The Worm or the Spaghetti?

by CalMeacham

“Dr. Frankenstein….” begins the Bright Young Intern, but he is halted before he can begin his question proper by the authoritative voice of the lecturing physician.

“That’s FROHN-kon-steen,” he corrects.

“Sir?”

“My name. It’s pronounced FROHN-kon-steen, not Frankenstein.”

So begins the scene introducing Gene Wilder as the hero of Mel Brooks’s 1974 horror-comedy, Young Frankenstein. The lines, familiar to armies of fans, instantly establish the name and the character of Frederick Frankenstein, descendant of Victor Frankenstein (the latter renamed “Henry” in James Whale’s 1931 version of the story). Frederick has inherited Victor’s medical skill, but clearly wants no part of his legacy, going so far as to change the pronunciation of the family name.

But the Bright Young Intern (played by Danny Goldman) will have none of this, and presses the lecturer with a series of questions to establish that Frederick is, in fact, of the family of monster-makers.

“Isn’t it true,” he asks, “ that Darwin preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, until by some extraordinary means it actually began to move with a voluntary motion?”

“Are you speaking of the worm,” asks Dr. Frankenstein snidely, hoping to crush the inquisitor with sarcasm, “or the spaghetti?”

“Why, the worm, sir,” says the student, undeterred.

“Yes, it seems to me I did read something of that incident when I was a student,” Frankenstein quickly spouts, clearly hoping to get this out of the way as rapidly as possible. Perhaps another dose of sarcasm will persuade this irritating student to shut up. “But you have to remember that a worm, with very few exceptions, is not a human being.”

“But wasn’t that the whole basis of your grandfather’s work, sir? The re-animation of dead tissue?”

It’s a very weird exchange – what are those lines doing in a modern comedy that was remembered more for slapstick and ribaldry and homage to the old Universal movies? The script, co-written by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, is surprisingly literate. It manages to invoke both the 1931 film and its sequels (especially 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, of which it is an almost direct parody), and the original Mary Shelley novel from a century earlier. The dialogue above is inspired by the book — in particular, by the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. The student’s question is almost a direct quotation from the introduction. According to an internet site, the dialogue in the film is faithful to Gene Wilder’s original script.

So what are those lines doing there? And who is the Darwin referred to? Charles Darwin didn’t leave on his famous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle until months after Mary Shelley’s book was published.

Actually, the Darwin referred to isn’t Charles, but his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), physician, philosopher, and all-around accomplished guy. He wrote two books on botany in which he coined many plant names still in use. He advocated female education and opposed slavery. He was a member of several philosophical societies, invented various devices, and turned down an appointment as physician to the king.

He was interested in the beginning and development of life. His book Zoonomia is said to have anticipated the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, while a footnote to his poem The Loves of the Plants is held by some to anticipate the theory of evolution. His posthumously published poem The Temple of Nature follows the progression of life from microorganisms to people. It’s not too surprising that Charles Darwin came from a family with such members.

So what work of Erasmus Darwin’s rated him a place in Mary Shelley’s introduction (and thus in Wilder’s screenplay)? And what is so odd about a preserved specimen of a worm “exhibiting voluntary motion”? Don’t worms do that all the time?

Well, to begin with, there is no worm called vermicelli. “Vermicelli” (“little worms” in Italian) refers to a particularly fine grade of pasta. Other than this, the word has no other meaning (aside, I suppose, from speaking of “little worms” in Italian). So Dr. Frahnkonsteen’s question seems absurd on the face of it.

There are, however, somewhat similar words that do refer to diminutive creatures. Erasmus Darwin wrote of the “vorticella, or wheel animal” in his Temple of Nature. Vorticella is a protozoan, a eukaryote, that occurs in 16 species. But there’s nothing extraordinary about a protozoan achieving voluntary motion.

Leonard Wolf, who edited The Annotated Frankenstein (and later The Essential Frankenstein), corresponded with Desmond King-Hele, author of Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement. According to King-Hele:

Mary Shelley’s remarks can, I think, be regarded as recording a mixed-up remembrance by Byron and Shelley of what Darwin wrote in his first note to The Temple of Nature. It is entitled “Spontaneous Vitality of Macroscopic Animals” …. Darwin does refer (p. 3) to a “paste composed of flour and water” in which “the animalcules called eels” are seen in great abundance and gradually become larger, even in a “sealed glass phial.” He also refers (p. 7) to the vorticella coming to life after being dried. Put this lot together and stir it, and you might arrive at Mary’s report. [The Annotated Frankenstein p. 4 (1977)]

In other words, Darwin was referring to what seems to be a case of spontaneous generation — life created from non-living matter — and this got mixed up in the minds of Shelley and Byron with a report elsewhere in the same work about the protozoan vorticella being dried and coming to life, which was further mixed up with the name of the pasta, vermicelli.

These are worms

This is spaghetti

How do Shelley and Byron get into it? The story of the genesis of Frankenstein is legendary (and has been depicted in several films, among them Whale’s own Bride of Frankenstein): Mary Shelley; her soon-to-be-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley; George Gordon (Lord Byron) and his companion, physician John Polidori; and others were holed up in Villa Diodati, near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Trapped indoors by thunderstorms, they amused themselves by recounting tales from a French translation, entitled Les Fantasmagoriana, of a German book of horror stories. Byron proposed that they each write their own little horror story. Mary was at a loss, until, on June 21, 1816, she listened, without contributing much, to a conversation between Shelley and Byron in which

various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him,) who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things, perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together and endued with vital warmth. (1831 introduction to Frankenstein, reprinted in Wolf, p. xii)

Later, lying in bed with eyes shut (but not asleep), she had an image of “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out….” And so was the novel inspired. Polidori’s contribution (after an abortive attempt at a story about a skull-headed lady) was ultimately published as The Vampyre (and got a big boost because people believed it to be the work of Lord Byron). Both Frankenstein and The Vampyre lead to popular stage plays, and The Vampyre inspired a long list of plays and stories about vampires, culminating in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Both Frankenstein and Dracula became big money-makers for Universal Studios, and later other filmmakers. So that soiree in 1816 by a group of bored teen and twenty-something intelligentsia had a profound impact on our cultural iconography.

The 1931 film took its lead from that 1831 preface, using both corpse parts and galvanism to bring the creature to life. It is worth pointing out, however, that there is no hint of either idea in the book as originally published, or in its 1818 preface. Or, in fact, in the 1831 edition, aside from the introduction. Frankenstein says that he “collected bones from charnel houses” and that “The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials.” It sounds more as if he was recovering the basic materials of a body — bones, veins, muscle tissue — and assembling them into a new body, rather than simply sewing together parts of complete corpses, as many of the movies depict. In fact, since some material came from slaughterhouses, it evidently wasn’t even human to begin with! Frankenstein seems to have been doing something akin to building a brand new, previously unimagined car from random parts, rather than putting together, say, the front of one car and the back of another.

As for the method, he refuses throughout the book to divulge that; he didn’t want anyone repeating his mistake. All that he says is that “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” (The body is at his feet here, and he kneels beside it in Shelley’s dream — clearly there is no operating table as imagined on stage or in the movies, no creation-tank as in the 1910 Edison Frankenstein or in Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 version. Victor, a mere student, builds his creation on the floor.)

The spark is, I believe, a metaphorical one, with no need to invoke galvanism. Even the 1831 introduction only indicates that “galvanism gave some token of such things”; the real mechanism of animation remains unidentified. Shelley seems to rule out Darwin’s spontaneous generation. A careful reading of her introduction suggests that she was aware that Shelley and Byron weren’t accurate in their recall of Darwin’s work — all that mattered was the impression she carried away from the conversation. Like any good science fiction writer — and the case has been made that Frankenstein is the first real science fiction novel — Mary Shelley uses bantered-about scientific ideas to extrapolate her own science, and doesn’t try too hard to peg down the source material, instead using it as a springboard to examine weightier issues about Man’s actions and their consequences. These issues are manifestly not that Man Should Not Play God, or that There Were Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Her writing – remarkably for a 20 year old – was deeper than that.

So, finally, we can look at that bit of dialogue in Young Frankenstein and understand it a bit better. Remarkably, it was not the worm. It was the spaghetti. But ultimately, as Mary Shelley admits, “not thus, after all, would life be given.” It wasn’t the spaghetti — it was the imagery that recollections and discussions about that spaghetti awakened in the not-quite-somnolescent brain of Mary Shelley.

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