Frankissstein

by Jeanette Winterson

  I should like to say more about the soul, said Shelley.

  Byron groaned. Polidori coughed. Claire stitched viciously at her cushion cover.

  My own mind, though, was elsewhere. Since I had thought of my story I had been preoccupied by it. The looming figure in my mind blotted out other concerns. My mind was in a kind of eclipse. I must return to the monstrous shadow crossing me.

  I left them to their bickering and metaphysics and went upstairs to my desk with a jug of wine. Red wine eases the ache of the damp.

  For the sake of my story I have my own desire to contemplate what it is about Man that distinguishes us from the rest of biology. And what distinguishes us from machines?

  I visited a manufactory in Manchester with my father. I saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines. They were distinguished only by their unhappiness. The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines.

  My father had me read Hobbes’ Leviathan when I was younger. Now I sit here, pen in hand, and into my mind comes Hobbes and his conjecture. He writes:

  For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life?

  I ask myself: what is artificial life? Automata have no intelligence; they are but clockwork. Biological life, even the most wretched being, has intelligence enough to milk a cow, speak a name, know when rain will come and when it will not, reflect, perhaps, on its existence. Yet, if automata had intelligence … would that be sufficient to call it alive?

  Shelley is improving my Greek and Latin. We lie on the bed, him naked, his hand on my back, the book on the pillow. He kisses my neck as we manage new vocabulary. Often we break off for love. I love his body. Hate it that he is so careless of himself. Truly he imagines that nothing so gross as matter can oppose him. But he is made of blood and warmth. I rest on his narrow chest, listening to his heart.

  Together we are reading Ovid: Metamorphoses.

  Italy is full of statues of beautiful men. Men who ripple and stand. To kiss one? To bring it to life?

  I have touched such statues, their cold marble, their serious stone. And wrapped my arms around one and wondered at the form without the life.

  Shelley read out to me from Ovid the story of the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with the statue he had carved himself. So deep in love was he with his creation that women were nothing to him. He prayed to the goddess Athena that he might find a living lover as beautiful as the lifeless form on his bench. That night, he kissed the lips of the youth he had created. Hardly believing what he felt, he felt the youth kiss him in return. The cold stone warmed.

  And there was more … Through the good offices of the goddess, the youth took on female form – a double transformation from lifeless to life and from male to female. Pygmalion married her.

  It must be, said Shelley, that Shakespeare had such a picture in his mind at the close of The Winter’s Tale, when the statue of Hermione comes to life. She steps down. She embraces her husband, Leontes, the tyrant. Through his crimes, Time itself had turned to stone, and now, in her movement, Time itself flows again. That which is lost is found.

  Yes, I said. The second of warmth. To kiss the lips and find them warm.

  The lips are warm after death, said Shelley. Who does not lie beside the beloved all night as the body cools? Who does not hold the body in her arms, frantic to bestow heat and reanimate the corpse? Who does not tell himself that this is but winter? In the morning surely the sun will come?

  Move him into the sun, I said (I don’t know why).

  Artificial life. The statue wakes and walks. But what of the rest? Is there such a thing as artificial intelligence? Clockwork has no thoughts. What is the spark of mind? Could it be made? Made by us?

  What is your substance, whereof are you made,

  That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

  The shadows darkened the corners of the room. I brooded upon the nature of my own mind. Yet when my heart stops so must my mind. No mind, however fine, outlasts the body.

  My mind turned back to the journey I had made with Shelley and Claire, who returns to this story like a bookmark – not the text, but a marker of some kind.

  I was to elope with Shelley, and Claire decided she could not be left behind, and so we agreed to go all together, keeping the plan secret from my father and stepmother.

  I must add this note that after my mother died my father could not be alone, and soon enough he had married again – an ordinary woman of no imagination, but she could cook. She brought with her a daughter called Jane, who soon became the ardent pupil of my dead mother’s writings, and in time changed her name to Claire; I did not disapprove of this. Why should she not remake herself? What is identity but what we name it? Jane/Claire acted as go-between for Shelley and myself when my father grew suspicious. Shelley and I were both fond of her, and so when the time came to leave Skinner Street it was decided that we should go together.

  Stars in the sky like uncounted chances.

  Four o’clock in the morning. Felt slippers on our feet, our boots in our hands, so as not to wake Father, though he sleeps deeply when he takes laudanum for his ague.

  We ran through the streets where the world was waking.

  We reached the coach. There was Shelley, pale and pacing, an angel without wings.

  He embraced me, burying his face in my hair, whispering my name. Our modest bags were loaded, but suddenly I turned from him and ran back home, stricken with conscience, to leave my father a note on the mantelpiece. I could not break his heart. I deceive myself. I could not break his heart without telling him I was breaking his heart. We live by language.

  The cat curled round my legs.

  And then I was off again, running, running, my hat slipping round my neck and my breath dry in my mouth.

  Anxious and exhausted, we were gone, post-haste to Dover, seasick under the sails of a boat that took us to Calais – and my first night in his arms in a padded room in a dark inn with the rattle of iron cartwheels going over the cobbles and my heart sounding louder than iron and wheels.

  This is a love story.

  I could add that my stepmother soon followed us, pleading for Jane/Claire to return. I think she was glad enough to be rid of me. Shelley walked all three of us up and down separately and together, arguing love and liberty. I do not imagine she believed him, but eventually she was exhausted, and bade us farewell. He had prevailed. We were in France, the home of revolution. What could we not manage?

  As it turned out – we could manage very little.

  Our travels were not easy. We had no clothes. Paris was dirty and expensive. The food gave us cramps and foul smells. Shelley lived off bread and wine. I added cheese. At last we found a money-lender from whom Shelley was able to borrow sixty pounds.

  Buoyed up by our wealth, we decided to travel, and set off into the country, seeking simplicity and the natural man that Rousseau had written about.

  There will be beef and milk and good bread, said Shelley, and young wine and clean water.

  That was the story.

  The reality was otherwise.

  For some weeks we endured, endeavouring to hide from each other our disappointment. This was the land of liberty. This was where my mother had come to find freedom. Where she had written The Rights of Woman. We thought to find like minds and open hearts. In reality, the cottagers overcharged us for every little thing. The farms were dirty and broken. The laundresses stole buttons and braids. Our guides were surly, and the donkey Shelley hired – that we might take it in turns to ride – that donkey was lame.

  Does something ail you? asked Shelley, disturbed by my silences, and I did not say, yes, the sour milk the sweating cheese the rank sheets the fleas the rainstorms the ro
t the beds stuffed with straw stuffed with mites. The soft vegetables the gristly meat the lice-teemed fish the weevil loaves. The distress of my father. Thoughts of my mother. The state of my underclothes.

  Only the heat, my love, I replied.

  He asked me to bathe naked with him in the river. I was too shy. Instead I watched his body, white and slender and sculpted. There is something unworldly about his form. An approximation – as though his body has been put on hastily, so that his spirit might walk in the world.

  We read Wordsworth out loud to distract the hours, but France was not poetry; it was peasants.

  At last, knowing my distress, Shelley secured us places on a barge that floated out of France and down the Rhine.

  Was it better? Smug Switzerland. Drunken Germany. More wine, I said. And so we passed our days, underfed, over-drunk, longing for the soul and not knowing where to find it.

  What I want does exist if I dare to find it.

  One day, not far from Mannheim, we saw the towers of a castle rising out of the mist like a warning. Shelley adores towers, woods, ruins, graveyards, any part of Man or Nature that broods.

  And so we followed the track, tortuous, towards it, ignoring the staring looks of peasants at their forks and hoes.

  At the foot of the castle at last we stopped and shivered. Even in the hot afternoon sun it felt cold.

  What is this place? asked Shelley of a man on a cart.

  Castle Frankenstein, he said.

  Desolate place of brooding.

  There is a story, said the man, requiring money to tell it, and Shelley paid twice over, not disappointed by what he heard.

  The castle had belonged to an alchemist named Conrad Dippel. Too early his beloved wife died and, unable to bear his loss, he refused to bury her, determined to discover the secret of life.

  One by one, his servants abandoned him. He lived alone, and was seen at dawn and dusk wandering amidst the graveyards and charnel houses, dragging home what fetid bodies he could find, grinding the bones of corpses to mix with fresh blood. He believed he could administer this tincture to the newly deceased and revive them.

  The villagers grew to fear and hate him. Alike they must guard their dead, and alike listen for his footsteps, or the bridle bells of his horse. Many a time he burst into a house of grief. In a bottle he carried his filthy mixture, stuffing it into the slack mouth of the empty body as a goose is stuffed for liver pâté.

  There was no resurrection.

  At length, everyone in the surrounding villages came together and burned him alive in his castle.

  The very walls reek of dismemberment and death.

  I looked at the ruined place. An outside staircase, dark and tumbling, like a Piranesi nightmare, collapsed and grown through with weeds, leading spiral by spiral, step by step, down to where? What cellar of horror?

  I pulled my shawl close. The air itself has the cold of the grave.

  Come! I said to Shelley. We must leave this place.

  He put his arm around me and together we walked swiftly away. As we walked, he instructed me in the art of alchemy.

  The alchemists sought three things, said Shelley: the secret of turning lead into gold, the secret of the Elixir of Eternal Life, the homunculus.

  What is an homunculus? I asked.

  A creature not born of woman, he answered. A made thing, unholy and malign. A kind of goblin, misshapen and sly, infused with dark power.

  In the oppressive twilight of our winding walk back to the inn I thought of that thing; that fully-formed being not born of woman.

  And now that form has returned.

  And it is not small. No goblin.

  I feel as though my mind is a screen and on the other side of the screen there is a being seeking life. I have seen fish in an aquarium pushing their faces against the glass. I sense what I cannot say, except in the form of a story.

  I will call my hero (is he a hero?) Victor – for he seeks victory over life and over death. He will strive to penetrate the recesses of Nature. He will not be an alchemist – I want no hocus-pocus here – he will be a doctor, like Polidori, like Doctor Lawrence. He will discern the course of the blood, know the knot of muscle, the density of bone, the delicacy of tissue, how the heart pumps. Airways, liquids, mass, jelly, the cauliflower mystery of the brain.

  He will compose a man, larger than life, and make him live. I will use electricity. Storm, Spark, Lightning. I will rod him with fire like Prometheus. He will steal life from the gods.

  At what cost?

  His creature will have the strength of ten men. The speed of a galloping horse. The creature will be more than human. But he will not be human.

  Yet he suffers. Suffering, I do believe, is something of the mark of the soul.

  Machines do not suffer.

  My creator will not be a madman. He will be a visionary. A man with family and friends. Dedicated to his work. I will take him to the brink and make him leap. I will show his glory as well as his horror.

  I will call him Victor Frankenstein.

  This mind is the matrix of all matter.

  Max Planck

  Reality cannot bear very much of humankind.

  Your name?

  Ry Shelley.

  Press?

  Guest. I am a guest of Professor Stein.

  Professor Stein’s lecture is open to the public and live-streamed on the Royal Society website.

  The Royal Society was founded in 1660, for the furthering of natural science and the promotion of scientific knowledge. Here, in Carlton House Terrace, overlooking The Mall, it feels like London at its most opulent and undisturbed. In fact, the neoclassical buildings were designed by John Nash and built between 1827 and 1834. Stucco-clad. Corinthian-column facade. Elaborate frieze and pediment.

  The timeless serenity of the past that we British do so well is an implanted memory – you could call it a fake memory. What seems so solid and certain is really part of the ceaseless pull-it-down-build-it-again pattern of history, where the turbulence of the past is recast as landmark, as icon, as tradition, as what we defend, what we uphold – until it’s time to call in the wrecking ball. In any case, the Royal Society only moved here in 1967. History is what you make it.

  Tonight we are the history we are making.

  I watched the audience come in: students with man-bags slung across their bodies. Hipsters with close beards. Kids in T-shirts who work at London’s tech hub in Shoreditch. Sleek bankers, suave in handmade suits. Geeks. Sci-fi buffs. Two Muslim women in headscarves wearing Sophia the Robot hoodies.

  There are a lot of young people in this audience.

  Victor Stein has a big following on Facebook and Twitter. His TED talk has netted six million views. He’s on a mission, that’s certain.

  Some people wonder: whose side are you on?

  He’d say there are no sides – that binaries belong to our carbon-based past. The future is not biology – it’s AI.

  He has a nice, clear graphic up on his screen:

  Type 1 Life: Evolution-based.

  Victor explains: Changes happen slowly over millennia.

  Type 2 Life: Partially self-designing.

  This is where we are now. We can develop our own brain software through learning, including outsourcing to machines. We update ourselves individually and generationally. We can adapt within a generation to a changing world – think of toddlers and iPads. We have invented machines of every kind for travel and labour. Horses and hoes are a thing of the past. We can also overcome some of our biological limitations: spectacles, eye-laser, dental implants, hip replacements, organ transplants, prosthetics. We have begun to explore space.

  Type 3 Life: Fully self-designing.

  Now he gets excited. The nearby world of AI will be a world where the physical limits of our bodies will be irrelevant. Robots will manage much of what humans manage today. Intelligence – perhaps even consciousness – will no longer be dependent on a body. We will learn to share the planet with non-
biological life forms created by us. We will colonise space.

  I’m watching him as he talks. I love watching him. He has that sex-mix of soul-saving and erudition. His body is lean and keen. His hair is abundant enough for vitality, grey enough for gravitas. Straight jaw, blue eyes, crisp shirt, tailored trousers tapered at the bottom, handmade shoes. Women adore him. Men admire him. He knows how to play a room. He’ll walk away from the podium to make a point. He likes to crumple his notes and throw them to the floor.

  He’s a Gospel Channel scientist. But who will be saved?

  Behind him on the screen tonight is Leonardo’s drawing of The Vitruvian Man. As the audience sit in silence, Leonardo’s image animates itself, takes an appearing trilby from an appearing peg and, placing it on the back of its head, turns and walks into an appearing sea. The sound of the waves can be heard clearly. The image of the man walks without pausing until the waters reach his head. All that is left behind is the hat floating calmly on the indifferent sea.

  Victor Stein smiled. He walked forward, turning back to his screen. He said, I called this lecture The Future of Humans in a Post-Human World because artificial intelligence is not sentimental – it is biased towards best possible outcomes. The human race is not a best possible outcome.