Cecil Helman - The Body of Frankensteins Monster: Essays in Myth and Medicine

The Body of Frankenstein's Monster: Essays in Myth and Medicine

Copyright 2004 Cecil Helman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Paraview, P.O. Box 416, Old Chelsea Station, New York, NY 10113-0416, or visit our website at www.paraview.com.

The Body of Frankenstein s Monster was originally published

by W.W. Norton in 1992 and as Body Myths by

Chatto & Windus in 1991.

Cover photos by Elmore R. Reese Jr.

Cover design by smythtype

ISBN: 1-931044-83-X

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2004102091

T O MY DAUGHTER

The Body of Frankenstein's Monster is a collection of essays on different aspects of the modern body: how we now understand it, how we talk about it, how we represent it in art and cinema, and how we try to make sense of its symptoms and cyclical changes.

Although it was first published in Britain in 1991 under the title Body Myths (followed by the American edition the following year, under its current title) almost all the insights in the book are still true today.

In the early 1990s interest in the iconography of the body was only just beginning. The book was ahead of its time, for since then there has been a growing interest in every aspect of the human body: its ideals of beauty, strength and fitness; its diseases, fashions and foods; and its iconography in present-day art, literature, myth and religion. Even the contemporary cult of Celebrity which some anthropologists see as a modern substitute for religion, and the worship of Saints has added to this growing interest, with the media's relentless, and daily focus on beautiful people and their perfectly-formed bodies.

By why the body? Why such an enormous interest in it, in recent decades? My answer now (as it was then) is that in a rapidly changing, unstable world, the individual's body has become one of the last frontiers of their personal identity, and of their sense of Self. At a time of increasing fragmentation and uncertainty with the breakdown of families, communities, and even nation states many people have a growing sense of vulnerability, and of a loss of control over their lives. In this atmosphere, the individual's body can become one of the last refuges of their sense of security, the last space that they can actually control. For even though they cannot control the financial crises, terrorism, war, pollution, and other global threats that impact upon them, at least they can still exert some control over the foods that enter their bodies, the way that it is dressed or adorned, its shape and form and fitness, and how it interacts daily with other human bodies in work, play and sexuality.

In the 1960s, as a medical student in Cape Town at the time of the world's first heart transplant by Dr Christiaan Barnard, I soon realised that the body was not just a physical object - a collection of organs, cells and enzymes. On the contrary, despite all that we were being taught at medical school, it also had powerful symbolic dimensions. In fact, you could never understand the body fully, or even talk about it, merely in terms of anatomy, physiology or genetics. For it is intimately connected with language, and we have always had to resort to metaphor, poetry and imagery to help us understand it and its changes, whether in illness or in health. Several years after graduating, my anthropology studies at London University also taught me about the very different ways that the body is understood in different cultures. I learned how our own image of the body far from being universal is always, to some extent, culture-bound. For each society teaches its members a unique way of perceiving themselves, and their own bodies, which may be quite different from those of other societies, in other times and other places.

In order to understand more fully our own, modern Western perceptions of the body, I felt that one had to look for clues in many different places: especially in the imagery of popular culture. I became interested in how the body is portrayed in contemporary literature, art, history, myth, television, and, of course, cinema particularly its more imaginative genres of science fiction and horror films. I came to the conclusion that it was just as important to understand all these fictional bodies, as it was to understand the bodies portrayed in scientific and medical textbooks.

Looking back, it is fascinating to see how many of these fantastical images of the body in literature and film, from as far back as the 19th century, are now actually coming true. Frankenstein's monster, for example that collage of bits and pieces of other people can be seen as a precognitive vision of transplant and spare-part surgery; the cyborg, in movies like Terminator and RoboCop, predicted bodies that were part-machine, much like those modern bodies now joined forever to dialysis machines, pacemakers, or life-support systems; the steady stream of Dracula movies gave early warning of some of deep fears of sexual contagion that would develop in later years during the AIDS epidemic, and all the hysteria over a disease transmitted by blood and other bodily fluids; and finally, the Werewolf films were a commentary in the 1930s and 40s, as they still are today, on the cyclical patterns of male violence that still occur, with their regular reversion to animal behaviour.

Many of these changes to our modern notions of the body, have been brought about by Medicine itself especially its advanced technologies of diagnosis and treatment. Several of the essays in this collection address this issue. The Radiological Eye, for example, suggests that thanks to the invention of X-Rays (and later of CAT Scans and MRI's), we now take for granted for the first time in history that the body can be made transparent to the human gaze. What therefore, I speculated, are the possible effects of this fact on our contemporary ideas of self, and of our own mortality especially when, on an X-Ray plate, we can now glimpse the skeleton hidden inside ourselves, like a precognitive photo of the future?

The Rise of Germism argues that from the late 20th Century onwards, we have increasingly borrowed concepts from medicine (such as its Germ Theory) to express and explain some of the major anxieties of our Age: from a loss of personal identity, to the fear of penetration by invisible dangers, such as terrorism or pollution. The Rise of Germism has a particular salience at this time, with the major, recurrent epidemics of recent years from SARS, AIDS and Hepatitis, to more recent anxieties about the latest version of Germism: the fear of anthrax, and other forms of bio-terrorism.

The Medusa Machine deals with the growing role of the machine in everyday life, and in the daily functioning of our bodies. Although these machines are useful, and often necessary for our survival, there is also a price to be paid for our dependence on them. It seemed to me that, for all their many advantages, they are slowly but surely robbing us of our autonomy: not only by making our bodies increasingly dependent on them, but also by leading us to conceive of the body itself as a sort of soft machine. In medicine, particularly, this has often led to a view of the sick body as a dysfunctional machine one that primarily needs repair, maintenance, or spare part surgery, rather than human healing and tender loving care. This in turn has led to a loss of some of the most human, and holistic dimensions of the relationship between doctor and patient.