Figure 1. Cerveteri, 1970. Photograph by A. C. Goodson

Figure 1. Cerveteri, 1970. Photograph by A. C. Goodson.

Goodson, A.C. (Alfred Clement) 1946-
Frankenstein in the Age of Prozac
Literature and Medicine - Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 1996, pp. 16-32 - Article
Subjects:
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1791-1851. Frankenstein.
Abstract

Goodson seeks to reform "our habit of considering the environment as something external to ourselves." By tracing the mood trajectory of literature written since the Romantic period, the author posits that "depressive pain is the native environment of romantic poetry." Through a close reading of actor/director Kenneth Branagh's film version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Goodson suggest that Branagh's film version of the text is true to the depressive mood of the 1990s. He notes that Frankenstein is a medical student, a suicide, and a poète maudit. According to this reading the monster is both a symptom and a product of depression.

Literature and Medicine 15.1 (1996) 16-32

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Frankenstein in the Age of Prozac

A. C. Goodson*

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Dejection" 1
The poète maudit, or writer cursed by fate and fortune, is a romantic original and a modern stereotype. From William Wordsworth and company to Emily Dickinson and Anne Sexton, psychic desolation has been the poet's dominant note, practically a signature of the calling. Typically--as in our images of Friedrich Hölderlin, John Keats, and Gérard de Nerval--the romantic personality is stressed out, undermined by fatal attractions, afflicted by obscure longings. Kindred spirits from Lord Byron to John Berryman have survived on brittle enthusiasm. Romantic irony, exhilarating but finally despondent, is often the only defense such writers have been able to muster. Their lives have become notorious, their verses public gossip. 2 Inspired desperation has characterized the poet's high vocation for two hundred years now.
In the emerging global village that is the internet, the poète maudit remains a sort of cave painter. But the cave paintings of the stone age are counted among the greatest wonders of human culture, while modern cave-dwellers still plumb the abysses of personal affliction. A single instance should suggest what I mean: a scrap of verse in which Paul Celan envisions an excavated Etruscan necropolis, outside the present-day village of Cerveteri, as the overgrown ruins of a Nazi concentration camp. In its delphic compression a holocaust narrative is born: [End Page 17]
DIE EWIGKEIT altert: in
Cerveteri die
Asphodelen
fragen einander weiss.
Mit mummelnder Kelle,
aus den Totenkesseln,
übern Stein, übern Stein,
löffeln sie Suppen
in alle Betten
und Lagern. 3
[ETERNITY ages: in
Cerveteri the
asphodels
ask each other white.
With mumbling ladle,
out of the death kettles,
over stone, over stone,
they spoon soups
into all the cots
and chambers.]
Dejection, desolation, holocaust: such is the inner life of the verse of the later enlightenment, at least the verse that gets a hearing. Its intensities are authentic. It is playing for keeps. Celan, the assumed name of a Rumanian Jew born Antschel whose parents were exterminated in a death camp (Lager), is one among many modern writers who took his own life--in a river, twenty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz. 4 George Steiner has recently considered him as the most distinguished European poet since the great tragic visionary, Celan's prototype, Hölderlin (1770-1843). 5 What are we to make of his eloquently drowning voice? What is the environment of this brilliantly imaginative despair, the cave of modern poetry?
Environment is a deliberately provocative way of putting it. It evokes nature more than culture, hard to figure as applying to modern poets, those creatures of civilization par excellence. We are accustomed to thinking of the environment as a containing set of natural conditions. Yet there are natural conditions that do not envelope so much as they rise up within us. We might speak for instance of genetic environments. The naturally occurring climates popularly characterized by testosterone, say, or Down syndrome, are as environmental as the weather. It is one purpose of this paper to reform our habit of considering the environment as something external to ourselves. If our health, personal and also collective, depends on our finding ways to work harmoniously within the environment we call nature, I want to add that it is crucial to begin by understanding how that nature is already our nature, something we own before we ever arrive at a concept of it. What we make of health depends very much on what we bring to it from this deeply personal experience. Such is the case of Victor Frankenstein, a medical student, a suicide, and also, as I will be suggesting, a sort of poète maudit. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kenneth Branagh's 1994 take [End Page 18] on this popular modern icon, Frankenstein is seen desperately struggling with something that turns out to be himself, whatever else it might include. The film leads us to ask the question I have just posed of the romantic writer: what is the environment of his despair?
Society and/or History have been the usual answers when the question has been asked so openly of modern despair. "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism," as Walter Benjamin put it famously, with the Nazis on the horizon, his own suicide a matter of months away. 6 This is an irresistible line of commentary, deeply modern in its conviction that society is a jungle. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's antisocial attitude underwrites the case: romantic rebellion against modern arrangements is the standard of our cultural politics. This standard has often been challenged--by Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot's teacher at Harvard, and by the apologists of modernity generally--but it has never been effectively dismissed because there is such heartfelt consolation in bearing witness to "what man has made of man." 7 Yet it is not clear that civilization and its discontents make up the real environment of poetic desolation, even if they provide a large target and plenty of occasion for revulsion. The death chambers of Cerveteri stand for something besides the Holocaust. They begin as signs of ETERNITY. The horizon of history comes into the picture subliminally.
I want to associate the dimension of eternity in romantic and modern writing with something that lies within the poète maudit, something too familiar to be entirely strange to our way of thinking, yet strange enough to be difficult for practiced readers of literature. Depression is the name it goes by now, in medical discourse and increasingly in public idiom. Depression is not a disease of the 1990s, yet its current celebrity owes something to recent advances in neuropharmacology, and in particular to the phenomenal popularity of Prozac, a serotonin uptake-inhibitor whose name has become part of the decade's cultural sign system. Earlier, tricyclic antidepressants had alleviated symptoms. Prozac was not just more effective, it was transformative. To psychiatrist Peter Kramer in his best-selling book, Prozac was a revelation, its successes irresistibly suggestive about the biochemistry of personality. 8
Depression began to turn up in mainstream journalism, first as an index of hard times on the homefront, then as a medical syndrome for which a remedy was at hand. 9 An organization devoted to this proposition appealed publicly, in a full-page ad in the New York Times, for donations to promote advanced research to put an end to the elusive and lethal "pain inside the mind" that is clinical depression. 10 An [End Page 19] epidemiologic study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 1993 showed just how pervasive depression was (eleven million cases a year), and how costly ($43.7 billion, on a par with heart disease). 11 Prozac became a fad among college students at Dr. Kramer's home institution, Brown University, according to faculty there. Prozac jokes proliferated in Britain, where its mood-brightening properties were satirized as the new American feel-good wheeze. Behind the buzz lay the lethal hush of depression and growing recognition that it was a medical problem, not a social position, poetic credo, or world-historical attitude.
What this has to do with poetry is the subject of a recent study by Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. A professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Jamison had already co-authored an exhaustive medical text on depression. 12 Without summarizing, I will elaborate on some of her findings as they bear on the argument I want to make here. Depression is the neurochemical environment of much of the literature of the past two hundred years as we have canonized it. In the English-speaking world, literary romanticism in particular is pervasively manic-depressive, not only in its characteristic preoccupations but in its expressive urgency. What we call romanticism was not known by this name among its original practitioners. It came to be recognized under this title by generations of readers, and it continues to be made, and remade, in the image of our changing cultural needs. Romanticism has usually been distinguished from contemporaneous writing--the novels of Jane Austen, the drama, anything humorous or conventionally ironic--as if it represented something sui generis. It has always appeared to be different from other literature in the period, a discordant note even in the literary tradition that spawned it. Considered by Jamison's lights, romantic writing as we have assembled it amounts to a modern cult of depression.
From Frankenstein to Alfred Lord Tennyson, from Walden to the reticent verses of the post-war English poet Geoffrey Hill, the romantic text is a site of mourning and melancholia, psychic cognates of depression. 13 Its eloquence might be compared with that of funerary inscriptions on classical stelae. From such typical performances as Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality Recollected from Early Childhood" to the magisterial In Memoriam of the Victorian Poet Laureate, the epitaph is a covert model of romantic discourse. Romantic mourning has been recognized by astute readers of Wordsworth's curious verse epitaphs. In postmodern criticism, such readings are associated with deconstruction, [End Page 20] especially with the critical idiom of Paul de Man. Deconstructive readers are mute about the inside sources of their responsive mourning; they are content to remain within the impersonal conventions of the cult. It is in the choice of significant texts that their deep motives come clear. Wordsworth has been their culture hero, as Hölderlin was for Martin Heidegger, for special reasons. Both poets have provided vehicles for an obscure pain, deeply inward, in search of an expressive outlet.
Jamison considers depressive pain the native environment of romantic poetry as we have come to know it. This pain in the mind had hardly been considered more than a literary sensibility, poetic grousing of the sort Eliot admitted he had indulged in The Waste Land, until she put a clinical name to it. Nature has always been considered the special province of the romantics. If the word is to include enough to remain significant for us now, it must be extended to include the natural predisposition to depression, for Jamison's study reveals not only the name of the brain fever that fires literary romanticism, but its remarkable persistence within families over generations. This too is nature. The predisposition to depression represents a degree of personal variance that is recognized by the medical community, yet habitually overlooked or dismissed as trivial by academic readers, perhaps because it is so pervasive in the literatures that we think of as our own.
For just this reason, it is worth dwelling on the gripping portrait of depressive pain in Branagh's film. After all the artless cinematic travesties of Shelley's tale of terror, here is one that discovers in her arch-romantic narrative the desolation that Jamison identifies with the artistic temperament. Branagh's film is true to its time and condition. Its affective environment is the depression-haunted 1990s, not some sci-fi cloud-cuckoo-land. It makes sense of Victor Frankenstein and his creature in ways that open up Shelley's text to postmodern reading, as I shall be suggesting. The film deals in self-understanding as no other rendition of the master narrative has. The innovations that Branagh introduces are not entirely successful, perhaps; outraged reviewers have disliked the torching of the creature's bride, among other things. Yet the film's effect is psychically terrifying. Its rhythms rise to the obsessional pace of a protagonist driven by an inner pain that he recognizes only as "madness"--a pain in the mind that he cannot alleviate.
This Frankenstein, as well as being a medical student, is a writer, a diarist of his secret project to rid the world of death. His mania is not written off to the peculiarities of the Mad Scientist, as it usually has been. As Branagh construes the role, Frankenstein's frenzy has something [End Page 21] to do with his family, something to do with his temperament. The science is only an avenue of escape from psychic pain. The film plunges viewers into the living nightmare of Frankenstein's condition, challenging them to cope with the overwhelming feelings that engulf him. Branagh invites us to see Frankenstein's world from within a depressed mind. Through these eyes, the sublime and beautiful alpine environment provides a chilling commentary on the darkness of human feeling. Nature is no refuge, in the conventionally romantic sense. An arctic ice floe, a faceless massif: the elements are a far cry from shelter. They are natural equivalents of Frankenstein's own wild nature, as desolate as his feelings.
A child of privilege, Frankenstein disrupts the serene world into which he was born, savagely destroying the family he loves for the sake of a creation that consumes his mind, his will, and finally his life. His creation is something born of himself, something he rejects but knows to be his own, something that passes away with his passing. It is distinct from him yet overtly identified with his state of mind. Frankenstein's creature is a stark figure of his personal desolation. By the lights of Branagh's film, it is a creature of his depression. Critics since Barbara Johnson have understood Frankenstein's monster as a projection of one aspect or another of his creator. 14 We grasp this primitive splitting of personality most fully by recognizing how the monster is a symptom, and also a product of depression.

The Black Sun of Melancholy15

What modern medicine calls depression is one of the most venerable disorders on the books. Its biological symptoms are recognized plainly in early Greek medicine. Contention about its etiology, currently raging in the clinical literature and in U.S. public health-care debates, actually dates back some 2500 years, to Hippocrates and Aristotle. So does its notorious association with men of learning and influence. 16 Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a literary compendium that looks back on this classical legacy, represents it as a kind of plague: "And thence it comes to passe that in City and Country so many grievances of body and minde, & this ferall disease of melancholy so frequently rageth, and now domineeres almost all over Europe amongst our great ones." 17Feral means both wild and deadly. It takes melancholy, as the disease had long been known, back to the wild body and [End Page 22] its four innate humors. The body's revenge on the overcharged mind remains a good working definition of the depressive condition. 18 This feral disease calls us back to our primordial environment, whose claim on us is that of nature itself. There is no health in us outside it, no real understanding of our natures that does not begin from it.
Burton recognizes melancholy as a somatic condition whose cure lies within the body. Among the regimens he prescribes is exercise, including all sorts of physical stirring from the idleness common to gentry then as now. Walking in particular would become the home remedy and also the usual literary signifier of "this ferall disease." William Cowper's daily rounds from his refuge in the vicarage at Olney look forward to the endless expeditions of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Quantock combes and along Bridgewater Bay, and later in the high fells of Cumberland. Protracted into days and weeks, often in dangerous seasons and changeable climates, walking of this extravagant kind was more than a recreational habit. It was a constitutional sign.
Such compulsive walking figures powerfully in Frankenstein in settings that characterize the derangement of Shelley's hero. It is on the disconsolate walk home after his brother's murder that Victor Frankenstein is first confronted by the creature he has made. This phantasmagoric encounter is etched by lightning on Mont Blanc, and it recurs with variations throughout Shelley's tale, typically during Victor's solitary expeditions on foot. Branagh's film dwells on the romantic association of walking with psychic release. In the opening scene, a grizzled character comes in from the cold of an arctic blizzard to tell his story and die. It is the final lap of a marathon of anxious pacing, much of it through glacial wilderness. Victor Frankenstein's long march to self-destruction is replayed in flashback as he rehearses his life to a kindred spirit, the captain of an ice-bound ship.
The creature that haunts his footsteps is a trekker, too. Its stutter step has long stood in the popular imagination for its repulsive condition. The creature begins life in a viscous stupor, as Branagh translates the tale. It sloshes clumsily around in the amniotic fluid spilled from the vat of its birth, unable to stand, hanging on its creator's reluctant arms. As played by Robert De Niro, the creature is a figure of raging dejection, its heavy stalking a sign, like the face, of something human yet strange, unnatural. If we are terrified of this monster, it may be because its desolation looks strangely familiar. Frankenstein's creature is his unnatural child, born not from a womb but from a lab, every inch the father's son. Its stalking is monstrous but also human, the sin of the [End Page 23] father and sign of the father's state of mind. What is obsessive in the creator's frantic researches turns compulsive in the creature's serial killing.