The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein And

The Medium Is the Monster The Medium Is the Monster Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology Mark A. McCutcheon Copyright © 2018 Mark A. McCutcheon Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 Cover image: Deadmau5 live in San Francisco. Copyright © 2015 by Maurizio Pesce. Cover design by Marvin Harder Interior design by Sergiy Kozakov Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens ISBN 978-1-77199-236-7 (cl.) 978-1-77199-224-4 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-77199-225-1 (PDF) 978-1-77199-226-8 (epub) doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771992244.01 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McCutcheon, Mark A., 1972-, author The medium is the monster : Canadian adaptations of Frankenstein and the discourse of technology / Mark A. McCutcheon. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. 1. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851—Adaptations. 2. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851—Influence. 3. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851. Frankenstein. 4. McLuhan, Marshall, 1911–1980—Adaptations. 5. McLuhan, Marshall, 1911–1980—Influence. 6. Technology in popular culture. 7. Technology in popular culture—Canada. 8. Technology in literature. 9. Technology and civilization. 10. Technology and civilization in literature. I. Title. PR5397.F738M33 2018 823’.7 C2018-900180-1 C2018-900181-X This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities and the assistance provided by the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution– Noncommercial–NoDerivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons license, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. For Dr. Leslie Robicsek, to whom I promised long ago to dedicate my first book. (I’m sure neither of us then envisioned that my first book would look like this, but writing is full of surprises and unexpected turns, which may be one reason why Mary Shelley described it as “hideous progeny.”) Even the most abstract categories, in spite of their validity for all epochs—because of their abstract nature—are yet in the precise terms of this abstraction themselves as much the product of historical conditions and possess their full validity only in respect of and within these conditions. Karl Marx, Grundrisse ([1857] 1983, 390) The Québec film-maker, Jean-Claude Labrecque, once said of the threat of cultural obliteration posed by new technologies of communication: “It’s like snow; it keeps falling and all you can do is go on shoveling.” Technology as snow, or maybe as a nuclear winter; that’s the Canadian, and by extension, world situation now. Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind (1984, 129) The malicious horizon made us the essential thinkers of technology. Dionne Brand, No Language Is Neutral (1990, 23) Contents Acknowledgements xi Introduction 3 1. Technology, Frankenstein, and . Canada? 11 2. Refocusing Adaptation Studies 35 3. Frankenstein and the Reinvention of “Technology” 59 5. Monstrous Adaptations: 4. The Medium Is the Monster: McLuhanesque Frankensteins in McLuhan’s “Frankenpheme” of Neuromancer and Videodrome 103 Technology 85 6. “Technology Implies Belligerence”: Pattern Propagation in Canadian Science Fiction 133 7. Is It Live or Is It Deadmau5? Pattern Amplification in Canadian Electronic Dance Music 155 8. Monster Mines and Pipelines: Frankenphemes of Tar Sands Technology in Canadian Popular Culture 175 Conclusion 189 Index 223 References 205 Acknowledgements I want to thank many individuals and institutions for supporting the work that’s gone into this book. Thanks to Daniel Fischlin, at the University of Guelph, for introducing me to the capacious field of adaptation studies. Thanks to Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, of the University of Bonn, and the Association for the Study of the New English Literatures (ASNEL) for inviting the keynote talk I gave at ASNEL’s 2007 conference, where I first formulated this book’s argument. Thanks to Alan Filewod at Guelph, and to Joel Faflak, at Western University, for supervising the doctoral and postdoctoral work that went into fleshing out that argument—and thanks to SSHRC for their doctoral and postdoc support. Thanks to my Atha- basca University colleagues, to the Research Office, and to the Athabasca University Faculty Association. Thanks to Libraries and Archives Canada for letting me probe their McLuhan holdings. Thanks to Catalyst Theatre for sharing script materials from their superb stage version of Franken- stein. Thanks to the many friends, colleagues, mentors, and students I’ve bounced these ideas off; and thanks to the organizers who have accepted and the audiences who have attended preliminary communications of the study’s findings at conferences held by ACCUTE, Athabasca University, CACLALS, CSDH-SCHN, the Cultural Studies Association (US), MLA, NASSR, Philipps-Universität Marburg, the TransCanada Institute, the University of Otago, and Western University. Thanks to the editors of the ASNEL proceedings series, of the journals SFFTV and Continuum, and of the book Popular Postcolonialisms, in which earlier versions of chapters, passages, or spinoffs of this research were previously published. Thanks to Siobhan McMenemy for early feedback on the project, and massive thanks to the manuscript’s peer reviewers, to editor par excellence Pamela Holway and everyone at Athabasca University Press, and to indexer extraordinaire Louise Fairley. And last, but very far from least, my deepest thanks to my parents, to my daughters, and to Heather: for everything. xi doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771992244.01 The Medium Is the Monster Introduction The question that animates this book might at first sound like the start of a joke: what do modern technology, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Canada have to do with one another? The short answer is “Marshall McLuhan,” and much of what follows will be devoted to explaining this punchline. I want to venture a twofold argument: first, that Shelley’s Frankenstein effectively “reinvented” the meaning of the word “technology” for modern English; and, second, that Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and its receptions, especially in Canadian popular culture, together constitute a tradition in adaptations of Frankenstein that has globalized this Frankensteinian sense of the word. So my two main tasks here are to provide a concrete account of the historical origins and transformation of the definitively modern word “technology” and, by closely reading Frankenstein and its Canadian adaptations, many of which also adapt McLuhan, to model new directions for adaptation studies. I aim to show how Frankenstein, technology, McLuhan, and Canadian popular culture relate to one another, in historical and cultural contexts, and to explore the implications of this interrelation. I start with an historical account of the modern meaning of “technology,” a word that organizes not only whole scholarly fields but also the political economies of whole nation-states—yet a word whose meaning is often ambiguous in scholarly literature and ambivalent in popular culture. Technology, a term that initially used to denote the study of any art or technique, has come, in modernity, to describe machines, industrial systems, and media. Con- trary to extant definitions (such as that in theOED ), which locate the word’s redefinition in the late nineteenth century, this book shows that its modern “reinvention” emerged in the early nineteenth century—specific- ally, in the wake of Frankenstein’s publication. The Medium Is the Monster analyzes Frankenstein as a founding intertext for technology in its own time and in adaptations that popularized the story by simplifying it as a 3 doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771992244.01 cautionary tale of technology run amok (Baldick 1987, 7). My argument then turns from Frankenstein in its period to its postcolonial adaptations in Canadian popular culture, anchored in McLuhan’s work. If Frankenstein helps us to understand the modern transformation of the discourse of technology, then Canadian adaptations of Frankenstein help us to understand the globalized transfer of this discourse, a transfer effected largely by McLuhan’s media theory, together with its myriad adaptations. The impetus for this investigation derives from two areas of interest: first, a preoccupation with the rich variety ofFrankenstein ’s receptions and adaptations, which abound in Canada and repay postcolonial study in this national context; and second, an interest in—and a dissatisfac- tion with—the ways the word technology is used in popular culture and scholarly literature. In popular culture and everyday speech, references to technology regularly strike a sometimes subtle, sometimes strident chord of ambivalence. In scholarly literature on technology, and in popular literature too, the word enjoys great elasticity of meaning, as an abstraction, sometimes a convenient one—sometimes even an unexamined one.

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