Читать книгу Frankissstein - Jeanette Winterson - Страница 11

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

That is why we invent stories, I said.

And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.

Still shut in by rain, I write and write.

Claire sits sewing in a corner. Polidori nurses his lame ankle. Yesterday he jumped out of a window to prove his love for me. The idea was Byron’s. When he is bored he is dangerous.

All we do is drink and fuck, said Byron. Is that a story?

That’s a bestseller! said Polidori.

We sleep. We eat. We work, said Shelley.

Do you? said Byron, who is on a diet for his corpulence, and besides, he is insomniac, and idle. He cannot find the lines, he says, for his supernatural story, even though our enterprise is the challenge he set. That is irksome. We are irksome.

Polidori is busy with his own tale. He calls it The Vampyre. Blood transfusions interest him.

For want of excursion or diversion, the gentlemen fell to discussing the series of lectures we had recently attended in London. Lectures delivered by Shelley’s doctor, William Lawrence, on the origin of life. Life, Doctor Lawrence argued, is based in Nature. There is no ‘super-added’ force such as the soul. Human beings are bone, muscle, tissue, blood, etc., and nothing more.

There was an outcry, of course: No difference between a man and an oyster? Man is nothing more than an orang-utan or an ape, with ‘ample cerebral hemispheres’?

The Times newspaper had this to say: Doctor Lawrence strives with all his powers to prove that men have no souls!

Yet, I said to Shelley, you of all men believe in the soul.

I do, he said; I believe it is each man’s task to awaken his own soul. His soul is that part of him not subject to death and decay; that part of him made alive to truth and beauty. If he has no soul he is a brute.

And where does this soul go, at death? said Byron.

That is unknown, answered Shelley; the becoming of the soul, not its going, should be our concern. The mystery of life is on earth, not elsewhere.

The rain is on earth also, said Byron, staring out of the window like a helpless god. He wanted to ride his mare and was turning restive.

We shall all be dead soon enough, said Polidori, thus we cannot live as others would wish us to live, but only for our own desires. He looked at me, his hand on his crotch.

Is there not more to life than what we desire? I said. Might we not sacrifice our own desires for some worthier cause?

You may do so if you wish, said Polidori, if that gives you satisfaction. I would rather be a vampyre than a corpse.

To die well is to live well, said Byron.

None finds satisfaction in death, replied Polidori. You imagine it so, but what will you know of it? What will you gain from it?

Reputation, said Byron.

Reputation is gossip, said Polidori. Say well of me, say ill of me – what is that but tittle-tattle?

You are out of sorts today, said Byron.

It is you who is out of sorts, said Polidori.

Shelley put his arms round me and held me to him. I love you. You, dear Mary, you, who is most alive.

I could hear Claire’s needle stabbing into her tapestry.

All alive o! All alive alive o! sang Polidori, beating time on the arm of the divan. Byron scowled and limped to the window, opening it to let in the rain directly onto Claire.

Will you stop it? She jumped up as though she had been stung, shouting at his laughing at her, taking her place on another chair and savagely snipping her yarn.

Death is a counterfeit, said Shelley. Almost, I do not believe in it at all.

You will gladly believe in it when you inherit your father’s estate, said Byron.

I watched him, sardonic, cynical. A great poet, truly, yet unkind. The gifts of our nature seem not to modify the manner of our behaviour.

Shelley has little money and is the most generous of men. Byron is rich, netting £10,000 a year from his estates, yet spends only for his own pleasure. He may live as he pleases. We must take care. That is, I must take care of our accounts. Shelley scarcely seems to know what he can spend and what he cannot. We are forever in debt. Still, if I can sell the story I am writing we shall be more at ease. My mother made a living from her writing. It is my intention to follow her example.

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 rot 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.