The monstrous, for the purposes of this paper, requires a measuring stick of some kind - a familiar, standard monster. Frankenstein’s monster fits this role and presents a picture of the monstrous that best fits the representation found in Slapstick - he is uncanny, created through forbidden means, and misunderstood. The uncanny can be defined in relatively simple terms. Freud recognizes that the term is related to “what is frightening - to what arouses dread and horror,” but that the core of this “feeling” requires this special term.1 The uncanny is distinguishable from the frightening in some ways, but in others, the uncanny lies within the realm of the frightening. Freud also points out that the uncanny can seem difficult to pin down in terms of definition because different people experience it in different ways. However, Freud also argues that there is one constant among all such experiences: “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”2 The uncanny is the familiar made unfamiliar; therefore, the term must be applied to each individual case of fright to determine if it is indeed an uncanny experience. What is uncanny for one person, may not be for someone else. Frankenstein’s monster is uncanny because he resembles a human being, but he is not - he was created from corpses, brought to life through forbidden and forgotten science. The monster terrifies every character it comes in contact with because the experience is uncanny, but it is also terrifying because these characters do not understand the monster. He cannot communicate, and does not understand any kind of social norm or acceptable behavior. The reactions of these characters and the monstrous nature of Frankenstein’s creation will serve as a standard for the monstrous
The twins’ monstrous appearance, in contrast with this criterion, is not perceived as such by the other characters in order to defamiliarize standard reactions to monsters. By defamiliarization, I am referring to the technique by which familiar devices are made intentionally obvious and thus unfamiliar to the reader so that the reader may recognize and acknowledge the device at work. Swain wastes no time connecting the story of his childhood with the stereotypical gothic when describing his parents’ response to him and his sister: “It was humane. It was also expensive and Gothic in the extreme. [. . .] They entombed us [. . .] in a spooky old mansion which they had inherited - in the midst of two hundred acres of apple trees on a mountain-top, near the hamlet of Galen, Vermont. No one had lived there for thirty years.”3 Their parents’ actions come not in response to their physical appearance, but in response to the warning that they’d better not “risk their furniture” by attempting to raise the children. The twins are assumed to be idiots because their parents are familiar with the standard monster, and based on this assumption, their parents lock them up. The description of what the parents do is overtly gothic to the point of cliché. Wilbur and Eliza are, after all, not only monstrous in appearance but supposed to be idiots, so in Wilbur’s retrospective mind, the reaction was completely warranted. He states with complete objectivity that once he and his sister were “older and uglier, and capable of breaking arms or tearing heads off, a great gong was installed in the kitchen. This was connected to cherry red push-buttons in every room and at regular intervals down every corridor.”4 It becomes clear, once Wilbur’s story progresses, that this preventive measure was taken not because of any actual fear of physical harm but because of an unspoken obligation to uphold a proper reaction to a physical and mental monstrosity. Therefore, this cartoonish reaction defamiliarizes standard responses to monsters and correlates with one of the core reasons for fearing a monster: misunderstanding.
Wilbur, almost inexplicably, is able to outline the depth of his parents’ misunderstanding of him and his sister. He relates a letter his father wrote to his mother: “‘However short our children’s lives may be, we will have given them the gifts of dignity and happiness. We have created a delightful little asteroid for them, a little world with only one mansion on it, and otherwise covered with apple trees.’”5 The parents have an expectation that allows them to justify loving what they perceive to be physically and mentally monstrous creatures, who are, by some unfortunate coincidence, also their children. They expect that their children’s lives will be short because not only because it is a stereotype of the monstrous, but it is what is most convenient for them. It allows them to feel sympathy for these monsters, and it gets them out of what is, in their minds, little more than an awkward situation as soon as possible.
However, Wilbur and Eliza are secretly intelligent. Their stupidity is a front they put on because they believe they must maintain everyone’s expectations. Beneath the twins’ monstrous appearance and fake stupidity lie their true personalities. When Wilbur and Eliza are joined, they form a single brilliant genius. When apart, Eliza is illiterate, and Wilbur is “of low normal intelligence for [his] age.”6 Through their brilliance, they could “read and write English by the time [they] were four. [They] could read and write French, German, Italian, Latin and ancient Greek by the time [they] were seven, and do calculus, too.”7 They live in what Wilbur describes as a paradise, secretly gaining as much knowledge as they can while all of their nurses and caretakers believe them to be asleep. The twins’ happiness stems from the ignorance of everyone around them - from everyone else assuming the twins are stereotypical, familiar monsters - and they are fully aware of it, deciding that, “idiots were lovely things to be.”8 They don’t speak - they respond with “Buh” and “Duh,” call their parents “Bluth-luh” and “Mub-lub.” They recognize that they can remain in their Eden as long as they keep everyone ignorant of their intelligence.
The effect of defamiliarizing these standard responses to monsters is an accentuation of the reaction of utter horror and disgust to superior genius as a monster. During a visit for their birthday, the twins’ mother has a breakdown, screaming at their father, “‘How can I love Count Dracula and his blushing bride?’” and “‘How on Earth did I give birth to a pair of drooling totem poles?’”9 Wilbur and Eliza overhear this and decide that in order to make their mother happy, they must reveal their intelligence. Once their true, superior intelligence is revealed, it becomes monstrous and uncanny in the eyes of everyone who encounters it. It is the reaction that is expected to be caused by the Wilbur and Eliza that everyone knew up until the point they reveal their intelligence.
The twins’ parents witness their true abilities for the first time when their new doctor administers an intelligence test and allows the twins to put their heads together. Up until this point, Wilbur has not described to the reader what physically happens when the pair is united. They answer every question correctly, but Wilbur admits,
The only trouble was that the two of us, in the innocent process of checking and rechecking our answers, wound up under the table - with our legs wrapped around each others’ necks in scissors grips, and snorting and snuffing into each others’ crotches. When we regained our chairs, Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner had fainted, and our parents were gone.10
This is how Wilbur and Eliza achieve their superior genius. Their incest is now what is perceived as monstrous and uncanny. Wilbur and Eliza’s secret relationship is not only one that produced a phenomenal genius, but it is incestuous as well. Incest is perceived as uncanny because it resembles familiar sexual interaction, but it is between two people who are absolutely prohibited from having such interaction, making it unfamiliar. Their superior intelligence should be a discovery that brings great joy because up until this point, the twins had been thought of as idiots, capable of murderous rampages because of their lacking intellect. This discovery should eliminate any and all misunderstanding. Instead, it creates more. Their parents and Dr. Cordiner see the method of their intelligence as horrific, and it is uncanny to them; therefore, they not only misunderstand it, they cannot understand it. They cannot see past the method to the meaning of the result - the twins are nothing like what their parents thought they were for all these years. Instead they are still monstrous but in a new way - one that cannot be tolerated at all. The twins are separated for thirteen years as a result of the discovery of their relationship.
Incest is not necessarily the core of these events. It is not that the incestuous relationship should be accepted based on its results, but rather such results must be ignored because the method is prohibited. The twins’ incest has produced a monstrous birth. The core of these events is that the product of the act, superior intelligence, something that should be praised, is completely ignored because of the act itself. It becomes monstrous itself because it was birthed through monstrous means. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the product of the act must be ignored.
Incest, as a prohibited relationship, develops into a theme throughout Wilbur’s story once it is revealed. Throughout the story of his childhood, Wilbur continually includes seemingly random updates about what the Chinese have been doing. These fragments form the story of a nation’s success that runs parallel to and ultimately helps to bring about the demise of America. But it is the hint, the possibility of prohibited relationships that truly connects the story of China to Wilbur’s own tale. At the time that Wilbur and Eliza are being separated because of the discovery of their monstrous combined intelligence, Wilbur notes that China is
secretly creating literally millions upon millions of geniuses - by teaching pairs or small groups of congenial, telepathically compatible, specialists to think as single minds. [. . .] and long before I became President of the United States of America, the Chinese had begun to combine those synthetic minds into intellects so flabbergasting that the Universe itself seemed to be saying to them, ‘I await your instructions. You can be anything you want to be. I will be anything you want me to be.’11
The implication, though it is never verified, is that these relationships are of the same nature as Wilbur and Eliza’s - perhaps taboo in some way, but not necessarily incest - suggesting that the only way to achieve such unbridled genius is to commit a prohibited and monstrous act; therefore, such a genius is always heinous since it is a monstrous birth of the prohibited act. China differs from Wilbur and Eliza in that the West is uninterested in what China is doing. They are not witness to any monstrous act. They do not even understand the results. Wilbur says that “the Chinese had sent two hundred explorers to Mars - without using a space vehicle of any kind. No scientist in the Western World could guess how the trick was done. The Chinese themselves volunteered no details.”12 The Chinese are operating at a level of intelligence that is not just beyond the West, it is completely misunderstood by the West. China’s intelligence beyond understanding is therefore monstrous when compared with my earlier criteria because it is created through forbidden means and is completely misunderstood. The results of this intelligence become terrifying, and the results of Wilbur and Eliza’s intelligence become equally monstrous.
During Wilbur’s presidential campaign, his platform is based on a plan that he and Eliza created during a fit of their incestuous genius. The plan is to create artificial families based on assigning new middle names to every American. All citizens are assigned a new middle name consisting of one of twenty-five nouns and a number; hence, Wilbur’s is Daffodil-11. Every American has 10,000 new brothers and sisters and nearly 200,000 new cousins, where sharing noun and number makes a sibling and sharing only a noun makes a cousin. This, however, creates new incestuous relationships, though artificial. No one, not even Wilbur recognizes this, but inevitably two people sharing the same middle name, making the pair siblings, are bound to commit artificial incest. This becomes increasingly likely because strong family ties develop. The development of these ties begins partially at the fault of Wilbur, who while promoting this platform demonstrates how to deal with a beggar or stranger:
‘You can say to him, “Buster - I happen to be a Uranium-3. You have one hundred and ninety thousand cousins and ten thousand brothers and sisters. You’re not exactly alone in this world. I have relatives of my own to look after. So why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooon?” ’13
The American public takes this mantra to heart, and during Wilbur’s second term, the country falls into chaos. Families become factions, and soon, artificially made monarchs such as the King of Michigan and the Duke of Oklahoma rise to vie for power. This is a direct result of incest on two levels. First, Wilbur and Eliza’s incestuous relationship enables the intelligence that gives birth to such a plan. Second, the plan itself, while not the intention, creates an artificial incest. This result arises out of misunderstanding of what the plan was originally intended for - the twins wanted no one to be without family. Wilbur’s campaign slogan is “Lonesome No More!” Despite these intentions, the intelligence that developed the plan was monstrous, borne of forbidden means, uncanny, and completely misunderstood. Thus, its results are the same, creating a monstrosity in artificial incest. Out of this artificial monstrosity, the means for America’s end develops.
Monstrous acts play their part in America’s demise in a third way as well. For over thirty years, America has had absolutely no contact with the Chinese, who over the last few decades have been shrinking themselves generation by generation. By the end of the story, they are numbered in the trillions and are microscopic. Americans begin dying of a disease known as The Green Death - caused by “inhaling and ingesting invisible Chinese communists.”14 The Chinese developed the intelligence to shrink themselves by presumably committing prohibited acts similar to those of Wilbur and Eliza. Their forbidden intelligence, unlike Wilbur and Eliza’s, is left to develop completely unchecked, and it ends up killing half of the American population. It is made even more horrifying because the Americans do not understand and cannot understand what is happening to them. America is bombarded and brought down by two completely misunderstood products of intelligence born out of monstrous acts.
Wilbur’s story turns the monstrous upside down, but its focus is on the reaction to intelligence. Yes, he and his sister are monstrous in physical appearance, but that is inconsequential to other characters. In the minds of these characters, traditional monsters lack intelligence, and therefore must be treated accordingly. When the twins’ intelligence is discovered, instead of being hailed as geniuses, who have the poor misfortune of physical deformity, they are separated so that they may be kept mediocre and normal. Genius as monstrous operates on two levels within the novel. First, genius achieved by monstrous means is itself monstrous and must be ignored. Second, genius that is misunderstood or not understandable is monstrous because its consequences cannot be predicted or controlled. No matter what the implications of monstrous genius are, they cannot be accepted because their results are bound to be disastrous.
Notes
1 S. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in V. Leitch (ed), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 2001, p. 930.
2 ibid., p. 930
3 K. Vonnegut, Slapstick, Dial Press, New York, 1972, p. 32.
4 ibid., p. 35.
5 ibid., p. 38.
6 ibid., p. 104.
7 ibid., p. 45.
8 ibid., p. 44.
9 ibid., p. 73.
10 ibid., p. 114-5.
11 ibid., p. 105.
12 ibid., p. 70.
13 ibid., p. 187.
14 ibid., p. 267.
Bibliography
Freud, S., ‘The Uncanny’. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 2001.
Vonnegut, K., Slapstick. Dial Press, New York, 1972.
Freud, S., ‘The Uncanny’. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 2001.
Vonnegut, K., Slapstick. Dial Press, New York, 1972.
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