weird fiction and ecology, David Tompkins praises VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy for its engagement with the altered natures of the Anthropocene, but distinguishes his work from the weird tradition out of which it so clearly emerges, arguing, mistakenly I think, that VanderMeer “is clearly not coming from the same place as poor old benighted H.P.” I would agree that VanderMeer’s “is an ecologically minded Weird fiction,” but I hope to have shown that this is not a radical departure from weird narrative traditions, but rather an extension of them.
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