Frankissstein: A Love Story

by Jeanette Winterson

I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself. And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature.

In London I was not so content as I am here on the lake and in the Alps, where there is solitude for the mind. London is perpetual; a constant streaming present hurrying towards a receding future. Here, where time is neither so crammed nor so scarce, I fancy, anything might happen, anything is possible.

The world is at the start of something new. We are the shaping spirits of our destiny. And though I am not an inventor of machines I am an inventor of dreams. Yet I wish I had a cat.

Shakespeare. He coined that word: eyeball. What play is it in? Eyeball?

Is this life a disordered dream? Is the external world the shadow, while the substance is what we cannot see, or touch, or hear, yet apprehend?

Polidori interrupted excitedly (he is a great one for interrupting excitedly).

Male children are conscious earlier than female children, said Byron. I asked him what caused him to think so. He replied, The male principle is readier and more active than the female principle. This we observe in life.

Ah, said Byron, I thought she would be a glorious boy. If I must sire girls, then I trust she will marry well. Is there not more to life than marriage? I asked. For a woman? said Byron. Not at all. For a man, love is of his life, a thing apart. For a woman, it is her whole existence.

My mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, would not agree with you, I said. And yet she tried to kill herself for love, said Byron.

No, I said, it is hope. Hope that one day there will be a human society that is just. That will never happen, said Polidori. Not unless every human being is wiped away and we begin again.

Do you believe that if every person had enough money, enough work, enough leisure, enough learning, that if they were not oppressed by those above them, or fearful of those below them, humankind would be perfected? Byron asked this in his negative drawl, sure of the response, and so I set out to disaffect him. I do! I said. I do not! said Byron. The human race seeks its own death. We hasten towards what we fear most.

Arkivists

My husband is of this temper. Byron is of the opinion that woman is from man born – his rib, his clay – and I find this singular in a man as intelligent as he. I said, It is strange, is it not, that you approve of the creation story we read in the Bible when you do not believe in God?

The gentlemen laugh at me indulgently. They respect me, up to a point, but we have arrived at that point.

We are talking about the animating principle, says Byron, slowly and patiently as if to a child. Not the soil, not the bedding, not the container; the life-spark. The life-spark is male. Agreed! said Polidori, and of course if two gentlemen agree that must be enough to settle the matter for any woman.

Yet I wish I ha...

What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend? Sonnet 54, said Shelley. Sonnet 53, I said.

I said to him, Do you believe in ghosts? Truly? I do, he said, for how can it be that the body is master of the spirit? Our courage, our heroism, yes, even our hatreds, all that we do that shapes the world – is that the body or the spirit? It is the spirit.

But there is something of a lighthousekeeper in me, and I am not afraid of solitude, nor of nature in her wildness.

I found in those days that my happiest times were outside and alone, inventing stories of every kind, and as far from my real circumstances as possible. I became my own ladder and trapdoor to other worlds. I was my own disguise. The sight of a figure, far off, on some journey of his own, was enough to spark my imagination towards a tragedy or a miracle.

I was never bored except in the compa...

substrate

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.

trilby

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.

Professor Stein, as you know, the Hanson robot, Sophia, was awarded citizenship of Saudi Arabia in 2017. She has more rights than any Saudi woman. What does this tell us about artificial intelligence? Nothing – said Professor Stein – it tells us a great deal about Saudi Arabia. (Laughter in the hall but the woman persists.) Will women be the first casualties of obsolescence in your brave new world? On the contrary, said Professor Stein, AI need not replicate outmoded gender prejudices. If there is no biological male or female, then—

To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world.

If you believe, as I do, that religious texts – like myths – are texts we create to mirror the deeper structures of the human psyche, then yes, naming is still our primary task.

believe him. This second I truly do. Valhalla is burning and the white male gods are falling into the fire, but the Rheingold is what it always is – pure and untainted – and it will be found again, like a second chance, like a new beginning, and these will be the bad old days, when humans ruled the earth – which, by the way, will be restored as a nature reserve because AI won’t need shopping malls and automobiles to satisfy its desires. All your worries about robots taking over your jobs – dude, you can’t even imagine the coming world …

nonplussed

Some of us are transhuman enthusiasts too. That isn’t surprising; we feel or have felt that we’re in the wrong body. We can understand the feeling that any-body is the wrong body. Transhuman means different things to

different people; smart implants, genetic modification, prosthetic enhancement, even the chance to live forever as a brain emulation.

I heard a voice behind me. It’s a little like an art installation in here, isn’t it? Have you seen Damian Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank? What does he call it? The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

In fact, he says, it was the Lancashire cotton workers’ solidarity with Abraham Lincoln over slavery. Manchester workers refused to process cotton from the slave plantations. In those days, ninety-eight per cent of the world’s cotton was processed in Manchester. Can you imagine that?

Isn’t content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn’t free-floating; it’s enmeshed. That is true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora – that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind – global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves – all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change. Nationalism is on the rise, I say. He nods. That is a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.

Once out of the body you will be able to choose any form you like, and change it as often as you like. Animal, vegetable, mineral. The gods appeared in human form and animal form, and they changed others into trees or birds. Those were stories about the future. We have always known that we are not limited to the shape we inhabit.

I said, I accept that our experience of reality isn’t objective. My subjective experience of the desert will be different to yours, but the desert is really there. The Buddha would not agree with you, said Victor. The Buddha would argue that you are a slave to appearances, that you confuse reality with appearance. Then what is reality?

The best minds have asked this question forever, said Victor. I cannot answer it. What I can say is that just as consciousness appears to be an emergent property of brain function – you can’t pinpoint consciousness biologically – it is as elusive as the seat of the soul – but we would agree that consciousness exists – and we would agree that at present machine intelligence isn’t conscious. So perhaps reality is also an emergent property – it exists, but it is not the material fact we take it to be.

Last night Byron declared Prometheus to be a serpent story – by which he suggests a reach for knowledge that must be punished, as it is in the story of the Garden of Eden: Eve eats the apple from the forbidden tree.

Perhaps, I said, it is women who bring knowledge into the world quite as much as men do. Eve ate the apple. Pandora opened the box. Had they not done so humankind is what? Automata. Bovine. Contented pig. Show me that pig! said Claire. I shall marry that pig! Why must life be suffering? Author’s note: THIS IS THE MOST PROFOUND THING CLAIRE HAS SAID IN HER LIFE.

I understand those men – and, yes, those women. Their work is their livelihood and their life. They are skilled. The machines are senseless. What man would stand by and see his life destroyed? (Each one of us! came my secret answer, in a sudden illumination of the way we live, forever wrecking the good we have for the little we have not. Or clutching at the little we have for the good that would be ours, if we dared …)

I glanced at Shelley, my Ariel, this free spirit, imagining himself imprisoned in a loom of words.

And yet you dislike the idea of intelligence not bound to a body. That is irrational of you. We are our bodies, I said.

Every religion disagrees with you. Certainly, since the Enlightenment, science has disagreed with religion – but now we are returning, or arriving, at a deeper insight into what it means to be human – by which I mean it is a stage on the way to being transhuman. Show a little humility and you will be able to think more clearly.

Humans will be like decayed gentry. We’ll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We’ll have a piece of land that we didn’t look after very well called the planet. And we’ll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories. We’ll be fading aristocracy. We’ll be Blanche Dubois in a moth-eaten silk dress. We’ll be Marie Antoinette with no cake.

Even an entire species has to grow up. It’s not survival of the fittest – it’s survival of the smartest. We are the smartest. No other species can tinker with its own destiny. And you, Ry, gorgeous boy/girl, whatever you are, you had a sex change. You chose to intervene in your own evolution. You accelerated your portfolio of possibilities. That attracts me. How could it not? You are both exotic and real. The here and now, and a harbinger of the future.

Five hundred a year and a dick of my own … What are you talking about, Victor? You are so ill-read, he said. I suppose it’s because you did science. You did science!

He didn’t answer that. He said, Vampires are like coal-fired power stations. My version of eternal life uses clean energy.

twelve-hour days spinning the wealth of the world’s richest city – and were going home to disease, hunger, cold and a life expectancy of thirty years? Communism must have seemed like the best possible solution. It is the best possible solution, I said, but human beings can’t share. We can’t even share free bicycles. We were passing a canal with yet another orange bike upended in the green water. Humans: so many good ideas. So many failed ideals.