10 QUESTIONS for James Morrow on his novel, The Phiosopher’s Apprentice (2008), and its relationship to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
The “Frankenstein and You” Question: Can you tell us about your first encounter with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?
Full disclosure: it was only after I committed myself to writing a Frankenstein-inflected novel—which eventually saw print as The Philosopher’s Apprentice—that I sat down and gave Mary Shelley’s Gothic chiller a careful cover-to-cover reading. Before that, my impression of the book was formed largely by a superficial reading during a high-school summer vacation, by the Classics Illustrated adaptation (which was actually quite well done), by the Boris Karloff movies, and, later, by some literary criticism I’d encountered concerning Shelley. I was especially intrigued by the quasi-Freudian interpretation of the novel. Just as Mary Shelley’s mother died giving birth to her, so does Victor Frankenstein’s act of vicarious motherhood lead to his destruction.
My first systematic reading of Frankenstein left me awestruck by Shelley’s achievement. I think she produced not only a masterpiece of horror fiction but also a complex and important philosophical novel, a book whose meanings seem to multiply with every generation.
The “Frankenstein and Your Work” question: What impact has Frankenstein had on your writing? Are there aspects of the novel that have especially influenced you in general?
When in a strictly intellectual mode, I can tease my original adolescent (in both senses of the term) reading of the novel apart from the numerous cinematic Frankensteins that have emerged over the years from Hollywood’s Universal Pictures and Britain’s Hammer Films. But at the emotional level, I can’t sustain that dichotomy. I love—and in many cases also respect—the celluloid incarnations of Shelley’s brainchild. Indeed, I used the writing of The Philosopher’s Apprentice as an excuse to revisit several dozen movies that trace (sometimes overtly, sometimes obliquely) to the original novel.
Fun fact: although the Universal Frankenstein films are drenched in Expressionist shadows and faux-Gothic, Mittle-European atmosphere, they’re actually all set in the twentieth century, with telephones, automobiles, and public lighting appearing routinely. Not until the Hammer revolution (beginning with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957) was Shelley’s vision accorded an appropriate period setting.
As a film buff, I don’t necessarily put a premium on fidelity to literary sources. The three-hour Mark Kruger-directed Frankenstein starring Alec Newman, Luke Goss, and William Hurt (spun from a TV miniseries) is intensely faithful to the book, but it’s also a boring movie. Give me James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein or Terence Fisher’s The Revenge of Frankenstein any time!
To answer your question, beyond The Philosopher’s Apprentice, many of my short stories owe something to the Frankenstein meme, especially “The Wisdom of the Skin” (a Shelley-inspired resurrection story), “Spinoza’s Golem” (the title says it all), “The Iron Shroud” (another Golem yarn), “Lady Witherspoon’s Solution” (steampunk feminism keyed to chemically induced devolution), “Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva” (about the Yeti’s formal education in Tibetan Buddhism), and my stand-alone novella, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari.
The “History of Its Reception” question: Your novel, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, pays homage to Frankenstein. An earlier title of your work was “Prometheus Wept,” a reference to Shelley’s subtitle. What creative goals influenced you to think about Shelley’s work for this specific novel?
Second full disclosure: I think Prometheus Wept is a much better title, but for various political reasons we ended up calling the book The Philosopher’s Apprentice. The clause “Prometheus wept,” of course, refers to the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.”
The protean figure of Prometheus reverberates through Western intellectual discourse. I suspect Mary Shelley had in mind the late-stage version of the myth, in which Prometheus actually creates the human race, though in earlier iterations he merely brings fire to humankind, and there’s also a version (my favorite, actually) in which he blesses us with death amnesia: in the distant past, you see, every person apprehended the exact time and place of his or her own death—thus, through the gift of amnesia (that is, through a tenuous illusion of immortality), Prometheus created the conditions whereby scientific, artistic, and political ambition could flourish and civilization happen.
Meanwhile, we’ve all observed how today’s scientific humanists have made an emblem of this Titanic hero. One thinks immediately of Prometheus Press and its valuable (for my money) line of atheist, humanist, and secular cris de coeur.
The Philosopher’s Apprentice turns on the conceit of a fabulous machine, an “ontogenerator,” that enables a scientist to subject a human clone to artificial maturation, hurling it into adulthood in a matter of hours. Over the course of the novel, this technology gets put to all sorts of bizarre uses, some of them ethically troubling. So, while I’m totally on board with scientific humanism, the novel dramatizes situations in which Prometheus might very well have wept.
The “Genre” Question: Frankenstein is a key work in a number of linked genres. It’s a late Gothic production and perhaps the first science fiction story. It’s a crucial “sympathetic monster” tale in horror. And its transformation of humanity marks it as fantasy, too. Did you engage with Shelley’s work because of its place in science fiction or horror or another genre? Do you regard it as the first sf story? Is its place in the history of genre important to you and your writing? Do you think of your own work as genre?
The point is sometimes made that if you translated “science fiction” into Latin and back again, you would get “knowledge fiction.” As a partisan of secular reason and the 18th-century Enlightenment, I prefer to focus on the science—the “natural philosophy,” as it was then called—in Frankenstein. Sure, it’s also the quintessential horror novel, an allegorical fantasy, and a kind of Gothic romance, but the adult James Morrow is drawn to Shelley’s novel for its epistemology and philosophy. Professor Waldman’s speech on alchemy and its limitations is especially worth revisiting.
Do I think of my own work as genre? Third full disclosure: I never read much SF as a kid, and I conceived my first novel, The Wine of Violence, more as a sociological fable than as a work of serious extrapolation. But since then I have unequivocally embraced the SF community (which has even supported my historical novels, The Last Witchfinder and Galápagos Regained, though their genre elements are oblique and postmodern at best). Science fiction has given me a karass, some awards, much affirmation, and occasionally a semblance of a living wage. I’m not complaining.
I seem to recall that when John Ford was publically tilting with Cecil B. DeMille over alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood, he began by standing up and saying, “I’m John Ford. I make westerns.” Now, of course, Ford directed all sorts of pictures over the years (one thinks immediately of The Informer and The Grapes of Wrath), but evidently he felt most at home in the cowboy genre. I’m James Morrow. I write science fiction.
The “Gender of the Writer” question: In Mary Shelley’s own time, that a young woman, a teenager, wrote such a “hideous” book shocked some. Attempts to see Percy Shelley as the “true” author continue. Does Shelley’s gender, especially in relation to her now solid place in literary and genre history, matter to you and to your interest in her work?
It was in the inaugural issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine (which I collected in 1958 at age eleven and still have in my sock drawer) that I first learned the facts behind the novel. The editor, super SF fan Forrest J. Ackerman, offered a quotation from Mary Shelley (I cannot vouch for its authenticity): “I have a general answer to the question so frequently asked me. ‘How did I, a young girl, come to think of and elaborate such a hideous idea?’ ”
Ackerman continued, in his trademark hyperkinetic style, “What’s this? Did you read right? A young girl wrote Frankenstein? That’s absolutely right. It’s incredible but true and one for Ripley that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was only 17 years old when she created this world-famous horror classic! In other words, in a case of truth being even stranger than the strangest fiction, the author of Frankenstein was not only a girl but a teenager!!!”
I’m willing to give Ackerman a pass here. His attitude toward young Shelley was a bit condescending, perhaps even paternalistic. But Mary herself evidently supplied the term “young girl,” and in 1958 Second Wave Feminism was still brewing far out at sea. Ah, but how wonderful it is that today, in a conversational context such as this, we can talk about “Shelley,” and everybody knows the referent is Mary, not Percy Bysshe.
The “Gender and the Story” Question: Yet Shelley wrote a story all about men: it seems to be a profound critique of gender. Because of her remarkable approach, her story has drawn interest from Feminist, Gender, and Queer scholars. Women play key roles in Philosopher’s Apprentice, as Creators and Created. Were you interested in her complicated gender commentary for your own work? What can you tell us about gender in your work?
Most of my fiction has properly been characterized as theological satire. I take a dim view of the God hypothesis—that is, I find little to admire in the theistic theory of how the universe works, an attitude of mine most conspicuously on display in my novels Only Begotten Daughter, Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon, and Galápagos Regained. But beyond religion, two other preoccupations run through my oeuvre. The first is the idiocy of war (a theme I first developed in This Is the Way the World Ends and continued to explore through two stand-alone novellas, Shambling Towards Hiroshima and The Asylum of Dr. Caligari). The second is what I sometimes call the necessity of feminism.
Can a man be a feminist? I think that’s a conversation worth having. I appreciate the argument whereby the label “feminist” should be reserved to women exclusively, just as a black-activist identity should be reserved to those who’ve experienced white racism firsthand. And yet I would suggest that, while a white person can go through life largely oblivious to racial issues (hardly a commendable habit), the same is not true of gender. Almost everyone is born with—or comes to acquire—one or more sexual orientations, and these have inescapable political implications. And so, I find nothing untoward in a man identifying as a feminist (though there is more to be said on this subject).
Only Begotten Daughter relates the story of Jesus Christ’s bewildered but admirable divine half-sister. The Last Witchfinder tells of a bluestocking who makes it her life’s mission to bring down the 1604 Parliamentary Witchcraft Statute. Galápagos Regained dramatizes the hair-raising adventures of a resourceful and tough-minded actress who becomes Charles Darwin’s zookeeper. The Philosopher’s Apprentice attempts to offer readers three estimable and complex female psyches that, despite tracing to the same genetic material, are markedly distinct from one another (my wife and her two sisters served as provisional models).
Not all critics would term these four novels “feminist,” but I don’t know what else to call them.
The “Reception of Your Story” Question: Can you tell us about the reception of your story? Did reviewers or others remark on the influence of Shelley’s novel in any ways you find interesting?
Allow me to invoke Walker Percy’s wonderful taxonomy of book reviews. We fiction-makers tend to elicit four distinct kinds of critical reaction: the bad good review (the critic delivered a favorable notice but missed the point of the book), the good good review (the critic understood the author’s intentions and praised their successful realization), the good bad review (the critic accurately diagnosed what was wrong with the book), and the bad bad review (the critic hated the book for reasons he or she was unwilling to disclose).
On the whole, The Philosopher’s Apprentice was well received. Entertainment Weekly thought it was swell, Library Journal gave it a starred review, and NPR’s Maureen Corrigan called it “an ingenious riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.”
But the novel does contain a conceit that some readers might misinterpret as validating the anti-choice position—aborted fetuses, “immaculoids,” that get turned into adult humans via the ontogenerator (the rubber-science technology at the heart of the plot) and then go forth to torment their would-be parents. I liked the sheer outrageousness of that idea, but because I imagined fetuses undergoing artificial personification, some readers might have assumed I was ratifying the arguments of the Religious Right (the opposite of my intention).
It now occurs to me that some of the “bad bad” reviews The Philosopher’s Apprentice received perhaps trace to the immaculoids, but I’ll never know. I was on rather thicker ice with my satiric short story called “Auspicious Eggs,” which deconstructs the notion of “the rights of the unborn” by positing a dystopian future obsessed with “the rights of the unconceived.”
The “Connecting Characters” Question: Can you tell us about the relationship between Shelley’s original characters and the characters that exist in The Philosopher’s Apprentice? Were there important “revisions” or comments you wanted to make on her original monster/creature when developing characters for your own novel? Were Londa or the fetus/clone creatures influenced by Shelley’s Creature?
From the very first verbal sketches I made for The Philosopher’s Apprentice, I knew the novel would be a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but with a twist. My protagonist would not be a physical monster—that is, a brutish and bewildered naïf who commits murderous acts (though for reasons we can understand)—but rather a “moral monster,” a creature with an outsized superego, determined to make the world conform to her hypertrophic conscience.
As for the immaculoids, the “fetus creatures” as you call them, they emerged near the end of the composition process. They were a kind of thought experiment. What would happen if the Religious Right found a way to exploit the ontogenerator? I figured they would pilfer tissue from abortion clinics, subject it to artificial maturation, and send forth the resulting monsters to make the world a worse place.
The “Byronic Hero” question: The “Byronic Hero” appears on our Frankenstein Meme website as a keyword, a crucial theme with many iterations in literature and sf. Victor is a famous embodiment of the dark, brooding, superior, charismatic Byronic Hero. Edwina for one, and other creators of hideous things from your novel, seem to share Byronic traits as “mad scientists.” What did you take away from Shelley’s Byronic Hero—and what new “take” did you want to make on this enduring icon?
There is indeed something Byronic about Victor Frankenstein, though I hadn’t thought about it much before pondering your question. And I’m pleased you noticed that my female protagonist’s ostensible “mother,” Edwina Sabacthani, is rendered in “mad scientist” mode. I wouldn’t say she’s Byronic so much as Southern-Gothic-Romantic. The primary model for Edwina is the character of Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer, wonderfully and creepily portrayed by Katharine Hepburn in the movie adaptation.
Thinking back on The Philosopher’s Apprentice—and the book is now ten years old—I realize how densely populated it is with mad scientists. At that level, the novel perhaps evokes the 1940’s Universal Pictures monster-reunion movies (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula), but instead of a castle crammed with monsters, I give my readers an island full of demented rationalists: Edwina, of course, but also the other two characters who get their hands on the ontogenerator—the amoral Dr. Vincent Charnock and later Londa Sabacthani herself—plus my male protagonist, Mason Ambrose, who comes to see himself as Londa’s true “creator.”
The “Anniversary” question: The 200-year Anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is here. Is there anything more you can tell us about what it means to you that she and her work have become so crucial to modern culture? Is there something about Shelley and her work you wished we had asked, or that we should note, now that we are celebrating her work?
I would argue that, ever since its publication, Mary Shelley’s novel has functioned as a kind of Rorschach test—or, if you’ll forgive my wordplay, a Rorschach text. The central idea is among the most powerful ever accorded a work of fiction. And yet there are fundamental ambiguities at the novel’s core, and this indeterminacy has given critics, scholars, fiction writers, and lay readers room to project their personal passions onto Shelley’s pages.
Some of these projections are extraordinarily valuable in their own right. I think immediately of Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound, Michael Bishop’s Brittle Innings, Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, and John Kessel’s Pride and Prometheus. But then we also have Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, which found the author riding roughshod over Shelley’s novel to dramatize his profound disgust with reason and the 18th-century Enlightenment.
I have expressed my dismay with Roszak’s book before, so I won’t belabor the point here, but thinking about The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein makes me realize that the question I wished you’d asked concerns the whole thorny problem of the Enlightenment. What was Shelley’s attitude toward scientific progress? It’s hard to say, but it’s clear that the Romantics were fascinated, not repulsed, by science. Shelley’s husband, after all, was an Epicurean, about as materialist a philosophy as can be imagined (which is not to say she borrowed her worldview from Percy Bysshe). But the Romantics were also chary of science’s potential to exhaust the world, leaving no room for poetry and irreducibles. The novel I wrote before The Philosopher’s Apprentice, an historical epic called The Last Witchfinder, is an unabashed celebration of the Enlightenment. My saga of Mason Ambrose and Londa Sabachthani strikes a more cautionary note.
Administrative Note: Tyler Leung, CSUF, adapted the original questions, first developed with my graduate students in classes leading up to the project, to make them specific to Morrow’s novel. (David Sandner)